Howard Scott speaking in 1933: Technocracy is a dual thing. On the one hand it is
an organization of scientists, engineers, technologists and workers in
other technical fields; on the other, it is a body of thought. This
body of thought may be concisely described as a technological approach
to, and an analysis of, all social phenomena. Technocracy is not
premised on any philosophical preconceptions, convictions or beliefs.
Technocracy is based primarily on a study of the rates of growth of all
energy-consuming devices on this Continent as a function of time.
Technocracy is concerned with the natural resources available for
conversion into use-forms and their quantities; with the quantity of
energy and materials consumed in the proper operation of the physical
equipment on this area; with the number of people required in this
total operation and the hours of work within a given time. These are
some of the principal questions with which Technocracy has always been,
and is now, concerned. …

Ever since man was driven from the
jungle by his more agile but less enterprising relative, the ape, he
has been conducting a long and arduous struggle, fighting his way
toward ever more effective sources of energy. In this struggle the
problem of population has come to play an increasingly important part.
For example: in the 200,000 years prior to 1800 the biologic
progression had so far advanced that the total world population of the
human species in the latter year was approximately 850,000,000. In the
subsequent 132 years this population grew until it is now approximately
1,800,000,000–a greater increase than in the previous 200,000 years.

The
point to be especially noted is that most of this population increase
is due to the introduction of technological procedures into social
life. By way of contrast, consider China. According to the Nanking
estimates of 1932, China has a population of 470,000,000 today an
estimated growth of only 71,000,000 in the past two centuries.
France–according to the estimates of Reid, Baker, and others–would
require over four hundred years to double its present population of
approximately 40,000,000. Both of these countries are admittedly
backward in their rates of growth on the technological level; that is
to say, neither of them has taken full advantage of the incentive to
population increase afforded by the introduction of technological
procedures into their social life.

Compare these examples with
the United States. In 1830, slightly over a century ago, this country
had a little more than 12,000,000 people. Today the figure is
approximately 122,000,000–an increase of 10 times in a century. Now
set these figures against the background of the energy consumption
during the same period: In 1830 we were consuming as a nation less than
75 trillion British Thermal Units of total extraneous physical energy
(derived principally from windmills and domestic animals with some coal
and water power.) In 1929 we consumed slightly less than 27,000
trillion British Thermal Units of extraneous physical energy–an
increase in the century of 353 times. What is the drift of such
facts–which can be supported and strengthened from many sources?

Technocracy
points out that in all social systems prior to the last 200 years man
was the chief engine of energy conversion. Efficient from the
mechanical point of view, this engine was severely limited in output,
rating at approximately one tenth horsepower per eight-hour day. All
the work and wealth of human society from the dawn of recorded history
to the beginning of the 18th century depended exclusively upon this
engine. Thus we have Adam Smith, in the opening sentence of his famous
book, (published in the same year as America’s Declaration of
Independence and, ironically, within a short distance of the town where
James Watt was developing his steam engine) defining wealth in terms of
human labor which in turn created all values. This was a correct
description of the conditions of which Adam Smith wrote, but it has
since become increasingly evident that man, as a creator of physical
wealth, is receding more and more into the background, yielding, and
not unwillingly, to the rapid growth of technology and of power
procedures. Technocracy emphasizes that in all the older social systems
there was no means of altering the rate of doing work: You could
increase the total number of human beings only up to the physical
limits of the area in which they lived, that limit reached, migration
was the only alternative to the reduction of population by mass famine. (10/30/08)
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George Monbiot writes: How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said “there you go again”. His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn’t always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD.

But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so dumb, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies. (10/30/08)
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Ellen Brown, JD writes: October 24 marks the 79th anniversary of the October 1929 stock market crash. Heavy selling started on Thursday, October 24, 1929, and accelerated the following week on Black Monday and Black Tuesday, October 28 and 29. Many feared a repeat of this disaster on Friday, October 24, 2008, after Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell nearly 10% during the night, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 8%, and Germany’s and Britain’s fell 5%.

“In a stunning turn of events,” reported Yahoo! Finance, “the futures for the major indices were ‘lock limit’ down before the start of trading Friday, meaning they had hit a 5% threshold that prevented them from trading any lower until the stock market opened Friday.” Traders prepared for the worst, but remarkably, disaster was averted. The U.S. market fell only 3.5%, just another “ordinary” bearish day.

Why the more modest drop in the U.S., where the financial debacle originated and should have hit hardest? Suspicious observers saw the covert hand of the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), the group set up under President Reagan to maintain market “stability” by manipulating markets behind the scenes. Bill Murphy commented in LeMetropoleCafe.com:

In response to Bill Saporito’s comment in Time it might be countered that Henry Paulson’s Plunge Protection Team
is quite adept at rigging an economy. The difference between an
acknowledged socialist state and the stealth socialism we have in the U.S.
today is that in a socialist state, everyone expects the market to be rigged
and operates accordingly. In a rigged pseudo-capitalist economy, investors are
easily separated from their money because they expect the market to follow
“free market principles” based on “supply and demand.” They are seduced into
“pump and dump” schemes – artificial manipulations that allow insiders to
unload stock at a high price or buy it at a low price – because they trust in
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which is supposed to automatically set things
right in a market left to its own devices. The market today is indeed
controlled by an invisible hand, but it is not necessarily serving the
interests of small investors.  (10/30/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: In the typhoon of commentary that’s blown around the world a step behind the financial tsunami that’s wrecking everything, two little words have been curiously absent: “fraud” and “swindle.” But aren’t they really at the core of what has happened? Wall Street took the whole world “for a ride” and now a handful of Wall Street’s erstwhile princelings have shifted ceremoniously into US Government service to “fix” the problem with a “toolbox” containing a notional two trillion dollars. This strange exercise in financial kabuki theater will shut down sometime between the election and inauguration day, when the inaugurate finds himself president of the Economic Smoking Wreckage of the United States. What will happen?

I have thought for some time that things could get dangerously out of hand in America, despite our exceptionalist notion that we are immune to the common plot-lines of history. For starters, inauguration night will seem more like Halloween, as those two little words fly in to haunt the new president. So, a large and looming question is: who will be appointed the next attorney general of the US (to replace the human sash-weight currently occupying the office), and how soon will the federal marshals be scouring the wainscoted hallways of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, not to mention a thousand Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge fund boiler rooms, with man-sized nets?

A story-line is already emerging to the effect that these birds really didn’t quite know what they were doing in grinding out that multi-trillion dollar basket of alphabet securities sausage (a theme on Sunday’s “60-Minutes” broadcast). Nobody will buy that line of bullshit, though — and certainly not in the courtroom where, for instance, Mr. Hank Paulson will have to answer why his own firm of Goldman Sachs set up a special unit to short its own issues. It will be edifying to see how they answer.

In the meantime, however, millions of Joe-the-Plumber types will have gotten their pink slips, slipped helplessly into foreclosure, watched the repo men hot-wire their Ford pickups, and eaten down the kitchen cupboard to a single box of Kellogg’s All-Bran (which had been sitting there for eleven years infested with weevils). They will be watching the official proceedings in the federal courtrooms with jaundiced eyes as they hunch in their tent cities, in the rain, sipping amateur-brand raisin wine bartered for a few snared rock doves. How long before the hardier ones among them venture out to Easthampton with long knives and matches? (10/30/08)
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