Chapter 26
Emergence through Emergency
2Despite materialist-chisellers’ continual manipulations, life has been intuitively and unconsciously evolving its own emancipation along the route of chance-happenings. The chisellers’ moments of highest apparent gain have always, and inevitably, been fraught with germs of another emergence stage through unforeseen emergency. These emergencies, with all their attendant travail, have been the ‘‘outs’’ for man. Paradoxically, potentially benefited man (the public) has usually been the most recalcitrant protester.
3 Let us recall and survey the workings of the EMERGENCY in New York just before the ‘‘New Deal’’ administration ‘‘came in’’ and declared a bank moratorium—just as Fincap was about to go down for the third and last time.
4 During Hoover’s regime it had become evident to Fincap and his coterie of political servants in government that if the primary credit depository of the people—the insurance companies and savings banks—were to ‘‘go under’’ due to having been glutted by ‘‘practically’’ worthless ‘‘legal-for-trust-fund’’ mortgages, panic—REAL PANIC—would occur to a degree irresistibly precipitating SOCIAL REVOLUTION. Such a climax would not only have sacrificed Fincap’s ability to sell the juicy, accumulated, unharvested three years’ debt crop, but also Fincap’s every ‘‘legal,’’ constitution-interpretative monopoly and franchise, and the sequence chain of property ‘‘deeds’’ would have ‘‘gone by the board.’’ Fincap would never again have been able to capture government control through politics because, with his unearned income shut off, he would have had no ‘‘wherewithal’’ with which to fee the politician whose job-machine would likewise be busted due to popularly accredited survival and jobs for all. In short, this would have been the end of Fincap whose original advantage was gained from horseback. Fincap’s preoccupation ‘‘with the horses’’—‘‘sport of kings’’—is religiously well founded.
5 To avoid utter panic and consequent revolution, the Fincap-tuned legislature of the Hoover administration ‘‘set up’’ what it called the RECONSTRUCTION FINANCE CORPORATION—a most suitable name, though the second word should be first. This new entity was supplied with an arbitrarily inaugurated capital of approximately 3 billion dollars, later extended to 6 billion. This advance of people’s wealth to save Fincap was actually drawn from the people’s credit of their own ability behavior. This ‘‘reconstruction’’ money was employed as a thawing fund, that is, to pay accrued interest, 12%, of debtors to the insurance and savings institutions so that it put 50 million into good standing again and allowed of refinancing generally without public awareness of the jeopardy of their depositories.
6 Yet, five years later, when a meager 4 billion was advanced by the government to protect itself (the people) against starvation in the midst of plenty, Fincap’s still subservient press protested with a sanctimonious front page ‘‘cross head screeching’’ that was both awful and ludicrous. It was ludicrous in the light of the 1937 stock market ‘‘bust’’ paradoxically resulting from the same ‘‘New Deal’’ administration’s announcement that it was going to discontinue underwriting survival and jobs, intending to force this function back through the old route of the states to the community ‘‘chest,’’ that over-beaten, small-town-Tarzan’s-bosom; and to the February 1938--20th page quarter column item that Congress had, by enactment, written off as ‘‘uncollectable’’ 2/2 billions of R. F. C. loans to banks, railroads, municipalities, et cetera.
7 The ‘29--‘31 panic averted, Fincap proceeded to shake down the numerical size of his potential bankruptcy by passing the bankruptcy along to individuals of the proletariat. This was done by foreclosing small mortgages on farms, homes and chattels on which interest was overdue. By ‘‘cracking down’’ on America’s ‘‘home owners’’ and farmers during the last two years of the Hoover administration, Fin- cap accomplished an immediate reduction of 21 billions of potential ‘‘loss.’’ Inasmuch as the 21 billions represented only a first mortgage equity figure, which was less than 50% of the appraised value of the property foreclosed upon, the home, farm and life-work investment loss to the small people was actually much nearer 50 billions—an amount twice that of the national debt of the time, and a 25 billion capital gain on paper for Fincap which he could resell to pay back the R. E C.
8 Now, when the workers and people of a nation are taken for a buggy ride of 50 billion dollars simply because they made the mistake of accrediting Fincap’s tenets of ‘‘good citizenship,’’ they may be expected eventually, if not soon, to recapture that 50 billions, realizing that it was an accounting loss through legal fabrication enforcement and not a real all-people’s loss, inasmuch as the houses and lands are still in existence. Moreover, they are not likely ever to forget the irreparable life loss and bitter unhappiness thrust upon them by Fincap.
9 An accounting system based on ‘‘debt’’ is so fallacial that it cannot take cognizance of true wealth, individual or popular, despite the common inclusion of the word debt in commonwealth matters. For instance, until an item of production has been utilized as collateral in one way or another, and, therefore, is set up in the debt structure it has no value. If a farmer on an island in Maine cuts down trees, laboriously planes them by hand and builds them into a house, he has actually converted energy into a work-and-use form product, conferring environmental control. A banker comes to the island and says, ‘‘There isn’t any house there because it is not on the books.’’ Nevertheless, the islander did cut down the trees, built the house and create wealth without borrowing from the debt system.
10 Such houses constructed on islands not only in Maine but throughout all lands, houses in which people live for generations and which are commonwealth in fact, would be said, in the fiscal accounting system extant between our government and the banking system, to have no value because no fixed credit was extended to the farmer to facilitate his fabrication of the dwelling. Similarly, the small roads that the Maine farmer-fisherman may have developed on his island are not officially accounted. The product is not appraised as an item of credit in the national economy, all of which is as preposterous as would be the statement by the president of the A.B.A. to a visiting Englishman sailing up N. Y. Bay that he and the ‘‘boys’’ loaned the money to build the New York City looming ahead, ‘‘boys’’ whose granddads were tailors and farmers and ministers. No, wealth does not come from money or from money manipulation.
11 The factor that Fincap brutally overlooks is that LIFE does account everything and must always balance. The electric polarity is consistently insistent. People will be glad not only to accredit themselves with an ever-increasing national ‘‘debt’’ limit of multi-billions but, in due course, will cut out the word ‘‘debt’’ altogether. They will suddenly AWAKE, no longer debt-bedamned, but DEBT-BEDAMNING (and coincidentally hydraulically damming sun-lifted water) to the realization that they possess in actuality though non-capitally accredited (in terms of an articulated, permanently-harnessed environment, in power-station harnessed water falls, and in roadways, production mechanisms, et cetera) a plant and structure in America for mutual interservice representing somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 billion current U. S. wage dollars. They may draw at will on this established-in-advance-credit without incurring debt, and, moreover, with adequate surplus to export to people elsewhere about the world who have scarcity of goods. ALL is theirs…‘‘now, as in the beginning and forever shall be.’’
12 Reverting to Fincap’s handling of the aversion of panic, his actions revealed that he was embarrassed, also, by other regulatory matters of his own early subversive contrivance. Suddenly he found the governmental accounting set up and its letter-following servants (whom he had thitherto encouraged) to be very much ‘‘in the way.’’
13 The government servants said (carrying out the letter of Fincap’s game), ‘‘In the name of the city, state and federal governments, we will have to foreclose the mortgages on certain giant buildings because the insurance companies and other holders of first mortgages, receiving no revenue from these buildings, are not paying the taxes due thereon, and taxes represent an a priori lien.’’
14 The civil servants, whether they liked it or not, were being forced to precipitate another pdnic angle. If the insurance companies had to foreclose their first mortgages, only themselves to be foreclosed upon for taxes owing the government, further cause for panic would inevitably be incited.
15 This was true not only figuratively but dramatically. People are much more impressed by the fate of one Empire State Building, simply due to its sensorial bigness appeal to their imagination, than by the fate of one million homes. Those responsible for affairs behind the scenes realized that the dramatic failure of the Empire State, if recognized, would be symbolic of ‘‘system’’-failure to such an extent as possibly to stir the people to that ever-threatening awful revolt. So they spent enormous sums nightly lighting the eighty floors of the Empire State Building to make it SEEM occupied during the hours that rented buildings are illuminated, an obvious hoax to all who witnessed it knowingly night after night, but probably effective in relation to transient visitors who came, saw and returned to the ‘‘sticks’’ with the impression that the Empire State Building--Symbol of Financial Glory—was ablaze with light and activity.
16 More realistically, however, to avoid this dramatic detonator to panic, the city, which, through tax failure, was unable to pay its interest to the insurance companies on its ‘‘legal-for-trust-fund’’ indebtedness, agreed tacitly not to foreclose upon the insurance companies on such buildings as the Empire State which had reverted to the Metropolitan Life in non-publicized but potential fact, provided the city’s indebtedness to the state and federal government were also ‘‘given a ride’’ for the nonce. A hands-off agreement on a foreclosure merry-go-round was evolved, necessitating the New Deal’s declaration of a general mortgage moratorium, underwritten by vast federal credit which, never forget, is the people’s own credit. Thus the people, by ‘‘financial prerogative’’ itself, assumed potentiality of an at any time foreclosure position on all the ‘‘goods and chattels’’ of Fincap’s debt structure football game. The accumulated recapture cost of this they will never be able to extract from the obsoleted structures of the by-Ford-evolution emasculated warehouse era.
17 Summarizing the primary results of the 1929--1932 emergence through emergency, we find:
18 The city went ‘‘into hock’’ to the central government in order to fund the municipal bond interest payments to insurance companies and savings banks, unpaid due to the depletion of taxes in the industrially evacuated city.
19 The insurance companies and savings banks were also factually, though not officially, ‘‘in hock’’ to the government through this indirect method of salvage.
20 The government through tax liens (non-foreclosing only to avoid panic) became the eventual proprietor of tremendous empty city skyscrapers.
21 The government was forced, due to the inadequacy of ‘‘charity,’’ to become responsible for the feeding, housing and clothing of unemployed multitudes in addition to their policing, sanitation, hospitalization, penalization, and made-work occupation.
22 While there are eventualities of efficient integration of the ‘‘resultants’’ above listed, they have not yet happened and so discussion will be postponed until a later chapter (Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe) dealing with trend extensions, to follow the chronological recitation of economic factors emergent in the twenty year post-War evolution. So multitudinous and overlapping have these events been that unless ‘‘picked’’ out carefully they are missed in the welter of murder, rape, prize fight, Charley MacCarthy, et cetera, gas fumes of paper and radio broadcast.
23 Focusing once more upon the Empire State Building as a clue to the social gains by inadvertence and evolution’s certified accountancy we find that the Empire State’s first seven years’ rental averaged under 20% of full occupancy and ‘‘authoritative’’ claims are made today of 50% occupancy, but investigation would reveal that many of this 50% tenancy are ‘‘fill-ins’’ such as Al Smith’s ‘‘Liberty League,’’ and others.
24 Although a complete failure as a money-maker through rent, the Empire State Building is, nevertheless, an indirect social instrument. Its uppermost peak has become America’s central television research laboratory due to the broad horizon available at that height. The short waves with which the television experiment are being conducted cannot be land focused beyond the sight-horizon. The building that was erected and preserved as a mighty gesture by the forces of exploitation to avert a panic, symbolically and paradoxically has become the laboratory of one of the most socially EMANCIPATING of all the infantile scientific industries—TELEVISION.
25 Television as a world-encompassing, non-opinion contaminated news-broadcasting agency, impossible to prohibit from the air, carrying such records as the movie-photographed ‘‘sinking of the Panay’’ will smash dictatorships as the hand of man smashes the mosquito. The overtone motifs of the universal social symphony, the exquisite notes of the ‘‘random element,’’ are here detectable once more. Here is the ‘‘holy ghost,’’ indeed.