GLASS-STEAGALL UNDERSTOOD: The Space in Which To Live (Part I) | WPN World People News

The recent effort for a virtual renaissance for Glass-Steagall, has now surged, somewhat abruptly, into a narrow, but marginally regained, leading role for those in both the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. who are now privileged to have become manifestly sensible of the present policy requirements for the survival of civilization. Rather than continuing to gamble on the outcome of civilization under what have been recent policies, mankind must begin to respond to the fact that that galaxy, which our Solar system inhabits, is currently entering a long wave of change, a change in effects to which leading currents in mankind must now prepare themselves to respond.

Certain so-called traditions must now be abandoned, as having shown themselves to have become worse than useless in the present circumstances; but, there are, in addition, also contrary traditions too often underestimated, which must be reawakened, and quickened instead.

Take, for example: "fire." After all, the voluntary trend of increase, in modes of cultural progress and the power of mankind to exist, have always depended upon what is termed in modern language, "increased energy-flux density." The fireside has always marked the essential difference of man from beast. It is the species which succumbs to a declining, or even merely a fixed energy-flux density in the mode of its existence, which has been the likeness of the doomed "dinosaurs" of every successive age of the biology of life.

In the course of what is, for mankind, the long history of life as such on this planet, we must now examine the prospect for our galaxy, a galaxy which is the location of crucial factors in the existence of our Solar system, and of life on Earth itself. Nonetheless, the distinction of the evolutionary progress of living processes for mankind, has been more or less steadily upward in the long term, from lower to higher qualities expressed by our own living species. Such has been the effect of an adducible law of nature as known to us presently, a notion which expresses a lawful impulse which finds its outstanding present expression in the emergence of that special trait of noëtic impulses which seems, this far, to be unique to our human species. The essential distinction is, that mankind is the only species presently known to us, which is capable of voluntary evolutionary progress in its embedded species-characteristics.

Only humanity expresses truly voluntary creativity.

The world of late, most notably the trans-Atlantic region generally, has been plunging into a presently accelerating trend of (de facto) willful decline within the domain of the human species' habitation. This recently accelerating trend has been underway since the launching of the great folly of a post-President John F. Kennedy, virtual decade's length of a long, wasting U.S. warfare in Indo-China. Despite some relatively transient exceptions, trans-Atlantic civilization has been in a broad, general trend of physical-economic decline, since the approximate coincidence of the essentially successive assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.

Admittedly, that pattern to which I have just made reference, has not quite fit a simple trend-line as matters have appeared to many over the indicated span since the beginning of that interval. The changes have occurred, much less by the will of a passing term of apparent leadership, than as long-term trends over the course of successive generations, as since the 1890 ouster of Germany's Minister Otto v. Bismarck. The trends responsible for this effect have not been simply episodic; they have been essentially and persistently systemic in direction, and in design, over, for example, the course of the 1964-2012 interval, or, even, in my own personal awareness of this continuing long process, since the regrettable accession of the wretched U.S. President Harry S Truman.

Among the most convenient of what might be attributed to be causal features of such a long-term culturally-determined trend-line, there are, and have been the indications of a relatively long-term setting in the direction in cultural trends. Similar, has been the trend-line set into motion in trans-Atlantic policy-shaping of governments and populations over spans of several recent generations. The most recently presented initiative of certain notable figures of the United Kingdom, typifies the kind of "ripened cultural" harvest of change in the initiatives on whose effect the presently needed, more or less profound cultural and technological changes in policies depend. It is this factor, upon which the success of such urgently needed, epochal changes in direction now depends.

What has changed, most clearly and simply, is that the entirety of the trans-Atlantic system, had entered a descent into a kind of an inflationary "break-down crisis" which had been set into motion by the combination of the Kennedy assassination and the fraudulent treatment of the event, through attempted concealment of the essential facts of that case. We have come to a point of global crisis, at which there is no remaining option for tolerating the continuation of this presently continuing crisis, a crisis actually in progress over more than a century of hitherto prevalent parameters of change, since 1890.

On such occasions, the option of urgently needed, upward change, when it occurs, were to be passed along, immediately, to those leading circles which are qualified to rise above the currently tired notions of tradition which have reigned over the term of even a set of successive generations; we must now escape the shackles of those recent decades of established trends of practice. As in the instance of the outcome of Shakespeare's Richard III, only the rarer circles of leadership which possess "deep reserves of historical insight," as Shakespeare did, insight beyond those of ordinary political leadership, are capable of instigating those urgently needed, truly successful cultural revolutions within and among nations, and doing so under the kinds of stressful conditions which confront the trans-Atlantic world, in particular, at this time.

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I. The Fires of Economic Recovery
The essential lesson of economics for this moment, is one we should learn from the history of known living species over the span from the earliest known varieties of life on Earth, up into our modern biological times. When that span is presented against the specific backdrop of several millions years of human cultures on Earth, we may name the case as being the history of the evolution of mankind's progress through the characteristic expression of advances in "the use of fire." Among the considerations so posed, we have the special case of the increase of the energy-flux density in modes of warfare, on the one side, and the recent generations' poorer progress of the per-capita increase in the rate of man's effective capture of "energy-flux density," on the other.

This is to be understood as a principled outlook overlooking both a long past, and the hope of rescue, to be provided by a prospective, immediate future alternative. Consider the following, crucial perspective.

War: The Bismarck Complex
The ouster of Germany's Chancellor Bismarck in 1890, unleashed the intended state of general warfare which Bismarck's diplomacy had impeded up to that point in the process. The result of Bismarck's ouster has been, not a particular sequence of distinct wars, but a virtually pulsating continuation of a state of general, implicitly global warfare, warfare sometimes subsiding, but still oncoming, if briefly waning, coming upon us in wave-like expressions of fluctuating phases and tempos over the entirety of the period from the ouster of Bismarck to the present date. The ironical juxtaposition of the roles of the increase of "energy-flux-density" in intertwined and contrasted warfare and production is to be considered from that vantage-point.

I have much to say on this important matter at an appropriate, later point in this present report.

Meanwhile, this ironical juxtaposition of physical economy versus warfare, then, had brought us to a breaking-point expressed in the 1944 Normandy landing and its kaleidoscopic-like, immediate consequences. The irony of the consequences of that special moment in history, was, that, despite the consequently accelerating rush toward thermonuclear arsenals and their impedimenta, the net, long-term cultural trend in world economic affairs centered upon the trans-Atlantic sector, has been chiefly downward, economically and morally, despite the instances of technical progress occurring within the context of the general economic decline. Typically, the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, and the related matter of the actual launching of the virtual decade of wasting warfare in Indo-China, brought to an end the thrust toward net physical-economic progress within the reach of the trans-Atlantic sector of the planet.

Thus, the ruling parameters of deliberate and correlated change in policies of social-economic progress, have defined the downward-leading edge of the trans-Atlantic world's trends, since the notable assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers. Mid-1968 has been the crucial, datable, estimated turning-point in the social process for the trans-Atlantic world. Since that time, episodic changes aside, the trans-Atlantic section of the world as a whole has never turned back into a sustained, truly upward direction up to the present time.

This process has brought us, now, to the point of "critical mass," as follows.

My Role in These Matters
This locates the point at which my significant present, personal role in these developments emerged: exactly during the onset of Autumn 1977. I had not been unique in my own commitment to promote the military conception of strategic defense; but, as a participant in the formation of the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), I had, as if instinctively, committed myself in that direction. It became a matter of a personally independent initiative, such that I found myself, over a few following years, caught up, more and more, by what was to become known as a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

From the start of that process, I had seized upon strategic defense with a certain lusty commitment. For reason of the cumulative science-driven commitment in which I participated, I came to recognize and emphasize the notion of the superiority of the strategic defense over the alternative. As a result of my advocacy to that effect, I chanced, in the setting of the process leading into the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, to come into a leading position in the launching of an international orientation toward strategic defense. My personal role in approaching Soviet representatives (with my government's clear knowledge), had, up to a point, engaged a shared U.S.A.-Soviet exploration of strategic defense, a shared interest which had come near to actual adoption during the period of the still oncoming election and installation of President Reagan. Later Soviet officials had developed a contrary position, which led into the largely self-induced disintegration of the Soviet Union over the course of the decade of the 1980s.

Unfortunately, the prospect for strategic defense was soon wrecked, as much by U.S.A. and western European circles, as by a ruinous change in the leadership of the already worried Soviet economy itself. The hope of the inherently principled advantage of the defense, was thereupon postponed, until a recent rebirth now centered in the intersecting strategic-defense policies of both the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the evolution expressed in the presently current negotiations with Russia's military institutions.

source: Executive Intelligence Review.