In Youth News

Today, the Children's Committee to Abolish Political Bias proclaimed 2011 the Year of Interplanetary Citizenship.
 
Not to be outmarketed by their competitors, major retailers and rival consumer product manufacturers joined in the proclamation.

Adult groups, like research foundations and thinktanks, banded together to devise a Solar System Constitution as well as other legally-binding documents to provide validity to those who have already declared their preference for interplanetary rather than antiquated national citizenship.

Countries with active or planned space ports announced that space port property officially belonged to the Interplanetary Consortium and was subject only to the laws, rules and regulations of the Consortium.

Several independently wealthy citizens of countries around the world released a joint statement that their land holdings were now officially consular property of the Interplanetary Consortium and thus had diplomatic immunity on Earth. They listed strategic locations where those seeking political asylum could live safely, secured from taxation or persecution by any country on the planet.

 The UN Security Council went into emergency, closed-door sessions.

Analysts estimated that upwards of 40 percent of the world's wealth and 25 percent of the global population had been committed to an organisation which had not existed the day before.

In homes everywhere, parents quizzed their children where and when they had first heard of the Interplanetary Consortium or international citizenship.

Many children pointed back at their parents' love of utopian romance and scifi stories, slowly explaining to the clueless adults about the spread of instant-on technology and the power of one virtual mind that the younger generation had become, including many of the world's least-known youngest richest people who did not want their wealth in the hands of risky investors, unlike their poor, unemployed parents who had been taken for a ride and fleeced by Wall Street, with more debt piled on them by Washington.

Security firms came forward with their balance sheets showing ownership of vast sums of debt from many prominent countries that had been converted to ownership of those countries' military units, quietly being reorganised (based on corporate rather government bureaucratic procedures) and fully operational to protect the interests of the Interplanetary Consortium by the start of 2011.

Scientists on Anarctica sent a text message that the whole continent was, by default of belonging to no country, automatically part of the Interplanetary Consortium.

The WTO announced trade negotiations would begin immediately. Myanmar and North Korea recognised the IC's official status as a galactic political entity.