Some Questions and Answers from Lyndon LaRouche's December 12, 2000 Webcast Teleconference

Debra Freeman: We do have a question for you, Lyn, from Brazil. This is from Carlos Chagas, who is Brazilian journalist, who writes for Tribuna de Imprensa, as well as other publications. He is a highly respected journalist. He is a senior analyst of the Brazilian strategic scene, and he asks Mr. LaRouche: "What do you think about Governor George W. Bush's statement, that the poor and indebted countries of the world, like Brazil, must pay their debts with their forests?"

Lyndon LaRouche: Well, that's obviously what it is. This is British colonialism, as practiced by ... I don't know if George W. Bush knows what British colonialism is. I think he has informants who tell him that Texas exists, but he's just simply mouthing something that's given to him. The man is a limited man, very limited. I wouldn't try to overinterpret George Bush's mind; you might get lost in the swamp.

But it's obvious that the policy he's reflecting is the resource grab, the stealing, which is the same thing the British East India Company did in India. The same kind of thing. And I don't think George Bush knows the difference.

If you know his history, and I know some of it, but I know the leading circumstances--who owns him, to the extent that anybody wants to claim ownership. This man is not a man of ideas, and anything that he says, either comes out of his mouth because somebody put it there, or it stumbles out of there because it doesn't know where else to go.

Debra Freeman: Lyn, we have a question for you from Dr. Frederick Seymour, from D.C. General Hospital here in Washington, D.C. Dr. Seymour?

Dr. Seymour: First of all, thank you for the opportunity to bring this problem to your attention, and to the rest of the people involved.

D.C. General Hospital is a hospital for the homeless, the disenfranchised, and those without insurance, or sufficient insurance to cover their medical problems. We're in the middle of apparently a political battle, and many people here believe that it's already been decided. I understand from a National Public Radio broadcast, that Dr. Edward Mueller, of Hopkins, and two other presidents of medical schools, believe that part of the education of physicians in the world, certainly in this country, is being affected by the lack, or reduction, of medical facilities that are training hospitals. D.C. General has been rated as 25th in about 150 in this country. Certainly an honorable position, considering the difficulties of our budget, and the shortness of our annual stipend, to provide for the poor.

In view of the crisis that you see throughout the world, and throughout this country, we know that other hospitals are being closed. The HMO's seem to be putting pressure, not only on the educational system, but on the welfare, the common welfare, for the poor. And certainly, sooner or later, each one of us. How do you think we can approach this, in our setting here? Here we are, in the nation's capital, and we're unable to provide assured health coverage for our citizens.

Lyndon LaRouche: Well, I think you know that the people who decide these kinds of policy trends in health care, know what they're doing. You know the effects, but they also know the effects. If you look at the testimony before the Congress, if you look at the civil transactions and hearings on this, you know they know what this is.

For example. Most people in the United States, who've been through world wars, or recent wars, through the 1960s, remember a relationship between the medical support system, the public health system, and wars, and the general population. Our history of the medical policy in the United States, developed largely as a byproduct of our military medical policy. The Civil War was one of the big lessons; the great break in medicine occured in the Civil War, the biggest war we ever fought, the greatest number casualties, the greatest problems. The horror of what we weren't able to do, in that war, struck us.

The French and the British had a big experience in World War I. We had some experience in World War I, and watched what they had. We had also the experience of World War II. By the time we had finished World War II, what we knew, and what other countries knew, knew from the standpoint of government and public health, what you have to do for public health. We applied to that also, everything that we'd learned from fighting epidemics, long before we had antibiotics, and things like that, back in dealing with the Black Death and so forth, earlier, other epidemics. We realized that if you're going to defend public health, or if you're going to defend the individual health, you have to defend public health. How can you defend an individual selectively, on the basis of, "I like him, and he's got this disease." It can't work. In infectious disease, particularly. You've got to deal with the general problem.

Which means, that as we had with the Hill-Burton legislation, which was the result of our experience in World War II, we understood that what we had to mobilize for war, in terms of medical resources and support resources, and other logistics relevant to that, we had to maintain, for any kind of catastrophe, or general condition.

That is, for example, in war the great thing is called friction. Great losses in warfare, generally, except for certain battles, comes as a result of frictional losses in warfare, from sickness, from injury, accidents, and so forth. Therefore, the first line of defense of the health of the military force, was to defend the logistics of the general population, their welfare. So we did that.

The Hill-Burton legislation, as policy adopted back in the 1940s, laid that out clearly.

Now, what we're doing today is, we're shutting down health care institutions. We no longer have an indepth public health reserve. We long since liquidated the Veterans Hospital system, and so forth and so on. We no longer have a policy...

Or, for example, in Germany, the thing was put this way. You have three objectives in medical care, today. One is called, first is shareholders; next is the paying customer; and third is the institution that provides the care, and the population. So, that's the policy. We know that. So, what are we doing? At a time where disease is spreading, we are more vulnerable to infectious disease than ever before. The antibiotic revolution has run out of steam, at least in the present form. We now diseases spreading through globalization, such as Lassa fever, and so forth, spreading throughout Europe. You could have a disease come from an unknown disease, someplace in AFrica, could hit some place in the South Pacific, or someplace else at an airport, and can be conveyed to somebody who dies of the disease in Europe, or the United States, thereafter.

So, we are vulnerable to disease. We are also vulnerable to other kinds of disease, and therefore we have to understand, we have to have a national policy, which is consistent with the lessons we have learned, inclusively from military medical history. We must have an infrastructural capability, which means, hospitals available, clinics available, in every area, to maintain, as the Hill-Burton legislation prescribed. That's the first requirement.

Don't say, you can't afford it. Can you afford to kill people? is the question. If you don't have those institutions, you have no frontline defense against disease, including infectious disease.

What happens when we get hit with a new epidemic, of a new type, like the flu epidemic which hit at the end of World War I? A new type of disease. How do you deal with that? You have to have indepth capability, otherwise you are defenseless. People want policemen to shoot more and more, all the time; they want death sentences, in Texas especially. But what are you going to do to defend life? What are going to do to enable us to mobilize resources, to recognize and deal with a disease? How are we going to improve health care, which requires research?

What we're doing now, this prescriptive kind of thing, is wrong. A physician must treat a patient, not a disease. How do you know--he comes in with a classification, you're going to treat that disease. Are you going to treat the patient, or are you going the disease? You're talking about an institution that deals with people who largely are poorer. You're dealing with people who are coming in not as diseases, but as patients. The special thing you describe about your institution, is that it's an institution which treat people. And you then find out what diseases they may have after they come in. They may come in with one thing, and you find it's something. The point is, to find out how to treat that person, and we need the capabilities for treating that person, as we did in the medical services, in our military in World War II. We need the same principle.

We must have the hospitals. We must have the institutional capability. We must have the physicians. We must have, above all, the training institutions, which give us the depth of capability. We must have the research capabilities, which we are not building.

For example. A vivid example. [inaudible--]

Out of the work of Vernadsky, and his follower Gurewitch, in Russia, there are important researches in the tradition of Pasteur and Vernadsky, into dealing with the question of the nature of life, as a physical principle, as opposed to something which comes out of inorganic processes. We have important researches going on there, which are astonishing in their implications.

We have a friend of mine, who's successful in Italy, because he works on problems of healing of professional athletes. And of course, people of these teams want these people treated quickly. So therefore, he's been able to develop techniques which improve that healing process, from burns and breaks and so forth. And therefore, he's come up with some ideas of magnetic wave impact on the healing process, and they're highly tested and proven.

We have work in biophotonic reactions, interactions, all kinds of things, on life. We are now in a situation, where we've run out of steam on the anti-biotic revolution, either temporarily or whatever--the thing is running out of control. We need, above all, research institutions. We need medical and related research institutions, associated with the clinical functions of medical care, in order to develop the indepth capability for defending the American people, among others, agianst the problesm of disease. And if we don't do that, where are our priorities? What are we defending? We're not defending people.

Therefore, the point is, the government has to take a policy and say: you sharpies, with your shareholders value; the first obligation of government, before we cut any taxes to benefit George Bush, the first obligation, is to find the way, the way we used to do under Hill-Burton, a combination of private, municipal, state, local, and federal agencies, must decide, under a Hill-Burton kind of standard, decide what every community in the United States requires. And decide on how they're going to raise the money to do that. And to have training institutions, as we used to.

For example. Take the case of Washington, D.C., which you're referring to. Look, Washington, D.C. is the nation's capital. It is the window on the world for the United States. Look at the prison system, and the health care system, in the Washington,D.C. area. Is that a disagrace to the United STates, or is it not?

What if someone gets sick in certain parts of Washington? Will they be treated? Even desperately sick. Will they be treated? The education, the health care, and related systems, the prison system, for example, the criminal justice system. These are things which, when not maintained, are the shame of the United States as a whole. And if we can find the right policy, where the federal government should be most concerned, in the Washington, D.C. area, to make sure we have a model policy on medical care, in this area, which has real target objectives--not the so-called shareholder value, paying customer, priorities--then we will set a policy in the nation's capital, which every member of Congress can see, and which they depend upon, to some degree or another--or their staff depends upon it--which we can use as the model for approaching the United States as a whole.

We have to make that kind of decision, an FDR-type of decision. Otherwise, there's no solution. There's just a fight, a rearguard battle.

Debra Freeman: We have a question from New York, from a representative of the United Nations Population Fund, and if the technology works, we'll be able to hear that question.

Question: The question is, that the court system used to be the final arbiter, but now it appears that the independence of the judiciary has been eroded. What do you propose be done?

Lyndon LaRouche: Well, the problem here is essentially a question of philosophy of law. And the thing I mentioned, Scalia, the Scalia question, is the case. Scalia, if you read his colloquys, and read some of the papers I've read, and look at some of things he's done recently, this man should not be on the Federal bench. He represents an extreme reflection of the kind of philosophy of law, which should not be on the Supreme Court. And apparently it tends to be a majority.

If you uphold... Look, the United States was made as a revolution against John Locke. If you read the Declaration of Independence, the upholding of the principle of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as opposed to Locke's argument for life, liberty, and property, and you look then at the Confederate Constitution's preamble, which specifically attacks and repudiates the Declaration of Independence, you see clearly what the issue is. It is an issue of law.

The United States has to be based on a principle of natural law. That is, a principle that is based on a conception of what the nature of man is.

For example. In the case of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, there is a general agreement on man as an individual, made in the image of the Creator of the universe. And thus the policy of society, respecting mankind, thus has to be derived from that as a notion of natural law.

What is natural law? Natural law is what man must do to man, and must not do to man. And therefore, if you see that man is made in the image of the Creator of the universe, and then you say, "What is it about man that distinguishes man from an animal?" And therefore you must defend that. The creative power of man, which no animal has. You must develop that. You must provide the circumstances of life, in the family, in education, and so forth, which promote. You must provide a standard of justice, which is based on truthfulness, not finality. [Inaudible]

Therefore, if you have judges, from the legal profession, who are able and allowed to think in that American way, in terms of the notion of the common good, the general welfare, the nature of man, then you can have justice. If you have a system of law, which is dominated by the Scalias of the world, then you have a truly nominalist law, in which the interpretation of the mere written words by some sharpie, who twists the words semantically, becomes the law.

Like this idea of finality. Take the case of Texas. Finality. It's a Scalia-type word. The greatest number of executions in the U.S. occur in Texas, death sentences carried out. What does that mean? We know from cases already considered, that most of the death sentence cases who are probably innocent of what they've been charged with [tape switch] ... [B]ecause it's the very nature of a corrupt system of justice, when a crime is committed to grab some poor bloke, as the British would says, and throw him in, in order to have a human sacrifice to go on the record as having been burned alive, to pay for the crime. A human sacrifice. And from this DNA testing and so forth, we see that the incidence of innocence in these cases, is highly signficant, and that when you look at the justice system in general, how it handles many of these cases, not simply on the death penalty level, you say the criminal justice system of the United STates is one of its biggest crimes.

But this would not occur but for this concept of finality, and related ideas, associated and typified by Justice Scalia. If you had old-fashioned lawyers, who said that the fight for justice never ends; the fight for justice continues as long as a man is alive; the fight for justice continues after he is dead. Justice for his integrity, justice for his family. And if you have that kind of law, then you have a tempered kind of justice in the legal profession.

Look, there are plenty of lawyers still left in this country, who believe in justice. But the problem is, in criminal justice practice, they can't find a court to practice it in, except as a gesture of futility. And the problem here, essentially, is, we have to clean up the federal courts. We have to get the kind of President who will do that, and the kind of Congress which will do that. In order to put on the bench, the old-fashioned kind of honest just lawyer, as a judge, who is operatively from a conscience, and from a conception of law as derived from natural law. A conception of the common good. A sense of justice. A sense of fairness. And that's lacking--that's what the problem is. And as long as you turn, you eliminate the judge, and put the hangman in instead, which is what we've done. The rightwing judges who've been put in recently, since the Nixon revolution, the Southern Strategy, are not judges; increasingly, they're nothing but hangmen. Sentence first, trial second. Verdict first, trial second. And then make the verdict a finality, then the trial's a matter of formality.

So, that's the problem. We have to go with the gut moral issue.

Rep. Erik Fleming: First of all, Mr. LaRouche, it's good to see. I guess I wanted to you to elaborate a little more about this Southern Strategy, and how to defeat it. As you know, I'm basically on the front line dealing with people like Trent Lott, and Tom DeLay, and other folks, and their idiocracy. How best--

I think what I think is important, is that, for you to elaborate a little more on the Southern Strategy, and the history of it, and where it's derived from, what its main intention is, and then how to basically kill the beast. Because I've always been taught that in order to destroy something, you have to understand how it was created. So, I'll sit down to listen to what you have to say.

Lyndon LaRouche: Okay. Slavery in the United States--the United States from the inception was held hostage to slavery. Because under the conditions in which we obtained our freedom, you had a bunch of people who were slave owners, who threatened to join the British in destroying our effort, unless they were allowed to have their peculair privileges.

So, in the process, especially after the French Revolution, when the United States lost its important strategic ally, and we had no significant strategic ally again, after 1789, until we won the Civil War--so the Civil War was actually, under Lincoln, was in part an attempt at the completion of the American Revolution, which had been done in the first places. Now, the forces involved were largely directed from the United Kingdom, from the British Monarchy. That has always been our number one enemy. And when you've got people who think they're friends of the British Monarchy, you say, there's another one of our enemies.

The enemy was located in our Republic, first of all, in New York City. The first real British agent, under the republic, of any note, was the founder of the Bank of Manhattan, Aaron Burr, who was an agent of the secret intelligence committee of the British Foreign Office, Jeremy Bentham. The Bank of Manhattan, which still exists as Chase Manhattan, etc. today, was that institution.

Throughout our history, with a few ripples and rumblings, there has been a basic continuity of an alliance between Wall Street bankers, and their associated law firms, and the slave-holding and related interests in the so-called Southern states. The basis for reviving this was the Southern Strategy.

Now, if you think about it, you take the struggle for freedom from Lincoln's time. The first major setback was Tilden-Hayes, where a compromise was made, in which the protection, that allowed the Ku Klux Klan to come back, in a sense.... The second major setback was Grover Cleveland, a Democratic Party from New York City, who brought back the institution of Jim Crow. Cleveland, President Grover Cleveland, a great Democrat, brought Jim Crow back in the United States, under the auspices, the same auspices, as creating the federal bureaucracy. Then you had Presidents: Teddy Roosevelt was the nephew and follower of James Bullock, the leader of the intelligence services of the Confederacy. And Bullock was the person who trained and groomed President Teddy Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson, who was brought into the White House by Teddy Roosevelt, by running the Bull Moose campaign, was a fire-eating Ku Klux Klan enthusiast, who organized the second revival of the Ku Klux Klan, officially, publicly, from the White House. Coolidge was of Yankee origin, but he was of the same stripe.

So, when Roosevelt came in, Franklin Roosevelt, again, you had a renewal of a struggle to reaffirm the Constitution of the United States, that is, the principle of the Constitution of the United States. Roosevelt's body was not cold before most of the work he did was destroyed under Truman. And the problem in the 1940s and 1950s was not McCarthyism, it was Trumanism, and Trumanism was part of the Southern Strategy, as people who've "got nose" know.

Kennedy, with whatever shortcomings he had, was an attempt to revive Roosevelt. Roosevelt's policy, with respect to South and Central America, other things. Kennedy was killed, about the same time, Adenaur was chased out of office in Germany, and they shot and tried to assassinate De Gaulle in France. So there was a great change in U.S. policy, in this context, after the assassination of President Kennedy. (Which was not done by Oswald! Three other guys did it.)

After that, you had Nixon, in 1966, you had openly--together with Phillips, and Don Fowler in South Carolina, and others--you had openly, for the Southern Strategy. The pretext on which they launched the Southern Strategy against Johnson on the issue of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since that time, you've had George Bush at the Republican National Committee, chairman, George Bush as Nixon's National Committee chairman, had the function of implementing the Southern Strategy for the 1972 election of Nixon, the re-election of Nixon. [inaudible] The same--Carter is a part of it. Who kids themselves about Jimmy-boy? Jimmy-boy's a chameleon. Smiles to you face and stabs you in the back. Redneck all the way. He's Southern Strategy. Always was.

Now look at the question of these guys on the population policy: Not for nothing was Congressman George H.W. Bush called "Rubbers" in the Congress! He was for population control. That the only one thing he had going for him in the Congress when he was there. Seemed almost as dumb as his son does today. So you have a consistency of the question of the attitude then.

Now, what's the other side of the thing? You look at the question of racism. And racism is a marker. It's not the problem. It a marker of the problem. The problem goes much deeper. [inaud] No more industry. What's that? You know about the Nashville Agrarians? Like good old William Yandell Elliott? All those nice fellows? Those racists. They don't call themselves racists, they call themselves "genteel folk." They're like the Richmond paper, which, at the defeat of the Confederacy, announced that the "peculiar institution" of the South, how slavery had enabled a genteel crowd of white folks to rise up and reach a "high level of culture like the British--unlike those ol' damn Yankees!"

So, the Nashville Agrarians is a racist without the shackles, hm? Like Robert Penn Warren, and people like that. That's what they represent.

Now, the other thing is: shareholder value. Under the American System, we're very happy to have entrepreneurs make profit, as long as they're doing some good for the country. We're proud of it. But shareholder value--no, they don't do some good for the country. They want the country to do something good for them. Increase the price of their shares, whether they earned it or not. So it's another form of slavery. It's fine, let 'em have money. That's not the problem. But they should not be able to use the laws of the nation to enslave the rest of the population to exactly tribute from them for unearned gain, by gambling on Wall Street.

So, there's three things: that idiot Milton Friedman--I say that advisedly, the guy's a fool--his function is [inaud], therefore, idiots admire him because they find he's like them. That's way they admire him. The rise of the Mont Pelerin Sociey influence in the United States, especially over the course of the 1970s--all of these things converge. What does it amount to?

Then look at population policy: 1966, population policy in the U.S. State Department. 1974, Kissinger really pushed it: Kill. Kill. Genocide. Scowcroft, the next year. Push it. Genocide. Carter. January 1981. Genocide. Global 2000. Al Gore: Genocide--read Earth in the Balance. Genocide. So the policy, the question of: what is the attitude toward man? Toward the human being? The attitude toward the human being is that of human cattle? Where some people are cattle that work and live at the suffering of other people? Or are human beings human, and therefore entitled to a form of justice under natural law? That's the issue. And therefore, those who think, like parasites, that they can suck off the back of people --

You know, the mass base of the Southern Strategy is very simple. There's no difference between the racists, like the Tom DeLays, or the Phil Gramms and the Romans sitting in the Roman Arena with their thumbs down for the Christians, in Nero's Arena. That is, we've got an entertainment system and the kind of culture we've developed--we have developed in our population a kind of pure evil, which is called "popular opinion," which infects and corrupts a large part of our population. So, yes, there are only a few, a relative handful of people at the top who use, who are the authors of these kinds of policies against man. But the problem is, is many of our fellow human beings, who are also victims of the process, like the poor whites under slavery of the old Confederate South, who are too eager and zealous to go along with the Master, in running the lynch mob for the Master's pleasure.

And the problem we have, is because we have not organized our people properly, enough organizing to stand up on their hind legs like human beings, and fight for what's good for us, as human beings, and not compromise that for some handout at the back door of the Master's mansion. That's what the problem is with us. That means, of course, leadership. What we need are leaders. Not leaders because they wear epaulets or stripes, or whatnot, but leaders because they have the personal commitment of a leader, who know that our fellow human beings, who we love, are weak. They're easily led astray. And their friends need among them, some strong people, morally strong people, who will stand up, and be the conscience of their fellow people, and lead them.

And the great thing, the thing we always admire about Martin Luther King, is the negative side: is, that when we lost him to the assassin's bullet, we couldn't seem to replace him. He was a unique creature. A unique person, with a unique capability, a precious capability. And we had no replacement when they took him away. And the important thing therefore, is to develop leadership in depth. Leadership of the people, for the people, in depth. Because we know the weaknesses and corruption of our fellow citizens. But, it's just exactly those fellow citizens who tend to be so corrupt, so easily, just tore off in the wrong direction, who make possible the toleration of these few who impose this thing upon us. And you have the fellow who says, "I want to fight this." Then he looks the other way. "That's fine fella, but don't come--don't include me. I don't want to be in this fight this time." You know. You've met him.

And that's the problem. And therefore, those of us who have positions of leadership, in whatever part of leadership we are, we have to have the guts to stand up and not compromise on these things. Because, if we wait, if we set out, if we make a morally corrupt act, the effect of seeing us sell out to our conscience, discourages the people around us, and causes them: "Okay. Here's my great leader. Look what he's doing. He's taking this, he's doing this. He's bombed out on this. He's bought off on this." As leaders, I think we have to do, among other things, set examples. We have to turn around to our fellow people in our movement, this great movement, we have to turn around and say, "Look, you can't do that any more. You're not allowed to do that any more. You don't 'go along to get along.' You don't betray principle for the sake of a handout. You stand up on your hind legs, and say, 'I'm a human being.'" And people around you will take courage from that. You know that. You've been there.

And that's the only answer. How are you going to defeat this stuff? Know it. Know what it is, know where it comes from, know the nature of the problem. And also recognize, that our fellow man, who's very weak, poorly educated, vacillating, tends to be easily corrupted, will have to have a sterling quality of leadership and moral leaders, in order to keep our own people from betraying themselves, just like the people in the Roman Circus betrayed themselves when they went "thumbs down."