Do You Know?

John Darvill

1996

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat 1st quarter 1996, No. 342

... This social system, as with all other present systems, uses commodity valuation, employing debt tokens, or money, to effect its distribution of goods and services. In order for this to be accomplished, scarcity conditions must be maintained, if not naturally, then by artificial means. But, in North America, with its vast array of technological equipment, scarcity can only be accomplished by design, making inferior merchandise, charging high prices, with cartels, price supports, subsidies or whatever. In spite of all this, it is difficult to move inventory fast enough. The U.S. Commerce Dept. revealed that, in August of 1995, business stockpiles of unsold goods grew for the seventeenth consecutive month. Total inventories grew by four tenths of 1% to a seasonally adjusted $969.12 billion following a revised rise of 1% in July. But, most of the August rise occurred at the retail level. No wonder they all look forward with such anticipation to the HO HO HO season.

... For the business interests to have any hope of maintaining healthy inventories, the economy must also be healthy. Alas, this is not the case, and, as the pressure of increasing technological application continues, the utilizing of sufficient person-hours of labour to assist a healthy economy becomes even more of a pipe dream. In order to preserve a competitive edge and a healthy bottom line, they must install more technology and employ less person-hours of labour. This would be good for individual business but bad for the economy in general. The latest anouncement of such a move comes from GTE Corporation. They have announced that they will cut 4,700 jobs by the end of 1995. This is part of a revamping of telephone operation that will cost a total of 17,000 jobs. GTE announced in January of 1994 that it would cut 17,000 jobs, nearly a quarter of its telephone workers, over three years; by the end of 1995 about 12,000 will have been cut.

Telephone operations employment has dropped from 100,000 in 1968 to 68,000 in 1988, and GTE has reported that it expects to save $1 billion a year in expenses. But then there will be that many less to purchase goods and pay taxes, and that number will be more of a burden placed on those that can. Not far behind to be jobless are the bank employees, supermarket employees and any service industry in which automated equipment can perform much more efficiently and cheaply than can humans -- and that means all of them.

... Economic difficulties are serious, but these can be handled; when we realize the futility of monetary expediency these will all disappear. But, far more serious is the tremendous effect we are having on this planet in our mindless pursuit of maintaining this archaic Price System. In our effort to feed an expanding world population, farmers are using heavier doses of fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation water, but that has serious side effects. Agricultural chemicals may gradually poison the soil; irrigation also deposits a harmful residue; when the water evaporates it leaves behind various salts. This build up of salty compounds in the soil and the salinization process can render the land useless for farming. The World Bank in 1993 reported that some degree of salinization effects 28% of U.S. irrigated land, 23% of China's and 11% of India's.

Global warming is now no longer an uncertainty. On the basis of improved computer models of the atmosphere, a panel of 2,500 scientists was able, not only to pick out the tell-tale signs of human generated warming, but also to predict what is likely to happen if pollution continues to grow. Vast areas of the Antarctic Peninsula are turning to mush. Plants have begun colonizing higher altitudes as lower levels became too warm. The dangerous dengue-fever virus, traditionally confined to warmer elevations below 1,000 metres, has now been found above 2,000 metres in Colombia. The mountains of Central America, long a barrier to the spread of such diseases, may cease to serve that function as germs become able to survive in the warming mountain tops. Rainfall has grown markedly heavier in the U.S.A. over the past one hundred years. The, U.N. sponsored, Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, also points out that temperatures will probably continue to rise -- jumping as much as 5 degrees Centigrade over the next century. It will be the biggest increase since that which ended the last Ice Age, but this one is occurring over decades, not centuries. This will cause sea levels to rise, inundating coastal areas and river deltas, and endangering more than 100 million people.

The oceans are being affected. As much as 10% of the world's coral reefs have been wiped out, largely by pollution and destructive fishing methods. At the present rate of devastation, another 60% will be destroyed in 20 to 40 years. Of the world's 15 major ocean fisheries, 13 are being exploited at a rate that challenges their ability to sustain fish populations. Cod, off the east coast of Canada, and salmon off the west coast, are examples of things to come. A growing "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico has sounded alarm bells among scientists who fear it's doing serious harm to one of the United States' key fisheries. This zone, in which there is no oxygen in the water and therefore no aquatic life, has increased in size dramatically in recent years. This "dead zone" now covers 18,000 sq. kilometres. That is a 2,500 sq. kilometre jump, from 1993 to 1994, when the dead zone was found to have doubled in size compared to the worst previous year. Scientists believe it is the result of a massive plankton bloom caused by an influx of man-made nutrients that flow into the Gulf from the Mississippi River.

The plankton, tiny organisms fed by nitrates and other contaminants that wash in from fertilized fields, sewage plants, and other sources bloom, die, and fall to the sea bottom where their decomposing remains deplete the oxygen in the water.

... Population increasing, resources depleting, climatic warming, ozone depletion, pollution of land, sea and air, declining water table, soil erosion, these problems keep going on, but precious little is being done about them. There is much cause for alarm, but there is only a good deal of lip service -- certainly a lot of talk but very little action. The main concern, in fact the only concern for most people, is a continuation of the Price System. That is: "Any social system that affects its distribution of goods and services by means of commodity valuation, using any form of debt token or money." No other kind of social system exists anywhere in the world. It is blind obeisance to an outmoded, outdated and obsolescent system that is at the root of all our problems. It is dragging us down to destruction, and it is no longer applicable in a world in which technology should be the governing system. It must be discarded and replaced with a government of function, based on energy accounting as the medium of distribution and control. Technological problems require technological solutions for control. We can enjoy what technology can do for us, if used correctly and not abused for the benefit of a few, as it is today.