This Week You Need To Know

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., addressed an international webcast conference on Jan. 5, 2005, speaking by video hook-up from Germany to an audience in Washington, D.C. The event was sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. LaRouche's opening keynote is published here. A lengthy discussion followed, which can be found archived at www.larouchepac.com.

Lyndon LaRouche: At a meeting with some of my associates here in Germany, on the 4th of January, the question was asked of me as to whether, in an article which I had written and which was published in EIR on the 17th of December, whether I had actually prophesied, in a sense, the coming of this tsunami. Let me just read the paragraph in question, the opening paragraph of that article, to you. It will go up on the screen, but I'll read it to you in my own voice at the same time, and then come back and explain to you what this is all about.

The article begins as such, in the first paragraph:

"Let such caricatures of poor King Canute, as President George W. Bush, Jr., howl their denials, while they can still be heard. Let him shriek in futile rage against those thunderous winds of chaos which were already hurling themselves against the increasingly bankrupt national financial systems of the world. That chaos, now excited to the greater turbulence caused by the desperate antics of such poor, enraged fools as he, now descends with its own added uncontrollable fury, upon our hapless, present world monetary-financial system. So, now, just a few weeks following our modern Canute's recent claims of electoral victory, the oncoming waves of a great storm of global breakdown crisis are striking on the gates of the governments of the world, and are already pounding the hoaxster's illusion of Bush's economic recovery to shreds. The terminal breakdown crisis of the 1971-2004 world monetary system is thus now fully under way."

Now, my answer to that question, which was prompted by this paragraph I just read to you, was that this was obviously not a prophecy by me. I don't prophesy tsunamis. But it does have another lesson we must learn from it.

First of all, when the tsunami was known to the U.S., the U.S.—as Debra just said—did absolutely nothing, from the Presidency, from the official institutions, nothing to warn people in those parts of the Indian Ocean whose lives could still have been saved, from the effects of the tsunami. Nothing was done.

The thing got up to a G-7 or someone of that rank in the State Department, and according to him, it stopped there, because he had no authority to go further. Nothing was done. Obviously, tens of thousands of people who might have lived, died as a result of that negligence by the United States. But worse, as Debra has indicated, four days passed before the President of the United States had anything to say of relevance about that catastrophe, or proposed anything to do to deal with the effects of the greatest international catastrophe in modern history.

Now, the question is this, the question posed to me on the 4th of January: Was I being prophetic in some ironical way, when back in November when I wrote that first paragraph of that article? No, but this is the nature of history.

You know, the history of mankind on this planet, which is probably about 2 million years long, so far—if we don't make a mess of it, it may continue—it's been besieged by natural catastrophes. Gradually, over the period of passing generations, with the help of science, we've learned to deal with some of these catastrophes, to anticipate them, to ameliorate their effects, to control them; in some cases, even prevent them. And we would hope that that would continue. But natural catastrophes are a part of living on this planet. And therefore, what happens is, mankind has a system of government, a system of society. Everything seems to be going according to plan, and then something intervenes, a natural catastrophe, either foreseen or not foreseen. And the whole culture is put into jeopardy.

For example, about 1,600 years before Christ, you had an explosion on the island of Thera, in the middle of the Mediterranean, something like this type. It just blew the whole island apart; fragments still exist today, but the island was blown apart, and the entire region was subjected to an effect like this, that we saw in the Indian Ocean. And much of civilization of that period, in that part of the world, was wiped out by the effects of that sort of thing.

What happens in a crisis like this, a great natural catastrophe, is that the question is, can the existing society, can the existing culture, respond effectively to that crisis? Can it respond in a way that enables it to survive? And on that evil day in this past month, George Bush and the United States did nothing, until finally Europe shamed us into doing something, and President Clinton and President George Bush, the former President, took joint action to get the United States to recover some of its dignity.

But still, this President, the incumbent President, does not understand the situation. And the culture he expresses by his Presidency is a culture of a people who have lost the moral fitness to survive. And the challenge before us, the challenge posed by the tsunami, by George Bush, Jr.'s failure to response to it appropriately, is: Are we, our nation, morally fit to survive? Is this a test of us?

Now, there have been crucial moments in history before. Sometimes man-caused, or natural catastrophes. One was the great religious warfare which was launched beginning actually in 1492, when the Grand Inquisitor of Spain expelled the Jews from Spain, in a manner which presaged what Hitler was going to do to the Jews of Germany some centuries later. And that event, that religious persecution of the Jews, and later the Moors, by Spain, set into motion throughout Europe, religious warfare that continued for more than a century, about a century and half, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. All of the accomplishments of the 15th Century, the Renaissance, the founding of the modern nation-state, the beginning of modern science, the beginning of modern culture, were put in jeopardy. It didn't destroy this entirely, but it nearly did.

And then, when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, which established modern international law and civilized behavior among nations (at least those of Europe), the people of Germany, who had been the chief target of this war, rejoiced. And they rejoiced in the form of a hymn, named Jesu, meine Freude. Later, at the beginning of the 18th Century, a great man, Bach, re-set this hymn, which was already an established hymn, which celebrated the relief of mankind from this terrible century-long, more than century-long, epoch of religious warfare.

And today, I think we should celebrate in a similar manner and in a similar spirit, and therefore, I have planned that, on this occasion, we shall precede the discussion, the further discussion tonight, with another performance, a somewhat still more enhanced performance of what you heard back on Nov. 9, an enhanced performance of Bach's Jesu, meine Freude, in memory of the victims of this great tragedy, which was a natural catastrophe, and an affirmation, the affirmation of Europeans following the Peace of Westphalia: that we're going to go on to build things, rather than destroy them. So let's have the youth deliver this, and then we'll get back to other business.

[Chorus performs Bach's motet.]

A Classical Tragedy Today

Now, there are three topics which I wish to address, but I wish to put them under an umbrella.

What we're talking about, today, is essentially Classical tragedy. We're looking at a Classical tragedy of humanity.

Now, there are several ways of looking at tragedy. You have the Classical Greek tragedy, which ended in the worst for all concerned, generally. And from these great Classical Greek tragedies, great lessons were learned, and they pertained to things largely which involved the culture of all the people of that time.

But then Plato criticized that kind of tragedy, because it left out one thing: It left out the factor of the Sublime. It left out the fact that there has to be a solution for mankind, out of every tragedy; maybe not a happy ending for that particular story, but there must be a clear lesson learned, from study of an actual case of tragedy, a lesson learned which gives people hope for a solution.

Remember the Thirty Years War in Central Europe. Two-thirds of the population barely survived, in terms of population level. But out of that came international law, the first founding of modern international law, based on the rights of nation-states, and the obligations of nation-states to consider the advantage of the other nation, to help the other nation. So there was a sublime solution, the Treaty of Westphalia, to a great tragedy, over 100 years of religious war.

We have entered into a great tragedy. Our tragedy in particular, in the United States and Western Europe in particular, has been a tragedy of about 40 years.

In the post-war period following World War II, we were still, despite the mistakes we made, we were still, in the United States and increasingly in Western Europe, we were producer societies. We in the United States were known for our production of wealth; we were proud of our production of wealth. We were proud of increasing the standard of living of our people. We were proud of these achievements, and then, about 40 years ago, about the time that the Vietnam War was launched, we went through a cultural change, from a producer society to a post-industrial Utopian society. More and more, particularly after the establishment of the present monetary system, which wrecked the old system which did us well, the new monetary system transformed the nations of South America, and other parts of the world, into nations to be exploited.

We ceased to produce our own wealth more and more over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, we relied upon the cheap labor of others. We lowered the standard of living in Mexico, throughout the Americas, and we prospered on their cheap labor. But we didn't prosper so well, because we began to abandon our places of work. We dumped the lower 80% of our family income brackets in the United States, into a relatively more destitute position. And only the upper 20% of family income brackets were really in on the system, in on the benefits.

Now, we've come to a point, like that in Europe and that here, we've come to a point where that system is dead; it's hopelessly finished. This international financial monetary system can not be saved. The IMF system can not be saved in its present form. The World Bank can not be saved in its present form. Wall Street, as we call it, can not be saved in its present form.

We've come back to a condition somewhat like that faced by Franklin Roosevelt in March of 1933, but worse. We're in a situation where the President of the United States then acted, as Roosevelt did, to put the bankrupt banking system into bankruptcy reorganization under Federal control, and by these measures, prevented a panic, prevented destitution. It also prevented us from going the way that continental Europe went, into fascism, one nation after the other, because they didn't take the kind of steps that we in the United States took under Franklin Roosevelt.

Roosevelt gave us a system, he built a system during the time he was President, a system which was perfectly consistent with the intent of the Founders of the United States. A system that said that the government is responsible for the general welfare; we must defend the general welfare. He did an excellent job. We escaped fascism here, we helped to free Europe from fascism, we provided the margin of support which defeated that monster, and we gave the world a post-war world which we proceeded, after Roosevelt's death, to make a mess of.

But the institutions he gave us, like the Social Security system and what that implied, systems of regulation and protectionism, this made us a strong economy, the strongest in the world. We were able to assist other nations to develop in a similar way. Europe was reconstructed because of us. Parts of the world as a whole benefitted because of us. Even under the conditions of this conflict with the Soviet Union, we still prospered until the middle of the 1960s, when we became idiots, and decided to flee from the finest system of economy that existed on this planet, and go into a post-industrial Utopia. We became pleasure-seekers, instead of producers.

And we stopped producing. We shipped our jobs overseas, and now we've come to the point where the great swindle, the great financial swindles, the swindles of credit financial derivatives, have brought us to the point that the present international monetary system, the present banking system, the banking system of the United States, the banking system of Europe, are now hopelessly bankrupt on their own. Only government intervention of the type that Roosevelt took, could save this system from chaos.

Take the case of one of these crisis cases, the Schwarzenegger syndrome. You have a predator who escaped from Hollywood, who was turned loose on the people of California. He's now the governor. He walked into a mess which he helped to create, because of him and his financial friends who helped to profit from the Enron system. It was the Enron system which bankrupted California, or virtually did. He moved in and took credit for saving California from what he created, under the direction of George Shultz, his controller. As governor, he made the debt of California far worse than what it was when he came in, and everyone who understood it, knew that was going to happen. Now California is about to go off the Pacific shore, into the Pacific Ocean—that is, financially, because the real estate bubble in California, everything else in California, is more bankrupt, more hopelessly bankrupt since Schwarzenegger has been governor, than ever before. And Schwarzenegger represents that interest. Not only is he a predator, and a tasteless creature, but he represents that interest, that financier interest typified by George Shultz, which has created the mess.

And unless we have a government that says, "George Shultz, you're wrong, the Mont Pelerin Society is wrong, and we've got to go back to a Franklin Roosevelt way of thinking about the nation," unless we do that, California is doomed and the rest of the nation is doomed. What is about to happen to Schwarzenegger, in the emergency conferences that he's having in California, is only a foretaste of what is going to happen to the United States as a whole.

The same thing is true in Western Europe. Except for the markets in Asia, the markets in Russia, India, and especially China, of Germany, in particular, without those markets, the economies of western continental Europe would go flat today. So therefore, we're in that kind of situation.

Three Crises

So, we have three crises. One, we have a monetary-financial crisis. The system is going down. Anyone who tells you differently is either insane, stupid, or lying, and I don't know whether maybe George Bush the President is all three—the President. Secondly, we have a crisis of economic decadence. We in the United States no longer have the ability in our labor force to produce as we produced before. We've shipped our technology overseas, we have not developed improved technology of production in the United States, we've shut down our factories, we've shut down our farms, our people have lost the skills they used to have to be productive. We have a major job of putting the country back together again.

Now, 40 years is also, to speak of economic decadence, the lifetime of investment in basic economic infrastructure, such as a power station, a power system, a river system, a water management system, a system of locks and dams, highway systems, mass transportation systems, and so forth. For 40 years, we've moved into a net shrinking of investment, wasting our investment of 40 years ago in basic economic infrastructure. Our railroads are gone, our farms are largely gone, our river management systems are gone, our power systems are going, our cities are rotting, and the housing crisis is about to collapse. Also, a similar situation exists in Europe.

The Pinochet Model for Social Security

We also have a second class of issues; we have certain immediate issues, apart from the crisis itself. We have Bush's intent to rape Social Security. Now, the Bush people—I'm not going to accuse Bush of understanding anything. I wouldn't stretch people's imaginations that much. I mean, the man is sitting down at his ranch there, and the greatest natural crisis in his lifetime has blown out, affecting the world as a whole, and he's sitting around bicycling around the shrubs of his little patch down there, and saying that it has nothing to do with me. It's an act of God. Go blame God.

But this guy is nonetheless intent on bringing the Nazi program of Augusto Pinochet from Chile into the United States.

Now, Pinochet is a Nazi. At the end of the war, some people like the friends of George Shultz, before George Shultz was fully grown then, but the friends of George Shultz, like Allen Dulles, protected the Nazis. They took a whole chunk of the Nazis, including the cartels, which are the real financial part of the Nazi system, and they saved them, and they brought them into leading institutions in the United States and into Europe. They moved some of them down, by the "rat-line," into South America. And they nested down there, in places like Bolivia and Chile and Argentina, and so forth, and other parts there.

So these fellows were used by people like Shultz and the people behind them, in the beginning of the 1970s, to start to bring Nazi forms of operations into South America, using live Nazi veterans of the type that had been saved by Allen Dulles and company, and using them to overthrow governments and to commit mass murder, like Operation Condor, which was done under the supervision, from the United States, of George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and others. They did it.

So, we built up Pinochet as a new Nazi dictator in Chile, and through him, we also ran Operation Condor, with a lot of missing persons, mass killings of people, just the way Hitler did mass killings—not as many, but the same way—under the governments of that time: the dictatorship in Argentina, the dictatorship in Chile, and so forth.

Now, come the 1980s. The Pinochet system doesn't work. They're about to go bankrupt. Fascism is not exactly a very good system. What do they do? They steal the social security system of Chile, which is the only thing left standing of much worth, and they steal it. They privatize it. And it's about gone now, and people have died as a result of that.

Now, George Bush, the President, has announced he's determined to privatize the U.S. Social Security system, and also, if we can believe one of his aides, that he intends to do something else: to default on the sovereign debt of the United States, which George did in order to cut taxes on the wealthy, who least needed the tax cuts. What he did was, he stole the money from the Social Security fund, the paid-in Social Security amounts. He took it! To cover it, he created a debt, a bonded debt, a promise to pay by the Federal government, the same thing as a Treasury bond. A promise to pay by the Federal government. And now he's going into a situation where the Social Security system is going to be collapsed, and he intends to pull it off—or at least his advisors do—by defaulting on the sovereign debt of the United States. If the President of the United States, at this time, defaults on the sovereign debt of the United States, what the hell is the dollar worth in the morning? We'll go into the same category that we've put Argentina into, immediately.

Now, what will probably actually happen, if he were to do that, he would steal about $2 trillion, which he'd give to his friends on Wall Street, the financial gamblers. But that would cause the dollar to go up on the market for a short period of time. What would the Chinese, and Indians, and others do, who have large holdings of U.S. dollars? They would dump their dollars on the market quick, as the last chance to get the best option for getting out from under a dollar that was going to collapse totally. Where are we then?

So this is not just a smart predatory deal by President Bush. This is stupid beyond belief, and that stupid person down in Texas, has gone for this, under the pressure of certain swindlers who are concerned only for what they can steal in the short run, and not the future of the nation, or the future of humanity. They're willing to destroy the United States, and you have some suckers in the United States who are still willing to support George Bush in the privatization of Social Security.

Now, Social Security is not broken. If you can keep George Bush's paws off it, it's not broken. If we maintain the system—and we may have to increase some rates of pay-in on Social Security by people who are earning income in the upper brackets; we did that before, we may have to do it again. It didn't hurt anybody. We maintained the levels, the guaranteed levels, and we actually made some improvements in what people received, monetary-wise, in Social Security. The Congress went through this in the last session, this question. There is no threat to Social Security in the United States today, except the threat from President George Bush and his friends: the threat to privatize.

So, if you want to save the United States and save your Social Security, don't privatize it.... [audio break] What is going to happen if you go into the private sector at the point the economy is going to crash? You're going to make a profit, on the magic of compound interest, in a collapsing economy, an economy which you're helping to collapse? No, Social Security is, in general, the only security left for families in the United States. The pension plans, the private pension plans are collapsing. Major pension plans are about to collapse now. You don't want to put people in private pension plans now. That means no pension. And therefore, we must save and defend the Social Security system. And these guys are planning to steal for a short term, for the sake of power. Now, I know what is really going on in the minds of the people who are doing the manipulation. The mind of George Bush, that's another question; everyone can make their own guess. But the guys behind—I know what's on their mind.

The only way that you can get by with this, is the Pinochet way, the Hitler way. You know, in the final analysis, there's no guarantee that money is worth anything. Any money system, any banking system, can go under. There's no such thing as an infinitely protected, guaranteed banking system or money system. Money is only worth the backing behind it. The backing behind it is usually governments. Currencies have been cancelled before. Many currencies have ceased to exist, national currencies. They go out of business, and new currencies replace them. What these guys have in mind, the guys on the George Shultz level, not the guys on the poor George W. Bush level, but on the Shultz level, they know that if you establish a dictatorship, a Hitler-style dictatorship in the United States and Europe, you don't have to worry about anything. You make your own money. You declare new money. You cancel the old. You cancel old debts, repudiate them. Create new debts. You and your friends get along just fine. The people don't.

So, what's in motion here, if anybody's foolish enough to rally to support George Bush in his intent to go the Pinochet way with U.S. Social Security, tell 'em, "You're crazy, buddy. You're not going to get anything, except dead."

Iraq and the Drive for Empire

Now, we also have some other immediate issues. We have the Iraq issue, and that's kind of interesting, as General Hoar, formerly from the Marine Corps, has emphasized, and others, who have come to the same conclusion that many of the rest of us have come to. They may not all agree with me, but we all agree on one thing, and that is, that the danger is that if we don't get out of there, or get out of this war quickly, which we never should have gotten into, we're not going to have a U.S. military anymore. Because what we're doing to people we're cranking through this Iraq war scene, is we are destroying the U.S. military, the volunteer system. We're losing. People don't want to sign up for the Reserves anymore. They don't want to join the National Guard anymore. They don't get health care, there's negligence. We're just not going to have a capable military anymore. That's one of the things. We've got to get out of there.

Now, how did we get into there? We've got to face the truth about that. We got in there because Dick Cheney wanted to go there. I don't think George W. Bush knew where it was on the map. He just heard his Daddy was there one time.

But Cheney wanted to do that, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense back under George H.W. Bush. He planned to go to, preventive nuclear warfare, it was called, with things like mini-nukes, and planned to use warfare around the planet to establish a new global system. The idea was, the Soviet Union was collapsing, so why can't we become an empire? We have the muscle, we have the power. Why don't we just become an empire, and declare that history is over? The United States has become a world empire, and there's no more history. Everything is simply administration of this thing that has suddenly taken over the planet.

And the way they thought they were going to do it was to go back to what some people thought back in 1945, '46, '47, when they thought that the use of nuclear weapons, when we had a monopoly on them, that we could intimidate the Soviets and others, and we could establish a world government. We'd turn the United Nations into a system of world government in which sovereign nations would no longer really exist. They'd be simply local departments of a world government. But then came the Korean War, and simultaneously the discovery that the Soviet Union had developed a thermonuclear weapon which was already operational, and we didn't have one yet. So, they called off preventive nuclear warfare, for the time being. We then went to a new system, called Mutual and Assured Destruction, which developed over the course of the 1960s, 1950s, and the idea that we would create weapons so terrible that nobody would dare go to war, and we could bluff our way through, somehow, with that system.

Now, that's dead. But then, once the Soviet Union had collapsed, some idiot thought, "Ahhh! Land of Opportunity! We've got superiority in nuclear weapons, let's use that superiority to go around clobbering countries one at a time, clobber them into submission. Pick Islam as an enemy. Start a general religious war against Islam, and let's get going, buddies." These were the so-called neo-conservatives.

And therefore, because they wanted to start that process, they took a spot, Iraq, as a place to start the game. Go into Iraq, then go after Syria, take on Iran, take on North Korea, and keep going. The intended targets for warfare included China, and what remains of Russia. That's where they intended to go.

So, on the basis of falling for that, the policy that was represented largely by Cheney—he's not the brains behind it, there's a fellow in London who's a little bit more important on that—but this is the policy. And because of 9/11, because the American people were terrified by this spectacle of 9/11, which was like the Reichstag Fire in Germany, set by Hermann Göring, which induced the German people to submit to decree government under Adolf Hitler—Hitler became a dictator because of Hermann Göring setting fire to the Reichstag, and saying the enemy did it, the Communists did it, and they needed emergency powers. And they gave Hitler emergency powers, and he never gave it up, willingly. And that's what Cheney was up to.

So they were intent to use the power, the intimidation of the American people, to believe that the safety of the people depended upon backing George Bush and Cheney against the terrible Islamic peoples, who are coming to get us, or other people. Anybody who's coming to get us. "We've got to kill 'em all!"

So they got into a war, on a pretext. The pretext was a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There never were, and Cheney knew it. He lied! If the President of the United States understood anything at all, he must have lied! Or maybe he simply believed what Cheney told him was true. But they lied. They all lied. The entire Bush Administration, collectively, lied, to get us into a war. Now the Congress shouldn't have capitulated, but because of 9/11, they too decided to go along to get along. And they gave Bush a wedge, an unconstitutional wedge, to get into a declaration of war by the back door. And Bush used it.

At the time, he was afraid that the United Nations was going to come up with a settlement of the problems that were mentioned in Iraq. Bush acted on that weekend, to go to war, for fear that the United Nations would take the action which would remove the pretext for war that he was playing with. We got into this war.

That was bad enough. First, when we went into war, we had a fellow called General Garner. Garner was assigned to take over the function of managing things in Iraq, after Iraq had surrendered. That was his position. Iraq did surrender, about the time of that famous battle at the airport outside Baghdad. But then, what did they do? They sent in Bremer to replace Garner.

Now, what Garner had started to do—he'd done the intelligent thing that any general officer in the field would do, in a territory which had just surrendered to you. He would call in the relevant forces, including the military, which had surrendered to him, and the people who run government, who had surrendered to him, and say, "Okay, we're now in charge of this place, and you're working for us. We're not going to stay here, but for the time being, you're going to work for us. Because, in the meantime, while you're still working for us, we're going to get this country back in shape. You in the military are going to be responsible for certain logistical things, and you're going to be responsible for security in the country." You're talking about a fairly modern army, to run security, 200,000 approximately, a modern army to run security in Iraq, the former Iraqi army, minus a few people we had some strong objections to.

And all the Ba'ath Party, who were the bureaucrats, who ran all the deals of government, all now working for us. We didn't need to have an extra bunch of troops in there. They were going to do it themselves, under our auspices. But Bremer was sent in there, and he fired all the Iraqis who were supposed to work for us, and who would have worked for us. He fired the Ba'athists, who would have worked for us, and we got a mess. And then somebody inside the thing started a real resistance against the United States. It wasn't al-Qaeda! That was a lie too. It was Iraqis, and probably part of the old secret services of the Iraqi system. And now you had approximately 200,000 people, trained military people, who were out of jobs, who were a little patriotic, and they wanted to fight. And you had Ba'ath bureaucrats, who know how the country works and who know where the monkey sleeps, and they're now available as recruitable people. And what we got was a case of what's called asymmetric warfare.

It's the kind of foolishness that we got into in Vietnam. The kind of foolishness which the French got into, in a more difficult situation in certain respects, in Algiers. We were going into a replay of an Algiers kind of asymmetric warfare, which has been corroding our troops, corroding everything we try to do there. Because the Bush Administration is clinging stubbornly to trying to keep this war going. And the only mess we have in Iraq today is not Saddam Hussein; it's the mess we created under the Bush Administration.

What's the Alternative?

Now, we've got to get out of there. And I mentioned before, we have to go to the positive. In crisis, you have to find positive solutions, not just go at the negatives. What's the alternative? My alternative personally—and I think it's a model for anything anybody else wants to do—my alternative is, I said, let's take Southwest Asia. Southwest Asia is bounded on the north by Turkey, it's bounded by Armenia and Azerbaijan, it's bounded by Iran, and it includes all the Arab countries, down into Egypt and beyond. This is Southwest Asia.

This is the richest oil-producing area of the world. It probably has an oil supply for cheap oil, at probably one-tenth of the price of most other sources around the world, producing cheap oil, probably for about 80 years to come, maybe more. It's dominated largely by the role of Saudi Arabia, which has been in this sense a partner of the United States since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and his deal with King Saud. Why does somebody want to make a mess of that? Here is a key part of the world's essential, presently, of its power systems: petroleum, plastics, and so forth. Why do we want to make a mess of that territory, where petroleum will cost 20 times, 20 times as much in other parts of the world, just to produce? Why do we want to do that, after we've boxed ourselves into limiting ourselves to petroleum as a major source of supply for power sources in various parts of the world?

So therefore, we have an interest, and other nations have an interest, in stability in an area called Southwest Asia, which includes the countries I named, in particular. It means stability along the Nile River, because if you have civil war in the Blue and White Nile area, or below that, if you have a disruption of the water flow of the Nile north, you're going to have hell in Egypt, and that hell is going to spread throughout the region. So don't play games with that area of the world in that way, either.

So what we need, is, we need an agreement among these nation-states, to administer their own region on certain principles. In order to bring that off, there's one sticking point in the whole system, and that is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now, if we don't stop that conflict, there are not going to be many Palestinians, and probably no Israelis left. We're in a process of an end-game there, which can only result in the extinction of Israel, and the extinction of a lot of Palestinians.

Therefore, an Israel-Palestinian peace, whether as one nation or as two nations, is necessary. And this has to be done by aid of power exerted by the United States government, and by the cooperation of other governments. But it has to be based also on a community of interest, of mutual security interest, in the region of Southwest Asia. We now have an excellent situation—Turkey is an excellent partner in that region for such a venture. We can get along with Iran, get along fine. We don't have a problem that can't be solved, if we go at it in the right way.

Vote Suppression

Now, we have a third issue, for the time being, apart from the Iraq issue and its implications: Vote suppression. What the Bush Administration did, and the Bush campaign did, is, relied on a massive campaign of vote suppression.

Now, another name for vote suppression in many parts of the country, was racism. And what Karl Rove's crowd did: pick an area, which they think that too many people of African descent are in that area. "Let's cut down the vote, because they're likely to vote Democratic. So let's assume that everyone who looks black must be a convict. And let's assume they have no right to vote. It may not be true. They may not be convicts. They may have the right to vote. But let's assume they don't, and let's treat them on the basis of that assumption. And let's send in goon squads. Let's threaten them. Let's scare the devil out of them. So they won't vote. Let's rig things, so their votes aren't counted."

Vote suppression. Now, that's a violation of our Constitution! It's a violation of the Voters Rights Act. It's a Federal crime, but a lot of Republican agents did it. They are known. It is known they did it. It's a crime! It's a Federal crime!

What are you going to do about it? Do you believe in law and order? Do you believe in justice? Do you believe in due process? Do you believe in catching criminals? Well, these guys are criminals! If they did that—they committed a couple of offenses, which are confirmed. If they engaged in vote suppression, particularly the racist variety, which is one of the common varieties, you know where they belong.

Are we going to do it? Is the Republican Party going to clean up its mess and turn these guys in, for court administration, shall we say? Are we going to say that the vote means something in the United States? Are you going to let hysteria, and muscle, and mob violence determine who can vote and who can't? And then say that this guy in Texas, who doesn't know what a natural catastrophe is, has been honestly and fairly designated as the re-elected President of the United States, with that stinking mess sticking out there?

Vote suppression! We don't know what the result of the election was, because we don't know what the effect on the election was of corrupt practices such as vote suppression and related kinds of things which, if they're not formally crimes, ought to be considered as tantamount to crimes.

The Opportunities Before Us

Let's go to the third issue: the question of the opportunities before us. Now, one of the reasons I'm in Europe at this point, well, the principal reason for my schedule, is that I'm engaged in exploring, in ways that I can do better than anyone else, as the kind of citizen I am, in exploring some options for new kinds of understanding between the United States and our partners, not only in Europe, but new relations with the nations of Asia and coming to common decisions on what we're going to do about the injustice, the terrible situation in Africa, for example.

In the Western Hemisphere, we could do something ourselves: If we wanted to behave ourselves, we could fix our relations with the nations to the south of us. It might take some patience, but we could do it. But in the world at large, in a world in crisis, we have to develop new kinds of ties, new kinds of relationships, with the world at large.

We have to develop a new understanding with Western Europe and Russia, for example. We have to bring in a new system.

Now, for some time I've been on this case, back to the 1980s, for example, in particular, when I was pushing the Reagan Administration to adopt the SDI, which it did do. And as a part of that, one of the things that I was doing in my negotiations with the Soviet government on behalf of the Reagan Administration, was to propose this kind of arrangement. I said, let's get rid of this immediate threat of a thermonuclear confrontation. Let's do this by getting other nations to agree with us—and I did find a lot of agreement in Italy, Germany, France, and so forth on this—why not propose that we consolidate, scientifically, the technologies needed to develop systems which are superior to any kind of system which we have now, but which we know exist and can be developed, in order to intercept missiles of this type, in such a way that we can prevent anyone from winning a war by the use of thermonuclear ballistic-missile barrage? And use that technology which we develop for this particular purpose, and use it immediately for many other purposes, to improve the economy of the nations of the world, and share this technology with people.

Various people proposed that. Let's build a world, a new kind of world in which we have new kinds of cooperation among nations. This is the way to resolve these political problems, by creating a platform from which we can negotiate the political problems by platforms which represent common interest.

So what we need today, we need to get rid of the terrible relations which the Bush Administration has created with Europe. We have almost lost our friends in Europe, at least as far as this administration is concerned. Some people in Europe are frightened of the United States. They try to be nice to Bush, as Putin does in Russia. But they know that the United States is really their enemy. You saw this come to the fore again recently when Brzezinski was meddling in Ukraine. You saw the angry reaction from Russian President Putin.

Things are not good. Don't believe it: Just because Germany is nice, and because the French ask to cut deals, and the Italians are nice, don't believe that they're happy with the United States. They're not. Going into the greatest crisis in modern history, which we're in now, we need to come to common action and understanding for common action, with nations in Europe. We need to think in the long term, of our relations with China, our relations with India, with Asia in general. We need to think about justice for Africa, as well as other things. So therefore, these are the kinds of discussions we ought to have, and my job is to pioneer in finding out, and spreading the propaganda, and finding out people in Europe and elsewhere who are interested in that kind of proposition.

There's a movement in the world today which was somewhat activated by George Bush's unleashing of war against Islam. One of the figures in this, of course, is Pope John Paul II, with his continuation of his efforts for peace among religions, a dialogue among religions, ecumenical program, which became expanded into a general dialogue of cultures. And there's a move for a dialogue of cultures in many parts of the planet. The time has come to do that. We have to think about this kind of future relationship. And I'm involved in particularly one thing, in particular.

At present, as you probably know, one of the central features of conflict in the world today, is a fight for ownership control, financial control, over raw materials. The United States is one of the nations involved in this. You'll find that the smart money, the smart predatory money in the United States, is reaching out to grab long-term control over raw materials. You'll find in Europe, in the United Kingdom, the same thing. An effort to grab as much as possible, of the future raw material resources of the world. Russia is itself, with the nations immediately adjoining it, a raw materials power. The mineral resources of Russia, of that area, are immense.

China is not much of a raw materials power, in terms of its own immediate territory, but China is the biggest bidder for raw materials, future control of raw materials, in the world today, moving down into South America, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and so forth. The great shields of raw materials that we have least explored are in Eurasia, including going down into Africa, the African shield, or the Eurasian shield.

Now, there is no shortage of raw materials on this planet, at least for the foreseeable future. If we manage things properly, and use the science we have and the science we know we can develop, we can ensure that this planet has a sufficient flow of required raw materials to ensure a modern and technologically progressive society available to every part of this planet for an indefinite period to come.

For example, the richest source of raw materials is the ocean, not the land; it's the ocean, and what lies under it. So, if we proceed with the proper science, we can manage this. One of the things that we have to do, obviously, is we have to work out under a revised world system of sovereign nation-states, agreements among states to cooperate in a program of development and sharing of raw materials at fair prices, which means that every part of the world can get access to the raw materials that it legitimately requires, at fair prices.

This is one of the differences in the situation today from what it was, say, 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. We are now so expanded in terms of the advanced utilization and occupation of the planet, we can no longer assume there are frontiers that we can loot, like barbarians, indefinitely. We are taking over the planet, economically, physically, we're taking over more and more of it. But when you take over the entire territory, you don't have neighbors to loot. You've got to think about how you manage what you have. And so therefore, one of the common problems, the common interest problems of the planet, is to develop a relationship between European civilizations which have one kind of culture, and the assortment of cultures which are called Asian.

The point of unity with the great expansion of the population of China, India, and some other parts of Asia, which are the great population centers, is to deal with this problem of guaranteeing the raw materials for all, at fair prices, on fair terms, for the indefinite future. And therefore, what we need is a new, what we would call a new Treaty of Westphalia, where we enter into a global agreement, probably through facilities of a reinvigorated United Nations Organization as a medium for doing it, to set up multi-layered agreements, multi-layered contracts, for management of things like raw materials on this planet for the future.

It goes together with things like the space program. We live in the Solar System; we're part of the Solar System. The conditions on Earth are dependent upon the conditions in the Solar System in which we live. Therefore, we do have to reach out, scientifically, and find out what's out there. We do have to discover principles that are otherwise not available presently.