Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 26, June 26, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 26, June 26, 2020

- I. A Temple of Hope

- Winning the Fight for Civilization Means a New, Expanded Civil Rights Movement Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1997)

- The Idea of America and Our Mission Today by Robert Ingraham

- II. 1.5 Billion Jobs

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST ‘Day of Action’ Mobilizes Youth for 1.5 Billion Jobs with the LaRouche Plan

- Global Expansion of NATOIs Not in Germany’s Interest!

- Global Expansion of NATO Is Not in Germany’s Interest! by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- III. A Future Based on Scientific Breakthroughs

- A Real Revolution in Space by Michael James Carr

- China’s Long March Out of Poverty by William Jones

‘We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident…’

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

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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

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Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

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Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

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United States: Debra Freeman

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 26, June 26, 2020

Cover This Week

Sculpture by James West, 2017

Detail of a bronze statue of George Washington, in Philadelphia.

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‘WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT. . .’

I. A TEMPLE OF HOPE

3 Winning the Fight for Civilization Means a New, Expanded Civil Rights Movement

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

January 19, 1997

15 The Idea of America and Our Mission Today

by Robert Ingraham

II. 1.5 BILLION JOBS

26 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

‘Day of Action’ Mobilizes Youth for 1.5 Billion Jobs with the LaRouche Plan

32 Global Expansion of NATO Is Not in Germany’s Interest!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

III. A FUTURE BASED ON SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS

35 A Real Revolution in Space

by Michael James Carr

45 China’s Long March Out of Poverty

by William Jones

Correction: In the June 19, 2020 EIR article, “Unleashing the Productive Power of Creativity,” the first two graphics were reversed. All digital versions of EIR have now been corrected.

RSVP

RSVP

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I. A Temple of Hope

January 19, 1997

Winning the Fight for Civilization Means a New, Expanded Civil Rights Movement

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

EIRNS

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. delivers his address on “The Immortal Talent of Martin Luther King, Jr.” to a Martin Luther King Prayer Breakfast sponsored by the Talladega County, Alabama Democratic Conference, January 19, 2004.

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Mr. LaRouche celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday in Florence, Alabama over Jan. 19-20, 1997 at the invitation of the Northwest Alabama chapter of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Committee. The committee had organized the two-day celebration with the theme: “Making Real the Dream: Frame the Vision for the 21st Century.” LaRouche made three appearances, addressing hundreds of people.

He was joined on Sunday, Jan. 19 at St. Paul AME Church by his good friend, Amelia Boynton Robinson, the doyenne of Alabama’s civil rights struggle. LaRouche interrupted his speech when Mrs. Robinson arrived, and gave her a big hug, a photo of which accompanied excerpts of his remarks in the next day’s Times Daily. Mrs. Robinson, a 60-year veteran of the movement, also joined LaRouche at a rally. This is the edited transcript of Mr. LaRouche’s address at the Greater St. Paul AME Church in Florence, Alabama. This speech is being published for the first time here. A longer report on those events is available in EIR Volume 24, Number 6, January 31, 1997.

Dear friends, especially you young children. The question is, as I look at you young people, I say, “Do you have a future?” And, for most people in the United States, there apparently is no future. Not just anyone, but for anyone, there is no future. And, young people, particularly people who are under 35 or under 30 years of age, are convinced of that. People in the generation up to their 50s, 40s and 50s now, are thinking about how to secure their retirement. They don’t think so much about these things. They think, “Where do I keep my money? How do I get through?”

But, the younger people are saying, “No. That’s not important. We’re not going to make it at all, the way things are going.” And, the young people under 35 and under 30, are right. If things continue to go the way they’re going, there is no future worth mentioning. Oh, human life will go on, a dark age, perhaps 20 percent of the world’s population size will continue. Life expectancy will drop by about half of what it is today—if things go the way they’re continuing to go.

Children see, and young people see that in hospitals, there are officials coming from insurance companies and other institutions, and hospitals, going up to someone who’s a little bit ill, and saying, “Would you please sign this ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ paper?” Which means that if you collapse, nothing will be done to bring you back to life. You’ll be allowed to die. People are being starved to death so they will die—in hospitals. These kinds of things: care that used to be available, is no longer present. You don’t even have to make a personal decision: if you remove a hospital from a certain area, or deny people access to medical care, they will die. There’ll be an increase in the death rate.

And, when you think back, it’s getting worse, and worse, and worse.

The Importance of the Civil Rights Movement

The question is: Can it be changed? And, this is the kind of thing you think about when you celebrate the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King. I have a very special view of him, probably not unique. There are many people, perhaps, who would precisely share my view of the matter. But, let me share it with you, and state how the memory of Martin Luther King addresses the question, Do we have a future for our young children? Can we change things so that there will be a future for our children?

NARA

U.S. troops returning home aboard the USS General Harry Taylor, August 11, 1945.

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As it’s been revealed, I was born in 1922. When I came back from overseas, I was still a young man. And, things suddenly got bad. We’d come out of a depression. Roosevelt had (not Roosevelt Bell, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he would do the same for you if he could, if he had the opportunity); and, under conditions of war, we had revived this impoverished, pitiful, despairing nation. We had built the most powerful economy on this planet, out of the ashes of the depression. And, the war was over, and somebody decided to do it all over again, to sink it back into a depression. That fellow was Harry Truman. People who advised him to do so.

So, people came back from the war. They had gone to war out of a depression, had been called into military service. Their families had worked in the factories, or worked on the farms, to provide the succor to keep this nation going, both in military goods and otherwise, to go through this terrible war. They came back, the war had ended, and they were back in a depression. And, that’s one of the things that went wrong with this nation. It became demoralized, it became bitter, and we began turning on one another.

Harry S Truman Presidential Library

President Harry Truman outlines the Truman Doctrine in a speech to a joint session of Congress, March 12, 1947.

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It wasn’t Joe McCarthy that unleashed terror in this country, it was Harry Truman. People moved out from despair of the depression, into the hope which was born in people in military service and others, during the wartime period, and then to be plunged back into a depression again, and people turned mean, very mean. They were no longer concerned about their neighbor, no longer concerned about the world in general.

They were concerned about their family security, their economic security, basically saying:

Look, I’ve got five years military service to make up. I’ve got to get the house bought, the house built. I’ve got to start my family. I’ve got to worry about my family. My wife and I, we have to worry about our family. We can’t be concerned about the neighbors! We’ve got to think about our career. We’ve got to think about OUR PERSONAL FUTURE, OUR ECONOMIC SECURITY. And, before I say anything, I’m going to think whether what I say will affect my security, my financial security. Can I lose a job by saying the wrong political thing, or expressing an unpopular opinion? Can I be thrown on the unemployment rolls, like back in the Depression, by saying something which is deemed unpopular, by perhaps the FBI, or Harry Truman, or somebody else?

I will say nothing, I will not think! I will not look to the right or the left. I will look straight ahead, at my personal financial security. And, I will sacrifice a neighbor, I will sacrifice anybody, for my personal financial security.

And, out of that, came this meanness, which took over 95 or more percent of our returning people from World War II. And, out of that meanness came, later, Joe McCarthy, who was simply the clown in the street, who was created by the meanness inside the majority of my generation.

Now, there were many good things that were done in the postwar period, during the past years, since 1945, since the war ended. Many good things were done by many people in the United States. The space program, which was started here in Florence, in part, and then moved over to Huntsville, because some Senator thought it would be nicer over there. That was a good thing. Many other good things were done.

But, in terms of the policies which have run the United States in the postwar period, there was only one change in policy which, today, was any good. And, that change in policy was effected in two bills which President Johnson put through the Congress, and signed himself: the civil rights bills of the 1960s. Those bills were not simply the personal effort of President Johnson, or others. They were the result of the work of a movement, which is known as the civil rights movement.

Now, the civil rights movement wasn’t born in the 1950s, it wasn’t born in the 1960s. The civil rights movement was born as soon as there was slavery in the United States, because there was always somebody struggling against slavery, and I’ll come back to that again.

But, the difference was that the civil rights movement had created around itself a leadership, in a time which was capable of making the civil rights movement the cause of, also, a change in policy in the United States.

Now, in this process, one young man was chosen, by the hand of Providence, to head up that movement. His name was Martin Luther King. He was a young minister who was sort of picked out of a crowd one day, by a wise old man who said, “I’m not going to lead the civil rights movement. This young minister is the man I recommend,” and Martin Luther King stepped forward. And, he took the mantle of responsibility which was given to him by that group of ministers, and he went on, through struggle after struggle, to provide a very special kind of leadership for that movement.

CC/Minnesota Historical Society

Martin Luther King speaks to an anti-Vietnam war rally at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, April 27, 1967.

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True Christianity the Only Way to Defeat Racism

Now, throughout it all, there was one thing which is outstanding about Martin; outstanding for me. See, Martin is a Christian, in the truest sense of the term. And, to understand the civil rights movement’s achievement, you have to understand that.

Because you had two groups of people who were inside the civil rights movement. You had one group of people who were Christians; and, I’ll come back to that, which is my main point. But, you had another group, such as people from the Communist Party and others, who had a different view, but who supported the civil rights movement, and did some good with their support. Various kinds of secular people who were not Christians, or even anti-Christians. But, they had a different philosophy.

One group said there must be racial justice: the secularist. He accepted racists, and said there may have to be racial justice. Another group, like Martin, said, “No, there are no races. There is an injustice which is called racism, but there is no basis for racism. That’s the thing we want to get rid of.”

Now, this is the secret, in my mind, of the civil rights movement. Think of those marches on Washington. Think of Martin in Washington, and think of him in terms of the address he gave just before he was murdered.

What did he represent? He said, “We’re not fighting for racial equality. We’re fighting to heal this nation, and to heal this world.”

Let me get right to the point. What’s the issue here, the issue today? What’s the significance of being a Christian, or, in some cases, Islam, because people in Islam actually share this view, as normally do people who follow Judaism.

In Genesis, the first chapter, man and woman are each made in the image of God, and endowed with the power for mankind to exert dominion over the world, which is also the universe, as the space program tells us, exemplifies.

Each child, newborn child, wherever they’re born, contains that spark: made in the image of God. A spark of genius which, if cultivated, enables that child to realize, as an adult, those powers of genius on which all human progress depends, man’s mastery over the universe. The increase in life expectancy, the improvement in the conditions of life of the household, the mastery of nature, the exploration and conquest of nearby space, and on and on.

Warren K. Leffler

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.

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All of the great achievements come from a power of discovery which no animal has, but which all human beings have. And, everything we have, is based on—what? Discoveries of principle, discoveries of ideas, inventions which individual persons have made, which enable the entire human race, using those discoveries, to solve problems; to increase mankind’s mastery of the universe; to increase life expectancy; to have family life; to get rid of child labor, so that a child can continue in school to be educated to the ages of 16, 18, 20, 25, so they might be more fully developed; which you can’t have if the parents die at the age of 30 to 35 on the average. You can’t keep children in school. You can’t do that, if people live in dirt poverty. Those are the conditions of child labor.

And, these discoveries have made it possible for mankind to do that. Over the course of human existence, from what we know of prehistory and history, most people in all parts of this planet, 95 percent or more of them, of every culture on every part of this planet, through the thousands of years of human existence, lived, in every culture, as slaves, as serfs, or in even worse conditions of life. They were not educated, they were not developed. They were treated as cattle, more or less as cattle.

And, through the power of ideas of discovery, and the sharing of these ideas, and building a society which is based on that principle, we have shown, in the past 500 years of the development of modern civilization, that it is possible to provide true freedom and true expression, to all human beings. Not 5 percent, not 50 percent, but 100 percent. That all human beings can live in normal family lives, or the equivalent; can live with life expectancies which reach to as much as 80 or 90 years of age, which is becoming modal today; can raise children and participate in the raising of grandchildren; that children can attend schools until the ages of 18 to 25, and can be given the opportunity to select a vocation, a profession, which has meaning for them in life.

So that, when we have run our course in a society which meets this challenge, every individual can go to their grave with a smile, or has the power to do this. Because they were born, they have found a mission which makes their life useful to the people around them, and to people in times to come. And, they can think of themselves as a person sent by God to do something, know that they have run their course, they have performed their mission, and they can be satisfied and proud, that their life was necessary.

What Makes our Lives Meaningful?

In a religious service, what do we do at a funeral, a funeral of a member of the family or a friend? What do we do? We talk about death, but we don’t talk about death. We talk about the test of Death.

When you see the face of Death, you are confronted with questions. And, the question is: What is the meaning of life? How shall we live? We think of a beautiful life, the life of a beautiful person, a person who we think is a gift of Providence to us. We say, “That was a good life.” We mourn the death, but we rejoice in the life. We turn to children, we turn to others and say, “See that good life.”

Or, we see somebody who died without accomplishing anything, and we say, “See the promise that this person had, what they might have become.” Like the person, the profligate who wasted the talent given to him; if he had used the talent given to him, what his life might have been. And we might rejoice at the time of his death now for the life he had lived, had he used it.

The test of Death: Is life meaningful? And, the essential thing about freedom, is to have a meaningful life, the freedom to have a meaningful life, not only for one’s own sake, but for the sake of your family, for the sake of society as a whole. To rejoice in living, to rejoice on being sent on a mission which is of some importance.

Like the person who’s educated to be a physician. That’s his vocation. It’s not just a way of making money, it’s a way of doing good, of providing a good which otherwise would not be available to people, perhaps advancing medical practice. And, when that person dies, we mourn the loss, or we rejoice in the life that was. That’s freedom.

Now, Martin had a grasp of that, and was careful to keep the movement moving in that direction. Martin identified that by referring to the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. This nation was created for a purpose. It was a purpose which was affirmed by Abraham Lincoln, which some people deny. But, nonetheless, it’s true.

Photo by Alexander Gardner

President Abraham Lincoln, on August 9, 1863.

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THIS NATION HAS NOT FULFILLED ITS PURPOSE. It is like the man with the talent who buried it, or wasted it. And, Martin said, “No! We must, in the course of the struggle for civil rights, to reverse the cruelty, the falseness, the deprivation, we must establish a principle not for all the people in this country, but for all the people in the world, that everyone has this right.”

There are no races, because every child from every part of this planet, from every background, has that same gift, which, if nurtured, can accomplish the same thing. And, our mission should be to order the affairs of this planet in such a way that no person, that no baby born in any part of this world is denied that right: that freedom to develop, to find a vocation; the opportunity to practice a vocation, for the good of mankind; and for the fulfillment of their own life. To live a life in which they can rejoice with the gift of living.

And, Martin had that. Those who talked about racial politics, even though many of them were well-meaning, didn’t have that.

Now, what has come upon us? Martin and people associated with him, by the time he was assassinated, had induced a somewhat reluctant but conscience-stricken President of the United States, Johnson, to sign the two bills, the so-called Civil Rights bill and the Voting Rights bill. And, that was great. And, that was the only good reform in policy, which the United States has accomplished in the past 55 years, since Roosevelt died.

Waiting for the Train to Leave the Station

But, since 1968, we have gone nowhere. Some things have been less bad than they were before; but the fundamental problem has not been addressed.

As I’ve said many times, it’s like a train. The passengers say, “We have a right to travel on this train.” And, they protest, and get the right to travel on the train. And the day comes that the President of the United States says, “Well, I’ve got the Congress behind me, now you have the right to ride on that train.” Fine.

So the passengers, who had some tough experience with the U.S. government, go down to the railroad station to get a ticket to get on this train. And, they’re given the ticket; no problem. Very good. “Can we sit anywhere we choose?” “Yes, you can sit anywhere you choose that’s available.” They sit. They’re on the train, and they sit, and they sit, and they sit, and they sit. The dust collects upon them.

Some man comes through and they ask him, “What’s happening? When’s the train moving?” He says, “It’s not moving. The railroad just went out of business.”

And, that’s what happened to civil rights, for most people.

So, it was the unfulfilled promise, and there was no leadership which was capable of replacing Martin. There was no movement. The movement dissolved. Civil rights leaders went in various directions, some to careers here, some to careers there, some to this foundation, some to this. There was no united civil rights movement of the type which had captured the imagination of a nation; which had inspired most of the people of this nation, some even reluctantly. But, they had been inspired nonetheless. It’s like the man who beat the donkey on the back with a stick. He said, well, he may cry about the pain, but he was inspired to move. And, it was moved.

Neil E. Das

A railroad boxcar, abandoned in a derelict section of St. Louis, Missouri, typifies the rot of the post-industrial economy, February 20, 2011.

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The movement is dead; but, it’s not dead. There are people, old friends, in this room today, who I know well, who have kept the spark of the movement alive. But, the movement, the train has not moved. Some of the cars have collapsed. Eh? The conditions have become worse for many people.

For example, you take the typical American. Now, if you look at the typical member of the labor force, that is, the person who either has a job, or is looking for a job, or should be looking for a job if they hadn’t given up in despair. Take the typical income and production, output, of this person. Measure this income in terms of physical goods, not only in consumer goods such as housing, clothing, food, other essentials. Also, three classes of services: education, health care, and science services of various kinds.

By those standards, in the United States, in the lower 80 percent of the income brackets, but also in the United States as a whole, the income per person, in the labor force today, is half of what it was 25 years ago. And, this is expressed by the fact that, where one person as a wage-earner could have supported a household in the late 1960s, it takes two to three incomes in the comparable family, not to quite make that standard of living today.

Look at the cost of housing. Look at all kinds of costs, the purchasing power of the income today, what people have lost, why families work three jobs or more in the family, just to keep the family together. Things have become worse.

All over the world, it’s worse.

And, we’re coming to a time of a great crisis; because, in part, of this collapse of our economy, because in the middle of the 1960s, we decided to stop investing in scientific and technological progress. The factories began to close down. Low-paid services replaced a factory job, for example. This sort of thing.

Because of that, because we’re much poorer than we were 25 years ago, but because the financial speculation has greatly increased, we have now come to the point on the global scale, that the entire financial system of this planet, is in the process of collapse, headed toward disintegration. That is now going on. It will happen very soon. I don’t know exactly what date the final stage of collapse will occur. But, it’s like the Titanic, which is sinking, the ship Titanic. And, it’s going lower and lower in the water. I don’t know what day or what hour this ship is going to go under the water, but I know stomping on the deck isn’t going to help it any. It’s that kind of situation.

We’ve come to the point that, unless, very soon, the President of the United States, and some leaders of some other countries, makes a decision to create a new monetary system, to scrap the economic policies which have guided this nation and much of the world for the past 25 years, to reverse that, to go back to the kind of economy which is based on factories, and farms, and infrastructure development, like the great TVA production which was around here before, to go back to that, that kind of work, that kind of production; to make things better, to build more hospitals, to make more hospital beds, to produce more physicians, to improve the physical conditions of life; unless we go back to that kind of policy, this civilization as we know it, is doomed.

Alfred T. Palmer

Construction at TVA’s Douglas Hydroelectric Dam on the French Broad River in Sevier County, Tennessee, 1942.

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The important thing is that the very nature of the crisis is going to force people, people of influence, to face the reality that the present policies are not working, that we must scrap these policies, we must go back, in part, to those policies which served us well. We must continue the policies from the past, which were good, and scrap the more recent policies, which are bad.

In that process, as I’ve said on a number of occasions, if the United States is going to come out of the mess it’s in, we’re going to have to recognize what Martin understood, in his own terms; not necessarily my terms, but the idea is the same.

This great nation has been spoiled, over its history, since its foundation, by two evils. And the two evils are of the same form. One evil, is a bunch of parasites from Boston and New York, and so forth who were associated with the British East India Company and drug trafficking. The Bank of Boston, the famous names of the so-called Bluebloods. They call them Bluebloods, because they couldn’t get any red—not enough oxygen or something, too much carbon dioxide.

The other thing which the Bluebloods were part of, were the Southern Bluebloods, were called Gray Bloods: the slaveowners, typified by the Confederacy, which is not some kind of spontaneous U.S. development. It was a creation by the British monarchy, first, by Jeremy Bentham, who organized it, and then Palmerston, Lord Palmerston, who organized the Confederacy and what became the Civil War. And, this country was torn apart for a long period of time by this struggle over the evil of slavery. It was torn apart in the great Civil War, one of the greatest wars, the most destructive wars of modern times, of family against family on the territory of the United States. And, out of that war, under a leader, Abraham Lincoln, we emerged with a policy.

And, Lincoln understood that our enemy was the British monarchy; and, Lincoln, I can tell you, had a war plan. His war plan was to defend the United States by taking over Canada. He had Erickson, who built the Monitor, the famous Monitor—which was only the preliminary design; Erickson had another design for oceangoing Monitors and Lincoln was prepared to build such Monitors and send them across the Atlantic to blockade every British port, and to bring the British Empire as a power to an end.

And, he could have done it. So the British Intelligence service had Lincoln shot by a British Intelligence agent called Booth, who was deployed from Canada, under the direction of Palmerston’s crowd in London, to do it. And we lost a good deal of what we had won in the Civil War in the postwar period, especially after the assassination of another president who wasn’t pleasing to the British, by the name of McKinley.

We got Teddy Roosevelt, whose mother was a Bullock from Atlanta, hard-core Confederacy, and whose uncle James Bullock was the head of the Confederate spy service, who trained Teddy Roosevelt in the arts of government, and we got that Confederate no-good as a president by virtue not of an election, but an assassination, arranged by British intelligence.

Then we have another President who came along later: Woodrow Wilson. Now, Woodrow Wilson was famous because his family was one of the leading Ku Klux Klan families. And, from the White House, Woodrow Wilson, as President, launched the mobilization of the Ku Klux Klan, which re-founded it not only in Stone Mountain, Georgia, but also in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in New Jersey, in Michigan, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Minnesota, and in Wisconsin. Almost four and a half million Americans were members of the Klan in the 1920s at a time when there were about 102 million Americans in all.

And this was done by a President of the United States working closely with people who are now called things like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and so forth, who were the people—Goldwyn and Mayer were two of the people involved in producing and distributing the film called The Klansman, later called The Birth of a Nation, around which the recruiting drive for the Klan was organized, under Woodrow Wilson and his successors. And there are some people who call themselves Thomas Jefferson Democrats and Woodrow Wilson Democrats today. Many of them in the eastern states have recently become Republicans. They may not have changed their nature, but they certainly have changed their sheets.

Now the problem in this country is that when you look around at injustice, you look at injustice in U.S. domestic policy, injustice against senior citizens in general, injustice against chronically ill, or the endangered ill, injustice against the poor. Then you look abroad and you look at Africa, which I’ll get to here. The injustice which the United States is condoning, by supporting the British genocide against Africa today, together with the genocide which is being sponsored by a former President of the United States, today known as Sir George Bush, who was knighted by the Queen for his services to the British Empire, and who is involved in the genocide going on in Zaire now.

When we see the injustice which is being done, or condoned by the United States, to other countries, or the injustice which the institutions of government, such as Newt Gingrich and his kind, are imposing upon people in this country, then you say, “There’s something evil in the United States.” And, you say, “What is that evil?”

Well, the cause of it might not be racism; but, racism and the history of racism and slavery in the United States, is a symptom of the evil. And, it’s the leading characteristic symptom of that evil in the United States.

And, what Martin understood, was the way to attack the problem was not to protest just against injustice, but to say, “We must use the movement to transform the United States into the kind of nation it must become, for itself at home, and in the world,” which is what the significance for him was of this emphasis upon the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. That there are rights under natural law, rights which flow from the recognition that every man and woman is created in the image of God, with powers accordingly, powers which must be nurtured, and developed, and utilized.

There are no races, there is only racism. There is only the failure to recognize that the person next to you, is a human being of the same race you are, the human race, distinct from all animals. And, that human being next to you has to be loved, because they are human, because they are in the image of God. And, if you don’t love them, you are not a Christian.

No matter how bad they are, you don’t like execution, you don’t want execution of prisoners, because no matter how bad somebody is, who are we to say they couldn’t be redeemed? Who are we to kill them before they’re redeemed? It is not necessary. We can be rich enough, we can keep them in prison forever, if necessary, if they stubbornly live on like that, hoping for their redemption, some act of redemption, so that nothing in the image of God is wasted.

The Truth About Africa and Changing the U.S.’s Role There

Let me describe the situation in Africa. All of Africa, all of sub-Saharan Africa today, is in the process of being murdered. I’ve been engaged in Africa politics directly for over 20 years, since 1975, when I first began meeting leading circles in various African countries, and was engaged since that time in projects for the development of Africa, and for addressing its problems.

Most people in the United States, including African-Americans, have no idea what Africa is like. None. You have a case where fresh water, safe, fresh water for drinking, is a crisis. A problem that can be dealt with, with pennies. You have dysenteries, problems that could be treated at the cost of pennies, if the care is there per capita. It’s not there.

You have enough land area, and enough farmers, to more than feed all of Africa. But, the bugs eat the food. The diseases eat the food, when it’s growing in the field. When the food is harvested, if it is harvested, it’s destroyed by diseases, by insects, and rots. Because there’s no means of preservation or transportation to handle it.

The life expectancy in Africa, in Central Africa recently, has dropped from over 50 years for an adult, to, now, between 30 and 40 years. Diseases are ravaging through the area. And, the mass murder is beyond belief. For essentially about, now, 30-odd years, Africa has been condemned to mass death.

This is not by negligence, this is by policy. And it comes from the highest levels of the British monarchy, specifically, Prince Philip, the founder of the so-called environmentalist movement, the environmentalist movement which, in the name of plant life and animals, is insisting that human beings’ numbers be reduced. And this is going on in Africa. They say there are too many Africans. That’s what Prince Philip, and Greenpeace, and the environmentalist movement in this country, says: “There are too many people in Africa!”

CHOGM

The British Commonwealth’s heads of state receive their Queen, Elizabeth II, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, November 27-29, 2009.

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Well, they’re doing something about it. They are launching wars, they are launching terrorism. For example, in the recent several weeks, the government of Uganda, a member of the British Commonwealth, acting under instructions of the British monarchy’s Privy Council, sent troops, including mercenaries they hired, into camps in Central Africa, where millions of Hutu refugees were living. These troops of Uganda, hiring a mercenary killer as a front, a fellow called Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who’s a butcher, a criminal, one of the most notorious, disgusting criminals in all Africa. Thirty-five years’ record as a criminal. And, they used that as a cover.

But, it was troops of Uganda, sent from Uganda, which went into the camps, killed many of the armed people, and drove the others from the camps, in death marches, back into countries from which they were refugees, where the young men, as they approached these countries, were taken out and disappeared, never to return. They were shot. Young men of military arms-bearing age, were killed off. And, the women and children fled into the bushes to die.

THESE ARE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ON THESE DEATH MARCHES. MILLIONS. The total population involved, is a population of about 13 million of two nations, which speak the same language. These are the nations of Rwanda and Burundi. You have over two million people being slaughtered, with death rates, mass death rates, counted in terms of days and weeks. It’s the highest rate of genocide ever perpetrated on this planet. And, it’s only typical of what is being done throughout Africa.

Who protests this? Who protests this? Many in the United States are defending that, some are even praising this thug, this Kabila. Even African-American leaders are praising Kabila, a mass-murderer, a genocidalist working for the British monarchy, as a hero.

Recently, Sudan was attacked by the British Empire, the British monarchy. There is no “rebel force” against Sudan. It doesn’t exist. I met with the leaders of the former opposition from south Sudan. They made peace. I met with them. We discussed their problems, personally. I met with them twice, while I was there. We have ongoing communication with them.

The British have launched forces from Uganda, from Ethiopia, and from Eritrea—the armies of Ethiopia, the armed forces of Uganda, the armed forces of Eritrea, are moving in to destroy Sudan, under British direction. And, there are those in the United States who will condone that, that genocide.

EIRNS

Lyndon LaRouche delivers the keynote address to a seminar in Khartoum, Sudan, sponsored by the Centre for Strategic Studies (Khartoum) in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Schiller Institute, and EIR in 2001.

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This is part of the same operation as the genocide in Zaire. The rate of mass murder, is there. Where is the morality in the United States which stands up and says, “Our government must not only not support this, but our government must destroy this mass murder, must halt it, and must condemn and expose those who are complicit in genocide.”?

There’s no difference between those who support the murderers in Zaire, who support Kabila in Zaire, and those of the German-American Bund, who supported Hitler while he was killing Jews in the concentration camps in wartime Europe. They have the same morality. And, there are many aspects of our morality, public morality today, which echo that same Nazi-like attitude, against the sick, against senior citizens, against those—“Look, please die. Don’t you realize that you’ve run your time? Sign this piece of paper. You’ve done your time. Look, it’s somebody else’s turn next. Go out. You’re costing us too much money.” “Cut down this hospital, on which a community depends! It’s costing us too much money.” “Put all our welfare people on these HMOs, where they will die at accelerated rates,” as is being done.

What’s the difference? Yes, it’s greater in Africa. The excuse is, “Well, we don’t know anything about Africa.” Well, why don’t they find out something about Africa? We’re committing crimes there. Shouldn’t we be accountable for what the power of our nation does in various parts of the world?

A Time of Catastrophe

Well, what do we do at home? What do we do about the drug plague which is destroying our cities, destroying so many of our youth, especially among the poor, poor minority groups? What are we doing about the murder which is being practiced against senior citizens, against those who just happen to be poor, or against the chronically ill? All in the name of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s balancing the budget—the man who can’t balance his mind.

So, in the 1960s, when Martin came, as I defined the hand of Providence on his shoulder, I think is the fairest way to put it, and brought together the forces of the civil rights movement, which attracted support from people of my generation, as typified by John Kennedy, a man of my generation, who had been President; that became a force in our national life, which took this nation a step upward, to become better than it had been before.

We have now come to a time of catastrophe. Things are terrible. There is no future for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, unless we make a change.

Obviously, the same principles that we faced in the 1960s, face us again today. We need to recreate the movement. Not necessarily in the same form, or an imitation, but we need to create the spirit of that movement, and engage it on a larger scale nationally. Because the character of this nation is such, that the legacy of the toleration of slavery is a specific illness which rots the soul out of this nation. And therefore, the question of civil rights injustice, and understanding of that question, is crucial.

But, the communist solution doesn’t work, even though many communists, and socialists and others, who were atheists, supported the civil rights movement, in part, at various times. Their philosophy is deadly, as we’ve seen in later times, for the civil rights. Because civil rights depends upon the principle of recognition, in one way or the other, whether you take it from Genesis 1, or whether you know it in some other way; to know that every man and woman is made in the image of God, to exert dominion over this planet. And therefore, every individual’s life is sacred, and intrinsically loveable. There are no races, there is only the evil of racism.

World Telegram/Dick DeMarsico

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964.

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Becoming a Person Who is a Gift of Providence

How do you translate that into personal morality? My answer is, again, the funeral service, the test of Death. Each of us faces death: how will we face it? What about all that pleasure-seeking you were doing? What about that wealth you were accumulating? What about that property you own? What does it mean? You’re going to take it with you?

Or, are you going to take with you, what you have been, for all eternity? What that mortal life that’s yours has been in all eternity? You came, and you went. What did that mean, in all eternity? Did it mean something? Were you a gift of Providence, as Martin was? Did you adopt a mission of some kind, a vocation, which meant that your life was beneficial, served some higher good? That you were like the man of Providence who came into the lives of the people in the community and then departed, and their lives were better thereafter? And they say, “God sent that life to us.” Were you the gift of Providence?

And, if you were not the gift of Providence, as you face death, what does your life mean? It doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s the wasted talent. And, therefore, people have to fight for a higher kind of selfish motive; not the motive of punishment and rewards, not gain, not greed, not envy, not any of those seven deadly sins. But, the reward of doing that which enables you to face Death, or its prospect, with a smile on your face.

I was the stranger who came as a strange little creature, born into this community. I walked through this community, and the time came when I died, and I went from this community. And, in the time between the time I appeared as a stranger to whom they gave a name—I didn’t come with a name, they gave me one. What name did I give myself? Was I the gift of Providence to this community?

And, when you look at these children, what are we giving them, for their future? What kind of a world are we giving them? Think of all the children. Think of the people of Africa. Think of the lives of the people in this country. You can organize a movement, only on this principle, which is known to all of those who follow the book of Genesis. But, it’s especially a Christian principle: the idea of being a person of Providence in this sense.

And, what is the act which, to me, typifies this great act of Providence? Take a child. A child is born. What do you give that child? Oh, you give the child love and nurture, but how does the child in the long run recognize this as love? You say to the child, “You are human.” The child says, “Am I an animal?” They point to a dog, a sheep. “Am I an animal, like the dog or sheep?” What answer do you give? “No, human beings are different.” “Why are they different?” “Well, we human beings—the dog will do what its grandfather and father, and so forth, before it did. It can’t change its nature. You can use its nature to make it better, behave better. But, you can’t change its nature, cause it to change its nature. Man can change his nature.

Man can make a discovery of a principle of the universe, like a scientific discovery, or an artistic discovery. Man can then show somebody next to him, or her, how to make the same discovery. That discovery can then be used by people to change society, to make society better, as in a scientific discovery.

So, what do you give a child? You give a child general nurture. You also give them education, schooling, the act of love. Don’t tell a child to “learn” how to do this, and “learn” how to do that. They should learn a few things. They should learn where to pee, and things like that (not in the wrong place). But, children should learn—what? To be human.

What’s that? It is to relive the great discoveries of people thousands of years or less before them, to re-enact the moment from the mind of a great discoverer, and to accumulate those discoveries, so that the child says, “Hey, I know that man!” “How do you know him? Did you ever meet him?” “No! But I thought his thought. I re-enacted his discovery.”

And the child says,

Now I know what it is to be human. I have the voices, in a sense, in my mind, of many of these great discoverers of past humanity. Now I know what it is to be human. And, I want to do something like that. And, if I can’t make a discovery of my own, at least I can share these discoveries which I have made, re-enacted, and share them with others. Or, I can use these discoveries and this knowledge, to benefit society around me. I am human! I embody people from generations, or thousands of generations before me, in ideas and discoveries!

These are things upon which humanity depends! I can share this, in a useful way. Perhaps I can learn how to do the same thing, and make some valid original discoveries of my own, and pass those on.

Now, isn’t that happiness? When you’ve given a child a sense of that, through that kind of education, haven’t you told the child, “We love you. We’ve shown you how to discover yourself.”

That is my view of what we have to do. We have to fight. We have to fight as in war. We have to fight to save humanity from a terrible peril. But, in the United States in particular, we have to recognize that all of the evil that I know of, and I’ve been around, not as long as Amelia has, or a few other people, but long enough to know that every evil I have met, in the United States, as characteristic of our culture, you can find a smell of racism in it.

And, you won’t get rid of that, unless you approach it from a Christian standpoint. There are no races, there is only a human race. Every person is made in the image of God, every man and woman. Everyone has this potential, a potential which we must love. And thus, suddenly, the whole evil from this country falls apart.

But, when you make a resolution like that, it doesn’t work unless you act on it. And thus, I think that without the civil rights movement’s rebirth, in the context of the great struggle we have to make for justice in this country, and internationally, without the rebirth of the civil rights movement on that Christian basis, we won’t make it. Mankind will find itself condemned, as failed cultures and failed empires of the past were, to collapse into a long period of a new dark age. To pay a great penance to purge itself of the evil that it’s done, and its evil ways, and then given a chance, at some later time, maybe several generations later, to come back and be given another chance to start all over again.

I would rather we didn’t have to start all over again.

Thank you very much.

The Idea of America and

Our Mission Today

by Robert Ingraham

The portals of the Temple we have raised to Freedom, shall then be thrown wide, as an Asylum to mankind. America shall receive to her bosom and comfort and cheer the oppressed, the miserable and the poor of every nation and of every clime. The enterprise of extending commerce shall wave her friendly flag over the billows of the remotest region of the world. We shall learn to consider all men as our brethren, being equally children of the Universal Parent—that God of the heavens and of the earth, whose infinite Majesty, for providential favour during the late revolution, almighty power in our preservation from impending ruin, and gracious mercy in our redemption from the iron shackles of despotism, we cannot cease with gratitude and with deep humility to praise, to reverence and adore.

—Gouverneur Morris, “Observations on

the American Revolution,” 1778

June 18—Much is being said right now about “racism in America.” The public is inundated with talking heads in the mainstream media regurgitating various opinions about the so-called universal problem of racism. There are even demands that America should pay “reparations” for slavery. Others are outraged by such assertions and demands. People are being whipsawed emotionally, and the crisis is driving citizens further apart (as intended), not bringing them together. Emotions and frustrations are manipulated, and truth and insight are orphaned. Given the danger of this situation, it is time for some very blunt talk on these matters. Hopefully, such a discussion will provoke some people to look at this subject in a more serious and honest way.

The current attempt to inject racial strife into the ongoing coup against President Donald Trump is one of the most dishonest political tactics in modern times. Slavery and racism are not an “American problem.” Slavery and racism are features of the oligarchical domination which has plagued mankind since before the dawn of recorded history. The subjugation of large numbers of people into de facto or de jure slavery is the essence of oligarchical rule.

Racist mass-murder has always been a feature of oligarchical culture, but to understand it within the context of today, you must raise your scope of vision from the individual to the broader killing fields which are imposed by the economic policy decisions of the financial elite.

Consider the post-1971 financial and economic diktats of the City of London and Wall Street, which have led to economic looting and mass murder in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere at the hands of the trans-Atlantic mega-banks, the International Monetary Fund and the private equity funds. Look at the current locust plagues in Africa, and the threat of famine in large parts of the world which threatens the lives of tens of millions. Debt slavery, which destroys the economic basis for survival, has been imposed on the majority of the world’s population, savagely in the case of the poorest of nations, but also upon the “lower 99 percent” in Europe and America.

CC/Policy Exchange

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney in 2015.

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Murder is not simply a matter of pulling a trigger or kneeling on someone’s neck. Deliberate mass murder is as simple as “signing one’s name” to a document, issuing policy directives, withholding loans, extracting usurious debt payment, or cancelling contracts for nuclear power development. No one gets blood on their hands. No one has to gaze into the eyes of the victims. The dead are invisible. This is what we see today in the decisions made in the richly-carpeted and ornately-bedecked boardrooms of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, and Goldman Sachs. This is real racism, organized racism, organized mass murder, and it comes from the financial oligarchy based in London. Its intention is not simply to kill people, but to kill posterity, to destroy any possibility for a productive future.

Likewise, Malthusian mass murder is the heart and soul of the “green finance” proposals of former Bank of England head Mark Carney (and his pal Michael Bloomberg), which if enforced worldwide, will kill hundreds of millions. The same Malthusian game plan is seen in the intention of Obamacare and the current destruction of Britain’s National Health Service, where essential medical treatment is routinely denied to the very sick and elderly who no longer have “lives worth living.”

To the extent a moral prejudice of racism exists within the population of any country, it is the product of oligarchical masters who seek to divide the very people they wish to oppress, and manipulate them into fighting one another. It is a tactic of oligarchical rule, and to become a foot soldier on such a battlefield is very foolish. Indeed, it is a sign of one’s own acceptance of servility.

Consider that the money to create Black Lives Matter was donated—to the tune of tens of millions of dollars—by the likes of George Soros and the Ford Foundation. How is it possible to fight oligarchical oppressors if your entire movement is financed by them? At the same time, much of the most vicious of the anti-Trump rhetoric is a product of digital and social media operatives backed by the Silicon Valley “billionaires club,” and their friends in and around British Intelligence, some of the same people who are intent on bringing you the Surveillance State.

William Clark, 1823

Enslaved Africans planting sugar cane on a plantation on Antigua.

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Whence Slavery?

Long before Spanish and Portuguese ships began transporting slaves out of Africa, slavery already existed in every corner of the world, including in Africa, where it was endemic among both the sub-Saharan and northern Islamic states and tribes. There were black slaves in Africa long before there were black slaves in the Americas. For millennia, slavery existed in China, Russia, India and in Europe. By far, the greatest number of slaves in the Islamic world were white Europeans. Slavery was also widespread among almost all of the pre-1492 Native American population. When Europeans landed in North America there were already slaves here. Where legal slavery did not exist, brutal caste systems and feudal entailments, such as the serf system in Russia, and other forms of de facto slavery prevailed. Everywhere where oligarchical and imperial systems existed,—which was almost everywhere on earth, among all races—slavery was universal.

Of course, the trans-Atlantic slave trade of 1500-1776 was an abomination and took institutionalized slavery to a new previously un-imagined level. But who did it? Who was responsible? Who brought the slaves to the Americas? The greatest number of slaves, by far, was in Latin America. This was a product of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, two of the most reactionary imperial regimes in Europe, both financed by the banking establishment of Genoa. The first African slaves to arrive in North America, at Jamestown in 1619 and New Amsterdam in 1626, arrived on ships of the Dutch West India Company, the slave-trading arm of the Dutch Empire.

After 1713, the Spanish granted the Asiento de Negros,—the right to bring African slaves into the Americas—to the British Crown, i.e., the British monarchy itself. In the 18th century, the British monarchy brought more than 6 million slaves out of Africa, including a staggering 110,000 in 1768 alone. This was an imperial policy, a policy under the control of the Monarchy, the Privy Council, the Bank of England, and the Royal Africa Company.

Imperial systems have always been financial empires, controlled by a financial oligarchy. This was as true of the Roman Empire as it was of the 17th century Netherlands, where the creation of the Bank of Amsterdam, the Bourse and the Dutch East and West Indies Companies—all between 1600 and 1610—resulted in the Netherlands becoming the greatest slave-trading empire on the planet. By the 18th century, the British Empire,—with the new Bank of England, the Exchequer, the Royal Africa Company, and the East India Company—began to elbow the Dutch out. But always, the slave traffic—much like the later opium/narcotics traffic—was a financial policy, with huge profits financing the London stock market and the Bank of England.

This was the new Anglo-Dutch financial paradigm,—a monetary empire financed by mass-murder. Today’s misled amateur student of history who sees Spanish Conquistadors killing Aztecs or British soldiers slaughtering Africans, and cries “racist genocide,” fails to recognize that these foot-soldiers, like the Roman legions before them, served a higher master.

In the 13 American colonies, all of the slaves were brought in under the authority of the British monarchy, with the most notorious operation being the Royal Africa Company, headed by the future King James II. Many of the colonies, particularly those which retained a semblance of self-rule, resisted the deluge of slaves. Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and other colonies all passed laws banning or restricting the importation of slaves, and all such laws were nullified by the Board of Trade and the Privy Council in London.

Up until about 1640-1650, slavery, as it later became codified, did not actually exist in the American colonies. In almost all of the colonies, black Africans were legally considered indentured servants. This gave them the same legal rights as white indentured servants, and their servitude was not inherited by their children.

By mid-century this began to change, and with the founding of the Royal Africa Company in 1660, Britain’s rulers became determined to impose on the colonies an economic system based on slave labor, exactly as they did in Barbados and their other Caribbean colonies. Key to this was the eradication of self-government among the colonies. One by one, Charter Colonies, such as Massachusetts, Connecticut and Virginia, and Proprietary Colonies, such as Pennsylvania and Maryland, had their charters revoked and their independence quashed. By the time of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, all 13 colonies had Royal Governors, appointed by the monarchy, with the authority to override the decisions of elected legislative bodies within the colonies. These developments coincided with the massive expansion of slave importation carried out under Royal supervision in the 18th century.

To repeat the point, it was the British monarchy which imposed—by force of arms and legal prosecution—a slave economy on the 13 colonies from 1650 to 1775, and it was that monarchy against which the colonists—white and black—rebelled in 1775.

The Birth of Freedom

Reason is that wherein man goes before all other earthly creatures and comes after God only.... For whereas God and nature hath furnished other creatures, some with hoofs, others with other instruments, and weapons both defensive and offensive, man is left naked, and destitute of all these, but may comfort himself in that one endowment of reason, and providence, whereby he is able to govern them all.

—Rev. John Robinson, “Of Faith, Hope,

and Love, Reason and Sense”

The single initiative, the single act of courage which made possible humanity’s escape from the omnipresence of oligarchical slavery was the 1620 voyage of those who became known as the Pilgrims, and the establishment of the Plymouth colony that same year. This was the act which proclaimed the determination of a people to live free, and it was the 1620-1776 developments in America which created—for the first time in human history—the possibility of eliminating oligarchical slave systems worldwide. That 1620 voyage was perhaps the greatest blow against human slavery in the history of our species.

This year we mark the 400th anniversary of that voyage. Where are the celebrations? Where are the names and motivations of these heroes proclaimed? In 1920, on the tercentenary of the Pilgrim voyage, parades, conferences, and celebrations were held across America. Proclamations were issued. Special coins were minted, and special postage stamps were issued. Today, history is turned on its head, and a lying narrative is propagated that, somehow, this initiative by the Pilgrim Brethren ushered in a new era of slavery and genocide. It is time to reclaim the glory and the wondrous truth of what was accomplished.

Between 1585 and 1626, several attempts at colonization were made in North America, including at Roanoke (VA), Cuttyhawk (MA), St. Croix (Maine), Popham (Maine), Jamestown (VA) and New Amsterdam (NY). Of these, all but Jamestown and New Amsterdam failed. The most significant characteristic of all these colonies, however, is that they were commercial efforts, established primarily with the intention of returning financial profits to London. One telling feature is that all of these colonies consisted entirely of men, except for a small number of women in the second attempt at Roanoke in 1587.

Currier & Ives

“The Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, Dec. 22nd, 1620.”

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When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth with 102 colonists, that number included 48 men, 24 women and 30 children. What the Pilgrims brought to Plymouth were families. Their intention was not to establish a colony which would transmit loot back to London, but to create an entirely new type of society, grounded in human freedom. This is identical in intent to John Winthrop’s later proclamation for establishing a “City Upon a Hill” in Boston.[fn_1]

The Pilgrims, in fact, were escaping from two oligarchies. They had fled England for the Netherlands in 1608 to escape from the oligarchical nightmare which was descending upon England in the wake of the coronation of James I in 1603, dark developments explored profoundly by William Shakespeare. But by 1619 their situation in the Netherlands had become untenable. Amsterdam was becoming a clone of the Venetian paradigm of slavery, usury, and financial speculation; the maritime Dutch Empire was expanding, and Europe was descending into the murderous chaos of the Thirty Years War. The decision was made by the Pilgrim congregation to relocate to the New World,—not a light commitment, given the record of previous colonization attempts in North America.

What the Pilgrims brought to North America was the belief that all human beings, of whatever station, were endowed with reason, that the potential for productive creativity, in the image of a creative deity, exists within each one of us, regardless of race, religion or status. That was the foundation on which they determined to build a new society, and the guiding spirit of their efforts was a commitment to the agapic ideal of the Common Good.[fn_2]

As the Pilgrim pastor John Robinson declared in his essay, “Of Created Goodness”:

First, We must do good in obedience to God’s commandments.... Secondly, That we do it at all times, as we have opportunity.... Thirdly, We must do good readily.... Fourthly, According to our ability.... Fifthly, We must have respect to men’s present wants; and not only consider what we can spare but withal what they stand most need of.... Sixthly, We must do good to all....

This dedication “to do Good” would later be enshrined by Cotton Mather in his work, Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good ... to do Good.

Set into motion was a process of creating an anti-oligarchical culture, one coherent with the principle which Gottfried Leibniz later termed “Happiness.” This effort proceeded through stages, with many reversals and crises, but in 1776 the call went forth—as a self-evident truth—that “All men are created equal,” and in 1789 a new Republic was formed, pledged to defend the General Welfare and secure the “Blessings of Liberty” for future generations.

What we are discussing here is the “Idea of America,” the well-spring from which all later great developments flowed. Martin Luther King possessed a profound moral grasp of this issue, and Lyndon LaRouche battled for this ideal, this vision, throughout his life.

The Breakthrough

Prior to 1775, slavery was legal—under the authority of the Crown—in all thirteen British colonies. The people of these colonies were not Americans, but British subjects, and the rapid development of a slave-based economic system in America was overseen and enforced by the London Board of Trade, the King’s Privy Council, and the Royal Governor of each colony.

Then, within ten years of the founding of the new United States of America, seven states—Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, and New York—had abolished slavery. New Jersey joined them a few years later, and in Delaware abolition was defeated by a margin of only one vote. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in human history. This was not slavery, or some other injustice, being abolished by royal decree, but free people voting to willfully end the persecution of a portion of the nation’s people. This is what became possible once free from the British Empire.

From 1776 to 1801, the political dynamic in the new nation was toward the diminution and eventual end of slavery. The moral inhumanity of slavery was widely acknowledged, and its abolition recognized as a mandatory requirement to fulfill the mission of the Revolution.

In the southern states, many slave owners voluntarily manumitted (freed) their slaves. Between 1780 and 1800, as a percentage of the black population, the number of freed slaves in the South went from below one percent to more than ten percent. This anti-slavery tendency was particularly strong in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, and in Delaware the number of freed slaves eventually outnumbered the number of slaves 8 to 1. In Maryland, by 1800, 25 percent of the slaves had been freed. At the same time, by 1801 the vast majority of abolition societies in the nation—scores of them—were in the South, and they were very active and winning supporters.

In 1785, only two years after the independence of the new nation had been recognized at the Treaty of Paris, the first society aimed at ridding the nation of slavery was formed in New York. This was The New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May be Liberated, with John Jay as president and Alexander Hamilton as secretary. The founding document of this society read, in part,

The benevolent Creator and Father of all men, having given them all an equal right to life, liberty, and property, no sovereign power on earth can justly deprive them of either, but in conformity to impartial government, and laws, to which they have expressly or tacitly consented.

Two years later The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was founded in Philadelphia, with Benjamin Franklin as president. Its founding constitution stated,

[T]he Creator of the world to make of one flesh all the children of men ... it is the especial duty of those who acknowledge the obligations of Christianity, to use such means as are in their power to extend the blessings of freedom to every part of our race.

In 1787, the Continental Congress unanimously—including all the southern delegates—adopted the Northwest Ordinance, which forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory, a vast area in which slavery had previously been legal under British rule. This set the stage for the future admission of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin as free states. The very next year, at the Constitutional Convention, Gouverneur Morris would denounce slavery as a “nefarious institution” and make the point that in the regions where slavery was most widespread, poverty and the lack of economic development were most pronounced.

After 1789, the leadership of the new Washington administration would spearhead the drive to end slavery. Washington himself, contrary to modern-day accusations, was virulently anti-slavery. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris and Philip Schuyler led the way. In 1790, shortly before his death, Ben Franklin, together with Alexander Hamilton and other notables, submitted a petition to Congress proposing that all children born on U.S. soil after 1808 would be born free, thus eliminating slavery for future generations. By 1796 every state in the nation – north and south – had shut down the slave trade.

Clockwise, from top left: Joseph Duplessis Siffred, ca. 1785 ; John Trumbull, 1806 ; Ezra Ames, 1817 ; John Trumbull, ca. 1793

The leadership of the Washington Presidency spearheaded the drive to end slavery in the United States. Clockwise from upper left: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and John Jay.

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Most importantly, it was between 1789 and 1797 that Alexander Hamilton would enunciate and implement his revolutionary economic program of National Banking and Public Credit, a sovereign anti-oligarchical system based on free labor and the willful increase in human creativity and productivity of the entire population. This was intended to define the future, to unleash the rapid development of the potentials within the citizenry, intended by Hamilton for everyone, of every race and creed.

Continuing Warfare

The 1801-1825 reign of the Virginia dynasty of Jefferson-Madison-Monroe derailed the intention of Franklin, Washington, and Hamilton. Then, following the four-year interregnum of the Quincy Adams Presidency, the twelve additional years of Jackson and Van Buren brought the nation to the brink of ruin. By the time of the Polk Presidency in 1845, the proponents of a permanent slave-based economic and cultural order were firmly in control of the nation. This continued up to the Lincoln Presidency.

The death of Washington in 1799 and the assassination of Hamilton in 1804 removed the two impenetrable obstacles to this transformation. Jay, Morris, King, Rensselaer, and others fought, but they were unable to stem the tide.

This was a counter-revolution, against the intention of what had been fought for from 1775 to 1783. Simultaneously, between 1801 and 1833, the entire economic system of Hamilton was dismantled. The credit of the nation was placed into the hands of London financiers, who in the wake of the Napoleonic wars controlled both the world gold trade as well as international finance. Wall Street emerged as London’s junior partner, and after 1815, the slave hub of New Orleans, previously part of the French Empire, would become the banking capital for the cotton trade and expansion of the slave economy. By 1840, New Orleans possessed 12 percent of the nation’s total banking capital.

The South became the cotton plantation of the British Empire. Between 1801 and 1835, U.S. cotton exports grew from 100,000 bales to more than a million, reaching four million bales by 1860. Eighty percent of this cotton was shipped to Britain, where over 20 percent of the entire population were directly or indirectly involved in producing cotton textiles. The financial triangle, London-Wall Street-New Orleans, financed and managed this slave economy.

Politically, the counterattack against the founding intention of the nation—the drive to make a slave-based economic system an hereditary part of the nation—was led by a new organization established in 1816—The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, a.k.a., the American Colonization Society (ACS). Its creator and foremost member was Henry Clay, who served as president of the Society for 13 years. Madison also served as president, and Monroe and Jefferson were both members. All of its founders were southern slave-owners.

Jean-Baptiste Adolphe Lafosse

Henry Clay

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On the one hand, the ACS launched a nationwide movement to send freed slaves back to Africa. The vast majority of these freed slaves had gained their freedom during the fight to create the new Republic from 1775 to 1801, some taking up arms in the revolutionary cause, and all possessing U.S. citizenship, as dictated by the Constitution. They were simply to be gotten rid of, while those who had not yet been freed would remain as slaves.

The true intention of the ACS, however, went way beyond this hare-brained colonization scheme. With backing from the Jefferson and later Jackson leadership of what became the Democratic Party—but with many Whig allies—the ACS quickly emerged as a powerful national organization. Its primary purpose was not to propose colonization but to destroy all efforts at abolition.

Toward that end, leading newspaper owners and editors were recruited, and vicious racist editorials were printed in many northern cities. Mobs were mobilized. Abolition meetings and conferences were broken up by armed hooligans. Abolitionist leaders were assassinated. Anti-abolition riots, targeting both white and black proponents of abolition, were unleashed. A literal reign of terror descended on the nation. One of the most egregious incidents was an 1822 race riot, organized by ACS leaders in New York City, which interrupted a performance of Shakespeare by the great black actor James Hewlett, culminating in the actors being savagely beaten and the theater burned to the ground.

In 1832 Andrew Jackson imposed censorship on the U.S. Mail. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail, particularly those traveling to southern states, were routinely examined. Pro-abolition letters were seized and not delivered. Northern newspapers which contained anti-slavery editorials, communiqués between abolition organizations, and even personal letters which expressed anti-slavery views,—all of this was confiscated.

Simultaneously, legislation was introduced in a number of northern states to make it a crime to publicly advocate the abolition of slavery. All of this was intended to utterly silence all challenges to the slave system. This went so far that in 1836, the U.S. House of Representatives adopted the “Gag Rule,” which prevented any of the elected members of the House from openly discussing slavery on the House floor, particularly in the form of reading anti-slavery petitions that had been sent to the House by constituents. All of these outrages were organized by the ACS.

Throughout the South, abolition societies were outlawed, abolition proponents jailed or murdered, and laws were passed to re-enslave previously freed slaves. Pro-abolition newspapers, such as The Emancipator in Tennessee, The Abolition Intelligencer in Kentucky, The Liberalist in Louisiana and the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Maryland were all shut down. In all of this, the ACS was the deployer of the shock troops, on behalf of the resurgent slave system.

Taken as a whole, this was a coup against the intention of the Revolution, and it was noted as such by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette who, during his 1824 tour of America, remarked that he was astonished to discover “the aggravation of the prejudices against the blacks,” saying that in the Revolutionary War, “the black and white soldiers messed together without hesitation.”

Anthony Henry Wenzler

William Jay

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William Jay

Into the midst of this battle stepped William Jay, the son of John Jay and the lifelong intimate friend of James Fenimore Cooper. Frederick Douglass described Jay as “our wise counsellor, our fine friend, and our liberal benefactor.” Lewis Tappan, the individual who persuaded John Quincy Adams to represent the Amistad defendants, stated that Jay, “by his pen and active labours, has performed a greater service to the cause than perhaps any other man.”

Jay began his public career at the age of 30, in 1819, when he joined with his father in publicly opposing Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise. He stated at that time, in a letter to Elias Boudinot:

I have no doubt that the laws of God, and, as a necessary and inevitable consequence, the true interests of our country, forbid the extension of slavery. If our country is ever to be redeemed from the curse of slavery the present Congress must stand between the living and the dead and stay the plague. Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. If slavery once takes root on the other side of the Mississippi, it can never afterwards be exterminated, but will extend with the future Western Empire, poisoning the feelings of humanity, checking the growth of those principles of virtue and religion which constitute alike the security and happiness of civil society.

J.C. Battre

Lewis Tappan

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In 1833, Jay became a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). The founding convention of that organization in Philadelphia was attacked by a mob organized by the American Colonization Society, and six months later the ACS instigated a reign of terror in New York City, including assassinations, mob attacks and arson. These events were organized by James Webb, a New York leader of the American Colonization Society and publisher of the Courier and Enquirer. Over a period of days, churches were burnt down, the homes of abolition leaders Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and the Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. were attacked, and people were assaulted in the street. One eyewitness of the 1834 violence, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, of Brooklyn, described the scene thus:

I have not ventured into the city, nor does one of us dare to go to church to-day, so great is the excitement here. You can form no conception of it. ’Tis like the times of the French Revolution, when no man dared trust his neighbour. Private assassins from New Orleans are lurking at the corners of the streets to stab Arthur Tappan. Five thousand dollars were offered on the Exchange in New York for the head of Arthur Tappan on Friday last. Elizur Wright is barricading his house with shutters, bars, and bolts. Judge [William] Jay has been with us two or three days. He is as firm as the everlasting hills.

William Jay responded to these outrages with the publication of his Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization and American Antislavery Societies. He would go on to author numerous other works, including View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery (1839), “On the Condition of Free People of Colour in the United States” (1840), and A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (1849). He became the leading intellectual voice of the anti-slavery movement. He also was the most prominent critic of the 1850 Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Law, issuing a proclamation condemning Daniel Webster for his perfidy.

In his 1835 Inquiry Jay declared war on the American Colonization Society, enunciating in depth the betrayal of the American Revolution by the ACS. He demonstrated that numerous tenets of the ACS, adopted at their founding meeting, were un-Constitutional, i.e., in violation of the founding intent of the nation. His most severe criticisms were directed toward Henry Clay, personally, the individual who had declared at the founding meeting of the ACS, “Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored—contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them.”

In January 1836, Jay issued an Open Letter to Andrew Jackson, enumerating, at length, the illegal and un-Constitutional actions of that administration.

Defending the True America

In 1840, Jay, together with Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, James G. Birney and Gerrit Smith, resigned from the American Anti-Slavery Society. They were joined in this exit by almost the entirety of the leading black members of that organization, including Samuel Cornish, Charles Bennett Ray, Theodore S. Wright, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. These individuals, and others, then founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.[fn_3]

LoC

William Lloyd Garrison

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The crisis which provoked the split in the AASS was that by 1840, William Lloyd Garrison had begun to declare that the United States had been constitutionally based on slavery from its inception; he publicly called for Northern secession from the “slave nation.” Later, Garrison would publicly burn a copy of the U.S. Constitution, uttering the words, “The Union must be dissolved.” This characterization of the United States as a “slave nation” was not only shared by the plantation owners of the South; today, it defines the declared outlook of Black Lives Matter.

Jay and his allies vehemently opposed this slander against America, and many proceeded to establish a new political party, the Liberty Party. Initially, Jay would not join the new party, because he judged that it might prove divisive and alienate Whig and Democratic allies. By 1843, however, as Democratic and Whig leaders lined up to support the annexation of Texas and its admission as a slave state, Jay joined the Liberty Party and became a member of its executive board.

This principled conflict with Garrison is perhaps best expressed by Frederick Douglass. Upon his return from England in 1847, Douglass also split with Garrison, for the same reason as Jay and others had done in 1840. In his famous 1852 speech, known today as “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” Douglass said the following:

I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length; nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery....

In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made?...

Capital Gazette

Frederick Douglass

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Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

Jay on the Mexican War and Fugitive Slave Act

In 1849 Jay published “A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War,” and the following year he authored a searing critique of the 1850 Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Act, which was printed as a pamphlet and enjoyed wide circulation. He viewed the annexation of Texas, and the subsequent war with Mexico, with horror, as the death-knell of emancipation. Opposing the admission of Texas as a slave state, Jay said:

My opposition to the increase of slavery in this country, or to the increase of slave representation, is general and universal. It has no reference to the lines of latitude or points of the compass. I shall oppose all such extension at all times and under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitation of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises.

In response to the Fugitive Slave Act, Jay stated:

The law is an outrage upon the Constitution of our country and the precepts of our religion. It is a burlesque on justice and on all the acknowledged rules of evidence in the trial of issues. The demand it makes upon individual citizens to aid in hunting and enslaving their fellow-men is diabolical. I have made up my mind to suffer imprisonment and the spoiling of my goods rather than hazard my soul by rendering any active obedience to this sinful law. It is horrible that so many of our fashionable cotton divines are now preaching up the supremacy of human law and virtually dethroning Him whose ambassadors they profess to be.

William Jay died on October the 14th, 1858. Informed of his passing, Frederick Douglass issued the following remarks:

In common with you, my friends, I wear the hated complexion which William Jay never hated. I have worn the galling chain which William Jay earnestly endeavoured to break. I have felt the heavy lash, and have experienced in my own person the cruel wrongs which caused his manly heart to melt in pity for the slave.... In view of the mighty struggle for freedom in which we are now engaged, and the tremendous odds arrayed against us, every coloured man and every friend of the coloured man in this country must deeply feel the great loss we have sustained in this death, and look around with anxious solicitude for the man who shall rise to fill the place now made vacant. With emphasis it may be said of him, he was our wise counsellor, our firm friend, and our liberal benefactor. Against the fierce onsets of popular abuse he was our shield; against governmental intrigue and oppression he was our learned, able, and faithful defender; against the crafty counsels of wickedness in high places, where mischief is framed by law and sin is sanctioned and supported by religion, he was a perpetual and burning rebuke.

Healing the Nation’s Wounds

Today, the cry for “racial justice” is omnipresent, and the treasonous mainstream media plays the same role as the ACS-controlled newspapers of Jay’s era, declaring that America is an intrinsically racist nation, founded by slave-owners. Violence and the determination to censor alternative views—in a manner reminiscent of the ACS-imposed reign of terror and the “Gag Rule” in the 1830s—is increasingly the accepted norm.

How, then, can we pull people together? How can we win a happier future?

LoC

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The answer is to be found in the life of Martin Luther King. The provocateurs of his day, such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, attempted to destroy King’s organizing with calls for “Black Power,” but King would have none of it. His vision, his mission, was always inclusive. He fought not for “racial justice,” but for universal justice for each suffering human being. He fought for posterity, for a future he held firmly in his mind,—for each new child, yet unborn, to have the opportunity to develop, in freedom, their God-given skills and potential.

Proverbs 29:18 warns, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That is exactly what we are seeing today. Where is the vision of a better more productive future in what we are witnessing? It is certainly not to be found in inane demands to “defund the police,” let alone in the smashing of windows and looting.

Yes, there is organized evil in the world today, but rage-filled “identity politics” is impotent against that evil. As a result of the massive financial speculation and economic cannibalism of recent decades, combined with the devastating world-wide economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we now face a crisis of historic consequence. Policies are being implemented, and much worse policies are proposed—at the highest level of the financial oligarchy—which will kill hundreds of millions.

In considering the nature of today’s financial oligarchy, don’t just think of Queen Elizabeth and her half-witted son. The 21st century imperial system is more of the form of what Lyndon LaRouche characterized as a “slime mold,” a foul-smelling putrescence of like-minded billionaires and oligarchical elite. Like the hereditary aristocracy of centuries ago, they believe in their right to rule over humanity. Their policy is Malthusian: kill off as many people as possible and halt human scientific progress.

The British elite and their hangers-on have always hated the Idea of America. From Plymouth, through to Ben Franklin, Washington and Hamilton, America’s ideas were impermissibly revolutionary, valuing the creative divinity in every human individual and the ability to advance the human race. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, the alien culture of racism, this time in the form of identity politics, was resurrected, as the Bush and Obama regimes sought to achieve the complete eradication of the American revolutionary idea and the integration of the United States into the globalist post-1989 design. It is high time we taught the actual history, and it is high time to turn upon the actual slave masters.

The crisis of today cries out for sovereign nations the world over to work together toward rebuilding the physical economic potential of our species. That is the task before us. Under the Artemis program, America is returning to the Moon. The Chinese are going to the Moon. Russia is expanding its space program, and many other nations are joining this effort. It is cooperation among nations which will create a more productive future. It is the intention of empire and oligarchy to divide us and destroy our future.

Shall we be dupes or heroes? If we accept the vision of what might and must be, and fight together for that future, we will have honored those who landed on these shores 400 years ago.

[fn_1]. For a more in depth report on the Pilgrims, see “A Temple of Hope ... A Beacon of Liberty,” EIR, Vol. 33, No. 43, October 27, 2006. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. One of the greatest tributes to the Pilgrims was given by John Quincy Adams. His speech, given at Plymouth in 1802, is available. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. For more on the African-American abolition leaders, see “Hail Columbia, Happy Land!” EIR, Vol. 44, No. 22, October 20, 2017. [back to text for fn_3]

II. 1.5 Billion Jobs

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

‘Day of Action’ Mobilizes Youth for

1.5 Billion Jobs with the LaRouche Plan

Schiller Institute

On June 17, youth around the world mobilized to move their governments to build up their national health systems. Day of Action reports were received from Africa, South America, Europe, Yemen, and the U.S.

Schiller Institute

Schiller Institute

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Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is Wednesday, June 17, 2020.

It’s fair to say that the strategic situation and the crisis is deepening everywhere in the world, from the coronavirus pandemic, to the economic crisis, social crisis, and the war danger. It’s a crisis that demands a response, and so the Schiller Institute today is conducting an International Day of Action, around the program for 1.5 billion new, productive jobs, and the demand for a Four Power Summit. Helga, what can you say about this Day of Action today and what you expect to come from it?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Today’s International Day of Action involves mostly young people from many different countries mobilizing for the idea that each country must have a national health system on the standard of either the Hill-Burton Act of the United States, or the excellent medical standard demonstrated in Wuhan, China. Young people, from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, the United States, many African countries, and several European countries working together, contacting people to move their respective governments to join the chorus demanding that the international community move to face this emergency by building up the required national health system in every country.

These are young people who have started to study in a very serious way, the economic theory of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche: physical economy. They are studying the real source of wealth, not money, but the increase of the full activity of the labor force. They are studying classical music, which is critical for the development of creative mentation. Today, they are contacting hundreds of institutions, including other youth organizations, clearly communicating that the emergency is escalating. We have the pandemic and increasing famine resulting from the pandemic.

We need to get action initiated at the appropriate level. We know what to do, we know what governments should be doing—organizing emergency teams of medical personnel, supplied with medical protection gear, with medicine, to go into all of these countries and start training programs for young people. We are discussing this with doctors in the United States and in Europe, and the idea is that we organize with the young people, in Africa, in Latin America, to contact institutions so that such training programs can be set up in the short term.

The idea of young people starting to take responsibility and action in their own hands, so to speak, to get this going, to get governments moving, is quite exciting. Young people from different countries made a remarkably good, short video. Please circulate that video to spread the idea of this international youth movement which is starting to get the ball rolling. Spread the petition for a world health system in all possible channels you can reach, and get on board! We need an emergency mobilization! This pandemic is exactly what we knew it would become—it is expanding, it’s reaching now the Global South, and we count on you to be part of this mobilization.

Schlanger: One of the things that’s exciting a lot of the youth, especially in poorer countries, is the idea that it is international. That it does include people from all over the world, and that we’re not taking anything for granted that any country, just because it’s poor, should have to go through high death rates, famine and suffering of that sort.

Now, one of the things that’s occurred in the last couple of days is the recurrence of coronavirus in China, an outbreak in Beijing. What do you have on that, Helga?

CGTN

A new strain of COVID-19 may have emerged in a new wave of infections in China. Shown: testing in Beijing for that new wave, June 15, 2020.

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Zepp-LaRouche: This is very worrisome. It seems the outbreak in Beijing is a new strain. It’s not the same one as hit Wuhan earlier. It looks more like the kind of the coronavirus strain now doing so much damage in Europe. Beijing has quarantined more than 20 neighborhoods and cancelled 1,200 flights in and out of Beijing. This strain of the virus, according to some doctors from China, appears to be more aggressive than that in Wuhan.

There is a spike in cases in many American states. In Houston, Texas, four hospitals had to turn away ambulances. It’s a very difficult climate. President Trump wants to have big rallies—this is a very, very acute situation.

Then, if you look at the picture in the Global South, the World Health Organization has warned that the COVID-19 is now on a steep upswing there. The situation in Brazil is horrendous: They had 37,000 new cases in a single day, June 16, and that is only a guess, because testing is very underdeveloped.

In Lima, Peru, the Archbishop had an incredible demonstration to make sure that people understand that each single death is tremendous loss: Photographs of 5,000 of the more than 6,000 who have died in Peru were obtained and placed on the pews in the Cathedral, so it looks like these dead people are sitting there in the pews of the church.

In densely populated countries, like India, medical care is being triaged, not so much as a result of any decision, but due to the simple lack of enough hospital beds, personal protective equipment, masks, and ICU beds. There is a similar situation in many African countries.

This is exactly why we are making such an emergency mobilization to really start to treat this pandemic in the way it must be treated, until a vaccine is developed. It may take a year; it may take more than that, and the pandemic will take a lot of lives, because in the developing sector it meets conditions where people are working in the so-called “informal economy,” which means that any lockdown immediately threatens their lives.

There is the immediate danger of famine, which the World Food Program has been warning of again and again, and it’s not getting the kind of coverage in the mainstream media which you would think it should get—namely, to address the agriculture crisis, to double the food production—and that is why our mobilization is so absolutely crucial and why you should join it.

And that will also be the subject of an upcoming conference of the Schiller Institute on June 27. You should register for that conference to be able to participate in an active way. And you should spread the news about it, because we are trying to mobilize an international alliance, to turn this situation around, through the implementation of the kinds of programs which we discussed already—the world health system in every country, the 1.5 billion productive jobs, and that will all be a subject of this conference. And we will again bring international speakers to make clear that there is this kind of dialogue and spread of this alliance, which is absolutely needed.

Schlanger: One thing I think that very few people in the United States are aware of is this famine crisis, the “hunger pandemic” as it’s being called. It’s even hitting the United States. It’s not getting a lot of media coverage, but food processing, especially meat packing, is collapsing. The effects of the coronavirus, combined with the poor prices being paid to farmers, has brought farmers into the streets worldwide. Do you expect that we’ll have some farmer participation in the Day of Action, and also in the Schiller Conference on June 27?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. If you really want to see farmers in action, together with those responsible for the cities and urban life, you should attend the LaRouche PAC meeting this Saturday, where farm leaders from the United States and urban leaders will be in dialogue.

We’re trying to spread this mobilization. The hunger pandemic will be the subject of the second panel of our June conference. We will have speakers from the developing countries, from Africa, from Latin America, and this is really important, because this is not something which can be solved in any one country; but we have to get the kind of international cooperation to really change the agenda, and implement a completely different economic system, one which is not devoted to financial profit making, but to the common good of the population.

CGTN

On June 17-18, Chinese representatives and delegates of the African Union Commission, the UN and the World Health Organization convened an on-line China-Africa Summit to work together to defeat COVID-19. Shown below is President Xi Jinping, who chaired and keynoted the event.

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Schlanger: One area where this is being addressed is a summit taking place right now between China and many of the African nations. What can you tell us about the China- Africa summit?

Zepp-LaRouche: This is very important, because today’s meeting involves Xi Jinping, the leaders of the African Union, UN General Secretary António Guterres, and the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. They’re trying to get a handle on this incredible situation.

As you mentioned, not only is the pandemic spreading, but also the famine. And there are areas in Africa where you have a horrible combination of drought for longer periods than usual with the locust plague, which is now destroying the food of 35,000 people a day or more; and obviously you need international cooperation. So, it’s good that the African Union member countries are working together. One can only hope that the United States and European countries will join in their efforts, because the need is even greater than if you mobilized all the existing industrial and agricultural capabilities of the so-called advanced countries. It is still not enough to address this problem in the necessary time.

Schlanger: One of the other interesting developments is the China Belt and Road Initiative conference which is also taking place. There have been efforts to derail the Belt and Road Initiative; there’s talk from some of the anti-China people that “China can’t afford it now; they’re collapsing, their economy is going down....” What’s the reality?

Zepp-LaRouche: China is resuming the Belt and Road discussion. As you know, part of it is the Health Silk Road, but also there are projects which constitute a precondition for development—infrastructure. China is returning to an emphasis on great projects.

There is a new anti-China organization on the scene, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which has such people as Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Bob Menendez, and this politician from the Green Party in Germany, MEP Reinhard Bütikofer. This is incredible, because Bütikofer is a co-chair of this alliance which brings together the worst kind of anti-China/anti-Russia hawks in the United States. When he was younger—now he’s grown in age, and also in size, quite significantly—he was a member of something called the KBW (Communist League of West Germany), which was the Maoist organization. He even was the head of the German-Chinese friendship society. But that was at a time when China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution.

As everybody knows, China has completely turned away from that paradigm. With the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, China has started an economic development path which is very much similar to the American System of economy; the German economist Friedrich List is very famous in China, and that method has proven to be absolutely successful, as it has been everywhere it was ever invoked in history—in the United States, in Germany, in Russia. Wherever these principles were applied, they worked. China has been able to uplift 850 million people from poverty, and is intending, despite the pandemic, to end its domestic poverty this year.

People should stop being so absolutely immoral: This is not a time to keep playing geopolitical games. This is the time to join hands and address the issues faced by all of humanity. This anti-China campaign, and the anti-Russia campaign are contributing to a very unstable strategic climate and the danger of war. People tend to forget that, but I think that war danger is absolutely there.

Left: Office of Senator Cruz; right: CC/Stephan Röhl

Senator Ted Cruz (left), and Reinhard Bütikofer, a Green Party Member of the European Parliament and a member of the newly formed anti-China Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

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Schlanger: One of the interesting developments of the last week, was the discussion that President Trump and Vladimir Putin had, which was then followed up by two events that were also interesting. President Trump, in his commencement address to the graduating cadets at West Point said, “We are ending the era of regime-change wars, of endless wars.” He said he’s not going to continue this policy anymore. Almost at the same time, President Putin reiterated his point that the reason people are making up fairytales about Trump and Russia, was to stop Trump and to tie him up and prevent him from moving toward a cooperative relationship.

How does this fit in with the overall picture of fighting against geopolitics?

Zepp-LaRouche: It is very significant, that President Putin in 2016, if people remember, when Trump won the election, warned that Trump’s opponents would try a “Maidan” kind of a coup against his administration, referring to the coup in Kiev in 2014. He also said that the campaign against Trump contributed to the present riots in the United States. This is very significant, because it again and again proves that leaders in Russia and China are quite aware of both the coup and also the reasons why this coup is being made, and obviously, by implication, that there is a difference between Trump and some of his hawkish cabinet members.

The issue is still very much whether the largest countries of the world—the U.S., Russia, China—can cooperate, or will the efforts that cause provocations and even proxy wars prevail? Can these countries come together in time to establish the necessary cooperation, to address this crisis, precisely what the Schiller Institute is demanding—a summit of President Putin, Xi Jinping, and President Trump?

The danger of war is great. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), has just published findings that while the number of nuclear warheads has slightly decreased, the danger of confrontation has increased. There are too many people who think about winning a first strike. The Russians have made clear they will never allow a first strike to succeed and they have hypersonic weapons to counter such action.

On June 24 there will be the big military parade in Moscow. This is the parade originally scheduled for May to celebrate the end of World War II, but it could not take place in May, and now it will only be broadcast by TV, so the masses of people will not be physically attending. There are many TV teams, and as the announcers have already said, they will have a better view than if they were physically there, because these many TV teams will show airborne units, they will show the military hardware. People should watch this parade and remember that it commemorates the end of World War II and should be a warning to never again entertain the idea of world war. Such ideas constitute a very real danger.

White House/Shealah Craighead

In his Commencement address to graduating West Point cadets, President Trump declared, “We are ending the era of regime-change, of endless wars.” Accompanying Mr. Trump on his arrival at the U. S. Military Academy is LTG Darryl Williams, Superintendent.

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Schlanger: You brought up a couple of times the growing war danger. For example, the blowing up of the Liaison Station between North and South Korea; the famine and the chaos in Syria; the terrible civil war in Libya: All three of these situations are a result of the efforts of the regime-change crowd in the West, in the trans-Atlantic region, and the sanctions policy.

Zepp-LaRouche: Under conditions of a pandemic, all the sanctions should be lifted right away, because it obviously prevents these countries from addressing the medical emergency. Most of these countries are already not very developed and not very rich.

In the case of North Korea, I think the fact that there was no follow-up in terms of loosening the sanctions after the discussions between President Trump and President Kim Jong Un, is for sure the big reason, whatever other little provocations may have been going on there; so now North Korea is moving the military to a tourist area in North Korea and also to the industrial zone of Kaesong; and, as you said, they blew up this building in the demilitarized zone. So I’m pretty sure that people—Kim Jong Un and others—are watching the anti-China campaign coming from the United States and Great Britain, and given the strategic location of North Korea, they probably drew their own conclusion from that. So you can actually see how this anti-China campaign has all kinds of secondary aspects.

In the case of Syria, it is quite obvious that Trump’s attempt to pull troops out of Syria is not quite succeeding, because a number of military leaders in the United States are not exactly following Trump’s orders. But there is clearly an attempt now to move in the direction of regime-change against Syria through famine! The sanctions should be lifted. Anybody, and any governing body, including the EU, that is still supporting these sanctions, should be confronted with their inhuman behavior.

Libya is a typical case of a proxy war, at minimum between Turkey and Egypt, but it also involves Turkey and Italy, and is a very dangerous situation, because it eventually involves tensions between NATO and Russia. So I think all these hotspots clearly could only be resolved if you have the kind of international cooperation among the large powers, because they’re proxy crises which are the derivatives of the tensions in the large picture.

Schlanger: U.S.-German relations seem to have hit a slightly bumpy road in the last few years, now escalating with the threat of sanctions against German companies and the German government involved in the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. Where is this headed?

Zepp-LaRouche: This is incredibly serious. Ted Cruz apparently is preparing a bill in the Senate to impose sanctions, not only against all private sector firms in Germany and Europe that are working together to finish the last 150 or so kilometers of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, but also there is the threat of sanctions against institutions of the German state! Now this is incredible.

First of all, it’s the sovereign right of Germany to import its energy from whomever it wants; secondly, there is a complete upsurge, not just among left politicians, but from the CDU/CSU and SPD and so forth, not only because of the Nord Stream 2, but also for weeks there was the discussion that the U.S. wants to pull out 9,500 troops from Germany, to reduce its troop presence there to 25,000. What upset people was not just that it was being mooted, but the way it was done, that the U.S. did not inform Germany, its supposed partner. Germans found out about the plan in the media!

This is causing a big uproar among the entire spectrum of politicians. The Linkspartei [Left Party] and SPD faction leaders are now saying that the United States should not only withdraw their troops entirely, but also take their nuclear weapons with them.

Others, including a professor from the academy of the German army, are saying there is no threat from Russia against NATO, there is no intention on the part of Russia to attack NATO, so the reason why these U.S. troops are there is not to protect Germany, but to protect the strategic interest of the United States, because after all, Germany is being used as a launching pad for drones and other operations into the Middle East, into Africa; and the German ambassador to Washington also very clearly said, these troops are not there to protect Germany.

So there is quite a great deal of upset, and the professor from the Bundeswehr University said that, “for some time now, and escalating recently, there is a drifting apart of interests in all areas between the United States and Germany.” Now, I find that quite incredible. And what is that supposed to mean?

If that leads to a situation where the EU thinks it has to build its own army, to build a bloc against China and against the United States, this is the kind of geopolitical dynamic which I think is exactly what contributes to world wars: If you look at the long arch, it’s these kinds of things which have very negative effects.

I think the solution is not sanctions against the auto sector, or forcing the EU to get rid of the import tariffs for lobsters—all of these things are so absolutely secondary. I think Germany and the United States should work together to solve the problems of the refugee crisis, the building of Southwest Asia, to solve the pandemic, and work together to industrialize Africa—these are the kinds of things we should put our minds to, and together on.

And I think we have to have a different paradigm and a completely different thinking. Because national interest is fine—I’m all for national interest, including that of Germany. But as Friedrich Schiller said many times, you cannot have a national interest which is in contradiction to the interest of humanity. Therefore, you have to be a patriot, and you have to be a world citizen at the same time.

That is the kind of spirit which the Schiller Institute is trying to evoke. That will be the subject of our upcoming conference on June 27, which you should absolutely join and listen to and participate in, and that is really extremely urgent.

Schlanger: Any final words to give people the impetus to take part?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think the best thing is to look at this short video, which shows young people from Yemen, from Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. You see that these young people are fighting to get a world health system, that is the hope. The future is theirs, and the best we can do is to give them all possible support, so that their efforts succeed. So join our mobilization, because it is the most promising vehicle to get a change in the world picture.

Given the multitude of crises and that more and more people and countries are understanding that we need a new paradigm, I would not be surprised if we could not move governments at large, including the United States, Russia, China and many others, to implement our program—the 1.5 billion jobs that need to be created, because that is the only way that we will stop the pandemic and the famine. So join this effort.

Schlanger: Thank you very much, Helga, and we’ll see you again, next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week!

Global Expansion of NATO

Is Not in Germany’s Interest!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

CC BY-SA/Stephan Röhl

Emily Haber, German Ambassador to the United States, speaking at a conference in Berlin.

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This article first appeared in the German-language weekly newspaper Neue Solidarität. It was translated by the EIR staff.

June 19—After weeks of rumors, President Trump made it official: The U.S. government plans to withdraw 9,500 U.S. troops from Germany and limit the total number of troops stationed here in Germany to 25,000. In addition to numerous expressions of outrage over the rudeness expressed by the U.S. failure to coordinate this step with its “partner,” some of the otherwise suppressed facts were brought into the open about the reasons for the U.S. presence. The commotion was further heightened by the threat that U.S. sanctions against participation in Nord Stream 2 could affect not only German and European companies, but even government agencies and officials in the German Federal Republic, to which end U.S. war-hawk Ted Cruz even wants to introduce a bill in the Senate.

So it’s time to start thinking about German interests in a complex and rapidly changing world. In itself, the reduction in U.S. troops could be a welcome development, as any downgrading of military capacities can reduce tensions in Europe and as a whole series of military experts believe that a Russian attack on NATO can be virtually ruled out. It would be a different matter, however, if these troops were relocated to Poland and other Eastern European countries and therefore became part of a heightened policy of encircling Russia.

The German Ambassador to Washington, Emily Haber, said in a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations that the U.S. troops were not in Germany to defend Germany, but to project the military strength of the trans-Atlantic community into Africa and Asia. One can even be certain that as long as Trump’s promises to end the endless wars of the Bush and Obama administrations, and to withdraw troops from those conflict areas, are in practice ignored by the Pentagon, there will be no closure of the base at Ramstein and no withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons, as requested by the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Parliament, Rolf Mützenich.

Far more important than the commotion over Trump’s style of dismissing his partners, are the plans that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg presented at the recent meeting of the NATO Defense Ministers for NATO’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. That’s because the entire trans-Atlantic war-hawk faction—including, for example, the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund, Ian Brzezinski (the son of the disastrous Zbigniew Brzezinski), and various other think-tankers—are pushing for the globalization of NATO and the strengthening of relations with “global partners” such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. Special efforts have been made to include India in the strategy of an “Indo-Pacific Partnership” to encircle China.

NATO in the Pacific?

Brzezinski wants to go so far as to establish a NATO headquarters in the Pacific region, from which NATO maneuvers would be coordinated and which would by no means be limited to purely military operations, saying that NATO’s entire range of diplomatic, economic, technological, social and military capabilities must be mobilized to demonstrate the “geopolitical power” of the West. The Economist commented that the real discussion in NATO, which is much more important than the “short-term spats” between Germany and the United States, is how will NATO counter China’s rise in the next ten years, and thus still have a purpose in 2030.

Ian Brzezinski (left) is pushing for the globalization of NATO, whose Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (right) says he’s “concerned” about China’s rise. Pictured below are U.S. Army soldiers training in Hohenfels, Germany for deployment to Afghanistan.

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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg professes to be “concerned” about China’s rise and Chinese investments in nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that could reach Europe. He is silent about the fact that China’s “rise” is because it has lifted 850 million of its citizens out of poverty, and relies to do so on the very scientific and technological progress that the EU is throwing out of the window with its economically insane “Green Deal.” He also hides the fact that the surge in Chinese armaments investments is in response to the hysterical anti-China campaign currently being escalated by the British and war-hawks like top U.S. officials Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper. He also forgets to mention that China, according to the Swedish research institute SIPRI, has only about 5 percent as many nuclear weapons as the U.S. has.

Gage Skidmore

Former Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon.

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To the extent that the pro-war trans-Atlantic faction is trying to escalate the military encirclement of Russia and China and is even intent on the complete economic decoupling of China, pressure is increasing for Europe to be fully integrated into the anti-China campaign. Probably the wildest propagandist in this regard is Steve Bannon, a representative of the extreme right in the U.S., who recently called for the immediate decoupling of the West from China in the German newspaper Die Welt, owned by the notorious Springer publishing house. Bannon asserts that this is not a cold, but rather a hot war, and if the EU wants to try to avoid this war, the European countries will end up as the “vassals” of China.

The same line is taken by the Green leader Reinhard Bütikofer, Co-President of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), whose political similarity is not only to Bannon. IPAC includes war-hawks like U.S. Senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, who obviously don’t mind doing political things together with Bütikofer, a former member of the Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands (Communist Union of West Germany, KBW).

The KBW was one of the numerous so-called “K” groups at the time of the 68er youth uprisings and the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the preeminent U.S. new left organization, most of which groups were fully in line with the Chinese cultural revolution and the anti-technology Red Guards.

At the same time that China turned away from this ten-year plunge into what is considered to be one of the darkest periods in China’s history, and began a great change with the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, which started China’s rise, the various supporters of the SDS and the “K” groups embarked on the “long March through the institutions.” More than a few of these radicals were collected by the Atlantic establishment and, as a result, made it to high positions, including to the rank of foreign minister. From then on, The Internationale was replaced by the old song, Whose bread I eat, his song I sing, and so they still sing today.

Justin Holmes

Former UN nuclear weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, has said that since there is no threat from Russia, NATO has no reason to exist.

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World War III?

Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, who has the merit of blowing the whistle on the lies upon which the Iraq war was based, recalls—in a commentary on Trump’s partial withdrawal of troops from Germany and the fears expressed by the U.S. think tank CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) that NATO would not survive Trump’s second term—the old dictum that still circulates in NATO today. It was formulated by Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, that NATO’s purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Ritter underscored that the Russians would never have wanted to join NATO, but on the other hand, without the alleged threat from Russia, NATO has no justification for its existence.

Without discussing here the prehistory of how the Cold War and the formation of NATO came about, we can state now that NATO lost its purpose after the demise of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. It was not Russia that broke all the promises made during German reunification, but the same neocon and neoliberal agents of a unipolar world, who saw Trump’s election victory as an existential threat, who are now attempting a coup against him and who, after their demonization of President Vladimir Putin, are using the same mode of lies and fake news, to build an enemy image of China.

The aim of this policy in all three cases—against Trump, against Putin and against Xi Jinping—is regime change to create the “end of history” utopia announced by Francis Fukuyama after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which all governments opposed to the “rules-based neoliberal order” that guarantees the privileges of the establishment are simply eliminated.

The problem is that the idea of a global NATO is the stuff of which World War III will be made. The idea of containing the rise of China, a nation of 1.4 billion people, pursuing a progress-oriented economic policy, cooperating with over 150 nations all participating in the economic progress generated by the New Silk Road, is as absurd as it is unrealistic. A political scientist at the Helmut Schmidt University of the Bundeswehr in Hamburg, Prof. Dr. Michael Staack, recently commented on the tensions between the United States and Germany, with the assessment that German and American interests today “diverge on all important issues.” He advised the government to “ask the planning staff” to work out independent answers.

This analysis seems plausible, but it is inaccurate. It ignores the axiomatics of the respective political groups. Just as right-wing Marco Rubio and the “former” Maoist Bütikofer get along, the supporters of the neoliberal paradigm on both sides of the Atlantic, who are united in their hostility toward Russia and China, agree. On the other hand, the real interests of the sovereign nation states of America, Germany, Russia, China, and all other states are incompatible with the structures of a world government that only serves the interests of the oligarchy.

It is time for Germany to cancel the so-called Status of Forces Agreement and membership in NATO. A new security architecture that considers the interests of all states on this planet is long overdue.

III. A Future Based on Scientific Breakthroughs

A Real Revolution in Space

by Michael James Carr

Now, the present system …, as long as we try to operate according to the rules of an international monetary system, the United States is now hopelessly doomed. However, under our Constitution, with a President, and with the backing of a Congress which supports him in this, the United States can turn on a dime: Precisely such is the key to my proposed legislation.

—Lyndon LaRouche

in an October 10, 2007 webcast

NASA

The SpaceX Dragon’s Endeavour, the crewed capsule, autonomously docking with the International Space Station, May 31, 2020.

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June 19—With the May 30 successful launch of the crewed Dragon Endeavour to the International Space Station (ISS), the United States demonstrated the truthfulness of LaRouche’s outlook. The United States can be resurrected out of the collapse that the City of London and Wall Street financial forces have imposed upon it. To better understand the future, we must reflect a bit upon the past.

During the 20th and early 21st Century, there were only two short periods in which the American System of economics—of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Carey, Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon LaRouche—has been able to prevail over the British attempts to suppress it which have continued now for more than 300 years. The Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy administrations, while far from perfect, were times of the use of Hamiltonian national credit and support for scientific and industrial progress. In particular, the scale of efforts involved in Kennedy’s Apollo Project portended a move towards an unending stream of technological revolutions with infinite possibilities. British imperialism could not tolerate this.

In 1963 Kennedy was killed. After that assassination, Lyndon LaRouche picked up the torch. He had no official authority, but he had a commitment to creating a better future. He soon identified the British hand behind the cultural warfare aimed at America.

Strangulation of NASA and the Future

In 1967 the London Tavistock Institute (think-tank of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6) released the Rapoport report, which decried the growing interest of young people in science and engineering due to the excitement about space exploration and travel. It demanded efforts to destroy that optimism and shut down the U.S. space program. In that same year, 1967, large-scale layoffs began in the aerospace industry.

In 1968, war, assassinations, riots, were used to spread pessimism. The first Moon landing in 1969 was treated as an amazing stunt, not as the beginning of a revolutionary cislunar (the Earth-Moon space) economy. The propaganda campaign (“We have too many problems here on Earth to be spending so much money in space”) to shut down NASA and scientific progress was already in high gear even as longer and longer lunar stays covered more and more territory and performed more and more important research.

The London-orchestrated propaganda pushed the idea that science was responsible for war and suffering while industry was responsible for pollution and desecration of “Mother Earth.” The President Nixon who oversaw the return of Apollo 11, allowed the NASA budget to be cut down radically. Apollo would be shut down after the 6th Moon landing. Apollo and Saturn parts would be used to make a short-term space station and a docking with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit, but the fount of progress was being shut down. Nothing new would be built!

Nuclear technology was targetted for shutdown. High-speed rail and supersonic transport projects were targetted. Tens of thousands of scientists, engineers and workers were being laid off. Young people studying science and engineering were left high and dry—their prospects dimmed towards insecurity and poverty—because there was no credit system to back them up; we didn’t have a policy to promote the development of industry. We had a policy to shut it down and go back to the colonial status of a subject colony. The future of American-led progress for the world was just being shut down!

To revive NASA and the future that was being strangled, LaRouche and other interested people fought to build Wernher von Braun’s reusable two-stage shuttle. The opposition to this proposal engendered such haggling that agreement was reached only with nearly impossible conditions. What Imperial Finance would tolerate to be built was far from the original conception of von Braun. In fact the expectation was that it would fail to fly.[fn_1]

So it was greeted as a miracle when the courage of astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen, along with the determination of engineers to do the impossible, cobbled together something that actually flew. But it was dangerous, delicate, constricted to low Earth orbit (LEO), and expensive to operate. In the middle of this dark time, Lyndon LaRouche put forward a forty-year timeline for colonization of Mars which, still today, is key to the transformation of the productive power of civilization as a whole, and guides revolutionary thought in space research.

The Shuttle System

Despite the sabotage, the Shuttle System succeeded in many notable ways: It put most of the International Space Station into orbit, it launched and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope, it allowed for a new understanding of aerodynamics up to Mach 25, and it kept sending back amazing video and photography that continue to inspire people around the world with the idea that man can do almost anything! Of course, this system should not have been shut down until a better replacement was available. But the combined take-down by presidents Bush and Obama was “crowned” by Obama’s public abandonment of manned space travel. That president, who said “We already went to the Moon,” also showed his Malthusian worldview when he told a Town Hall meeting in South Africa in 2013:

Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over—unless we find new ways of producing energy.

He had already said, in Virginia in 2008, “We don’t need any fancy fusion power.”

When shuttle operations were shut down with the last flight in 2011, again the Empire, which of course is always betting, bet that the infant Commercial Crew Program (CCP) to build private spacecraft for getting people to and from orbit would fail. Certainly the CCP was not focussed upon development of the revolutionary technologies necessary to really make human access to LEO a simple, cheap, routine process. The disease of monetarism, love of money, was put in the driver’s seat. So, in the sense that it was focused upon use of “off the shelf” technologies, it was designed to fail to produce the revolutionary technologies really necessary to assure better access to space, and thereby fail to have the spinoff effects into the rest of the economy which more than pay for the cost of developing revolutionary technologies.

Despite the temporary insanities of recent decades, from the long perspective, the United States has accomplished a very bumpy upward trajectory for its people over the course of its history. The upward bumps were powered by two main factors: (1) periodic implementation of American System credit, tax, tariff and industrial development policies, and (2) what Lyndon LaRouche identified as the development of labor power. LaRouche’s concept encompasses both the discovery of new scientific principles (which always are first made inside a single mind), and the insight and drive to apply the new discoveries to the productive machinery of society—technological progress.

Among scores of technological revolutionaries worldwide, an unusually high number were Americans, and a significant percentage of those were immigrant Americans, such as Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the revolutionary Linotype machine (look it up!), John Ericsson (U.S.S. Monitor), Wernher von Braun who organized America’s first successful space launches, John Augustus Roebling (Brooklyn Bridge), Andrew Carnegie, Nikola Tesla, and many others. So, it was not unusual for a young person with big ideas to be drawn to the United States even during times of self-destructive general economic policies. Such is the case with Elon Musk, founder, CEO, CTO, and majority owner of SpaceX.

NORAD and USNORTHCOM

Elon Musk

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Who Is Elon Musk, and What Is SpaceX?

There is a reason that NASA Administrator Bridenstine said the other day that we want to inspire hundreds of new Elon Musks. Like entrepreneur/engineers before, he deliberately set out to transform civilization for the better. As a boy in South Africa, he was ridiculed as a bookworm. As a young person, he identified three areas of rapid change which offered him an opportunity to make a real contribution: (1) making civilization multiplanetary, (2) developing the possibilities of the internet, and (3) developing better power sources than fossil fuels. Born a few months before the last Moon landing, early on, he set his sights on emigration to America, land of opportunity and bumpy revolutionary progress.

Of course like most people, he has made plenty of mistakes and is going in the wrong direction by pushing the idea that solar cells can power civilization, or in thinking that his next chemical-rocket-powered spaceship will be able to land people on Mars; however, despite heaps of ridicule, the 48-year-old has transformed three major areas of life for the better so far: made access to space much easier with revolutionary technologies, transformed the world auto industry with the introduction of the Tesla Model S electric sedan, and is now in process of bringing high-speed, space-based internet services to nearly every inhabited remote spot on Earth with the SpaceX Starlink system.

After selling his portion of PayPal, which he had been instrumental in creating, Musk decided to put one third of his resultant fortune into a project to help NASA and reignite interest in space development.

In 2001, he adopted the idea of landing a little greenhouse on Mars (as the Chang’e 4 did in 2019 on the far side of the Moon) and made several trips to Russia to attempt to buy a couple of old Russian rockets to launch his greenhouse. The Russians did not take him seriously (despite the fact that he had Mike Griffin along, who would soon become the NASA Administrator). So, in 2002 he set up SpaceX with a plan to mass produce a small rocket, the Falcon 1, to launch small satellites. If he could succeed, perhaps he could develop a low-cost capability that would be able to help NASA in some way, and further his commitment to making humanity multiplanetary.

To summarize a fast-paced process, here is a timeline of SpaceX history:

2002: Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) founded.

2006: First Falcon 1 launch failed.

2008: After two more failures, and on the brink of company dissolution, the last of Musk’s money was put into a fourth launch attempt, which succeeded in reaching orbit. The Falcon 1 became the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit.

2008: December 23, NASA awards an International Space Station (ISS) resupply contract to SpaceX.

2010: First successful Falcon 9 launch.

2011: Wins NASA contract to build Crew Dragon vehicle to send astronauts to the ISS.

2012: First launch of the unmanned Dragon supply vehicle to the ISS.

2015: First successful Falcon 9 first stage return landing near launch pad.

2016: First successful Falcon 9 first stage return landing on a drone ship (requiring less fuel than landing at the launch site).

2017: First recovery of a payload fairing.

2020: Became the operator with the most satellites in orbit: the Starlink system.

2020: First of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program contractors to launch people to orbit on the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

You see from this history that, over time, in addition to a great many commercial launch contracts, SpaceX won some NASA contracts. However, SpaceX’s objective was not the winning of contracts, not profitability. SpaceX was founded to make civilization multiplanetary. That requires cheap, routine access to orbit. So revenues were turned back into research and development. In its short history, the Falcon 9 system has undergone rapid improvement and revolutionary upgrades. Like Henry Ford’s original automobile company, as much as possible, SpaceX seeks to produce all of its parts and product in-house, using the newest, most advanced manufacturing technologies.

So, in 2011, when SpaceX was awarded a contract to develop a system to get astronauts to the ISS, NASA got quite a bargain. Instead of failing to deliver on the contract, (as the Empire had hoped), NASA got unexpected returns: reusable first stages and payload fairings, and multiple improvements actually leading to the massive decline in the cost of access to orbit. So much so, that commercial industrial production in orbit and on the Moon is now in the immediate future.

NASA

An artist’s rendition of SpaceX’s proposed Starship, a crewed lunar lander.

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Space X, Today and Tomorrow

The Falcon 9 rocket has been successfully launched in 87 of 89 attempts over 10 years. It is expected to launch over 35 times in 2020 and over 50 times in 2021. Every mission is unique, so it is difficult at this time to quantify and compare the costs of various systems (especially since some figures include R&D and some only include operating costs). However, some published figures should give a rough idea of the change which is upon us: from 1970 to 2000, typical freight-to-orbit costs were around $18,500 per kilogram; typical costs for a Falcon 9 freight launch are around $2,720 per kilogram. It is a story much like the story of Henry Ford’s Model T.

But better than trying to quantify the change in money terms, the process of getting cargo and people into orbit is just becoming a smoother, simpler, more automated and autonomous process.

Right now SpaceX is developing its next rocket/human spacecraft combination, the fully and rapidly reusable Superheavy/Starship combination, which will have payload-to-LEO capability in the same range as that of the Saturn V or the new NASA/Boeing Space Launch System. The Superheavy is the first stage and the Starship is the spacecraft, although the entire system is also known as the Starship. Work on the Starship is accelerating towards production of two per week by the end of 2020. SpaceX aims to get operational launch costs for this system down to $2 million a flight.

While this system on its own will not be able to fulfill Musk’s dreams of directly flying people to Mars, it will be very useful in building up the infrastructure which Lunar and Mars human colonization will require. In May, SpaceX was one of three company teams that won NASA contracts to further develop Lunar Lander proposals. The SpaceX design is a modified Starship.

The team Musk has assembled at SpaceX is primarily of young people, with a few older, experienced people from other parts of the NASA/aerospace community. In the hiring process, little attention is paid to degrees or “academic credentials.” What is sought is people with demonstrated abilities in independent construction or creation. The aim of LaRouche PAC’s proposed Space Civilian Conservation Corps, or Space CCC, is to bring forward such capabilities in millions of young people, in order to proliferate the type of revolutionary progress underway now at SpaceX throughout the economy more generally. If you are a young person, seek out such opportunity. If you are older, withhold your blanket criticisms of young people; SpaceX is showing what young people can do.

Wikimedia Commons

Comparison of super heavy-lift launchers, capable of putting 50 metric tons or more into orbit—past, present, and future. Note the SpaceX Starship at right and the two versions of the NASA/Boeing Space Launch System (SLS) in orange. Next year, the Block 1 version will launch an Orion spacecraft around the Moon.

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More New Spacecraft Point to a Bright Future

So what do these changes mean to you, or to a poor young person out on a rural farm or village on the other side of the world, for example? The immediate change will be that the SpaceX Starlink array of 12,000+ tiny LEO communications satellites will bring affordable high-speed internet service to every sparsely inhabited part of the planet, from the Outback to the Sahara, to the Yukon. This service will begin this year in North America and rapidly cover the world.

There’s a huge amount of future activity coming up immediately. There’s going to be another unmanned test launch of the Boeing Starliner atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V this year. If all goes well, it will join the Crew Dragon as a third option for crew transfers to the ISS. It is expected to work well, but will probably be more expensive than the Crew Dragon system. In any case, NASA is determined to maintain multiple systems for access to LEO, so that even if one system is grounded to solve a problem, NASA is never again left without an American human launch capability. Nonetheless, NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, will return to swapping seats on vehicles depending upon crew and flight scheduling. Sometimes Americans will still ride Russian spacecraft, and sometimes Russians will ride American spacecraft.

Next year, as part of the Artemis program, the giant NASA/Boeing Space Launch System (SLS), now undergoing testing, will launch the NASA/Lockheed Martin Orion spacecraft on an unmanned test mission around the Moon and back. This is the system that will land astronauts back on the Moon in 2024.

So, after nine years with no direct way to get people into space, the United States is about to have three manned spacecraft systems in operation. Also noteworthy next year: The Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser will start carrying cargo up to the ISS. While its contract with NASA is for unmanned cargo missions, Sierra Nevada also intends to build a manned vehicle. This lifting body design offers the unique capability of landing on a runway, unlike the Crew Dragon or the Starliner, which land under parachutes—the Crew Dragon at sea and the Starliner on land. We have a long way to go before achieving the ultimate vehicle, but the Dream Chaser will be another step in that direction.

India and China are also going to fly new manned spacecraft in the next two years, and China will start building a space station next year, using a version of the Long March 5 rocket. The new Chinese spacecraft has the international docking adapter system, enabling China to be integrated with the rest of the international space community, if we straighten out the political mess we have with some Imperial operatives in Washington.

The New Multiplanetary Economy

Earlier this year, a company called Axiom Space with many experienced ISS project people in leading roles, signed an agreement with NASA to start tests of various manufacturing capabilities aboard the ISS, and then to start adding modules to the ISS strictly for private space manufacturing projects. They have identified—as targets for space manufacturing in orbiting space stations or space factories—fiber optics; higher strength, lower-weight alloys; satellites; biomedical research components such as protein crystals; growth of organs and tissues in space, with a sort of biological 3D printing capability; and micro-encapsulation for pharmaceutical and medical purposes.

FIGURE 1

Axiom Space

Above, an artist’s depiction of three Axiom Space manufacturing modules, attached to the ISS. Below, several Axiom Space manufacturing, habitation and power modules, separated from the ISS and functioning as an orbital factory.

Axiom Space

FIGURE 2

NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA has been discussing potential partnership opportunities with Bigelow Aerospace for its inflatable habitat technologies.

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As manufacturing technologies and systems are proved out, Axiom will undock clusters of modules from the ISS to form separate orbital factories, Figure 1, tended by people and supplies sent up and returned by the commercial transportation systems now coming on line.

Another company, Bigelow Aerospace, which already has a test inflatable module, Figure 2, installed on the ISS, has built prototype inflatable space stations for industry or space tourism. Now that the cost of getting people into orbit is coming way down, it will be able to get customers to contract for launch of its stations.

Picking up upon some of LaRouche’s ideas, and struggling to wrest control of the American economy and culture from the City of London/Wall Street Imperial system of mass impoverishment and pessimism, President Trump in his Inaugural Address moved to redirect a constrained NASA towards human exploration of the Moon and Mars. One of the main results of the redirection is the Artemis program.

As part of Artemis, NASA is planning to build a Lunar-orbiting, man-tended space station called the Lunar Gateway. It will be a staging point to accumulate cargo, fuel, and systems for operations going to and from the surface of the Moon or Mars. Several contracts have already been let. NASA is still negotiating with international partners for hardware contributions to the project. It is expected that many of the ISS partners will contribute hardware and services.

NASA

Three companies were granted development funding for the Artemis crewed lunar landing system—SpaceX (left), Dynetics (center) and Blue Origin (right).

NASA

Artist’s depiction of the Dynetics proposal for a crewed lunar lander, shown ejecting empty exterior propellant tanks.

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In May, NASA signed contracts for 10-month studies of three different human Lunar lander proposals from three different teams of companies—one team led by Blue Origin, one by Dynetics, and the aforementioned SpaceX team with a Starship derivative. Each is radically different from the other two. Each has positive and negative aspects to its design. At least one, but probably two, will be contracted for construction by NASA. The first goal is a human landing by 2024.

Over time the same approach taken with commercialization of LEO, will be applied to the Moon. The Moon is rich in metals, Helium-3 (the perfect fuel for fusion power and fusion rockets), and water for human use and rocket fuel. The one-sixth gravity of the Moon as compared to Earth, makes it an ideal place for building the infrastructure not only for the surface of the Moon, but also the infrastructure for LEO and spacecraft heading to Mars.

Mars

Next month the United States will be launching the Perseverance rover to Mars, which is an updated version of the Curiosity rover already roving there. It will also have aboard the little Martian helicopter called Ingenuity. Second, also in July, Tianwen-1 a Chinese Mars rover will launch. Third, the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter for Mars is being launched atop a Japanese rocket this summer. It is primarily designed to study Martian weather. Over time, civilization is building up quite an impressive infrastructure on and around Mars.

However, sending people to Mars via the same kind of chemical propulsion used for robotic systems, entailing trips of seven months even on the least time, least energy, transfer orbit—which is only available approximately every two years—is not a viable proposal. Even discounting the effects of an extremely hazardous deep-space radiation environment, think of the difficulties astronauts have in regaining muscle strength after long duration stays on the ISS. Imagine landing on Mars in that condition.

To send people to Mars, we are going to need fusion power. Even fission-powered nuclear thermal rockets (NTRs), with around twice the specific impulse (or push per unit propellant) of chemical rockets, will not suffice. We are going to need continuous rocket thrust throughout the trip, which can only come with energy sources as dense as fusion power. Serendipitously, as the Italians say, “the cheese has fallen right on the macaroni.” The Moon has been collecting Helium-3 deposited by the Solar Wind bombardment over the eons. Helium-3, extremely rare on Earth, is the perfect fuel for fusion rockets and fusion power in general!

As we process the Lunar regolith, we will extract the water, metals, and Helium-3 necessary to build Krafft Ehricke’s Selenopolis, but also to export Helium-3, metal fabrications, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Lunar agricultural products. These will go to Lunar orbit, back to low Earth orbit, or to the spacecraft that will head off to Mars. The Moon is the perfect place to create the provisions and bulk equipment necessary for the entire field from low Earth orbit to the surface of Mars, because very little energy is required to move mass from the Lunar surface to any other destination in space.

Beyond Artemis, we will need to send complex robotic systems to the Moon to begin building a base and begin mining, manufacturing and agriculture. So in the medium term, the bulk products of Lunar mining and agriculture will begin to pay for the complex robotic and other imports from Earth. Over time the balance of trade will begin to create a self-subsisting economy on the Moon as part of a broader cislunar economy. Even before this relative economic equilibrium is reached, the Moon will provide the fuel and other bulk provisions necessary for the early development of Mars.

None of this is possible yet. The advances represented by the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon are important steps forward. The SpaceX Starship will represent another big step forward, but certain additional actions are required to be taken now to ensure ultimate success in developing the space frontier. In the drive to implement President Trump’s Artemis program in this decade, we must not short-change the work on the future technologies that will allow Artemis to seamlessly lead to Lunar and Martian colonization in the 2030s and beyond.

NASA

An artist’s rendition of early human exploration operations on Mars.

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The Necessity for Fusion Propulsion

Fundamentally, breakthroughs in propulsion technology orders of magnitude greater than those so far achieved will be required. It is still too difficult and expensive to get to LEO and the Moon, not to mention Mars. As EIR has previously reported, small enterprises exist with infant technologies but great potentials. We are fortunate that some millionaires and billionaires have put their own money behind some of these projects. However, just as with SpaceX, NASA contracts and grants on a large scale will be required to bring the new technologies to fulfillment of their inherent potentials. These are the most profitable investments a government can make. And government-sponsored basic research must be greatly expanded, especially including construction of large-scale physical experimental devices (not studies derived from computer simulations) at the national laboratories and universities.

Federal investment in fusion research has been cut even below the already low levels of the 1970s. This must be reversed as part of the national revival and global development. Recent breakthroughs at MIT in the manufacture of much more powerful, compact superconducting magnets give a hint of what could be possible. Besides the universities, dozens of small companies around the United States and around the world have formed to pursue the goal of making commercial fusion energy devices. Decades of slow progress have now put the world on the cusp of success in this area. The situation is much like the similar situation in 1900 with respect to the development of powered aircraft. We do not know who will be the new Wilbur or Orville Wright, or the new Glenn Curtiss, or Louis Charles Joseph Blériot, but they are out there.

Since successful fusion power or fusion propulsion systems have not been developed yet, Federal grants to legitimate projects of multiple types must be offered on a large scale. Of particular note from the standpoint of NASA, the small grant made to Princeton Satellite Systems for its work on development of the Direct Fusion Drive rocket must be turned into a contract to begin building test engines, and then prototypes.

FIGURE 3

Science Museum, London

A model of the Skylon spaceplane, designed by Reaction Engines, Ltd. in the 1990s. It has the SABRE air-breathing rocket engine. The spaceplane takes off like an airplane, reaches low Earth orbit, and lands like an airplane on its return to Earth.

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In 2019, Reaction Engines, Ltd. of England, successfully tested its engine precooler design up to Mach 5 conditions at a Colorado facility, in a trial sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This is the key technology required to build Reaction’s proposed air-breathing rocket engine, Figure 3, the Synergistic Air Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE). This technology holds the key to building space planes that can take off and land like aircraft, yet fly up to orbit. The ability of a rocket engine to use ambient air up to very high altitude and Mach 5—at which point the rocket can switch over to onboard Oxygen—makes routine human access to LEO possible. While DARPA and Boeing are interested in this technology for aircraft, NASA should sponsor the development of the first actual spaceplane using this technology.

FIGURE 4

CC/Saruno Hirobano

The Central Japan Railway’s superconducting maglev line, now being installed for commercial operation.

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Finally, we again push for the development of the StarTram superconducting maglev evacuated-tube launch system for heavy freight. Proposed by Dr. James Powell, the designer of the world-record-holding Japanese superconducting maglev railroad system, Figure 4, now being installed for commercial operation, StarTram is a system that imparts most of the energy to the orbital vehicle while it is on the ground, instead of requiring the vehicle itself to carry along massive quantities of fuel.

The high G forces associated with the first version of this system would make this purely a freight system, but would promise the cheapest freight delivery to LEO from Earth of any known system. Decades ago, Krafft Ehricke had proposed a similar maglev launch system for the Moon (minus the tube, since the Moon has no air resistance). It just so happens that the same general technology is needed to build modern rail systems for travel on Earth.

There is no dichotomy between the technologies needed in space exploration/development, and development of terrestrial civilization. The more Federal grants, contracts and credits are directed into meeting the challenges we have identified here, the bigger will be the payoff in increasing mankind’s potential relative population-density, the key economic metric put forward by Lyndon LaRouche.

That is why Presidents Trump, Xi, Putin, and Prime Minister Modi must meet, agree to shut down the floating exchange-rate system bubble economy (the modern form of the British Empire), create a New Bretton Woods gold reserve system, and implement the full LaRouche Four Laws program to ensure the future our posterity deserves.

The New Paradigm, on Earth and in Space

When we speak of agreement among the United States, the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and the Republic of India, we do not disrespect any other nation. We speak of the four most powerful republics on Earth, the minimum united force capable of overthrowing the City of London/Wall Street-centered imperial disease, which has spread war and poverty for centuries. Each of the four republics has been targeted for destruction by the British Empire. The four have an identical interest in its final demise.

In LaRouche’s New Paradigm, relations among sovereign nations will return to Alexander Hamilton’s and Henry Carey’s concepts of complementarity and harmony. In Hamilton’s case, he refuted Adam Smith by insisting that since producers need customers, a farmer should be very happy to have prosperous cities to which to sell, and likewise a tool-maker or bookbinder in the city should be very happy to have prosperous farmers to whom to sell. Your interest is not to rob the producer by manipulating prices. It is in your interest to give the producer the cost of production plus a little more for reinvestment in improvement of tooling and product. The synergistic result far exceeds the potentials when there is no mutually beneficial relationship.

This simple principle, foreign to the fake news organs of empire, must again become the basis of American policy, as it had been under leaders such as John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.

In the deadly environment of space, mutual dependence is even more intense. The expanse of trillions of galaxies, the relative smallness of the Earth, combined with the huge amount of work required just to preserve life, serve to bring people and nations together in a profound way. Ask any astronaut.

So what will be the role of the United States in the New Paradigm in space? As a nation of nations, mixing people and ideas from all over the world, and with deep connections back into every corner of the world, and an incredible history, the world counts on the United States, and its space agency NASA, to bring nations, companies and people together in the development of space. We expect that individual countries and companies will wish to develop and maintain their own independent spacecraft, launch systems, and lunar mines, but it is very important that all the systems maintain minimal degrees of interoperability and be mutually supporting.

We would expect NASA to continue to put together partnerships with nations and companies, as it is negotiating for the Lunar Gateway. There is so much work to do that some division of labor is mutually beneficial. As previously mentioned, it will be important to bring in China and India to the teamwork.

The World Is Counting on the United States

But of greatest importance, the world is counting upon the United States for revolutionary ideas that solve problems faced in space development. The world is counting upon America to realize Kennedy’s vision of an unending stream of technological revolutions with infinite possibilities. The reason that LaRouche PAC and EIR speak of the key role to be played by the new 50 million productive jobs to be created inside the United States, even as we speak of creating 1.5 billion new productive jobs worldwide, is that the world is in need of a massive upshift in technologies of production. As LaRouche stressed, the most important factor in determining the relative labor power of a group or society is the quality of its tooling and organization. The quality of the tooling is determined by the science and technology that go into the design of the tools.

It is true that widespread distribution and application of existing technologies could raise the general worldwide standard of productivity and living conditions. However, really massive global improvements require breakthroughs in all of the areas of which we spoke earlier, plus areas such as optical biophysics and areas yet to be conceived. Some breakthroughs will come from other countries, but the world is counting upon the U.S. to produce more than its fair share of progress. Because of the past decades of Imperial suppression, we have quite an array of people with ideas and plans, just waiting for the chance to test them.

As we dismantle the monetarist control over the economy and the Imperial control over the means of communication, let us, as a Federal Government, direct the resources, whether contracts, grants or loans, into the space program, the rebuilt fusion program, the national labs, the university labs, and to responsible people with big ideas!—especially those with no possibility of immediate success, because it is such long-term projects successfully brought to fruition that will have the most revolutionary effects. The Universe will pay us back!

That is the real revolution.

[fn_1]. It is reminiscent of the case of Billy Mitchell. He was reluctantly permitted to demonstrate that aircraft were capable of sinking a battleship via bombardment. However the rules of the demonstration were set such that he was not permitted to use a bomb powerful enough to actually sink the ship. He was set up to fail! When he disobeyed the rules and used an adequate bomb to successfully sink the ship, he was court-martialed! [back to text for fn_1]

China’s Long March Out of Poverty

by William Jones

Public domain

Deng Xiaoping, who put China firmly on the path of “reform and opening up.”

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June 18—With the initiation of the policy of “reform and opening up” in 1978 by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who had taken the reins of power not long after the death of Mao in 1976, China began to reestablish its relationships with the rest of the world. It also embarked on its first really successful attempt at developing its economy based on the promotion of science and technology.

Far from following some overriding “game-plan” for achieving “world hegemony,” a notion being foisted on the general public by China-bashers like Michael Pillsbury, who in his 2016 book, The 100 Year Marathon—China’s Secret Strategy To Replace America as the Global Superpower, depicts the process of “reform and opening up” as a conscious effort by China to develop into the world hegemon, China really made its way to where it is today only through a rather arduous process of “crossing the river by feeling the stones” as the Chinese adage says. Contrary to Pillsbury’s rather paranoid—and simplistic—view of history, the process of “reform and opening up” was far more complicated—and far more erratic—than anyone might imagine.

Like other early leaders in the CCP under Mao, Deng and his family were made victims of the Cultural Revolution. Shown is Deng (l.) with Mao Zedong.

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Charting a New Course

With the death of Mao in 1976, the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could dismantle the disastrous Cultural Revolution, an attempt by Mao to maintain the Mandate of Heaven after his disastrous Great Leap Forward debacle. While the Cultural Revolution had wrought havoc with much of what was then China’s intellectual elite, who had been trundled off to the countryside for “rehabilitation,” or killed, Premier Zhou Enlai, himself a subject of ire for the Cultural Revolution’s “storm troopers,” the Red Guards, had assisted those who were victims, to survive the ordeal.

During the worst days of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou did his utmost to maintain a certain sector of Chinese high-tech production in the area of space and in the nuclear industry, which had been created under Mao’s program of “two bombs [atomic and hydrogen] and one satellite.” Zhou had in 1963 already formulated the famous “four modernizations” and, at the last Communist Party Congress he attended shortly before his death in 1976, he reiterated their importance as the basis of Chinese policy. The “four modernizations” referred to modernization in industry, in agriculture, in national defense, and in science and technology. And this was taken up in a most determined manner by Deng Xiaoping.

Although Deng Xiaoping would not himself become Communist Party Secretary or China’s president, or even premier, he was one of the Eight Immortals, the name given to those who had been involved in the struggle of the Communist Party since the Long March to the mountains of Shaanxi in 1934, to escape the wrath of Chiang Kai-shek. And like Zhou Enlai but unlike Mao, Deng had been one of those who spent time in France as a factory worker during the First World War.

Topwar.ru

Many party cadre and intellectuals were subjected to public humiliation, ostracism, and beatings by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

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Once he had overcome the opposition to his leadership, his position was fairly solid, although not completely unopposed. He began immediately to rebuild the nation from the devastation it had undergone. In 1977 he reinstituted college exams and reopened the schools, which had been largely closed during the Cultural Revolution, made only accessible, and on a limited basis, to those with the correct “class background.” Most of the professors had been sent to the countryside. They were now brought back to the classroom.

public domain

Zhou Enlai, a target of the Red Guards, was able to use his position to help those they victimized.

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He also opened the door to the outside world, intent on accessing the necessary scientific and technical know-how to enable the country to rebuild. Deng laid stress on the advancement of science and technology as the motor force for economic development. This was the long-term perspective. In the short-term, however, it was not totally evident to Chinese scholars how they should proceed in order to move forward. And a major period of consultation, deliberation, and experimentation began in the search to find the right “development path” for China.

Deng Xiaoping Announces the New Policy of ‘Reform and Opening Up’

In December 1978, the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China met. It was preceded by a month-long discussion at a preliminary Working Conference. It was at these two meetings in which Deng and his allies—many of whom only recently returned from disgrace and even internal exile as a result of the purges of the Cultural Revolution—took control of the leadership of the Communist Party and set China on a new path.

At the time, the Chinese economy was totally dependent on state-owned industries. This had been the Soviet model and it was this model that the Chinese Communist Party had, by and large, followed. Even with the abandonment of the autarchic policy of the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and opening the door to trade with the Western nations, it was still unclear how China was to transform its command economy into a functioning modern economy without devolving into chaos and anarchy.

One thing was clear from the beginning, however, and that was the need for a revival of China’s scientific capabilities. Even before the 1978 Third Plenum, Deng was aware that the revival of education and science was of the utmost importance. Within a month of his return from a visit to Southeast Asia, Deng convened a Forum on Science and Education in 1977, to begin the reorganization and expansion of scientific institutions. In addition to reviving the Academy of Sciences (CAS), he founded a new Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). He reinstated the State Science and Technology Commission and ordered the drafting of a new Seven-Year Science Plan. Speaking at that forum, Deng said,

We must create within the party an atmosphere of respect for knowledge and respect for trained personnel. The erroneous attitude of not respecting intellectuals must be opposed. All work, be it mental or manual, is labor.

With regard to areas of study in institutions of higher learning, there should be a unified plan to specify which ones should be merged or divided, where new ones should be added or reductions made, and which ones should be abolished....

The United States has 1,200,000 scientific research people. The Soviet Union had 900,000 the year before last, and the figure has grown since. We have only about 200,000....

Nevertheless, as some comrades have pointed out, this small number of researchers can undertake more projects and achieve greater successes than the same number in capitalist countries, if only we take advantage of the superiority of our socialist system and organize our efforts in a unified and rational way....

Then on December 13, 1978, Deng announced at the closing session of the Central Working Conference of the Third Plenum, the policy of “reform and opening up.” The method to be followed would be based on the concept that “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth.” This was in direct contrast to the prescription given by Deng’s predecessor Hua Guofeng, who had formulated the doctrine of the “Two Whatevers”: Whatever policies Mao supported, and Whatever instructions Mao gave, should still be followed.

Deng told the delegates:

To make revolution and build socialism we need large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways, and generate new ideas....

At present, most of our cadres need also to apply themselves to three subjects: economics, science and technology, and management. Only if we study these well will we be able to carry out socialist modernization rapidly and efficiently. We should learn in different ways—through practice, from books and from the experience, both positive and negative, of others as well as our own....

While these words seem to ring of common sense now, this was such a break with the old ways of doing things that there were many in the audience who doubted the wisdom of moving in the direction Deng indicated, and many who felt that this ultimately would undermine the leading role of the Communist Party by introducing reckless “experimentation.” In fact, Deng’s radical shift in policy no doubt preserved the role of the Communist Party which was losing support as a result of the disastrous policies it had followed during the previous two decades.

But there was great excitement in the nation as a whole. The students who had been sent to the countryside to work, when the universities were closed, were now back in the classroom. Intellectuals who had been exiled and harassed were now brought back to revive the education and science centers of the nation. The Chinese Communist Party, which had previously shunned intellectuals who didn’t have a pristine “proletarian” background, were now openly recruiting them into the party.

‘Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones’

But the road ahead was still somewhat unclear. Two things were key. China must open itself to the outside world, the world where science and technology was advancing rapidly. And it must find a way to tap the creative capabilities of its own people by opening the door to some form of market economy. While state-owned enterprises could continue to be the mainstay of the Chinese economy, a niche had to be found in which private enterprises could have the freedom to experiment and develop.

But how to move from a dirigistic “command economy” into a more “open” economy that could tap more effectively into creativity and innovative ideas—and tap into experimentation, which could not be done in a rigid top-down structure—was not so clear cut. Chinese scholars, reflecting on their own experience, also went to the books to look for answers. And they began to invite foreign scholars to China to examine how things worked in other countries.

Initially Chinese scholars started to look at other attempts to reform the old Soviet model in the East European nations. CASS began a study of the Yugoslav and Hungarian experiences in “market socialism.” They also began to study the New Economic Policy that had been practiced in the early days of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. And the work of Soviet economist Nikolai Bukharin, who had been purged and executed by Joseph Stalin after Stalin’s launch of the forced collectivization, became a hot item for economists.

Shaanxi People’s Publishing House

Xi Zhongxun addresses the crowd at a mobilization meeting in Xi’an, in June 1949.

public domain

Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping’s father, a leading figure in the Communist Party from the end of World War II, was also humiliated, as shown here, and sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

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But Deng had already set things into motion himself. In 1977 in Guangzhou province, which sat across from the British enclave of Hong Kong, officials complained to Deng that many youth were fleeing the province and attempting to swim to Hong Kong. Deng realized that simply imposing stricter control measures was not enough. The problem was the discrepancy between the standard of living in Guangdong and in Hong Kong. The officials also complained about the lack of foreign currency for purchasing foreign technology in order to realize many of their construction projects.

Deng encouraged them to export their fruits and vegetables to Hong Kong in order to acquire more foreign currency. He also encouraged them to build a hotel and encourage foreign tourism in the province. Then in April 1978, Deng appointed Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping’s father and himself a comrade from the early days in Ya’nan in the 1940s, to head the province in what would become the “critical experiment” in reform and opening up. Xi, like Deng, had also been under a cloud during the Cultural Revolution and had been exiled to manage a remote factory.

Even before the Third Plenum, Deng had already begun his own exploration of different economic models in foreign countries, traveling in 1978 to Singapore, to Japan, and to Malaysia. The success of the Asian tigers, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, countries which had largely developed according to Hamiltonian rather than free market principles, also served as models for development. During his visit to Singapore, Deng examined and was favorably struck by the tremendous development in the city-state since the time of his first visit there on his way to France in 1920 to participate in a work-study program.

The visit to Japan in 1978 was ground-breaking. Deng had been in touch with Japanese colleagues during the early 1970s and was aware of developments there. He was also eager to change the tense relationship which had existed between the two nations since the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894, and to build on the commonalities that had earlier existed between these two Asian powers.

On his visit to Japan, Deng was accompanied by Liang Chengzhi, who was born in Japan and educated through primary school in Japan, and then later at Japan’s Waseda University. Liang was also a veteran of the Long March and was the son of Liang Zhongkai, who had been one of the leading candidates to succeed Sun Yat-sen as leader of the Kuomintang, until he was assassinated by rivals in 1925.

Government of Japan

Takeo Fukuda, Prime Minister of Japan (1976-78), was sympathetic to Deng’s attempt to modernize China.

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Deng met with Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda as well as with the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, and many of the leading political and economic figures in the country. He was particularly impressed by Japan’s effective industrial management. Here also was a nation like the United States, which had a long history of practicing Hamiltonian economics spurred on by the Japanese translations of American economist Henry Charles Carey and Carey’s disciple, E. Peshine Smith, who spent many years living and working in Japan. The Hamiltonian system was not a British “free trade” system, but rather a system in which private industry was nurtured, promoted, and encouraged by measures taken by the central government. Perhaps here was a model for China to transform its own system without losing control of its direction.

The American System of Economics was brought to Asia by followers of Henry C. Carey (left), such as E. Peshine Smith (right), who participated in Japan’s modernization.

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While Deng was in Japan, the two countries signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship, thereby establishing formal relations. Deng also took a trip on the Shinkansen, Japan’s high-speed railroad and envisioned high-speed rail as a future transportation mode for China. Deng’s visit also opened up China to Japanese investment, which would take off the following year and would play a major role in helping China in building up its own industry and infrastructure during the Deng years.

The First Special Economic Zone

In January 1979, one month after the Third Plenum, Xi Zhongxun in Guangdong was given the green light to formally accept foreign direct investment and became China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Fujian province, situated across from Taiwan, would become the second.

As the SEZ experiment began to show results, there were now considerations of using more of the coastal areas, which had easy access to the export markets, as engines of growth for the entire economy. Deng’s much-cited slogan to people involved in the process, “Let Some People Get Rich First,” dramatically characterized the seismic shift in the Chinese economy.

White House/Jimmy Carter Library

Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the U.S. in 1979, after the establishment of diplomatic relations, was instrumental in changing America’s views of the People’s Republic of China. Here Deng is welcomed by President Jimmy Carter.

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The process did not always go so smoothly. There was opposition in the ranks from those who felt that this introduction of “capitalism” into the Chinese model would have a corrupting influence and be detrimental to the system and the authority of the Communist Party. The emphasis on export from the coastal regions also left the central and western parts of the country still in the grip of poverty as the coastal regions became more prosperous. This stuck in the craw of the traditional, egalitarian approach of the Communist Party.

And, of course, for the party leadership, the ongoing changes were often a matter of safely piloting the ship of state between the Scylla of a straight-jacketed command economy and the Charybdis of chaotic—and dangerous—free-market chaos. And, in addition to many well-meaning people in the Western nations, there was also the lure among the more avaricious of the Western capitalists of grabbing a piece of the China market and China’s resources.

By 1985, a variety of Western academics in the field of economics were being brought over to China to discuss the issues at hand in order to find a solution to problems that arose in the process. In addition to the variety of economists from Eastern Europe and its practice of “goulash Communism,” there were also many Western economists who were invited to come and discuss and make proposals, including the radical von Hayek “free-marketeer” Milton Friedman.

Dialogue with LaRouche

It was around this time that Chinese officials came into contact with economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche had come to the attention of Chinese scholars particularly with regard to his proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which had been adopted by President Reagan in March 1983. LaRouche organizers were invited to China to discuss LaRouche’s economic ideas and then later, a group from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade came to visit LaRouche and took time to get a briefing on LaRouche’s economic development model, the LaRouche-Riemann model.

In 1985 there was also correspondence between Mr. LaRouche and Professor Huang Zuwei, a leading Chinese rocket scientist at the Beijing Institute of Space Systems Engineering. Dr. Huang had some specific questions with regard to the effects of space research—and the SDI—on economic development. At this time, Chinese scientists were mulling over the implications for China of possible SDI cooperation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Caught in the middle as a major power, China felt that it must start to gear up its own scientific potential with respect to this major development between two countries, both of which had earlier been adversaries.

LaRouche wrote an extensive and profoundly philosophical reply to Dr. Huang, which outlined the history of technology and political economics from the Golden Renaissance to the present and his own ground-breaking notion of increasing energy-flux density as the key measure of economic development. He also dealt with the key issue of space exploration and the colonization of Mars:

If we can construct new cities on Mars, then we can more easily employ the same technologies to construct rich habitations in such deserts as the Sahara and the Gobi. Apart from the fact that we have concrete scientific-economic needs to proceed with space-colonization, the creation of task forces which must solve each and all of the problems of spaceflight and space-colonization, in a coherent way, forces mankind to make scientific breakthroughs at a much more rapid rate than would otherwise occur. Science requires a concrete task orientation, which focuses the powers and self-development of science on those kinds of practical objectives which require development of the principal frontiers of scientific inquiry....

I would recommend to you, your colleagues, and your government, that China consider concentrating much of its physical science under institutions integrated by a common mission assignment respecting the colonization of the Moon and Mars. For reason of the nature of the primary and auxiliary technologies that mission-assignment implies, not only space-research and BMD, but every frontier of scientific inquiry is implicitly subsumed in the most efficient way under that mission-assignment. This would foster the highest ratio of scientific benefit in every field, per average scientist and technician employed.

It should be noted that LaRouche’s advice was given seven years before China would commit itself to a program of manned space exploration! Dr. Huang was also interested in inviting LaRouche to China to discuss his ideas, but for logistical reasons, this never came about, no doubt to the detriment of China as the next few years would show.

One Step Back—Two Steps Forward

At this point the Chinese Government of Zhao Ziyang unfortunately went with the disastrous “free market” recipe laid out by Milton Friedman. The rapid push for free market opening moved a bit too quickly and inflation—and speculation—was starting to take off. This growing economic dilemma together with the growing impatience among the youth for more rapid change, fueled by the concerted efforts of certain forces in the West eager to utilize the uncertainties in Chinese decision-making to foment a “color revolution,” led to the tragic events of June 1989, which created a temporary hiatus in China’s relationship with the West and a temporary hiatus in the “reform and opening up.” There was now a shift back to a more stringent control of the economy while the “dust settled.” Stricter controls were implemented to curtail inflation, and for a short period it seemed the reform policy would be scrapped.

But the aging Deng was not going to let that happen. In January 1991, Deng visited Shanghai, and after a briefing by Shanghai mayor Zhu Rongji (whom Deng would soon bring to Beijing to head the newly established Economic and Trade Office), he visited some aeronautic and automobile factories. Deng reiterated his own earlier expressed desire to make Shanghai a special economic zone, but Chen Yun, a conservative economist, who had been the virtual dictator of Chinese command economy policy in the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949, opposed the move and prevented it from being implemented at that time.

Then in 1992, Deng again traveled to Guangdong province to visit the first SEZ. This trip became known as Deng’s “Southern Journey,” and it was his final decisive intervention in securing permanence for the changes initiated in 1978. Throngs of people came to see the aging leader. He encouraged them to do more to make the region a hub of economic development and to follow the lead of the four Asian “dragons”—Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. A New Year’s phone call from the new Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin to Deng while on his trip indicated that Jiang also was leaning in the direction of continuing the “reform and opening up” policy.

By this time, some of the restrictions after Tiananmen had been lifted. Jiang Zemin visited the United States and met with President Bill Clinton at the APEC conference in Seattle, Washington in November 1993. The U.S.-China relationship was starting to get back on track and the new U.S. President seemed eager to re-establish close ties with China. There was also an increase in the number of Chinese students who were able to attend American universities, a process that had been promoted by Deng Xiaoping.

Economic policy was now largely in the hands of the new head of the People’s Bank, Zhu Rongji. Zhu had been one of the younger economists who had been present in the discussions with the Western economists in the 1980s. From 1993 on, Zhu was in charge of the People’s Bank of China and in 1998, with the death of conservative Premier Li Peng, he was named China’s premier.

public domain

As head of the People’s Bank of China, Zhu Rongji worked to transform the command economy of China into a socialist market economy.

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Zhu’s major task in 1993 had been to get the overheating Chinese economy under control. He took radical measures to bring order into the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and in eliminating some of the waste and inefficiency in the public sector, a measure that would draw the ire of many of the leading bureaucrats running those enterprises. He was also intent on dealing with the endemic problems of corruption. In 1993, the idea of a “market socialist economy” was inserted into the Chinese Constitution. Zhu instituted a tough policy of curbing the issuance of currency, limiting bank lending, and imposing order on the rather chaotic investment—important temporary measures needed to cool down inflation.

Zhu was also concerned by the extravagance of local governments intent on spending money to build new Disneylands, while the rural population was still living in conditions of extreme poverty. Even before the anti-poverty campaign in the countryside, initiated by President Xi, fighting poverty was also a matter of long-term concern for the government.

When the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997, Zhu was at the helm, directing a policy of aggregate spending in order to help counter the collapse of the Asian financial markets. He kept the exchange rate stable in spite of the pressure to revalue the RMB vis-à vis the other Asian currencies. He also used the crisis to overcome some of the conservative opposition to further economic reforms

China Agrees to Join the WTO

As the dust settled after Tiananmen, President Jiang Zemin was eager to stabilize China’s relations with the Western powers. He felt that if China could join the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which the People’s Republic of China was never able to join, it would help secure China’s ties with the West. While this would necessitate tough changes that would seriously affect the Chinese economy, particularly prices and employment, it was felt that it would be better to be inside the organization and have a say in setting the rules for the world economy, rather than being outside and having the rules imposed on China.

As head of the People’s Bank, Zhu Rongji had shown little interest in WTO membership since his main concern was to bring about a reform of the top-heavy SOEs, in order to make them more competitive, before opening up more widely to foreign products. But given the tough resistance from the SOEs to his reform project, he felt that WTO membership and the forced entry of foreign competition into China would force the SOEs to make those reforms. So when he was appointed Premier in 1998, he took the lead in negotiations for membership.

The Clinton Administration—and Wall Street—were also interested in bringing China into the WTO in order to gain access to the huge Chinese market and to bring China into the West’s “rules-based order.” Perhaps they could keep this economic giant in a trade-based “straight-jacket,” they figured.

Government of China

Zhu’s visit to the United States helped create support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and establish permanent trade relations between China and the United States. Here, Zhu is pictured with U.S. President Bill Clinton during his visit, April 6-14, 1999.

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The situation looked auspicious when Zhu traveled to the United States in April 1999 to negotiate an agreement. But there was opposition from some in the Clinton Administration, who wanted guarantees for labor unions and protection for U.S. industries, like textiles, that would be directly threatened by the Chinese competition. When these demands were leaked by the U.S. side before negotiations were terminated, Zhu came under heavy fire from conservatives at home, who felt that he had gone too far in the concessions that he was prepared to make. Nevertheless, President Clinton, realizing the missed opportunity, renewed negotiations—leading finally to an agreement on Chinese entry—which were finalized shortly before he left office.

Both Wall Street and the business community generally approved of the agreement, smelling the profits that could be made in China. They were successful in bringing enough congressmen on board to ratify the agreement in the U.S. Congress. But Congress was not about to give up its “prerogative” of taking China to task on human rights and other sundry issues through a blanket waiver on trade with the United States. The “straight-jacket” had to remain in place. So as a part of its agreement to grant China Permanent Trade Relations (PTR), Congress mandated the establishment of a committee, the Congressional-Executive Committee on U.S.-China Relations, which had to report each year on China’s “human rights” and military spending, thereby preserving the ability to throw a monkey-wrench into U.S.-China relations on a regular basis, which still created a serious impediment to full normal relations between the two nations.

kremlin.ru

President Xi Jinping used the success of China’s “reform and opening up” to offer a path of development for other developing nations in his landmark Belt and Road Initiative.

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China Assumes Its Role on the World Stage

By the time Xi Jinping assumed the post of Party General Secretary and China’s President in 2013, it was clear that China, under “reform and opening up” had become a major economic power. And the progress it was making in alleviating the endemic poverty in the rural districts showed the power that could be achieved by a developing country with a government intent on improving the conditions of life of its people. It was clear that China would also expect a say in the question of global governance, with a unique perspective from its own history and philosophy, and a strong commitment to helping other developing nations that had never succeeded in overcoming poverty in the post-Bretton Woods financial structure.

Clockwise from upper left: CGTN, CGTN, CGTN, CNSA;

Economic development, driven by continual advances in science and technology, has made China a leading producer in many fields. Clockwise from upper left: Middle school students learning English, an automobile factory, a Chang’e lunar lander, and the Lanzhou-Xinjiang high-speed railway.

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And as the largest developing country, China has maintained its commitment to the developing world. Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative was a clear declaration that what China had achieved in its ascent out of poverty could be done by any other developing country—and that China was prepared to help in that endeavor. And while the Belt and Road Initiative has also benefited many of the developed countries through its improvement of the world transportation grid and increasing the velocity of trade worldwide, it retains its primary role as the way out of poverty for countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And the role China played in hosting the Hangzhou G20 Summit in 2016, clearly indicated that it was hard at work to create a more just international financial system, which President Xi has named “a community of shared future for mankind.”

While the rise of China has caused some consternation among the ruling Western powers, there is no fundamental contradiction between the development of China and the development of any other country, including the United States. To the extent that the U.S. has been on a downward spiral during the last few decades, this has been due to a loss of direction among our own governing elites, as President Trump himself has indicated, and most particularly, the loss of a clear national commitment to a program of development based on the advancement of science and technology. And while the needed principles of development have been so eloquently elucidated and promoted over the last half century in the prolific works and political efforts of economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, his voice has been largely ignored by the short-sighted political elites of his own nation.

Since the Deng era, China has remained committed to “reform and opening up” as the path forward for its economy.

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China achieved mankind’s first landing on the far side of the Moon and is embarking on an entirely new phase of Lunar exploration, offering its cooperation with other countries eager to explore these new frontiers. We now have an opportunity to reflect, on the occasion of the May 30 launch of Falcon 9, on our own glorious history in space during the Apollo era. Perhaps we can return to the “better angels of our nature” and revive the spirit of innovation, which has long characterized our nation. And we can—and must—do this in collaboration with China, which has so successfully learned the lessons of economic development, and implement these lessons for the benefit of all mankind. And in this respect, the recent publication of Volume I of Lyndon LaRouche’s Collected Works could serve our nation’s leaders well in reviving the true American spirit.

Buy Lyndon LaRouche Collected Works, Volume I

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