...... ...................Larouche Online Almanac

Published: Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Volume 4, Issue Number 20

This Week You Need to Know:

LAROUCHE DEMANDS BOLTON BE DEFEATED IN THE SENATE

May 13—Lyndon LaRouche today demanded that the Senate follow up the Foreign Relation Committee's refusal to recommend the nomination of John Bolton to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, by defeating the nomination.

Capitulation by people in the Senate would be pure cowardice, LaRouche warned, and lead to disaster. It would be an act of pure cowardice, which would spread to the United Nations, and lead to the United Nations being rendered less than useless.

...more

The Franklin Case: Bigger Than the Pollard Affair?

by Jeffrey Steinberg

Two senior Israeli intelligence officers are now under investigation for their ties to indicted Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin. The identification of former Mossad liaison to U.S. intelligence Uzi Arad, and former Israeli military intelligence officer Eran Lerman as targets of the ongoing FBI probe into possible Israeli espionage, involving Pentagon neo-cons and two top officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), suggests that the scope of the investigation goes way beyond the issue of Franklin's passing classified information, and hoarding secret Pentagon documents at his West Virginia home.

...more . . . . . . . . . .. . InDepth pdf

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Latest From LaRouche

Guts and Government

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

This LaRouche PAC leaflet was issued on May 10, 2005.

General George Washington's actions against the Hessians, like Frederick the Great's decision at Leuthen, Czar Alexander I's courageous acceptance of the Prussian leaders' advice on trapping Napoleon's invading forces, General Douglas MacArthur's Inchon Landing decision, are only typical of famous cases in modern history in which a situation required a combination of competence and courage from an exceptional individual who acted against the lack of a quality of command-decision capability by a majority among other leaders. The General Motors crisis is such a kind of national crisis, when a decision by some exceptional leadership must override the impulse of the majority to equivocate and vacillate.

...more

Animation Studies:
U. S. Physical Economy
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The Economy

World and Nation-State

This Week in History

May 16 - 22, 1933

TVA Created by Congress

Congress Passes Legislation Creating the Tennessee Valley Authority

On May 18, 1933, during the famous "Hundred Days" of New Deal legislation to restart the American economy, Congress responded to President Franklin Roosevelt's proposal to create the Tennessee Valley Authority. This was a massive regional infrastructure project dealing with the watershed of the Tennessee River in seven states. At that time, most of the Tennessee Valley was like a third-world country, where a million families lived on cornmeal and salt pork.

The hillsides had been stripped of their timber after the Civil War, creating serious depletion of the soil and a runoff problem that regularly led to disastrous flooding. In some areas, 30% of the population suffered from malaria, and there were also large pockets of tuberculosis, pellagra, and trachoma. Half of the population lived on farms, but 97% of those farms had no electricity. Yet the Tennessee River, which roared past farms lit by kerosene lamps, offered a virtually untapped source of potential power.

During the 1920s, Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, a Republican progressive, had fought for government operation of a large hydroelectric plant which the Federal government had built at Muscle Shoals, Ala., during World War I. His efforts were frustrated by the lobbying of private utility holding companies and by the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations. Concurrently, while Gov. Franklin Roosevelt was attempting to set up public power utilities in New York State, a professor at Antioch College, Arthur E. Morgan, wrote an article on managing unified river systems. Roosevelt determined that it could and should be done.

Writing in 1937, Roosevelt looked back at the beginning of the TVA: "As Governor of New York I had sponsored and brought about a statewide planning movement to be based on a study of the proper use of the 30,000,000 acres of land in the State, in which each ten-acre square would be separately studied and classified. Up to that time although many cities, weary of 'growing up like Topsy,' had begun to plan their future growth and development, little on a very large scale had been done for country areas.

"Before coming to Washington, I had determined to initiate a land-use experiment embracing many States in the watershed of the Tennessee River. It was regional planning on a scale never before attempted in history. In January 1933, I visited Muscle Shoals with a group of officials and experts; and thereafter planned for the development of the entire Tennessee Valley by means of a public authority similar to public authorities created in New York while I was Governor, e.g., the Power Authority.

"This plan, for using the land and waters of these forty-one thousand square miles, fitted in well with the project which had been urged for many years by Senator George W. Norris, for developing power and manufacturing fertilizer at the Wilson Dam properties which the United States had erected during the World War. We proposed to enlarge the project from the Muscle Shoals development which was but a small part of the potential development, to include a multitude of activities and physical developments."

When President Roosevelt travelled to Muscle Shoals in January of 1933, he brought along not only Senator Norris, but also Senators and Representatives from the four corners of the country, and a team of engineers. In his informal remarks, he stated that, "We are here because the Muscle Shoals Development and the Tennessee River Development as a whole are national in their aspect and are going to be treated from a national point of view."

That evening, the President made a speech from the portico of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, the same spot where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as President of the Confederacy. Although Abraham Lincoln's assassination had prevented the implementation of his development program for the defeated South, Roosevelt was now poised to carry it out. The President said that he was determined to put Muscle Shoals to work, and to make it "a part of an even greater development that will take in all of that magnificent Tennessee River from the mountains of Virginia down to the Ohio and the Gulf."

Roosevelt continued by stating that, "Muscle Shoals is more today than a mere opportunity for the Federal Government to do a kind turn for the people in one small section of a couple of States. Muscle Shoals gives us the opportunity to accomplish a great purpose for the people of many States and, indeed, for the whole Union. Because there, we have an opportunity to set an example of planning, not just for ourselves but for the generations to come, tying in industry and agriculture and forestry and flood prevention, tying them all into a unified whole over a distance of a thousand miles so that we can afford better opportunities and better places for living for millions of yet unborn in the days to come."

On April 10, Roosevelt submitted a request to Congress for legislation, saying that, "I, therefore, suggest to the Congress legislation to create a Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation clothed with the power of Government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." When the three board members he appointed to head the enterprise asked him what the TVA was, the President replied that it was a regional agency that didn't merely provide better navigation, flood control and electric power—it reclaimed land and human beings.

The TVA completely transformed the area which it served, bringing to its population the benefits of technology and a sense of hope and self-worth. But such an American System program was vehemently opposed by what Roosevelt dubbed the "Economic Royalists," or Tory faction. The TVA's program of inexpensive electric power, fertilizer, flood control, tree replanting, and mobile libraries was attacked as "socialism."

The Commonwealth & Southern Utility Company, owned by J.P. Morgan, and the American Liberty League brought 57 different legal actions against the TVA to stop its program. But in 1938, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the TVA was constitutional. The young president of Commonwealth and Southern was Wendell Willkie, who would lose to Roosevelt in the 1936 Presidential election, but would later play an unexpectedly positive role.

The most revealing attacks on the TVA were those which admitted that electricity might indeed help the farmers, but since they could not afford it, electric power was just a "luxury." The TVA replied that electricity was a necessity on the farm, and set out to show how it could be provided and used.

The agency's power plants provided electricity at a low rate, and that rate became the yardstick for the private power companies. The power was provided to towns and cities and rural cooperatives, and the farmers used the power to pump, grind, refrigerate, saw, milk, heat, and dozens of other functions which brought their farms up to the standards, and profitability, of modern agriculture. The first town to take electricity from the TVA over its own lines was Tupelo, Miss., and in the first year of service, the domestic consumption in homes and on surrounding farms jumped 126%.

President Roosevelt's long-range purpose of reclaiming not only land, but the lives of America's citizens and their posterity, was echoed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. He stated that, "We are getting ready for the day when a larger and more urgent population will require new acres for food supply and more power for industry. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be to confess that we have lost heart and hope in the future of America.

...more

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Links to articles from
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Vol. 32, No. 20
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Feature:

The Battle To Save GM Is the Battle To Save the Nation
by Nancy Spannaus
The battle lines are drawn around the future of the U.S. auto industry, particularly the General Motors Corporation—and the outcome of that battle may well determine the future of the United States as an industrial power. On the one side is the international banking establishment, which has signalled loud and clear its intent to strip and bury the productive core of the industry, in a desperate attempt to save their financial assets and power. On the other side, are the forces led by Lyndon LaRouche, who has the only plan on the table for protecting, and expanding, the machine-tool capability and skilled labor force which the auto industry represents.

  • Guts and Government
    by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
    This LaRouche PAC leaflet was issued on May 10, 2005.
    General George Washington's actions against the Hessians, like Frederick the Great's decision at Leuthen, Czar Alexander I's courageous acceptance of the Prussian leaders' advice on trapping Napoleon's invading forces, General Douglas MacArthur's Inchon Landing decision, are only typical of famous cases in modern history in which a situation required a combination of competence and courage from an exceptional individual who acted against the lack of a quality of command-decision capability by a majority among other leaders. The General Motors crisis is such a kind of national crisis, when a decision by some exceptional leadership must override the impulse of the majority to equivocate and vacillate.
  • Kirk Kerkorian
    Billionaire Vulture Grabs Up GM Stock

    U.S. stock markets were sent 'booming' on May 4 by a strike on General Motors by corporate vulture Kirk Kerkorian, who made a sudden move to raise his holdings to 9% of all GM stock. The stock had fallen to around $25 a share, from $46 a year ago, and Kerkorian (or is it Kevorkian?) bid $31 a share for 28 million shares. Auto supply companies' stocks also rose, even as they were announcing many new plant closings!
  • Wilbur Ross, Jr.
    The Profile of A Vulture Capitalist
    by Pat Salisbury
    An announcement in the Wall Street Journal on May 9 that billionaire 'entrepreneur' Wilbur Ross was planning to move into the auto parts industry, should ring alarm bells about the danger of cannibalization of the heart of productive industry in the United States. Ross, who served as a bankruptcy specialist for the financier oligarchy's Rothschild family for 24 years, now operates the Wilbur Ross Company out of New York City. The company describes itself as 'a private equity firm specializing in distressed investments.'
  • A Damage Report
    The Cost of the General Motors' Crisis
    by Nancy Spannaus and Lawrence Freeman
    Starting in the 1970s, General Motors Corporation began a process of shrinking its workforce and capacity. Under a hostile financial environment, which rewarded quick-fix financial speculation and cheap labor, and with a corporate management oriented toward this monetarist direction, GM drastically shrunk its labor force, from over 500,000 in 1978, to about 120,000 today.

National:

Bolton Fight Opens Window On Intelligence-Rigging
by Edward Spannaus

A new window on the Cheney gang's 'cooking of the books' on intelligence assessments—which has been largely covered up by all investigations to date—has unexpectedly been opened, with the fight over the nomination of John Bolton to become the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, the official conclusions of both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the SilbermanRobb report on WMD intelligence, were that there was no evidence of intelligence analysts being pressured to produce assessments which would justify the drive to war in Iraq— even though such evidence was contained in the details of their own reports, which most people never bothered to read.

  • Documentation
    Senate Committee Rakes Bolton Over the Coals

    Following are excerpts from the May 12 debate and vote in the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on the nomination of John Bolton to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
  • Secret Downing Street Memo
    The following are excerpts from a secret document reporting on a meeting of British Prime Minister Blair and his top security advisors, on the subject of Iraq; it also reports on a visit to Washington by Richard Dearlove, the head of MI-6, identified only as 'C.' The meeting took place July 23, 2002, well before the Iraq War. The document was leaked to the London Times, and published on May 1, 2005. The memo was written by Matthew Rycroft, then a Downing Street foreign policy aide.
  • Congressmen Seek Answers
    This open letter to President Bush, dated May 5, requests immediate information concerning a leaked document in Britain, which indicated the existence of a secret Bush/Blair prewar deal. It was signed by 88 members of Congress, led by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee and Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus. The leak has essentially been acknowledged by the Blair government.

The Franklin Espionage Case: Bigger Than the Pollard Affair?
by Jeffrey Steinberg

Two senior Israeli intelligence officers are now under investigation for their ties to indicted Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin. The identification of former Mossad liaison to U.S. intelligence Uzi Arad, and former Israeli military intelligence officer Eran Lerman as targets of the ongoing FBI probe into possible Israeli espionage, involving Pentagon neo-cons and two top officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), suggests that the scope of the investigation goes way beyond the issue of Franklin's passing classified information, and hoarding secret Pentagon documents at his West Virginia home.

Nuclear Option on Hair Trigger: Profiles of the Detonators
by Edward Spannaus

'We stand here on the precipice of a Constitutional crisis,' declared Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on May 12, on a straight party-line vote, to send to the Senate floor another of President Bush's 'filibuster bait' nominations, that of William Pryor to sit on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bush Administration's Strategic Policy Creates a Conundrum for U.S. Military
by Carl Osgood
The process by which competent military professionals are attempting to develop operating principles and conceptions by which the Bush Administration's strategic policy can be militarily implemented, appears to be heading into a contradiction which suggests that that policy cannot be implemented—at least, not in a rational way. This contradiction was first noted two years ago by this reporter after the Unified Quest 03 war game, co-sponsored by the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TraDoc) and U.S. Joint ForcesCommand, and held at the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., when the pre-emptive war policy became an issue in the game.


Economics:

'Pension Panic' Nails Coffin Of Bush Social Security Scheme
by Paul Gallagher
Events in Congress have offered proof of Lyndon LaRouche's judgment that the May 11 United Airlines (UAL) $10 billion default against all its employee pension funds, means that the 'Chile Model' privatization of Social Security, frantically pushed by the Bush/Cheney White House for the past six months, is dead.

Conference Report
German Labor Calls For Emergency Action
by Rainer Apel
Expectations were high at the May 11 conference on 'Industrial Policy' in Berlin, arranged by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group for select factory councillors of German industrial firms. About 300 labor representatives from all over Germany attended the meeting.


International:

60TH ANNIVERSARY OF WORLD WAR II VICTORY
Commemoration Sends a Double Message to the Russian People
by Michael Liebig

On May 9, during the celebrations held at Moscow to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Victory over Nazism and the end of the Second World War, two messages came very prominently to the fore. The first was a message to the Russian people. Despite Russia's collapse in the course of the 1990s, and the huge problems that remain, the country is pulling itself together. That War is, in a way, the exemplar for what is taking place before our eyes. In the Autumn of 1941, when crushing defeat seemed inevitable, suddenly, in a paroxysm of effort almost without precedent, and as more than 20 million men and women went to their deaths, the U.S.S.R. nevertheless succeeded in stopping the Wehrmacht, rolling back those massed armies, and in the end, sending them down to defeat.

Pitfalls Ahead For Tony Blair
by Mary Burdman

The Labour Party won a third term in office in the May 5 British national elections—a first for Labour—but the results were a 'tremendous rebuff' for Prime Minister Tony Blair, a well-known British military historian told EIR, while another British strategic analyst termed the results a 'bloody nose' for Blair.

Bush Policy, Not Proliferation Threatens World Security
by Marsha Freeman

During the first week in May, the 188 nations that are party to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), began deliberations at the United Nations, to review the status of the Treaty over the past five years. After a year of trying to hash out an agenda for the three-week conference, the participants could not agree on what to discuss, and were no closer to agreement after a week of consultations.

South American-Arab Summit Sets Example For World Peace
by Gretchen Small

Co-hosted by Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the first-ever South AmericanArab Summit was held in Brasilia on May 10-11, bringing together 17 Heads of State, two Vice Presidents, a Prince, 60 Cabinet ministers, and 315 other officials from the 34 nations of these two seemingly disparate regions. Together, these countries—12 in South America, 22 from the Arab League—represent over 660 million people of the developing sector.

LaRouche to German Youth
Earth's Next 50 Years: Your Generation Crucial

Here is the transcript of Lyndon LaRouche's opening remarks by phone to the LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school in Du¨sseldorf, Germany, on May 7, 2005.

'Don't Re-Kissingerize Lebanon,' Patriots Say
by Nina Ogden

A seasoned political leader in Lebanon commented, after watching an interview with President Bush on Lebanese TV last month, 'Many people who watched it are asking a serious question, 'Is Bush senile?' There is a French expression for a senile person who just repeats the same words over and over again. This is what Bush sounded like—repeating over and over again the words 'freedom, democracy, freedom, democracy.' Bush demanded that Lebanon form a Cabinet after the Cabinet had already been formed. He demanded that the Syrians leave when they are already out the door. Does no one in his own intelligence departments tell him anything? No one pays attention to him. He is being left behind. It is an embarrassment to the world to have a President of the United States in this condition.'

Italy Is Drawing the Lessons From the Calipari Murder in Iraq
by Claudio Celani

If Niccolo` Machiavelli were to write The Prince again, he would surely include, in the chapter 'How a Nation Can Lose Its Best Allies,' a report on how the United States handled the crisis with Italy over the assassination of Italian intelligence official Nicola Calipari. As EIR readers know, Calipari was killed in Baghdad on March 6 by a U.S. patrol, which opened fire on the car in which Calipari was escorting Giuliana Sgrena, a liberated hostage, to the airport.

Interview: Ellie Armon Azouley
Young Israeli 'Refusers' Face Jail for Resisting Oppression of Palestinians

Ellie Armon Azouley is an 18-year-old Israeli, a 'refusenik,' who is facing a jail term for her decision to refuse to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the occupied territories. Azouley has worked for human rights inside Israel—with both Jews and Palestinians—since her early teens. She has personally observed the discrimination and human rights violations against Palestinians, and as a matter of conscience is refusing to be an occupation soldier, where she would be participating in the occupation's humiliation of, and violence against, Palestinians.


American System:

Hamilton's Economics Were About Mind, Not Money
by Nancy Spannaus

Two contemporary developments prompt this renewed treatment of the contributions of First Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to the intellectual tradition of the United States, most specifically its American System of political-economy. The first is the multimillion-dollar promotion of Hamilton through the New York Historical Society's recently concluded exhibit, an exhibit which will soon begin to travel throughout the United States. The second, more important, is the increased necessity for Americans to master the principles underlying Hamilton's economics, a subject which has been virtually buried over the past 70 years, if not more, but which is crucial to the ability of political leaders today to get out of the deepening depression, and onrushing financial breakdown crisis.

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