Lyndon LaRouche offers support
for Teamsters' UPS strike

Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., issued the following statement on Aug. 12, supporting the strike of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters against United Parcel Service. We have added subheads:

I regard the well-designed strike against United Parcel Service as an important, most timely part of the struggle to return the United States to those principles which plainly underlie our republic's Federal Constitution. Important, because many in the Congress either never learned, or have forgotten our Constitution; timely, because prominent Justices of our Supreme Court have dedicated themselves to overthrowing that Constitution. I write to call your attention to those issues of this strike.

The fundamental law of our Federal Republic is stated in the Preamble of that Constitution. The remainder of the body of that Constitution is a well-considered design of government for implementing that fundamental law. I quote that Preamble, and then address that principle which the Preamble carries forward from the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to our selves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States."

Republican principles

Read this in light of some very distinctive and meaningful choice of language featured in the Declaration of Independence: "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." This is the language which our republic's founding fathers adopted from Gottfried Leibniz's exposure of the evil intended by John Locke's "Life, Liberty, and Property." This difference in language was the central issue of our war against the British monarchy's oppression, then, and against the same alien philosophy of our so-called "Thatcherite neo-conservatives" today. Put this central principle of our Declaration of Independence together with the fundamental law of our constitutional Federal republic, its Preamble, and the importance of victory of this strike against the rampage of inhumane "neo-conservativism" should be clear to all thinking citizens.

Our republic was founded by colonists chiefly from the British Isles, Netherlands, and Germany, who settled here under the inspiration of a great struggle for civil and religious freedom then in progress within Europe itself. Those founders sought to do here, what had seemed to be nearly impossible in Europe itself at that time. Thus, in the many struggles against the English and British monarchy and Parliament, from the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, through our Declaration of Independence, our forebears, relatively freer from that sodden hand of feudal oligarchism which still ruled Britain and other European states, framed what has proven itself to be the most suitable design of government yet specified by any people of this planet. Would that we had been able to stay with that design and its intention.

The struggle to free man

The European struggle for liberty, of which the republican leaders of the colonies were representative, was conceived to the purpose of forming national republics which would serve the true interest of all of the people, rather than merely a small minority of overlords and their lackeys. This intent sprang from a Christian reading of Genesis 1:26-28, that each and all persons are made in the image of the Creator, that mankind might exert dominion in the world. The intent was to free mankind from the circumstances to which more than 95% of the people of all known cultures had been condemned earlier, to live as slaves, serfs, or, in other guises, as virtual human cattle to be herded, and culled by overlords' exertion of what is called today "property right."

The essential distinction of man and woman, which sets us apart from, and above the beasts, is the developable, creative powers of the individual human mind, the source of humanity's manifest power of dominion over nature about us. Thus, the education of each and every mind, the conditions of family life needed for the cultivation of that same potential, the opportunity to work and live, as adults, in a fruitful manner consistent with the dignity which that implies, are the hallmarks of true human freedom, and the wellspring of a natural right of each and all persons, which is always to be superior in law to the claims of property-right.

Thus, Leibniz replaced Locke's "Life, Liberty, and Property," with "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Thus, when slave-owners sought to defend their regression to the most evil practices of past history, the degrading of men and women to the status of cattle, they invoked Locke's slogan as their law, as do, to kindred effect, radical neo-conservatives of today.

The practices against which this strike are directed, express the evil which has taken over much of the economic practice of these United States during the course of the past quarter-century. Cheating human beings of their right to a decent living, and the looting of our enterprises by the scavenger's trick of "just-in-time" policies of inventory maintenance, typify those misconceptions which have ruined the living standards of our people, collapsed our governments' tax-revenue base, and looted our physical economy down to the bone, all for the sake of great speculative short-term paper profits on Wall Street and similar places.

Now, as under the leadership of that President Abraham Lincoln who restored the intent of our 1789 Federal Constitution, it is necessary to go to battle once again, to give flesh and blood to the intent of that Constitution. Every true patriot of our nation, and every lover of true freedom from around the world, should salute those trade-unionists whose battle is our own.