Money is Killing Us!

Jim Feeney

1997

Published in:

Technocracy Digest 3rd quarter 1997, No. 325

Some ideas for you to consider are in the following questions and answers from a lecture on Our Electric System, For Profits or for People? given at the San Francisco State University, November 12, 1996, by Jim Feeney, a Technocracy member from Sacramento, who is an electronic technician.

Q: What's your opinion on affirmative action?

A: Karl Marx, poor old fellow, had answers that are laughable now when you think of it. He was advocating a society of workers, and we, in this country, have had, for the last 60 or 70 years, a virtual worker-less society.

The whole concept of affirmative action is just nonsense; it's so obsolete, but in the present society -- a society whose roots come from antiquity -- it's all we think about. Now we've got to look at the real problem; we have to forego the ancient stuff. Even people I know, who are fine, lovely people -- they're most of my best friends -- have an approach which is obsolete. Affirmative action has no place now, nor will it have in the future. When we get on a jet plane, even the most right-winged crank that you know, does he check the color of the pilot's face or his/her morality? No! He wants competency. That's what we need -- competency -- to divide who does our jobs for us and who doesn't.

Q: Is direct current electricity useful for everything?

A: Direct current electricity is the transmission system from power plants over long, long distances. The present current AC system, that we use in this and every other country, was invented in the head of one, Nikolai Tesla. He is the one who developed the polyphase voltage system for distribution of electricity. This country is so vast, and the alternating current distances involved are so great, that the losses from some of these lines, that are 350 or 400 miles long, amounts to about half its power. This is due to in-the-ground dialectric and those other factors. Also, the insulators have to be 2.8 times as large as for direct current and, of course, on top of that, there is no practical way of using this million-and-a-half volts directly. Transformers must be used to give us our household current, reduced from these 12,000 volts on the street.

A million-and-a-half volts is beyond the capabilities of AC, so we have solid-state rectifiers to convert it into AC. To see solid state converters, go down to Los Angeles and look over to your right-hand side as you go by Sylmar, and you'll see a great big cage. They at least cage the thing in so that you couldn't just throw a rock, or sabotage it in some fashion. There's a caged-in area that has all these rectifiers in them which convert this direct current line. It goes clear down through Nevada from up north, and it's a 750-thousand-volt line instead of a million-and-a-half, and it's above ground, so IT IS capable of being sabotaged.

That wasn't the point of my talk. The point of the talk is that this is a system, and our energy source -- our electricity -- is being (mis)managed in the Price System-way of doing things. The whole thing is being compromised by a lack of good scientific planning and execution.

Q: What does Technocracy propose to do in case the oil supply is diminished by 50 percent? Does it propose to expand on electricity?

A: It doesn't make any difference whether it's hydroelectric, nuclear, or whatever, as long as it is sustainable. The bottom line is sustainability. Energy must be used wisely. In a sense, we don't use it at all today; we really are throwing it away. SMUD, in Sacramento, has reduced the demand for electricity by a huge amount, by conservation.

Q: What is that SMUD you mentioned?

A: Sacramento Municipal Utilities District. They reduced the demand by encouraging conservation, tremendously. There are, of course, diminishing returns if you get down to a hundred percent efficiency. We use the automobile, but actually, we don't use it -- we abuse it. Consider the whole Alaskan oil supply at today's rate of consumption -- there's only a one-year supply. The whole thing is only a one-year supply.

Our devouring of resources in this society -- in this political society -- not this technological society -- is absolutely disgraceful; a disgrace to the world. We don't have to do that. For instance, instead of recycling aluminum, we can use steel cans. Steel cans take one- ninth the energy to recycle than aluminum cans, and they can be retrieved without anybody doing anything. Throw it into the garbage and take it out with magnets and it's ready to be recycled.

Q: Biodegradable too, is it not?

A: Yes, but you wouldn't want to do that. Sometimes, things are done in the Price System merely because they are technologically, or ecologically, or engineering-wise feasible. For instance, take the Bay Bridge. When they converted it from the rail and auto to auto only, they cut the capacity person-wise to one-quarter of what it was.

You can go on and on and on, and this relates to the energy stuff you asked about. Here is another one -- the jetliners. I used to say I could drive my Volkswagen 250 times around the circumference of the earth for one takeoff of a jetliner. Where is the energy efficiency? PSA runs planes from San Francisco International down to Los Angeles LAX, and they barely get to altitude, where they could get energy efficiency gas-mileage, when they have to descend. We should get rid of such flights and put in a high-speed rail system. The Price System doesn't allow that though -- energy efficiency doesn't have a high priority.

You can go down the list on an energy efficiency standpoint. We have enough oil, used properly, to last for two to three hundred years until fusion or something else is developed. In a way, I hope we do not solve the problem of fusion energy because, if we do, we will ignore all other problems and totally deplete our resources. That's unacceptable, because, if we do, we will have not solved anything.

Q: You talk as though the business person is the cause of our problems. Are they?

A: Absolutely not. The business person and the politician don't know what the hell they're doing. That's criminal. No matter how dedicated people are, handing them this same set of rules to go by -- our Price System rules -- they would be just as helpless as Clinton. It's a situation beyond them; they are incompetent to handle it. Technology belongs in the hands of scientific people.

Business people -- money missionaries -- are telling natives: We're going to mine this mountain-top and do all this work up there. After we are through, your farming, fishing etc. -- your whole life -- will be changed. You can move down to the city and they'll give you a little something. These money missionaries are everywhere, as we speak, rearranging the whole world so it fits into this money Price System-way of life.

In this country, it's getting right down to that even a ``flush'' has a price tag on it. Everything, virtually everything, is being put to the test: how many dollars will it convert? For instance, the federal government has told the National Parks Service people how many dollars are to be used for recreational versus mining. It sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Actually, the joke is on us. We seem settled in and, through our complacency, we are really giving acquiescence to our own destruction.

The business people, let me stress again, are not the problem. As a whole, they're decent, ordinary, wonderful people; I have many good friends in business; but they have rules -- the Price System rules. These rules are the controlling factors. Business people do the only thing they know how. It's up to us to challenge the Price System rules, and we will get to Technocracy's concept of how to do that presently.

Q: Can you describe what the transitory phase between the Price System and the Technocratic future might look like?

A: I have just as good a crystal ball as anybody else. We humans have the facility to use our time to look at the future. We have the basic ability to do this because of this hundred billion bit-computer inside our cranium, and with it, we can formulate all kinds of things. We can go from the thoroughly impractical Jules Verne stories to the latest technological projections. The only problem with that, is, that we must confine ourselves to the physical world if we want a solid, workable answer. If we apply our projections to the physical world and leave the pseudo concepts to the fiction authors, then we'll be on safe ground.

For instance, we know how much food is required for a person to live. It's as simple as that. What we have now is a system that trains people to hold their place; in other words, if a homeless person doesn't know how to get out of the rain, then he walks along the street. The society that we permit to exist has at least trained hungry people not to smash windows and take food. And to think this food is in abundance! Downright silly!

It's a miracle how anybody can say that the welfare system doesn't work. It does. The homeless, and others in the poor class, hold their place and don't engage in drastic actions. It isn't that something is wrong with those people; they have been trained, and act accordingly. The rest of us give tacit approval of everything we're told, and we pay taxes and keep electing government officials. These people we elect ``buy-off'' farmers and ``bribe'' them not to over-produce food stuff -- in order to keep it scarce. By so doing, food is out of reach of these people who obviously need it.

This is just to maintain our social economic system -- our ``Price System'' -- a system that is totally lacking in filling the requirements of our scientific, technological age. If you'll read the first three-quarters of this booklet The Technological Social Design, you will understand the workings of this antiquated Price System. You will see how it is built on scarcity, and how value is maintained. In realizing how our Price System works, you will see that everything you've been taught has to be turned on its head; what you have been taught is all wrong. For some people, it's a very wrenching experience to learn about the true workings of our Price System.

Under discussion is ``conditioning,'' as an example will show. A father takes out a nickel and dime and puts them in his hand, and says, ``Hey, son, I'll let you have one of those, whichever one you want.'' So the two- or three-year old son, naturally, is going to take the nickel. To the son, who has not been ``conditioned,'' his natural instinct tells him that the larger has more value. Our schooling will change this, and he and his fellow mates will be conditioned to fit into our Price System.

You can condition people to ``think'' any way you want. With that conditioning, then they go through 15-16 years of schooling, and they can graduate from Stanford or Chicago with a degree in economics, and they're totally divorced from the real world. They have converted everything into this old-way Price System thinking.

So conditioned, they can deliberately go to countries in South America and elsewhere and, working for let us say, I.M.F., this is what they promote: ``Your country can have prosperity by mining, chopping down forests, and you, working long hours at a low pay scale. While this promotes austerity, it's good for you and your country.''

Q: Should not students learn how to operate and improve the technology?

A: Yes, updating and maintaining technology comes first. Following right behind that requirement, is an appreciation for the arts which, to many, is basic to enjoying our technological age. Even though, today, we have a surplus of technologists -- technically educated personnel -- constantly seeing that we have qualified people of this nature -- is imperative for us to enjoy our marvelous modern age.

To technologists, such as myself, technology is so fascinating. I find technology so fascinating that I now work, myself, for play, instead of pay. A problem there? Not at all. We have to keep our technological schools adequately supplying society with its needed, qualified personnel. That's what our criterion should be: that whatever knowledge is out there, it should be available to all young people, and not just on the Internet, or for business.

Be that as it may, what we have today is out of balance. What has been over-stressed is the idea of making a living, and spending little, or no time at all, enjoying living.

Q: It looks as if education, at least college and university, is becoming out of reach of many. How come? Every student has huge debts from loans. What to do?

A: Today, in the Price System -- here as well as elsewhere -- debt creation has become a way of life. The whole idea of the Price System is that you crank up debts against your fellow-man faster than he can crank it up against you. We take out loans and someone has a debt claim against us. Then we get a job and, hopefully, we get to a point where we have debt claims against someone. So, it's a big game. It has nothing to do with wanting a job; it has nothing to do with education. It's simply the old way of doing things, and the only reason anybody can charge anything is because it's scarce. Students are subject to these matters as they go about getting their education (conditioning?).

There's never been a price for air; it's abundant. But that's changing. In Tokyo, on smoggy days, for a price, a machine lets a person suck on a tube that supplies oxygen. So with anything that is scarce, the price goes up and that's because, according to our Price System method, it's a quantity evaluation process, based on scarcity. Unfortunately, students rarely investigate matters on this important subject.

Q: What are you referring to as the energy system's major problems in the next few years? Is it a problem that would drastically reduce the energy system's power output?

A: Oil, of course, is the major problem. Here is one scenario: The Price System politicians are hoping that we can have a major crisis and, combined with an oil crisis in the Middle east, this would allow us to go onto a war-time footing. Preferable is a limited war because if you dropped a bomb it would be too quick. What is needed is prolonged war to boost the economy.

Look at the last 60 years. During World War II, there were enough jobs for all. About four years after World War II, we got caught up with all consumer demands. Then, veterans were getting out of college with the G.I. Bill, but they couldn't get jobs. Harry Truman managed to get us into the Korean War, and the economy took off; jobs came into existence. That boost was wiped out in a couple of years, and so we were back in the doldrums. Winston Churchill went to Fulton, Missouri, and gave his famous ``Iron Curtain'' speech. That, in essence, was the declaration of the Cold War, and everybody `bought' it.

Then they started the ``War on Space,'' so to speak. In this war -- like all others -- none of the war stuff comes back on the market; it's all shot away. It doesn't come back and flood the market and depress prices. It goes into the seas or up in the air, or joining all the space garbage.

Q: You say that we are blessed. How?

A: This is the Technocracy Technological Social Design, in which Technocracy analyzes our problems and proposes a viable solution to them. If you read and study it, you will see that North America is blessed with the greatest amount of resources, the best range of climate of any place, and the largest tributary system of water than any place in the entire world.

Even though crops were destroyed in the middle of the Great Depression, there was plenty of food; food was even exported. We just don't appreciate how well situated North America is; it's a blessed place. And we're abusing our privilege on the Earth. The cause of our problem? I say go home and look in the mirror; but look on the wall behind the mirror and you'll see the Price System. We permit its rules -- through ignorance -- to rule our lives. If you want to learn what their rules are, and a replacement system for them, investigate Technocracy.

Q: What must be done? Examining the Price System? What is the first step that must be taken by everyone?

A: I guess I answered that: investigate Technocracy. You have a choice: you can either take it as a personal solace to know that there is a future, or you can get active and promote the idea. Or you can reject it off-hand -- but that's not intelligent. I would encourage you to, at least, investigate Technocracy's proposals. We would like to have you join us and do things; there is plenty to do. I close with that thought.