THE BIG DEAL ABOUT THE DUBAI PORTS WORLD DEAL BEGAN WITH THE NEW DEAL
Those who own oil also own the atomic energy and have long ago assumed that, if humanity exhausts or abandons oil, it will automatically switch over to atomic energy. Humanity has had nothing to say about all this because the know-how was so obscure and the lawyers' strategems so invisibly large.
The lawyers' international stratagems were and as yet are so obscure, in fact, that no government authorities -- let alone the public -- knew that the world energy monopoly's scientists had not taken into account earthquakes, for instance, in the construction of New England atomic energy plants, nor had the public or government anticipated that the intuitive wisdom of humanity would develop such an antipathy to atomic energy ....
The second great gasoline "pinch" of June 1979 was put upon the public by the invisible energy-know-how cartel to ... divert the public concern generated by the Three Mile Island radiation accident and threat of a reactor "meltdown". Though the public had reacted strongly against atomic plants, the sudden energy supply squeeze administered by the oil companies made the general public so energy hungry again that it stopped, for the moment, listening to those who were attempting to curtail atomic energy plants.
-- from "Legally Piggily" in Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller, published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press.
"The national debt at the time of the New Deal was $ 33 billion -- which was the cost of World War I. Before World War I we frequently had no national debt whatsoever. We have today a national debt that exceeds $ 800 billion" -- wrote Buckminster Fuller in late 1980 -- with "thirty percent of that indebtedness [coming] from underwriting ever-longer-term mortgages.
"In 1934 the U.S.A. underwrote a completely obsolete building industry while [Dwight] Eisenhower allowed the banking world to make an incredible amount of money in interest rates and services in support of the building and real estate game".
Fuller continues on the subject of real estate financing, writing, that the "building industry -- if it were any good -- would pay the U.S.A. back handsomely."
Twenty-five years after the publication of R. Buckminster Fuller's masterwork, the best in a long series of wonderfully insightful and well-reasoned books about how new technologies have been transforming humanity and human life in the modern world, the United States of America is facing a major political and social crisis ( once again ). The political crisis is driven by the controversy over the proposed acquisition of the royally chartered Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company by Dubai Ports World, owned and controlled by the United Arab Emirates. The social crisis is being driven by the near-absolute failure of government at all levels to respond efficiently and sensibly to the enormous problems caused by, and damage inflicted by, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The incredible destruction of large parts of the City of New Orleans and of lesser towns like Pass Christian on the Mississippi state line, have been highlighted in recent days because the major news agencies revisited the City for the annual celebration of "Fat Tuesday" or Mardi Gras.
Thousands of housing units and other structures in New Orleans are still uninhabitable because they were swamped with six, seven, even nine foot of water after the levees were breached. Thousands of people in Pass Christian are living in canvas tents because, and this was reported by both ABC News and CNN, "the insurance industry" is delaying payment for damaged or wrecked houses there, arguing that uninsured flood damage, and not insured wind damage, was the primary cause of so much destruction. What hasn't been reported on, at least not by these mainstream news media outlets, is the fact that the old houses and apartment buildings were the product of the building technologies of the 19th Century, even if they were constructed in the 1920s and '30s and '40s.
The only positive aspect of the foot-dragging going on in parts of Mississippi and Louisiana, as the insurance companies try to squeeze themselves out of paying claims from the Katrina and Rita events, is that "new" housing built to the same plans and standards as the old housing -- which was wrecked -- has not yet begun. For most of the last twenty-one years of his incredible life, Buckminster Fuller lectured on the subject of modernizing building practices in literally hundreds of appearances around the world and around the United States. And he was a man who, having discovered the principles of the geodesic dome, knew a little something about how to build storm-resistant housing.
With the repeal of the prohibitions on mixing insurance with banking and loan origination, the financial titans of the United States and Great Britain rushed into mergers which have produced enormous money-industry conglomerates. Corporate banking operations acquired insurance companies and corporate insurance operations got themselves into banking and specifically into mortgage origination. Given that writing mortgages is lucrative and paying claims against insurance policies is not lucrative, there is little doubt that these conglomerates will delay paying off on storm-damage claims for as long as is humanly, i.e., "legally piggily," possible.
The issue of having a company owned by a foreign government operate the port of New Orleans, among others, is a very real one given the four and 1/2 years of bombast from the Bush Administration about "the War on Terror." The bogeyman Osama bin Laden is a Sunni Arab. He, like others in the vast family of the late Mohammed bin Laden, had many ties to the sheikhs who are the true leaders in the UAE and Dubai.
However legitimate those questions are and will continue to be, the truth according to Buckminster Fuller is even more perplexing. In 1981 he wrote:
"[What] we now call lawyer capitalism ... deliberately took the world's private enterprise corporations out of the fundamental jurisdiction of America. They have kept their U.S.A. operations going in a seemingly normal way, so people in U.S. America haven't realized that these companies are officially situated elsewhere despite the incredible amplification of those great corporations' annual profits, whose annual totals payable to these corporations' stockholders are of the same magnitude as the annual increase in the U.S.A.'s joint internal and external debt increases.
"America is utterly bankrupt externally in terms of balance of trade due to its own oil companies now operating as Arabian business."
"Sum-totally, what has been taken from the people of the U.S.A. runs into many trillions of dollars. In the quarter of a century since Eisenhower America has become completely bankrupt, with its world leadership, its financial credit, and its reputation for courage, vision, and human leadership gone.
"None of this was the American people's doing."
The actual and accounted "national debt" has escalated from right at $ 1 Trillion in 1981 to $ 7.5 Trillion in 2005, with no end in sight. Using Fuller's ratio as a basis for calculation, the actual drain on the peoples' earnings -- and not counting that debt which is based on the swindles conducted by the Ekkers of GAIA -- has multiplied from the figure of $ 6 Trillion to well over $ 45 Trillion. It is clear from the figures being pushed around concerning the Dubai Ports World proposal to buy Peninsular & Orient that a substantial segment of that drained-off earnings has been lodged in the Arab emirates of the Gulf.
The fact that the Bush Administration, as evidenced by the statements made publically by President George W. Bush, has declared its intentions to see this deal consummated is colored by the reality of who owns shares in the P & O conglomerate. The money being paid by the Arab sheikhs for the assets and machinery and ships of P & O will be paid to British owners for the most part. So in essence, the decades of the U.S. purchasing oil and petroleum products from these Gulf emirs and their front companies has resulted in the creation of a slush fund for them to go shopping around the world.
They are, by their lights, spending this money wisely. Buying port operations and shipping and gaining access to commercial centers in China, Malaysia, India and the United States speaks to their concern that their oil will eventually dwindle and then run out completely. They are plotting the long-term survival of their own regimes, and like all sensible back-room negotiators they are looking at where THE REAL STREAMS of revenue flow.
Once again, it is most urgent to note that Buckminster Fuller said, 25 years ago, that at least $ 100 billion of the foreign aid paid out around the world in the decades previous to his publication of Critical Path was used to pay "for the overseas establishment of the great corporations."
The true rulers of the planet at the beginning of the new century are, therefore, these multi-national corporations. Even the giant Corporation called THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA does not possess a sum total of assets which equals the economic assets of these already-been-outsourced and formerly domestically situated corporations. No wonder, then, that the CEOs and banking industry leaders of the U.S.A. and Great Britain are all applauding the proposed sale of P & O to the Dubai Ports World group. It's just another 'yard sale,' in their view, and "we the people" of this country are the rubes and suckers who tend this yard for them day by day.
We work, they skim, we work harder, they skim more.
That's the fundamental equation at work in the question of the sale of Peninsular & Orient to the Dubai Ports World group.
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