The Institutional Money Hole and Special Interests

When it comes to institutional spending, there is something of a Paradox in action. The ordinary thinking that is that if we have a huge societal problem, then we can spend money and invest in resources to fix the problem. But what actually happens is the problem becomes institutionalized. We pay because we have a problem, and the money is used to address the problem in any number of ways, but somehow the problem never gets fixed. The money is being spent to effectively perpetuate the problem. You see, if the problem were ever to be fixed, then the money would go away and everyone involved would lose their jobs.

Apparently nice people can do crazy things to protect their incomes. There was an AIDS Conference some years ago and a young researcher stood up to address the Conference, and when it became apparent that he was about to address the issue of a higher AIDS rate among those practicing anal intercourse, he was booed off the stage, and his paper was not allowed to be read into the minutes. You see, at the time the AIDS Scientific Community wanted more funding, and it was thought they could get more funding if they stressed the “fact” that AIDS was a heterosexual mainstream disease too, and they were will to hide any inconvenient evidence to the contrary, all while believing they were doing the right thing. Oh, and this is what concerns me of the chronic and widespread atheism in the Scientific Community, that once they have figured out that there is no rational basic to believe in God, then the very next step is to determine that there is likewise no rational basis for morality, virtue, truth or honor, and that they might rationalize any course of action for whatever reasons appeal to them, money not being the least of such things.

So back to the idea of Money being used to perpetuate the problems it is supposed to be fixing. Examples are easy to come up with. The United States funding Israel. It has turned the Israeli Economy into a permanent war economy. Their Society would collapse if they ever made peace with their neighbors, and so we will never have peace in the middle east, because we pay so much to have a perpetual war. Now the U.S. is about to do the same with Afghanistan, proposing to give the Kabal Regime 2 billion dollars every year that they don’t come to peace with the Talaban. Oh, and U.S. is also giving Columbia billions of dollars a year to close down the Drug Cartels. Guess how likely that is to ever happen. Now the U.S. is probably thinking of giving Mexico money to stop all the drug cartel related killings in their country. That ought to make everything better, but effectively it will be paying them to continue on with the slaughters, as long as the Yankee Dollars keep flowing in.

Funding the Cure for diseases is the saddest of all examples. Research Laboratories and Pharmaceutical Companies make too much money off of disease to ever cure anything. I suppose many of the worst diseases have already been cured a dozen times over, but the research is proprietary and it is hid out of sight, or outright burned to keep it from publication. No Million Dollar Nobel Prize can compete with diseases that bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in pharmaceutical and treatment profits. They will release results about drugs and treatments that only ameliorating symptoms, that is about keeping patients alive longer so they can buy more drugs. This is why everything in the Medical sphere needs to be made non-profit. We shouldn’t be setting prices on these matters of Life and Death.

What about energy. We can pour all sorts of money into alternative forms of energy, but the Trillion Dollar Oil Economy will find ways of sabotaging it all. I remember back in the late eighties or early nineties, that a TV news show, Prime Time Live, had advertised a story for the next Thursday night about a new invention. An amateur researcher, a president of a semi-large manufacturing company, had found that when he added a small electrical current to jars of water of a certain size filled with water and metal plated glass beads of a certain size and composition, then the water would break into a rolling boil. The steam energy from the boiling water could be sent through a dynamo and create hundreds of times more energy than the small current it had taken to precipitate the reaction. It was free energy, the heart of a perpetual motion machine. The Researcher had packaged his Experiment and sent five full sets to the best Universities in America in order to verify his findings. The advertisements for the show ran for a day, and then they were pulled, and it was like nothing had ever happened. You can say this for America, no one even knew there had been a scandal. Maybe America’s concern for Truth and Freedom in the rest of the World is only a concern for appearances, and that when Regimes clamp down, they should do it discretely so that nobody ever finds out, like they do in America.

Well, we can understand why America might have taken extreme measures to destroy the Perpetual Motion Free Energy Machine. The U. S. Dollar effectively rests on the value of Oil. It is not based on gold, and not on silver. Basically the dollar has a strong value because the OPEC Countries prefer that Oil be paid for with dollars, so any country buying Oil on the International Market needs to go into the Currency Exchange business first, and trade up the price of the Dollar. If Oil were to lose its value, so would the dollar and the American Economy would collapse. It also bares consideration that the same thing would happen if Saudi Arabia ever decided to open their trades to any international currency and not just the Dollar. We can only guess how much leverage this gives to Saudi Arabia regarding American foreign policies.

Anyway, so there was an invention that could have been used to stop the onset of Global Climate Change 20 years ago, and it was shelved because it would have eliminated Oil, the primary villain of Climate Change, all to protect the shaky moorings of our capitalistic based economy, which will collapse anyway, if not for one reason, then for another. The consequences of Climate Change and growing levels of Commodities Scarcity as Growth Capitalism goes further into saturation simply will not permit business as usual, and new Super-Computers can easily model and predict the End of Civilization, give or take five or ten years one way or the other.

Well, to tie this essay up, we will eventually have to address our problems, and address them with money expenditures, but we need to be careful how we do this. Money creates Special Interests which take on Political Lives of their own. Once created they refuse to die. We need to guarantee that All projects are explicitly temporary, and goal driven. We need to pay to fix our problems, and not pay to have them institutionalized.