Voting Your Global Conscience

The Simultaneous Policy offers an ingenious scheme to take back the world

by Syd Baumel

"This is brilliant! I haven't been so excited since fifth grade when I learned that the UN was starting," says Seattle animal rights activist Nancy Pennington. Down in the Global South, Brazilian academic Farhang Sefidvash describes it as "a wonderful way of implementing cooperation, which is the new law of human survival in the globalized world." And back in the US, Noam Chomsky calls it "ambitious and provocative," adding, "Can it work? Certainly worth a serious try."

What is it that's generating such enthusiasm among grassroots activists and global justice gurus? Something you've probably never heard of. It doesn't help that it has a snoozer of a name or that it's a simple, yet braintwisting, concept that gives new meaning to the words "thinking outside the box."

"It took a long time to sink in. This is not a quick bite," says Eileen Weintraub, who coordinates the movement's modest Northwest contingent. "It's hard to convince others of its worth in a few words." Ironically, it materialized fully formed in a flash to British businessman John Bunzl five years ago.

"[T]he idea . . . came to me in a split second and completely by surprise," Bunzl writes in the British journal World Review. "Not, as it happens, while I was in the bath, but while I was doing the washing up after a Sunday lunch."

The idea, which Bunzl later named The Simultaneous Policy, is a Bach fugue of interlocking components: of rigorous problem analysis and an ingenious plan for solving them.

The principal problem is something global justice activists know all too well: corporate-driven globalization with nary a thought for people and planet. Its side effects include environmental destruction, global warming, unfair trade and a ballooning gap between rich and poor.

For Bunzl, the problem is as primal as a bunch of schoolboys scuffling over a donut and trampling it into the dirt in the process. It's a downward spiral of destructive competition. It's a global rut ...in which all nations of the world are forced to compete with one another for capital and jobs to the benefit of market speculators and transnational corporations who play one country off against another. But this is a vicious circle which ultimately no one can win and all must lose. For even the rich and powerful who benefit in the short term have children who need clean air to breath and fresh water to drink; they too will come to realise that a wholesale transition from global competition to global cooperation is vital if spaceship Earth, all of its passengers and their offspring are to expect a civilised and sustainable future.

So how to share the donut?

With a growing majority of the world's population now having the right to vote, Bunzl's brainchild is a massive international voting bloc that would tell politicians: boys, don't fight, cooperate, or we won't vote for you!

The Simultaneous Policy (SP) would also tell politicians exactly how we the people want them to cooperate. Any person who adopts SP by filling out a simple form can join expert policymakers--individuals, NGOs--in drafting multilateral laws that single nations dare not pass alone, a globalization of shared values.

Understandably people may express a lot of ifs and buts about SP, but Bunzl seems to have a reasonable answer for everything, whether in his 2001 book The Simultaneous Policy: An Insider's Guide to Saving Humanity and the Planet, the SP website at simpol.org, or the SP listservs where Bunzl never tires of fielding queries and thinking aloud with other adopters.

Bunzl has been reality-testing his baby with brainy global problem-solvers since 1999. He readily acknowledges that the success of SP depends on a providential synergy of factors--mass voter adoption, mass political party adoption, mass media attention, among others. But, like Chomsky, Bunzl believes it just might work, And besides, "If we don't try, we'll never find out."

Syd Baumel is editor of The Aquarian (aquarianonline.com) in Winnipeg, Canada and an adopter of the Simultaneous Policy.

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