NWV News - SmartGrid: Technology For "Big Brother"

SMART GRID: TECHNOLOGY FOR “BIG BROTHER”

By Sarah Foster
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
September 14, 2011
© 2011 NewsWithViews.com

It’s not been two years since utility companies rolled out Smart
Grid, the massive project to restructure the nation’s electrical system, which includes replacing existing old analogue meters on homes and businesses with ones that transmit information by radio frequency. “Smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using two-way digital technology to control appliances at consumers’ homes to save energy, reduce costs, and increase reliability and transparency.”

Old Analogue Meter

But despite glowing promises of energy savings and lower rates, the project from the outset has faced opposition from a public that does not want a technology that can “control appliances” from a point outside the home, and is increasingly alarmed by the threat the meters pose to health and privacy. And that opposition is growing.

“There is a major war being waged in this country, although you'd never know it by the silence from the old, disgraced media (ABC, CBS, NBC) and all the cable ‘news’ networks,” writes columnist Devvy Kidd in a recent report for NewsWithViews. “This new assault on our bodies and privacy is over another relatively new piece of technology that allegedly will save energy … When I say millions of Americans are up in arms over this, I am not exaggerating.”

Those millions of Americans come from all points on the political spectrum – conservative, libertarian, liberal, independent. Democrats and Republicans, tea partiers and progressives find themselves united against the local utility company and, ultimately, the U.S. Department of Energy, the lead agency for the project.

But apart from health and privacy issues, every taxpayer has reason for concern. Smart Grid doesn’t come cheap. Estimates vary as to cost and range from $100 Billion to $2.2 Trillion. In February 2010, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) announced Smart Grid will cost $165 billion over the next 20 years.

“Governments, industry bodies, and electric utilities around the world are coming together with newfound urgency – spurred in some regions by copious amounts of economic stimulus funds – to stimulate the development of the Smart Grid,” reports Pike Research, a consulting firm specializing in analysis of “clean technology” markets.

All this, for something for which there is no consumer demand, but is driven by government fiat. Why this “newfound urgency”? What’s the hurry? Particularly at a time when economies around the world are in serious trouble.

Patrick Wood, co-founder of The August Institute and editor/publisher of The August Forecast and Review, may have discovered the answer; and he presented his findings this June at the California Eagle Forum in Sacramento. It was the group’s Tenth Annual State Conference, and the organizers chose for a theme: “Agenda 21 and Its Many Tentacles” – of which Smart Grid can certainly be regarded as one.

As described by Wikipedia: “Agenda 21 is the action plan of the United Nations related to sustainable development, and was an outcome of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. It is a comprehensive blueprint of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the UN, governments, and major groups in every area in which humans directly affect the environment.”

Wood titled his talk: How Agenda 21 Seeks to Implement Big Brother’s Technocracy Controls through Smart Meters, Smart Grids, and Smart Growth – which pretty well sums up his conclusions.

“Smart Grid enables control over energy (water and natural gas, too!), distribution and consumption, on a local, national and global basis,” Wood states on his webpage.

With its ability to continuously monitor electrical usage and control electrical devices in people’s homes, “Smart Grid is not just a new system for delivering electricity more efficiently; it’s the enablement of Technocracy,” he told his audience; and later: “It’s a subset of Technocracy.”

Technocracy?

Most participants at the conference were no doubt familiar with Smart Grid, particularly since California Eagle Forum President Orlean Koele has written and published a book detailing its many threats to health and privacy. But many of these same attendees appeared never to have heard of Technocracy. Which isn’t surprising: it was a movement that flourished during the early 1930s, only to disappear suddenly down the memory hole. Wood has written several articles on the subject -- including one in NWV – but watching images and power points projected onto a screen made his remarks particularly chilling, even for those who had read his reports.

It is Wood’s contention that although Technocracy as a movement died decades ago, the philosophy lived on behind the scenes at Columbia University where it had been founded, and today is being positioned as the replacement system for capitalism.

This would explain the sudden fervor to install a costly project like Smart Grid worldwide, and Wood mustered compelling information to bolster his arguments.

“They cannot make Technocracy happen without Smart Grid in place,” Wood later told NWV. “They have to have it.”

Worse than Communism

Here are a few of Wood’s remarks on Technocracy from his Eagle Forum address:

“Technocracy, if implemented, would create totalitarian control, but it is NOT socialism, communism or fascism. It looks like it but it’s not. Our ladder is leaning up against the wrong tree on this. It’s totalitarianism and it is much, much worse.”

“It seeks to replace the price-based economic system with an energy-based system – think energy currency, think energy credits, think pricing everything in terms of the energy it takes to produce it, rather than the free-enterprise market system we have right now in currency,”

“Technocracy makes no provision for private property, there’s no mechanism for accumulating wealth. Everything is controlled by energy production and consumption, and everything is controlled by the state from the top down.”

If this information was new to conference attendees, it was also relatively new to Wood, who recalled he’d been researching and writing for 35 years about globalization, the global elite, and in particular “the machinations of the [300-member] group known as the Trilateral Commission,” yet in all that time had never heard of Technocracy.

About three years ago he ran across a historical study of an organization called Technocracy Inc. and, intrigued, was soon immersed in research on this obscure group and movement. He was amazed at what he found. Laid out in decades-old academic journals, newspapers and magazines, was the framework for an entirely new economic-political system designed to replace capitalism.

“Technocracy proposed not just a new shuffle, but a replacement economic system based on energy distribution and consumption and run by engineers, scientists, and technicians,” Wood said.

It had been developed and promoted by just such a group – “technocrats” they called themselves -- during the early 1930s at Columbia University. They believed that capitalism was dead and the resulting society should be micro-managed by experts like themselves. One of its cofounders was M. King Hubbert, in those days a brilliant young geo-physicist. During the 1950s Hubbert devised the “Peak Oil Theory,” which holds that humans are fast using up the planet’s supply of oil. He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of the environmental movement.

Formally incorporated as Technocracy, Inc. in 1932, the movement was one of the most popular the U.S. has experienced, with over 500,000 card-carrying members at one point. Suddenly it disappeared, rejected by both the newly installed Roosevelt administration and the public, and “scrubbed” from history.

But during the movement’s brief heyday, technocrats created and published volumes of reports and documents, including a definitive handbook: Technocracy Study Course.

Circling the Noose

“These guys, being scientists and engineers, wrote a detailed list of requirements that would be necessary to implement Technocracy -- first in America, then the entire North American continent,” Wood said. Here are five of those requirements with his comments.

Technocracy, Inc. 1932: Energy Distribution Requirements

• Register on a continuous 24 hour-per-day basis the total net conversion of energy: Think Smart Grid for a minute, which you know you’re going to see
• By means of the registration of energy converted and consumed, make possible a balanced load: You’ll see the words ‘balanced load’ all over the literature for Smart Grid…
• Provide a continuous inventory of all production and consumption: Now this is not just for energy: this is all production and all consumption, but the first blush is of course of energy.
• Provide a specific registration of the type, kind, etc. of all goods and services, where produced and where used: This is 1932 folks. Are they doing this today? Are we being sliced and diced with the data and stuff?
• Provide specific registration of the consumption of each individual, plus a record and description of the individual (Scott Howard, et al, Technocracy Study Course, p. 232: Think Homeland Security. Think NSA.

In addition to the five Wood listed, the Study Course has two more requirements:

6. Allow the citizen the widest latitude of choice in consuming his share of Continental physical wealth [each person’s “share” to be determined by technocrats]
7. Distribute goods and services to every member of the population.

“They’re circling the noose of this data collection around us, and now, all of a sudden, out of the blue comes … Smart Grid. Lo and behold, give the engineers a list of requirements and they’re going to come up with a new bright idea lickety-split.”

Replacing Capitalism

In 1969 Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia, wrote the book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, which Wood has called a “Neo-Technocratic treatise.” He recalled he’d read it when it was published but it meant nothing to him. So with a new awareness of Technocracy, Wood reread it, “and lo and behold I find out that the book parallels exactly what [the technocrats] said in 1932.”

“Here are the same themes; the same concepts; in some cases the same phraseology,” Wood exclaimed. “Brzezinski just used the word technetronic to replace technocratic. It’s similar, but not quite the same -- and absolutely the same concept.” Wood contends that had Brzezinski lived during the 1930s he would have been “leading the charge” for Technocracy Inc.

In 1973 David Rockefeller and Brzezinski set up the Trilateral Commission, with the goal of creating a “New International Economic Order.”

Wood regards Rockefeller as someone who is a master at “hijacking” other people’s ideas. Technocracy was apparently one of them, an idea that “Rockefeller and his crowd ended up hijacking for their own benefit.”

Until the last few decades the technology didn’t exist for implementing a technocratic order. For that you need computers capable of maintaining a “continuous inventory of all production and consumption,” and registering “on a continuous 24 hour-per-day basis the total net conversion of energy,” and so on through the other requirements.

You also need an electrical grid system able to handle massive amounts of data, one that allows provider access to and control over a consumer’s electrical devices. You need Smart Grid.

As noted earlier: “They cannot make Technocracy happen without Smart Grid in place. They have to have it.”

Another necessary element is a controller chip in everyone’s computer, thermostat, washer, drier, and so on. That’s been developed, and – as Wood put it – “All the major manufacturers are running nuts over this to put this chip into everything you buy.”

He predicted that within a year “you aren’t going to be able to buy a washer, drier, a new thermostat, air conditioner, or whatever that doesn’t have this technology embedded in it -- and there is no way to turn it off within the device.”

One Contiguous Policy Unit

Smart Grid doesn’t stop at U.S. borders. There are plans – 50 percent completed -- for creating a North American Smart Grid, with 22 working groups that the Security and Prosperity Partnership “cut loose with the Dept. of Energy” talking with other countries to tie the Smart Grid together between Mexico, Canada and the United States “in one contiguous policy unit.”

Some elements are already in place and the negotiations are a “done deal” – “they’re merely working on the build-out at this point.”

“And this has all happened in the last three years,” Wood emphasized. “In 2009 when the financial meltdown happened and President Obama authorized a recovery stimulus package, $3.4 billion was ponyed up to be put onto Smart Grid -- just summarily. Nobody paid attention to it at that time.”

Other industrialized counties in the world did the same -- Canada, Mexico, countries in South America, China, Great Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. “All across the world they spent stimulus money to kick start Smart Grid in their own countries,” said Wood.

“Does that tell you something?” he asked. “Who orchestrated that? Who gave them simultaneously the idea to do it with taxpayer money, not industry money?”

Contacted later by telephone, Wood told NWV that U.S. tax dollars did not fund Smart Grid in foreign countries -- the money came from their own stimulus packages. “They did it themselves through their own governments.”

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However, he said, pressure could have been applied probably by the IMF, the World Bank, or the Bank for International Settlements – perhaps all three. These organizations “have their hooks” in other countries’ political systems where Smart Grid is being implemented, Wood observed. “They can make nation states hop and sing and dance to their tune.”

It Ain’t Over Yet

In his concluding remarks Wood emphasized that Smart Grid is happening with no congressional (or parliamentary) oversight in any country. “Nobody’s looking at this – it’s by executive fiat.”

And he reminded his audience: “Technocracy makes no provision for private property, no mechanism for accumulating wealth. Everything is controlled by energy production and consumption, and everything is controlled by the state from the top down.”

Last – a touch of whistling-in-the-dark humor: “It ain’t over till it’s over. And in the meantime, remember – Smart Grid is watching you.”

Earlier Articles

1 - Michael Coffman: Is Carbon Currency the End Game?: Sept. 10, 2011. Part 1 of two arts
2 - Devvy Kidd: 'Smart Meters' -- The New Silent Killer: Sept. 2, 2011. Two parts
3 - Rosalind Peterson: Costly U.S. Power Grid Tests Approved without Public Consent: Aug. 5, 2011
4 - Rosalind Peterson: The Smart Meter Rebellion: May 31, 2011
5 - Patrick Wood: Technocracy and the Global Elite: March 10, 2010

Related Articles / Selected Sources

1 - M. King Hubbert and Howard Scott: Technocracy Study Course, 1934
2 - Reports by Patrick Wood: The August Forecast and Review:
Technocracy's Endgame: Global Smart Grid: June 15, 2011
Smart Grid: The Implementation of Technocracy? March 3, 2010
Carbon Currency: A New Beginning for Technocracy? Jan. 26, 2010
3 - The Daily Bell, Staff: Smart Grid: Edge of the Authoritarian Wedge: April 1, 2011
4 - The Daily Bell, Staff: Incredible Real Reason for Carbon Trading: Jan. 26, 2010:
5 - Review of Wood’s article on Carbon Currency/Technocracy, link above)
6 - Devvy Kidd: My Fight against Smart Meters: Aug. 15, 2011
7 - Orlean Koehle: Just Say NO to Big Brother's Smart Meters, Oct. 21, 2010. 112 pages.
8 - The Smart Grid: An Introduction: Dept. of Energy
9 - Smart Grid Website: Nat’l Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Dept. of Commerce
10 - Smart Grid News: “News and analysis for the automation and modernization of electric power”