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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (72809)	7/10/2006 11:19:59 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 362386

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth By R. Buckminster Fuller From Chapt. 6. The whole book is online. Typical of the subsidiary problems within the whole human survival problem, whose ramifications now go beyond the prerogatives of planners and must be solved, is the problem of pollution in general-pollution not only of our air and water but also of the information stored in our brains. We will soon have to rename our planet "Poluto." In respect to our planet’s life sustaining atmosphere we find that, yes, we do have technically feasible ways of precipitating the fumes, and after this we say, "But it costs too much." There are also ways of desalinating sea water, and we say, "But it costs too much." This too narrow treatment of the problem never faces the inexorably-evolving and solution-insistent problem of what it will cost when we don’t have the air and water with which to survive. It takes months to starve to death, weeks to thirst to death, but only minutes to suffocate. We cannot survive without water for the length of time it takes to produce and install desalinization equipment adequate to supply, for instance, all of New York City. A sustained, and often threatened, water shortage in New York City could mean death for millions of humans. Each time the threat passes the old statement "it costs too much" again blocks realization of the desalinization capability. Anybody who has been in Washington (and approximately everyone else everywhere today) is familiar with governmental budgeting and with the modes of developing public recognition of problems and of bringing about official determination to do something about solutions. In the end, the problems are rarely solved, not because we don’t know how but because it is discovered either that it is said by those in authority that "it costs too much" or that when we identify the fundamental factors of the environmental problems‹and laws are enacted to cope incisively with those factors that there are no funds presently known to be available with which to implement the law. There comes a money bill a year later for implementation and with it the political criteria of assessing wealth by which the previous year’s bill would now seemingly "cost too much." So compromises follow compromises. Frequently, nothing but political promises or under-budgeted solutions result. The original legislation partially stills the demands. The pressures on the politicians are lowered, and the lack of implementation is expeditiously shrugged off because of seemingly more pressing, seemingly higher priority, new demands for the money. The most pressing of those demands is for war, for which the politicians suddenly accredit weaponry acquisitions and military tasks costing many times their previously asserted concepts of what we can afford. Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have-nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots." futurehi.net