Latest From LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche Addresses Midwest, Seattle LYM:

'FOR WANT OF THE MESSAGE, THE KINGDOM WAS LOST': — WE'RE THE PEOPLE WITH THE MESSAGE

Here are Lyndon LaRouche's remarks to LaRouche Youth Movement cadre schools in Toledo and Seattle, on May 8, 2005.

We're in an interesting situation. You're almost in the middle of it, or approximately in the middle of it, geographically in Toledo.

We have the following problem: We have a number of people in UAW locals, UAW presidents, who are in a sense "on the ball" conceptually on the nature of the problem before us. We also have reported from the Democratic Party and from the Congress, the fact that some alleged UAW officials say there is no problem. I don't know what the problem is, that they would say that! Particularly after what happened this past week. We're now in a situation, where, as I've read it—.

Let me just step back one, and say something else on this: What we got, during the week, and I didn't agree to it at all—first of all, we got from the GM people—who I think are worthless anyway; I don't think they have any competence whatsoever in the industry. They're in another business, not the automobile-manufacturing industry. They're in the financial business. But, then you had, obviously, from Democratic Party high-ranking circles in Washington, that they had not only from the management of GM, but also from UAW officials, the perception that there was no problem! Now, we also had a story, to the effect that there was not going to be a downgrading of the GM stock to junk status, until mid-summer! And by that time, the people would have gotten out from under their financial derivatives problems, and would have let it go, and it would have been announced without any great problem for the financial community as a whole.

I said, "Bunk!" But, nobody agreed with me, apparently, from those circles. Even circles that are friendly to me. I said, "No, it's going to come down." Well, it came down a day or so after I got this word from high-ranking Democratic Party officials, who are relaying things from people in the Congress, who were looking into this matter; saying there's nothing to do, there's nothing that Congress can do. If the constituents don't complain, how can the Congress act? Especially the UAW.

So, then it collapsed. And it came as a shock to many people in Europe, and a shock to all the circles that we're regularly in touch with, in the Congress and similar places in the United States. They were wrong! They had disagreed with me, and they were—as usual, when they disagree with me—wrong! Especially on economic and strategic matters.

So now, the thing is finished.

Now, what can happen, is either we reorganize the GM production capabilities, and presumably other things, like Ford may be in the same boat, for example; but, we take those measures, now, which require action from the Senate, in particular, or else, you're going to find that there is no future for the automobile-manufacturing industry in the United States—at least, no future worth mentioning. The only thing that might possibly survive, will be foreign subsidiaries, of foreign companies operating in the United States in manufacturing. But, U.S. companies operating in manufacturing of automobiles in the United States, will be largely out of business. And that means that the entire labor force, or virtually all of it, associated with GM and with other things, like Delphi and so forth, are out of business!

And it's irreparable. What happens is, if that happened, you would have that the only significant machine-tool capability, would be a limited capability inside the military, and that is pretty much on thin ice these days. So, that's where we stand.

So, the big problem we have, is foolish people, who don't take seriously what is about to happen to the manufacturing potential of GM and associated companies in the automobile and related fields. If that continues, then the United States starts to become a real Third World country, with not much of a future. Under those conditions, the chain-reaction effects under present circumstances, would be such, that there would be very little hope of a recovery, and the world would go into, not a depression, but a virtual dark age. Because, what would happen is, the dollar would collapse—it's ready to collapse. And without some kind of program of the type I'm indicating, there's no hope for the dollar.

If the dollar collapses, that means that everybody who holds dollars overseas, such as China, Japan, and elsewhere, and Europe, is up the creek. Because a collapse of the dollar will be a 30-50% collapse of the value of the dollar; which is already, now, it's around $1.30 for a euro, already. And only because of certain special manipulations has that been somewhat lowered, moderated. If the dollar goes down, you're talking about $2 for a euro, or something like that: When that sort of effect hits, then you have a chain-reaction, because the world monetary system is a dollar system. You have a chain-reaction inside the world monetary system, you have a sudden crash which is much bigger than the 1929 Crash, 1929-1931 Crash—much bigger. As a matter of fact, it's the edge of a dark age.

And remember, back under Roosevelt, when he came into office in March of 1933, we still had, lying fallow and partly operating, and still breathing a little bit, we had industrial capability. And Roosevelt was able to stimulate that potential, including farms! You know, people still had farms then, if you may recall. And many people left the cities, went back to live with their relatives on the farms to get some chickens and eggs, seed, or something, hmm? This is not the case, now.

So, we have a national social catastrophe. We have a disaster beyond anything in memory of any living person, hitting the United States. All because the "horse lost a nail"—you know, the story of the horseshoe nail. "For the want of the nail, the shoe was lost. For the want of the shoe, the horse was lost. For the want of the horse, the rider was lost. For the want of the rider, the message was lost. And for want of the message—the kingdom was lost." That's the kind of thing we're looking at.

So, we're in a position, a very significant position, where we have the message, clearly. And at this moment, all the speaking people in the political system, do not have the message. The industry doesn't have the message. And apparently the UAW leadership doesn't have the message. And certainly, that bunch of idiots called GM's financial-management crowd, at GMAC and so forth, they don't have the message, either! They've got a gravedigger from Las Vegas: He's already selling off the bones!—of the GM productive capability.

So, we have to do something. And we have to, in a sense, deliver the message in appropriate ways, that I just gave you: If they continue to behave the way they're behaving, if the Senate continues to behave with a lackluster response to my proposals that I've seen so far: If this thing continues, kiss the United States good-bye! It's gone! A gone bunny!

And this happens, you know, in history. There have been entire civilizations which seemed to be dominant, in their region at least, at that time, which went down! Went into wreckage! And they were lucky if they existed in history, at that point. For example, you had the case of Greece, Athens: They had just achieved a great naval victory, through an alliance, over the Persian Empire, which was the major threat to Greece at that time. These damned fools, in the leadership of Athens, under Pericles and so forth, started a war against their allies! Began looting their allies, and acting like an empire, a cruel, Nazi-like empire. This set into motion what became known as the Peloponnesian War.

And Greece never recovered from the Peloponnesian War. You had the attempt to reform it, led by Socrates; and what happened, is the government of Athens murdered—committed a judicial murder—of Socrates! You had later, a man who was a young guy, a young man at that point, Plato, at a time later, picked up and began to lead Greece in a program which could have saved it. And founded Plato's Academy of Athens, which continued from that point on, for about seven centuries, as the leading scientific institution of the world. But, they went down, too.

As a result of that, and after a period of this Ptolemaic system, which was already collapsing, Rome came up. And at the end of the Second Punic War, Rome began to expand as an empire. And there were bloody fights among the military forces of Rome, until finally, about the time of the inauguration of the Emperor Augustus, Rome took over. And Rome was a big step down—culturally, politically, everything! It was a retreat of civilization, from the level that Greece had represented, at the time that Greece went into the Peloponnesian War.

Now, the characteristic of this, which is really ominous, is, the entry of Greece into the Peloponnesian War—at the time of Athens' greatest power, up to that point—was that the Greek population had become what is called "Sophists." Now, if you want to see what a Sophist is, look at the typical Baby-Boomer generation of today: That is, the people born after the war, after World War II. And look at the "Tweeners," those who are in, say, their 30s today: You want to see Sophists? You want to see people who don't believe in truth? Who believe in spin? Who believe in playing word-games? Who have no standard of truth? They have only a standard of adapting to popular opinion and manipulating popular opinion. And being manipulated by it! As you see in the case of the leadership of the UAW, or the national leadership of the UAW. And to say nothing of the utter incompetence and suicidal propensities, of the financial management of the General Motors Corporation, GMAC, and so forth.

So, we're in a situation, where we have an analogous kind of situation: a situation which is typical of the collapse of great empires. In which the United States, and the civilization it dominates, is about to go into the bucket, because of this kind of ideological phenomenon, which over the past nearly 40 years—and longer, but especially about 40 years, since the run-up to Nixon's election—the United States has been going to hell. The beginning of the War in Indo-China, officially, the official War in Indo-China, was the beginning of really going to hell. And we've gone to hell!

Now, we're at the point, that we still have chance to survive: If we will change our ways. If we will get rid of the sophistry, and get back to a sense of truth, we could survive. We could survive quite nicely, if you look in terms of a couple of generations. We could begin to recover right now. Under my leadership, if I were President, we would be recovering right now. We wouldn't be recovered, because you can't fix what you've destroyed. And a lot of things have been destroyed, in the past 35 years. They don't exist any more to be fixed. You can't repair the automobile which has been scrapped.

So therefore, we're going to have to rebuild. But we can rebuild, and continue to rebuild successfully, if we wish to. And within a couple of generations, that is, within 50 years, we could have a world system which we could be proud of. And in the meantime, we could enjoy the fact—under rather tough times, but we would enjoy it—we would be on the way up.

We are at the turning point, right now. And you young guys, in your generation, especially the 18 to 25 age-group: You represent the turning point. Because, unless you're able to crack through, as a force which can bring the older generation (I don't know if you can do anything with the Tweeners, but maybe the Baby-Boomers) bring them back to their senses, we can survive. We have a chance. It's up to you.

Now, what I've written, recently—I don't know if you've seen it; you may have heard about it—a new piece: It deals with the mental aspects, the mental diseases, the mental sickness, which is underlying our problem, at the same time I indicate what the direction of the solution is, which I've been talking about in various things I've written and spoken about and so forth, in the recent period. We could survive.

But we have to understand these ideas. You're not going to survive with slogans. You've not going to survive with gimmicks: You're going to survive by ideas which overcome the Sophistry, the particular type of Sophistry, which dominates and directs the political behavior of the leading institutions, including the Congress of the United States, today. So, you're not going to it by slogans; you're not going to do it by gimmicks. You're only going to do it by changing the minds, the way the minds work, of a lot of people in the political parties and Congress.

Now, we've demonstrated that can be done. We demonstrated it by my policy, going into the 2004 Presidential election. I went into it, and I stuck to it, because I knew I had to. I knew the nation had no chance, unless I ran for President. That didn't mean I had to win the nomination, or win the Presidency. But I had to fight. I had to fight to change the political system, the political climate in the United States. I had to exploit the fact that the system was going into the bucket, and it was creating anxiety and uncertainty: in the hope that some people would realize that we were going into the bucket, or would get those reactions, realize we had to do something about this.

So, we stuck to it! We stuck to the Democratic campaign despite the fact the Democratic Party officially tried to do everything possible to destroy my participation. We succeeded in breaking through at the Boston Convention, which is something we did, over the objection of most of the leadership of my own organization, who were trying to sabotage me, from Leesburg, most of the time; and also, some of the regional leadership, also. We did that.

We went to Boston; we broke into the Democratic Party campaign, the Presidential campaign. They still weren't much ahead, but we had broken through. Now, by having broken through, by the end of the August, about the beginning of Labor Day, we were then brought in to the Democratic Party campaign, as a factor. And we played a key role in organizing for victory. What we had done, had it been started earlier—in the Spring for example, with our program—the Democratic Party would have been able to overwhelm all the opposition and would have assured, that even despite the vote fraud that was being done by this bunch of clowns, that we could have won the election. Actually won it, not just earned it.

All right. That's the situation. Now, we're in a situation: The Democratic Party was about to go out to commit a self-burial, the day after the election results were announced. We prevented that. We did that largely with a webcast which I launched on Nov. 9: We succeeded. We got some motion, some life out of the Democratic Party leadership, a small part of it. We went on. And when Barbara Boxer and others did their job, around the actual ceremony of inauguration of the President in protesting it, the Democratic Party pulled itself together and began to fight.

So therefore, we have a President of the United States who is already, in principle, seen as a lame duck. In the press—the British press for example: President George Bush is described as a "lame duck"; in the Australian press, President George Bush is described as a "lame duck." More and more people in the United States, are privately saying, "This is a lame duck. Maybe he's a dead duck, but he's not going to win anything." You had a press conference, a public press conference of the President—televised for about an hour—and what you saw, is a spectacle of a babbling idiot. And you blushed with shame for the United States to have such an idiot as its President! Such a mean-spirited, nasty, little idiot as President!

And still, the Democratic Party is whimpering. Some people who have been close to me, under pressure have backed off from me and so forth, because they couldn't take the pressure. That's gone on.

So, we're in trouble. So, you and I, and so forth, and we're sitting here, we are, spiritually, the future of the United States, and pretty much civilization because of the importance of the United States, in this process. We are the key. It's in our lap. It's our responsibility. The Democratic Party has proven that it's dead without me. It's doing a fine job, in many respects now. But it would be dead without my active participation, in a leading, influential role. Be finished. And the United States would be finished, too.

So, there we are. A relative handful. This is not unusual in American history, that we've gone to our greatest victories with a handful of people, relatively speaking, fighting. Remember the number of people that wanted to cave in to the British during the Revolutionary War? And so forth and so on, through our history. So, it's those of us, the tiny minority, which sticks to the responsibility, sometimes with ragged pants, and dirty this and dirty that, and poverty this. And it's we—not with the money, but with our guts and brains, who have repeatedly saved this country, or inaugurated, set off the spark which led to the saving of the country: We're back there, again.

That's our situation. And, you shouldn't be frightened by it. You should be proud of yourselves, to be part of it.