Politics In Technological North America

John Waring

1992

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 4th quarter 1992, No. 329, Vol. 54

The departments, bureaus, commissions, offices, councils, institutes, agencies, centers, services, administrations, courts, authorities and even corporations that constitute the hodge-podge framework of what is presently known as the U.S. Government is the result of a total absence of any sound, consistent concept, much less any operational plan that is compatible with our technological age.

Like all other political schemes, its fundamental proposition is how to manage people and money values in conformity with a prevailing economic ideology. This is simply because politics in all forms, like economics, is derived from the 6000 year old understanding that the toil of people produces everything that is made. (Adam Smith asserted this and laid the basis for today's corporate enterprise businesses, reiterated by Karl Marx's socialistic glorification of toil.)

The original 1787 Constitution, and the formal establishment of the Federal political government two years later, was limited by the vision of the merchants, lawyers, and tillers of the soil who led the new country's rural-agrarian economy. All that would be needed, in their view, was a national army and navy to repel invaders, a Department of State to deal with foreign nations, a Justice Department, a treasury, a postal service, a small bureaucracy, and a weak law-making body with a president to be chosen in quadrennial popularity contests, otherwise officially known as elections, in order to give the people the illusion of having a voice in decisions, the one thing that was lacking in England.

The business leadership of the loosely "United" States fully intended to keep the country a confederation of almost independent states, except to tolerate their mercenaries in the national capitol. Originally they were satisfied when the revolution ended in 1782 with their "Articles of Confederation" as guide.

Revolutionary in name only, the writers of the Constitution unblushingly copied the British parliamentary idea with a House of Representatives roughly parallel with the House of Commons and a Senate similar to the House of Lords, traditionally a mouthpiece for the Crown. So wary were the financial rulers of this country of the people's voice that they did not allow the people to vote for U.S. Senators until the year 1912. (The idea of a Senate and senators, of course, goes back 2,000 years to ancient Rome where the word originated.)

The business of Economics, long entrenched in England and the rest of Europe, was continued unaltered here in the Constitution except to make it easier, more lawfully acceptable and feasible, even if under cover, for the financial elite of top investment banks to establish policy, both foreign and domestic, for the government to officially carry out as national policies.

Appropriately, George Washington, one of the wealthiest land owners, was inaugurated first president on Wall Street in New York City (1789) where there is still a bronze plaque to commemorate the event.

At first we imported technology-- the steam-powered atmospheric engine whose components from England were used in 1755, having only 12 horse-power, to pump water out of a New Jersey mine. By 1800 we had about six small steam engines. Then, beginning in the 19th century, we began inventing technology right here -- powered steamboats, railroad locomotives, farm engines, water-powered and then steam-powered factories followed by electric-powered factories until now we live in the world's first completely modern technological society.

Today, approximately 99.9% of the work of production in mining, agriculture, manufacturing, communications and transportation for the 280,000,000 people of industrial North America is performed by technology.

By the year 1840 there was more steam-engine generated power here than in Great Britain or any other country on earth. We had taken the world's lead in industrial capacity. And today, we have more powered technology than there is in the rest of the world combined. Our way of life is completely different from that of the rest of the world, yet we are deluded into accepting the belief that the same basic social construction, ie., politics and economics that rule over primitive countries whose people live under deplorable conditions because of lack of technology, is good enough for North America in the 1990s.

Our political superstructures multiplied to keep up with government bureaucracies and business's economic demands, both parasitically imposed over the production and distribution of physical goods and services. A.T.&T. and the Bell System are not and never were in business to provide communications as all their advertisements claim; they are in business to make money. U.S. Steel is not interested in making steel, nor is General Foods interested in producing foods. Both are interested in making money.

Our government practices chicanery with misleading language: The Department of Education does no teaching; the Department of Housing and Urban Development neither designs nor builds dwellings; the Department of Transportation moves no freight, and transports no passengers; the Department of Agriculture does grow food but only at its efficient agricultural experiment stations at Beltsville, Maryland and several more such USDA farms around the country. Those farms are models of what could be done continentally on a much larger scale. The same holds true in other fields, such as forestry as well as in technological research.

The bulk of the USDA's appropriations (money from taxpaying citizens) goes mainly to subsidize large commercial farms that grow most of the food. Certain essential crops such as wheat, corn and other grains, honey, milk, butter, cheese, peanuts, etc., are harvested ever more abundantly as a result of scientific research at USDA experiment stations. A bitter irony is that the first law of our obsolete Price System is to create a scarcity despite scientific discoveries. The abundance our technology is capable of creating would drive the price down toward zero, and farmers, who are businessmen, would go out of business.

So, the intentional creation of scarcity has been going on since the 1930s. U.S. politicians serve as agents of businessman farmers by collecting taxes from the citizens, then handing it over to the farmers via legally entitled "Price Supports", then keeping prices up so these same citizens can pay again in the form of high prices for produce. (Part of the crops bought from the farmers by USDA is given freely to welfare families and needy school children; much more is being subsidized to be shipped abroad. This is not a humanitarian gesture; it is anything to maintain artificial scarcity here.)

If this makes sense to anyone, consider also that portions of the publics' taxes allocated annually by the Treasury to USDA also pay the salaries of the highly competent agronomists who experiment with seeds and soils that will increase (never decrease) crop yields that will have to be taken "off the market" by Public Law 480 whenever abundance threatens price.

Most of the departments and agencies perform mainly as regulators even though their names imply that they manage or coordinate for the public's benefit. Actually they perform primarily to keep competing business interests from overstepping the legally defined bounds of greed, to prevent overt cheating on each other, to set rates, to limit monopoly, etc. These include Interstate Commerce Commission (railroads, trucks, pipelines), Federal Communications Commission (telephone, radio, telegraph, television), Federal Highway Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Maritime Commission, Federal Railroad Commission, Urban Mass Transportation Administration, Federal Energy Regulatory Administration (formerly the Federal Power Commission), Civil Aeronautics Administration, Federal Highway Administration and a number of others.

The growth and complexity of science and technology have compelled the Price System to institute many technical agencies that actually perform functionally on a national scale with varying degrees of efficiency, whether in research or operationally, each with a professional staff, and despite the arbitrary handicap of constrictions by Price System monetary interferences to acquiring needed equipment that could expand their skills and enlarge the scope of their services. An example of a functional organization is the U.S. Telephone service before it was deregulated.

As Technocracy has long pointed out, regardless of his impressive sociable personality, a politician of any party or ideology, like a businessman or banker in North America, is a professional incompetent. Those who are most adept at accumulating rectangles of green paper and their equivalent in other certificates of value, title, etc., advance in influence and authority to make higher-level decisions that affect production and distribution.

In other words, it is not necessary to know anything whatever about electrical energy to be a CEO, president or lesser official of an electric power utility, or to know anything at all about petroleum or coal to head a mining or refining company, or to know anything about food or nutrition to run a food manufacturing conglomerate, or to be able to pilot a plane to head an airline, or to know anything about human pathology, medicine, or health to be chairman of the board of a pharmaceutical company or a hospital.

Politicians, local or national, are not chosen by the public on the basis of competence or knowledge but rather in terms of personality and promises. Likewise, heads of governmental departments are chosen not for competence, expertise or experience but for their personal ideology and for conformity to a particular "party" line and their willingness to play the game as directed. They do not necessarily have to know anything at all about the functions and services they are to direct. The Secretary of Labor does not necessarily have to be one who has ever been a worker. The Secretary of Education does not have to have been an educator. The person selected to head the Department of Defense , which is basically a functionally technical realm, is chosen without regard for any knowledge he may have in military strategy, logistics, etc., since it is now primarily a money-management agency. The important thing is that they are willing to "toe the line" in accord with the prevailing political and financial ideology.

Now that the concocted "Cold War" has been ostensibly suspended and the Department of Defense's expenditures are falling below $300 billion a year, the social system is unable to sustain itself domestically without that massive annual financial injection. The economy's tottering infirmity becomes painfully obvious as it slides from Recession toward Depression.

Since 1945, the Department of Defense has been the main political support for pump-priming the U.S. Price System's disintegrating economy, maintaining profits and payrolls at the risk of a nuclear war and wantonly sacrificing 100,000 American lives in foreign interventions in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East -- this with $4 trillion from investors injected into the Treasury and from Treasury bonds bought by debt buyers -- who will continue to accrue interest payments for as long as the system continues its pay-off.

As Technocracy has pointed out since the 1930s, the major national policies that the United States and Canada follow, both foreign and domestic, are and always have been decided not in Washington D.C. or Ottawa but privately by the top investment banking houses of Wall Street and Bloor Street. An objective analysis of the major trends in United States and Canadian policies, especially since the turn of the century, will point in the direction of monetary investment as the dominant stimulus.

Woodrow Wilson said in his book, THE NEW FREEDOM:

"Who has been consulted when important measures of government...were under consideration?
"The gentlemen whose ideas have been sought [by Congress] are the big manufacturers, the bankers, and the heads of the great railroad combination. The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. It's written on every intimate page in the records of Congress, it is written all through the history of conferences at the White House, that the suggestions of economic policy in this country have come from one source, not from many sources...
"You will always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really consulted are the men who have the biggest stake--the bankers, the big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce, the heads of the railroad corporations and of steamship corporations...
"Every time it has come to a critical question, these gentlemen have been yielded to and their demands have been treated as the demands that should be followed as a matter of course.
"The government of the United States is at present a foster child of the special interests. It is not allowed to have a will of its own."

Overriding all the particulars of the Price System's internal pros and cons is the development of technological power in industrial North America. This phenomenon was first perceived by the Technical Alliance, forerunner of Technocracy.

We now average 330 mechanical-electrical horse-power hours for every man, 330 for every woman, 330 for every child every 24 hours, rendering politics and its controlling partner, economics, obsolete on this Continent. In reality, the system's continuation on this Continent is becoming indefensibly dangerous: geologically, ecologically, technologically, socially and individually. Every day that we tolerate our technology and natural and human resources being misused for the system's gain, we court serious threats to our survival.

The only alternative is Technocracy's historically unprecedented technological design for governance--a coordination of our North American productive technology and renewable, recyclable resources, all for one purpose: the production and delivery of an optimum high standard of living to all citizens of North America. It is a functionally scientific statesmanship and stewardship. It means that we have no need for interference controls such as politics and money. A nation-wide legal referendum can make it possible. It is up to the citizens of North America.