Beginning Wednesday morning, Nov. 6, 1996, the United States will grope its way out of the year-long, news-media generated, virtual reality of the 1996 national election-campaign, into a world gripped by what is already the worst crisis of the Twentieth Century. The Congress and the Executive branch, must prepare those early U.S. actions, through which a semblance of stability can be restored to both the internal affairs of the United States itself, and to a world outside the U.S.A., a world, most of which now appears to be in the process of disintegrating.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned the U.S. and other governments, that the present international financial system faces a global banking crisis. For once, IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus is right: the presently accelerating banking crisis expresses an underlying economic and financial crisis, worse than anything experienced in the Twentieth Century to date. The entire world economy would disintegrate if the U.S. government did not act immediately, once the banking collapse begins, to put the worlds monetary and financial systems into government-supervised bankruptcy-reorganization.
The worsening financial and economic crisis adds its energy to social and political crises in every region of our planet. The Middle East is on the verge of blowing up. The most-intensive genocide of the Twentieth Century, against the Hutus of Central Africa, is in progress at this moment, conduited through the British puppet-dictator of Uganda, Lady Lynda Chalkers (President George Bush-backed) General Museveni. Central Asia is ready to explode under the ricocheted impact of Londons Taliban operations in the Pushtun sectors of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kashmir.
While Italy struggles to reverse a years-long process of disintegration launched by a plot hatched on the British Royal Familys yacht Britannia, a political mass-strike wave like that which brought down the Communist regime in East Germany, is already under way in Belgium, and intersects persisting mass protest in neighboring France. Echoes of the same mass-strike impulse have erupted, once again, in the eastern part of Germany, and elsewhere. Central and South America are in various stages of a general explosion. Russia lurches at the brink of dictatorship or chaos. So, it goes, on and on, around the world.
Although the U.S.A. and China are relatively the most stable nations of the world today, here, inside the U.S., medium-term prospects are not much better than those for Eurasia or Ibero-America. If this nation escapes safely from our present distress, future historians will look back at the recent thirty years as the most perilous period in our Federal republics history up to the present date. Even during the time of the short-lived Confederate States of America, the estrangement of our citizens from their government had not fallen to such a hateful state of affairs as emerged out of the Reagan and Bush years.]
The spread of the militia movement, based in those social strata which have either fought our nations wars, or were prepared to do so, merely symptomizes the accelerating disaffection of the citizenry from their government, at all, local, state, and Federal levels. The economy, health-care and retirement issues, housing issues, and the past twenty years pattern of deepening corruption of the justice system, are driving a growing, large ration of our citizens from among ethnic minority groups, senior citizens, and others, to view government on both the state and Federal level, as their mortal adversary.
Even more ominous than the citizens growing emnity against state and Federal government, is the bitter resentment setting the citizen suffering from governmental abuses, against the other citizen whose merciless indifference to truth and justice is rooted in what senior economist John Kenneth Galbraith has accurately portrayed, as a flight into the virtual unrealities of the entertainment society.
It is time to get down to some very serious business. Beginning the weekend of Nov. 9-10, the recently established FDR-PAC will launch the process of rallying groups of concerned citizens into policy-shaping caucuses. The first of these, to be convened in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 9, will hear and discuss expert reports on the subject of health-care policy. Two additional sessions will be convened in Washington, on drug policy, and housing policy, during November, and two more during December. This will overlap sessions held on topics of foreign policy. FDR-PAC activities will be echoed by meetings in various parts of the nation, some co-sponsored by the PAC, but many more besides.
The best news of this moment, pending hoped-for results of the Nov. 5 general election, is that the Autumn phase of the 1996 election campaigns, has awakened a fresh spirit and force within the Democratic Party. The revived role of organized labor on the scene, has become a major part of the change, but only a part. There are, of course, still those Democrats who wish the Party to be what this country does not need, what Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) ridiculed, in a January 1995 address, as a second Republican Party; but, despite virtual Republicans, and even a few racists, such as outgoing Democratic National Chairman Don Fowler, there is something afoot in the Democratic Party today, which evokes memories of the mobilization under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
What is now on the move, is the force within the Democratic Party, and among the constituencies rallied against Gingrichism during this election, which represents the popular base for those policy-deliberations which must begin almost as soon as the election-polls have closed. That is the popular base which the FDR-PAC is addressing with its program of policy-caucuses.
The strategic crisis
The one issue which will make or break the U.S. government during the months ahead, is the onrushing, global financial crisis. Put to one side the looney tunes sung by types such as Libertarian candidate Browne and Senator Phil Gramm: during the election-campaign period, even none among the sane leading figures in official Washington has been willing to risk a major news-media lynching, by discussing alternatives to the presently institutionalized, national and global financial and trade policies. Now, with the election behind us, and the onrushing global banking crisis, they have no choice but to face up to the reality of the situation, and that very soon. There is no way in which the United States government can continue the past twenty years trends in economic, financial, deregulation, and trade policies, and survive.
Presuming the Democrats, in collaboration with sane, non-Gingrichite Republicans, control the Congress, the United States could survive the onrushing crisis. Otherwise, come 2000, George Bush might discover, that Kuwaiti money can no longer buy the Presidency for his goofy Governor son, for the simple reason that the United States has come apart during the meantime.
The politicians who continue the present posture of stubbornly ignoring the reality of the onrushing financial and economic crisis, will soon be crushed, and swept aside politically, by the reality they ignore. Then, the present writers objective authority as a policy-shaper, is unique, not only inside the United States, but world-wide. To parody the title of James Carvilles delicious book, They have been wrong, and EIR has been right.
The ongoing global economic and financial collapse is key to most other strategic issues.
Russia, for example. Credit Ambassador Vernon Walters with preventing perennially foolish President George Bush from making as much a British ass of himself on the issue of the post-1989 reunification of Germany, as Bush did on most other issues of his 1989-1993 U.S. Presidency. On every other key issue of post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, knuckle-dragger Bush was a stooge for Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers Fourth Reich geopolitical doctrine. The practice, and intent, of Thatcher-Bush policy toward the former Comecon sector, was to exploit the momentary moment of greatest vulnerability of the former Soviet power, to ensure that the entire region of the former Comecon was so thoroughly destroyed, economically, so depopulated and demoralized, that no political power should ever arise again in that part of the world in the forseeable future. This Orwellian, Thatcher geopolitical doctrine was called the reform.
Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration, so far, has failed to overturn the Thatcher-Bush conditionalities imposed upon Russia under the Newspeak label of reform. It was inevitable, that, unless that reform were discontinued, Russia would either collapse into chaos, or explode into an enraged dictatorial regime, brimming with hatred against the West, especially against the United States. We have now reached that point: Russia is on the verge of an explosion. That does not mean global thermonuclear war; nonetheless, the world-wide ricochet of destabilization and homicidal chaos from within the region of the former Warsaw Pact, would approximate the aftermath of a general war, throughout the planet. This must change immediately, before it is too late to reverse the effects.
In the Middle East, for example. The success of the Oslo accords between Israel and Chairman Yassar Arafat, depended upon the delivery of economic assistance, especially to Palestine, especially the large-scale public infrastructure development upon whose foundation any healthy development of a Palestine private sector depended absolutely. This was never delivered. The donor nations promised aid, but accepted the conditionalities which empowered the World Bank never to deliver that aid, and to prohibit the infrastructure development without which the peace effort would die of economic strangulation. Thus, the way was prepared for the bloody intervention of London-directed, and Brooklyn-based thugs into Israel, to topple the Labour government, virtually to obliterate the peace process.
In Africa, especially sub-Sahara Africa, the U.S.A. has no clear and consistent policy. The former colonial powers, notably the British and French, are successfully orchestrating genocide throughout most of sub-Sahara Africa, all with the complicity of the UNO Security Council, the Secretary General, and the locust-plague of UNOs Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) camp-followers, which facilitate the subversion. The crucial issues here, are issues of economic, financial, and trade policies; what the U.S. continues to support, on these accounts, are pro-genocidal policy-relics of the Bush administration.
In Central and South America, virtually every nation below our Rio Grande borders is either disintegrating, as Colombia and Argentina are being disintegrated, and as every other nation of the region is either at the verge of disintegration, or, close to that point. This is a result of a lunatic U.S. policy toward this entire region, especially since 1981, which a Bush-whacked Clinton Administration has not seen itself free to change. Acknowledging that Bushs politically-motivated, and London-steered Starr-chamber techniques have sabotaged the functioning of the Executive branch, these past eighteen months: the crucial issues here, are issues of a continuing, fatally wrong-headed U.S. economic, financial, and trade policy toward the region.
The same foolish, counterproductive policy-thinking shown toward these foreign sectors, is the crux of the internal problems of the United States itself. The U.S.A., too, is the victim of the same ruinous policies which the U.S. Governments of the past quarter century have imposed upon Ibero-America, Africa, most countries of Asia, and, more recently, the former Comecon.
The FDR-PACs initial focus of attention, in sponsoring the transition phases policy-caucuses, will be on those kinds of social-policy issues which tended to dominate the election period: Health-care policy, anti-drug and related policies, housing policy and related matters of urban policy, will dominate November. Key issues of entitlements policies will be featured during December.
During the same period, EIR will be assembling a major Special Feature on the subject of the global food shortage, which will be published in the Nov. 29 issue. In addition to EIR's continuing focus upon economic, financial, and strategic issues, our coverage of the health-care, housing, and justice policies will be ongoing throughout the transition period leading into the seating of the next Congress.
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