Winning a decisive battle against Wall Street and London
By Patrick Ruckert
December 29, 2021
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20211230-The-Second-Wave-of-Electrification-in-the-United-States.pdf?_t=1640990312
On December 21, LaRouche PAC posted on this site an article by Michael Carr, “The Third Wave of Electrification has Begun.” https://www.larouchepac.com/the_third_wave_of_electrification_has_begun
Toward the end of that article, Michael stated, “As was the case in Lincoln’s time, progress depends upon political will and positive government intervention.”
Contrary to the noise too often heard in recent decades, government, provided it is sovereign and serving the general welfare of its citizens, uncorrupted by a financier oligarchy, can get it right, particularly with respect to great projects whose scale is beyond the means of private financial interests. More generally, private sector utilities, in creating a healthy physical economy, work best as a contractor partner with government, especially in the water and power sector.
The Second Wave of Electrification, which Michael Carr describes in his above cited article, began with the creation by Thomas Edison, and others, of a central power and distribution system, driven by steam engines, and soon by hydroelectric power generation from dams.
This article will explore more fully that Second Wave of Electrification, focused on the period of the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The 1930s, during the presidency of FDR, saw the greatest leap in electrification that has occurred anywhere in the world before or since.
By the 1920s, electricity was a necessity in every city and town. But rural areas and farms were simply left out. Part of our story today is why that was the case, and the fight to bring to the 25 percent of the American population who lived on the farms in 1933, the electricity necessary for life in the Twentieth Century.
It was a fight. It pitted the cartel-allied private utilities against most of the people of the United States, especially the rural and farm population. The stakes were fundamental to the future of the nation. Electricity and the access to it was central to the revolution brought to industry, commerce and the daily lives of the population. It was a great good; one that defined the course of the Twentieth Century.
For whom and for what purpose this great good was to be controlled was a question that, still today, has not been settled. Though through the 1920s and the 1930s, a series of federal laws and even some state laws regulated the power industry. But, it was a fight. Through the 1920s, what was known as power trusts of private electric companies emerged, run on the same monetarist ideology upon which hedge funds and derivatives operate today– “how can we loot and steal using this new development called electricity?” These privately owned, and increasingly Wall Street-controlled trusts, were not motivated by the idea of how to use the power of electricity for the development of the nation. For these trusts, and the criminal banks that controlled them, it all came to an end with the crash of 1929, in which these power trusts were a key element of the speculation and debt that collapsed.
