Good Day for Goals for Americans Foundation!

Last Friday, April 18, 2008, was a very positive day for our small but intense Foundation.

Pope Benedict XVI

Last Friday Pope Benedict XVI, the Roman Catholic Pope of Rome, spoke to the people of the world before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.

We’ve not always so enthralled with many of this Pope’s views and statements — especially when some of his most significant pronouncements in effect serve to block the urgent need for human-population stabilization.

But when the Pope speaks of the “age of globalization and cultural interdependence” and when the Pope emphasizes the need for much greater international efforts to take on the urgent issues facing all of us humans on planet earth we welcome his gradual enlightenment. As the Pope declared:

Questions of security, development goals, reduction of local and global inequalities, protection of the environment, of resources and of the climate, require all international leaders to act jointly and to show a readiness to work in good faith, respecting the law, and promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the planet.

Last Friday as well, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom also spoke to the world from American shores. He too emphasized the theme of “Global Interdependence.” Before 350 invited guests at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Prime Minister declared the need for “a new kind of global peace and reconstruction corps”:

We urgently need to step out of the mindset of competing interests and instead find our common interests, and we must summon up the best instincts and efforts of humanity in a cooperative effort to build new international rules and institutions for the new global era.

“Interdependence” indeed!

This is precisely why last year we updated and republished The Declaration of Interdependence, which we first published in 1976. As with our other major initiatives, we had this publication delivered to every member of the U.S. Congress and key policy makers in Washington, DC

In January 2008 when world leaders met in Davos, Switzerland, Goals for Americans Foundation’s (GfA) ideas and concerns were brought to their attention with our full-page ad published on the inside back cover in the issue of Foreign Affairs provided to every Davos attendee.

Since then, we have just published and sent to all those who attended Davos our pamphlet After Davos in which I write: “We must fire the imagination of mankind with a vision of how great a place the world can become if all countgries and all people will work together for the common good.”

It is in this spirit that we have called upon the Davos leaders to establish a new Institute for the Future of the World, headquartered in Davos, and charged with working continually and tirelessly to identify the most urgent problems collectively facing humanity and to devise specific plans to solve these problems

Also last Friday a former President of the United States showed a combination of interdependence and independence of his own. Against considerable pressures Jimmy Carter held a number of meetings with the most senior leaders of the Palestinian independence movement who are exiled from their country and headquartered in Damascus, Syria.

GfA has been focused for the past year on Iraq. Our major 48-page publication PLAN V for Victory and Peace in Iraq was published this winter. At the same time we are well aware that a major issue in today’s Middle East is also “interdependence.” From Palestine to Lebanon, from Iraq to Iran, from human rights to democracy, what is really needed now is a major new American commitment to work seriously with the international community, including the United Nations and the League of Arab States, to help bring about a New Middle East where basic concepts of justice, dignity, and economic prosperity will prevail. Our major plan for such a New Middle East will be published later this year

And finally last Friday was a very good day for GfA because the new May-June issue of Foreign Affairs magazine arrived in the mail to subscribers. On the inside back cover of this issue our GfA ad calls for “A Department of National Goals” — another major theme our Foundation has championed for many years