**Note: We are republishing each of the 22 challenges from Catherine’s fiscal cliff article – one a week. Helps to digest them bit by bit!**
By Catherine Austin Fitts
The budget and the federal regulatory structure operate in accordance with a legacy industrial-based economic paradigm that is increasingly outmoded in the face of technological advances and globalization. Despite these trends, significant technologies continue to be suppressed.
The world is changing. Washington is often lobbied by a wide group of constituencies that want government to protect them from the risks and expense of that change. So, for example, as video on the Internet shifts market share away from Hollywood, the entertainment industry lobbies for greater control of the Internet.
This often puts Washington on the wrong side of numerous highly sensitive technology questions – involving both mistakes in adaptation or suppression. For example, Washington is leading the charge in the U.S. and globally to adopt GMO technology – corrupting the global seed supply, destroying agricultural diversity and paving the way for both the industrialization and control of the global food supply. My guess is that the suppression of breakthrough energy technologies cannot last. As we move away from fossil fuel for which the U.S. dollar is the exchange currency, the pressure is on to backstop the U.S. dollar with an asset other than oil – thus the push for GMO’s.
This means that the general economy is paying for the U.S. governmental mechanism to engineer control for a private syndicate with the compromising of the fundamental nature of life.
Globalization has been engineered through international agreements that are then used to supersede national laws and national sovereignty. The result has been global devaluation of the value of labor relative to capital that has centralized wealth in a manner that has shrunk total wealth. One of the most persuasive descriptions of this process was provided by Sir James Goldsmith in 1994, when he came to the United States to lobby Congress against the adaptation of the Uraguay Round of GATT.
Goldsmith Interview – International Agreements? Sir James Goldsmith’s 1994 Globalization Warning
Integration of new technology is expected to significantly increase middle class unemployment over the new decade. As I write this, the latest Kiplinger Letter, is warning of the danger of a significant squeeze on middle class incomes as a result of robotics and other automation trends. Expect this to put additional stress on the federal budget without a parallel effort to use technology to lower expenses and increase the productivity and self sufficiency of individual households and small businesses.
