COSMIC COSTING

R. Buckminster Fuller

http://bfi.org


HAMILTON VS. JEFFERSON

In the decades immediately following America's successful 1776 revolution, a
group of political strategists led by Alexander Hamilton persuaded the
Congress of the United States that it was not the intention of the founders of
the republic that their government should have any capital-wealth-initiating
capability.

Wealth, they maintained, was a mysterious reality that emanated exclusively
from inherited fortunes and the private ventures of large landowners. There
were no government or public inspections of the nature of their wealth other
than the self-evident land and the publicly registered deeds of ownership.

All the U.S. Government's financial needs, said the Hamiltonians, must be
underwritten by funds from these for the first time exclusive,
self-accredited, wealthy individuals, loaned to the government through the
wealthy citizens "banks," and must be repaid to their banks by the government
with funds raised by taxation from the people.


DEBT VS. WEALTH

And this exclusively negative, politically sustained interpretation provides
the legal precedent for today's limited liability privilege of bank's and
insurance corporations to loan out at interest to humanity (as government of
individuals) the very same earnings and savings deposits that humanity had
entrusted to the banks and insurers for safekeeping.

Unauthorized by the depositors and unbeknownst to them, the banks have been
loaning out the deposits of the borrowers themselves. Thus the banks are
"justified" by precedent in paying exclusively to themselves the interest
earned on the deposits.


SPECULATION VS. BIOLOGY

Since the deposited monies are not biological, those monies cannot actually
multiply in physical-energy fact. The "interest" earnings were predicated
historically on the use of cattle as currency -- a real currency that did
indeed multiply its numbers biologically.

That present paper and metal money cannot multiply the so-called earnings of
interest on it means automatic increase of the number of dollars in respect to
the true wealth of life-support items for which the money is exchanged. Thus
interest charges on non-biological money automatically deflate the value of
the money.

The banks' continuing escalation of discount and interest rates progressively
devalues humanity's commonwealth equity while siphoning over the deposited
wealth into the banks' credit accounts, so that the depositors' realized funds
of later years have only a fraction of the buying power they had commanded at
the time of deposit.

The banks of 1970 have all but abandoned their specious representation,
popularly advertised until the time of the 1929 crash, that suggested that the
individual's consistent bank-deposited savings would continually grow,
ultimately to provide handsomely for the individual's old-age needs. But the
myth persists as a popular concept and as a psychological drive.


CRASH & DEPRESSION

The American banker's "wealth bluffing" poker hands were "called" for the
first time in the 1929-1933 stock-market crash and Depression.

Their empty-handedness occurred because:

(1) the banks themselves had no real wealth, and

(2) the banks had used the depositors' funds as investments elsewhere in
"non-liquid cash" ventures. These frozen resources brought about unmeetable
"runs" and bankruptcy of the banks.

After Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the U.S. government reopened the "banks"
with public knowledge of the fact that the people's deposits were now being
guaranteed only by the people's government, and not by the bankers or by
private-enterprise wealth.

The banks and their managers, "owners," and employees were then put under
stiff government regulation. Thus the U.S. Congress and administration
socialized the banking system, but without saying so in a forthright manner.
The people's government, and not the bankers, became the guarantor of last
recourse.

The reestablishment of the "banks" were restored by the New Deal only because
people were accustomed to placing their savings in the safekeeping of banks,
considering them less subject to robbery than when hidden under mattresses.
The Roosevelt administration found it easier to yield to this popularly
conditioned reflex than to re-educate the people on economics. The public of
1933 knew little or nothing of the Alexander Hamilton fiscal coup of a century
earlier.


THE WARFARE STATE

The U.S. Reconstitution Finance Corporation -- which rehabilitated and
refurbished the prime industrial production corporations such as U.S. Steel --
plus World War II further confused the socioeconomic issues that were already
too complex for omnispecialized society to understand.

Most of the humans who remember the great crash bankruptcy, which peaked to a
5,000 failed-bank crescendo in late 1932, are now dead, and the New Deal's
invention of non-banker banks, with postal-clerk status bank employees, has
been perpetuated and transformed, through enormous political maneuvering and
obscure economic semantics.

As a consequence, the bank stockholders have succeeded in regaining their
debt-exploiting prerogatives, thereby running the U.S. national debt [1973] to
a record $400 billion "owed" to them, on the books with intensely interesting
"interest" to the banks, insurance companies, and their bond-buying customers.
The annual interest on this is $21 billion.

The U.S. national-debt service of $21 billion interest was equal, pre-Nixon,
to one-half the value of all the monetary gold in the world. With the U.S.
Dollar in 1972 realistically deflated 50 percent by true world-market,
international-trading value, the Nixon $21 billion public-debt interest is
annually equal in value only to one-eighth the world's monetary gold.

This obscurely managed, complex system of wealth now promises again to
bankrupt the U.S. people, whose presidential elections can only be won through
corrupting, multimillion-dollar TV-time-buying campaigns. This could bring
about the end of a sovereign United States and swift emergence of its people
as world citizens.

Unnoticed among all the world-political-crisis news, the 155 largest
industrial corporations born and developed in the United States had committed
80 percent of their wealth to operations outside of the United States. They
have gone "world"; they have their own world inter-accounting, which
transcends politico-economic sovereign accounting.


FEUDALISM VS. COMMONWEALTH

In order for a world-around democracy to prosper, world society must learn how
to prosper; world society must learn how all this came about.

We discover that, historically, the exclusively agricultural accounting system
now being ineptly applied to word industrialization began with a sovereign's
claim to the lands established by his conquering "deeds or arms."

Public recognition of the claims was secured by the sovereign's continued and
ever-increasing armed might. The sovereign of his or her assignees then issued
paper deeds to great lands to pay for the armed deeds of their
comrades-in-arms who became the lords of all the conquered lands other than
the king's.

This landlordism, or land ownership, was originally dispensed from deeds of
war. Then the great landlords loaned or sold parcels of their lands to
share-cropping farmers who had to pay the landlord a tithe, or rent, and
"interest" out of the wealth produced by nature within which to store the
grains collected in the basket (fiscus is Latin for basket; thus the fiscal
year is that which winds up within the basketed measuring the net grains
harvested).

The real pay-off, or course, was in regenerative metabolic increments of the
botanical photosynthetic impoundment of Sun radiation and hydrocarbon
molecules' structuring and proliferation through hydrogenic and biological
inter-accommodations.

Obviously none of this natural, wealth-regenerating and multiplying process
was accreditable to the landlords.


COERCION VS. COOPERATION

Yet the sovereigns and landlords imposed themselves by force into the
metabolic wealth-harvesting and sharing equation even earlier in history.

Nomadic tribal herders -- after wandering the seemingly infinite wilderness
for millions of years, as their semi-domesticated cattle led them to verdant
pastures -- found the once free, open land being gradually claimed,
proclaimed, and patrolled by the most powerful armed war lords, who suggested
that the herder needed "protection" for their defenseless flocks and herds,
which were tantalizingly stealable wealth.

The roving, sword-brandishing strongmen imposed their "protection" on all
comers within their realms and battled with other strongmen to increase their
respective territories.

Finally, the herders were forced to "buy" the lands they roam from the lords
who sold the herders their "own" special ranches. The ranches were sold at
prices far beyond the herders' total savings in skins or total livestock
value, so the landlords "loaned" the herder the down-payment purchasing price
to acquire the ranch while the lord took back, and held as collateral a number
of heads of the herders' cattle.

From collateral, the lord took as "payment in kind" both the annual reduction
in total purchase price and -- to cover "interest" -- the young cattle bred
seasonally.

The word capital (capita in Latin, originally referring to heads of cattle)
was thus derived. The herder hopefully earned (i.e. bred) enough additional
heads of cattle eventually to pay off the landlord in kind.

In later millenniums the herder could sell his cattle in exchange for the
landlord's inanimate, non-herding money in the form of coins and thus repay
the landlord or traffic in other goods, all of which had fallen prey to the
landlord's "protection."

During the interim the cattle deposited as collateral continued to breed, and
the newborn cattle became basic "interest" claimed unilaterally by the
landlord and appropriated exclusively to his own account.


THE BIRTH OF MONEY

Metallic coin money was invented only four millenniums ago when ships capable
of sustaining sea commerce were developed.

It became impractical for traders to carry aboard ship cattle with which to
negotiate, so coins with patterns of sovereign conquerors gradually became
negotiable.

Both phonetic spellings and coined money were the "inventions of necessity" of
the Phoenicians. Overseas traders needed negotiability written words with
which to contract long-term trading arrangements between people who never came
into direct contact with one another and knew little or nothing of the
language, conditions, and resources prevailing in the mystically far-apart
lands of those with whom they traded. The Phoenecian's phonetic alphabet
provided graphic symbols for sounds, and thus made possible the spelling out
of any language's sound words.

After a millennium or so of high-seas battling, of sea lords, such as the
Vikings (Veekings) and other great pirate-fleet operators who imposed their
"protection" on great empires, the Veeking Phoenicians, or Fenecians, became
the Benetians of Venezia.

Shakespeare's merchant of Venice, and this attempt to substitute human flesh
for live cattle flesh as collateral for the banker's trade "accommodations,"
dramatizes the nonsense of equating that which is biologically productive and
the "protector's" non-productive metallic money.

Society no longer equates the "protection"-imposing racketeer with the banking
establishment. But this long-ago, muscle-warped concept of wealth, and the
unjust and lethally conclusive way in which it was established ("to whom this
and that belonged"), was developed over the millenniums in just this manner.


THE DEATH OF MONEY

Considered independently of yesterday's dubious claim, the exclusively
biological premises of the agrarian era are utterly inapplicable to the new,
inanimate, industrial metabolics.

The difference is that existing between failure-prone, local agricultural
metabolics and the never-failing eternally inter-regenerative,
radiation-mass-radiation-mass recycling that characterizes the fail-proof
metabolics of a universe and its increasing availability to humanity aboard
planet Earth.

Only through the human mind does the inexhaustible cosmic wealth become
increasingly available for local terrestrial evolution. This harnessing of
eternally inexhaustible energy into human-task powering can be factually
accounted for as part of the irreversibly amplifying inventory of metaphysical
know-how.


ENERGY & INFORMATION

The commonwealth of Universe consists entirely of: first physical energy,
either in its associative phase as matter, or in its disassociative phase as
radiation (both of which phases are eternally and completely
inter-transforming without any overall loss by the universe); and second,
abstract, weightless metaphysical laws, knowledge of which, and know-how to
employ which, constitute humanity's most unique faculty.

Since first, the physical cannot "wear out" or decrease and, second, the
know-how can only increase, wealth, consisting entirely and only of the
physical and metaphysical, can only increase.


EFFICIENCY VS. WASTE

Throughout the multi-millions of years of humanity's known presence aboard
planet Earth -- until the inception a century ago of applied science's
conversion of water-wheel and steam-engine power through electro-magnetic
regenerators distantly delivered by wire to electric-motor driven or heated or
refrigerated tools -- 99 percent of the total energy consumed and used by
humanity was consumed as food to power both humans and domestic animals.

In the U.S.A., in 1971, only 1 percent of all the energy consumed was in the
form of food to support muscle-accomplished work, while 99 percent of the
energy was consumed by inanimate power-driven tools and electro-chemical
processes. Twenty percent of all the inanimate energy was consumed by
automobiles; that is, the American automobiles consumed twenty times as much
energy as that going to feed Americans.

In America, at all times, 2 million cars are halted at stoplights with their
engines running. This means that the equivalent of 200 million horses are
jumping up and down going nowhere. While human metabolic processes are far
from 100 percent efficient in converting food energy to realized foot-pounds
of work, humanity's ignorant, sheepish waste of both its muscle power and
technological power is horrendous.

Mechanical efficiency is expressed in relative percentages of work realized
per units of energy consumed: water wheels are 90 percent; fuel cells, 80
percent; jet engines, 60 percent; turbines, 30 percent; reciprocating engines,
15 percent.

But as operated, all the work that humanity gets out of its technology is 5
percent of the potential 100 percent energy consumed. Only one-twentieth of
all the energy consumed by humanity produced physical work is either useful or
wasteful.


BLACK GOLD

Out of every 100 barrels of petroleum distributed and consumed by world
society today, 80 barrels are completely wasted, going into powering machines
and processes that, averaged overall, are 80 percent inefficient.

Scientific calculation shows that the amount of time and energy invested by
nature to produce one gallon of petroleum, "safety deposited" in subterranean
oil wells, when calculated in foot-pounds of work and chemical time converted
into kilowatt-hours and at the present commercial rates at which electricity
is sold, amounts to approximately $1 million per gallon of petroleum as
cosmically developed prior to its discovery and exploitation by humans.

When humans discovered the petroleum, they wrongly assumed that it was
absolutely free and belonged to the finder. Humans take into account only the
cost of pumping, processing, and distributing oil. Anyone should be able to
sell a million dollars for fifty cents!


NATURAL WEALTH

Only cosmic costing properly accounts for the entirely biological evolution
and cosmic inter-transformative regeneration in general, as well as for the
parts played gravitationally and radiationally in the astro-totality within
which our minuscule planet Earth and its minuscule star -- the Sun -- are
inter-functionally secreted.

Cosmic costing makes utterly ludicrous the selfish and fearfully contrived
"wealth" games being reverentially played by humanity aboard Earth.

Fortunately, the Sun does not demand for all the energy that it delivers by
radiation to Earth in the overall cosmic scheme, which is trying to make
humanity a success despite its overwhelming ignorance and fear.

The stars -- the Sun -- are trying to tell humanity to awake and prosper and
to consciously assume the important cosmic responsibilities for which it was
designed. Since realization and fulfillment of that responsibility involve
evolutionary discovery by humanity of the cosmic stature of its mind and the
inconsequentiality of its muscle, the planting of humans on Earth may not bear
fruit.


ACTION OR OBLIVION

When Universe is developing important functional dependencies, she does not
put all her embryos in the same locale. So poor is the probability of
self-discovery by humans of the infinite potential of the mind and the
relative triviality of muscle power that nature must have planted a myriad of
humanity seedlings on a myriad of planets.

The first manifestation that humanity may make good on this planet is the
serious introduction of cosmic costing into the mainstream deliberations of
Earthians.

It completely eliminates the economic validity of bankruptcy accounting,
except when humans make the mistake of trying to hoard or withdraw critical
"capital" assets from productive functioning. It is akin to attempting to
withdraw one of the stars from the celestial system. Into what universe, other
than the cosmic totality, may the star be transferred?

Every atom and electron is an essential part of the eternally regenerative,
ergo totally inexhaustible, (but always locally ebbing and flooding),
pulsative Universe.



ELECT YOURSELF! ACT LOCALLY - ACT GLOBALLY.

Citizens Executive Administration
of the United States of America

http://egroups.com/group/cea-usa

http://www.bfi.org

http://www.bioneers.org

http://www.cdi.org

http://www.futurenet.org

http://www.homepower.com

http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org

http://www.transaction.net


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