Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 11, March 13, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 11, March 13, 2020

- I. What Leaders Must Do Now

- IMPLEMENT LAROUCHE’S FOUR LAWS Emergency Appeal to the Presidents of the United States, China, and Russia, And the Prime Minister of India by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Angst on Wall Street: the ‘Floating Rate’ Monetary System Is Sinking by Paul Gallagher

- THE LAROUCHE FACTOR The State of Play Following Super Tuesday by Barbara Boyd

- II. The Intrinsic Power of Sovereign Government

- The Issue of America’s Manifest Destiny for Today by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (2000)

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST The European Renaissance Is Our Model for Addressing Today’s Existential Crises

- SUCCESSFUL PHYSICAL ECONOMICS One Hundred Billion People on Earth, And Many on the Moon and Mars! by Megan Beets

- IN MEMORIAM Chuck Turner: Bald, Bold, and Bright

Don’t Panic

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 11, March 13, 2020

Cover This Week

LPAC

See page 27.

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DON’T PANIC

I. WHAT LEADERS MUST DO NOW

3 IMPLEMENT LAROUCHE’S FOUR LAWS

Emergency Appeal to the Presidents of the United States, China, and Russia, and the Prime Minister of India

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

President of the Schiller Institute

March 8, 2020

5 Angst on Wall Street: the ‘Floating Rate’ Monetary System Is Sinking

by Paul Gallagher

7 THE LAROUCHE FACTOR

The State of Play Following Super Tuesday

by Barbara Boyd

INTRINSIC POWER OF SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENT

10 The Issue of America’s Manifest Destiny for Today

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

January 14, 2000

28 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

The European Renaissance Is Our Model for Addressing Today’s Existential Crises

36 SUCCESSFUL PHYSICAL ECONOMICS

One Hundred Billion People on Earth, and Many on the Moon and Mars!

by Megan Beets

42 IN MEMORIAM

Chuck Turner: Bald, Bold, and Bright

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

Watch The LaRouche Case video

Watch the LaRoucheMemorial video

Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche

at lpac.co/exonerate

I. What Leaders Must Do Now

March 8, 2020

IMPLEMENT LAROUCHE’S FOUR LAWS

Emergency Appeal to the Presidents of the United States, China, and Russia, And the Prime Minister of India

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the Schiller Institute

This appeal to President Trump, President Xi, President Putin, Prime Minister Modi, and leaders of other countries, for the emergency implementation of the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche, is being circulated internationally. Readers may add their signatures to this appeal.

March 8—Most health experts are now calling the coronavirus officially a pandemic, and only a few are avoiding this term in order not to rattle the markets and the investments in the “Pandemic Bonds.”

It is apparent that this pandemic will be the deathblow for the otherwise already bankrupt financial system, of which the largest stock market collapse since 2008—the unprecedented plunge in the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes, and the announcement of Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren to go for “helicopter money”—are alarming and undeniable signals.

Instead of learning from China which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) has set a new standard for dealing with such a crisis, most governments did not use the three months’ warning time they gained due to the efficient intervention by China, to go into a crisis mode. It is shocking, but not surprising, how completely incapable the liberal establishment has shown itself to be of reflecting on the fact that it is their policies which are the cause of an unprecedented threat to the entire human civilization, and of drawing the conclusions to change their ways.

As early as 1974, Lyndon LaRouche set up an Ecological-Biological Holocaust Taskforce, to investigate the effects of the IMF and the World Bank policies to slash food and energy consumption, as well as health expenditures in the developing countries—which showed that this would lead to biological catastrophes, the emergence of old and new diseases, and pandemics. In the following decades, LaRouche and his movement published many more warnings, and offered concrete development programs for all continents, the implementation of which would have prevented the present, out-of-control crisis.

Sure, the so-called industrialized countries may somehow cope with the crisis, but at what price? Due to the privatization—i.e., profit-orientation—of the health sector, there are now far too few intensive-care beds available for the treatment required. The Belgian critical care doctor and head of the national trade union of doctors, Dr. Philippe Devos, has just warned that this shortage will lead to the triage of old people for the sake of young ones, when the number of cases overwhelms the available ICU (intensive care unit) beds, which he expects will happen. Are we getting back to the slippery slope of ending “unworthy lives,” as condemned at the Nuremberg trials?

And what about the poor countries, which have not even the capacities for tests, let alone treatment? What about countries like Haiti, Nigeria, and Bangladesh? What about Iran, where the denial of medical supplies by the sanctions is clearly already causing the loss of many lives, unnecessarily?

What about the locust infestations in African and Asian countries, a danger which has been known for many months, and where the ridiculously small required financial help of $76 million has not been given, so that now the danger is that the locust swarms develop into a full-fledged plague, threatening millions of people’s lives in a short period of time?

What about the barbaric scenes at the Turkish-Greek border, where police from both sides are using tear gas against refugees, where one side may “instrumentalize” these people who have absolutely nothing, but the other side is no less barbaric, trying to keep the “outer borders of the EU” protected? Does the EU establishment really think it can build a new Limes Line around Europe, while Southwest Asia and Africa implode with a coronavirus pandemic, a locust plague, starvation, and desperation?

This establishment turned a blind eye to the interventionist wars by the Bush and Obama administrations, which were, after all, the main cause for the refugee crisis. They have had no interest in building infrastructure in Africa over the last decades, mainly because of their neo-Malthusian ideology. Have they, in reality, accepted the idea to let this pandemic and this locust plague run their “natural course?” Is this not a good fit with the Green ideology, which preaches that having fewer people is good for the environment?

There is a solution for this existential crisis, but when the so-called “elites” are morally unfit to introduce the necessary reforms, we need a broad mobilization of the population, who must act as real citizens. There has to be a broad, popular demand that the leading countries of the world—starting with the U.S., China, Russia, and India, supported by others—implement the following steps in the reorganization of the present financial system. The best way to accomplish that is to conduct an immediate emergency summit of President Trump, President Xi, President Putin and Prime Minister Modi to initiate these steps:

1. There must be an immediate implementation of a global system of bank separation, modelled exactly on Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall law of June 16, 1933. Under this system, the commercial banks must be put under state protection, and must be completely separated by a firewall from the speculative investment banks, which can no longer be allowed access to either the assets of the commercial banks, or the privilege of bail-outs through taxpayer money. The toxic paper of these banks, including outstanding derivatives contracts, have to be written off. Legitimate claims, which have to do with the real economy or the pensions and other assets of working people, are to be marked as valid in the new system. Some categories of demand for payments have to be frozen for the time being, to be evaluated in terms of their validity by state institutions.

2. There must be the creation of a national bank in every country, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States or the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau in Germany after World War II, so that state credit for productive investments can supply the physical economy with the necessary funds. The issuance of these credits must be guided by the principles of high energy-flux density and an optimal increase of the productivity of the productive capacities and the powers of labor, through an emphasis on scientific and technological progress.

3. Among the participating countries, a system of fixed parities must be established, and cooperation treaties must be established among sovereign states for the purpose of well-defined infrastructure and development projects. These treaties together will represent, in fact, a New Bretton Woods System as was intended by President Franklin Roosevelt, with the explicit intention to provide credit for the industrial development of the developing sector.

4. The urgent increase in the productivity of the world economy—to accommodate a world population of presently almost 8 billion people—must be facilitated through an international crash program for the realization of thermonuclear fusion power and other advanced technologies in such fields as optical biophysics and life sciences, in order to find solutions for challenges such as the coronavirus. Likewise, a crash program of international cooperation in space technology and travel can establish the necessary next higher economic platform for the world economy, as this has been developed by the economist Lyndon LaRouche.

The Belt and Road Initiative initiated by President Xi Jinping, which already has been joined by 157 countries, offers a concrete perspective to bring the urgently required industrial development to Southwest Asia and Africa. China has offered to work with all countries on this planet in a win-win cooperation to extend the New Silk Road to Southwest Asia and Africa, and in this way to provide a concrete development perspective, which is the only human way to solve the refugee crisis. The United States and all European nations must cooperate with this plan.

We, the signers, are making this urgent appeal to the governments mentioned, to act in this moment of an extraordinary challenge to the safety and existence of all of mankind, to correct the mistakes of the present system that led to this present crisis, and return to the principles of the common good, of sovereignty of the nation-state, and food and energy security, while we adopt a vision for the common aims of mankind and a community of the shared future of humanity.

hz.zepp@schiller-institute.de

Angst on Wall Street: the ‘Floating Rate’ Monetary System Is Sinking

by Paul Gallagher

March 6—Now is the time for the leading spacefaring, technologically powerful nations—particularly the United States, China, Russia, and India—to create a new international system of credit for scientific and industrial development. The Bretton Woods System launched by Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration in 1944 was such a system, and through the 1950s and 1960s that system gave many nations rapid growth and rising living standards, until the City of London banks succeeded in abolishing it in the early 1970s. The parasitic “floating exchange-rate” system they put in power after 1971 is finally, after decades of financial crises and crashes, destroying itself.

Fifty years of currency floats, casino speculation, deindustrialization, and globalization have crippled the “developed” nations of the United States and Europe and their allies. As a result, these nations currently don’t have the hospitals to meet a serious global epidemic of a novel coronavirus. They don’t offer help to stop unusually large swarms of locusts devouring food in developing countries. They don’t even think of exporting modern capital goods to those countries, in the way that FDR thought of exporting the revolutionary Tennessee Valley Authority model to the world.

“Fears arising from the coronavirus epidemic” are supposedly triggering 1,000-point plunges on Wall Street and a headlong global rush into U.S. Treasury securities, driving their interest rates down toward zero, and yet at the same time resulting in an aggravated shortage of liquidity (to speculate with!) on U.S. interbank lending markets. And for the third time recently, a significant Indian lending institution—the $50 billion Yes Bank Limited in Mumbai—has failed and had to be nationalized.

But it is not “virus fears” shaking London’s rotten “floating-rate” monetary system after 50 years. It is the tens of trillions of unpayable, speculative, securitized debt in an “everything bubble” of corporate speculation and households’ underpaid overextension. And there are hundreds of trillions of derivative bets trembling on top of it.

Underneath this financial house of cards are the beleaguered, worn-out real economies of the world’s nations, spiraling into a worldwide manufacturing recession, a recession now rapidly being worsened by the impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic and its quarantines. Large losses are beginning to cascade: by airlines (200,000 flights have been cancelled so far worldwide); in hospitality and retail businesses of every kind; in auto production and sales (China auto sales were down 80% year to year in February); in dropping aircraft orders. Oil producers are trying to cut world oil production by 1.5 million barrels/day. A leading Italian economist estimates his country is losing 2.1% of its GDP. The IMF is lowering its world economic estimates virtually every other month.

In her statement released by the Schiller Institute one week ago, Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for a summit of the leaders of the world’s economic and technological powers to put the “floating-rate” monetary system out of its misery. The American people must convey to President Trump the urgent message that now is the time for him to take a leading role, with at least China, Russia, and India, in replacing it with an improved, new Bretton Woods System. The first step is to restore Glass-Steagall bank separation—allow the immense bubbles of speculative, unpayable debt to be rapidly written off without destroying lending banks which are the channel of credit. Then the task is to begin to build. The futile effort to refinance unpayable speculative debt will be replaced with new joint credits for great projects of infrastructure in developing countries and at home. America and her partners will accelerate great space exploration missions by cooperation, and use space science and nuclear science and technology to raise human productivity and combat disease.

That new Bretton Woods credit system has been waiting since Lyndon LaRouche first outlined it more than 35 years ago. Aroused and organized citizens have to make these actions clearly understood among themselves and others around them, before they can be effective. Millions are attentive; this is the time.

Click here to buy The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land Bridge

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THE LAROUCHE FACTOR

The State of Play

Following Super Tuesday

by Barbara Boyd

Gage Skidmore

Joe Biden

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March 5—What we just saw on Super Tuesday, the so-called Biden miracle, requires a certain degree of madness to decipher. In other words, you have to put yourself in the shoes of those who have not fled the hair-on-fire insanity of the Democratic Party and explore their thinking. Yes, there was a huge mobilization of the apparatus Bloomberg had built in the Southern states, coupled with a mobilization of the extant Clinton and Obama and Bush machinery there, to suddenly get behind Biden; and yes, the media provided the Biden miracle narrative as cover; but that was only part of the picture.

The overriding dynamic is the hatred and fear of this President, created from the coup, exacerbated at this point by the uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus. Think about how crazy they are—Chuck Schumer going to the steps of the Supreme Court and directly threatening two justices. Some think, in a delusion, that they can somehow hide Joe Biden’s dementia and get him a Vice President who will reassure the public while continuing to inflame broad sectors of the public with the notion that anything, anyone, is better than Trump.

CBP/Glenn Fawcett

Sen. Charles Schumer

Sen. Bernie Sanders

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Should Biden win, it will be a fascist government of national unity, in which dopey Joe plays only a minimalist ceremonial role. More likely, the continued fragmentation of the Party between the Biden establishment and the Sanders forces will result in a brokered convention in which a new candidate emerges, or, prior to that, a new candidate may actually enter the race.

Within the elites, the clearer-eyed conviction is that this President has been trapped by the necessity of holding Republicans in his coalition for purposes of winning re-election and cannot take the bold steps which will be necessary in an economic contraction. They intend to inflame public fears around the virus and economic contraction in order to defeat Trump.

The LaRouche Factor

This is where we come in to the picture. We have successfully educated large sections of the Trump base, independents, and people on the nominal left about the nature of the national security state. And mass strike conditions within these populations continue now. But most, if not all, of the same people are absolutely ignorant about LaRouche and his economic discoveries and programs, and absolutely ignorant about the economic and scientific solutions which can get us out of this decadent descent. They continue to react and revolt but lack the ability to articulate the solutions. The fake narrative being sold to the population is that this election is a contest between something called “socialism” and something called “capitalism.” And that fake narrative is just as bad, or worse, than the claim that the Russians hacked the DNC.

They have no knowledge of the unique characteristics of the American System of political economy, the real invention which can be said to have been “made in America,” albeit with the best of European philosophical parts. It is completely different from British neo-liberalism, which is the actual content of Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism, as he keeps saying, or the predatory rentier finance capitalism of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman, the dominant economics of both the Democratic and Republican establishments. And they need to be educated about the concrete features of the American System and the methods of thinking employed by LaRouche, and educated fast.

Susan Kokinda recently pointed out that most have no idea that they are living in an economic system deliberately created in the aftermath of the destruction of the Bretton Woods system. But LaRouche understood, immediately, the consequences of that destruction and fought all his life for the solutions which it is now possible, given the mass strike conditions in the population, that we can impose, if we lead.

I am writing a series now for EIR meant to make this concrete for people. Michael Bloomberg’s New York City is my laboratory for demonstrating to people what happened post-9/11 to the United States—in education, healthcare, city building and housing, the environment, and culture. Once you look at these areas—not as the single issues, which is the way they are paraded to the public—but as aspects of a single, systemic takedown of former living standards, you can begin to map the actual apparatus and people responsible.

Left: EIRNS/Will Mederski; right: EIRNS/Dan Sturman

Left: Michael Bloomberg; right: Felix Rohatyn

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Bloomberg: Administrative Fascism

Mike Bloomberg is the protégé of Felix Rohatyn. Bloomberg’s three terms as Mayor of New York simply continued the policies of popular manipulation and profiling, dumbing down of the population, acceptance of wide disparities in income and social class, and colonial policing methods, which LaRouche detailed during New York’s 1975 financial crisis, and which he fought throughout the remainder of his life.

To cite but one example: 20 hospitals closed in New York City under Bloomberg’s reign. That was partly the result of President Barack Obama’s and Ezekiel Emanuel’s huge cuts in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. It was also the result of two commissions chaired by Stephen Berger, former executive of the Emergency Financial Control Board and veteran of Nelson Rockefeller’s Commission on Critical Choices, one under Governor Pataki and another under Governor Cuomo. This was the second stage of the deliberate shrinkage of New York. The first stage occurred, savagely, with the takedown of most neighborhood New York hospitals as the result of the 1970s financial crisis, BIG MAC, and Rockefeller’s prescriptions for the City. This second stage was led by the same people or their heirs, particularly Stephen Berger.

CC

Stephen Berger

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The same holds true in education, where Bloomberg took over the schools and instituted the drill-and-grill testing regimes of George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top.” Neighborhood schools were closed down, teachers were punished for non-performance, increases in teacher salaries by Bloomberg were used to obtain a buy-in to educational programs which were actually performing menticide on the young people subjected to them. Like most things involved here, the origins of this program were in Britain, and Bloomberg actually brought in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education czar, Sir Michael Barber, as an advisor. Barber advocates changing schools into individual businesses in which principals become the “entrepreneurs,” seeking funding from both public and private sources and testing becomes the stock exchange-like measurement of student “progress.” This model was fully deployed in the New York City school system by Bloomberg.

Right now, there are revolts brewing in the healthcare sector and in the education sector against these policies, and among the parents, teachers, students, doctors, nurses, and patients who have been subjected to these genocidal policies. By inserting LaRouche’s policies for actual economic productivity and sustained growth and science into these revolts, and extending what we have done concerning the national security state, we’re in position to turn the tide in this battle.

II. The Intrinsic Power of Sovereign Government

January 14, 2000

The Issue of America’s Manifest Destiny for Today

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This speech was first published in EIR Vol. 27, No. 4, January 28, 2000, page 22-35.

This is the edited transcript of a live video webcast conducted by then Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, from the Wyndham Hotel in Billerica, Massachusetts. Subheads and embedded links have been added.

LoC

The signing of the Mayflower Compact by the Pilgrims in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, before landing at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. The Pilgrims dedicated themselves to creating a society based on the principle of the Common Good.

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Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ve chosen to do this in New England for a number of reasons. First of all, because the issue of Manifest Destiny as a debate over the foreign policy of the United States, is the leading issue today. The currents, the opposing currents on that debate at the end of the last century, and at the beginning of this century, those issues remain today more important than ever before.

And they’re more important than ever before because we’re in one of the worst crises worldwide we’ve seen in any recent century. And this policy has to be understood. Unfortunately, very few candidates who are running for President, have even the glimmer of ideas of what this means. Most American citizens no longer know what the issue is, or what its practical implications are. And tonight, I will attempt to make that, in a shortened version, clear to you.

This is New England, a good place to choose for dealing with this, because it was here in New England, as defined in 1630 by John Winthrop, the founder of New England, otherwise known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony at that time, that the foundations of the states of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were made, under the leadership of Winthrop and those associated with him.

Peter Pelham

Left: John Winthrop, Founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; right: Cotton Mather

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From that point on, there was a certain policy about the developing of a nation in North America, starting from the Massachusetts Colony. That policy has continued as a viable policy to the present day.

It did not, however, start entirely here. It was a concept which was brought to North America by Europe. It was a policy which, in one form or the other, already dominated the late Fifteenth Century, the so-called century of the Renaissance. And, it was from the Renaissance that the ideas of our present, or what should be our present foreign policy, and what it has been in the best times in the past, was founded—from those ideas.

From the time of the Roman Empire, from the time of the birth of Christ, civilization in the Mediterranean region had collapsed, degenerated, and continued in a degenerate form of one degree or another, for about fifteen centuries.

But with the birth of Christ and the leadership role of his Apostles, there was a new conception of man and society, which was based largely upon the foundations of the Classical Greek tradition, especially the ideas associated with the work of Plato. And in the Apostles, especially in the Gospel of St. John, or the Epistles of Paul, you’ll find this conception of man on which our later foreign policy here was founded. You’ll find it established there; especially, for example, in Paul’s Epistle in I Corinthians, Chapter 13, where this concept of man was set forward.

The Power of Cognition and the

Golden Renaissance

But the idea is that man is not an animal. Man, unlike any other species, is capable of willfully increasing our species’ power in and over the universe. This is possible, because we have a power which is called, technically, cognition, the power to discover universal physical and other principles, to prove that those principles are correct, and to apply those principles in ways which enable us to increase man’s power in and over the universe, and to improve the conditions of life of the human being.

This quality in the person, the quality of cognition, combined with a determination to do good—in the sense of increasing man’s power in the universe, in the sense of improving the conditions of life of human beings through the use of this power—was called, in the Ancient Greek, agapē, which is the term which was the subject of the original Greek version of Paul’s I Corinthians, notably I Corinthians 13.

For a long period of time, almost fourteen centuries from the birth of Christ, there was a struggle by Christians, to establish a society which was consistent with that principle. That is, that all men and women are equally made in the image of the Creator, by virtue of having this power of cognition, the quality of agapē, the potential to increase man’s power in and over the universe, and to improve the conditions of life through the discovery of these kinds of principles, which no animal could do.

And thus, we must have a society fit—a form of society fit, for that quality of creature: man cast in the image of the Creator. And it was only in the Fifteenth Century, in a period called the Golden Renaissance, that the first successful steps were made to actually establish this kind of society, for which people had struggled and dreamed over the intervening fourteen centuries.

This developed in the middle of the Fifteenth Century, around an event which is called the Council of Florence. But the enemies—the Roman feudal tradition, tried to stop the emergence of this form of society, which we call today the sovereign nation-state. And therefore, powerful forces, centered in Venice, organized a revolt against the efforts to form this kind of society.

The first such nation-states based on this principle, were France under Louis XI; and following that, modelled on the success of Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England founded the first modern nation-state in England, though his son and successor, Henry VIII, as we all know, erred. He stepped in the wrong direction a few times. He had a Monica Lewinsky in his life.

So, as a result of the struggle in Europe—and remember, Europe was dominated, from about 1517 until the middle of the Seventeenth Century, that is, 1648, by religious wars. Those who opposed the nation-state in Europe, tried to defend the old feudal order, in one way or another, by pitting parts of Europe against each other in religious wars. And terrible religious wars dominated Europe during most of the Sixteenth Century and the first half of the Seventeenth Century, until the Treaty of Westphalia.

Detail of John Trumbull’s painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee presenting their draft to the Congress.

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A New Nation-State in North America

Now, it was under these conditions that people in England and elsewhere, conceived of establishing a new nation-state on the continent of North America. The first such venture was the founding of New England, by that name, by John Winthrop, in 1630. And it’s from that, that the United States came.

Now, Massachusetts was not always good; New England was not always good. It deteriorated. But nonetheless, what was done under the leadership of Winthrop, and collaborators of his, such as the Mather family, in education and so forth, this was the foundation of what was continued by Benjamin Franklin during the Eighteenth Century, in leading this nation, or what became this nation, to founding the United States.

At a later point, the question came up, and it came up around the question of the Constitution in the 1780s, and in 1789 in particular: What was the mission, and what was the purpose by which we, as a nation, should define ourselves? How should we define our relations to other nations, in particular, but to the world in general? What was our purpose and our mission, which would be a kind of—our law, as it pertained to what purpose would guide us, in dealing with other parts of the world?

Now, back in the Fifteenth Century again, a crisis erupted. The Venetian oligarchy, which is a financier oligarchy, organized the fall of Constantinople, and turned Constantinople over to the Turkish or the Ottoman dynasty, thus dividing Europe, cutting Europe apart, and obstructing the development of the spread of nation-states which had been planned throughout Europe, nation-states such as—pioneer nation-states, such as France under Louis XI, or England under Henry VII.

And at that point, still in the Fifteenth Century, one of the founders of the Council of Florence, one of the organizers of it, Nicholas of Cusa, with his friends, launched an alternative to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, to try to save civilization as a whole, and European civilization in particular, by colonization, by voyages of exploration—by finding allies behind the back of the Ottoman Empire.

So, a map was drawn, drawn by one of the associates of Cusa, a geometer—who drew a map of the spherical Earth. This map was drawn by Toscanelli. The map went to Portugal. It was a map which influenced the Portuguese, in exploring the Atlantic, and going into the Indian Ocean.

The same map was picked up by Christopher Columbus, who had a correspondence with Toscanelli. And Christopher Columbus went to a woman, Isabella I of Spain, who was a little bit better than her husband, and much better than those who followed her as the rulers of Spain. And she sponsored Columbus’s voyage to America, using the map to rediscover the continent on the other side of the Atlantic. And he succeeded.

And therefore, we had a Spanish development in the Americas, where people who didn’t like the conditions of life in Spain and who had some courage, would flee to the Americas, to the so-called Hispanic Americas, to establish what became the foundations of nations in Central America and South America, that is, the Spanish-speaking part of this world.

At a later point, at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, you had the great effort of John Winthrop to found New England, as the germ of a new nation, a new kind of sovereign nation-state republic, based on those principles, and to spread that. From that time on, from 1630, the patriotic Americans, who were dedicated to that heritage, including, typically, Benjamin Franklin, worked to develop the United States, or what became the United States, as a nation, to move westward, and to move toward Asia.

And the struggles: beginning with the King Philip’s Wars here in New England, where the British and French tried to stop the spread of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, by organizing what was called King Philip’s Wars, to stop the spread of the colony.

Other efforts were made. But nonetheless, the struggle went on. The struggle was always—colonize westward. Bring the best people from Europe, the best common people who believed in this idea; bring them to this land, develop this land, move westward, open the way to the west, keep moving westward.

Andrew J. Russell

Begun in 1862 under President Abraham Lincoln, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869.

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This continued. Of course, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, you had the great effort of Lincoln and others, to build a transcontinental railroad, to spread and develop this land, by building railways which would enable us to conquer the land, to make it open to the people.

Remember, the railways were actually development areas. Where a railroad went, on both sides of the railroad, you developed farms, you developed industries, you developed towns. You developed the land. You brought people in, people from Germany, from other parts of Europe, to settle and build farms, and spread the area under development.

U.S. Technology Was a Model

And then we came to the West Coast. So, in 1861 to 1876, under Lincoln’s leadership, and his followers, immediate followers, the United States emerged as the most powerful single economy in the world, the most advanced technologically. Not necessarily the most advanced scientifically, but the most advanced technologically.

Our level of technology was a model, so that by about 1876-1877, the entire world was looking to the United States as the model to be emulated. Russia adopted the model of the Americas. We had Mendeleyev, who was at the 1876 Philadelphia celebration of the Centennial of the founding of the United States. He went back to Russia, and he built the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

You had developments in Germany. Germany, in 1877, changed its policy fundamentally, so that the German economic policy was a copy of the American economic policy.

Japan in the 1870s, adopted the American model of Henry Carey. And Henry Carey directly had a hand in directing Japan in doing that, to lay the foundations of what became the economic successes in Japan. And the same thing happened with Sun Yat-sen at a later point.

Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese who was educated in Hawaii. While educated in Hawaii, he became the future founder of the nation of China as a republic. He was backed by the Americans. He was hated by the British, and persecuted by the British.

But if you look at the plans for the development of China by Sun Yat-sen, in a book, The Vital Problem of China, which we republished, even in China, to get it back-translated into Chinese, for the benefit of the Chinese. His model for the development of China, was the model of the United States, the model of 1861-1876: the American model.

After visiting the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the great chemist and inventor Dimitri Mendeleev returned to Russia and built the Trans-Siberian Railway. Shown is a steam locomotive arriving at Khilok station in 1900.

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A Great Debate

So in this period, there came a great debate, a debate between the patriots and traitors of the United States, particularly in the latter part of the century. The patriots of the United States looked at the Pacific Ocean, and said, in continuation of the ideas of Cusa, that we must go across the Pacific, to help the nations of Asia develop.

And they understood something more about this. They understood that the culture of European civilization—when we speak of European civilization, we’re talking about, essentially, a Greek-founded, or Classical Greek foundation for European civilization, in all its achievements. So, it was a Christian matrix imposed upon the Greek Classical model. This was the model upon which our Constitution was based, our laws. This is the difference between us, and the British laws and the British traditions; that we recognized that we dealt in the world with other cultures: the culture of China, the culture of India. That we, being the products of European Christian civilization, must find our way to come to an ecumenical agreement and cooperation with people of other cultures in other parts of the world.

And the great drive, and the great debate in the last part of the Nineteenth Century, between the patriots, on the one side, like Blaine from Maine, who was Secretary of State for a while, who was an associate of President Garfield, an associate of the great heroes of our nation in that period, had this conception: We must go across the Pacific to establish an ecumenical relationship and bond with the peoples on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, to develop the world as a whole for our common benefit. And we must reach out to other nations.

What was the other idea here? That because of problems in Europe—and, of course, I have a great deal to do with Europe, personally. I know a good deal about it. I have a wife who beats me if I don’t learn enough about it—

But in any case, if you look at European governments and European political systems, the political systems of Europe are, at their best, inferior to the form of government which we established here in the United States, with our Constitution.

What’s the difference? Our head of state is an elected President. There is no person, under our law—of course, the Congress doesn’t obey the law too much, too well these days—but there’s no person under our law, who has greater authority in the state as a person, as an elected official, than the President of the United States. That is the characteristic of our Constitution.

Democratic Reform in a Feudal System

Now, what’s the difference, in Europe? With the exception of what de Gaulle tried to do with the Fifth Republic in France—which was an abortive effort, because when he went out of power, the Fifth Republic degenerated—European governments are not true republics. There has never been a true republic in Europe, not since the Greeks at least, or since the efforts in the Fifteenth Century.

Why? What happened in Europe, is, under the impact of the American Revolution, the idea of freedom received a jolt, and there were continuing efforts in the late part of the Eighteenth and in the Nineteenth Century, to develop republics in Europe. But the Europeans never succeeded in building a republic. What they built was something different. They built movements which moved for democratization, to democratize society. And thus, what they did, is they put pressure on the existing form of government—which was a feudal form of government, based on a monarchy, or somebody who took the place of a monarch, a permanent bureaucracy, which stayed no matter what the government was otherwise, and a parliament.

Nicholas of Cusa began the 15th Century Renaissance. Shown: Detail of relief on his tomb, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa before St. Peter, by Andrea Bregno, Church of St. Peter in Chains, Rome.

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Now, the parliament was a feudal institution. It was not a republican institution. And always, as you can see, if you look at the history of European governments, the monarch, the king, or the bureaucracy as such, could overthrow the parliament at any time they wanted to. All they would do is form a parliamentary crisis, and they’d dump the government. So the government had no real power. The government had power to lobby, to pressure the state, to pressure those who rule society. But no power to actually make policy—power to help shape policy, power to pressure. So, what we had in Europe was a democratic reform in a feudal system. And that’s what the governments of Europe are to the present day. Look at the way their governments function. They are not true republics.

We are the only true republic, in that sense. We are the ones who bear this principle. So it was understood by the best people in our society: two things.

First of all, that what we are did not come from the ground in the United States. It did not come “from the frontier” as such. It did not come from barrooms on the frontier, or from cowboys and Indians shooting each other, which is what Teddy Roosevelt thought it came from, or said it came from. But he was a great liar, so you can never believe what he said anyway. But the United States, as a republic, came from the greatest thinkers of Europe, typified by people like John Winthrop; typified by others who came here, and brought the best ideas of Europe here, with the hope that on this ground, those ideas could grow up and flourish as they had not been able to grow up and flourish in the same degree in Europe.

For example, in the end of the Eighteenth Century, the United States, our republic, was called a “temple of liberty and beacon of hope for all mankind.” And our function as a nation-state, as something produced here through the best influence of the best ideas of European civilization, was to create a form of society which would be an inspiration and a friend to all humanity, in bringing forth on this planet, a system of sovereign nation-states, which would cooperate, for their mutual benefit, in an ecumenical way.

The Principle of Reason

Now, what does that mean, “ecumenical,” in this sense?

You have a whole history of ecumenicism, particularly in the Mediterranean region. Because you had, first of all, Judaism and Christianity. And you had the great Jewish writer—rabbi, as he’s called, Philo of Alexandria, who was a friend of the Apostle Peter, and who wrote very important writings, who actually helped to civilize the Jewish religion at that point, which had been a captive of Babylon and the Romans at that time. And he laid down a principle of ecumenicism.

Later in the Fifteenth Century, the same Nicholas of Cusa to whom I referred, wrote a paper called De Pace Fidei, or The Peace of Faith, a dialogue among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, on what the relations must be among the people who represent these different religions. What is the common basis to avoid religious war, and to have a peace among the faiths, based on the adoption of certain common principles? It’s the same principle of Christianity. We call it the principle of reason.

In fact, if we can discover the truth, if we can discover a principle of nature, what we call a “universal physical principle,” if we can prove that principle to be valid, demonstrate it to be universally valid, then we’d know, by the power we have to make that discovery, there’s something going on in our minds which is not formal logic: the power of reason.

What we say, therefore, if we have a difference with others on religion, or on culture, we say that we must reason together, we must use this power of cognition, the principles which are made known to us through this sharing of this power of cognition, to recognize whatever our differences are in a particular faith as a given faith, that we must work together on the basis of reason. We must reason together, find a true universal principle, adopt it commonly, and work together on the basis of reason.

“Moses Mendelssohn played a key part in creating what is the modern Classical German culture.”

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Civil society must not be a religious society, but civil society must be of an ecumenical form, based on this principle of reason. And that is the way that we will have to deal with cultures such as China, or the culture of India, or other cultures which come from roots other than European civilization. In the case of European or Mediterranean civilization, in dealing with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, you have problems and struggles, but you shouldn’t have them, but because of a common root, you have an easier task in coming together in adopting common principles. Whereas, you go into other parts of the world, you don’t have the same cultural background. Therefore, you must look deeper, to the principle of reason, to find a common foundation for working together for a common interest. But it must be a voluntary association, based on reason teaching us that this is the thing we must do together, and civil society must be based on that.

For example, I referred recently in things we’ve published to one of our heroes, Moses Mendelssohn. Moses Mendelssohn in Germany, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, played a key part in creating what is the modern Classical German culture. Now, you might say Classical German culture is a Jewish conspiracy. And in a sense, it was. And he was part of it. He was also the great liberator of Judaism from persecution, by these ideas. One of his most famous writings, was on this subject. He remained, to his death, an Orthodox Jew. And he said he would, always. But, he said at the same time, society must be based on the principle of reason: Political society, civil society, must be based on the common principle of reason.

We Must Dedicate Ourselves to the Truth

And that we in the United States in particular, must exemplify that: the principle of reason. Not religious bigotry, but the principle of reason: that if something is true, we can discover the truth, and we can test it as to which is true and which is false, in universal principles. And other than that, we must dedicate ourselves to the truth, even when we don’t yet know it. That is, if we don’t know what the answer is, we can at least dedicate ourselves to the urge and desire and method of finding the truth. And that’s what our society is based on.

So, the conception among all the greatest thinkers of American politics, was in that direction. They may have said something slightly different than what I’ve just said, but we would all agree, among us. If they were alive and standing here today, we would agree. And Blaine would agree, even though I have some differences with some of the things Blaine said. But we would agree.

And the function of this nation is to be, still, to become again, the beacon of hope and temple of liberty for mankind, which it’s not right now. Not even for our own citizens. For the 80% in the lower income bracket, it’s not. But it must become that again. That’s our purpose. That’s the function we have among nations. That’s the role that the President of the United States must have, in dealing with other nations, in leading this nation, in his negotiations with other powers: to come to those forms of collaboration and agreements which are consistent with that. We must call ourselves that, we must see ourselves as that, and we must function to that effect. We’re not doing it now. What’s the situation now?

“The U.S. is using its power and the power of the British Commonwealth combined, to steal massively from other nations.” Shown are clothing workers in Hong Kong.

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We’re Producing Less and Less

We’re in a terrible situation. Not only is the United States in an economic crisis—and if we weren’t stealing from other countries, we’d know how bad our poverty is. The United States is using its power and the power of the British Commonwealth combined, to steal massively from other nations.

For example, you wouldn’t have the boom on Wall Street, unless, for the past fourteen years, the United States had been looting Japan. We have been stealing from Japan. Japan is printing money, and issuing it, at a quarter-percent interest overnight. Japanese yen, which are being issued by the Bank of Japan at a quarter-percent interest, are being borrowed by Americans and by Europeans, and others. They convert them into dollars; they use the yen to buy dollars. Then they come into our markets, and they jack the markets up, with financial speculation, like this great Internet bubble that’s now ready to pop.

In this country, we have a deficit, a national so-called current account deficit, that we as a nation, are spending $300 to $400 billion a year more than we are taking in. We are taking that money, from other countries.

We are living, not on what we produce, but—we produce less and less. We’re living upon slave labor, or virtual slave labor, from other countries. We don’t produce our goods—or less and less. We get cheap goods from other countries, through virtual slave labor abroad. And our companies buy those cheap goods, and dump those things on us. And that’s how we get along.

Look at our supermarket malls, for example. They’re disgusting. No decent goods. Look at the fact that our satellites don’t go up regularly, because they don’t work so well any more, because our engineers and our firms are no longer as competent as they used to be, because we’re not a productive nation any more.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Federal intervention is required to defend family farmers. Here, a bankrupt farm being auctioned off after foreclosure.

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Our farmers, generally, the real farmers, the family farmers, are going bankrupt. When farmers who are now in their 60s and 70s die off, what’s going to happen to the farms? There are no replacements for them, except cheap labor working on company farms. Gone.

Where are our industries? Look at New Hampshire, for example. How do people in New Hampshire live? We used to have industries here. We used to have respectable industries. We used to have some farming here, to get by. It was always a rather poor state, relative to Massachusetts, but a proud state. We used to make jokes when I lived up here, about the Massachusetts drivers and things like that. But we were proud, we had some dignity. Now, we take in people’s laundry. New Hampshire lives by tourism in the summer, and tourism in the ski season. And a few other things. But New Hampshire overall, as an economy, is no longer a viable economy. Look at what’s happened to Massachusetts. The collapse of the industrial potential of this area, of the technological potential. It’s being destroyed. So, this is true of the United States as a whole. We are being a self-destroyed nation. And the bills are piling up. Since [President Jimmy] Carter, since the middle of the 1970s, our national debt has become a cancer. Our total indebtedness has become a cancer, which is about to crush us.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

With trillions of dollars of debt in mortgages and derivatives attached to commercial real estate holdings, bankers, business owners, and their employees have reason to panic, without LaRouche’s solution to the financial crisis.

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When Japan goes down, as it may soon, or when Russia goes down, or a combination, and Brazil goes down, Mexico goes down, Ecuador’s already gone, there’s a crisis building up in Europe, we will go down too. And you will have people who are now in the upper 20% of income brackets, working as middle management at $60,000, $70,000 a year, with stock option bonanzas, which they’re using to buy $300-400,000, $600,000, million-dollar shacks, tar-paper shacks with Hollywood frontages on them, shacks that will collapse if people don’t stay inside to keep the walls straight—this terrible stuff.

The Danger of Fascism

This is what we face. The white shirts can turn into brownshirts very easily in this country. You have people who have no skills, really, who are middle management, who are generally psycho-managers more than goods managers. And when they lose their jobs, when the Internet bubble collapses—not all the Internet industries will go down. But some of them are just fly-by-night operations, essentially. And when they go down, these people—who have got $600,000 to a million-dollar mortgages on these tar-paper shacks, with a little bit of glorification and fancy faucets—when they go down, those mortgages will be unpayable. They’ll be migrating, looking for a job, and we’re going to have panic in this country, not so much among the people who are already poor, because they’ve gotten used to poverty. But these people will go crazy.

And if we don’t provide a solution for this problem here, a [Franklin] Roosevelt-style solution, we’re going to have white shirts turn into brownshirts. And you’re going to have the rage, which you see in the death-penalty cases, the finality rule in death-penalty cases, as in particularly Virginia and Texas, or now in Florida, where you’ve got the—both Bushes who want to kill everybody. I don’t know, just for pleasure or what not? They might as well open a Roman circus, and just get ’em out there, and kill each other or something—a meanness in the American people, an absolute meanness. You turn that kind of thing loose, with the absolute lack of morality—as we used to understand morality as morality, person to person—drive these people into a rage, and you’re going to have the brownshirts, or their equivalent, stampeding through the society, destroying us, tearing us apart.

So, we have a crisis. Since last August, when the financial crisis, the Russian crisis hit, we’ve been getting into wars. It started with [Vice President] Al Gore and his friends.

[President Bill] Clinton had a problem with the Lewinsky case—actually, with the Starr Chamber. He was distracted. In the absence, while the President was distracted by this impeachment process from last summer on through February, Al Gore and his friends inside the administration began organizing wars, together with the British government.

You had the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. There was no reason to do that. They were not involved in terrorism, or producing something—It was done because Al Gore and Madeleine Half-bright wanted it done. You had other incidents. You had Al Gore’s fanatical speech, for example, in Kuala Lumpur, attacking the Prime Minister of Malaysia in a way that even a Nazi diplomat wouldn’t have dared do in his time. Filthy behavior! The same crowd. Then you had the forcing of the renewed bombing of Iraq, pushed through by Al Gore. Not the President. By Al Gore and his friends, Madeleine Half-bright and so forth.

The Ostruznica railway bridge in Belgrade, destroyed by NATO bombing, May 1999.

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Then you had us go into a no-win stupid war, organized by the same people, behind the back of the President, in the case of the so-called Kosovo war, or the war against Yugoslavia. The bombing war, which has simply destroyed the territory. It solved no problem. The conditions are far worse than when the war started, throughout the entire region, including Kosovo. The same forces, the heirs of Bush and Thatcher, have launched terrorists internationally, headquartered in London. They’ve launched it in Transcaucasia. They’ve launched wars between India and Pakistan, virtual wars, now ongoing, and similar things throughout the world.

So, you’re in a situation which reminds you, in a sense, of what happened during the 1930s, during the period of the 1930s Depression.

But, at the same time that the economic situation is ready to blow, we’ve got this chaos—threat of wars. We have already the threat of a deflationary collapse: A 60-80% collapse of the stock market, for example, could occur at any time. Nobody knows when, because political factors will decide when and how things happen. We have a hyperinflationary tendency in real estate and elsewhere already building up, reminding us of Weimar Germany in 1923. They could go that way.

We’ve got wars and chaos spreading. We’ve got the two biggest dummies in politics, running as leading Presidential candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties. Either of these idiots in power, whether they’re just dummies or not, is a threat to our national security. That’s our situation.

Now, what’s the solution? That means we’re coming to a point in foreign policy, this financial system, this monetary system, this crazy thing that was started in 1971 with Nixon and the floating-exchange-rate system, this is about to come to an end, one way or another.

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

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We’re in a time in which the people who represent money, big money, are hysterical. Their plans are not to have Wall Street go up forever; you’ve got people who have bought into what they call “income streams”—people who have bought up raw materials, especially through London. The mega-mergers are grabs. They take all the money in sight, and they’ll never pay the bills. But somebody behind the scenes, who is behind the money grab, who has an angle on grabbing those assets when these mega-merger organizations go bankrupt. This means gold mines, it means petroleum, it means the communications industry—which is being grabbed up now. The idea of the communications industry being indispensable—anybody who controls communications after the system goes belly-up, will be able to control that income stream as a monopoly, or as a syndicate that controls it as a monopoly.

And we have the same thing with our power system. We’re running out of power. But people are moving, like Enron, to grab up power from companies, power companies that are going bankrupt, that control your energy. Control communications, control energy, control food supplies, control raw materials, the things on which life depends: to control those things, means you control whatever income stream exists when the thing goes belly-up financially. And they’re already moving for it. They have the suckers who are still betting on Wall Street. They’re still betting on these crazy stocks, betting on these financial ventures. They’re counting on their mutual funds, their money-manager accounts. They think they’re making money on it. They’ll be wiped out.

We don’t know exactly when, but it’s coming. No. The smart guys are not doing that. They’re letting the suckers do it, especially the suckers in the upper 20% of income brackets.

They’re grabbing up, around the world—they’re grabbing assets. Petroleum assets, mineral assets, communications system assets, power system assets, water assets, food monopoly assets. They’re grabbing them up. And when the malls go bankrupt, when the suburban projects go belly-up, they’ll be there, controlling the income stream and controlling the world. That’s their idea. They’re mad and greedy. That would mean a New Dark Age. We’ve seen this before in human history, in European history in particular, this kind of thing. And if we don’t stop it, don’t prevent it, it’s going to mean Hell, Hell on Earth, at least for decades to come.

LoC

President Franklin Roosevelt signing the Emergency Banking Act of 1933.

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We Have to Take Roosevelt-Style Decisions

So, what’s the solution? The solution is, of course, that we have to take Roosevelt-style decisions and answer the crisis. We have to act. We have to create a new monetary system. We have to put the thing into bankruptcy reorganization. We have to make sure that people don’t die on the streets because their pensions aren’t paid, because their savings accounts have disappeared.

We’ve got to keep order, so normal life continues. We’ve got to improve employment and production. We’ve got to do those things as emergency actions immediately. We’ve got to prevent chaos and bring back order, and start to put ourselves back together again.

But we can’t do it all by ourselves. We have to do it with other nations, or at least some other nations. Now, we need some other nations. Well, most of the world’s population, where is it? Most of the world’s population is in Asia: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, other parts of Southeast Asia, Central Asia, China, Japan, Korea. And then, also Africa.

This is where the great part of the human population is. Then we have ruined areas of the world, which could be great and prosperous, with good labor forces, at least the remnants of them, in South and Central America. Many of these countries have good labor forces, under good conditions.

So, we have people with whom we should cooperate and can cooperate, to put this planet in some kind of order.

And this brings us back to the question of Manifest Destiny. Does the United States still have the function, of being a temple of liberty and beacon of hope for these nations of the world? And can we do that by making sure we do it also internally, to restore the nation internally, as a temple of liberty and beacon of hope, in order to give it the moral authority to be a temple of liberty and beacon of hope worldwide? Could it be done? Yes, it could be done.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche and Ronald Reagan in conversation at a National Rifle Association candidates’ debate in Concord, New Hampshire in January 1980.

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A LaRouche Foreign Policy Approach

Let’s take the case of my own, and Helga’s, and our friends’ foreign policy, which we’ve been practicing. This is not something we dreamed up, it’s something we’ve been practicing.

It started in New Hampshire, in the New Hampshire primary campaign in 1980, when I was sitting at a table at a gun club event which had about 2,500 people up there in the Concord area, at what used to be the old New Hampshire Highway Hotel. And because we were arranged at the table as Presidential candidates, in alphabetical order by surname, Ronald Reagan was at the end of the table, and I was next to him. And you had all these other funny fellows there, too.

So, Ronald and I got into a little bit of discussion. There wasn’t much substance to it. It was just a discussion. But I saw, when he put his speech together, a five-minute speech which we were each allotted to do, I saw the way he did it, and realized the man was not as dumb as he was supposed to be. He had problems, but he wasn’t stupid. And I recognized that from talking to him.

So, when he became President, or had been elected, I, as a Democrat, got into a conversation with some of the people who were going to form, who were in the process of forming the new administration. And I said, “Well, what’s your agenda?” You know how politicians talk. And a whole bunch of them, including Richard Richards, and so forth, said: “What’s your agenda?” So, I would discuss with these people the things that I thought the United States ought to do. And they would say, “We like that, we don’t like that, we like that, we don’t like that.”

So, we would go around (Helga went with me to some of these meetings), and we’d meet various people, and we’d talk with the Democrats. I would say to the Democrats, leading Democrats in the Congress, “This is the way I think we ought to deal with the Reagan administration. We ought to move quickly, because there are some bad things over there. But we ought to move quickly to find common denominators which are good for the nation, and get this thing going in that direction now.”

Well, one of the results was that at the end of 1981, I had a project. And the question was discussing it with the Russians, or the Soviets then. So, to make short of the thing, I got involved, on behalf of the Reagan administration, in discussing with the representatives of the top Soviet circles, on my policy for dealing with the weapons crisis and related matters. So that led, eventually, about a year later, to Reagan making the famous speech announcing his SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative], on March 23rd, 1983.

Now, that went awry afterward. And I was out of the picture soon, because my enemies got into it pretty quick. And they made a mess of it. So what they’re talking about, about missile defense systems today, is mostly nonsense. Even though there were some people in the background who knew what we were talking about.

But since that time, and in earlier businesses in dealing with non-aligned nations and developing nations generally, I’ve been pretty much involved with the question of foreign policy matters, over a period of about at least three decades. And I know a lot of people, if you look at some of my endorsements [as a candidate for President] from various parts of the world, from leading figures from South America, Europe, Asian countries, and so forth, you see a reflection of the fact that I have been a significant figure on their horizon, in terms of relations with the United States and others, over this period of time.

In many of these countries, there are people who wish I were President. They think it would be good for them and good for the world. And they say so.

Courtesy of the Mount Washington Hotel

The International Monetary Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944. Shown at the podium is U.S. Treasury Secretary and Conference President, Henry Morgenthau.

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A New Bretton Woods System

So, I know these countries. I know what we can do. And I know that if I were President, I could deal with this problem. The problem is, that we must have an emergency action to put the present monetary system, which isn’t functioning, into bankruptcy, bankruptcy reorganization, by governments, by sovereign governments. In other words, we all agree that each government will take its chunk of the problem, and they’ll put that chunk through their own bankruptcy reorganization. But then we will coordinate our efforts, to get something out of this which will be stable for all of us.

Now obviously, if you’re going to make a sudden move like that, you’ve got to base your move on something which is a proven precedent. You can’t come up with some completely newfangled thing that nobody ever heard of before, and expect the people, as well as the politicians, to suddenly accept that as a plan of action. You’ve got to say, here’s where we went wrong. Here’s where we were doing things that were working, relatively speaking, and here’s where we went wrong and we began to do the wrong thing. That’s why we’re in a mess. Now, let’s go back to the point in the road where we made the wrong turn, and let’s begin to move from there.

So, this idea of a New Bretton Woods, is very simple. We had, from 1944 through 1958 and somewhat beyond, we had, with all its faults, a monetary system and a general economic policy which worked. It may not have worked the way we liked it, but it worked, relative to anything we’ve seen since. We had recovery of the world from the war, economic recovery.

U.S. National Archives

Post-war reconstruction of Germany is underway. The poster reads: “Emergency Program–Berlin–With the help of the Marshall Plan” (circa 1948).

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We had the Marshall Plan. We had a rebuilding of the United States economy, based largely upon Marshall Plan exports into Europe. So we built up our industries in helping Europe develop, and Japan develop, through Marshall Plan cooperation, and through that kind of policy; through the Bretton Woods agreements, the old Bretton Woods agreements: sovereign nation-state, gold reserve, fixed parities, tariffs which were protective for all countries, each and all countries, trade agreements of that type, and so forth. Low-interest, long-term loans to promote international trade, and that sort of thing.

LoC

President Roosevelt with UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and war correspondents at the conclusion of meetings at Casablanca, Morocco, January 1943.

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It worked. With all the failures, it worked! With all the problems, it worked, relative to anything we’ve seen since 1971. If we had never stopped doing that, we wouldn’t have the world financial and economic crises, or the U.S. crisis we have today. It should be obvious to nations which have gone through this kind of experience of the present IMF system—they all know it doesn’t work, they all know it’s destroying us. Well, let’s get rid of it. Well, you don’t ask one nation, by itself, to get rid of it. You try to get a group of nations together, to say, “We will jointly agree this thing has to go.” And if you have the majority of the human race in the deal with you, it’s likely to fly. And if the United States is a partner in it, the President of the United States, it’s likely to fly, particularly if the American people at that time perceive a major crisis which needs some fixing.

And our argument to the American people is: This is what worked. We’ve got the facts to prove it. You’ve got senior citizens who remember how it worked, who can remind you of it and tell you about it. That worked. What you’re doing now, has failed.

Now, let’s simply go back to the turn in the road where we made the wrong turn. Go back to the Bretton Woods model, maybe change the relations among states a bit, but do basically the same thing. Go in the same direction. Learn the lessons of the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, and go back to that.

A National Mission

Now, what does that mean? As I dealt with this yesterday, in a press conference in Concord, where the question came up, particularly from one of our friends who is in the machine-tool area: How do we do this? I said,

Well, you can’t just have an economy and set up a master plan of how it’s going to work and have it work. You’ve got to have a national mission. You’ve got to have a sense of purpose. What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?

Well, the general condition of this planet is as follows. Presuming we’ve gone back to the old Bretton Woods model, or something like it, the same principles, the same general idea, now. How are we going to build our way globally out of the crisis? How are we going to have a mutual advantage: China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South America, Central America, Europe, the United States? How are we going to have a deal that is equitable to all? What do we have to do?

Well, the basic problem of the planet is that when [Franklin] Roosevelt died, we didn’t do what he intended to do, that is, to rip up all vestiges of Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French colonialism and imperialism, and end the domination of this planet by a free-trade system. That was Roosevelt’s intention, as he stated plainly and repeatedly, to Winston Churchill. But, when Roosevelt died, Winston Churchill won. And the Washington gang took orders from Churchill, along with the people who worked for Churchill. And they put the policy in.

So, as a result of that, we did not address the question which Roosevelt intended to, to transform what had been the colonial region of the world, or semi-colonial, under free-trade domination and looting, and transform this into a collection of sovereign nation-state republics, which would be in partnership with the United States in particular, as well as Europe, and to try to build this world up so that you had just economic conditions throughout the world as a whole. To bring nations together as sovereign nation-states, so we would not create a situation where we’d look forward, in Roosevelt’s view—and mine at the time, when I was in service—to a world where you wouldn’t have another terrible world war.

And the way to do that, is to have a just economic system, and a just political system, in which sovereign nation-states have a partnership, a sovereign partnership, in terms of doing things together, which are in the common interest.

We Must Rebuild the Nation

Now, what does that mean today? That means in countries like China, or India, or Southeast Asia, or South America now, Central America, you have nations which could not by themselves, with their own resources, recover in time to meet the desperate condition of all of their population.

One case is China. China has now currently a rate of growth, annual rate of growth, of about 7-8% per year, maybe 8.5. It depends on how you calculate. But that sounds very good, considering the fact that the United States has no growth, really no net growth. You take the hot air out of our financial system, we are contracting, as manifest by the fact that we can no longer afford the health care we used to have. They tell us we can no longer afford the pensions we used to have, we can no longer have the educational system we used to have, we can no longer afford anything that we used to have, we’ve become much poorer. And anybody who’s telling us that things have become better is kidding themselves, or blowing hot air, blowing bubbles, as they’re doing on Wall Street.

It’s not enough to have a certain rate of growth, you’ve got to be able to sustain the growth. Now, you can have growth in the inland area of China, for example, where very poor people live. The Chinese economy is mostly located on the coastal areas, or near the coast, traditionally.

Inland, it’s poor, very poor, desperately poor. They’re one of the poorest parts of the world. They’re just better organized than some other parts of the world. But they’re very poor.

And the social stability of China, depends not merely on improving the economic conditions of these people, but improving the cultural conditions; and the improvement in economic conditions, is necessary to improve cultural conditions. That means you have to have a higher standard of living, more education, and all the things that go with that. Well, they’re not going to be able to do that, without a lot of high technology. You can not sustain growth at high rates, without also increasing the average productive powers of labor, as measured in physical terms.

We can do that. We have on this planet the ability to produce the technologies, which, used by developing countries such as China, or India, or South American countries, or Africa, we have the technologies, which, on the long term, will enable these countries to sustain growth, real growth, on a stable basis.

Ah! We used to be machine-tool exporters. We used to be high-technology exporters. Europe, especially continental Europe, used to be high-technology exporters. Present-day Russia has some industries, the scientific, military and scientific-industrial complex, which could produce machine tools—capable of doing it. Japan has a machine-tool capability.

If we, the nations which have a machine-tool type of capability for science-driver machine-tool development—we can supply the developing sector of the world with the tools and the technology which they need, to increase their productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer. That solves their problem.

We need to employ our people. We need to get back to work. What should we do? We should build those industries, and farms, and so forth; we need to maintain our own national economic security at home.

But what should we export? What should we concentrate on, in terms of exports? We should concentrate, together with Europe, together with Japan, and other countries which have a high-technology capability, on building up—what? Our universities, particularly science education. Our university laboratories, which test discovery and development of scientific principles; our machine-tool capabilities, including the highly specialized ones, and develop the new principles, including the ones that produce the applications for sophisticated machine tools, including the mass production machine tools that go with that. And helping these countries get also the supporting repair capabilities and maintenance capabilities, in the area where the industries are developing, which they don’t have in these countries now, at least not adequately.

Boeing

Workers installing the main-deck cargo door on a 737-700C at Boeing’s Plant #2 in Wichita, Kansas.

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That should be our mission, particularly for the next quarter-century, next 30 years. We should rebuild ourselves, not only to put our own shop at home in repair, but to orient ourselves, using this aerospace industry as a focal point or driver for this thing, to retool the United States with a mission. We, together with other countries which can do this, are going to adopt a mission of helping the rest of the world transform itself to end this kind of deprivation and misery, which affrights us and disgusts us. And thus we, those nations and we, should be able to meet together to come to the kind of terms which will be durable, because they’ll be beneficial over a long period of time to come. We have to understand our Manifest Destiny.

The Role of Legitimate Government

Our Manifest Destiny lies in Classical Greek civilization, its unique contribution to global civilization. It lies in the role of Christianity, especially the Apostles, like John and Paul, in taking this Greek Classical legacy and using it as the tool of Christianity, to improve the condition of mankind, as the Renaissance did later.

We need to develop the nation-state, the idea that a national government has no moral authority, except as it is founded on an absolute commitment to promote and defend the General Welfare of all of its people, including their posterity. That’s the only right that a government has to rule. Otherwise, it’s simply some group of people that treats the government and the people as their personal property, and passes down laws accordingly.

But the only foundation for law, is the principle of the General Welfare: that all human beings are equally made in the image of the Creator. It is our obligation to promote their General Welfare so defined, as creatures of cognition and reason, to develop and cultivate their powers of cognition and reason, to develop all children, to develop all adults, equally, and call that the General Welfare. To improve the condition of the present and future generations, the General Welfare. That is the only moral authority and the chief responsibility of legitimate government.

Our concern is to have on this planet the emergence of governments which correspond to this principle of the General Welfare, which is the foundation of law in the Preamble of our Constitution, and of our constitutional law. And to make that commitment, define that, our being the temple of liberty, make that the definition of our being a beacon of hope. And let us reach out to other nations, with that message, with that commitment, with that purpose, and say, “Let’s end this nonsense. Let’s learn the lesson. Let’s deal with the crisis.”

And let us, in the process, to show this is no novel idea, let us understand the Greek Classic. Let us understand the mission of the Apostles. Let us understand the accomplishments of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. Let us understand the achievements of the great scientists and others who struggled to make the Renaissance possible, including Abelard and Charlemagne, or Dante Alighieri and others who came before that, who made it possible.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Veterans parade in a World War II victory commemoration. What does it mean to be an American? “What’s your mission, what’s your commitment?” asks LaRouche. “Our concern is to have on this planet the emergence of governments which correspond to this principle of the General Welfare, which is the foundation of law in the Preamble of our Constitution, and of our constitutional law.”

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What it Means to be an American

Let us remember that, and let them live in us. This is no wild idea. We are simply affirming the proven principles of history, and the history of the United States in particular. Let us project that. Let us encourage our children, our citizens, to project that. When they say, “What are you?” You’re an American citizen. What does that mean? Other countries have citizens. What do you mean by your being an American citizen? What does it mean? What’s your mission, what’s your commitment? What’s your standard for picking the politicians you elect? What do you demand and expect them to do? Where do you expect them to stand? On some bite-size slogan they put out? Some phony gimmick, some sideshow, boola-boola, or do you want someone who thinks like that, who you can trust, because they are committed to that?

To educate our children, so that when they reach maturity, they’re that kind of a person, where each person can finally see themselves in what I call the simultaneity of eternity. Not an unusual term, but one rarely used.

That once we understand our nature, we understand that we are made in the image of the Creator, each equally so. We must cultivate or redeem that quality which is within us, given to us at birth. We must relive the acts of reason, the discovery of universal principle, which has been passed down to us, for us to re-experience and absorb in ourselves.

We are short-lived. We are born, and we shall die, all of us. Then, what is the meaning of our life, as our human life? Is it not to assimilate and cultivate in ourselves, those qualities which define us as human; to absorb the gifts of reason from preceding generations, from history; to utilize those and preserve and defend those gifts of reason, to add something to that for future generations, so that when we pass on, we have retained a permanent place in the span of eternity?

That is the natural capability, and also the right of every human being: not to be an animal that is born and dies, that has pleasure in the meantime. The right of every human being is to live in such a way, that they, in their own way, can have their powers of reason cultivated, can find something good to do for humanity, so that they can die with a smile on their face, because they die with the assurance that in the life they had, they have secured a permanent place, an identity for themselves, in the simultaneity of eternity.

That’s the commitment we must have. That is, to spark what’s inside us, and must radiate from us, so that we become a true Beacon of Hope and Temple of Liberty for all mankind. That’s what all of my predecessors in this political profession, who were good people, thought and dreamed. That’s what Blaine, in his own way, from Maine dreamed. That’s what John Winthrop, the founder of New England, dreamed. That’s what Benjamin Franklin attempted to do. That’s what Cotton Mather preached, and preached to others. That’s what Lincoln represented. That’s what Garfield represented. That’s what McKinley represented. That’s what Cleveland didn’t represent. That’s what Wilson didn’t represent. That’s what Coolidge didn’t represent.

That’s what Roosevelt, in his own imperfect way, tried to represent. That’s what poor Kennedy, who was assassinated, was groping to try to represent, too. All the best people at least tried to represent that, in their own way. And that, for us, as Americans, when we were good, was always, for us, our choice of Manifest Destiny. Thank you.

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ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

The European Renaissance

Is Our Model for Addressing

Today’s Existential Crises

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s March 4 weekly webcast by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. A video of the webcast is available.

CGTN

People all over the world are looking for leadership in dealing with the virulent coronavirus, which has now become pandemic. Common scenes in South Korea (above) and Iran (below).

CGTN

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Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast for today, March 4, 2020, with our founder and chairman Helga Zepp-LaRouche. The obvious starting point is the issue that’s on virtually everybody’s mind—the spread of the coronavirus. People are trying to figure out how to deal with it, governments are in action. There’s a lot of panicking being spread by some people, and then there’s also a lot of disinformation. I think, given the record we have, based on Lyndon LaRouche’s forecasting going back to 1971, what you have to say on this, Helga, is very significant for people. So, why don’t we start with what the recent status of this is, and how are nations addressing it?

The Coronavirus Danger

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think it is a very serious threat. There are several renowned virologists and experts who say it is, de facto, a pandemic already. Now, I will qualify that in a second. For those people who think this is too much, or that this will cause panic, I think when you have a situation like that, it is extremely important to take a calm assessment of the situation and then take the actions necessary to combat the threat and do the kinds of things that will hopefully succeed.

The reason this coronavirus is a very dangerous pandemic is that it has characteristics which are more serious than previous pandemics, and it coincides with a financial system which was already bankrupt before the coronavirus appeared. Naturally, the effects—both in the real economic situation and the real economy, as well as on the financial system—in all likelihood will trigger a collapse of this system.

So, rather than looking only at the health aspect of the coronavirus, it is the absolutely urgent moment and necessity to reform the international monetary system which is bankrupt; to replace it with a new credit system which we should discuss in a second. And then use that crisis to bring about the changes in the strategic situation which will help to solve a whole bunch of other problems. President Trump reflected this in his way by saying it is an irony of the situation that because of the coronavirus crisis, forces are coming together which would normally never do so.

Having said that, I think we should first look at the coronavirus itself. It is now officially spread to 70 countries, and it is not possible to reconstruct the origin, and who infected whom. But it is now spreading according to what is called “asymmetric transmission” or “community transmission,” and now beginning to hit countries whose health systems are not as good as China’s or even the European countries or the U.S., all of which already have big flaws in their health systems.

The danger is that it will now begin to spread much faster in this way. I also think there is a vast under-reporting, because in many countries, the kind of testing which was done rigorously in China has not even started—including in the United States, where the first test kits were flawed and did not work, which shows you one dimension of a broken-down health system. Several countries are now regarded as hotspots. It is spreading now more quickly in countries other than China: It is now in South Korea, Iran, and Italy.

CC/Zairon

In Europe, in an effort to arrest the spread of the coronavirus, many large conferences and fairs have been postponed and museums closed, as is the Louvre Museum in Paris, shown here.

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The situation is serious enough that major international events are being cancelled. In Germany, it was the Leipzig Book Fair, which was supposed to open shortly, and the Kraft International Conference in Munich. The Hanover Fair has been postponed for three months. Similarly, in France, the Louvre Museum has been closed, and indoor events involving large crowds are no longer permitted. That shows you that there is actually a serious concern.

I must say, however, that the reaction both in the United States and in Europe was delayed. I think measures should have been taken much earlier. Early on, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said the coronavirus would not come to Germany, a rather absurd assumption. The collapse of the health system which we have talked about many times before, is now really coming home to roost.

CC/Olaf Kosinsky

Jens Spahn, Germany’s Health Minister.

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Last December, the European umbrella trade union for health workers and nurses issued an urgent complaint that, because of the budget cuts and austerity in the last decade—especially after the 2008 crisis—there was a severe health crisis. Not enough staff. Pay for nurses and health workers has been cut in several countries; and resources have been cut down, and hospitals have been closed. That is now leading to a very critical situation.

China has 4.3 hospital beds per 1000 citizens. In the United States, it’s only 2.5 beds per 1000 people. So, you can see that China has been in a much better situation to deal with the coronavirus, and it has taken measures characterized by the World Health Organization as a new standard in how to deal with such epidemics and pandemics. China has now offered help to other affected countries.

It has offered help to the EU countries, but also Iran and other countries that are being hit very hard, offering expertise gained from its experience with the coronavirus over the last several months, but it is also offering masks, protective gear. I think the European Union and other countries would be well-advised to take China’s advice and its help. This is extremely important. A lot of time has already been lost, and now it is time for the kind of international cooperation which overcomes prejudice and geopolitical stupidity. I think this is now something that should really occur immediately.

EIRNS

“I warned you!” In 1974 Lyndon LaRouche created a Biological Holocaust Taskforce that forecast outbreaks of new diseases and new outbreaks of old diseases, and proposed remedies.

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LaRouche in 1971: ‘Depression Ahead’

Schlanger: When you now speak of delay, I think back to 1971, when your late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, spoke about how, if the world continues with the policy of neo-liberalism which came with globalization, austerity, and so on, that mankind would be confronted with biological holocausts. His warning was made very clearly, and yet, under the neo-liberal doctrine, the healthcare system, as well as the industrial system, manufacturing, food security—all of this has been torn down. So, apart from the emergency measures, we really do need this radical transformation of the monetary financial system.

Zepp-LaRouche: Let me stress one thing. Many of our viewers are quite aware of the fact that the name of my late husband has been slandered by many forces. But if you look at the present situation, I think it is a simple matter of honesty to recognize that every one of his prognoses has come true. And the reason why he was so “controversial” is because he went against the powers that be, against the people who were going for the complete deregulation of the markets, of the increase of the power of speculative interests in Wall Street and the City of London.

When he made this historic prognosis on the 15th of August, 1971, saying that when President Richard Nixon decoupled the dollar from the gold standard, abandoned the fixed exchange rates among the world’s currencies, and destroyed the Bretton Woods system by doing so, if that trend were to be continued, it would inevitably lead to a new depression, to the danger of a new fascism; or that system would be replaced with a completely new economic world order.

Then he proceeded every step of the way to warn about the consequences of the extreme monetarism which had been introduced and escalated, by warning that you cannot continuously lower the living standard of entire continents—as was done to the developing sector in Africa and Latin America and many of the Asian countries—without causing old epidemics and new diseases to emerge. And that that was the big danger.

In 1974, we created something we called the Biological Holocaust Task Force, [See the report in the EIR article, “LaRouche’s 1974 Task Force Forecasts Global Epidemics,” published October 24, 2014] to study the danger of the outbreaks of such new diseases. We also proposed the remedies, namely, to go into a crash program for optical biophysics for the study of life sciences, to find cures for these old and new diseases. Obviously, this was not done, because it was not seen as profitable by the pharmaceutical industry and the banking interests behind them.

LaRouche in 2014: Four Laws

So, now we are at the situation where all the forecasts of Lyndon LaRouche have come to a boundary condition. This financial system is absolutely bankrupt; we have to dramatically replace the monetary system and change it into a credit system.

This is why I have issued a call for the immediate implementation of the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche. I will just briefly summarize again what they are.

There has to be an immediate end to the casino economy. That means you have to have the introduction of a global Glass-Steagall banking separation in exactly the same way as Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed and implemented it in 1933.

Then you need new credit mechanisms; you need to bring back the issuing of credit into the sovereign power of governments, away from private interests. Which means you have to have a national bank in every country to issue credit for productive investments.

Then you have to implement a New Bretton Woods system by connecting these national banks in every country, which must go back to a fixed exchange-rate system.

The nations of the world must then establish long-term agreements among themselves for investments in very well defined infrastructure projects, in industrial investments, to increase the productivity of each and all with a special emphasis on such frontier areas as fusion, bio-optics, bio-physics, cooperation in space ventures.

And we need an urgent implementation of the many worthwhile projects as touched on in EIR’s Special Report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, published in 2014, and updated in 2018 by the Schiller Institute. The idea is to bring economic development to all regions affected by crises right now. That would specifically include Southwest Asia, because of the refugee crisis; and Africa, because of the coronavirus crisis, but also the locust crisis, the migrant crisis.

But the key message of all of this is, there is a solution. This solution could be implemented extremely quickly. As a matter of fact, we have also proposed that a summit should take place among the four most important powers of the world—Russia, China, India, and the United States—not excluding other countries, but because these four most important and powerful countries, together, have the economic and population muscle to actually implement LaRouche’s Four Laws.

Such a summit is already in the works and is on a very good track. I first made my proposal for such a summit on January 3, following the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq. A few days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a similar but different proposal, suggesting that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council should have an immediate summit to address the basic questions facing all of humanity. In the meantime, China and France have agreed, and today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reported that President Trump also has said he is very interested in participating in such a summit. So, that is the framework which could solve these problems very quickly.

I would appeal to all people, rather than becoming anxious, despairing, help us, rather, to bring these solutions about. I think this is the key characteristic of our organization—the Schiller Institute, the LaRouche movement—that we are fighting for actual solutions. The only solution which would function in such an extraordinary crisis, is to abandon the system which caused all of these crises, and replace it with a system which is in the interest of all nations. Let us achieve a New Paradigm of international cooperation. That is eminently feasible if the political will can be mobilized. That’s why I am asking you to contact us and work together with us to create the international support for these ideas.

Mere Money Machinations Won’t Work

Schlanger: In that context, we see the crazy response of the European Union and the Federal Reserve to the crisis, that the coronavirus can be dealt with by flooding more money into the system: The Federal Reserve’s dropping the interest rates, and so on. That’s the continuation of the neo-liberal system; that’s what we have to change, isn’t it? That kind of thinking?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, exactly! That really shows you that there is an absolute disconnect of the present neo-liberal establishments on both sides of the Atlantic—a complete disconnect from the causes of the crisis, and what is actually needed to remedy it. I have not seen any reflection, by any of the leading liberal representatives in Europe, or in the United States in the Democratic Party, for that matter, nor the neo-cons in the Republican Party, who have sat back and said, “Wait a second, why is our system not functioning? Why do we have a financial crisis? Why do we have the outbreak of pandemics?” That unwillingness of the liberal establishment is a very good reason for ordinary citizens to really mobilize and force a change, because, as it looks right now, it will not come from these elites.

Schlanger: I think that’s why we’re seeing a global insurgency precisely against these elites. We just saw in the United States, besides the craziness of the Federal Reserve, the election underway. The Democratic Party looks as though the establishment has decided they’re—at least for the moment—going to rally around Joe Biden, who is Mr. Establishment, the Obama-Clinton Democratic Party. Bloomberg just announced today that he’s dropping out; $500 million for a handful of delegates. Probably the worst businessman in world history.

What are your thoughts now after Super Tuesday?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think the Democratic National Committee (DNC) clearly wants to rig the election again: get Bernie Sanders out, who has his own massive problems, without question. But to basically try to get all the other contenders to drop out and support Biden. This reflects the fact that they have absolutely not learned the lesson of 2016. They still don’t know why Hillary Clinton lost that election. As you say, Bloomberg probably paid $1000 to $2000 or $3000 for every vote he got. I haven’t calculated it exactly, but it was a very expensive vote-buying. He blew $500 million for advertisements; this is really a joke, but I think a Biden candidacy would implement exactly what Bloomberg has been proposing: Green financing. It would be a complete catastrophe.

Creative Commons 2.0

Democratic Party presidential hopefuls all endorsed the Green New Deal. A campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan on August 1, 2019.

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I think we are now in a revolutionary situation, so forget about November 2020. The kinds of changes which the world urgently needs are a question of now. I think the immediacy of the situation is here. There were reports in the Italian financial press saying the only reason there has not yet been a wide recognition that we are already in a pandemic, is because of the so-called “pandemic bonds.” This was a financial instrument developed by the World Bank in 2017 after the Ebola crisis, which pay investors 6.9% to 11%, but if a pandemic breaks out, the principal is supposedly redirected to help low-income countries finance their emergency responses. The next date of maturity of these pandemic bonds is March 15.

That shows you the utter absurdity; to delay necessary measures, including informing the public in the necessary way, just to not risk the profit of some speculators. And it also shows you that the health sector is definitely not something which should be subject to financial speculators, but it should be absolutely the responsibility of sovereign governments to provide a health system for the common good of the people. I think this just shows you that the establishments at this point are incapable, unwilling, to recognize the reason why the liberal system is not functioning.

That means we will continue to have a very revolutionary moment. As the consequences of both the pandemic and the condition of the financial system get clearer, I think the upheaval which we have seen in the health sector in all European countries, but also among the farmers, will just increase. And it will force the kind of solution with the Four Power, or maybe the UN Security Council permanent five-member agreement which we have been proposing and which now Russia has successfully put on the agenda.

That’s the only thing to look at; don’t be confused. Don’t think the solution can be postponed until some date in November 2020, because the crisis is here, and it requires an immediate solution.

Turkey, Syria, and Greece

Schlanger: This is to all of our viewers: This is why we have been emphasizing, “Join us now!” Don’t think you can vote in November to change something. By November, it may be too late.

Helga, you’ve been talking about the unwillingness to change, the incapacity to change. We’re seeing a situation emerging now with Turkey, with the fighting going on in Idlib province, the possibility of a new wave of refugees into Europe. A lot of dangerous silliness coming out of the European Union. What’s going on with this situation?

Zepp-LaRouche: The problem is that Turkey is using the refugee issue to blackmail the EU. But also, they have attacked Syrian forces in Idlib, and are backing terrorist elements. It’s really amazing. Instead of attacking Turkey for intervening again in Syria, trying to escalate the longstanding war against the Assad government, the British First Secretary of State, Dominic Raab, came out in full support for Turkey. Then, this unfortunate German Defense Minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), also threatened to increase the sanctions against Syria, and basically fully took the side of Turkey.

CGTN

CGTN

Turkey’s President Erdoğan has created a large number of refugees in Turkey’s longstanding war against the Assad government in Syria. Here, a group of such refugees, attempting to escape across Turkey’s border into a Europe that doesn’t want them, are caught in the middle of Greek police using tear gas to stop them, and Turkish forces using tear gas to force them across.

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Fortunately you have Russia in this situation, and Putin said very clearly that if Turkey enters Syrian air space and territory, it is at their own risk if they are attacked. Russia obviously has a big role to play; Erdoğan will go to Moscow tomorrow to meet on Thursday and Friday with President Putin. If Putin and Trump would—they may be doing this already—but if they would agree on how to handle this crisis, then Erdoğan could be contained. Right now, however he is weaponizing these unfortunate and desperate refugees.

First the 13,000-15,000 refugees were fed the fake news that the border to Greece and Bulgaria was open. Then we saw the horrendous pictures of these refugees caught in the middle. Greek police used tear gas to repel them at the border. And Turkish forces used tear gas to drive these refugees back across.

These poor people, who have absolutely nothing to lose, because they are desperate, are being weaponized. They are absolutely caught in the middle of all of this, but obviously these pictures are supposed to force Europe to make another deal like the one the EU concluded several years ago, paying 6 billion euros to Erdoğan so he would build camps for the refugees. All together now, there are about three million Syrians in Turkey; plus many other people from Asia, from Afghanistan, from Iraq. Obviously, this is an untenable situation.

CC/European People’s Party

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

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Turkey claims the EU did not pay the promised 6 billion euros—probably a lot of this money went to NGOs and not to the Turkish government. This is all a completely disgraceful situation. And the situation between Turkey and Greece is super-hot. A delegation of the European Union, consisting of EU President Ursula von der Leyen; Charles Michel, the head of the European Council; the head of the European Parliament David Sassoli; and the Prime Minister of Croatia Andrej Plenkovic, just visited and gave a press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who basically said what is happening is that Turkey is absolutely making an asymmetric attack on the territory of Greece, and that this cannot be tolerated.

These august European Union guests had very little to say and very little to contribute. It just shows you one more time the utter impotence of the EU. But it also shows that if you have the statements of AKK completely echoing what the British First Secretary of State is saying, you have clearly the EU falling into the Great Game of the British again, using the Middle East as the cockpit for the Great Game. One only can say, the only counter to that is what I said earlier: You need the Four Powers—the United States, Russia, China, and India—to work together to counter these machinations.

Otherwise, I think it should be obvious that the only way to solve the refugee problem and the resulting instability is with an economic development plan for the entire region. It’s now been several years since China offered to extend the New Silk Road from Iran to Iraq to Syria, and to Turkey and Egypt; to connect the New Silk Road via Turkey with Europe, and via Egypt with Africa. That is something which has to start, because you have to give people hope. You have to give the perspective of economic reconstruction of Syria, of Iraq, of Afghanistan.

If you don’t have an economic perspective, there is no way this problem can be solved. I find it absolutely criminal that some politicians still are holding to the line that they will not give a penny for the reconstruction of Syria until President Bashar al-Assad is chased out of his office. I think this just completely criminal. The people who are saying that are personally responsible for the lives lost, and I think they should be treated with contempt.

UN/Cia Pak

Hassan Rouhani, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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What is needed right now is an urgent, international solidarity to reconstruct Southwest Asia as one region. Iran is one of the countries which has out-of-control poverty and coronavirus infections. President Hassan Rouhani recently said that there is not a single region in Iran that is not affected by the coronavirus. Even some members of the government are reported to be sick from it. The economic, trade, scientific and military sanctions which are being imposed on Iran by the U.S. are killing people.

It should stop right away, because you need a comprehensive solution. China has offered to help with the infrastructure; Russia has offered to build up the energy in the region. Obviously, other countries can participate in building up industry, agriculture, bringing in lots of new freshwater sources with new technologies. All of that is absolutely feasible, but it does require that the countries stop playing these geopolitical games.

If you are for ending geopolitics because you don’t want to have refugees, work with the Schiller Institute. We are the organization that is doing something; we are the organization that has solutions. That is why you should absolutely join us on the spot.

A Renaissance

Schlanger: In the midst of this confluence of crises, instead of panic and despair, you’re talking about solutions. I found it very interesting that Donald Trump, when he was in Davos, Switzerland attending the World Economic Forum there, spoke about the Dome of the Cathedral in Florence, Italy which you and your husband have often referenced, as an example of the merger of beauty and science as the proper approach. Europe had been through a dark age before, when mankind was lifted out of it with the Renaissance. You’ve been very outspoken about the need for a new renaissance, so I think it would be very useful for you to say something about that now.

Zepp-LaRouche: Many of you viewers probably know the extremely important book, the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Through the telling of 100 tales, he described the consequences of the Black Death in the 14th Century on the population of Florence. When you read this book, you can see the parallels to the present. The irrationality which naturally comes with pandemics; the misery; how people lose any kind of empathy because sickness overwhelms people.

I don’t think we are quite at that point, yet, in Europe, but if you look at what is happening in Africa with the locust plague destroying the basis for survival for many millions of people, we are quickly approaching such a situation like that in 14th Century Europe.

I have said many times, you need to study how mankind came out of the 14th Century and created the beautiful Italian Renaissance. Because that is a lesson to be learned. I can only make it very short. It was in Italy that a group of humanists developed, who took the ideas of Dante Alighieri, of Petrarca, of the school of Padua, who went back to the great philosophers of ancient Greece for a way forward. That environment allowed Nicholas of Cusa, among others, to bring the Greek Orthodox delegation to the Catholic Church’s ecumenical Council of Ferrara and Florence. The Greeks brought with them the entire works of Plato.

Nicholas of Cusa himself was one of the absolutely outstanding thinkers; I think he was probably the greatest thinker of the 15th Century, at least for European civilization. He introduced a new kind of thinking, the thinking of the coincidence of opposites—the coincidentia oppositorum—you have to think at the higher level of unity where you can solve problems that are unsolvable on the level of Aristotelian contradictions. So, it was that new thinking which, in my view, also influenced the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, coming together with the thinking of Plato, which had been lost for 1700 years in Europe. It then led to an explosion of a new image of man, a new optimism, a new role for science and technology, a new role for the common good, introduced for the first time in the question of the state.

EIRNS/Eli Santiago

LaRouche PAC organizing in New York City for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, and for a cultural and scientific renaissance.

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The Italian Renaissance, which laid the foundation for 600 years of European civilization, which the United States is also a part of, is a model.

If you are in a crisis—and the West is in a crisis, because we have lost our roots, we have lost the connection to our great traditions—we have to do exactly as the Italians did, going back to the period of ancient Greece. We have to go back to ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, the German Classical period, and other great contributions in universal history, and revive the best traditions of what we had in the past. Which means we have to reject the liberal way—and I know I’m upsetting now again a lot of people—that starts with the Enlightenment, which really was an attack on the Renaissance.

Instead we must go back to the humanist image of man. The idea that man is a unique species; that we are the only creative species on the planet and the only such species that we know of in the universe so far; and that we have great art, Classical composition, Classical music, great poetry and drama, great painting; classical art in general. We have to somehow go back to the image of man associated with these highest expressions of human civilization.

I’m absolutely convinced that if we do that in this moment of the coronavirus crisis and the other very severe challenges that we are confronted with, I think we can have a revival. I think we can have a true renaissance of our identity based on these great traditions. As the old Chinese saying goes, a great crisis is a great opportunity. I have always believed that Leibniz was absolutely correct that a great evil always means that mankind has the chance to create an even higher good, exactly because of this creative identity of man.

However, I have to say one thing. I am absolutely convinced also that this requires the full rehabilitation of my late husband, because his ideas laid the foundation for this movement and his analysis from 50 years ago has been correct all along the way. He provided the solutions we urgently need today. So, I think you should join our fight for the rehabilitation of Lyndon LaRouche. His exoneration would have the same intellectual spark and effect today as the re-introduction of Plato did to spark the Italian Renaissance, by getting people on a completely different level of scientific and artistic thinking. That’s why I’m asking you to support our effort to exonerate Lyndon LaRouche.

Schlanger: Helga, I don’t think you have to apologize for upsetting people. Anyone who is in a comfort zone right now, is obviously hiding in their own delusions. You’re following in your husband’s footsteps by being the person who helps to break them out of that comfort zone.

So, thank you for that, and we’ll see you next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till next week.

SUCCESSFUL PHYSICAL ECONOMICS

One Hundred Billion People on Earth, And Many on the Moon and Mars!

by Megan Beets

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Megan Beets

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This is an adaptation of a presentation given to a Michigan audience on February 29, 2020.

If we were to take the attitude which the United States had under the Eisenhower-Kennedy space program . . . combined with policies of investment tax credits for investments of a suitable kind, with a science enrichment program in our schools and similar kinds of things, I can assure you that—knowing what we know is important to work upon in science, in technology, knowing the kinds of projects which are the best way to express these technological improvements—if mankind of this planet had the political will to do that, we would increase the potential population density of this planet . . . [to] the order of magnitude of a hundred billion people, more comfortably, much better fed, much more secure, much freer, much less crowded than today.

—Lyndon LaRouche,

Food for Peace Conference, 1988

March 8—Contrary to the Malthusian outlook so prevalent among today’s policy makers, university professors, Wall Street bankers, and global elites, not only can the planet sustain upwards of 100 billion people, this is an absolute requirement for the progress of the human species, the planet, and whatever other planetary bodies we might someday inhabit.

This leads us to a brief, but indispensable lesson in economics from Lyndon LaRouche, the most successful economic forecaster of the 20th and early 21st centuries. That lesson is this: Economics has nothing to do with money! If it were about money, then the great geniuses of Wall Street—who produce nothing, merely inventing fictitious financial instruments which are leveraged to astronomical “values” and traded by the microsecond—would not be staring in the face of the biggest financial collapse in human history. Though there is more “money” floating around today than ever before, the physical conditions of life for the majority of people in the United States and many other parts of the world have been collapsing.

Economics is not about money; it is physical. What is physically required, per capita and per square kilometer, to provide a high standard of living for a population nearing 8 billion? How much energy (electrical and other), tons of raw materials, heavy machinery, water, and other supporting infrastructure are required by manufacturing, mining, and agriculture, to support the population? Extend that estimation to include what will be needed over the next economic cycle for a growing population.

In order to answer these questions, one can not approach the economy in the habituated way: from the bottom up, as a collection of individual businesses and actors, each with its own needs and income stream. Instead, change your thinking, and consider a national economy as a whole, as a unified agro-industrial firm, the survival of which depends upon producing more than it consumes, qualitatively and quantitatively.

Profit in Physical Terms

In his 1984 textbook, So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics?, LaRouche uses a simple schematic (Figure 1) of the economic activity of a national economy. The vertical bars on the left represent the total population, separated by category of labor (agricultural, industrial, or other), divided into three segments: youth, mature (working age), and elder. The total physical goods output of the mature segment of the labor force is represented on the right side of the figure.

FIGURE 1

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For purposes of illustration, focus on the output of the industrial labor force. This LaRouche divides into several categories, borrowing some basic concepts from thermodynamics: (1) V represents the portion of total physical-goods output required by households of the operatives. This includes not merely consumer goods, but transportation infrastructure, medical goods, etc.; (2) C is the total of capital goods consumed by production of physical goods, including costs of basic economic infrastructure of physical-goods production. Together C+V = energy of the system, or that which is consumed by the operatives and industries in the process of production for one economic cycle.

Productive output that supersedes the bare minimum needs of the current production cycle, which LaRouche categorizes as S, is the only competent definition of economic profit—i.e., producing more than you “cost.” From this surplus, S, we must deduct that which is necessary to support the households and activity of the overhead expense category, D. In this category, we have necessary overhead (doctors, teachers, necessary administration, etc.), and economic waste (unemployed persons who we wish to be employed, financial gamblers, drug dealers, etc.). Any physical goods output remaining is classified as free energy, S′. We will return to this very important category of output.

While this approach already frees us from the false measuring stick of money, merely dividing economic output into categories doesn’t tell us much—we must put it into motion, and look at how these categories ought to change over time in a successful economy.

Productivity

The first requirement of supporting 100 billion happy, healthy human beings, is that category V must grow over time, both in quantity and quality. As V grows, the ratio of C/V must also grow, a ratio which LaRouche calls capital intensity. This could otherwise be described as the technological and productive might which is “backing” each person—tons of steel, kilowatts of power, miles of rail—per capita. In capital intensity terms, people in the United States today are much more expensive than a century ago, and this is a good thing! It means that as individuals, we have greater power in and over nature, than those who came before us.

As capital intensity (C/V) grows, for a successful society, the ratio of the surplus S/(C+V), that is, productivity, must also grow. Another ratio interests us here: the expense ratio, D/(C+V). As capital intensity grows, the category of (non-waste) overhead expense will naturally grow, in the form of longer periods of education for more highly skilled operatives, more complex administrative tasks, etc. The key for a healthy economy is that while the expense ratio is growing over time, productivity must grow faster.

Why? And how? Here is where we return to the most important economic category: S′, free energy.

Science Drivers Such As Space Exploration

In thermodynamics, it is free energy—beyond the energy of the system—which is capable of doing new work. It is no different in human economics. The physical profit of the economy allows investment in new kinds of work—the development of new technologies, for example, and the upgrading of plant and equipment with those technologies. How we decide to direct this economic free energy will determine whether we, as a society and as a species, succeed or collapse.

In a 1983 book, There Are No Limits to Growth, LaRouche provides a vision of a good use of that free energy:

Imagine Mars fifty or sixty years from now, and so imagine yourself seeing a square kilometer thickly planted with young trees, each grown already to approximately a meter in height. Is this “science fiction?” Unless we destroy civilization with thermonuclear warfare, or, alternatively, famines and pandemics caused by neo-Malthusian policies, between A.D. 2030 and 2040, there should be a significant beginning of large-scale colonization of Mars by mankind.

Lyndon LaRouche delivered his famous half-hour television broadcast, Woman on Mars, during the 1988 presidential campaign. In it, he presented an optimistic, realizable vision for establishing humanity’s first colonies on the Moon and Mars in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Christopher Sloan

An artist’s concept of Selenopolis, Krafft Ehricke’s city on the Moon.

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In the mid-1980s, even while under intense political attack (and later, unjust imprisonment), LaRouche ran for President. A central part of that campaign was a 40-year program for the colonization of the Moon and Mars. He presented this in, among other places, a 1986 paper, “The Science and Technology Needed to Colonize Mars,” reprinted in EIR on April 26, 2019 (Part 1), and May 3, 2019 (Part 2); and a 1988 television broadcast, Woman on Mars.

The multi-phase, comprehensive program begins with the building of space stations and transportation infrastructure in Earth orbit, and the establishment of the first permanent habitation on the Moon. This is all to be completed by 2005, and built with materials from the surface of Earth. Phase two, 2000-2015, establishes an energy grid on the Moon, improved habitations, a self-sustaining supply of foodstuffs, and a mining/manufacturing operation which will begin exporting products to markets on Earth.

By the early 21st century, one million people should be living and working on the Moon’s surface. In Phase 3, unmanned rover and orbital satellite exploration of Mars is followed by the placement of components for a future space station in Mars’ orbit. Flotillas of spacecraft carry the first human explorers to Mars’ orbit, and in-orbit assembly of vehicles for visits to the surface begins, followed by the first exploratory surface landings. This is completed by 2015. Between 2015 and 2025, a fleet of rockets for cargo and people, based on fusion technologies for powered flight, is built; the Mars-orbit space station is assembled, and materials needed for the first permanent colony are delivered to Mars’ orbit. By 2026-27, humanity is ready to descend to Mars’ surface and establish mankind’s first permanent foothold.

So now, dear reader, imagine yourself standing among those meter-high trees on the surface of Mars, under a dome which encloses this fledgling forest. Imagine the small city of scientists and workers just a short distance away. What challenges did humanity solve to get there? What discoveries were made which allowed you to stand among those trees, a resident of our first city on Mars?

Here we will touch on just two of many. First: control over energy.

The first Martians will be very expensive in energy terms. In order to sustain an Earth-like environment, energy use per capita and per square kilometer will be many, many times higher than even the most “expensive” societies today. For a rough illustration, think of what it takes in energy terms to sustain an individual at a research station in Antarctica—the energy consumed for warmth, delivery of foodstuffs, fuel for cooking, electricity generation, all take much more effort to supply than for a person living in a developed community in a temperate climate. In the deserts of Mars, only the energy-densities of nuclear fission and fusion will be able to provide enough power for a viable society. (See Figure 2.)

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

CC BY-SA 2.5/leafnode

The Hohmann transfer, developed in 1925, is an orbital maneuver that places a vehicle on a trajectory which spans two orbits. Here, the Hohmann transfer (3) is a new, elliptical orbit the closest and farthest distances of which are the starting planet’s orbit (1) and the destination planet’s orbit (2). A short burn of the engines changes the craft’s velocity to enter the Hohmann transfer orbit (Δv) and again to exit it (Δv′) and, for example, to enter an orbit around the destination planet.

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The case is similar with spaceflight. With current chemical and ion-thruster rockets, travel from place to place in space is done via Hohmann transfer orbits. (See Figure 3.) This is an orbital pathway on which, once the vehicle has fired its engines to enter the correct orbit, it can coast to its destination, only firing the engines very briefly for small course correction maneuvers. While very energy-efficient, travel via Hohmann transfer can take a long time. The NASA New Horizons craft, which flew by Pluto in 2015, left Earth in 2006, and used a series of multiple orbital transfers over nine years to get to its destination! For robotic craft, or short (three-day) voyages to the Moon, this is a fine way to travel, but for human beings who would be facing a months-long trip to Mars while exposed to dangerous radiation, a safer alternative must be found.

Because of the energy density of fusion fuels, a fusion-powered rocket would make it possible to carry enough fuel to fire the engine throughout the entire trip to Mars. (See Figure 4.) If the rate of engine firing accelerated the rocket at 9.81 meters per second per second (9.81 m/s^2, the acceleration of falling bodies in Earth’s gravity), with a mid-trip switch to deceleration at the same rate, passengers could reach the Red Planet in a matter of days or weeks, and would enjoy a simulated gravitational environment—thus providing the best chances for a healthy arrival. The kind of accelerated flight we’ve just described will also be necessary when human beings begin exploratory trips beyond our solar system.

In addition to greater control over energy, mastering high-energy particle beams and high-power lasers will give us greater and finer control over matter. Lasers, as opposed to light from the Sun or from a lightbulb, function as beams of organized, coherent light. A laser beam, and its energy, can be focused on a specific target, and its wavelength can be fine-tuned to the material it is to interact with. Figure 5 shows the increasing temperatures to which we could raise matter with mastery over high-power lasers.

FIGURE 5

Temperature Increase Through Focusing of Laser Beams

FIGURE 6

LLNL

A pulse delivered to a stainless steel plate by a conventional laser (a), which causes cracking and heating of the material, and by a petawatt laser (b), which produces a completely clean hole. The comparison below shows the jagged cut and slag of the conventional laser (c) versus the completely clean cut of the petawatt laser (d)

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One example of the power that lasers give us over matter is seen in the petawatt laser, already under development since the 1990s. A petawatt is 10^15—one quadrillion—watts. That’s about a trillion times the power of your 100 watt lightbulb, and 2,000 times the power output of the entire U.S. electrical grid. Compared to conventional laser cutting, which already provides a huge leap in precision and capability over mechanical blades, petawatt laser machining enters a new realm. (See Figure 6.) Because with the petawatt laser, discrete pulses of energy are delivered to the material, each lasting only femtoseconds (10–15 seconds), quicker than it can be transferred through the material, there is no deformation and no slag in the cut. This property carries over to the medical field, allowing surgeons to vaporize a single cell with absolutely no effect on its neighbor.

LLNL

The Texas Petawatt Laser seen here was completed with the help of teams from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is a 150 joule, 140 femtosecond laser. Currently, the laser allows scientists to study states of matter such as high energy-density plasma states, similar to those found in our Sun and in supernovae.

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Such discoveries as just described illustrate the purpose of a science-driver crash program. We must deliberately create new powers for mankind which did not exist before. This is what allows us to ensure that S′ continues to grow, and therefore it is the only competent definition of economic value.

Where Do We Stand?

On December 11, 2017, President Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, stating:

The Directive I am signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery. It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints—we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.

With the issuance of this directive, work already ongoing at NASA—pieces from past, cancelled or reduced programs—were pulled together and given new life in the Artemis Program. Under Artemis, human beings will walk on the Moon by the end of 2024. The rocket that will take them there, the Space Launch System (SLS), is a heavy-lift rocket with a payload capacity slightly higher than the Saturn V of the Apollo Program. Reflecting the excitement of the restoration of such a launch capability, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, in a February 2020 speech at the Stennis Space Center, said, “At Stennis we have an actual flight stage in our test stand for the first time in over 49 years.”

NASA

Projected time-line for the three Artemis missions.

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The first SLS launch of the Artemis Program is currently planned for April 2021. This 25-day mission, Artemis 1, will lift an unmanned Orion crew capsule into orbit. The capsule will then travel to the Moon, enter lunar orbit, and return to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Artemis 2, planned for late 2022, will be the first manned flight of SLS and Orion, with a four-person crew traveling to the Moon—the first time people have left Earth orbit since 1972—looping around the far side, and returning to Earth.

Before the 2024 landing, supporting vehicles must be constructed and launched—primarily for the Lunar Gateway, which will be a small station in lunar orbit from which the astronauts will descend to the lunar surface. President Trump’s 2021 budget request includes $3 billion for the development of a lunar lander, which will be housed at the Lunar Gateway, awaiting its crew. Late in 2024, Artemis 3 will send four astronauts to the Gateway and down to the lunar surface. The 2024 landing will be the first foothold toward construction of a permanent base, to begin sometime around 2028.

Though perhaps not as comprehensive as LaRouche’s 40-year plan for Moon-Mars colonization, the Artemis program represents an indispensable turn back toward economic—and moral—sanity. A robust and mission-oriented American space program is not only the vehicle for new discoveries which will increase the productivity of the entire economy here on Earth, as well as in space, but is the basis for peaceful international cooperation in the common interest of all humanity.

By taking an economics lesson from LaRouche, we can ensure that our posterity—future generations of billions and billions of human beings—are living lives that are happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative than what we enjoy today. What else is an economy for?

IN MEMORIAM

Chuck Turner: Bald, Bold, and Bright

CC/stand4security

Boston City Councilman Chuck Turner speaking to a rally at Harvard University, after being prevented from delivering a letter to the administration signed by eight Boston City Councilors in support of the security guards’ campaign for better wages and fair working conditions on campus, May 10, 2007.

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March 6—On Christmas Day, 2019, former Boston City Councilor and legendary community activist Charles “Chuck” Turner passed away at his home in Roxbury, after a long battle with cancer. He was 79.

Born in Cincinnati, Chuck became a community organizer and activist after graduating from Harvard in 1963. Among the many campaigns he led on behalf of the people of Boston were those for the prevention of the planned construction in 1969 of the Interstate 95 corridor running through Boston’s communities of color, as well as through white working-class neighborhoods, and for the 1983 Boston Residents Jobs Policy, which mandated that 50 percent of all employee work hours on large private and all public development projects in Boston go to Boston residents, 25 percent to people of color, and 10 percent to women. He created and led numerous organizations and programs dedicated to economic development, employment, housing, education, social justice, and world peace.

Chuck met LaRouche movement organizers in 1992 at a post office book table on Blue Hill Avenue and subscribed to Fidelio and 21st Century Science & Technology. He would often engage with us in lively telephone discussions of the great ideas and potentialities that Lyndon LaRouche and his associates presented in those publications.

At that time and throughout the 1990s, he was co-director of Emerge, the nation’s first anti-domestic-violence counseling program for men, He was almost always too busy with this important work to participate in our meetings and events, but he endorsed several initiatives of our movement, especially the Exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche. His wife, Terri, attended LaRouche’s Presidential Campaign presentation at Roxbury Community College in 1996. It was a happy surprise when, in the fall of 1999, he showed up for one of the weekly LaRouche activist meetings for the first time and informed the gathering of his candidacy for the District 7 City Council seat. A member of the Green-Rainbow Party, he was elected six times, serving from 2000 to 2010.

Wall Street’s High Oil Prices

In September of 2000, as an early winter of particularly cold weather—and high, rapidly increasing fuel prices—approached, LaRouche issued a memorandum “On the Subject of Emergency Action by Governments to Bring the Present Petroleum-Price Inflation Under Control,” calling for urgently needed actions to be taken to avoid “a chaotic breakdown in many, if not all of the economies of the world,” as a crucial first step in shutting down life-threatening hyperinflation in energy prices, and in the global economy more generally.

On November 1, 2000, in a courageous act on behalf of the citizens of Boston, and of the world, Councilor Turner introduced a “Resolution on Emergency Governmental Action to Reduce Oil and Natural Gas Prices” (excerpted here), explicitly based on LaRouche’s policy statement:

Whereas: The following actions proposed by economist Lyndon LaRouche to deal with that emergency situation contribute an important, and decisive step in the direction of moving the government of these United States to act in concert with other nations to solve the more general problem of the world’s financial and monetary systems. . . .

Therefore Be It Resolved: That the City Council of Boston urges the President of the United States, the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives to take emergency action to reduce oil and natural gas prices, including the following measures:

A. Declare a general strategic emergency in the matter of stability of flows and prices of essential energy supplies of national economies;

B. Establish contracts, directly between the U.S. government and the governments of petroleum-exporting nations, of not less than twelve months government scheduled deliveries of petroleum; and

C. Define reasonable prices for these contracts.

Be It Further Resolved: That the City Council of Boston urges the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts General Court, and other state and local governments of the United States to support these emergency actions in the vital interest of the General Welfare of its citizens.

EIRNS/Roger Ham

Chuck Turner co-chaired a Boston City Council hearing on an emergency resolution to lower oil prices, December 4, 2000.

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EIR published Turner’s “Resolution on Emergency Governmental Action to Reduce Oil and Natural Gas Prices” on November 17, 2000.

Councilor Turner then co-chaired hearings on December 4, beginning with the disaster that the high oil prices had already wrought on his constituents and noting that there was no shortage of supply, and that OPEC had increased production.

“Production now exceeds consumption, and yet the price continues to rise,” he said, pointing to the City of London and Wall Street’s manipulation of energy spot-market prices, reduction of refining capacity, and the mega-mergers of oil companies.

John Hoefle of Executive Intelligence Review, retired Massachusetts Senator Bill Owens, civil rights leader and Schiller Institute Founding Vice-President Amelia Boynton Robinson, and several other citizens and activists testified in support of the resolution. Three thousand petition signatures were filed by senior Democratic Ward Committeeman John Jones. A letter from Nevada State Senator Joe Neal, a similar resolution passed by the Camden, N.J. City Council, and a message from the Embassy of Venezuela, expressing that nation’s readiness to sell oil on direct, long-term contract to the U.S. government, were also presented.

Extended coverage of the events is available in the article, “Winter of Discontent Begins: Boston Meets on Fuels Crisis,” published in EIR on December 15, 2000.

I had the honor of reading into testimony Lyndon LaRouche’s statement, offered in support of the resolution, which said in part:

Neither Boston, Massachusetts, nor New England as a whole, command the glories today with which they were adorned during the decades I was a child, youth, and young man, living in those quarters of our nation. Nonetheless, there are reasons why decisions made in Boston and its vicinity can still shake the world for the better, and the measure before you, if adopted, is surely, once again, a shot which will be heard around the world.

Under pressure from the Boston financial establishment, and an Anti-Defamation League slander and intimidation campaign, the resolution was defeated 8-3. See “Boston Fails to Act: Its Citizens Will Pay,” EIR December 22, 2000.

FBI’s Railroad

In 2007 Chuck was targeted by the Justice Department, indicted in 2008, and in 2010 was convicted of making false statements and accepting a $1,000 bribe from an FBI informant, who had to be compelled by the DOJ to testify against him. In numerous public events, rallies, and interviews, up until his death, Chuck maintained his innocence and railed against the systematic FBI and DOJ persecution of Black elected officials. Throughout, he was supported in this by thousands of his constituents, who also re-elected him in 2009.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, after one of the hearings in 2008, stood next to Chuck outside the courtroom, condemned the DOJ’s case as “worse than sloppy,” and called for an investigation of the prosecutor. At a packed community support meeting at Roxbury Community College (RCC) a few weeks after his indictment, video excerpts from the 1995 Independent Hearings on Misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice were presented to give the audience a fuller understanding of Operation Fruehmenschen. He also addressed this persecution on a panel with LaRouche Spokesman Harley Schlanger in 2010. He served 28 months of a three-year sentence and went back to work in 2013, serving his community.

Tito Jackson Facebook page

Tito Jackson, former Boston City Councilor. “What they accused him of taking wouldn’t pay for one month’s rent for his district office.” He evoked a standing ovation, and thunderous applause, saying “Chuck Turner was not a crook.”

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Current and former elected officials, community leaders, activists, and friends addressed a crowd of over 500 at RCC in a three-hour memorial filled with stories, tributes, poetry, and music, expressing their admiration, gratitude, and love for Chuck Turner. His City Council successor, Tito Jackson, described Chuck’s decades of selfless service, how Chuck had for years maintained an office for his constituents, closer to their community than City Hall, out of his own pocket, pointing out that “What they accused him of taking wouldn’t pay for one month’s rent for his district office.” He evoked a standing ovation, and thunderous applause, when he said, “Chuck Turner was not a crook.”

In their remarks, a local labor activist and a Chinatown development director illustrated his dedication and determination, recalling two meetings Chuck participated in on December 17, just eight days before he died.

One of the moderators of the memorial reported that Chuck’s wife had asked him what his wishes were for his memorial service. At first, he said that he did not want there to be one. But as she insisted on an answer, he said that he wanted there to be music, “a gospel singer. Anything but Amazing Grace.”

—William Ferguson