Excerpts of the book Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller
(Chapter 3 continued)
The Securities and Exchange Commission
reforms removed J. P. Morgan's two directors from the boards
of almost every one of the U.S.A.'s great corporations—except
Henry Ford's—whose interlocking directorships had formerly
given Morgan prime control over U.S.A. industry. With the termination
of Morgan's control of all the major corporation boards such
as those of U.S. Steel and General Motors, these great corporations'
managements found that they were no longer beholden to J. P.
Morgan, and only to their stockholders. "All we have to
do now to hold our jobs is to make money for the stockholders."
At this moment the U.S.A. had evolved
into a managerial capitalism, in contradistinction to
the now-defunct, invisible "finance capitalism" of
which J. P. Morgan had been the master.
What became noticeable at this time was
the uniformity of position taken by all the great corporation
managements in respect to actions taken by the New Deal—for
instance, the great corporations' across-the-board refusal to
expend surplus on research and development.
To discover how that came about it first
must be realized that the industrial-enterprise underwriting
and expansion-financing of the private banking houses of Wall
Street could not have been carried on without the advice, contract-writing
services, and legal planning of the world's most powerful and
most widely informed legal brains. As a consequence the corporation
law firms of Wall Street, New York, were peopled with the most
astute thinkers and tacticians of America—if not of the
whole world. When the Great Crash of 1929 came and events of
the Depression occurred, as already related (and the great poker
hands were called, and the New Deal had prosecuted the guilty
and housecleaned the system and socialized the prime contractors,
etc.), it was the counsel of Wall Street lawyers that governed
the positions taken by the new, self-perpetuating, industrial-giants'
managements. It was the former J. P. Morgan's and other financiers'
lawyers who now counseled all the as-yet-solvent big-industry
managements to guard their surplus and refuse to cooperate with
the New Deal.
Furthermore the Wall Street lawyers could
see clearly what the public couldn't see—i.e., that while
the New Deal was unilaterally socializing the system, it was
doing so without exacting any contractual obligation on the corporations
to acknowledge the government's economic recovery strategies.
The corporations gave no legal acknowledgment of their socialized
status. It was clear to the Wall Street lawyers that without
such contractual acknowledgment the government socializing was
a one-sided, voluntary commitment on the part of the political
party in power. Therefore, in fact, none of the big corporations
had lost their free-enterprise independence by accepting the
enormous government rehabilitation expenditures.
Since the Wall Street lawyers and brethren
in other parts of the country were called upon to fill the Supreme
Court bench from which body they could determine the province
of "free enterprise," the lawyers reasoned somewhat
as follows: "A socialized system—as clearly manifest
by the U.S.S.R.—cannot tolerate free enterprise's freedom
of initiative. There is no lucrative law practice in socialized
states—ergo, if we are to survive, we lawyers on Wall Street
had best figure out how to go about keeping the fundamentals
of capitalism alive amongst the few great industrial corporations
that as yet remain solvent despite the 1929 and 1933 Depression
events."
The Wall Street lawyers saw clearly that
it was those surviving corporations' undistributed surplus which
certified that capitalism had not gone entirely bankrupt despite
its banking system's failure.
Operating invisibly behind the "skirts"
of the as-yet-live corporations, the Wall Street lawyers very
informally, but very seriously, organized far-ahead-in-time research-and-study
teams consisting of the most astute corporation lawyers to be
found in America. From these teams' realistic conceptioning they
formulated a grand strategy that would keep capitalism's private
enterprise alive and prospering indefinitely as run invisibly
but absolutely legally by the lawyers.
The latter's research discovered that
they would not soon be able to popularly and legally overthrow
the New Deal. It was clear that not until World War II was over
might they find conditions suitable for untying all the economic
controls established by the New Deal.
It is appropriate at this point to do
some reviewing of evolutionary changes that had been transpiring
in the nature of capitalism.
It all starts with the land-based
capitalism, a capitalism maintained by whoever seized, successfully
defended, and controlled the land—ergo, owned the land.
Those producing food and life support on the lands were all subservient
to, and paid tribute to, the great landowners. In land capitalism
whoever owned the fertile fields controlled all the wealth to
be made from that land. Land capitalism dealt with nature's own
metabolic productivity.
Then private enterprise and finance capitalism
came to discover what could be done with mass-produced metals
to multiply the value of the land-produced, life-support metabolics.
In the mid-nineteenth century mass production
of steel, for the first time in history, suddenly gave humans
the capability of producing long-span beams, whereby they were
able to produce large-enough, semifireproof, and powerful structures
to move more and more wealth-production work under cover. Western-world
capitalism began to produce wealth under cover in addition to
that produced out in the field. To make the tin cans in the factory
to can the food produced in the fields, or to take the cotton
produced in the fields and mass-produce cotton cloth, became
known as "value-added-by-manufacture." Value-added-by-manufacturing
was accomplished primarily with metals—metal buildings,
metal machinery, metal tools, metal sea and land transportation
systems, and, ofttimes, metal end products.
As already mentioned, it was the new,
world-around, metals sources that brought about the name World
War I.
Suddenly we had a completely new form
of capitalism, which required both the large-scale financing
and integration of metals, mines and mine-owners, metals refining
and shaping into wholesaleable forms, all to be established around
the world by the world masters of the great line of supply. The
world line of metals-and-alloy supply was essential in producing
all the extraordinarily productive new machinery and that machinery's
delivery system, as was the generation and delivery of the unprecedentedly
vast amounts of inanimate energy as electricity.
This new form of the world power structure's
capitalism—by ownership of the mines and metals working
all around the world—we call the metals and mining capitalism.
Whoever owned the mines had incredible power, but never as
great as those who controlled the line of their supply. Combining
the two, (1) the mines and metals-producing industry and (2)
the line of supply, we have the world power structure that operated
as the first supranational, world-around-integrated, metals cartels.
They were out of reach of the laws of any one country, in a metals
cartels capitalism. Combining these two with (3) the absolute
need of the large financing and credit at magnitudes rarely affordable
by any one individual, we find finance capitalism integrating
the world operation.
At any rate we now understand why the
1914-18 war was called World War I. It was inherently
a war for mastery of the world's metallic resources and their
world-around physical integration, controlling, and exploitation.
The amount of metal productivity of World
War I was so great that, after the war, as the arms products
became obsolete and were displaced by new design products, the
metal contained in the ever vaster amounts of obsolete products
began to come back into circulation as scrap. The scrap resources
swiftly increased. The Morgan-escaped managerial capitalists
said, "I'm going to keep my job if we pay our stockholders
dividends—the rate at which we can pay dividends is directly
dependent upon the rate at which our production wheels go around.
To keep our wheels going around, we don't care whether we are
using scrap metals or mined metals. As a matter of fact, the
metals-as-scrap are usually more refined than the metals coming
out of the mines. They cost less, so we're better off using the
scrap—whether from obsolete buildings, machinery, armaments,
railways, or ships." Formerly Morgan had insisted on all
his controlled manufacturing corporations acquiring all their
metal stocks only from newly mined, refined, and wholesale "shaped"
stocks.
The mining companies found that industry
would not buy ingots of their metals. They found that they had
to turn their metals into tubes, bars, sheet, plate, wire, and
a great variety of sizes and shapes. Wall Street's finance capitalism,
therefore, underwrote the development of a host of metals-shaping
industries who were the automatic customers of the only-ingot-producing,
metals-mining corporations.
The post-World War I mineowner-capitalists
began gradually to be washed out of the game by virtue of the
Morgan-emancipated managerial capitalists saying, "Our job
is to keep the wheels going around." Wheels-going-around
producing saleable goods from scrap metals became strategic.
Up to the time of World War I the owners
of the factories (Mr. Morgan et al.) said, "We put you in
as management to make a profit out of this factory." If
the management said, "Give us a new piece of machinery,"
the owners said, "New piece of machinery! What are you talking
about? We put you in to make money out of our machinery. You
are fired." Change was anathema to the J. P. Morgan-type
of financier. Scientists would come to Mr. Morgan and say, "Mr.
Morgan, I can show you how to make steel so that it won't rust."
"Young man! The more it rusts, the more I sell. How crazy
you must be! Get the doctor to look this man over, he's obviously
a lunatic—take those mad papers out of his pocket and put
them in my desk drawer."
But change was welcomed by the late-1930s'
managerial capitalism. New designs called for more whirling of
their production wheels. The change came in the form of many
new armament designs for the clearly approaching World War II.
The new designs released as "scrap" the metals from
obsolete designs.
Concurrently, with the New Deal's reforms
and controls, the wage-earners were now getting a fairer share
of the national income, and the economy was prospering—particularly
so as the New Deal began officially to remember the "forgotten
man." Congress put a dollar cellar under the wages and elevated
worker earnings enough to produce minor affluence and security
for labor in general.
Just before the U.S.A. entered World
War II, the Wall Street lawyers instructed the heads of great
corporations to say to Roosevelt, "We heads of the corporations
of America were not elected by the American people. We were chosen
by our stockholders. Our job is to make profits for our stockholders.
At the time of World War I a lot of business people were called
'profiteers.' As we enter into World War II war production, we
don't want to be called 'immoral profiteers.' If you want cooperation
from us, Mr. Roosevelt, you as government are going to have to
be the one to initiate our corporations' being properly rewarded
for our cooperation."
Mr. Roosevelt said, "I agree. You
are beholden to your stockholders, so you are going to have to
pay them dividends." Coping with this dilemma, the United
States Treasury Department agreed that it was legitimate for
the industrial corporations to make up to 12-percent profit per
each product turnover. The New Deal said, "We the people,
as government, are, however, going to renegotiate with you all
the time, continually inspect you, to be sure you are really
earning your profits." As a consequence of all the continuous
renegotiation by the government, those U.S.A. corporations earned
an average of 10 percent on every turnover. This meant that in
World War II for every annual war budget—running at first
at $70 billion per year—10 percent, or $7 billion, was earmarked
for distribution to the stockholders of the corporations. Complete
socialization of the stockholders of the prime U.S.A. corporations
was accomplished.
Amongst the prime contractors identified
by the New Deal were all the leading automobile companies. For
example, Chrysler was picked out to produce the war tanks. With
their powerful position established with the government, the
U.S.A. automobile manufacturers, on being asked to convert all
of their productivity to war armaments, agreed amongst themselves
to put into storage all of their production tooling and to resume
their post-war auto production with the models they were last
producing at outset of war. New production tooling would cost
them several billions of dollars. They had their Madison Avenue
companies grind out advertisements showing the G.I. soldiers
saying, "Please keep everything the same at home until I
return."
Because Germany's, Italy's, and Japan's
production equipment was destroyed during World War II, they
were free after the war to start using the newest war-advanced
technology in both the designing and the production of their
automobiles. That was the beginning of the end for the U.S.A.'s
prestige as the world's technological leader. The U.S.A. post-World
War II cars were inherently seven years passe in contrast to
the smaller, faster foreign cars. The "Big Three" American
auto producers undertook to manufacture while keeping the foreign
cars off the market and while they themselves exploited America's
market need for a geographically expanding economy's transportation.
In the late 1960s the "Big Three"
automobile companies of America found that their distributors
were disenchanted with decreasing financial returns and with
frequent bankruptcy. To hold their distributors G.M., Ford and
Chrysler deliberately manufactured a few of their mechanically
well-designed parts with inferior materials that were guaranteed
to deteriorate electrolytically or otherwise. The replacement
of these parts guaranteed that all the distributors' car buyers
would have to return to them for service on a high-frequency
basis, at which time the distributor would replace the parts
catalogue-priced so high that the distributor was guaranteed
a profitable business. This continuing deceit of the customers—we
the people—was the beginning of the end of the American
automobile business and the once-great world esteem for Uncle
Sam. U.S.A. discreditation has been brought about without the
U.S.A. people's knowledge of the money-maker-world's invisible
cheating.
Throughout all pre-World War II years
employers had maintained that unemployed people were unemployed
because they were unqualified for survival, socially expendable.
Then World War II saw young people deployed on war tasks all
around the world. In view of this loss of labor vast amounts
of automation were incorporated in the U.S.A.'s home-front war
production. With the war over, the government found the cream
of its youth all unemployed, and because of the automation there
were no jobs in sight. Because they were the proven "cream
of the youth," no one could say they were unemployed because
they were unqualified, so the as-yet-operative New Deal created
the G.I. Bill, which sent all those young people to prepaid college
and university educations.
By World War II's end labor was earning
so much that, for the first time, it was feeling truly secure,
affluent, and successful. Emulating the pattern of the rich,
individuals of labor were becoming little capitalists, with many
enjoying the realization of their own home and land, with two
shiny new post-World War II cars in the garage, their kids going
to college, and some savings in the bank. The workers began buying
shares in IBM and other superpromising private enterprise companies.
The Wall Street lawyers, being astute
observers of such matters, realized that this labor affluence
had brought about a psychological reorientation of the body politic.
People no longer remembered or felt the depression of spirit
that was experienced in the Great Depression of social economics
following the Great Crash. The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists
saw this as the time for breaking through the New Deal's hold
on government, an event which, up to that time, seemed impossible.
The lawyers said, "Whoever can get the victorious, supreme-command
American general of World War II as their candidate for President
will be able to get the presidency." They captured Eisenhower.
Eisenhower
had no political conviction, one way or the other. His vanity
was excited at the idea of becoming president of his country.
The Wall Street lawyers explained to
Eisenhower the prevailing new psychology of affluence and convinced
him that the new affluent majority would elect a Republican.
Thus they successfully persuaded him to be a Republican. With
the healthy economy the new wage-earner capitalists, with a vested
interest in maintaining the status quo, readily voted for Eisenhower
on the Republican ticket. Elsenhower's Wall Street lawyer-managers
explained to him that he had been able to win the war because
of the vision, courage, and ingenuity and the productive power
of American free enterprise. They convinced Eisenhower that "the
U.S.A. is, in fact, free enterprise." They also convinced
him that the Democrats' New Deal was socialism and therefore
the inherent enemy of free enterprise.
As soon as the Wall Street lawyers had
Eisenhower in office in 1952, they instructed him to break loose
all the economic controls of the New Deal. They had him cut all
price controls, all rent controls, all interest-rate controls;
they had him terminate anything that was stymieing the making
of big money by big business. For instance, they persuaded Eisenhower
to allow the insurance companies to invest their vast funds in
common stocks. Before Ike's liberation of the insurance companies
they were allowed to put their funds only in "Class A"
bonds and similar investments. Cheered by the capitalist-owned
sector of the press, his Wall Street lawyer-advisors for a long
time had Ike feeling like a great liberator.
The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists
put the Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles in as Ike's Secretary
of State to dictate the American foreign policy of "Soviet
containment," and Foster Dulles's Wall Street lawyer brother
Allen Dulles was put in as head of a new brand of absolutely
invisible, U.S.A.-financed, capitalistic welfare department,
the CIA, established ostensibly to cold-war-cope with the secret-agent
operations of our enemies. So secret was their operation that
the people of the United States and its Congressional lawmakers
had no idea of the size of the unlimited funds given to the CIA,
nor for what those unknown funds were expended. The CIA and Allen
Dulles had a U.S.A.-signed blank check for X amount of
money to do X tasks. I call the CIA, "Capitalism's
Invisible Army."
The great U.S.A. corporations, having
been saved in 1933 by being only "unilaterally socialized,"
and having in the subsequent fifteen years become powerfully
healthy from enormous war orders, immediately after Eisenhower's
election started escalating prices. Their logic was that the
first corporation head to increase prices in a given field of
production would be the first to be able to distribute that "upping"
as profits to his stockholders and thereby to gain for himself
greater economic management status and personal wealth.
As a long-time student of foreign
investment I saw a pattern developing. Between 1938 and 1940
I was on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine as its
science and technology consultant, and my researchers harvested
all the statistics for Fortune's tenth-anniversary issue,
"U.S.A. and the World." In that issue I uncovered and
was able to prove several new socioeconomic facts—for the
first time in the history of industrial economics: (1) the economic
health of the American—or any industrial—economy was
no longer disclosed (as in the past) by the total tonnage of
its product output, but by the amount of electrical energy generated
by that activity; tonnage had ceased to be the criterion because
(2) we were doing so much more given work with so much less pounds
of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given function
as to occasion ever newer, lighter, and stronger metallic alloys,
chemicals, and electronics. Though at that time universally used
as the number-one guide to the state of economic health of any
world nation, tonnage no longer represented prosperity. The amount
of energy being electrically generated and consumed became the
most sensitive telltale of economic health. Furthermore, I was
able in that issue to study carefully all the foreign investments
made in America all the way back to its colonization in the early
seventeenth century.
The ramifications of my studies in foreign
investments in America and elsewhere are wide. An example of
my findings included discovery of the swift, post-American Revolution
investment in U.S.A. ventures by the British (East India Company-advised)
financial world as already mentioned. I found a similar situation
to be existent in World War II. As head mechanical engineer of
the U.S.A. Board of Economic Warfare I had available to me copies
of any so-called intercepts I wanted. Those were transcriptions
of censor-listened-to intercontinental telephone conversations,
along with letters and cables that were opened by the censor
and often deciphered, and so forth. As a student of patents I
asked for and received all the intercept information relating
to strategic patents held by both our enemies and our own big
corporations, and I found the same money was often operative
on both sides in World War II.
The East India Company, whose flag I
have shown to be the origin of ours, was a private enterprise
chartered by the British. Quite clearly the East India Company
didn't lose the American Revolution. The British government lost
the Revolution, and the East India Company swiftly moved large
amounts of its capital into U.S. America.
With World War II over I began to watch
very closely the foreign investments patterning and the strategic
metals movements, especially of copper, but those of silver and
gold as well. In 1942 America had all the monetary bullion gold
in the world in the Kentucky hills. During World War II what
was called "the China Bloc"—which was the Sung
family and others backing Chiang Kai-shek—were able to persuade
the American Congress that China had always been corrupt and
was eternally corruptible; to completely avoid communism in China
Congress should let them have $100 million worth of gold bullion
($2 billion at January 1980 gold pricing) to be taken out of
the Kentucky hills. Personally I don't think that gold ever went
anywhere near China. I think it went right into the Swiss bank
accounts of some clever thieves. But with that much gold out
of the Pandora's box of the U.S.A. Kentucky hills vaults, it
provided a "gold lever" with which to progressively
pry loose more and more gold to be reintroduced into the "lifeblood"
of world economic accounting.
After World War II, with only the one
exception of the $100 million worth of monetary gold bullion
of the China Bloc, all the rest of the world's international
monetary gold bullion was residing in the Kentucky hills, U.S.A.,
vaults. All countries outside America had gone off the gold standard.
In the course of international monetary negotiating that accompanied
the U.S.A.'s post-World War I inadvertent ascendency into being
the master economic state, and the U.S.A.'s post-World War II
attempts to rehabilitate the leading economies around the world
by rehabilitating the economies of its vanquished nations and
thereby increasing international trading, the U.S.A. was persuaded
to re-establish the gold standard for accounting the international
balances of trade.
Gold is the super-helicopter of the open
world-market-trading stratagems of the makers-of-money-for-self
by the legalized manipulation of the money equity of others,
all unbeknownst to the initial wealth equity-owning others. In
1934 Roosevelt's New Deal prohibited the further use of gold
by U.S.A. citizens or U.S.A. businesses.
By 1953 it became apparent that the Wall
Street lawyers were moving the major American corporations out
of America. Of the 100 largest corporations in America four out
of five of their annual investment dollars in new machinery and
buildings for 1953 went exclusively into their foreign operations.
This four-fifths rate persisted for a score of years.
The Wall Street lawyers told Mr. Eisenhower
that they didn't like the overaltruistic social viewpoint of
the Marshall Plan for helping underdeveloped countries. They
liked foreign aid, but not exclusively for the development of
underdeveloped countries. The Wall Street lawyers approved of
the "foreign aid" wherefore the U.S.A. continued with
annual foreign-aid commitments by Congress. The average
annual foreign-aid appropriation has been $4 billion (1950 value)
per year over the twenty-seven-year period from 1952 to 1979,
which amounted to a $100 billion total. Each new year's foreign-aid
bill had a rider that said that if American companies were present
in the country being aided, the money had to be spent through
those American companies. In the foreign countries the corporations
and individuals could again deal in gold.
Foreign aid paid for all the new factories
and machinery of all the American corporations moving out of
America. This became a fundamental pattern: first the 100 largest
corporations, then the 200 largest corporations followed, then
what Fortune calls the 500 largest corporations. Moving
out of America could be done readily because a corporation is
only a legal entity—it is not a human being. It had no physical
body to pass through immigration or emigration. You and I cannot
move out of America because we are physical—we need a passport.
A corporation does not.
So the Wall Street lawyers simply moved
their prime corporate operations elsewhere. It was clearly evident
that with only 7 percent of the world's population in the U.S.A.,
and with two cars already in many U.S.A. garages, by far the
major portion of further exploitation of the world's peoples'
needs and desires would develop outside of the U.S. of America.
But the main objective of the Wall Street lawyers was for the
corporations to get out from under the tax control of the American
government. In 1933 the American people had saved the corporations
by subsidizing them; then, twenty years later, the Wall Street
lawyers moved them out of America, getting the American people
to pay for the move. This allowed the corporations to acquire
gold equities while the U.S.A. citizens and small domestic businesses
could not do so.
Soon after Elsenhower's 1952 election
to the presidency, the lawyers reminded him once more that America
clearly had won the war only through his brilliant generalship
backed up by American free enterprise, and said, "We want
you to stop the welfare-state-inclined American government from
competing with free enterprise. You must cut out all the navy
yards and the arsenals. They compete against the free-enterprise
corporations, which are quite capable of doing the same work
as the navy yards, but of doing it much more efficiently. You
must turn all such production over to private industry, cut out
the U.S.A. post office and turn that over to private enterprise,
cut out the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and turn that
over to the insurance industry." Although much of this transfer
of production from government to private enterprise control was
never completed, Eisenhower goaded on by his lawyers initiated
the flow of taxpayer-financed, highly trained personnel and especially
their technical know-how to private enterprise. This irreversible
trend continues on to the present day, as can be shown by the
history of the whole of the atomic energy field.
Those acquainted with the story of the
atomic bomb development remember the momentous occasion when
theoretical fission was discovered in 1939 by Hahn and Stresemann
in Germany and secretly communicated by them to American physicists,
who checked out their calculations and found them correct and
then persuaded Einstein to go to Roosevelt to tell him that this
was so and that Hitler's scientists were hot on the trail.
Franklin Roosevelt, exercising war powers
given him by Congress, in effect instantly appropriated $80 billion
for what became known later as the Manhattan Project. Later,
that initial $80 billion appropriation was supplemented by an
additional $75 billion for a total of $155 billion of the American
people's money that went into developing atomic energy.
The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists
sent a man named Lewis Strauss to Washington to "join in
the World War II effort." Strauss was a partner in the Wall
Street banking house of Kuhn, Loeb. He was also a brilliant son-in-law
of Adolph Ochs, president of The New York Times.
Strauss was made an admiral in gratitude for his forsaking Wall
Street to help America win the war. After the war Admiral Strauss
was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission; in 1953 Eisenhower
named him commission chairman. Strauss and the Wall Street lawyers
persuaded Eisenhower that the Atomic Energy Commission must not
be in competition with capitalism and must be turned over to
private enterprise. So it was—$155 billion worth of it,
all of which had been paid for by the American public—but
it consisted of work so secret that only the scientists who were
intimate with the work understood it.
All that was necessary to correct the
situation was to give contracts to private enterprise to carry
on the atomic work and to let the government's scientists go
to work for the private-enterprise corporations.
At this point the Wall Street lawyers
and Strauss persuaded Eisenhower that the United States Bureau
of Standards' scientists were in competition with private enterprise
and must be curbed. Strauss assured Eisenhower that the corporations
would take on all the bureau's discarded scientists. What the
Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists realized was something
momentous—to wit . . . that in the new 99.9-percent invisible
reality of alloys, chemistry, electronics, and atomics, scientific
and technical know-how was everything. Physical land and
buildings were of no further interest to capitalism. Metaphysical
know-how was the magic wand of the second half of the twentieth-century
world power structures. Physical properties were subject to deterioration,
taxable, and cumbersome. Advised to do so by their lawyers, capitalism
and private enterprise set about after World War II to monopolize
all strategic technological know-how—i.e., all metaphysical
properties—and to dump all physical properties. They called
for an economic program by which people would be forced to buy
the apartments and houses—to get all physical properties
off capitalism's hands.
The post-Eisenhower era becomes most
suitably identified as that of lawyer capitalism and of
"no-risk," sure-thing, free enterprise.
The whole of atomic development was know-how.
Scientists had the know-how, and anybody without their technical
information could not even speak their language. The Know-How
Club, monopolized by lawyer capitalism, was a very tight club.
Furthermore, the nonmember four billion plus human beings on
planet Earth knew nothing about the invisible micro-macro, non-sensorially-tune-in-able
reality. Large private enterprise had now hired all the know-how
scientists and engineers. They seemingly could keep the public
out of their affairs forever. The world power structure had the
U.S. government completely emasculate the Bureau of Standards.
There was an earnest and concerned battle by a few responsible
scientists to keep the bureau intact, but they were overwhelmed.
Henceforth all science must be done by the private corporations
themselves or under their subsidized university-college and private
laboratory work. To appreciate the extent of this know-how monopoly
of the big corporations, one need only look over the wording
of the scientist and engineering help-wanted advertisements of
the big corporations in the many pages of The New York Times
Sunday business section or of their counterpart publications
in other big cities.
In the invisible, esoteric world of today's
science there is no way for the American government or public,
without the U.S.A. Bureau of Standards' scientists, to follow
the closely held technical secrets of the big, profit-oriented
corporations. To a small extent such popular journals as Scientific
American help people follow details of this-and-that special
case science without learning of the significance of the information
in respect to comprehensive socioeconomic evolution.
No economic accounting books list metaphysical
assets. Metaphysics is held to be insubstantial—meaning
in Latin "nothing on which to stand." Patents can be
granted only for special cases—i.e., limited physical-practice
applications of abstract generalized principles, which principles
alone are inherently metaphysical and unpatentable, being only
"discovered" and not "invented." But physical
patents are capital.
We have two fundamental realities in
our Universe—the physical and the metaphysical. Physicists
identify all physical phenomena as the exclusive manifest of
energy: energy associative as matter or disassociative
as electro-magnetic behavior, radiation. Both of these
energy states are reconvertible one into the other. Because there
is no experimental evidence of energy being either created or
lost, world scientist-philosophers now concede it to be in evidence
that Universe is eternally regenerative.
The physicists have found that energy
will always articulate levers electromagnetically, gravitationally,
chemically by reactive forces, by vibratory waves, etc. Metaphysics
consists only of weightless, dimensionless, abstract thoughts
and mathematical principles that cannot lever physical needles
in respect to instrument dials. Energy in either of its states,
being physical, can be entered into the capital account ledgers.
The large issue today is the technical
know-how that governs the transformations of energy between its
two states. "Know-how" is metaphysics. Metaphysics
now rules. When the head of one of the U.S.A. 's largest banks
was asked what "commodities" were involved in that
bank's import-export dealings with the rest of the world on behalf
of the Chinese government, he answered that know-how was the
prime commodity being acquired by the Chinese through that bank.
I have spent a great deal of time since
World War II in Japan, dealing with their industrialists, and
have personally witnessed the Japanese acquisition by contracts
of a whole complex of exquisitely specific packages of industrial
know-how, together with the respective follow-through educational
services—all acquired from, and performed by, engineering
and business-administration teams of many of the leading American
corporations.
The post-World War II Japanese had already
perceived that they did not need to own the physical mines of
metallic ores because they had learned also how to carry on exclusively
with the melting down and recirculating of the world's metals,
particularly those poured into the Orient and Western Pacific
islands by the U.S.A. during World War II in the form of now-obsolete—ergo,
"scrapped"—armaments. The essence of Japan's recent
decades' economic success has been the acquisition and realization
of the industrial-technology-know-how wealth existent exclusively
in metaphysical know-how, in contradistinction to strictly physical
land properties, tools, and end products. With all their pre-World
War II machinery smashed the Japanese and Germans acquired new,
vastly improved industrial equipment with which to realize their
know-how production, whereas the World-War-II-winning U.S.A.
and European Allies using their old technology became more preoccupied
with making money than in producing superior products.
Because of the foregoing it was now possible
to maintain that hidden know-how capability within private corporate
walls. Since 99 percent of humanity does not as yet understand
science's mathematical language, less than 1 percent of humanity
is scientifically literate—ergo, the lawyers' strategy of
tight monopolization of scientific know-how within the scientifically
staffed corporations was highly feasible.
In 1929, at the time of the Great Wall
Street Crash, only about 1 percent of the U.S.A.'s big corporations
had research departments. Now, half a century later, all the
big corporations have all the powerful research departments,
other than those in which pure scientists are engaged in academic
work under some corporate or government subsidy. Through the
national defense budget's armaments development, all the once
risky research and development costs of enterprise are paid for
by the public through taxation.
The big oil companies knew long ago that
humanity would ultimately run out of an adequate supply of petroleum
and other fossil fuels, though coal may last a thousand years.
That's why, by the means we have reviewed, the oil companies
acquired control of the know-how on atomic energy as well as
all the atomic plants and equipment paid for originally by the
U.S.A. government. The power structure's only interest is in
selling energy—and only energy that they can run
through a meter. They're not in the least interested in anyone
getting windpower—except themselves. Very rich men love
having their sailing yachts wind-driven to Europe or the South
Seas, but this is not for the people. People's power must be
piped or wired to them only through meters.
When in 1972 all the power-structure
capital had converted its dollars into gold, oil, or other highly
concentrated and mobile equities, then-President Richard Nixon
severed the U.S.A. dollar from its government-guaranteed gold
equity value of $35 per ounce, the U.S.A. people's dollar buying
power plummeted—now, in 1980, being worth only 5 cents of
the 1971 U.S.A. dollar.
By 1974 much of the world's buying power
landed in the lap of the Arabs, who also sat atop the chief petroleum
source of the world. In effect they had both the money with which
to buy their petroleum and the largest reserves to be bought.
If someone wanted to buy their petroleum, often they couldn't
do so, because few in the world had the monetary resources remaining
with which to do so. The Arabs realized they would have to lend
out their money to work, but they had no experience in such investment
matters. The Arabs had no knowledge of the vast industrial production
and distribution technical and administrative requirements. Nor
had they any experience in the exploitation of the world-energy
industry prior to their own lands' exploitation by others before
the onslaught of the petroleum company giants. The Arabs had
not known how to discover, drill for, refine, and distribute
the petroleum upon which they had been sitting unwittingly for
thousands of years.
So content were the Arab monarchs with
the gratification of their every physical desire—artfully
heaped upon them personally by the capitalist world's foreign-oil-exploiting
functionaries—that they would never have taken over the
direct mastery of their petroleum affairs had not the psycho-guerilla
warfare between the capitalist and communist powers deliberately
aroused the Arabian peoples themselves, bringing pressure upon
their leaders to take over the foreigners' operations. Since
their subsequent epochal enrichment, the Arabs' political leaders
as well as the monarchs and sheiks have bought everything of
which they could dream, as stimulated by the affluent acquisitions
patterns in other economies. After vast stock and bond investments,
real estate and new building ventures in foreign countries, they
found that they could expend only a fraction of their monetary
wealth. The Arabs have now reached the dilemma of how to turn
their monetary gold fortune to important and lasting advantage.
In 1977 the king of Saudi Arabia said
to a leading American banker with large oil interests, "My
banks don't know anything about international banking and major
industrial accommodation." The American banker said, "Would
you like me to run your banks?" The king said, "Of
course." So the American banker did, and in the process
he taught them international and transnational industrial-finance
management.
There's no question that the few who
have title to Arabian oil find it essential to amalgamate their
operations with the world's great oil companies, which own the
vast equipment of world-around distribution and interaccounting
capabilities as well as the vast majority of refineries and petrochemical
industries. The great oil companies control it all. In general
they and noncommunist Arabia are one and the same. The Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries' (OPEC) officialdom, regardless
of national political differences, is very probably run entirely
by the oil corporations' trillions of dollars of persuasiveness.
It is relevant at this point to note
that the Arabs' inadvertent isolation of both the physical-wealth
items—(1) the underlying monetary gold and (2) the prime
negotiable energy commodity, petroleum—and their concurrent
discovery of their utter lack of know-how, clearly differentiated
out the relative values of (A) the purely physical petroleum
and gold, and (B) the exclusively metaphysical know-how wealth.
It turned out that B was most in demand as well as scarcest.
The physical wealth was thus proved to be of approximately zero
value, while the metaphysical know-how wealth proved to be the
prime economic "good-health" constituent of wealth.
Moreover, those who own oil also own
the atomic energy and have long ago assumed that, if humanity
exhausts or abandons oil, it will automatically switch over to
atomic energy. Humanity has had nothing to say about all this
because the know-how was so obscure and the lawyers' stratagems
so invisibly large. The lawyers' omnilegal international stratagems
were and as yet are so obscure, in fact, that no government authorities—let
alone the public—knew that the world energy monopoly's scientists
had not taken into account earthquakes, for instance, in the
construction of New England atomic energy plants, nor had the
public or government anticipated that the intuitive wisdom of
humanity would develop such an antipathy to atomic energy as
eventually to force lawyer capitalism to fall back on its "ownable"
coal mines and shale for conversion into pipable and meterable
liquid fuels. It is as yet inscrutable to the public, government,
and lawyer capitalism just how strong literate humanity's intuitive
wisdom will be in preventing the full-scale conversion of coal
and shale into liquid energy fuel when it learns, as it has now
been learned in a scientifically undeniable way, that this selfishly
exploitable energy fuel strategy will inexorably destroy the
atmosphere's capability of supporting biological life on planet
Earth. Like all fossil fuels coal gives off carbon dioxide when
burned, but coal gives off 25 percent more of it per unit of
energy than oil and 50 percent more than natural gas. Although
carbon dioxide comprises less than 1 percent of the Earth's atmospheric
gases, this concentration has risen 17 percent since preindustrial
times and is expected to rise an equivalent amount in the next
twenty years. The "greenhouse" effect from the Sun's
heat and increasing amounts of this otherwise harmless gas could
send average global temperatures soaring by as much as 6 degrees
Fahrenheit within fifty years according to a U.S. government
study. This unprecedented global environmental catastrophe would
be virtually irreversible for centuries.
No one knows whether the cessation of
the waste radiation of atomic energy exploitation or the cessation
of coal and shale conversion into fluid fuel will occur in time
to permit the physical continuance of humans on planet Earth.
What we do know however, as we have previously stated, is (1)
that, with the unselfish use of technology, it is now possible
to take care of all humanity at a higher standard of living than
any have ever experienced and do so on a sustaining basis by
employing only our daily energy income from Sun and gravity and
(2) that we can do so in time to permit the healthy continuance
of humans on planet Earth.
Now things are beginning to go wrong
with atomic-power generation . . . everywhere. To start off with,
neither the scientists nor the atomic plant private-enterprise
owners have any safe solution for what to do with radioactive
atomic wastes. Humanity's intuitions are logically aroused, and
public antipathy to atomic energy is rapidly expanding—despite
billions of dollars being spent by the world energy cartel in
propaganda campaigns to make the vast majority of people "go
for" atomic energy.
The second great gasoline-line "pinch"
of June 1979 was put upon the public by the invisible energy-know-how
cartel to painfully divert the public concern generated by the
Three Mile Island radiation accident and threat of a reactor
"meltdown." Though the public had reacted strongly
against atomic plants, the sudden energy supply squeeze administered
by the oil companies made the general public so energy hungry
again that it stopped, for the moment, listening to those who
were attempting to curtail atomic energy plants. The "gas
crisis" re-established "rational" public yielding
to governmental support of atomic energy as the "answer"
to the energy crisis.
Today's (1980) world-power-structures
struggle is one between the U.S.S.R. and big capitalism, which
we now call lawyer capitalism, which deliberately took the world's
private-enterprise corporations out of the fundamental jurisdiction
of America. They have kept their U.S.A. operations going in a
seemingly normal way, so people in U.S. America haven't realized
that these companies are officially situated elsewhere despite
the incredible amplification of those great corporations' annual
profits, whose annual totals payable to these corporations' stockholders
are of the same magnitude as the annual increase in the U.S.A.'s
joint internal and external debt increases.
America is utterly bankrupt externally
in terms of balance of trade due to its own oil companies now
operating as Arabian business. The national debt at the time
of the New Deal was $33 billion—which was the cost of World
War I. Before World War I we frequently had no national debt
whatever. We have today a national debt that exceeds $800 billion—30
percent of that indebtedness came from underwriting of ever-longer-term
mortgages. In 1934 the U.S.A. underwrote a completely obsolete
building industry while Eisenhower allowed the banking world
to make an incredible amount of money in interest rates and services*
in support of the building and real estate game, which building
industry—if it were any good—would pay the U.S.A. back
handsomely. The U.S.A. cannot even pay the annual interest on
its $800 billion national debt. That is why the Nixon presidency
and all those since have had to enter each year with a negative
budget, acknowledging that at year's end the U.S.A. will be a
$100 billion-magnitude unrecoverably deeper in debt. Our foreign-trade-balance
indebtedness is (as of September 1979) $104 billion ($86 billion
if foreign branches of U.S. banks are taken into account). Sum-totally,
what has been taken from the people of the U.S.A. runs into many
trillions of dollars. In the quarter of a century since Eisenhower
America has become completely bankrupt, with its world leadership,
its financial credit, and its reputation for courage, vision,
and human leadership gone.
| *In 1978 over $1 billion just for transferring home-ownership deeds. |
None of this was the American people's
doing. It was all done in an absolutely legal but utterly invisible
manner by the lawyer-capitalism. Individual bankers, industrial-corporation
officers, et al. have had to do what their lawyers told them
to do. No bad people have been involved. The lawyers were following
their survival instinct—and doing so completely legally.
Everything we have reported here has
been published at one time or another, but with the individual
items often so far apart from the last relevant item that the
public has tended not to remember and associate the items. As
a consequence the total picture presented here is approximately
unknown to any but the Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists,
most of whom are no longer alive.
One of my earliest books was Nine
Chains to the Moon, written in 1935 and published by Lippincott
in July 1938, and now being published by Doubleday. In it I referred
so frequently to Finance Capitalism that I developed a contraction
of those two words into FINCAP. FINCAP had died a lingering death
between 1929 and 1934. In this book, Critical Path, I
refer so often to the lawyer-resurrected "capitalism"
that it is appropriate to refer henceforth to LAWCAP. LAWCAP's
"capitalism" is paradoxically the most highly socialized
organization in all history—the citizens of LAWCAP'S welfare-state—the
whole body of corporate stockholders—having an annual average
dole of $100,000 per capita without their even having to make
a pretense of getting a job.
If we take the billions of dollars given
in the 1930s to the great U.S.A. defense-industries corporations
by the New Deal's Reconstruction Finance Corporation . . . if
we take the hidden tax-deduction subsidies to do research, development,
and advertising given to all these companies in pre-1942 dollars
between 1933 and 1980 . . . if we take the $100 billion in foreign
aid that paid for the overseas establishment of the great corporations
. . . if we take the $155 billion of atomic know-how and development
taken over by the oil companies . . . and if we take the number
of fine ounces of gold bullion taken out of America exclusively
by the capitalist world's banking system . . . and if we take
a reasonably low estimate of the unknown billions of dollars
taken out of the U.S.A. by the CIA to operate exclusively on
behalf of international capitalism without the knowledge or authority
of the people of the U.S. of America's quasi-democracy . . .
and if we multiply the sum of the foregoing figures by twenty-five,
which is the amount to which our present U.S.A. dollars have
been depreciated between the time of the appropriations and January
1, 1980, we come to a figure in the magnitude of $6 trillion
that has been legally transferred from the U.S.A. people's national
capital account over to the capital ownership account of the
stockholders of the 1000 largest, transnational, exclusively
American-flag-flying corporations.
The transnationally operating LAWCAP
in the early '50s resurrected the twenty-year-dead FINCAP and
its "capitalist" world and left only its American-flag-flying
storefronts in the U.S.A. to cover its comprehensive financial
withdrawal from the U.S.A. LAWCAP silently and invisibly moved
capitalism's big-time operations into the any-legally-propitious-elsewhere.
With its invisibly operating CIA (Capitalism's Invisible Army)
LAWCAP exploited the unwitting citizens of the U.S.A. in order—they
hoped—to destroy socialism.
The 1947-50 LAWCAP decision to start
a World War III had two objectives: (1) to keep capitalism in
business, and (2) to prevent the Russians from employing their
industrial productivity to produce a higher standard of living
for their own people than that demonstrated in the U.S.A. LAWCAP'S
decision to start World War III inaugurated history's greatest
game of poker, with the U.S.S.R. as a very reluctant player,
worried about its "home-folks' " political agitation
for a few "goodies." It became a poker game that called
for each side adding approximately $100 billion per year into
the "killingry kitty." They have now done so for thirty
years. This amounts to $6 trillion. By complete coincidence $6
trillion happens to be approximately the same magnitude as that
of the total mileage per year traveled by light operating at
186,000 miles each second of the year.
Throughout those thirty years, the U.S.A.-half
of this $6 trillion (that is, $3 trillion) was redeposited at
various turnover rates per year in the Western-world banks, and
the latter continually reloaned those dollars, at historically
unprecedentedly high rates, to armaments industry. The net of
it all was to convert science and technology's highest capability
into accomplishing the killing of ever more people at ever greater
distances in ever shorter time.
LAWCAP's comprehensive grand strategy
had its Achilles' heel.
Having successfully lifted $6 trillion
from the mid-twentieth-century world's leading nation—the
U.S.A. and its people—LAWCAP puppeted the U.S.A.'s people
into expending another of their own $6 trillion in playing "the
drop-dead killingry poker game" with the U.S.S.R. exclusively
on behalf of invisible LAWCAP. The latter was sure that with
its complete control of all the world's money to back the U.S.A.,
the latter could not lose the killingry poker game with the U.S.S.R.
Counting on winning the poker game, LAWCAP started planning its
own post-World War III future.
LAWCAP once more deceived its so-easy-to-deceive
U.S.A. puppet with the kibitzing of the U.S.A.'s playing of its
killingry poker hand. LAWCAP did so through its enormous media
control and its election-funding and lobbying power of the American
political game. LAWCAP had its political leaders convince the
U.S.A. people that they were playing the poker game so satisfactorily
that the U.S.A. assumed that it was far ahead in atomic bombs,
which gave it complete national security and assumedly maintained
its world-around power and prestige.
LAWCAP was confident that with ownership
of all money and control of all the Western world's arms-producing
facilities, they could outlast the U.S.S.R.'s ability to cope
with its internal pressure for shifting its productivity toward
its people's life-style—as surreptitiously agitated for
by the ClA's psycho-guerilla operations.
Because it was a "poker game"
the Russians, realizing that intercontinentally delivered warheads
with a twenty-minute lag between rocket blast-off and landing
bang-off inadvertently provided a twenty-minute radar lead, that
meant for the first time in the history of war that both sides
would be able to see the other side shooting at them twenty minutes
before the bullets would reach them, which gave both sides twenty
minutes within which to get away all of both sides' atomic bombs,
gases, germs, and death rays before the Big Bang, thus producing
the first war in history in which both sides and all their allies
would lose. To be a survivor of such a war would be worse than
being killed by it. Planet Earth would be humanly untenable.
Because the Russians knew all this was
so, and the American people did not seem to know it was so, the
Russians assumed after the Khrushchev-Eisenhower Geneva Meeting
of 1955 that atomic bomb warfare would never occur—that
is the way the U.S.S.R. played their poker hand. They assumed
only enough atomic bomb-making to camouflage their strategy,
while they counted on conventional arms, vast divisions of armed
and trained men, and the greatest ever of world history's line-of-world-supply-controlling
navies. The latter featured all of their now-perfected Vertol
planes, being above-the-sea-surface-emitted, vertically ascending
into the sky from enormous-bellied atomic submarines, moving
far more swiftly submerged—seventy knots—than could
the surface-battling, forty- to fifty-knot aircraft carriers.
This the U.S.S.R. assessed to be the world-winning strategy.
The reason that LAWCAP's strategy kibitzed
its U.S.A. players into holding four atomic bomb "aces"
and an aircraft carrier "king" was because LAWCAP wanted
to be sure that the atomic energy technology was so advanced
and proliferated by World War III's end that they could employ
its U.S.A.-peoples-paid-for basic equipment and widely developed
uranium mines and production sources and its scientific personnel
to produce the energy to run through their money-making meters
after their fossil fuels were exhausted.
LAWCAP's cupidity outwitted its wisdom.
LAWCAP's sense of evolutionary-event acceleration was faulty.
They bluffed only the people of the U.S.A.—not the Russians.
The Russians have now attained so commanding
a lead in the killingry poker game that even the U.S.A. president
concedes that it would take the U.S.A. a minimum of ten years
to restrategy itself so that it could in any way cope with the
Russians' "conventional" naval supremacy and its vastly
greater numbers of modernly armed divisions of world-around warfaring
capabilities.
In the meantime as already mentioned
the United States has gone completely bankrupt internally, its
national indebtedness coming very close to a trillion dollars
and its balance of trade debt to $109 billion—worsening
at a horrendous rate due to LAWCAP's arranging to force the U.S.A.
to obtain almost half its petroleum energy from the Near East.
The U.S.A. has for eight years past been unable to meet even
the interest on its internal debt as demonstrated by a negative
balance of trade. Its future credit has been hypothecated thirty
years beyond Armageddon. Nothing to stop the U.S. Treasury from
issuing 2050 notes, but for how far into the future can LAWCAP
keep selling U.S.A. promissory notes?
Unless God has something else in mind,
it looks as though it will not be long before LAWCAP's kibitzing
of the U.S.A. will have lost the $6-trillion killingry poker
game. Russia will not hesitate to "call" the U.S.A.
hand and rake in the winnings of omniworld, line-of-supply control—maritime,
aeronautical, and astronautical.
In one way the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. citizens
are in much the same socioeconomic position. The Communist party
which runs the U.S.S.R. consists of about 1 percent of their
total population, while the U.S.A. is controlled by about the
same 1 percent, who are the LAWCAP strategists of the great U.S.A.
corporations.
The U.S.A. is not run by its would-be
"democratic" government. All the latter can do is try
to adjust to the initiatives already taken by LAWCAP's great
corporations. Nothing could be more pathetic than the role that
has to be played by the President of the United States, whose
power is approximately zero. Nevertheless, the news media and
most over-thirty-years-of-age U.S.A. citizens carry on as if
the president had supreme power. All that he and the Congress
can do is adjust to what the "free-enterprise system"
has already done. They are riding on the snapping end of the
power-structure dragon's tail.
If I had not been studying and working
for a half-century on the assumption that this present state
of affairs would come about at about this moment in history,
I would have to be very pessimistic now about the human affairs
of the 7 percent of the world's population situated within the
national boundaries of the U.S.A. let alone critically threatened
omnihumanity.
But, in fact, I have been studying and
working anticipatorily throughout all those intervening fifty-three
years, and I know what I am talking about. The world now has
an option to become comprehensively and sustainingly successful—for
all—and that is what this book is about: How to do so .
. . and do so expeditiously enough to succeed within the time
limit. "How to do so" is implicit in the chapters that
follow starting with the manner in which I came to discover the
critical options and the individual self-disciplines that came
naturally to disclose the grand strategy of human survival and
successful functioning.
* * *
Only cosmic costing accounts for the
entirely interdependent electro-chemical and ecological relationships
of Earth's biological evolution and cosmic intertransformative
regeneration in general. Cosmic costing accounts as well for
the parts played gravitationally and radiationally in the totality
within which our minuscule planet Earth and its minuscule star
the Sun are interfunctionally secreted. Cosmic costing makes
utterly ludicrous the selfish and fearfully contrived "wealth"
games being reverentially played by humanity aboard Earth.
Fortunately, the Sun does not demand
payment for all the energy that it delivers by radiation to Earth
in the overall cosmic scheme, which is trying to make humanity
a success despite our overwhelming ignorance and fear. The stars
are trying to tell humanity to awake and prosper and to consciously
assume the important cosmic responsibilities for which it was
designed. Since realization and fulfillment of that responsibility
involve evolutionary discovery by humanity of the cosmic stature
of its mind and the inconsequentiality of its muscle, the planting
of humans on Earth may not bear fruit.
When Universe is developing important
functional interdependencies, she does not put all her embryos
in the same proverbial "basket," (or fiscus).
So poor is the probability of self-discovery by humans of the
infinite potential of the mind and the relative triviality of
human musclepower (which is not even as capable as a grasshopper's)
great nature must have planted a myriad of human-function-equivalent
seedlings on a myriad of planets. In order to succeed as local-in-Universe
critical information-gatherers and local-in-Universe problem-solvers
in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative scenario
Universe, the human-function equipment for local-in-Universe
information-gathering will be as variable as the varied environments
in Universe. Rarely will they have the appearance of human organisms—such
would be employed only under environmental conditions similar
to those of planet Earth.
The first manifestation that humanity
may make good on this planet will be the serious introduction
of cosmic costing into the mainstream deliberations of Earthians.
Cosmic accounting completely eliminates
the economic validity of bankruptcy accounting, except when humans
make the mistake of trying to hoard or withdraw critical "capital"
assets from production functioning. Withdrawal of capital assets
is akin to attempting to withdraw one of the stars from the celestial
system. Into what Universe, other than the cosmic totality, may
the star be transferred? Every atom and electron is an essential
part of the eternally regenerative—ergo, totally inexhaustible
(but always locally ebbing and flooding)—pulsative Universe.
from pages 188 - 197
For several years I was a member of
the "Dartmouth Conference." This was an arrangement
made by Norman Cousins and two other Americans with the Russian
Academy of Sciences to produce teams of U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. leaders
in various fields—teams of approximately twenty-five on
each side—to meet in such years as seemed expedient, first
in the U.S.A. at Dartmouth College and next at Moscow-and-Leningrad,
next at the Westchester Country Club in New York, etc. I was
a member of the Moscow-Leningrad and Westchester, New York, conferences.
The conferees discussed every known point
of contention existing between the two countries. The U.S.A.
team on which I served consisted of John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard
economist; Paul Dudley White, Eisenhower's cardiologist; Norton
Simon, financier; Leslie Paffrath, the director of the Johnson
Foundation; two Harvard U.S.S.R.-specializing professors; a U.S.
Navy admiral and a U.S. Army general. The latter four had been
on many U.S.S.R./U.S.A. arms-problem negotiating teams. The balance
of the U.S.A. team consisted of Norman Cousins (team leader);
Dr. Franklin Murphy, the chancellor of UCLA, now chairman of
the board of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation; David
Rockefeller; and myself.
The Russian team included the president
of their Academy of Sciences, their leading astronomer (who was
in charge of their space-vehicle guidance), their leading climatologist,
others of their leading scientists, their most eminent writers,
philosophers, economists, an admiral, a general—thirty in
all. Present also were a dozen "simultaneous interpreters"
loaned by the UN.
We all lived at the same hotel. The dining
room had only four-place tables. As you entered, you chose quickly
with which of the Russians you wished to sit. They were the first
to reach the dining room. You tried to sit successively with
each of the U.S.S.R. team members. The moment you sat down with
a Russian, an interpreter moved in with you. To our U.S.A. surprise
it turned out at the end of the conference that all the Russians
could speak English, while amongst the U.S.A. representatives
only the two Harvard professors could speak Russian.
Our meetings consisted of: (A) those
lasting all day, every day, at which all the officially-to-be-considered
points were discussed; and (B) the very small individual dining
room and other casual meetings at dinner parties and receptions.
At the latter it seemed as though all points of contention could
be coped with in a manner satisfactory to both sides. At the
formal all-day meetings, however, everyone seemed so intractable
that nothing could be resolved.
For the last day of the first week-long
conferences, some in Moscow, some in Leningrad, it was decided
by the leaders of the two teams that instead of having summaries
prepared of what had occurred, each side would select one of
its members to give a speculative half-day-long prognostication
regarding all prominent features of human life on planet Earth
for the next half-century. Each prognosticator would have half
a day in which to make his or her presentation. It was assumed
that the prognosticators would indicate how much each side was
accommodating the other side's conference issues. These presentations
were expected to provide a clue as to what extent the respective
sides would be yielding in the future to the opposing arguments
presented during the previous formal sessions.
The Russians chose their leading meteorologist
to give the U.S.S.R prognostication. He would have all of Saturday
morning to present it.
I was chosen to present the U.S.A. prognostication.
I had all Saturday afternoon to do so. In preparation I made
a tensegrity sphere to demonstrate new human-use potentials of
nature's fundamental structuring principles of discontinuous-compression-and-continuous
as employed in all geodesics and synergetics. I also calculated
the weight of a great cathedral we passed each day on the walk
to the grand palace in which we held our conferences. Employing
tensegrity principles, I was able to show a 99-percent weight
reduction for enclosing an equal amount of clear-span to that
of the cathedral, including adequately engineered snow-loading,
wind-loading, and earthquake-proofing.
I based my presentation on the twentieth
century's unprecedented invisible revolution in chemistry, electronics,
and metallurgy, by means of which we could now do so much more
with so much less weight, volume, energy, and time per each accomplished
function as to suggest that we humans would soon prove invalid
Malthus's seemingly infallible scientific conclusion that economically
on our planet Earth it had to be "only you or me—not
enough for both." I then outlined the changes in patterning
of life on Earth if there were ample high standard of living,
life support for all. My discourse, its predictions, and the
raisons d'etres for those predictions were approximately the
same as those of this book—Critical Path.
What I said pleased both the U.S.A. and
U.S.S.R. delegates. On the walk home to our hotel each individual
delegate from both sides hustled up beside me and told me how
excitedly pleased he or she was over my statements. The Russians
were unanimously enthusiastic about what I said. Fortunately,
all the U.S.A. delegates seemed equally pleased. At the
farewell banquet that night the president of the U.S.S.R. Academy
of Sciences said in his closing speech, "From now on Buckminster
Fuller will be ranked in the U.S.S.R. side-by-side with Franklin
and Edison." I assumed that the Russians had so classified
me because I was not only an inventor but dwelt in the lands
of capitalism—despite the fact that I am apolitical and
an ardent advocate of an omnihumanity-advantaging freedom of
individual initiative, and not of private enterprise's only selfishly
benefited freedoms.
In our second meeting, two years later
at the Westchester Country Club, many of the American participants
lived nearby and so went home each night. Together with the Johnson
Foundation director I lived at the club with the Russians. I
found that the young editor of Pravda was the only Russian
amongst them who seemed free to explore and discuss spontaneously
the world's future prospects. Though obviously a faithful communist,
his speculative thoughts seemed not to be bound within popularly
established party-line dogma.
What I learned from the Russians—regarding
which I am certain they were seriously convinced—was that
"the U.S.S.R. would never be willing to negotiate with the
U.S.A. regarding any world-around, supreme-power matters when
the U.S.S.R. was in a weaker military position than the U.S.A."
They said to me, "Every time we
struggle to attain parity with the U.S.A. so that we can negotiate,
the U.S.A. institutes an arms advancement before the meeting,
wherefore we are deprived of tolerable negotiating conditions.
"Worse than that," they said,
"this continually defeats turning our massive high-technology
productivity toward realizing a life-style for our socialist
economy equal to or better than that already enjoyed by capitalism—whose
world-publicized high standard of living is a thorn in our side
as we remain unable to do so—not because of technical or
social inability but because of the preoccupation of technological
resources with the cold warring."
Assuming that an atomic war would mean
that both sides would lose*—ergo, it would not occur—the
U.S.S.R. determined to outnumber and thus overpower the U.S.A.
in the design and the production of conventional air and sea
armaments and in the training and maintenance of a vastly greater
standing army, whereafter they felt they could negotiate constructively
for the establishment and maintenance of peaceful world-around
conditions.
It must be remembered that, in their
1920s-formulated, successive-multistaged five-year industrial
planning, the Russians had assumed a World War II to occur in
the early 1940s, at which time it would be evident to the private-enterprise
world that socialism could be successful—which private enterprise
had always said would be impossible—ergo, the private-enterprise-dominated
countries would start a war to destroy socialism but would do
it in a highly deceptive manner by having a Nazi propaganda offensive
launched against the German industrial cartels, which would suddenly
be turned against the U.S.S.R. This is exactly what happened.
The Germans first made the U.S.S.R. their ally. When well into
Poland and at the Russian border, the Nazis turned treacherously
against the U.S.S.R. The anti-U.S.S.R. strategy of the "Cliveden
set" miscarried when, soon thereafter, the U.S.S.R. and
the U.S.A. became allies.
No one in the U.S.A. can understand the
bitterness as yet existent in the U.S.S.R. over the millions
of U.S.S.R. troops and civilians killed by the Nazis. The U.S.S.R.
could not understand the U.S.A. rearming of the Germans, with
whom the U.S.S.R. was much more concerned as a World War IV enemy
than with the U.S.A. as such an enemy.
The Russians had assumed in their five-year
planning that when World War II terminated, they would be able
to divert all their high industrial productivity toward advantaging
all their people to prove that socialism could produce an economically
desirable life-style equal to or better than that provided by
capitalism. Again, the Russian planning became thwarted when
Western capitalism, which had been socialized by FDR's New Deal,
realized at the cessation of World War II that it could not carry
on without the vast government procurement program which is occasioned
only by war. To cope with this situation the capitalists invented
World War III (which they called the cold war).
The Russians queried of the U.S., their
supposed ally, "Who are you going to fight?" and the
U.S.A. answered, "You."
This meant that the U.S.S.R. would have
to focus all its high-science-and-technology productivity on
producing armaments for decades of around-the-world cold warring,
in the conduct of which both the Russians and the U.S.A. would
have to avoid direct, all-out interconfrontation. With the joining
of supreme-powers war by direct military confrontation, neither
side could withdraw without all-out surrender. However, all-out
intercontinental atomic war would mean the end of human life
on Earth. Therefore, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., in testing their
respective strengths, would have to operate indirectly against
one another through their respective puppet nations, hopefully
intent on drawing forth the "secret weapons" in the
other's arsenals. Thus we have the North versus the South Koreans,
the "Vietnamese" versus the Vietcong, the Israelis
versus the Arabs, etc.
The Russians decided early on that atomic
warheads would not be used because the rocket delivery times
traveling at 14,000 miles per hour were such that with radar
traveling at 700,000,000 miles per hour, both sides would know
ten minutes before being struck that the enemy had fired their
atomic warheads—ergo, both sides would have plenty of time
to send off all their atomic warheads, and both sides would lose.
So while deceptively continuing the atomic-warhead race with
the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R. committed itself realistically to producing
the strongest navy in history.
The U.S.A. politicans kept the U.S.A.
populace feeling militarily secure because they could point out
that the U.S.A. was developing far more atomic warheads than
was the U.S.S.R. The U.S.A. was doing so because big oil money,
which successfully lobbied Washington's Capitol Hill energy policies-knowing
that petroleum would ultimately be exhausted--fostered atomic-warhead
production in order to build up the atomic technology industry
(in the development of which the U.S. people's government had
spent over $200 billion) and its nuclear scientist personnel
whom they, the world-power-structure organizations, would need
to employ in operating the atomic-energy plants and the electrical-distribution
network as world petroleum supplies dwindled. They would need
the energy meters in order to continue exploiting the capitalist
world's energy needs.
When Jane's Annual World Inventory
of Ships showed that the U.S.S.R. Navy had reached parity
with the U.S.A., the U.S. politicians laughed it off by saying
the Russians did not even have aircraft carriers. This was true
because the U.S.S.R. had seen that aircraft carriers are "highly
vulnerable," so they built huge airplane-carrying submarines
from which a plane would take off by "Vertol"—vertical
flight to height, followed by horizontal flight—ergo, needing
no runways. This Vertol-from-submarine launching was strongly
advocated by some of the U.S. Navy's most astute officers, whose
word was not heeded because the aircraft carriers were much more
profitable business for private enterprise. The weapons industry's
Washington lobbyists were more persuasive than the U.S. Navy's
experts.
With its naval fleet supremacy established
but lacking en route support bases, the U.S.S.R. then set about
to develop disarmament talks with the U.S.A. from a superior
conventional-warpower position—that of controlling the high-seas
lines of supply.
Realizing that the U.S.A. senators had
jurisdiction over all peace negotiating and that the U.S.A. Senate's
Republican membership was intent to deprive the Democratic President
of peace-making success, and that apparently the U.S.A. was not
going to go along with ratification of the SALT treaty, the Russians
decided to put the heat on the U.S.A. so that a global naval-line-of-supply
confrontation incident such as the occupation of Afghanistan
would demonstrate—as it has in Iran—that the U.S.A.
can no longer control the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea and therefore
cannot take yesteryears' sure-to-win military steps against Iran.
The U.S.A.'s half-century dominance of
world affairs is now terminating, just as did Great Britain's
century and a third of dominance come to an end with the 1929
economic crash.
Sir Halford Mackinder was Britain's
chief geographical advisor from the latter Victorian period to
1930. Mackinder pointed out that the British Empire was built
on its mastery of the world's sea routes from the Orient to Europe.
He also pointed out to the British, circa 1900, that what the
world's seacoasts might really be was not what one saw when looking
at the world maps. He showed the British that the railways were
the large-tonnage-capacity, previously seagoing, cargo carriers
going up onto the land. He further showed them that the Trans-Siberian
Railway was being built by the Russians to short-circuit the
Orient-to-Europe high-tonnage cargo routes. Mackinder pointed
out that the Trans-Siberian Railway was strategically too far
to the north. Its snow impediment was too great to be economical.
The British kept the Russians bottled up by refusing them an
Atlantic port—Russia had to go to Archangel in the Arctic
Sea and, on the Pacific coast, to Vladivostok.
The Orient Express ran only from Paris
to Constantinople in Asia Minor. The czar-backing Russian-power-structure
interests, hoping to compete with the British, represented the
inheritors of the before-the-water-route, overland-caravaning
powers of the Old World. Mackinder showed the British that the
only economically successful trans-Europe and Asia railroad route
would have to be from France to Constantinople and thence via
Turkey and Iran to Kabul, Afghanistan, and thence through the
Khyber Pass, through Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia to Shanghai,
China, cutting shipping times down very much as compared with
the sea routes around Africa to the Orient. Mackinder's counsel
was heeded by the British.
Mackinder showed the British that Russia
could, by taking Afghanistan and Pakistan, reach the Persian
Gulf and then come through the Indian Ocean to intercept British
cargo ships en route to the Orient. Mackinder identified on the
map what he called "the Heartland." The heart of Mackinder's
Heartland was Afghanistan, with its Khyber Pass leading to the
east and its ability to break through to the Arabian Sea and
the Persian Gulf. Mackinder said, "Whoever controls the
Heartland, rules the world." Afghanistan was (and as yet
is) the heart of the world's heartland.
After World War I the British were so
"tired" that they did not listen to Mackinder as they
had before. In the 1920s he tried to make the British realize
that the airplane altogether eliminated the world's shorelines
as the limit of travel. The British did not see the airplane
as a cargo carrier and believed that their world trading exclusively
by ships of the sea would not be threatened by air traffic. No
one had ever flown across an ocean, let alone set up air-cargo
fleets capable of competing with their seagoing fleets. One of
the factors that they failed to envision was that of the technology
becoming ever lighter per unit of functional performance until
it became feasibly and economically air-deliverable.
Mackinder developed a doctorate-level
school in London in the 1920s. One of his students was a talented
German named Haushofer, who listened to Mackinder pointing out
that the armored tanks were, in effect, the navy destroyers coming
out of the sea and running up on the land. Mackinder said to
his students, "The French Maginot Line and all great fortresses
around the world are obsolete." He continued, "The
airplane raiders above and the armored tanks on the land could
circumvent, overrun, and overfly the fortresses and overwhelm
any troops or other defense." Haushofer graduated from Mackinder's
school, returned to Germany, and went to work for Goering, Hitler's
air minister. Haushofer described Mackinder's science in German
as Geopolitik. From his description of Mackinder's concept,
which the British were not heeding, Goering developed his blitzkrieg—lightning
war—with the Luftwaffe commanding the sky and tanks and
other armored vehicles commanding the land. Goering flew over
and rolled over the Maginot Line and took all Europe.
Until the end of World War II the British
had kept the Afghanistan heartland well under control. Then,
after World War II, they let its militarily guaranteed isolation
greatly deteriorate. Meanwhile the Russians were busy giving
Afghanistan such "presents" as a first-class highway
from Russia to Kabul. The U.S.A. gave them naught.
In 1954 the British Foreign Office advised
the U.S. State Department that they had just learned from their
ambassador in Kabul, Afghanistan, that Russia, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, and China had all installed impressive exhibition
buildings in Kabul to take part in Afghanistan's most sacredly
important holiday—the Geshin Fair. Neither the United Kingdom
nor the U.S.A. nor any of their allies had an exhibit in Kabul.
I received an emergency call from Jack
Masey of the U.S. State Department's U.S. Information Agency.
He asked me how long it would take me to produce a 10,000-square-foot-floor
area geodesic dome so light and compactly shippable that it could
be sent by one DC-4 airplane to Kabul. My Raleigh, North Carolina,
shop had it produced in twenty-five days, complete with a high-tension,
all-weather skin outwardly tensed to its geodesic, tubular aluminum
frame. All the struts and hubs of the dome were color-coded.
The 114-feet-in-diameter dome was test-assembled at the Raleigh
airport and accepted by the U.S.A.
It was flown to Kabul with my one engineering
representative to supervise its erection by the Afghans. It was
assembled in one day just in time for the Geshin Fair opening.
The U.S.A. show inside consisted of the Borden's "laughing
cow," bouncing ball bearings, and Lionel trains. No one
showed interest in the show inside, but all the Afghans, the
Russians and East Germans, the Chinese and Czechs, were fascinated
with the geodesic dome itself. The Russians asked permission
to bring in their moving picture equipment to make a documentary
of the dome construction. The then king of Afghanistan fell in
love with the dome—it was a great modern-materials Afghan
yurt—the Afghans' own architecture. The king asked the U.S.A.
to give him the dome, but the U.S.A. refused and sent the dome
off as an around-the-world traveling show.
The Russians, finding the Afghans making
themselves working automobiles out of the most battered second-hand
cars shipped into Kabul and then driving them around on very
rough dirt roads, made the Afghans a present of macadam-surfaced,
first-class roads, which delighted the Afghans because they provided
some real distance driving—the Russians extended the highways
all the way into the U.S.S.R. These roads recently (1979) provided
the means for the U.S.S.R. to roll their armed forces into Afghanistan.
Having been a long-time student of Sir
Halford Mackinder's work, I was fascinated through my dome experience
to discover that the U.S. diplomacy apparently knew nothing of
Mackinder's "Heartland" concept—or considered
it to be no longer relevant.
When early in 1979 the U.S.S.R. took
over Kabul, Afghanistan, it was because the balance of world
power had shifted from U.S.A. to U.S.S.R. mastery.
As we have related, Mackinder had identified
"The Heartland" on the maps. The heart of his Heartland
was Kabul, Afghanistan. Also, the Russians with their now-great
navy had access to the Atlantic Ocean only at Archangel and the
Baltic ports and Vladivostok in the North Pacific. With Afghanistan
under their control the Russians were able to control all the
northern and eastern borders of Iran and the western borders
of Pakistan.
Russia always uses the power structure's
number-one strategy—"divide to conquer!"—and
does so with psychological expertise. She often finds religious
divisibility the most propitious. It was feasible in Iran, which
could be divided religiously against the incumbent political
power—ergo, the Muslims versus the Shahdom of Iran—with
knowledge that after driving out the U.S.A.-supported Shahdom,
it (the U.S.S.R.) could divide the Muslims into their subsects
and militarily overwhelm Iran. The U.S.A.'s secretly supported
Kurdish opposition to Russia in Afghanistan and to the Muslims
in Iran would become the final obstacles to the Russians' century-held
objective of gaining direct access to the Indian Ocean and therewith
complete control of U.S.A. access to Arabian oil. The Russians'
move into Afghanistan was not just a power-structure play. They
were exercising their evolutionary ascendancy into the world's
top power position. The Heartland—Afghanistan and its ultimate
access to the Indian Ocean—is the historic prizes of the
world's top power position.
Fortunately for the cross-breeding world
citizens of North America and for the rest of the world, the
U.S.S.R. is most probably intent on getting the world power structure
under irreversible control as quickly as possible so that it
can institute controlled demilitarization and thereby turn its
immense productivity toward improving the standard of living
for the socialist world and thus prove socialism's life-style
to be equal to or better than the best of the life-styles produced
by capitalism. I am confident that Russia does truly intend world
disarmament. She will keep a powerful upper hand at each stage
of disarmament but will seek to have the world's militarily scrapped
metals reinvested in peacefully productive livingry advantage
for all the world's peoples.
I have only one objection to the
concept of comprehensive socialism: So far it has made no provision
for effective development of the individual initiative of humans.
Too long has such freedom of initiative been usurped either by
the Communist party, representing only 1 percent of the U.S.S.R.
population, or by the Western world's private enterprise's utterly
selfish exploitation for money-making rather than for common
sense-making. I have discussed this point with the Russians.
They admit that a party dictatorship is not "democracy"
and, at the same time, also admit that it is for true
democracy to which the Russians, the Chinese, and most people
of the world aspire. Possibly the electronically operative democracy
and its ability to cope with complex problem-solving will also
make safe the realization of individual initiative to be exercised
on behalf of all humanity by any humans anywhere.
*See p. 117, "Legally Piggily" chapter, and page 192 of this chapter.
from pages 278 - 280
We next observe the great twentieth-century
influx of industry onto the California coast. Overnight settlements
became towns and towns became cities, each with its own chamber
of commerce doing its best to attract ever more industry. In
order to pay for town governments taxes are necessary. In order
to pay political obligations the elected town administrations
need money to hire people to carry on all the legislatively conceived
tasks—some of them necessary, many of them unnecessary,
but all requiring large sums of money.
The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce
and the Los Angeles government did everything they could to invite
industry to move into their domain because industries produce
the greatest amount of taxable money-making. Industries also
produce jobs and thereby in turn wages that can be taxed. Los
Angeles did everything it could to attract industries and businesses.
Having many locally occurring petroleum wells, one of the most
logical of industries brought into Los Angeles was that of oil
drilling, pumping, refining, storage, and shipping, such as those
of the concentrated operations of the oil fields and harbor area
of Los Angeles's Long Beach. Los Angeles built a vast number
of huge refineries in the southwest part of the city. On its
southeastern side Los Angeles positioned its steel mills to satisfy
the large demand for steel products in the building of the oil
refineries, their storage tanks and pipelines.
The fumes from these industries then
loaded the mist and the warm airs, and the Sun-exposed upper
cloud surfaces and their shaded lower surfaces produced temperature
differentials, which in turn produced layer inversion, with the
fumes locked in on the underside, which then acted as a widespread
lower atmospheric lid, holding the industrial gases and fumes
close to the ground throughout the whole Los Angeles basin. Thus
smog became an industrially produced phenomenon.
Los Angeles's citizens became politically
articulate about this "air pollution" and went to their
city government saying, "We mustn't have this in our city."
The city government then went to the utilities, refineries, and
steel manufacturers and said, "Stop putting your smog-producing
fumes into our sky. We've looked into the situation and find
there exists equipment that makes it possible to precipitate
that fume. But you don't have that equipment." The companies
responded, "If we put in that fume-precipitation equipment,
it will cost us so much more to produce here in L.A. than it
does companies producing in places that don't have such controls
that we won't be able to compete in our industry. We'll be forced
out of business. So we're either going to have to cut out this
nonsense about fume precipitation or move out of your city."
The municipal government said, "For Heaven's sake, don't
leave. Your tax base is essential to our political survival.
We're politicians, we'll fix it up in some other way."
Soon thereafter the L.A. city government
made the following pronouncement: "People, the smog is your
fault. It's your backyard incinerators that are producing this
smog." The people said, "Sure enough, we are incinerating
in Los Angeles. We are in the wrong. We must stop incinerating."
So a law was passed saying that nobody could incinerate within
the city limits. The people did stop incinerating, and the smog
abated--but only in minor degree. The real offender was the industrial
fumes. Along came World War II, and the issue was buried under
more immediately pressing matters.
When World War II was over, great numbers
of additional citizens moved into California. Suddenly the smog
problem was back, and the whole act of pre-World War II was repeated.
The people complained to the municipal government, and the omnichanged
government personnel had entirely forgotten about what had happened
twenty years earlier. They went after the big corporations, which
threatened to leave town, and the city once again pleaded, "Don't
leave town. We need you here."
Once more the city blamed the people:
"It's the fumes from your automobiles that are producing
the smog. We have taken samples, with scientific instruments,
of the below-the-smog air, which samples when analyzed proved
the obnoxious fumes to be those of your automobiles." With
their greatest election-fund support coming from the oil men,
and with the most powerful regulation lobbying being carried
on also by the oil men, the politicians of America took up the
cry, "It's the automobiles." The people said, "Why,
sure enough. We'll have to do something about it. We'll pass
laws to limit the level of fumes coming out of each car and require
the manufacturers to produce and install special smog-control
equipment in each car." The automobile companies loved that.
It meant more accessories to be manufactured and sold and an
obvious way to rationalize increasing the price of their cars.
Christmas and New Year's Days are celebrated
everywhere in America, but Los Angeles, being a relatively new
and gigantic social body, is able to alter its celebration customs.
The L.A. refineries and heavy industries have learned that the
people of California want to take a Christmas vacation. So the
holiday becomes a ten-or-more-day vacation starting the weekend
before Christmas and continuing through the weekend after New
Year's Day. It pays all the refineries and other heavy industries
to shut down their plants. As the holiday proceeds, the air gets
clearer and clearer, until on New Year's Day--the traditional
Rose Bowl Day—you find throughout Los Angeles a dreamy-clear
view of all the surrounding, often snow-capped mountains. If
you went out with scientific devices to measure the fume-level
from the cars, your instrument would read approximately zero.
The only reason that auto fumes were previously measurable was
that the industrial-fume-laden ceiling held the auto fumes down
and locked them in at the level at which you and I are breathing.
I have taken many New Year's Day pictures from the hills of Los
Angeles showing it to be absolutely clear. Then, on back-to-work
industrial Monday, you see a vast, molasses-brown cloud rolling
in from the southwest gradually to obscure the whole of Los Angeles.
There is no question about it. It is
the refineries, the steel and other mills, and the public utility
fumes that produce the smog. But no municipal government anywhere
in America is going to let its industry go away. Therefore, cities
are always going to find political ways of absolving the industries
while blaming the people. Air does not stay in any one place.
There is a preposterously stubborn myth about "this being
my or someone else's airspace.... This is my air." Air keeps
moving right through the geometry of our environment to continually
recircle the Earth. The air belongs only to everybody on our
planet.
Home