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GRUNCH OF GIANTS

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, it had to compete with the post-office conducted mail and required far greater numbers of employees. Morgan saw that the copper mines and the electric equipment manufactured from copper as well as all the power-generating companies involved the least labor participation and the then maximally profitable business.

All of the foregoing required the availability and controllability of an utterly unprecedented magnitude of physical apparatus and installation of otherwise unemployed monetary wealth. The patents of Edison's inventions and an army of astute lawyers and brokerage houses became the pivotal legal-precedent-accepted economic properties and work force in amassing the initial procurement capital of Morgan's power monopoly.

This initial capital-amassing was greatly augmented by selling interest-bearing bonds to widows and trust funds in general, seemingly safely secured by the vast lands given as a "grateful" U.S.A. people's government as a subsidy to the pioneer railway-building-and-operating companies. The railroad company bonds were secured by the seemingly highly valuable real estate adjacent to all the railroad, cross-country rights-of-way, their way-station town properties, railway stations, trackage, etc. which railroad company bonds were purchased for widows and trust funds in general by their trustees. This capital amassing initially financed the electric power companies. As we have noted elsewhere, these railroad bonds became worthless in the 1929 economic crash. Nobody wished to buy the old depot buildings, etc.

When the automobiles and the auto-trucks took so much business from the railways as to render the railroad passenger systems profitless, and cross-country, pipeable petroleum replaced coal as a prime fuel, and giant transoceanic tankers were developed, and the Middle East oil lands were explored and developed, the petroleum business rose swiftly to become the maximum economic power giant of the twentieth century, outpowering the Morgan utilities-and-banks-based system.

The number of kilowatts of electric energy being generated from each BTU (British Thermal Unit) of fossil fuels burned or foot-pounds per second of water-power-derived turbine-functioning has continually increased since the very beginnings of electric-power generation and distribution. Concurrently, the weight of the production and distribution equipment to produce that power rapidly decreased per each kilowatt or horsepower of energy produced and delivered. As a consequence of this never ceasing technological increase in overall efficiency, the actual overall cosmically predicated costs of energy generation have always and only decreased, and cost increases have been the consequence of those in top power-positions contriving through pricing to be able to pay ever greater dividends to shareholders and thus to increase the stockmarket value of their own shares, thus in turn to increase their power to control the amassed money of others as capital. Such capital power manipulation is intoxicating and seemingly unchallengeable.

However, as with all socioeconomic-political power evolution, the politically appointed "public service" commissions in all the states have consistently granted even higher kilowatt-hour price rates to the privately owned, deceptively named "public service companies" producing the electric power. So unchallengeably powerful are the "public service" commissions that in 1981 and 1982 they have been able to allow great utility companies to abandon some nine hundred million dollars wasted by utility companies as they abandon their partially finished atomic energy plants on the U.S. West Coast—charging the loss to the consumers by increasing their rates. This results in private enterprise making a $900 million bad gamble and having the capability of passing on their loss to the public.

The constant fundamental operating-cost reductions, combined with constant price increases, have produced so much money that the power-generating businesses are amongst the wealthiest and most invisible of the politically manipulative organizations. After World War II, the electric power industry's three-quarters-of-a-century-accumulated wealth successfully combined its political power with that of the oil giants to "take over for nothing" the total atomic-energy program assets. This included all of the know-how and production apparatus of the U.S. government's military atomic-energy program, for which development the U.S. citizens had paid $150 billion.

This amassing of political power coincided with a generally dawning awareness of U.S. youth in general and an ever-increasing percentage of the mature U.S. electorate regarding the corruption of the political representatives of their theretofore-trusted democratic government. This corruptibility is inherent in the fact that the TV electronic campaign costs of U.S.A. elections now amount to $50 million for the presidency, $10 for a senatorship, and $5 million for a congressional seat. This corruptibility is enhanced by the U.S. Supreme Court's hang-fire no-ruling of 1981 which will allow unlimited money to be spent in the next election years.

The now-gone supranational corporate giants have always known that the fossil fuels can and will become exhausted. To meet this contingency, their post-World War II last-third-of-a-century grand strategy has been to force the U.S. government to develop superior atomic-war capability, knowing full well that atomic warfare will terminate human occupancy of planet Earth, which fact would eventually force the government to abandon its war use. First and foremost, however, the power monopoly would have to have accomplished their "public service" atomic energy objective; first, of becoming contractors to operate government atomic facilities; second, of siphoning off from the U.S. government all the latter's atomic scientist personnel and all the invisible know-how to develop world-around atomic-energy plants to feed into their wired and metered energy-monopoly system as the petroleum source diminished and approached depletion. In the meantime, while maintaining their power over the U.S.A and other political systems, their grand strategy found it necessary to have the U.S.A. and Western World population satisfied that the U.S.A. was successfully maintaining its fighting superiority over the U.S.S.R. by producing more atomic bombs than the Russians.

• • •

To initiate his wired and metered electric-energy-power monopoly in the "gay nineties"—1890—which three fourths of a century later became an overwhelming socioeconomic power, the elder J. P. Morgan used the earlier formula of issuing bonds and preferred stocks on each of his enterprises as soon as they were paying dividends. He was thus provided with additional free capital to initiate other branches of the power-structure system: for example, in copper mining (for use in the generation and conduction of electric power), steel manufacture (for the highline masts and structural housings of the electric equipment), etc.

He used his engineering firm of Stone-Webster to design and build his foreign-country power systems operated by Electric Bond and Share Company—EBASCO. His price increasing by the power companies was automatically matched by increase in the stock-market sale of his companies' shares. These share values increased with his own equities' advance. Using these equities as capital, he opened his own banks.

Because his enterprising monopolies earned good dividends, shares in his companies became increasingly popular. His own bank and the banks he controlled opened brokerage departments. He backed the opening of many stock-exchange-seat-owning individuals' brokerage houses to cope with the increasing complexity of open-market selling and buying of his companies' shares or bonds. By the time of the 1929 Crash, Morgan was controlling the boards of directors of General Electric, General Motors, U.S. Steel, the big three copper companies, the telephone and telegraph companies, all the "Edison Electric" public utilities, etc.; and many of the U.S. banks.

At the outset, Morgan's partners gave Harvard University its law and business schools, from whose highly educated, specialized graduates they recruited the army of lawyers and financial experts to service their Wall Street offices. This legal army handled the behind-the-scenes complex contractings and financial paperwork implementing Morgan's and his associates' enterprises. There being no laws against so doing prior to 1929, he used general bank deposits to underwrite his enterprises.

In the early 1920s, the Morgan-dominated banking system pushed farm machinery sales to farmers on time-payment plans secured to the banks by first mortgages on the farm properties as well as on the machinery. As I explained in Critical Path, the bad hog market of 1926 hit farmers financially, causing many to be unable to make their monthly payments on their time-purchased farm machinery. The country banks not only replevined the machinery but foreclosed on the farms, which were mortgaged to guarantee the time payments—the country banks found the farms unsalable, as there were no other U.S.A. individuals eager to go into farming. ("How You Gonna Keep Em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" —World War I song.) Then the bigger city banks, which had loaned the small banks money based on the "soundness of physical land and machine collateral," foreclosed on the small country banks. The larger city banks also found their foreclosure properties unsalable. No cash funds were available to accommodate their depositors' withdrawals. "Runs" on banks multiplied. There came a crisis moment when over five thousand banks closed in one day. Finally the big Chicago banks closed and only the big New York banks remained open. Then it was discovered that they, too, having loaned their deposits for industrial ventures, now lacked cash monies with which to refund their depositors and the New Deal and FDR declared the "Bank Moratorium," thereby avoiding admitting the bankruptcy of the U.S. banking system and with it the end of U.S.A. capitalism. The U.S. Congress, inquiring exhaustively into the matter, found that those New York banks' brokerage departments had been using deposits for underwriting venture industries. Because this was at the heart of the failure, the Glass-Steagel Banking Act of 1933 was enacted "permanently"—it was hoped—separating venture brokerage-underwriting from the New Deal government's guaranteed bank deposits of the people.

J. P. Morgan, Sr.'s strategy of organization of the financing and control of U.S.A. industrial development was evolved from his close cooperation with the Bank of England's centuries-old, behind-the-scenes laws of accepted precedent of physical property rights and their convertibility into "paper securities" as marketable shares in enterprise. The Bank of England and Morgan nurtured the young Grunch of eighteenth-century giants from their youth into lusty nineteenth-century colonial maturity. J. P. Morgan became the official fiscal agent of the British Empire in World War I. As the "Allies' " purchasing agent from 1914 to 1918, Morgan's amassing in the U.S.A. of the profits of World War I shifted the world capital of the grunch of corporate giants from Europe to America, and until the 1929 crash assured Morgan's dominance of the socioeconomic evolutionary balance of power over human affairs on planet Earth.

• • •

The Russian Revolution brought about the 1917 inception of the U.S.S.R. and its organization of world communism as an evolutionary challenge to capitalism's power.

In Critical Path I have traced these evolutionary events to 1981. In 1981, the supranational invisible moneymaking colossus finds itself faced with the U.S.S.R.'s 1981 superiority in number of conventionally armed divisions and greater all-oceans naval power than that possessed by the U.S.A. and its NATO allies.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger admitted in April 1981 the extraordinary Soviet military buildup, which has left in its wake the U.S. loss of strategic defense advantage which it had maintained in the fifties and sixties. He cites Defense Department data showing the Soviets' four-to-one advantage in tanks, their two-to-one tactical advantage in atomic-powered, atomic-missile-launching submarines, and a four-to-one advantage in submarines, and in addition the sizable increase in the weight and accuracy of their nuclear intercontinental strategic missiles. He describes their naval buildup as the fastest in naval history. Weinberger states that, at present, the U.S.S.R. continues to outbuild the U.S. two-to-one in surface vessels and five-to-one in submarines, according to his latest figures. (Jane's annual publications of international armaments have been providing these figures quite accurately over the years with no mention of them by the petro-atomic-power-structure-puppeted U.S. politicians and even less mentioned by the supranational-giants-controlled U.S. press.)

To regain its military edge (detente) over the Soviet Union, if it can be done at all, and assuming that the U.S.S.R. does nothing to offset the attempt, will take ten years and, according to Defense Secretary Weinberger $ 1.6 trillion or approximately $1 billion a day ($365 billion a year) over the next five years, just for starters. The supranational-money colossus needs that time to build its CIA-organized and U.S. people's unknowingly financed fighting power, officered by mercenaries (For example, the aborted Seychelles “invasion” of November 27, 1981, involving mercenaries based in South Africa.) and soldiered, sailored, and piloted by puppeted countries to attain a superior posture over the Soviet Union or any other power—including even a possibly-to-be-catalyzed, supranational, individually thinking and acting, spontaneously cooperating amalgam of now majorly literate, apolitical, world-around citizenry.

Since it takes millions of dollars to win U.S. elections, the vast majority of America's crossbreeding youth and an ever-increasing number of its adults concede politics to be so inherently corrupt as to cause increasing numbers of qualified voters to withhold from voting, lest in doing so their action be misconstrued as constituting their approval or acceptance of the present-day corruptibility of politics and its consequent inability to articulate the will of democracy.

In 1980, of the 227 million persons in the United States (159 million of whom were eligible to vote), only 78 million, or only one-half, of the eligible persons voted in the most negatively momentous presidential election in nearly a third of a century. Of that number who voted, only 40 million voted for the winning candidate, Ronald Reagan. The "overwhelming majority" that President Reagan repeatedly claims legitimizes his "mandate" for sweeping executive and legislative change consists, in fact, of only 14 percent of the people of the United States.

Many youth and many oldsters inspired only by a concern for all Earthians and convinced that their voting cannot stem big money's “will” did not vote. On the other hand, the economically rich, seeking to secure their economic advantage, for example rich widows and retired executives, leave it to their lawyers, stockbrokers, or such organizations as the very minor minority organization (immorally misrepresenting themselves as the "Moral Majority") to make their voting decisions.

Regarding such doing-the-thinking-for-others organizations as the “Moral Majority,” we have Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti's statement in August 1981, as quoted from a United Press International dispatch:

He said that the Moral Majority and other “conservative” groups are “shredding the spiritual fabric of our society” and are “intent on destroying diversity of opinion.... They threaten through political pressure or public denunciation whoever dares to disagree with their authoritarian positions.... They would sweep before them anyone who holds a different opinion.” Giamatti further criticized the “peddlers of coercion” for pressing uncompromising attitudes that are “dangerous, malicious nonsense” and as being advocates of “polyester mysticism” with a goal to “divide in the name of patriotism.... They have licensed a new meanness of spirit in our land, a resurgent bigotry that manifests itself in racist and discriminatory postures.”

The supranational-giant-controlled Madison Avenue advertising billions at once replied through the editorial pages of its U.S. newspapers which undertook to vitiate the statement of Yale University's president. It is not likely that the third-oldest and second-richest university in America has a board of trustees and faculty that would select as its president an irresponsible "crackpot," which many media editorials asserted Giamatti to be.

Because many of the invisible supranational corporation's manufacturing facilities are presently located on U.S.A. geography, and the invisible giant's armaments objectives require ten years lead-time, the colossus has now of necessity placed its initial armaments orders in the U.S.A.-situated factories. Capitalism's supranational corporate colossus also finds it most convenient and invisibly expedient to continue doing its business under the name "United States" which is easy for it to do effectively: first quite simply by hoisting the American flag in front of all its factories, and second by pulling the vital strings of the finance-shackled and lobby-locked congressional puppets to make them pass the requisite legislation. Thus, the colossus now (early 1982) has in production the necessary first-things-first of its ultimate ten-year, multi-trillion-dollar procurement, world-published as being "U.S.A. national defense activity."

Throughout its first 127 pre-World War I years, the U.S. government often had no national debt. World War I left the U.S.A. with a national indebtedness of $33 billion. The U.S.A. banking system went truly bankrupt in 1929, but the New Deal's 1933 Bank Moratorium postponed recognition of that fact. Since then the moment of acknowledgment that the U.S. government itself is financially bankrupt has been postponed first by further-and further-ahead postponements of the payoff dates for U.S. notes and bonds and by successive votes of the U.S. Congress to increase the national debt limit. By "money accounting" (in contradistinction to real-wealth accounting), the U.S.A. is now realistically bankrupt. Since Nixon became president, the U.S.A. has been unable to pay even the interest on its national debt, let alone reduce the principal. Before Nixon, Congress assumed tax underwriting of ever greater interest-bearing on ever more postponed and greater national debt limits. For all the Nixon years and all the years of his successors the president has had annually to file a negative budget, meaning the U.S. cannot even pretend to be able to pay the interest on its indebtedness.

The supranational-money-colossus banking experts therefore have ordered its U.S. 1981 president and its congressional puppets to legislate stringent budgetary measures without reducing Grunch's annual earnings, to be accomplished by curtailing old-age medical aid and eliminating schoolchildren's lunches—eyewash measures permitting the U.S. government to "technically" assume that by 1983 it would be balancing its budget as a first requirement of "sound banking practice," warranting the banks loaning their funds to accommodate the most profitable known business, that of armaments. However, by 1982 it became evident that the administration was not going to be able to do so, even within roughly a $100 billion deficiency. Balancing the budget would, in fact, be only a "creditability" cosmetic in view of supra-national-controlled international banking's superabundant monetary capability to pay for the ultimate $6-trillion CIA's (Capitalism's Invisible Army's) rearmament goal. If the supranationals are unable to accomplish a U.S. budget balancing, then a consortium of the supranational, only-logos-identified entities will use its own credit card banking system and comfortably charge off to insurance its $6-trillion armaments-acquisition program. But they don't want to play the game in that profitless manner. They want to do it through U.S. defense orders, which can pay handsome dividends throughout the process, making possible not only the continuance of all the corporation executives but the refunding of their capital expenditures.

Six trillion dollars! Let's try to sense the magnitude of that. Six trillion happens also to be the number of dollars the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. have already jointly spent on armaments since the end of World War II, when the United Nations was established. All electromagnetic radiation travels at 186,000 miles per second—that is, a little over seven times around the Earth's equator in one second, over to the Moon and back in four seconds, or over to the Sun in eight minutes. Six and one-half trillion is the number of miles radiation reaches out radially in one year, traveling at 186,000 miles per second. That is the magnitude of the number of dollars the supranational corporations are now intent on spending, and spending exclusively on killingry, at the same time that old people are deprived of their security and children go lunchless.

With control of the "Free World" media, the colossus hopes to postpone world realization of the fact of U.S. bankruptcy for ten years. Those ten years constitute the time needed to complete their program of rearmament procurement through U.S. government machinery.

Having attained its present military superiority, the U.S.S.R. is not going to give the supranationals those ten years to build their new offenses. The U.S.S.R. sought its superiority in order to force disarmament, so that it could turn its vast industrial productivity to the benefit of its own people to prove that socialism can demonstrate a higher standard of living than can capitalism, and knowing that capitalism is intent that the U.S.S.R. shall never have the opportunity. Knowing that capitalism is so intent, the U.S.S.R. is probably going to try to force a conventional warfaring showdown long before that critical ten-years-to-regain-parity opportunity is afforded to capitalism. Capitalism's recourse is to have its leaders move into the Rocky Mountain atomic-bomb-proof apartments, then to “push the button which ends it all for everyone.” (If you are upset by that, don't forget that Critical Path does offer a happy, but only by-the-skin-of-our-teeth to be attained "out" from the dilemma.)

Chapter 5.  Paper into Gold Alchemists

The supranationals have now completely forsaken their leadership in the once-upon-a-long-ago-time, prohumanity, industrial mass-production, gained exclusively through individual inventive ingenuity, integrity, and local community pride in producing only the best possible products, as does Japan today. Such was the leadership of Henry Ford, Sr., who was inspired to mass-produce no-frills, reliable motor vehicles for the lowest possible prices primarily to help the farmer get to market. That his activity involved large amounts of money was only incidental. It was obvious to Ford that a prudent amount of earnings must be set aside to buy ever-improving equipment. Also, he determined that a safety-factor surplus be set aside against poor economic days. Ford's enterprise was never to make money." At enormous expense he bought back all the shares in his Ford Motor Company from his original backers, whom he found were primarily interested in making money. Henry, Sr., fought J. P. Morgan for many years as to which it should be, "make sense or make money," which are mutually exclusive.

Ford's son and grandson failed to understand old Henry's inspirational philosophy of real-wealth producing and learned to play only the game of moneymaking with the money they inherited.

It is the strategic prerogative of the invisible corporate giant to unilaterally and arbitrarily alter the scoring values in the economic game of "earning a living" vs. either "winning a living" or "tricking a living." The corporate colossus alters the scoring values by increasing prices to ensure that the industrial game will always be won only by the "richest." It is reminiscent of the following incident of my boyhood.

Amongst the neighborhood boys of my childhood was one whose family was very rich and had bought him a set of baseball bats, balls, gloves, mitts, and other equipment such as catcher's masks, base cushions, pneumatic catcher's belly protector, home plate—that is, the equipment for an entire team. Finding a suitable neighborhood field, he would attract a crowd of us. Eager to play, resplendent in his baseball uniform, he would announce the rules of baseball as we were to play it if we wanted to use his equipment. When, however, his side or he himself began to lose or play poorly he would change the rules, making his side's just-scored runs worth five of the earlier runs. If his rule-switching became unacceptable to the rest of us, as it often did, he would pick up all the playing gear, put it in his pony cart, and drive away.

Here is another example. In between the "halves" of an end-of-season championship professional football game, the home team's super-rich and powerful owners, finding their team three touchdowns behind the visitors, convene an effective quorum of the league's team-owners present.

Using various economic wrist-twisting tactics, they persuade a "carrying" majority of the owners to vote that henceforth until further notice touchdowns are to be scored thirty points each, including the one touchdown just made by the home team. As the final scoreboard reads 30-21 in favor of the home team, it is easy to imagine not only the consternation of the public over such unfair tactics but the public's outright rejection of such on the spot, unilateral value-changing. This, however, is all there is to the phenomenon known as unilateral price-advancing, Which is solely responsible for "inflation."

The president of U.S. Steel Corporation says, "The price of U.S. steel is now advanced ten dollars per ton." The president of the United States says, "Mr. U.S. Steel, you can't do that." The president of U.S. Steel replies, "Not only can I, but I already have and that's that, Mr. President. Over and out!" Clonk.

Individual corporations within the economic power structure bring about inflation through unilateral price advancing, about the "reasonableness" of which unilateral score-changing the corporate greats use their media ownership to educate the public. They claim their price increase has been brought about by aggravating cost increases within their particular industry as well as by foreign competition, ergo by evolutionary events beyond the price-increasing management's control. To avoid antitrust action, the price increases are done by the great industrial corporations independently, one by one.

• • •

In order to understand the economic events transpiring in 1981, we must comprehend the rudiments of the financial securities world. The "abstract-being" corporation operating within the United States receives legal authority from state and city governments to sell common shares in "outright risk" ventures, to which common shareholders they promise only proportional sharing of cash profits from their economically successful operation. But corporations also receive legal authority to sell "preferred stocks," to the owners of which the corporation becomes legally obliged to pay a fixed annual rate of interest before distributing any of the profit to those corporations' common stockholders. If, however, the corporation has no annual profit, it has no obligation to pay interest to preferred stockholders. "Preferred" means first to be "paid off" at a fixed annual percentum rate out of net earnings, after which fixed percentum pay-off the common shareholders divide as much of the earned profit as the directors of the corporation feel can be distributed while also taking care of new-development expenses as well as safety-factor reserve fund set-asides.

If the corporate enterprise is to be liquidated, the preferred stockholders are to be paid off before the common stockholders. If the corporation fails, the preferred stockholder share in whatever equity may be left, but not so the common shareholders. If the corporation fails and no assets remain, the preferred stockholders have no further legal recourse, i.e., claiming rights.

In addition to the common and preferred stocks, both of which are outright risk-venture shares, corporations can raise initial, working, or expansion capital by issuing bonds, provided the corporation owns free and clear real wealth, that is, real estate or buildings and easily salable general machinery, such as machine tools, lathes, drill presses, etc., with which machinists produce special-purpose mass-production tools. The word real—of "real" wealth, of "reality"—developed from the Spanish word for "royal" or "royalty." The king or queen personally acknowledged truth. Real is what the socioeconomic power structure decrees it is. Real is, like the abstract legal-entity corporation, a legally accepted fiction—real estate equals royal estate.

Bonds are called securities, and their value is predicated upon the degree of probability that upon public liquidation of a company, the real estate, buildings, and machinery can be sold at the bonds' face value or more. While corporate bonds have priority over preferred and common stocks when corporations are liquidated, fail, or are sold, the bonds do not have priority of claim over those to whom the corporation is already indebted for goods, services, etc., nor do the bonds have priority over federal, state, or municipal taxes. Bond-owners have no share in the earnings of a corporation but do have fixed-interest priority over preferred stocks.

It is relevant to our understanding of securities to note that bonds other than those of tax-guaranteed federal, state, county, and municipal bonds have often proven to be less than secure. For instance, approximately all the railroad-company bonds of the U.S.A. were defaulted, i.e., became 100-percent unredeemable, in the economic depression of 1929 to 1933 and thenceforth.

Within the United States of North America, the right to incorporate is legally obtainable only from state governments and not from federal nor city, town, or county governments. If, however, corporation promoters wish to sell shares worth more than $300,000 for capital expenditures before earnings, then the federal government's Securities and Exchange Commission must also give its approval.

Some states in the United States grant incorporation rights that are more workingly satisfactory to a given type of enterprise than the privileges granted to the incorporators by other states. Some state's incorporation privileges are extended to cover the corporation's operations in other states. Many states grant incorporation privileges only within their own borders.

In addition to the securities issued by corporations or by non-incorporated companies or partnerships, bonds are issued by towns, counties, cities, states, the federal government, and multi-state "authorities." Federal, state, county, and city (municipal) bonds have face declared maturity dates and clearly scheduled tax-collection commitments to cover both the yearly interest rates and the maturity repayments to the bond-holder. All such government bonds have prior right to funds produced by taxes.

In the world of securities—properties—represented by written documents that are legally recognized forms of negotiable monetary investments, there are also insurance policies, and in particular life-insurance policies.

Known in world history's earliest records as "bottomry," what we now speak of as insurance dates back to its practice in 4000 B.C. Babylon as the underwriting of merchant-ship voyages. This practice made it possible for wealthy individuals who were not shareholders in the original shipbuilding enterprise to participate at their own risk in the merchant-ship venturing, which when successful was fabulously so.

Historically, life insurance is a very recent form of the already wealthy humans' and their corporations' capital gambling, and does not begin until the industrial era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when technology began to render humans' immediate physical environment more propitious for the protecting, support, and omni-accommodation of increasing numbers of human individuals, despite remote devastations occurring in the world's wilderness areas.

The technology of industrialization was first taken advantage of by the military specifically intent on how to more accurately kill more and more people at ever great distances in ever shorter periods of time. As a consequence, the technologically advanced nineteenth-century weaponry witnessed greatly increased war-wrought devastation, leaving more and more wounded to die on the battlefields. The medical world being as yet inexperienced and ignorant, the U.S.A. Civil War saw the highest ratio of deaths per battlefield-committed soldiers in all history. Due to medical ignorance, the U.S. Civil War also saw more wounded left unattended to die on the battlefield than in all other wars of known history.

When the U.S.A. entered World War I in 1917, it was asked by the British to replace all the line-of-supply ships the British had lost to German submarines and simultaneously to bring the U.S. Navy to parity with that of the British while also training, arming, transporting, and Navy-escorting one million soldiers across the German-submarine-infested Atlantic to the battlefields of France. When the numbers of U.S.A. troops killed and wounded in World War I battling reached unprecedented numbers, the U.S. Congress was confronted with the enormous cost of training, arming, and transatlantic-replacing of their killed and wounded troops in France. The U.S. Congress was then informed of an alternative solution to the replacement problem.

The U.S. medical scientists informed the U.S. Congress of the potential ability to save and repair the wounded U.S. soldiers in France, provided enough money was appropriated for a known-to-be-possible vast advancement in medical science: drugs, equipment, and practice. The cost of this capital investment in medical science, though historically unprecedented, was far less than the cost of entirely new troop replacements from the U.S. Convinced of these facts, the U.S. Congress appropriated the funds for the medical-science solution of its problem.

It worked. When the war was over and the saving and rehabilitation of vast numbers of veterans was realized, the new-era medical establishment was not disbanded. Enthusiastically supported by citizens in general, scientific medicine refocused its attention on the U.S.A. home front. One after another, the immediately fatal and "incurable" diseases, lethal conditions of yesterday, came swiftly under complete control. Medical information regarding further curing and effective anticipatory avoidances was enormously expanded in the late 1920s. It was discovered in the late 1920s that the area of highest mortality was the period of childbirth and its first ensuing four years. This brought successful coping with these initial years' fatalities into general effectiveness in the 1930s. The seeming population explosion after World War II was due in fact not to a postwar increase in the birthrate, whose small rise in the U.S.A. lasted for only two years, but to the coming of visible age of those who used to die but did not now or hereafter die in the womb or at birth or within their first four years in the 1930s, as had those conceived or born before the 1930s, together with the subsequent escapees of the pre-1930s childhood mortalities.

There is no scientifically accredited manifest of an alteration in the extreme-limit magnitude of human life-span throughout all recorded history. There are many claims and assertions of great longevity, but 113 years is the greatest span positively known to exist. One hundred and thirteen years is the terminal norm of human life. How many attain their potential longevity is another matter. Few do. However, the number of those who do is now increasing. Quite clearly, the ability to substitute plastic bones and mechanical hearts, etc., suggests that we may have entirely inanimate physical human mechanisms, proving what we have contended from the beginning to be true, i.e., that whatever it may be, life is not the physical equipment that it employs any more than is the telephone or any other of the integral or detached tools that life employs.

Despite many dramatically negative side-effects and feedbacks, twentieth-century technology has rendered the everyday physical environments in the U.S.A. and elsewhere ever more favorable to human life. This has greatly increased the realized life-span as well as the physique of Americans and others living under the same technological improvements of the environment—in the years between World War I and World War II, the average height of American males increased four inches.

A popular 1900 song said, "A dollar a day is very good pay when you work on the boulevard." Two and a half dollars per fourteen-hour day was the pay for my own first pre-World War I job in New York City with one of the great meat-packing companies, $15 a week ($880 a year), and I was able to live happily but frugally on it. I was married in 1917, and as an ensign U.S.N. in the U.S. Navy's European war zone duty I was receiving $1,800 a year.

The younger you are, the more attractively low are the annual rates of payment for maintaining each thousand dollars worth of a life-insurance policy. In 1917 I figured that if, when I died, my life insurance policy would give my wife a capital sum of $50,000, she could deposit that sum in a savings bank. She would then receive a 4 percent annual interest payment of $2,000 which would be $200 more per year than had been our U.S. Navy ensign's pay. She would have only one of us two to look out for, so that she should be able to save and add to the principal deposited in the savings bank. According to their advertising, the savings bank would continually "compound" the interest on the deposited amount. That was the economic picture presented to me in 1917 by the so-called honest businesses and the deeply respected banking world. Prudential Life Insurance Company depicted itself as "Secure as the Rock of Gibraltar." So I bought $50,000 worth of life policies. For my World War I zone activity of eighteen months duration I was given a bonus of a fully paid $5,000 of life insurance payable to my heirs at my death. The life-insurance company's sales talk failed to anticipate the great deflation of the individuals' dollars, brought about by moneymaking business' greed increasing the prices of products and services whose physical costs were technologically ever decreasing.

A third of a century later, my annual cost of living at a level which permitted me to travel to give lectures and to design and physically produce improved mass-production prototypes of livingry artifacts reached my 1917 assumed total "live-on-its-interest" capital equity of $50,000 being completely spent each year. I sold my life-insurance policies to the life-insurance companies for their then accrued cash value of $22,000. (This bought me the time to develop the geodesic domes.)

Today, as yet living in the same manner while doing the work essential to following through on my life commitment to solve socioeconomic problems exclusively by invention and development of artifacts instead of by politics, my annual cost of operation has reached $300,000 for servicing my commitment to problem-solving only by artifacts with no savings accruing whatsoever. Because I am not a "business" or a corporation my gross intake is rated as personal income and I am therefore in the 50-percent tax bracket, which precludes my saving any of that income, should I wish to, which I fortunately do not; though I am convinced that I am getting more for humanity with the dollars I spend than is any form of tax-supported government expenditure.

Each of the three Dymaxion three-wheel, front-drive, rear-steered cars, built by me in the depths of the 1930s depression, cost $28,000, i.e., $84,000 in all. Today they would cost twenty times as much for the same vehicles, built of the same materials.

Boastfully "ethical" big business and banking have reduced my "necessitous and desirable" acquiring capability by 95 percent. That is, they have priced and otherwise manipulated the money game in such a way that $95 out of every $100 I have earned has been taken away.

Life-insurance companies bet that humanity is going to live longer than it expects. Those who buy life insurance are betting that they are going to live shorter than the insurance company thinks they are going to live.

The life-insurance companies invented the term "expectancy" of probably-to-be-realized longevity of specific classes of humans existing under various environmental conditions in contradistinction to the (now workingly assumed) unvarying maximum limit of 113 years for all people.

The overall history of humanity's attained longevity is one in respect to which the average individual's attained life-span has progressively increased from a "probable average expectancy" of nineteen years of age for the people of 5000-B.C. Egypt (at sixteen years, Alexander the Great was the world's leading general) to seventy years in A.D. 1980 U.S.A. Though manifesting many setbacks, the overall evolutionarily inexorable increase in longevity of those living within the technologically advancing environment is a product of humanity always gaining more experience and learning ever more from its errors of conceptioning, and acting on how to cope more effectively and intelligently with the progression of natural exigencies. Humans gain despite enormous setbacks by industrial environment-polluting.

The insurance companies collect all possible vital statistics governing the probabilities of individual human survival under all the known controlling conditions. The insurance companies have large staffs of statisticians known as actuaries, who, aided today by computers, are able ever more effectively to render the insurance corporations' stockholders bets to be approximately "sure things." In investing the insureds' premiums today, they find IBM, DuPont, and other such stocks to be "sure things," and tax-secured U.S. government, state, county, and municipal bonds the most risky of investments, for reasons we will later examine.

During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, average life-expectancy in the most favorable environment countries has almost doubled. When I was born in 1895, life expectancy for a male born in New England was forty-two years of age. On July 12, 1933, I passed my "expectancy day." On July 12, 1979, I completed my "second lifetime" or double expectancy. I am now in the third year of my "third-expectancy lifetime" and am very healthy, with a new stainless-steel hip I have just acquired.

My two completed lifetimes and my third of a third lifetime have found the great majority of "savvy," well-to-do individuals I have met convinced that there exists an inherent inadequacy of life-support on planet Earth, and therefore that their own successful survival as well as that of those whom they cherish depends upon their cleverly learning more and more about how to be legally selfish and thereby to accomplish personal economic advantage by anticipatorily depriving others in directly undetectable ways. These ways are legally and socially accepted practices of deceiving and cheating the public—e.g., by altering the scoring system and the official "game rules" of the accrued monetary equities of other humans through zoning laws, "etc." x 1010 ways.

Price manipulation is most often defended as being governed by supply-and-demand variables, i.e., by what the traffic will bear" and not by time-energy costing, which science finds to be exclusively operative throughout all the constant energy-transformings and interchangings of Universe. This legal deprivation of other humans to one's own personal advantage is most simply accomplished through increasing rents or prices of a cup of coffee or a second-rate cigar (both of which have escalated during my lifetime from five cents to fifty cents). The powerful social precedent for price-advancing has been initiated by non-perishable mine and oil-well owners and those other prime industrial producers, the physical cost of whose products, measured in ergs of energy per hour and pounds of coal or petroleum per pound of manufactured goods, has steadily decreased.

The acceleration in technological enhancement of the living environment apparently accounts for marked life expectancy increases in post-World War I Canada, U.S.A., Sweden, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Netherlands, Japan. In these countries in 1968 the value of life-insurance policies in force exceeded their respective gross national incomes. In the U.S.A. in 1970 there were 355 million life-insurance policyholders. This being more policies than citizens meant that many citizens hold several policies. In 1970, the assets of 1790 U.S. Iife-insurance companies totaled 208 billion dollars.

Throughout the history of the United States of North America, until 1952, the federal, state, and municipal bonds guaranteed by the tax-collecting capabilities of those authorities, fortified by their ability to seize the property of tax evaders, were generally rated the most secure of "securities" to protect the U.S.A. population.

Until 1952 the states and federal government required that all life-insurance companies, all savings banks, and all trust funds invest only in notes and bonds of the ever-suitably-increasable, tax-supported federal, state, municipal, and multi-state authorities, whose bonds were officially qualified by federally supervised authorities as being "legal for trust funds." Included in the trust-funds category were all the bank- or lawyer-administered wills and trust funds of all kinds, all employment or executive retirement funds of corporations, labor unions, or cooperatives, all savings banks and life insurance companies.

In the post-1933 pullout from the "absolute economic crash" years of 1929 to 1933, the U.S. Congress approximately unanimously enacted a number of measures essential for coping with the economic errors clearly manifest in the post-mortem studies of the Great Crash. Essential to the correction of those errors was the establishment of absolutely inter-constant price, wage, rent, and interest rate controls. Profits were not only permitted but welcomed. They had, however, to be inventively attained by producing more, better goods, more satisfactory services, etc., for the same or lesser amounts of energy, time, and materials invested.

Thorough review of those 1930-42 economic climb-out years' events and their utter undoing in 1952 is clearly related in the chapter "Legally Piggily," in my book Critical Path.

In 1952, the twenty-year moribund G.O.P. regained control of the political initiative and immediately eliminated all price, rent, interest, and wage controls. It also passed laws allowing insurance companies, savings banks, retirement funds, and all trust funds in general to invest in common stocks, preferred stocks, and corporate bonds. This also brought about the formation of a myriad of investment-trust funds. It did not, however, allow the U.S. government or any of the states, counties, or municipalities to invest the enormous Social Security automatically tax-collected individual worker's funds or any other of its future-committed economic-responsibility funds to be invested in any other than its own U.S.A. government, state, county, or municipality dollar-savings-accounts, whose purchasing equity was being ever depreciated by inflation.

With wholesale industrial prices freed to escalate (though protested against by the U.S. Eisenhower-through-Carter presidents), retail prices, wages, and corporate share prices as traded on the stock markets swiftly escalated in response. So-called inflation was inevitable. What the colossus' media call "inflation" is of course deflation of humanity's buying power. Inflation does not increase the true values nor produce more or better goods.

All talk of Federal Reserve rediscount-rate-increases acting as an inflation retardant is in fact only "rationalization" camouflage for escalating bank usury rates. Though a Federal Reserve interest-rate increase may produce a momentary deflection in the "rate of inflation curve," it never does any more than that. There is no evidence whatsoever that Federal Reserve rediscount-rate-increases successfully arrest inflation. This being so, the continuance of such interest-rate increases ostensibly to combat inflation as actuated by the private-enterprise-controlled and deceivingly misnamed "Federal" Reserve Bank system must in historical retrospect be identified as a fraudulent means for increasing the profits of the banking system.

When Nixon cut loose the U.S. dollar from its U.S. government 1933-fixed ($32-an-ounce) relationship to gold, the U.S. citizen's dollar equity declined precipitously.

The last third of a century of overall stock-market price advances, in direct correspondence to the role of inflation in business pricings in general, has produced ever widening but false gaps between people's government fund equity values and the portfolio of world-around stockmarket values of the securities of the private-enterprise system.

Had the U.S. government in 1952 been allowed—by the U.S. government itself, which did the granting—to invest their Social Security and other appropriated funds in Fortune's leading one hundred corporations' common shares, as were all the fund managers of all the within-the-U.S.A. trust funds, life-insurance companies, and investment trusts with their funds, the 1982 value of the U.S. government-tax-collected Social Security and other funds would permit the U.S.A. to extend all manner of social benefits to all its people.

Hopefully, to prevent unilateral price manipulation the original value of the U.S. government tax-collected Social Security funds was price-locked into gold at $32 an ounce. This was done when approximately all the world's monetary gold bullion was stored in the U.S. Treasury's Fort Knox, Kentucky Hills vaults. It was then that the U.S. government contracted with its working citizens to provide each with post-retirement Social Security, to be purchased by them—as with all life insurance—by payments deducted from their wages and salaries and originally matched by equal sums paid for by the employers, all paid to the government in the form of taxes. The first Republican presidency after the New Deal allowed the employers to write off their share of this by allowing them to deduct it as operating expense before calculating annual taxes.

The January 1982 value of the U.S. government's up-to-the-minute paid-in Social Security and other tax-collected, government-committed funds are now stashed away only in ink figures in the U.S. Treasury Department books, completely bereft of that fund's $32-per-ounce linkage with gold, as arbitrarily severed by the Republican president of the United States without authority from the U.S. Congress and only on the advice of media-unidentified non-government "others" with whom he met in a secret two-day conference on Minot Island in Gilkey's Harbor, Islesboro (a Penobscot Bay, Maine, island), after most of the gold had been withdrawn from the Kentucky Hills vaults to meet negative international balances of trade brought about by oil imports.

If, since their inception a half-century ago, the tax deductions for Social Security had been invested in leading common stocks by a consortium of Merrill Lynch-grade investment houses, the majority of U.S. senior citizens would now be multimillionaires.

The advertising industry, the brokers, the banks, the conglomerates, the shipping business, and labor unions have all insinuated their money-making or wage-equity equalization into the complex price-increasing. All the while, the actual basic costs of nature's cattle's calves' hide-making from the photosynthetically Sun-impounded hydrocarbon-rich vegetation energy has not increased one iota. Inventors have greatly reduced the manufacturing costs accomplished only by machinery whose installation costs require large capital sums.

What we have experienced are ever larger sums of other's money being commanded by the money-makers—all at the expense of the individual human beings who do not command such sizable funds, discouraging their enterprise and initiative.

When in 1920 I bought my $50,000 life-insurance policies, the best U.S. Navy officers' shoes cost $4 a pair. Civilians had to pay $5 for first-class leather shoes. Fancy, made-to-order Cordovans cost $7 a pair. In the sixty-year interim, the cows have not improved the quality of their hides; automated shoe-manufacturing processes have not improved the shoes. In fact, the BTU's (British Thermal Units) per each kilowatt of the electricity required to operate the shoe-production machinery has continually decreased; but money-making business has gotten the price increased to $50 a pair. To do so, after each of their arbitrary price-increasings solely for greater profit they have had to share a minimum of their profit with the labor unions else the workers could not buy the shoes. If you are not a labor-union-backed wage-earner you simply pay more and more for the same shoes, which again means that those manipulating large amounts of money are robbing you.

The stock markets reflect these price increases. Since the shoes are no better and often worse, the net of it all is that the same shoes require ten times more of the individual's paycheck dollars, so I am being robbed by the system and my government is unable to protect me; in fact, the present administration of my would-be people's government is being conducted by those who have been robbing me. They have become utterly callous in their viewpoint of rationalized selfishness based on the economic assumption of "not enough for both you and me" wherefore they look out only for themselves. These are the people who are even now maneuvering toward an atomic war exchange in which all the unemployed and poor in general are the only ones sure to be eliminated.

The Reagan government's reduction of taxes for the rich money-makers which might otherwise have been applied to saving the nation's human security system, while concurrently also trying to increase the annual amount of armaments appropriations to a $150 billion level, shows how absolutely ruthlessly the directors of the supranational colossus are determined to acquire their own superarms protection against communism while realistically making hundreds of billions of dollars a year manufacturing their armaments while also ruining the lives (slow murdering) of many millions of U.S. citizen workers to whom the U.S. government has sold the insurance of old-age and health-security benefits. Nixon's cutting loose of the price anchorage betrayed all non-wealthy U.S. citizens.

The Reagan government has reinstated the military draft to raise troops to protect capitalism against communism, while refusing funds to bury the bodies of its appropriations-abandoned deceased veterans, which again makes it clear that what was once the Republican Party of Lincoln is now the party of unmitigated selfishness of big money.

We have arrived at an overall economic condition where the seemingly inalienable rights of U.S. citizenship can be enjoyed only if one is the owner of an amount of stocks whose dividends exceed $50,000 annually per individual at the present level of dollar depreciation. The very word "inflation" is a deliberately deceptive term adopted to exploit the easily misguided human reflex conditioning. It was spontaneously chosen to obscure the fact that all non-holders of corporate shares are being legally robbed.

The U.S. government Treasury, in its almost daily task of arranging for loans from syndicates of banks and brokerage houses for funding and refunding its ever-more-frequently-coming-due-for-payment short- and long-term government obligations, finds it ever more expensive to market even its short-term promissory notes and longer period bonds. Its long-term bonds sell at prices which, with interimly accruing interest, have ultimate monetary yields—between the price at which they were purchased in the financial market and their face-value maturity payoff—in the neighborhood of 18 percent, showing clearly that the financial-market world is now assuming that the U.S. government will soon reach a crisis point beyond which it will no longer be able to pay off either its short- or long-term obligations. All the big brokerage houses and banks that join in syndication to handle the sale of the government-refunding-note sales make so much profit in doing so that they will keep on risking their joint underwriting until they see the moment of formally acknowledged bankruptcy of the nation to be less than a year away. When the score reads one trillion and a half, with a debt increasing regularly at over 100 billion a year, somebody is going to see that the emperor has no clothes and when they shout out to that effect, there will be a swift world acknowledgment of the fact. Then they will try "Title 13," which allows the bankrupt organization to keep on operating and thus terminate any and all risks of private enterprise—for which risking on behalf of human gains it has been given the many considerations such as corporate privileges.

In the September 1, 1981, sales of U.S. Treasury ninety-day notes, which were almost certainly redeemable before any U.S. government bankruptcy payment-defaults, produced yields that were momentarily higher than the earnings on many high-grade corporate shares. Until the summer of 1981 these short-term, high-yield government notes had been sold only in minimum lots, the prices of which have been beyond the everyday buying scope of individual citizens but at negligible prices to the supranationals or any of their world banks. It is now far more risky to buy U.S. government securities than it is to buy shares in what once was risk capital's economic venture corporation shares. There is nothing in the words or spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution which states or suggests the U.S.A. is committed exclusively to the success of the rich. The U.S.A. we have known is now bankrupt and extinct.

The swift coming-apart of our national economic system to make way for evolution's inexorably developing integration of a world socioeconomic system is manifest in the full-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times (August 9, 1981) by one of the most conservative of the New York savings banks: "18% Interest Starting Now. Up to $2,000 Tax-Free Interest Starting Oct. 1." For this same interest rate, Dime Savings Bank required an investment of $5,000. Twenty similarly unprecedented savings-bank ads appeared in the same financial section. Before 1980, U.S. savings banks had paid in the range of 4-percent interest. The following week, that of August 16, the same plethora of bank advertisements appeared, with the percentage increased to 25 percent. By the week of August 23, the advertisements had advanced their offer to 40 percent interest. This was, of course, the correctly calculated percentage of gain, but misleadingly employed. The percentage represented "yield to maturity" in respect to the low August purchasing price of U.S. Treasury notes maturing on October 1, 1981, whose depressed market value indicated not only the imminence of U.S.A. bankruptcy, but the expectation that this particular set of U.S.A. "refunding notes" at ever higher interest rates and on ever shorter maturity terms would in all probability be redeemed before common recognition of the outright bankruptcy. The advertising was deliberate and mischievously misleading in that it implied a continuing 40-percent interest rate if you deposited several thousand dollars— whereas the interest advertised was to accrue only until October 1, 1981. The advertisements failed to clearly communicate that the interest rate after October 1 would be a customary savings-account rate. The advertisements were hoaxes to acquire savings deposits, which the bank could loan out at much higher rates of interest.

At this point in our review of how economic and other social conditions have evolved to such a threateningly devastating future outlook for many if not all humans, we wish to recall that inexorable cosmic evolution is intent on integrating all humanity in one global government and, therefore, on eliminating all of planet Earth's nations and on doing so in a hurry. The most difficult of all the world's sovereignties to eliminate is clearly that of the U.S.A. We recall having forecast this termination of the U.S.A. at least fifteen years ago. The 150 nations are 150 clots in the economic bloodstream of our planet. The headlong rush into the atomic holocaust is in fact a far more threatening development than the natural economic demise of the U.S.A., which in fact may be viewed as simply a self-removing-planetary-economics-blood-clot event.

Chapter 6.  Can't Fool Cosmic Computer

It must be remembered that, as clearly elucidated in Critical Path and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth  (The July 31, 1981, issue of Publisher's Weekly reported on the first U.S. publishers' trade fair in the People's Republic of China. Over six hundred publishers and eight thousand titles were represented, with several million English-reading Chinese attending the exhibit in six cities. Elaine Frumer, a member of the U.S. delegation reporting in an accompanying article entitled "What the Chinese Looked At," listed Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth first on the list she compiled of the ten books the Chinese showed the most interest in.), money is not wealth and that wealth is the organized technological capability to protect, nurture, educate, and accommodate the forward days of humans, whereas money is only a medium of exchange and a cash accounting system. Money has become completely monopolized by the supranational-corporation colossi, which inherently as legal abstractions ignore the problem of how to protect and nurture human lives.

In the very largest way of looking at planet Earth's socioeconomic-evolution events, we must observe that humans are designed with legs and not roots. Yesterday, humanity developed temporary roots as it cultivated its life-support food root-grown on the land. The metals made possible metal canning of food and mobilization of machinery. Today, all of human existence depends on the swift, world-around intercommunication system operating at 186,000 miles per second. We have transformed reality from Newton's "at rest" norm to an Einstein's 186,000-miles-per-second norm. Socioeconomically we have synchronized with the omni-intertransformative kinetics of the entire Universe.

Planetary economics has now shifted from a physical-and-metals capitalism to a strictly metaphysical, omniplanetary, omnicosmic-wealth know-how capitalism. The once noble and essential but now obsolete nations belonged to the rooted socioeconomic land-capitalism era of humanity. In reality, humanity is now uprooted kinetically and occupying the whole planet. Capitalism is dumping its immobile real estate and depending on science to synchronize its affairs with the invisible realities, misassuming, however, that science knows what it is all about. To successfully dump all its real estate, capitalism has all but ceased "renting" and through enforced selling of "cooperatives" and "nothing else but condominiums" is forcing the citizenry into anchored exploitability, while it is always increasing the corporate deployability and mobile shift-about-ability around the world.

Since science and human inventiveness are continually learning how to produce ever more, and ever better performance, for each ounce of material, erg of energy, and second of labor and overhead time invested in any and all of industry's production functions, the real cosmic costs are always and only decreasing, and all price-increasing, as already noted, is corporate selfishness "gotten away with by political-campaign obligations and by excruciatingly painful, behind-the-scenes corporate lobbyists' congressional bullying.

In 1940, two years before the U.S.A. entered World War II, the president of the Aluminum Company of America became interested in my use of corrugated aluminum in the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, which was the little, mass-producible, autonomous, one-room dwelling machine that I had developed for a group of Scottish leaders, intent on anticipating the wholesale bombing of England's industrial cities, who had proposed accommodation of the surely-to-be-displaced population in thousands of my Dymaxion Deployment Units to be installed on the Scottish moorlands. I was developing these deployment units at Butler Manufacturing Company in Kansas City. I was doing this by converting Butler's mass-production, twenty-foot-diameter, galvanized-steel grain bins into an autonomous, fifteen-hundred-dollar, well-insulated, fireproof, earthquake-proof, kerosene-ice-box-and-stove, Sears Roebuck-furnished, ready-to-move-into unit.

The Butler grain bins had been developed for the U.S. government "ever-normal-granary" program. The Alcoa president hoped that I would switch from corrugated, galvanized iron grain bins to corrugated aluminum bins. He told me that the cost of aluminum would always decrease. He said that the main cost was that of the electrolytic refining of bauxite ore into aluminum. He said the cost of electricity for the process was always decreasing as we learned to produce ever more kilowatt hours per each BTU of fossil fuel expended. Aluminum, he said, is one of nature's most abundant elements. The wholesale price of aluminum in 1940, when Alcoa's president made that statement to me, was twelve cents per pound. Today it is selling for over a dollar a pound, not because the Alcoa president was wrong in what he said but because massively organized selfishness has dishonestly changed the scoring system.

It is evident that the degree of technical "advantage" now attained by world-around industrial production capability, if realistically appraised and articulated, now shows that all humanity has just reached a state of comprehensive technical advantage adequate to provide a billionaire's level of living on an indefinitely sustainable base for all of the over four billion human passengers now aboard Spaceship Earth (see Critical Path). The world's economic accounting system, if properly entered into the world's computers, will quickly indicate that comprehensive economic success for all humanity is now realizable within a Design Science Decade. All it takes is shifting from weaponry to livingry production.

History's unprecedentedly large and invisible supranational Grunch of Giants being too supra- and infra-visibly large to be sensitively comprehended, it is difficult to surmise and accredit that the almost omni-computerized giant may be evolution's agent of most effective establishment of a world-embracing socioeconomic system most logically suited for the mass-production and distribution of its products and services to economically successful humanity. It could well be that the total-world-involved, supranational giant corporations' computer operations might, to their corporate directors' astonishment and to popular surprise, lead the Grunch into profitable discard of all that is not true, as for instance that anybody owns anything. Commonly acknowledged operational custodianship and popular reaccreditation of the integrated world-around technology management may supplant "ownership" with Hertz and telephone-renting.

The way that the giant can be successfully led into doing so is for a substantial majority of humanity, and eventually all humanity, realistically to comprehend the falsity of the greater part of the inventory of academic premises and axioms upon which the thus misconditioned reflexing of educated society is based. For instance, there is no God-validated deed to property of any kind whatsoever. There are no solids. There are no things—only systemic complexes of events interacting in pure principle. There is no up or down in Universe. There is no cubic structure. There are no straight lines. There is no one-, two-, or three-dimensionality. There is only four- or six-dimensionality, etc. As we eliminate that which isn't true, we inadvertently admit into reality that which is true. As world society divests itself of that which experimental evidence demonstrates to be untrue and embracingly enters into its computer the mathematical formulae of all that can be experimentally proven to be true, all the socially, selfishly malignant characteristics of the giant may vanish and the omni-pro-social-advantage-producing capabilities may prevail and flourish.

• • •

Fifteenth-To-Nineteenth Century Giants' Oath

Fee-fie-fo-fum

I smell the blood of a Britishman

Be he alive or be he dead

I'll grind his bones

To make my bread.

Twentieth-To-Twenty-First-Century Giants' Oath

We-Fort-five-hun

Steal kudos and credit American

Be it live checking

Or savings "dead"

We knead their dough

For dividend bread.

• • •

Each of the giants of today's great Grunch is a quadrillionfold more formidable than was Goliath. Each is entirely invisible, abstract, and completely ruthless—not because those who run the show are malevolent but because the giant is a non-human corporation, a many-centuries old, royal-legal-advisor-invented institution. The giant is a so one-sidedly biased abstract legal invention that its exploitation by the power structures of thirty generations have made the XYZ corporations and companies seemingly as much a part of nature as the phases of the Moon and clouds of the sky. Corporations operate on an unnatural economic basis that makes a successful Las Vegas roulette bet a trifling success. If you bet your money on the fortunate corporation, your bet is paid and repaid to you quarterly, continually, ad infinitum, often more copiously each year. Assuming an investment of 100 shares at a cost of $2,750 in I.B.M. in 1914 when the company was first formed, it would have grown by June 1959 to 59,320 shares values at $19,308,900, plus $1,089,000 in cash and stock dividends and an additional $101,906 from rights and privileges.

As I have frequently recalled, the grossly mis- or underinformed, 95-percent-illiterate world society of 1900 misassumed the existence of a fundamental and dire inadequacy of life-support to be operative on our planet, wherefore it concluded, and the political-economic system as yet maintains, that it has to be only one or the other of the planet Earth's two great political ideologies which can survive, and that all the people governed by the loser must perish—"there is not enough for both."

The now-predominantly-literate world population of 1981 has developed an intuitive awareness of the illogicality and even madness of all political systems.

All the foregoing inadequate life-support misassuming by both political parties and all the major religious organizations, as earlier noted, has resulted in both sides having jointly spent six and a half trillion dollars in developing the present capability to destroy all humanity within one hour. Humanity at large is logically intuiting that the same sum spent in the direction of improving the lives of the presently deprived many might readily have brought about better results than race suicide.

The awareness of the emergence of a new world society has been only intuitive, because it is actualized only by a superficial knowledge of the overall integrated effects of an almost entirely nonsensorially contacted invisible reality of electronics, chemistry, metallurgy, atomics, and astrophysics. The epochal events of humans landing on the Moon, satellite-relayed "instant" around-the-world information, and an exclusively direct Sun-powered, Paris-to-London flight are altogether reorienting world-around humanity's intuitive thinking into the realization that we can now do so much with so little that we can indeed take care of everybody.

There is a deep urge on the part of vast numbers of world "youth"—irrespective of their years—to do something right now about their intuition, which develops an impatience and ever more volatile group psychology. There is therefore an urge toward open physical revolt even amongst some of those who do know there is a bloodless, design-science, revolutionary option to attain socioeconomic success for all. The hotheads want to yield to their impatience. To those who urge us to join forces in bloody revolution, I reply as follows.

Before humans could be designed to occupy it, planet Earth had to be designed. Before planet Earth could be designed, the solar system had to be designed. Before the solar system could be designed, galaxies had to be designed. Before special-case galaxies could be designed, special-case macro-micro Universe, all its atoms and molecules, gravity, and radiation had to be designed. Before any realizable designing was possible, it was cosmically necessary to discover and employ the full family of eternally coexistent and synergetically inter-augmentative, only-by-mathematical-equations expressible, intercovarying, generalized principles governing the generalized design of eternally regenerative scenario Universe. And before all recognition of the eternal generalized principles and their inherent design-science functions, it was further necessary to have:

l. The design of an eternally regenerative, radiationally expansive and gravitationally contractive, everywhere and everywhen complexedly intertransforming, nonsimultaneously episoded, scenario Universe.

2. The generalized design of galaxies of entropic matter-into-energy as radiation-exporting stars and generalized star systems of planets serving syntropically, as radiation-into-matter importing planets.

3. The design of planet Earth as the Sun-orbiting, biosphere-protected, and oxygen-atmosphere-equipped incubator of DNA-RNA design-controlled biological life and of that life's photosynthetic conversion of entropic radiation into syntropic, orderly hydrocarbon molecules and a vast variety of hydraulically compressioned, crystallinely tensioned, exquisitely structured biological species omni-inter-regenerating as an ecological omni-life and human-thinking support-system.

4. The eternal mathematics—numbering and structuring. The eternally extensive mathematical spectrums of frequencies, wave lengths, and harmonic intervals.

Only thereafter could those human beings progressively re-evolutionize exclusively by trial-and-error enlightenment, from their born-naked state of absolute ignorance, to discover their scientific-principle-apprehending minds and thereby (now for the first possible moment in history) to glimpse humanity's semi-divine functioning-potential as local-Universe critical-information-gatherers and local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

Only now for the first time can we human beings effectively revolutionize society in an adequate degree to fulfill what I have identified in Critical Path as being the number one objective of humanity's inclusion in comprehensive evolution.

The generalized principles have always—eternally existed and have always been available for each special-case, revolutionary design-realization. The special-case design revolution has always had to precede the extra-specialcase local social revolution, whether it be by inventing guns which overwhelm archery or inventing the wireless telegraph which transmits messages halfway around the world at six million miles per hour, making utterly obsolete the Pony Express and its concomitant "Wild West" socioeconomic behavior-patterning. The greatest evolution-producing revolutions are complex and take the longest to be realized.

• • •

What I hoped I had made clear in Critical Path is that the inherently half-century-long design science-revolution phase of attainment of universal economic success has been successfully completed and now needs only the bloodless socioeconomic reorientation instead of the political revolution to exercise humanity's option to "make it" for all.

I hoped that Critical Path made clear that fifty-three years ago I anticipated today's transition of humanity from 150 nations operating independently and remotely from one another to an omni-integrated world family, with all that socioeconomic transition's conditioned-reflex stressings and shockings.

I hoped that Critical Path made it clear that the world data integration I initiated more than a half-century ago has kept growing into a comprehensive record of the invisible design-science revolution being achieved only by ever more performance, realized for ever less energy, weight, and time units invested per each increment of accomplished livingry functioning; and that more than a half-century ago I reduced my design-science, human-environment-augmenting structures and technologies to full-scale, physically working demonstrations of their advancement of technological advantage to economically accommodate an around-the-world pulsatively deploying and-converging, kinetic society.

I hoped that Critical Path made it clear that if I or some other individual had not taken these anticipatory initiatives more than a half-century ago, the comprehensively integrated physical-gaining-for-all now to be immediately attained simply through inaugurating the mass-production phase of its already developed prototypings, then the design science revolution could not now be realizable—it would take another fifty years to do the critical path work, and we now have only fifty months within which to exercise our option to convert all Earthian industrial productivity from killingry to livingry products and service systems.

I hoped that Critical Path made it clear that lacking the accomplishment of the design-science revolution, while also undergoing the transition into a one-world amalgamation of humanity which we are now experiencing, humans would have been catalyzed only into a world-around social revolution of the same bloody historic pattern of revengeful pulling down of the advantaged few by the disadvantaged many.

I hoped that Critical Path made it clear that the accomplished design-revolution's prototypes and developmental concepts now make possible for the first time in history a bloodless social revolution successfully elevating all humanity to a sustainable higher living-standard than ever heretofore enjoyed by anyone.

I hope that Critical Path made it clear that despite the reality of humanity's option to make it for all humanity, my own conclusion as to whether humanity will do so within the critical time and environmental development limits is that it will remain cosmically undecided up to the last second of the option's effective actuation, knowing that beyond that imminent moment lies only the swift extinction of humans on planet Earth.

The critical path I committed myself to in 1927 was and as yet is that of applying all technology and science directly to accomplishing the mass-produced components for advanced livingry for all humanity, instead of continuing to invest the advanced science and technology inadvertently falling out of the weaponry industry into the livingry tools industries. This critical path was inherently a fifty-year path.

• • •

I will now summarize the last few pages quickly.

The social revolution potential now can for the first time in history realize economic success for all and a comprehensive world enjoyment that involves not revengefully toppling the economically successful minority but elevating all humanity to a sustainable higher level of existing and interacting than any humans have heretofore either experienced or dreamed of.

The now-potentially-to-be-omni-successful social revolution could never before in history have been realized. Until 1970 there had always been enough physical resources but not enough metaphysical resources (of experience-won know-how) on our planet to render the physical technology capable of taking care of everyone at a sustainable, eminently successful level of physical well-being— bloodlessly accomplished and sustainable without the coexistence of either a human slave or working class. Until 1970 it had realistically to be either you or me, not enough for both. Since 1970 it has become realistically you and me—all else is automated acceleration to human-race extinction on planet Earth.

• • •

As we know, when the on-foot soldiers at CrŽcy stuck their pikes into the ground, points slantingly upward and forward, to impale the bellies of the advancing charges of cavalry, it was social revolution, brought about by design-science revolution. Thus armed with their newly-science-designed pikes, the long-overwhelmed many on foot began to gain emancipation from being overwhelmed by the horse-mounted few. Design did it.

Both the word revolution and the words social revolution have many meanings, from that referring to the mechanical revolutions of a wheel to the social changing of life-styles which occurred when the horse-mounted and -carriaged few, with their many on-foot servants, stable boys, grooms, coachmen, and the vast slums they drove through were almost entirely design-science-obsoleted by the automobile-mounted many covering vastly more miles and having only a diminishing self-servant-class functioning as some of the riders became the auto-production workers, gas-station attendants, etc.

Greater justice and economic improvement for the many is not always the result of social revolution. The Europeans' guns overwhelming of the American Indian bow-and-arrow weapons was in most ways a retrogressive social revolution implemented by design-science revolution. It is always the design revolution that tips the social scales one way or the other. However, sum totally the combined design and social revolutions ultimately favor the many. Between 1900 and today, 60 percent of humans in the U.S.A. have attained a standard of living far in advance of those of the greatest potentates of 1900 while concurrently doubling the life-span of that fortunate 60 percent.

Never before in all history have the inequities and the momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident to so vastly large a number of now literate, competent, and constructively thinking all-around-the-world humans. There's a soon-to-occur critical-mass moment when the intuition of the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, in contradistinction to the angered Luddites and avenging Robin Hoods, faced with comprehensive functional discontinuity of nationally contained techno-economic system, will call for and accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment will occur a realization by the responsibly inspired majority that the adequate capacity of the invisible technology to sustainingly support all humanity depends on all the resources, physical and metaphysical, being always and only employed for all of world-around humanity as a completely integrated techno-economic system operating entirely on its daily income principally of Sun-emanating energy. The integrated world-techno-economic system purpose is in contradistinction to a union of 150 autonomously operating nation-states, as with the United Nations. All this can now be comprehensively commonwealth-accounted in time-energy work units. All this can provide regenerative-initiative accommodating access of human individuals to the ever multiplying commonwealth-techno-economic facilities. The degree of individual-initiative computerized access to the commonwealth facilities will be predicated on the demonstrated performance and sustained integrity of the individual's ever-forwardly-anticipatory designing competence.

I have been a deliberate half-century-fused inciter of a cool-headed, natural, gestation-rate-paced revolution, armed with physically demonstrable livingry levers with which altogether to elevate all humanity to realization of an inherently sustainable, satisfactory-to-all, ever higher standard of living.

Critical threshold-crossing of the inevitable revolution is already underway. The question is: Can it be successfully accomplished before the only-instinctively-operating fear and ignorance preclude success, by one individual, authorized or unauthorized, pushing the first button of chain-reacting all-buttons-pushing, atomic, race-irradiated suicide?

The only happily promising recourse of each human individual is to our highest intellectual faculties and their mutual, ego-deflated, unselfishly loving preoccupation with comprehensivity and our employment of the most powerful tools of all:

(A) the family of generalized scientific principles governing the operational design of eternally regenerative Universe itself;

(B) comprehending and effectively employing synergetics, with the books Synergetics and Synergetics II presenting the comprehensive omni-image-able mathematical coordinate system employed by nature, thus avoiding the mentally debilitating, vast-majority-of-humanity-excluding quasimathematical coordinate system employed by present-day science;

(C) comprehending the major objectives and operating strategies of the major opposing power structures of world politics, their present status quo and probable future trending;

(D) comprehending the fundamentals of economics, of wealth vs. money, of the principal features and functioning of industry, banking, and securities;

(E) comprehending the educational system in general as well as the discovery of the shortcomings of science, engineering, and education in general;

(F) synergetically comprehending "what it is all about," as propounded in Critical Path and this book, Grunch of Giants, and discovering what our options are to confront imminent race disaster; and

(G) the individual discovery of God by a vast majority of human individuals—not the discovery of religions, but the discovery that each and every individual has an always-instantly-open , no-intermediary-switchboard-authority-to-contend-with, no-interference-of-any-kind, direct "hot-line to God": i.e., the weightless, nonphysical communication occurring teleologically between the differentially limited, weightless, nonphysical, temporal, special-case mind of the individual human and the comprehensively integrated, macro-micro unlimited, weightless, eternal, generalized mind of God.

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