Foreword by R.Buckminster Fuller

"(Fee x fie x fo x fum)4" by R.Buckminster Fuller

"Astro-age David's Sling" by R.Buckminster Fuller

"Heads or Tails We Win, Inc." by R.Buckminster Fuller

"Invisible Know-How, Inc." by R.Buckminster Fuller

"Paper-into-Gold Alchemists" by R.Buckminster Fuller

"Can't Fool Cosmic Computer" by R.Buckminster Fuller

Index

"An army of abstract legal entities (called corporations) now controls the economic and political future of mankind. In this urgent sequel to Critical Path , R. Buckminster Fuller traces the evolution of these multinational giants from the post-World War II 'military-industrial complex' to the current world economic crisis -- an evolution, he argues, that threatens the imminent bankruptcy of the U.S. and the collapse of the world economic system.

"As these economic giants have grown beyond the control of the political units (nations) into which the earth is currently divided, they paradoxically threaten to bring about a world-wide depression while perhaps signaling the emergence of a new form of political and economic organization for the beleaguered inhabitants of Spaceship Earth." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1983]

"With the appearance of Grunch Of Giants , R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory -- his long-gestated myth -- of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity. In fact, he has long argued that future historians of our era may subsume our business practices as a branch of mythology; thus it is not surprising that the word economics appears nowhere in his text.

"Fuller's myth is no idle fairy tale, since he faces his question -- the question of a technological imperative which only he could raise -- with the deadly seriousness of satire. That question is: Can our system of national political sovereignities and corporate profits survive the inevitable technological revolution required to obviate wars by effecting a worldwide rise in the standard of living.

"One of the functions of myth is to resolve contradictions in our culture. Grunch Of Giants portrays the rising multinational corporations in the paradoxical role of functioning both as the epitome of capitalistic selfishness and as the inadvertent vehicle for the dissolution of national political boundaries -- the last deterrent to a one-world economy.

"The result is more subversive of the property and profit values of the capitalist system than anything dreamed of since Karl Marx." --E.J.Applewhite.

"Military-Industrial Complex replaces the 'Great Pirates'. A warning." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1997).

Recommended.