WHERE IS U.S. FOREIGN POLICY GOING!

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Date: October 16, 1997

Any person who claims, that the United States government has a specific policy toward any part of the world, including the U.S. domestic economy, doesn't know what he is talking about. In most leading areas of foreign policy, for example, the Clinton Administration has at least two, mutually contradictory policies at the same time.

Take the case of Joe Doaks. Joe Doaks comes in to inform us that he has proof that the Clinton administration has such-and-such a policy toward this or that part of the world. Joe says, that he has the newspaper clippings to prove it. In comes Frank Smith, who insists that the Clinton administration has a different policy toward the same part of the world. He, too, has the clippings to prove that. Both of them are wrong. Even without taking into account the factor of factitious lunacy introduced from the Republican opposition in the Congress, the U.S. has many, mutually contradictory policies toward most parts of the world, as well as toward sending representatives into outer space.

Of course, it is partly President Clinton's fault. It is his watch, and what happens, or what he should do, but does not, falls to his responsibility. However, it is wrong to say that the President has failed the constituency which elected him; the source of his tendency for unworkable compromises between mutually contradictory policies, is the character of the overwhelming majority of that generation --both Democrats and others-- which he typifies on this account.

Unless that generation is willing to begin criticizing itself, it should have the honesty not to criticize President Clinton for the inconsistency of his policies. In his worst moments, President Clinton behaves all too much as a faithful representative of his generation.

The function of this week's feature on U.S. foreign policy, is to focus upon the importance of solving the devastating contradictions which have become characteristic of current trends in the Clinton Administration's formulation of foreign policy. For this purpose, we note certain similarities in these kinds of contradictory thrusts as they appear in the urgent matters of U.S. China policy, on the eve of the China-U.S.A. summit, with a similar pattern of contradictoriness in policy toward Central and South America.

In fact, the U.S. currently has no policy toward China, or toward Central and South America. In both cases, it has at least three, mutually contradictory policy-thrusts.

In the case of China policy, there is the Clinton administration's commendable thrust toward partnership with China, and, yet, there are also "globalist" elements, such as the hoax of "global warming," within the Clinton admintration's China policy which threaten to undermine, and even ruin the effort toward partnership. In addition to this contradiction within the Clinton Administration's own policy, the general public and the Congress are victims of an insane, Josef-Goebbels-like, anti-China propaganda barrage, from British agents in Hollywood, and inside the Congress.

A similar pattern exists respecting U.S. policy toward Central and South America. President Clinton's emphasis on partnership with the neighbors to our South, is correct; the notion of an economic partnership, to defend the Western Hemisphere against the present strategic economic threat from western Europe, a threat to both the U.S.A. and our neighbors to the South, is an excellent approach. However, the attempt to impose a "super-NAFTA" on those prospective allies, will victimize and alienate our friends to the South, while enraging such much needed political allies of the President as organized labor and other U.S. victims of the ill-conceived NAFTA policy.

Presently, it is virtually impossible to say that the United States has any one foreign policy toward any part of the world. The Clinton administration's impulse for negotiating compromises with two or more mutually irreconcilable policies, simultaneously, has locked the U.S.A., for the moment, into a "yes...but" policy toward almost every corner of the globe. On the virtually Hollinger Corporation-controlled, Republican side of the aisle, and in the London-directed U.S. mass media,⁽¹⁾ the proposed foreign policies are not merely reckless factitiousness by intent; the opposition to President Clinton borders on the insane.

Meanwhile, to the South, the pro-drug financier interest of the British Commonwealth, helped by influential lobbies such as the touchy-feely Inter-American Dialogue, has already grabbed financial control inside every one of these nations to our south. London has openly stated its intent, to use that top-down financial control in its effort to turn these nations against the United States, while capturing the entire region for assimilation into the British Commonwealth.

To our South, U.S. support for "Super NAFTA" is walking into a strategic trap. Similarly, pushing the "Global Warming" hoax, dooms any possibility of durable partnership for the U.S.A. in East and South Asia.

Of official Washington's foreign, and domestic policy-making, these days, it is said, "Those whom the pagan gods would destroy, they first make mad." While compulsive waffling over policy often appears to be the style of the Executive Branch, outright madness reigns over the Congress. The combined effect, reminds us of Rembrandt's famous painting of "Belshazzar's Feast." "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin": Unless government stops behaving in the way it has in recent years, this nation, and this present civilization, will not survive much past the year 2000, if that far.

Why Labor Is Saner than Wall Street

Usually, when Wall Street and organized labor get into a squabble over U.S. domestic economic policy, labor is usually right by instinct. The reasons ought to be obvious. Essentially, the reason is, that working people, especially farmers, industrial operatives, and skilled craftsmen, perform. Wall Street financier circles are intrinsically non-productive.

Take the case of the recent, well-planned UPS strike.

There were three relevant outstanding features of UPS' operations. One of those features, massive chiselling on wages to labor through replacing full-time employees with part-time employees, was the central issue of the strike. The second feature, UPS' role in the widespread practice of "just-on-time" inventory management, was the vulnerable flank which the unions' leadership exploited to defeat the UPS management. The third feature, was the looting of the productive process in order to provide an increased cash-flow for generating the speculative capital-gains loot obtained through upward financial leveraging of stock-prices. This third feature is key to the other two issues; this illustrates the lunacy of allowing Wall Street to shape the economic and related policies of the United States.

Go back approximately thirty years.

Between 1956 and 1971, approximately 70% of the annual foreign-exchange turnover of the U.S. represented import-export turnover. Under the floating-exchange monetary system put into effect during 1971-1972, this percentile collapsed rapidly, falling from 70% to about 5% by 1982, to about 2% under President George Bush, and to less than one-half a percent more recently. The percentile of the labor-force employed in productive occupations has collapsed, and the real purchasing power of wage-earners has collapsed, in terms of physical purchasing power per capita, by approximately half, during the same twenty-five to thirty year period.

Until the mid-1960s, the U.S.A. was, by policy, a nation committed to fostering essential improvements in basic economic infrastructure, and to fostering investment in those forms of scientific and technological progress which resulted in improved designs of products and increases in both the productive powers of labor and the per-capita physical purchasing power of households. Under those conditions, approximately sixty percent of the labor-force was employed in occupations which were highly performance-oriented, as performance is defined in physical terms.

Beginning the mid-1960s, within the simultaneous spread of the "rock-drug-sex" youth-counterculture, and the cults of "information society" and "post-industrial" utopianism, the percentile of the labor-force which was performance-oriented, contracted; the rate of that contraction accelerated, especially under the impact of the 1979-1983 "shock-effect" phase of implementation of what Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker had defined as his policy of "controlled disintegration of the economy."

In pre-1966 policy-shaping, performance-orientation predominated. The economic imperative of the Federal government, was to foster that increase in the growth of the per-capita tax-revenue base which enabled employers and government to provide not only for national defense, but also for an improved standard of living for the nation's households, and better technological opportunities for entrepreneurs. The physical-economic performance of government's policies' impact upon the economy, was a leading concern of the relevant offices of the Executive Branch and the corresponding Permanent Committees of the Congress. Over the period 1967-1977, this policy was largely abandoned, replaced by the kinds of "ideological agendas" which predominate in the thinking of so-called "middle class" Baby Boomers today.

In the performance-thinking-oriented, pre-1966 period, it was a scandal against the relevant political figure, if it could be shown that a political figure's policies were mutually contradictory by integrated performance standards. In today's "new era" of ideological agendas, performance-orientation is considered "reactionary" if it conflicts with any item on the list of "politically correct," ideological agendas. Instead of performance-oriented policy-shaping, today's "mainstream" orientation, is an echo of the 1968 meetings of those who were self-designated as Ford-Foundation-funded "SDS Crazies" on the Columbia University campus, or the "encounter group"-shaped Rainbow Coalition sessions of the early 1970s: to satisfy a relative maximum variety of single-issues on the list of politically-correct ideological agendas, with no consideration of integrated performance results.

Consider the cases of "NAFTA" and "Global Warming" as examples of this.

It is a fact, that the physical-economic conditions of the economy of Mexico collapsed after October 1982, and that that collapse has continued, unbroken, during the fifteen years since. The idea that "NAFTA" has been good either for the U.S.A. or Mexico, is a sheer delusion. Pushing a "Super-NAFTA" onto all of Central and South America, means the disintegration of every nation below our Rio Grande borders, and turning over the entire region, from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan, to the burgeoning drug-trafficking and other terrorist gangs presently rallied under Fidel Castro's Sao Paulo Forum.

Unless one is willing to greatly and rapidly expand the gigawattage of nuclear power production in every part of the world, any effort to reduce carbon-dioxide and related "emissions" must collapse the economy, as the economy of the eastern part of a presently united Germany has fallen catastrophically far below the pre-1989 miserable standard under the Communist regime there. Additionally, there is no scientific basis for the "Global Warming" thesis; bringing the so-called "scientists" in for counsel on that subject, is like turning marriage-counselling over to prostitutes.

Let us use an alternate term for "performance orientation;" that term is "truthfulness." Present "mainstream thinking" has rejected the principle of truthfulness, for the sake of a different yardstick of policy-making: "sensitivity." This change represents the abandonment of truthfulness to Bernard Mandeville's "principles of the market-place," to pure and simple, irrationalist hedonism. This is the policy-stuff of which ill-fated Sodom and Gomorrahs --and nasty Queen Elizabeth II's self-doomed London-- are made.

Science and truth have become the leading victims of "information society." Everyone likes "information;" few are interested in truth. "Truth?" The response is: "Please: don't go there!"

President Clinton did not invent this. This is the "mainstream thinking" of most of those among you who entered universities during the middle to late 1960s. If you belong to that category, President Clinton is not your problem; you are his problem.

Tibet, or not Tibet

U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) is a shameless agent of a British intelligence front- organization, known as Christian Solidarity International, a man who voiced no objections to introduction of Nazi-like prison-labor programs in the currently Republican Party-controlled Commonwealth of Virginia, and a man who has walked in the footsteps of Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, all the way to that Valhalla of Nazism known as the Dalai Lama's Tibet.

What attracted Hess and other Nazi ideologues to the Dalai Lama's Tibet, was not only the kind of mysticism they sought in the monasteries there. The oppression of the sparse population of Tibet by the hesychastic tyranny which ruled over them as virtual human cattle, was one of the most disgusting abominations against human rights continued into the Twentieth Century. On his record, Frank Wolf is a man who is singularly indifferent to human rights in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and in Holocaust-ridden Africa. He is by no stretch of the imagination a candidate for the part of a Good Samaritan.

Can one be deluded into believing that Representative Frank Wolf cares for Christians? Look at Africa, where millions of Christians have been killed in the genocide directed by those whom Frank Wolf supports, the circles of the satanic puppet-President of civil-war-torn Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, circles which include the common criminal, Laurent Kabila of Congo, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, John Garang, and the current dictators of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Is there an issue of rights of Christians under the present government of China? There is the well-known case of the legal status of the Catholic Church in China. Otherwise, China is a country of Asia, and of Asia culture, which, like nearly all of the population of East, Southeast, and South Asia, is still very much an underdeveloped region, still suffering the lingering effects of British, Dutch, French, and other imperialism. By any reasonable standard we must set for rights of human individuals and family households, most of the population of that region of the world --the majority of the human population, in fact, suffers a degree of economic deprivation which constitutes not only a deprivation of human rights in its own terms, but correlates with oppressive social conditions.

Furthermore, there is no form of violation of human rights, by that standard, which occurs in Asia, which is not already on the increase inside the United States itself. Worse, it is those factions in the Congress who shriek the loudest about the issue of human rights in Asia, who are in the lead in promoting Nazi-like measures which strip away the human rights of one constituency after another, here in the U.S.A. itself.

Since we have addressed the crucial issues of U.S.-China partnership in earlier editions of EIR, we can sum up this present discussion with the following remarks.

The death of President Franklin Roosevelt brought to an end the United States' war-time commitment to use the close of World War II as the occasion to eliminate from this planet all expressions of imperialism, including what President Roosevelt had denounced as "British Eighteenth-Century methods" in economy, to replace those British methods with the American method in political-economy. As a result of the failure to carry out that Roosevelt mandate, the world today is still predominately one great mass of economic and other injustice, especially against the peoples south of our Rio Grande border, of Africa, and of most of Asia. Complementing that, we have had an increase of virtual "Third World" condition of economic and related oppressiveness even inside the United States itself.

Now, after thirty-odd years of wrong-headed directions in policy-shaping, the present world-wide monetary and financial system has reached a boundary layer, at which its collapse is ongoing, and its disintegration inevitable. To survive, we must replace the present so-called "IMF system," with a new system, incorporating all the best features of the pre-1959 Bretton Woods agreements and institutions. To bring this new system, and its benefits into being, we require a powerful combination of partners. To establish the quality of partnership which can succeed, we must establish a keystone partnership with China, as well as with our friends below our Rio Grande border.

For purposes of developing a strategic doctrine to cover that requirement, we must return to a physical-performance standard in national policy-shaping. We must use the needed new financial-economic policies of a New Bretton Woods agreement, as the instrument by means of which we shall effectively address those other objectives which partnership in global economic growth will enable us to solve.

During the 1960s, the terrors of the age of thermonuclear conflict, drove the majority of the young people entering universities --and others-- into what has been a prolonged flight from reality into fantasy worlds of virtual reality. That flight from reality has come to a limit, a point at which that generation must finally abandon fantasy, and return to reality, or this civilization will not outlive this century. We must recognize the shocking contradictions within the current policies of the United States, as symptoms of a time when all that has been recently considered "mainstream thinking" is hopelessly unworkable, in which the only hope of survival, to abandon such "mainstream thinking," for a return to the reality of performance-orientation.

NOTES

1. No responsible critic could accuse EIR of exaggerating in pointing to London control over the U.S. major news media. Our investigation of the operation against LaRouche et al. run under the provisions of Executive Order 12333, back during the 1983-1989 interval, documented the way in which leading news media of the U.S. are controlled, top-down. Begin the list with the Hollinger Corporation and Murdoch chains. Add in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their syndicates. Include the Wall Street Journal, the the Moonie-controlled Washington Times, and an Associated Press which, together with NBC-TV News and the Wall Street Journal, was an integral part of a fraudulent prosecution of LaRouche et al. back during the mid-1980s. In the TV network medium, NBC-TV and CNN are among the most flagrant instances. A true patriot would consider shipping the whole pack of them off to London, as the precondition for building up an honest U.S. daily news media from scratch.