From http://www.american-buddha.com/legalpiggily3.htm
The Securities and Exchange Commission reforms removed J. P. Morgan's two directors from the boards of almost every one of the U.S.A.'s great corporations—except Henry Ford's—whose interlocking directorships had formerly given Morgan prime control over U.S.A. industry. With the termination of Morgan's control of all the major corporation boards such as those of U.S. Steel and General Motors, these great corporations' managements found that they were no longer beholden to J. P. Morgan, and only to their stockholders. "All we have to do now to hold our jobs is to make money for the stockholders."
At this moment the U.S.A. had evolved into a managerial capitalism, in contradistinction to the now-defunct, invisible "finance capitalism" of which J. P. Morgan had been the master.
What became noticeable at this time was the uniformity of position taken by all the great corporation managements in respect to actions taken by the New Deal—for instance, the great corporations' across-the-board refusal to expend surplus on research and development.
To discover how that came about it first must be realized that the industrial-enterprise underwriting and expansion-financing of the private banking houses of Wall Street could not have been carried on without the advice, contract-writing services, and legal planning of the world's most powerful and most widely informed legal brains. As a consequence the corporation law firms of Wall Street, New York, were peopled with the most astute thinkers and tacticians of America—if not of the whole world. When the Great Crash of 1929 came and events of the Depression occurred, as already related (and the great poker hands were called, and the New Deal had prosecuted the guilty and housecleaned the system and socialized the prime contractors, etc.), it was the counsel of Wall Street lawyers that governed the positions taken by the new, self-perpetuating, industrial-giants' managements. It was the former J. P. Morgan's and other financiers' lawyers who now counseled all the as-yet-solvent big-industry managements to guard their surplus and refuse to cooperate with the New Deal.
Furthermore the Wall Street lawyers could see clearly what the public couldn't see—i.e., that while the New Deal was unilaterally socializing the system, it was doing so without exacting any contractual obligation on the corporations to acknowledge the government's economic recovery strategies. The corporations gave no legal acknowledgment of their socialized status. It was clear to the Wall Street lawyers that without such contractual acknowledgment the government socializing was a one-sided, voluntary commitment on the part of the political party in power. Therefore, in fact, none of the big corporations had lost their free-enterprise independence by accepting the enormous government rehabilitation expenditures.
Since the Wall Street lawyers and brethren in other parts of the country were called upon to fill the Supreme Court bench from which body they could determine the province of "free enterprise," the lawyers reasoned somewhat as follows: "A socialized system—as clearly manifest by the U.S.S.R.—cannot tolerate free enterprise's freedom of initiative. There is no lucrative law practice in socialized states—ergo, if we are to survive, we lawyers on Wall Street had best figure out how to go about keeping the fundamentals of capitalism alive amongst the few great industrial corporations that as yet remain solvent despite the 1929 and 1933 Depression events."
The Wall Street lawyers saw clearly that it was those surviving corporations' undistributed surplus which certified that capitalism had not gone entirely bankrupt despite its banking system's failure.
Operating invisibly behind the "skirts" of the as-yet-live corporations, the Wall Street lawyers very informally, but very seriously, organized far-ahead-in-time research-and-study teams consisting of the most astute corporation lawyers to be found in America. From these teams' realistic conceptioning they formulated a grand strategy that would keep capitalism's private enterprise alive and prospering indefinitely as run invisibly but absolutely legally by the lawyers.
The latter's research discovered that they would not soon be able to popularly and legally overthrow the New Deal. It was clear that not until World War II was over might they find conditions suitable for untying all the economic controls established by the New Deal.
It is appropriate at this point to do some reviewing of evolutionary changes that had been transpiring in the nature of capitalism.
It all starts with the land-based capitalism, a capitalism maintained by whoever seized, successfully defended, and controlled the land—ergo, owned the land. Those producing food and life support on the lands were all subservient to, and paid tribute to, the great landowners. In land capitalism whoever owned the fertile fields controlled all the wealth to be made from that land. Land capitalism dealt with nature's own metabolic productivity.
Then private enterprise and finance capitalism came to discover what could be done with mass-produced metals to multiply the value of the land-produced, life-support metabolics.
In the mid-nineteenth century mass production of steel, for the first time in history, suddenly gave humans the capability of producing long-span beams, whereby they were able to produce large-enough, semifireproof, and powerful structures to move more and more wealth-production work under cover. Western-world capitalism began to produce wealth under cover in addition to that produced out in the field. To make the tin cans in the factory to can the food produced in the fields, or to take the cotton produced in the fields and mass-produce cotton cloth, became known as "value-added-by-manufacture." Value-added-by-manufacturing was accomplished primarily with metals—metal buildings, metal machinery, metal tools, metal sea and land transportation systems, and, ofttimes, metal end products.
As already mentioned, it was the new, world-around, metals sources that brought about the name World War I.
Suddenly we had a completely new form of capitalism, which required both the large-scale financing and integration of metals, mines and mine-owners, metals refining and shaping into wholesaleable forms, all to be established around the world by the world masters of the great line of supply. The world line of metals-and-alloy supply was essential in producing all the extraordinarily productive new machinery and that machinery's delivery system, as was the generation and delivery of the unprecedentedly vast amounts of inanimate energy as electricity.
This new form of the world power structure's capitalism—by ownership of the mines and metals working all around the world—we call the metals and mining capitalism. Whoever owned the mines had incredible power, but never as great as those who controlled the line of their supply. Combining the two, (1) the mines and metals-producing industry and (2) the line of supply, we have the world power structure that operated as the first supranational, world-around-integrated, metals cartels. They were out of reach of the laws of any one country, in a metals cartels capitalism. Combining these two with (3) the absolute need of the large financing and credit at magnitudes rarely affordable by any one individual, we find finance capitalism integrating the world operation.
At any rate we now understand why the 1914-18 war was called World War I. It was inherently a war for mastery of the world's metallic resources and their world-around physical integration, controlling, and exploitation.
The amount of metal productivity of World War I was so great that, after the war, as the arms products became obsolete and were displaced by new design products, the metal contained in the ever vaster amounts of obsolete products began to come back into circulation as scrap. The scrap resources swiftly increased. The Morgan-escaped managerial capitalists said, "I'm going to keep my job if we pay our stockholders dividends—the rate at which we can pay dividends is directly dependent upon the rate at which our production wheels go around. To keep our wheels going around, we don't care whether we are using scrap metals or mined metals. As a matter of fact, the metals-as-scrap are usually more refined than the metals coming out of the mines. They cost less, so we're better off using the scrap—whether from obsolete buildings, machinery, armaments, railways, or ships." Formerly Morgan had insisted on all his controlled manufacturing corporations acquiring all their metal stocks only from newly mined, refined, and wholesale "shaped" stocks.
The mining companies found that industry would not buy ingots of their metals. They found that they had to turn their metals into tubes, bars, sheet, plate, wire, and a great variety of sizes and shapes. Wall Street's finance capitalism, therefore, underwrote the development of a host of metals-shaping industries who were the automatic customers of the only-ingot-producing, metals-mining corporations.
The post-World War I mineowner-capitalists began gradually to be washed out of the game by virtue of the Morgan-emancipated managerial capitalists saying, "Our job is to keep the wheels going around." Wheels-going-around producing saleable goods from scrap metals became strategic.
Up to the time of World War I the owners of the factories (Mr. Morgan et al.) said, "We put you in as management to make a profit out of this factory." If the management said, "Give us a new piece of machinery," the owners said, "New piece of machinery! What are you talking about? We put you in to make money out of our machinery. You are fired." Change was anathema to the J. P. Morgan-type of financier. Scientists would come to Mr. Morgan and say, "Mr. Morgan, I can show you how to make steel so that it won't rust." "Young man! The more it rusts, the more I sell. How crazy you must be! Get the doctor to look this man over, he's obviously a lunatic—take those mad papers out of his pocket and put them in my desk drawer."
But change was welcomed by the late-1930s' managerial capitalism. New designs called for more whirling of their production wheels. The change came in the form of many new armament designs for the clearly approaching World War II. The new designs released as "scrap" the metals from obsolete designs.
Concurrently, with the New Deal's reforms and controls, the wage-earners were now getting a fairer share of the national income, and the economy was prospering—particularly so as the New Deal began officially to remember the "forgotten man." Congress put a dollar cellar under the wages and elevated worker earnings enough to produce minor affluence and security for labor in general.
Just before the U.S.A. entered World War II, the Wall Street lawyers instructed the heads of great corporations to say to Roosevelt, "We heads of the corporations of America were not elected by the American people. We were chosen by our stockholders. Our job is to make profits for our stockholders. At the time of World War I a lot of business people were called 'profiteers.' As we enter into World War II war production, we don't want to be called 'immoral profiteers.' If you want cooperation from us, Mr. Roosevelt, you as government are going to have to be the one to initiate our corporations' being properly rewarded for our cooperation."
Mr. Roosevelt said, "I agree. You are beholden to your stockholders, so you are going to have to pay them dividends." Coping with this dilemma, the United States Treasury Department agreed that it was legitimate for the industrial corporations to make up to 12-percent profit per each product turnover. The New Deal said, "We the people, as government, are, however, going to renegotiate with you all the time, continually inspect you, to be sure you are really earning your profits." As a consequence of all the continuous renegotiation by the government, those U.S.A. corporations earned an average of 10 percent on every turnover. This meant that in World War II for every annual war budget—running at first at $70 billion per year—10 percent, or $7 billion, was earmarked for distribution to the stockholders of the corporations. Complete socialization of the stockholders of the prime U.S.A. corporations was accomplished.
Amongst the prime contractors identified by the New Deal were all the leading automobile companies. For example, Chrysler was picked out to produce the war tanks. With their powerful position established with the government, the U.S.A. automobile manufacturers, on being asked to convert all of their productivity to war armaments, agreed amongst themselves to put into storage all of their production tooling and to resume their post-war auto production with the models they were last producing at outset of war. New production tooling would cost them several billions of dollars. They had their Madison Avenue companies grind out advertisements showing the G.I. soldiers saying, "Please keep everything the same at home until I return."
Because Germany's, Italy's, and Japan's production equipment was destroyed during World War II, they were free after the war to start using the newest war-advanced technology in both the designing and the production of their automobiles. That was the beginning of the end for the U.S.A.'s prestige as the world's technological leader. The U.S.A. post-World War II cars were inherently seven years passe in contrast to the smaller, faster foreign cars. The "Big Three" American auto producers undertook to manufacture while keeping the foreign cars off the market and while they themselves exploited America's market need for a geographically expanding economy's transportation.
In the late 1960s the "Big Three" automobile companies of America found that their distributors were disenchanted with decreasing financial returns and with frequent bankruptcy. To hold their distributors G.M., Ford and Chrysler deliberately manufactured a few of their mechanically well-designed parts with inferior materials that were guaranteed to deteriorate electrolytically or otherwise. The replacement of these parts guaranteed that all the distributors' car buyers would have to return to them for service on a high-frequency basis, at which time the distributor would replace the parts catalogue-priced so high that the distributor was guaranteed a profitable business. This continuing deceit of the customers—we the people—was the beginning of the end of the American automobile business and the once-great world esteem for Uncle Sam. U.S.A. discreditation has been brought about without the U.S.A. people's knowledge of the money-maker-world's invisible cheating.
Throughout all pre-World War II years employers had maintained that unemployed people were unemployed because they were unqualified for survival, socially expendable. Then World War II saw young people deployed on war tasks all around the world. In view of this loss of labor vast amounts of automation were incorporated in the U.S.A.'s home-front war production. With the war over, the government found the cream of its youth all unemployed, and because of the automation there were no jobs in sight. Because they were the proven "cream of the youth," no one could say they were unemployed because they were unqualified, so the as-yet-operative New Deal created the G.I. Bill, which sent all those young people to prepaid college and university educations.
By World War II's end labor was earning so much that, for the first time, it was feeling truly secure, affluent, and successful. Emulating the pattern of the rich, individuals of labor were becoming little capitalists, with many enjoying the realization of their own home and land, with two shiny new post-World War II cars in the garage, their kids going to college, and some savings in the bank. The workers began buying shares in IBM and other superpromising private enterprise companies.
The Wall Street lawyers, being astute observers of such matters, realized that this labor affluence had brought about a psychological reorientation of the body politic. People no longer remembered or felt the depression of spirit that was experienced in the Great Depression of social economics following the Great Crash. The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists saw this as the time for breaking through the New Deal's hold on government, an event which, up to that time, seemed impossible. The lawyers said, "Whoever can get the victorious, supreme-command American general of World War II as their candidate for President will be able to get the presidency." They captured Eisenhower. Eisenhower had no political conviction, one way or the other. His vanity was excited at the idea of becoming president of his country.
The Wall Street lawyers explained to Eisenhower the prevailing new psychology of affluence and convinced him that the new affluent majority would elect a Republican. Thus they successfully persuaded him to be a Republican. With the healthy economy the new wage-earner capitalists, with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, readily voted for Eisenhower on the Republican ticket. Elsenhower's Wall Street lawyer-managers explained to him that he had been able to win the war because of the vision, courage, and ingenuity and the productive power of American free enterprise. They convinced Eisenhower that "the U.S.A. is, in fact, free enterprise." They also convinced him that the Democrats' New Deal was socialism and therefore the inherent enemy of free enterprise.
As soon as the Wall Street lawyers had Eisenhower in office in 1952, they instructed him to break loose all the economic controls of the New Deal. They had him cut all price controls, all rent controls, all interest-rate controls; they had him terminate anything that was stymieing the making of big money by big business. For instance, they persuaded Eisenhower to allow the insurance companies to invest their vast funds in common stocks. Before Ike's liberation of the insurance companies they were allowed to put their funds only in "Class A" bonds and similar investments. Cheered by the capitalist-owned sector of the press, his Wall Street lawyer-advisors for a long time had Ike feeling like a great liberator.
The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists put the Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles in as Ike's Secretary of State to dictate the American foreign policy of "Soviet containment," and Foster Dulles's Wall Street lawyer brother Allen Dulles was put in as head of a new brand of absolutely invisible, U.S.A.-financed, capitalistic welfare department, the CIA, established ostensibly to cold-war-cope with the secret-agent operations of our enemies. So secret was their operation that the people of the United States and its Congressional lawmakers had no idea of the size of the unlimited funds given to the CIA, nor for what those unknown funds were expended. The CIA and Allen Dulles had a U.S.A.-signed blank check for X amount of money to do X tasks. I call the CIA, "Capitalism's Invisible Army."
The great U.S.A. corporations, having been saved in 1933 by being only "unilaterally socialized," and having in the subsequent fifteen years become powerfully healthy from enormous war orders, immediately after Eisenhower's election started escalating prices. Their logic was that the first corporation head to increase prices in a given field of production would be the first to be able to distribute that "upping" as profits to his stockholders and thereby to gain for himself greater economic management status and personal wealth.
* * *
As a long-time student of foreign investment I saw a pattern developing. Between 1938 and 1940 I was on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine as its science and technology consultant, and my researchers harvested all the statistics for Fortune's tenth-anniversary issue, "U.S.A. and the World." In that issue I uncovered and was able to prove several new socioeconomic facts—for the first time in the history of industrial economics: (1) the economic health of the American—or any industrial—economy was no longer disclosed (as in the past) by the total tonnage of its product output, but by the amount of electrical energy generated by that activity; tonnage had ceased to be the criterion because (2) we were doing so much more given work with so much less pounds of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given function as to occasion ever newer, lighter, and stronger metallic alloys, chemicals, and electronics. Though at that time universally used as the number-one guide to the state of economic health of any world nation, tonnage no longer represented prosperity. The amount of energy being electrically generated and consumed became the most sensitive telltale of economic health. Furthermore, I was able in that issue to study carefully all the foreign investments made in America all the way back to its colonization in the early seventeenth century.
The ramifications of my studies in foreign investments in America and elsewhere are wide. An example of my findings included discovery of the swift, post-American Revolution investment in U.S.A. ventures by the British (East India Company-advised) financial world as already mentioned. I found a similar situation to be existent in World War II. As head mechanical engineer of the U.S.A. Board of Economic Warfare I had available to me copies of any so-called intercepts I wanted. Those were transcriptions of censor-listened-to intercontinental telephone conversations, along with letters and cables that were opened by the censor and often deciphered, and so forth. As a student of patents I asked for and received all the intercept information relating to strategic patents held by both our enemies and our own big corporations, and I found the same money was often operative on both sides in World War II.
The East India Company, whose flag I have shown to be the origin of ours, was a private enterprise chartered by the British. Quite clearly the East India Company didn't lose the American Revolution. The British government lost the Revolution, and the East India Company swiftly moved large amounts of its capital into U.S. America.
With World War II over I began to watch very closely the foreign investments patterning and the strategic metals movements, especially of copper, but those of silver and gold as well. In 1942 America had all the monetary bullion gold in the world in the Kentucky hills. During World War II what was called "the China Bloc"—which was the Sung family and others backing Chiang Kai-shek—were able to persuade the American Congress that China had always been corrupt and was eternally corruptible; to completely avoid communism in China Congress should let them have $100 million worth of gold bullion ($2 billion at January 1980 gold pricing) to be taken out of the Kentucky hills. Personally I don't think that gold ever went anywhere near China. I think it went right into the Swiss bank accounts of some clever thieves. But with that much gold out of the Pandora's box of the U.S.A. Kentucky hills vaults, it provided a "gold lever" with which to progressively pry loose more and more gold to be reintroduced into the "lifeblood" of world economic accounting.
After World War II, with only the one exception of the $100 million worth of monetary gold bullion of the China Bloc, all the rest of the world's international monetary gold bullion was residing in the Kentucky hills, U.S.A., vaults. All countries outside America had gone off the gold standard. In the course of international monetary negotiating that accompanied the U.S.A.'s post-World War I inadvertent ascendency into being the master economic state, and the U.S.A.'s post-World War II attempts to rehabilitate the leading economies around the world by rehabilitating the economies of its vanquished nations and thereby increasing international trading, the U.S.A. was persuaded to re-establish the gold standard for accounting the international balances of trade.
Gold is the super-helicopter of the open world-market-trading stratagems of the makers-of-money-for-self by the legalized manipulation of the money equity of others, all unbeknownst to the initial wealth equity-owning others. In 1934 Roosevelt's New Deal prohibited the further use of gold by U.S.A. citizens or U.S.A. businesses.
By 1953 it became apparent that the Wall Street lawyers were moving the major American corporations out of America. Of the 100 largest corporations in America four out of five of their annual investment dollars in new machinery and buildings for 1953 went exclusively into their foreign operations. This four-fifths rate persisted for a score of years.
The Wall Street lawyers told Mr. Eisenhower that they didn't like the overaltruistic social viewpoint of the Marshall Plan for helping underdeveloped countries. They liked foreign aid, but not exclusively for the development of underdeveloped countries. The Wall Street lawyers approved of the "foreign aid" wherefore the U.S.A. continued with annual foreign-aid commitments by Congress. The average annual foreign-aid appropriation has been $4 billion (1950 value) per year over the twenty-seven-year period from 1952 to 1979, which amounted to a $100 billion total. Each new year's foreign-aid bill had a rider that said that if American companies were present in the country being aided, the money had to be spent through those American companies. In the foreign countries the corporations and individuals could again deal in gold.
Foreign aid paid for all the new factories and machinery of all the American corporations moving out of America. This became a fundamental pattern: first the 100 largest corporations, then the 200 largest corporations followed, then what Fortune calls the 500 largest corporations. Moving out of America could be done readily because a corporation is only a legal entity—it is not a human being. It had no physical body to pass through immigration or emigration. You and I cannot move out of America because we are physical—we need a passport. A corporation does not.
So the Wall Street lawyers simply moved their prime corporate operations elsewhere. It was clearly evident that with only 7 percent of the world's population in the U.S.A., and with two cars already in many U.S.A. garages, by far the major portion of further exploitation of the world's peoples' needs and desires would develop outside of the U.S. of America. But the main objective of the Wall Street lawyers was for the corporations to get out from under the tax control of the American government. In 1933 the American people had saved the corporations by subsidizing them; then, twenty years later, the Wall Street lawyers moved them out of America, getting the American people to pay for the move. This allowed the corporations to acquire gold equities while the U.S.A. citizens and small domestic businesses could not do so.
Soon after Elsenhower's 1952 election to the presidency, the lawyers reminded him once more that America clearly had won the war only through his brilliant generalship backed up by American free enterprise, and said, "We want you to stop the welfare-state-inclined American government from competing with free enterprise. You must cut out all the navy yards and the arsenals. They compete against the free-enterprise corporations, which are quite capable of doing the same work as the navy yards, but of doing it much more efficiently. You must turn all such production over to private industry, cut out the U.S.A. post office and turn that over to private enterprise, cut out the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and turn that over to the insurance industry." Although much of this transfer of production from government to private enterprise control was never completed, Eisenhower goaded on by his lawyers initiated the flow of taxpayer-financed, highly trained personnel and especially their technical know-how to private enterprise. This irreversible trend continues on to the present day, as can be shown by the history of the whole of the atomic energy field.
Those acquainted with the story of the atomic bomb development remember the momentous occasion when theoretical fission was discovered in 1939 by Hahn and Stresemann in Germany and secretly communicated by them to American physicists, who checked out their calculations and found them correct and then persuaded Einstein to go to Roosevelt to tell him that this was so and that Hitler's scientists were hot on the trail.
Franklin Roosevelt, exercising war powers given him by Congress, in effect instantly appropriated $80 billion for what became known later as the Manhattan Project. Later, that initial $80 billion appropriation was supplemented by an additional $75 billion for a total of $155 billion of the American people's money that went into developing atomic energy.
The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists sent a man named Lewis Strauss to Washington to "join in the World War II effort." Strauss was a partner in the Wall Street banking house of Kuhn, Loeb. He was also a brilliant son-in-law of Adolph Ochs, president of The New York Times. Strauss was made an admiral in gratitude for his forsaking Wall Street to help America win the war. After the war Admiral Strauss was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission; in 1953 Eisenhower named him commission chairman. Strauss and the Wall Street lawyers persuaded Eisenhower that the Atomic Energy Commission must not be in competition with capitalism and must be turned over to private enterprise. So it was—$155 billion worth of it, all of which had been paid for by the American public—but it consisted of work so secret that only the scientists who were intimate with the work understood it.
All that was necessary to correct the situation was to give contracts to private enterprise to carry on the atomic work and to let the government's scientists go to work for the private-enterprise corporations.
At this point the Wall Street lawyers and Strauss persuaded Eisenhower that the United States Bureau of Standards' scientists were in competition with private enterprise and must be curbed. Strauss assured Eisenhower that the corporations would take on all the bureau's discarded scientists. What the Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists realized was something momentous—to wit . . . that in the new 99.9-percent invisible reality of alloys, chemistry, electronics, and atomics, scientific and technical know-how was everything. Physical land and buildings were of no further interest to capitalism. Metaphysical know-how was the magic wand of the second half of the twentieth-century world power structures. Physical properties were subject to deterioration, taxable, and cumbersome. Advised to do so by their lawyers, capitalism and private enterprise set about after World War II to monopolize all strategic technological know-how—i.e., all metaphysical properties—and to dump all physical properties. They called for an economic program by which people would be forced to buy the apartments and houses—to get all physical properties off capitalism's hands.
The post-Eisenhower era becomes most suitably identified as that of lawyer capitalism and of "no-risk," sure-thing, free enterprise.
The whole of atomic development was know-how. Scientists had the know-how, and anybody without their technical information could not even speak their language. The Know-How Club, monopolized by lawyer capitalism, was a very tight club. Furthermore, the nonmember four billion plus human beings on planet Earth knew nothing about the invisible micro-macro, non-sensorially-tune-in-able reality. Large private enterprise had now hired all the know-how scientists and engineers. They seemingly could keep the public out of their affairs forever. The world power structure had the U.S. government completely emasculate the Bureau of Standards. There was an earnest and concerned battle by a few responsible scientists to keep the bureau intact, but they were overwhelmed. Henceforth all science must be done by the private corporations themselves or under their subsidized university-college and private laboratory work. To appreciate the extent of this know-how monopoly of the big corporations, one need only look over the wording of the scientist and engineering help-wanted advertisements of the big corporations in the many pages of The New York Times Sunday business section or of their counterpart publications in other big cities.
In the invisible, esoteric world of today's science there is no way for the American government or public, without the U.S.A. Bureau of Standards' scientists, to follow the closely held technical secrets of the big, profit-oriented corporations. To a small extent such popular journals as Scientific American help people follow details of this-and-that special case science without learning of the significance of the information in respect to comprehensive socioeconomic evolution.
No economic accounting books list metaphysical assets. Metaphysics is held to be insubstantial—meaning in Latin "nothing on which to stand." Patents can be granted only for special cases—i.e., limited physical-practice applications of abstract generalized principles, which principles alone are inherently metaphysical and unpatentable, being only "discovered" and not "invented." But physical patents are capital.
We have two fundamental realities in our Universe—the physical and the metaphysical. Physicists identify all physical phenomena as the exclusive manifest of energy: energy associative as matter or disassociative as electro-magnetic behavior, radiation. Both of these energy states are reconvertible one into the other. Because there is no experimental evidence of energy being either created or lost, world scientist-philosophers now concede it to be in evidence that Universe is eternally regenerative.
The physicists have found that energy will always articulate levers electromagnetically, gravitationally, chemically by reactive forces, by vibratory waves, etc. Metaphysics consists only of weightless, dimensionless, abstract thoughts and mathematical principles that cannot lever physical needles in respect to instrument dials. Energy in either of its states, being physical, can be entered into the capital account ledgers.
The large issue today is the technical know-how that governs the transformations of energy between its two states. "Know-how" is metaphysics. Metaphysics now rules. When the head of one of the U.S.A. 's largest banks was asked what "commodities" were involved in that bank's import-export dealings with the rest of the world on behalf of the Chinese government, he answered that know-how was the prime commodity being acquired by the Chinese through that bank.
I have spent a great deal of time since World War II in Japan, dealing with their industrialists, and have personally witnessed the Japanese acquisition by contracts of a whole complex of exquisitely specific packages of industrial know-how, together with the respective follow-through educational services—all acquired from, and performed by, engineering and business-administration teams of many of the leading American corporations.
The post-World War II Japanese had already perceived that they did not need to own the physical mines of metallic ores because they had learned also how to carry on exclusively with the melting down and recirculating of the world's metals, particularly those poured into the Orient and Western Pacific islands by the U.S.A. during World War II in the form of now-obsolete—ergo, "scrapped"—armaments. The essence of Japan's recent decades' economic success has been the acquisition and realization of the industrial-technology-know-how wealth existent exclusively in metaphysical know-how, in contradistinction to strictly physical land properties, tools, and end products. With all their pre-World War II machinery smashed the Japanese and Germans acquired new, vastly improved industrial equipment with which to realize their know-how production, whereas the World-War-II-winning U.S.A. and European Allies using their old technology became more preoccupied with making money than in producing superior products.
Because of the foregoing it was now possible to maintain that hidden know-how capability within private corporate walls. Since 99 percent of humanity does not as yet understand science's mathematical language, less than 1 percent of humanity is scientifically literate—ergo, the lawyers' strategy of tight monopolization of scientific know-how within the scientifically staffed corporations was highly feasible.
In 1929, at the time of the Great Wall Street Crash, only about 1 percent of the U.S.A.'s big corporations had research departments. Now, half a century later, all the big corporations have all the powerful research departments, other than those in which pure scientists are engaged in academic work under some corporate or government subsidy. Through the national defense budget's armaments development, all the once risky research and development costs of enterprise are paid for by the public through taxation.
The big oil companies knew long ago that humanity would ultimately run out of an adequate supply of petroleum and other fossil fuels, though coal may last a thousand years. That's why, by the means we have reviewed, the oil companies acquired control of the know-how on atomic energy as well as all the atomic plants and equipment paid for originally by the U.S.A. government. The power structure's only interest is in selling energy—and only energy that they can run through a meter. They're not in the least interested in anyone getting windpower—except themselves. Very rich men love having their sailing yachts wind-driven to Europe or the South Seas, but this is not for the people. People's power must be piped or wired to them only through meters.
When in 1972 all the power-structure capital had converted its dollars into gold, oil, or other highly concentrated and mobile equities, then-President Richard Nixon severed the U.S.A. dollar from its government-guaranteed gold equity value of $35 per ounce, the U.S.A. people's dollar buying power plummeted—now, in 1980, being worth only 5 cents of the 1971 U.S.A. dollar.
By 1974 much of the world's buying power landed in the lap of the Arabs, who also sat atop the chief petroleum source of the world. In effect they had both the money with which to buy their petroleum and the largest reserves to be bought. If someone wanted to buy their petroleum, often they couldn't do so, because few in the world had the monetary resources remaining with which to do so. The Arabs realized they would have to lend out their money to work, but they had no experience in such investment matters. The Arabs had no knowledge of the vast industrial production and distribution technical and administrative requirements. Nor had they any experience in the exploitation of the world-energy industry prior to their own lands' exploitation by others before the onslaught of the petroleum company giants. The Arabs had not known how to discover, drill for, refine, and distribute the petroleum upon which they had been sitting unwittingly for thousands of years.
So content were the Arab monarchs with the gratification of their every physical desire—artfully heaped upon them personally by the capitalist world's foreign-oil-exploiting functionaries—that they would never have taken over the direct mastery of their petroleum affairs had not the psycho-guerilla warfare between the capitalist and communist powers deliberately aroused the Arabian peoples themselves, bringing pressure upon their leaders to take over the foreigners' operations. Since their subsequent epochal enrichment, the Arabs' political leaders as well as the monarchs and sheiks have bought everything of which they could dream, as stimulated by the affluent acquisitions patterns in other economies. After vast stock and bond investments, real estate and new building ventures in foreign countries, they found that they could expend only a fraction of their monetary wealth. The Arabs have now reached the dilemma of how to turn their monetary gold fortune to important and lasting advantage.
In 1977 the king of Saudi Arabia said to a leading American banker with large oil interests, "My banks don't know anything about international banking and major industrial accommodation." The American banker said, "Would you like me to run your banks?" The king said, "Of course." So the American banker did, and in the process he taught them international and transnational industrial-finance management.
There's no question that the few who have title to Arabian oil find it essential to amalgamate their operations with the world's great oil companies, which own the vast equipment of world-around distribution and interaccounting capabilities as well as the vast majority of refineries and petrochemical industries. The great oil companies control it all. In general they and noncommunist Arabia are one and the same. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' (OPEC) officialdom, regardless of national political differences, is very probably run entirely by the oil corporations' trillions of dollars of persuasiveness.
It is relevant at this point to note that the Arabs' inadvertent isolation of both the physical-wealth items—(1) the underlying monetary gold and (2) the prime negotiable energy commodity, petroleum—and their concurrent discovery of their utter lack of know-how, clearly differentiated out the relative values of (A) the purely physical petroleum and gold, and (B) the exclusively metaphysical know-how wealth. It turned out that B was most in demand as well as scarcest. The physical wealth was thus proved to be of approximately zero value, while the metaphysical know-how wealth proved to be the prime economic "good-health" constituent of wealth.
click the above link to read more
No comments:
Post a Comment