Presidential Election 2000:
'The Fall of Ozymandias'
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The following speech was presented to an EIR seminar in Washington, D.C. Dec. 12, and webcast simultaneously on www.larouchepub.com and www.larouchespeaks.com. Another webcast seminar is scheduled for Jan. 3, 2001.
For many leading circles in the world today, the question is no longer, "Who is going to be the next President of the United States?," but, "What will the next President, whoever he is, become?"
The problem is that--you may not see it, but you should be able to feel it--the greatest crisis in modern history, at least in the past two centuries, is hitting the United States and the world right now, especially the United States, and this crisis is sitting on the White House steps, sitting like the ugliest monster, the hairiest monster, you ever saw, waiting to greet the next President when he arrives at the White House door.
The problem is that, at present, the United States, its political system, is almost totally unprepared to deal with reality. The mess in the Congress, the mess in the Presidential elections, has given us two candidates, one who can't think, and the one we hope will not try to think, as the contenders for the Presidential selection. The selection is not over. The Electoral College process has to be gone through, as I'll deal with that. The Congress has to be dealt with, before our next President is actually selected. And the onrushing crisis is going to weigh heavily in the minds of people, in the Electoral College, in the Congress, and elsewhere, who have to deal with finally determining who is going to be the next President.
The problem at present is that, imagine that you have one of the two known cases selected as President, with their known incapabilities, and their lack of attention, during the entire campaign, to any of the major issues which are going to confront the world through this present financial crisis, and related things now. Not one of them during the campaign made any reference to the financial crisis. Not one of them during the campaign made any reference to the real issues of the lower 80% of our population. And now, suddenly, they're going into a Congressional setting in which nobody really knows what to do, and worse, nobody wants to know what to do, because all of them have come in with their prefixed agendas. They're like pair of guys, lunatics, sitting with sawed-off shotguns, holding the members of a couple families hostage, and trying to blackmail the government into giving them something they want, as the price for not shooting those hostages, who they'll probably shoot anyway.
That's the situation of the political machines which are coming into Washington, both on the Gore side, and the Bush side.
Yes, there are some intelligent people in these machines. But the overwhelming character of the machines is typified on the Republican side, by a nitwit like Sen. Phil Gramm, and Tom DeLay, the terrorist. The Gingrich types. These types will not listen to reason. They have an agenda. They're determined to ram it through at any price. And we have on the Democratic side some of the same kind of thing.
While you have intelligent people in the Congress, and will have in the next Congress, the question is: Will the next Congress be capable of returning a vote in favor of any of the kinds of legislation which will be needed? Or, instead, lacking the ability to make law, faced with a situation in which the President cannot make law, because the Congress won't agree to it; no sensible laws can be passed. What happens then, is that the tendency is to go to methods of dictatorships, sometimes called, euphemistically, crisis management. Which means that the U.S. and other governments will create crises, create a crisis, in order to force a crisis-management decision upon the President and other institutions.
That is dictatorship, and that's the great threat: a United States which is, presumably a superpower, the Ozymandias of our time, faced with a situation where it pretends to rule the world, but is incapable of effectively governing itself, and lashes out like a wild, desperate beast, trying to get the world to obey, when it doesn't even know what it wants to do.
That's the situation which frightens, should frighten, us. A situation which is frightening people around the world. Now I've been, as you know, in touch with circles in many parts of the world: in Asia, in Eurasia generally, South America, as well as in our own country. I'm hearing what they're saying, what they're thinking. Very little of it gets across into the U.S. news media. Almost none gets on the lips of the politicians, although I do know that there are people in the White House, and elsewhere, who are seriously thinking. But the majority of the American people, the institutions of government and politics, are not thinking. Maybe some people are thinking, but not enough to do the job.
Now, given this situation, of a crisis-stricken government, which cannot face the realities it must face, and make the decisions it must make, what kind of a world do we have?
The problem is, essentially, that the world is gripped by the worst financial crisis in three centuries, since the end, approximately, of the Seven Years' War. Remember, Europe, after a grand and glorious 15th-Century Renaissance, slipped in, beginning about 1510-1511, into a period of religious wars. Religious wars dominated Europe until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Following that, with the coup in England by William of Orange, we have a series of wars, concluding with the Seven Years' War in the early 18th century. So, therefore, we had a period of about two centuries of chaos, in European history, affecting the United States. Which we came out of, with other troubles to follow. But we have not had, since the end of the Seven Years' War, we have not had in European civilization, and globally extended, the kind of crisis we now face.
And we have a situation in which, typically, among politicians, the question will be: How is the market going to react to this? Politicians are not thinking; they're saying, "Let's make the market happy." "If the market goes up tomorrow, that means it's happy; therefore, we've done the right thing. Let's not do anything to make the market unhappy." And the market is one of those hairy beasts, sitting on the White House and the steps of the Congress, which is trying to, threatening the next President and Congress coming in.
To get a picture of the issue, I turn to a comment yesterday, from one of the leading newspapers in Europe. It's a Danish newspaper, Berlingske Tiedende, which compared the situation in the elections in the United States today, to the kind of decision that was made by Judge Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Taney, in 1857, the so-called Dred Scott decision. Now the Dred Scott decision by Taney caused the Civil War. And the Berlingske Tiedende compares the behavior of the Supreme Court today, with emphasis on the person of Justice Scalia, Antonin Scalia, to the behavior of Judge Taney in the Dred Scott decision in 1857.
Now, that report in that press, which is an article that came out of the United States, I understand, by a U.S.-based reporter, is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.
If we want to understand the implications of what Justice Antonin Scalia represents, and his role in the current intervention into the election process, we have to compare him, and his cothinkers, to a fellow called Carl Schmitt, a famous romantic professor of law, and an official of the German government, in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was Carl Schmitt, with his emergency law provision, which was used, with Schmitt's personal approval, to bring Hitler into consolidated dictatorial power in Germany.
Now, Schmitt was a follower of a fellow called Savigny, but Schmitt was unique, in the sense that he believed, along with others of that century, that his faction in history, makes revolutions, then creates a state based on the revolution, and that law is merely the dictate imposed upon society by the state controlled by those revolutionaries. In that sense, Carl Schmitt argued that it is not the law, such as constitutional law, or the principle of natural law, such as the general welfare, which should determine what the state should become.
Remember, our Constitution, as expressed in the first three paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, was a declaration of a new type of nation, but based on a principle of European civilization called the general welfare. That is, that no government has the authority to rule, except as it is efficiently committed to promote the general welfare of all the population, and its posterity.
That's a government based on law, and our Constitution was framed, very carefully, by some very thoughtful people, to give us a form of government, in which the law would conform to that principle of the general welfare.
Now, Scalia is a fellow who rejects the idea of the general welfare. I was just reading the other day, a speech he gave to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., on the subject, in 1996, in which he explicitly outlaws the fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution, the principle of the general welfare. And read the first three paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. Compare that with the Preamble of the Constitution. Compare that with the arguments, and discussions, which filled it out, of the forming of the Constitution. Look at the Revolution which carried out this general welfare principle, the Civil War, led by Lincoln. Think of the revolution that Roosevelt made, to get us out of the Depression, and through World War II, and to lay the foundations for an economic recovery in the United States and Western Europe, over the period 1945-1965.
This was a government based on a principle of law called the general welfare. The function of government, is to recognize that every person is sacred, as made in the image of the Creator, and therefore government must treat all its people accordingly, to develop them, to nurture them, to ensure their rights, to ensure that they have a posterity of that quality. That's our law. And our notion of government is based on that principle of law, the principle of the general welfare, or what is otherwise called the common good.
Scalia rejects that. The so-called conservative majority, present majority, of the Supreme Court, has repeatedly rejected that.
There is the danger. When a government accepts the philosophy of a Carl Schmitt, or a Scalia, and faces a crisis of the type that we face now, you face a situation, as in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s, in which someone who thinks like Scalia today, or Carl Schmitt then, puts a Hitler into power. Maybe not as a dictator with a brownshirted mob, but a dictatorial government, which rules by crisis management, by crisis orchestration, by decree, in which the parliamentary process becomes irrelevant, and the judges become like Judge Roland Freisler of the Nazi court, merely a tool of official party policy.
And that's the danger. And that's what the world's afraid of: a United States which thinks it's a world power, it thinks it rules the world. We don't, actually. We've lost that ability. We're like Ozymandias. We rule the world, but the parts of us are scattered in the sand, and it's a desert sand at that.
Scalia's actions, in his personal concurring action in intervening in the recent Supreme Court intervention in the Florida case, has turned what was merely an election crisis, into a Constitutional crisis. If his argument is shared by the majority of the Supreme Court, then we will have overthrown the Constitution of the United States, by this action. Because we will have denied the principle upon which the authority of our government depends, the authority of the general welfare principle, as set forth very clearly in the first three paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, and affirmed clearly in the Preamble of our Constitution, which is the fundamental law of the United States, which Justice Scalia does not accept, and others do not accept.
So, he's turned an election crisis, which we could have solved, into a Constitutional crisis. As a result of his actions inside the U.S., the situation is becoming dangerous, not only for our own citizens, but for a world in which we have mass-murderous lunatics like Zbigniew Brzezinski running loose.
Given the situation in the Congress, and the extremely poor quality of the two leading Presidential candidates, and given the fact that no one will ever know, probably, who actually won a legitimate vote, in what was one of the most corrupt elections in recollection. We're at the brink of a situation in which the lack of the Congress, to react effectively to successive crises, would degrade the United States to ruling by crisis management, and national decrees, rather than by action fit to be described as law. That's the implication of what Scalia has done, in his concurring opinion, on the question of the stay of action in the recent Supreme Court case.
If that action is continued, on that philosophy, then the Constitution of the United States is in danger. One would hope that some of us could persuade, directly or indirectly, some of the Justices of the Supreme Court, to repudiate that. Not as a matter of determining who should win the election, or the designation as President-Elect, but simply as a matter of preserving the process of law, in the United States, as our Constitution and Declaration of Independence define that principle of law.
Scalia is important not only because he's been an increasingly influential figure on the Federal bench, but because he represents, in the most shamelessly frank way, a philosophy of law which is contrary to every principle for which the heroes of our national past have fought and died. He is, in point of fact, worse than Germany's Carl Schmitt, the Schmitt who played a key role in putting Hitler into power in Germany. Because his version of nominalist law, is even worse than that of the Nazis. The Nazis were constrained to bend to the influence of what they regarded as German custom, at least up to a point. With Scalia, no such constraint of custom exists. No perception of custom exists. So this fellow is worse, Scalia, in his philosophy of law than either Schmitt, or the chief judge of the Nazi system, Judge Freisler.
Well, before going to other matters, which I want to take up sequentially, let us put to one side the issue of who should be designated as the President-Elect of the United States. I say, that for purposes of this discussion, of the Constitutional discussion, forget that. Right now, it makes no difference. If Scalia's law, or similar law, determines who the President of the United States is going to be, we're not going to have much of a government anyway. And neither of the candidates is worth shucks anyway. One is just worse than the other. Pick one, the other one's worse. Either way, both ways.
We should not be tied up with a fantasy, like a football fan fantasy, of trying to say, which guy is going to win the position of President-Elect. That is not the question before us. The question before us is what kind of a Presidency, and President, are we going to create out of this crisis?
Now, let's look at this election for what it really is.
This was the most hypocritical, and corrupt, piece of hypocrisy, ever seen, and the issue of voting rights, as raised by both candidates, and also by the Supreme Court, is a farce, at the best.
Had the representatives--for example, in the case of Gore. Had the representatives of Vice-President Gore, and the Federal Court, not acted as they have done, to overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the situation which arose in Florida would not have happened.
It was a longtime adversary of mine, and of the Voting Rights Act, Don Fowler, a Democrat, South Carolina, who, in 1966, took the first step to nullify the Voting Rights Act. Fowler was one of the charter members of what became known as the Southern Strategy for the Democratic side. He's a hidebound racist, and that's what governs his policy in that state, and throughout the area.
Now, he acted, in 1996, in his capacity as Democratic National Chairman at the time, to nullify that act--the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He acted then to nullify it! At that time, Fowler did this in the interest, or for the convenience of, Vice-President Gore's year 2000 Presidential ambitions. Later, it was the Democratic Party officials working for Gore, in 1999, who pushed the Federal court to officially, formally nullify the Voting Rights Act.
Now, the attorney for the Democratic National Committee went to court, and specifically said to the court, it wants the court to nullify the Act. And said that Scalia, and similar people on the bench of the Supreme Court, are willing to nullify that, and will! They succeeded. Judge Sentelle, one of the Southern Strategy types of judges in the system, supported Al Gore's candidacy to nullify the Act. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been nullified, with the tacit consent of the Supreme Court. Now, what is the Supreme Court doing, talking about the Voting Rights Act now, talking about what happened in Florida, talking about anything else?
Now, for example, in the case of Florida, we had a great number of citizens who, according to the evidence submitted--it has to be tested, but it's submitted--that a company, working on behalf of the Governor of Florida, made an investigation to try to determine what kind of unqualified voters might be trying to vote in the next election. They hired a private company, which specializes in this. And they nullified the voting rights of a lot of citizens, saying that they had been previously felons, and couldn't vote. And they didn't care whether it was true or not.
So, a lot of people were prevented from voting in Florida, because of a fraudulent act by the state government.
Now, this came up to Al Gore's attention: He didn't care about that. He was talking about voting rights; he didn't care about voting rights.
In fact, the irony is that Al Gore, on the basis of Sentelle's nullification of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, stole, openly, 53,000 certified votes for my nomination in the State of Arkansas. Now, if he hadn't done that, if Gore hadn't done that, Gore would have probably carried the State of Arkansas. He lost it by fewer votes than he stole from me.
If he had won Arkansas, there wouldn't be any discussion of Florida, because the Electoral College votes he had from other states, plus Arkansas, would have put him over the top with over 271 electoral votes.
What goes around, comes around. That's what happened.
In addition to the great amount of irregularity, in the conduct of this national election, you had the following situation. People were not voting for candidates--they were voting against candidates. The majority of Americans who were eligible to vote, didn't want either one of those two jokers! Those who voted for Gore, voted because they were afraid of Bush. Those who voted for Bush, were afraid of, or contemptuous of Gore. So, who voted for Bush, and who voted for Gore? The two candidates together probably do not represent a majority of American opinion.
Furthermore, in the course of the election, neither of the candidates had anything important to say.
Now, if you look at the curve [Figure 1], we have 80% of the lower-income brackets of the United States, are in vastly worse condition today than they were in 1977, when a Southern Strategy Democrat, Jimmy Carter, became President. The lower 80% of the income brackets used to be the overwhelming majority of the national income, which is represented by that. Now, it's no longer the case.
If we look at the condition of housing, we look at the condition of education, we look at the situation in health care, we look at the situation in power sources in the community, urban housing, rent, housing in general--you look at these conditions, the conditions of life of the American family, the lower 80% of income brackets, is far worse than it's been at any time since the 1960s.
This is not prosperity! What did either of these candidates say about this? They promised more cuts. But they promised to give a few free handouts on the side, while the cuts go on. The health care problem is not cured. The housing problem is not cured. The human rights problem not cured.
So, for this situation, in which nobody is really sure who really voted for what, because of the very nature of the way the campaign was run, the founders of the Constitution had a clear vision. They created the Electoral College.
Now, if you study the way the Electoral College was put together, the concept was hard fought during that period. An Elector, once elected, once selected in any state, is supposed to vote that Elector's conscience. To qualify as an Elector, they have to demonstrate that they will vote, as a member of the Electoral College, without fear or favor, without partisanship, but on the basis of their conscience, and what they think is best for the country.
That's what the Electoral College was designed to do. It's a body of citizens, independent of the legislature, actually; independent of the parties; independent of any corrupt influence, who are qualified to stand as Electors, and say, "I am prepared to take the fact of the vote, as cast. I'm prepared to vote my conscience in selecting the next President-Elect of the United States." That's what the Electoral College is supposed to do. It's supposed to do that now. And that's what we should do.
We should simply insist that the Electoral College, as followed by the Congress, who follows up on whatever the Electoral College does, should simply determine, on the basis of its conscience, taking all facts available to it into account, to say who should be the President-Elect of the United States.
And between January 3rd and 6th, they should report that to the Congress. And the Congress should take that finding, by the Electoral College, and act upon it, as the Constitution specifies. If there are objections in the Senate or the House, they should be heard. And finally, of course, the thing goes back to the House of Representatives to make the final determination. I think, perhaps, by January 20th, we could have a President-elect. I don't think it would be a great crisis if we got a President by that process.
So, let's not be concerned in the meantime, by betting everything on which horse, running backwards, is going to win the race.
The crisis we face is of the following nature: As I've said, this is the worst financial crisis in world history. That is, the financial collapse that's coming down is bigger than any in world history. There's no soft landing. Unless it's Alan Greenspan falling on his head, from a high-story building. That's the only soft landing you'll find. This is going to be a very hard landing.
And that means that we are in a situation, in which we require a President who picks up where Franklin Roosevelt left off.
Now, Franklin Roosevelt inherited a depression, which came from the policies of a number of predecessors: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and also from help of Andrew Mellon. These guys put the United States into a depression. It couldn't have happened without them.
Roosevelt came into the situation, basing himself on the principle of the general welfare, basing himself on knowledge of the history of the United States. Remember his great-great grandfather was one of the collaborators with Alexander Hamilton in New York, on behalf of things like the National Bank, and so forth. So, he knew what he was doing. He may not have been a perfect man. You may criticize him for many things, but he knew what he was doing. He, by taking leadership, at the same time that Hitler was coming into power in Germany, saved the United States from something like that which happened in Germany.
He got us through the Depression. He led us through World War II. He laid the foundations for the re-creation of the economy of Europe and the United States in the postwar period. He represented, from 1933 to 1965, one of the great success stories in American history. There were a lot of faults, a lot of things wrong, granted. But the net effect was, that the condition of life of the American people, got better. The welfare of people in Europe, western Europe, got better. The world had a better chance.
In the past 35 years, we've gone in the other direction, sliding down again, the way we did from the assassination of McKinley, until the election of Franklin Roosevelt. The United States overall, was degenerating, morally and otherwise. And Franklin Roosevelt pulled us out of it.
Not saying he's perfect. But the lesson is this: What he did worked. What was done before he came in, in this century, did not work. What has been done since 1965, has not worked. We're in the worst financial situation, and economic situation, globally, in modern times. We face the worst crisis, globally, in modern times.
And therefore, at this point, we have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt, not as a perfect model of what we should do, but as an object lesson in history, of what this country can do under its Constitution, with its tradition, both to solve our problem here at home, to put our nation back together, to bring justice back to people who are denied justice, and to enter into forms of cooperation with the rest of the world, which are to our mutual advantage, most nations' and our own.
That's essentially what we have to do.
Now, in order to do that, we have to recognize that we wouldn't have gotten here simply because we had bad politicians. Because increasingly over the years, the past 35 years, the American people have gone nuts.
For example, I mentioned earlier: market. How many people say: "You've got to keep the market happy. You've got to vote, you must vote, to keep the market happy. You've got to keep the Nasdaq up! You've got to keep the Dow up! You've got to keep the shareholder value up, even if it means killing people, taking away their health care and everything else!"
It's insanity. We saw this kind of insanity before, in European history. In the beginning of the 18th Century, remember there was the John Law bubble in France, which bankrupted a lot of people in France. There was a similar bubble, the South Sea Island bubble, in England; it bankrupted a whole class of people in England.
We saw it in the end of the 1940s in the United States, what's called the Pyramid Club scandal. Where people acted like maniacs, insane maniacs, about what their Pyramid Club letter was going to do for them. The same thing is happening today. People are talking about their stocks, their stocks! We have no economy. We don't have power. Power outages are a thing of the present, not of the future. And they're growing.
Look at the housing situation, all of these conditions! People say the economy is better off?
Now, let's take one little fact. Presently, according to my best estimate, the current account deficit of the United States is running to about a rate of $600 billion a year. In other words, as an economy, we're operating at a big loss, building up a big debt, with no prospect of every repaying it. In the meantime, we're taking in trillions of dollars each year, or have been until recently, into the United States, to prime the pump on the Wall Street and other markets.
What happens when the U.S. dollar collapses? And a 40% collapse in the dollar is a possibility, in the market--it's a possibility, a real one. Look at what happened to the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq has gone down about 50% in its index value, in a recent period, and it's going to go down a lot deeper. The Dow is also going to go down, because banks are in trouble. And you've got a prosperous economy, because the market "feels good" today? Because some jerk from Wall Street told you the market feels good? The Congress is going to do this, or not do that, because it wants to make the market feel good?
What's the market? It's nothing but a big gambling operation. It doesn't produce any wealth, leads people to starvation.
That's one of the problems.
The other problem is, we're in what we call a post-industrial society. The United States went into a post-industrial society, about 1966. About the same time that Richard Nixon was meeting with the Klan down in Mississippi, and so forth, founding what became the general electoral policy of the Republican Party, called the Southern Strategy. And in 1976-77, Jimmy Carter from Georgia, became the flag-bearer for the Southern Strategy, the racist policy, inside the Democratic Party.
In 1982, we had the formation of Project Democracy, which was the union of the top layers of both the Democratic and Republican party, both of whom adopted the Southern Strategy, and they called it "democracy." And they try to sell that stuff around the world.
You should see the effect of it in Africa, the genocide, it's hideous.
So, these kinds of fads, these myths, which the American people have come to tolerate: They think the Democratic Party is democratic at the top--they don't know the party! They should get acquainted with the party. They think the Republican Party is a democratic organization? They should meet the Republican Party at the top. They should go down to Mexico, to Peru, to Colombia, to Brazil, to Argentina, to Chile, to Venezuela, and meet the Democratic Party abroad. Go to Africa, and meet the Democratic Party, the Republican Party. Go into Asia, and meet the Democratic and Republican parties. You call that democracy? They don't want any more of it. They want freedom!
They don't want that.
And that's the problem.
Now, let me just take this one thing, because what happened, when people came up with this post-industrial idea, which they pushed through in 1966--which is the first time that a change in the budget was made in the foreign policy part, in which it was specified that the United States would take into account "excess" population growth, in foreign countries, in its foreign policy, economic policy, toward countries such as in Africa.
So, actually the policy of genocide was actually introduced as an official policy in 1966, in that small degree. In 1974, Kissinger made it official policy, of the Republican Party and the government. Scowcroft made it the official policy. With Global 2000, Carter made it the official policy. Genocide is the policy of the United States today! It says that there are too many people in Africa, in South America, and elsewhere, who are sitting on top of natural resources, and Kissinger argued this explicitly in 1974. "They're sitting on natural resources. We, pure whatever--democrats--will want those natural resources in future generations. We can't allow these people to continue to multiply, and eat these resources up! We can't allow them to have technological development, because they'll use more natural resources. We've got to keep that population down!" And population control, since Kissinger, has been the policy of the United States.
You want to understand U.S. policy toward Africa? That is the policy toward Africa. You want to understand the policy toward Mexico? Toward South America? That is the policy of Kissinger and his type, toward South America and Africa. That's the policy in Asia, the same policy.
Post-industrial society. We're no longer committed to the general welfare. We're no longer committed to what we were committed to in the time Roosevelt was President. To cooperate with other nations, to increase the general welfare, not only of our own people, but to cooperate with other countries, so they might serve the general welfare of their people. And that we, as cooperating sovereign nations, would cooperate in ways which are beneficial to all of us, the general welfare. The common good. The common good of our republic. The common good of humanity. That is the policy we should have.
When you deny that policy, you're committing genocide, just by denying the policy.
When you accept post-industrial society, and Malthusianism, the way Al Gore did in his Earth in the Balance, you are promoting genocide.
Call things by their right name--that is genocide. If you say, that baby does not have a right to live; that population does not have a right to grow; that population must reduce its numbers; that population may not have the technology on which survival depends; it may not have the health care; it may not be allowed to have the immunization, the drugs, the health care facilities in general, on which survival depends--that's genocide!
Don't call it by something else! Some other name. It's genocide.
So, in 1966, we adopted the policy. No more industrial progress. Slow it down. Cut it out. No longer is the United States going to be interested in promoting technological progress for the people of Africa, or South America, Central America, or Asia. We're going to cut that down, for the sake of population control.
Then, what did we promise the American people then? Well, we promised them two things: Feel good. You go out, and do anybody you want to. Feel good. We won't give you any money, but you go out, and do anybody you want to, anyway you want to.
We also gave them an illusion. Just like the Romans or other people had popular opinion, we gave them an illusion. We gave them mass entertainment, which no longer contained ideas, but contained fantasy, sensual fantasy. We also gave them, what is called today the "new economy." We gave them what was called, at first, "information society." We said, "Well, the old economy, the smokestacks, the farms, these things are things of the past! They're old hat. We're tired of these things. We want a new society. We don't want to be forced to eat so much, or wear so much. We want a new society. We want a new freedom."
"Oh, we want a lot of money. We want comfort when we want it. We want it on demand. Instant comfort, instant gratification. We want it now."
So, people were given an illusion. They said, "Well, you don't have to have it."
See, the way to have wealth is to have money. If you've got money, whether you earn it, or you borrow it, you've got money. And with money you can buy all kinds of things. So what you need is more money.
So people became interested in my money. They didn't care whether they could have any health care from it. They didn't care whether they had a house. They just wanted my money.
So that became, in recent times, the new economy, the so-called new economy fad.
And let me tell you about the new economy.
Barnum, P.T. Barnum, was never the kind of faker, he would never have been as corrupt, as the kind of faker who invented new economy, such as the Nasdaq. Couldn't have happened.
Now, computers are very useful things, properly used. Communications equipment, which is maybe connected to computers, is also useful. One would hope that this computer technology would improve. That people would improve it. We would hope that the use of communications would improve. Fine.
But that is not what we're talking about. We're talking about "information theory."
And here's where the problem lies. Now, I'm an economist, as most of you know. And the way in which the human race has managed to prosper, especially since the 15th Century--I think we've got that curve there, the population curve [Figure 2].
The population curve shows you the changes in world and European civilization's demographic characteristics since the 15th Century.
Now the 15th-Century Renaissance in Europe had two characteristics. Centered in Italy, but it spread throughout Europe. As a matter of fact, the discovery of America was based on that revolution in statecraft. First of all, it created for the first time, the modern nation-state. A state committed to the general welfare. That is, government has no legitimate right to exist, except as it is officially committed to promoting the general welfare of present and future generations. That means all of the people. That means the conditions of life--betterment of the conditions of life of all the people.
Now this was first established as a form of state in France under Louis XI in the 15th Century, and in England, under Henry VII. And this was the founding of a perfectly new institution in humanity: the sovereign nation-state republic, based on the principle of what was called the general welfare, or otherwise, the common good. This principle of the sovereign nation-state was unique, and was in contrast to all known previous society, in which some people, a relatively few, treated most of the people as human cattle: that is, ruling groups of oligarchs and their lackeys, such as armed lackeys, would take most of the people and treat them in the same way that farmers treat cattle. You got them, and used them when you wanted them, and you killed them when you didn't. And that's the condition, that was the condition of the Mesopotamian Empire, ancient Babylon, it was the condition of Rome, of the Roman Empire, that was the condition of feudalism, in which the great majority of humans were human cattle. That was the condition of slavery in the United States: the treatment of human beings as cattle. You farmed human beings the same way you farmed cattle. And I think the cattle were sometimes treated better.
So, the modern nation-state was a break from earlier forms of society, which finally brought true justice to the form of society. Now, the ability to bring this justice about, depended upon another great discovery, which was made during the 15th Century: the idea of modern, experimental scientific progress, in which the discovery of universal physical principles, and the cooperation in their use to the benefit of mankind, made possible, with the support of the nation-state, the ability to raise the standard of living and life-expectancy of the people. And that's what that chart means. That in Europe, in the 15th Century, in the great Golden Renaissance, a new form of society, political society, was formed. One based on the sovereign nation-state, one based on a commitment to fostering and utilizing scientific and technological progress. It is typified, for example, by our dear friend Leonardo da Vinci, who was typical of the science that came out of that. Johannes Kepler was typical of the science that came out of that. Leibniz is in that tradition. The great Gauss is in that tradition. Riemann's in that tradition. This is the great tradition of scientific and technological progess, which enables us to meet the challenge of disease, of hunger, to meet the challenge of the conditions of life, generally. Therefore, these two things together are what make an economy work.
The characteristic feature of this--you look at the chart --that progress means an increase in not only the number of people you can sustain and the standard of living in which they exist, but an improvement of the demographic characteristics of the population as a whole, and of the members of households. It means the means to increase the number of years that a child spends in educational and later development. It means the richer development and opportunity for the mind of that child as they develop.
Now, what came along here, in information theory, was based on the work of a fellow called Bertrand Russell, who was probably the most evil man of the 20th Century. Russell was the man who invented the policy of developing and using nuclear weapons as a way of destroying sovereign government, and establishing world government. That was his life's purpose. That was the policy we've been living under for a long time. That was the policy of John J. McCloy, who was the boss of Kissinger at one point; McGeorge Bundy, who was a boss of Kissinger; and Kissinger himself. That's the policy they were based on. This policy is a complete hoax. It's based on the assumption that merely by transmitting information, without any discovery of a physical principle, that you can increase the wealth of society. It's not true. If you base a society on transmitting information, without the experience of scientific discovery, without the utilization of scientific discovery, you will have a collapsing condition of life in society.
And what has happened, is this information theory--what does it do? Look at the school system. Years ago, in any good school, the characteristic of a good school was that the student, in education, would re-experience, in the child's own mind, the actual original act of discovering a universal physical principle. For example, like the principle of universal gravitation, or other physical principles. The child was not told to learn this in a textbook, or to learn it from the teacher, or to learn it from the blackboard. The child was told to experience the circumstances of the person who made the original discovery. When the child had made that discovery again for himself, or herself, in his or her own mind, the child knew the discovery. The child could share that discovery with others. It wasn't a matter of learning how to behave, it was a matter of knowing. Being able to prove, physically, that that principle was true. And through that, man increased his power in the universe. Which we increased also, by educating our children that way. We increased that power to make discoveries. We increased that power to master new technologies, to improve our new technologies. We created the machine-tool principle, whereby an entrepreneur with a small plant, with a lot of skill, a lot of brains, a lot of friskiness, would make technological inventions, repeatedly, and would make a living out of being useful to the community, or to his customers, industrial customers and others, in providing improved technologies not otherwise available. These technologies which came from scientific discoveries, are what made it possible to improve the condition of life.
And thus, we were able to increase what we produced over what we consumed. Consumed not only as household consumption, but in terms of machinery, improvements, water systems, power system, transportation systems, all the other things that were essential. And that's what a real economy is.
What we have done, in the past 35 years, is to reverse that, to undo it. Look at our education system. Look at the changes in education introduced beginning about 30-35 years ago. We no longer teach children competently. We may have a few stubborn teachers still holding out here and there. But the new crop of teachers not only does not want to teach that, but is not capable of doing so. We have created a situation where our children don't have family life any more. The parents, the adults work too many jobs. There's no one at home most of the time. The streets are hell. The child has no leisure in which to think and experience as he used to. To play at home, to consult with the parents, to have a home life, where friends came in, ideas were exchanged. Doesn't exist any more. We destroyed it. We destroyed the educational system. Then what'd we give our people? We gave them mass entertainment. What is the mass entertainment? Teaching a six-year-old kid to kill! With six head-shots the first time he used a gun! Nintendo-style games like Pokémon. And the things like the Columbine assassinations, and the other kinds of killing. Look at the games, look at the television set. What is happening on the television set? What is happening in the movies? As a substitute for education.
So, somebody decided to turn the human race into a bunch of what a famous author, Jonathan Swift, called in Gulliver's Travels: "Yahoos." Our people have been turned into yahoos. Sensual, unthinking, rutting, rolling in the dirt, looking for one orgy of one kind or another to the next. No longer concerned for ideas. No concentration span. No skills.
Look, for example: The United States is going down. What does that mean? That means, in the Internet area, as many people are now telling you, there's going to be mass unemployment among a stratum, which were formerly a large part of the upper 20% of the family-income brackets in the United States. You're going to see that in the area around greater Washington. You're going to see glorified tarpaper shacks, going at $400,000 and up, mortgage, which the termites will turn down, that's how they'll starve! But these things will suddenly go vacant, or tend to go vacant, as the people who occupy these so-called development areas have lost their jobs and lost everything. And have no skills for any kind of employment by which they can sustain their former standard of living. They're desperate people. That's what this has done to us.
An example of this process is in industry. About ten years ago, in the United States and in Europe, but especially in the United States, they decided to eliminate machine-tool employment in automobile and other factories of that type, other industries. They said, we will now use computer modelling instead of machine-tool specialists. I'm not going to name the product. Some of you know it. But there's some vehicles and some tires that killed a few people, which are the result of introducing this policy called "benchmarking" into the automobile and related industries internationally. If you look throughout the world today, compared to 1988-1989, you'll find, around the world, a terrifying loss of the ability to produce a quality, reliable product which we had in 1988. We've destroyed it in the past dozen years, by eliminating the machine-tool category of employment, in large amount, from existing industries, and eliminating also, by not reproducing the quality of machine-tool specialists, who used to make our industries, in western Europe, the United States, and Japan work. And that is what has been done.
So this is a great mythology, which has been imposed upon us, this "New Economy," and we're going to have to go back to the old way of doing things. What we're going to have to do is very simply, we're going to have to eliminate what I've indicated. We're going to have to do essentially what FDR did. In the United States itself, the President of the United States is going to have to put the entire financial system, including the banking system, into bankruptcy reorganization. There is no way that can be avoided. It's absolutely necessary. The banks are bankrupt. Now, if you don't do something about it, they're just going to go belly-up! Now, a bank is not merely a financial institution; it's also a service institution. People use banks to deposit savings. They use banks as vehicles for getting credit to run businesses, to meet payrolls, things of that sort. Communities depend upon this service.
So, the government is going to have to act in a condition in which the entire Federal Reserve System is collectively bankrupt, and the government, as the responsible agency, is going to have to step in, and put the Federal Reserve System into bankruptcy reorganization. The first objective, which is much like what Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s, is to have a bank reorganization act, which will enable us to keep useful functioning in communities, to guarantee access to small savings in these institutions, and provide credit to keep the communities going, through these institutions. It has to be done. We have to create, essentially, a national bankrupting agency, under the Treasury Department, which will take over the process of overhauling the bankrupt Federal Reserve System, and cooperating with the state governments to ensure that banks that are needed will continue to function as service organizations in those communities, and will continue to provide those essential services on which the local economy and community depend. That, we have to do. It's a drastic action, but it has to be done. Because the general welfare demands we do it. We can not have this country go into chaos; we can't have the world go into chaos.
We're going to find a need; we're going to have massive unemployment in certain categories, with the Internet/Nasdaq area as one of those categories, along with services, and financial services, employment and so forth, it's going to go by the boards. What are we going to do with the mass unemployment? Well, in part, we can absorb it, because people are working too much. People working two or three jobs to try to hold a family together: that's too much. There's no room for family life in that. It's bad. What we want to do, is to put people back to useful work. So, therefore, we're going to have to have projects, either started by, or stimulated by the Federal government, in cooperation with the states, largely in areas of infrastructure, which will provide immediate mass employment, and provide the basis for restarting a threatened private economy.
That is, for example, if you have a railroad you're rebuilding, if you're building a water system, or you're building a municipal infrastructure program, whatever, this sort of thing is done, by either the Federal or state or local government, or in cooperation with these agencies, with a line of credit, organized by the Federal government to make sure these things get done. Now, when you implement such a project, you rely upon employing local resources, not just personnel, but local resources, to implement these projects. This means that you are immediately stimulating employment and growth in already existing industries, and also some new industries. This is the way these projects work all over the world. So, you're going to have to have a rebuilding program, which is based on some conceptions of national policy on employment, housing, energy, transportation, things of that sort. And that's going to have to come from the Federal government, in large part, even though the states and localities will do a lot of it, a lot of it will involve private agencies, but the Federal government must organize the financial system and the credit system, by which we can get these things going.
We are also going to require a fundamental change in foreign policy. I can not tell you how disgusted the world is with the United States at this time. I think perhaps the President of the United States may share that disgust, particularly as the incumbent President of the United States. Because, we are pretending to be a superpower. People were afraid of us, and that's why they said, "You are a nice, friendly superpower." Because they were afraid of us. They thought we had a lot of power. And because we were often very nasty, as Madeleine Albright is. As Brzezinski is. Now, when the election crisis occurred, and people throughout Europe and Asia knew that the United States was going belly-up very soon, with a financial crisis, then you had a certain amount of gloating and glee, especially on Nov. 7 and the day after, when the election crisis became obvious. People all over the world began laughing: "The United States is getting it! Good for them." And then they said, "It's not so good for them, because the United States going down the pit is not good news for the rest of us." But the attitude is, the United States has actually become increasingly disliked, even hated, throughout the world, because of the kind of abuse which has been imposed under the influence of the Southern Strategy and similar kinds of policies.
We're going to have to suddenly reverse that. We'll have opportunities. There are people in Europe, in western Europe, people in Russia who want to make that kind of change, who want that kind of new relationship with the United States. There are people among 13 nations of South and East Asia--including Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand--who are already working for such a change, to build up a regional zone of economic and financial cooperation, partly to defend themselves against the terrible policies of the United States, but also simply to survive. These people from these 13 nations desire cooperation with the United States. People in Europe desire the kind of cooperation I'm talking about with the United States. In Russia, there is presently a desire to find that kind of cooperation with the United States. Among the people of South and Central America, there's a desire to return to a kind of relationship which existed under Franklin Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy. They want that. In Africa, there's a desperate hope, against hope, that the United States might change its policies, and work with other nations to bring to Africa some kind of hope. It is quite feasible. All these things are feasible.
What we have to do as a nation, is we have to take the legacy of our independence, what we were once admired and beloved for around the world. We have to use the moral authority of the American Revolution and its legacy--not the bad things we've done in the meantime, but our legacy--and hold out a hand of cooperation with our friends in western Europe, Asia, Russia, Africa, South and Central America, and say to them all, "Look, we're all in a common mess. The world is going under. It's sinking. The time has come for us to cooperate."
Now, the leading nations in the world are members of an organization called the International Monetary Fund: Seven members dominate that, especially the United States and the United Kingdom. Now that International Monetary Fund is as bankrupt, or perhaps more bankrupt than the Federal Reserve System. But the IMF being bankrupt: Who is accountable for its bankruptcy? Well, the nations which created it are responsible for it. The IMF has no authority, except the authority given to it by its member nations, member governments. These governments, led by the United States, I would hope, would reorganize the IMF to put back in the kinds of policies that worked prior to 1965, and worked very well up till 1958. To restore protectionism. To restore regulation. To restore capital controls, exchange controls, fixed exchange rates, long-term credit at low rates in international trade, 20-25 year agreements on infrastructure development globally--these kinds of policies. And return what is the IMF today, as a taken-over institution by the authority of these governments, to make it an instrument of cooperation, in which we can do for today, what Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt did, between 1933 and the time he died in 1945. To make a success of improving the world for its inhabitants in a way which, in net effect, is good. And which stops the slide into Hell, which we're going into now.
That's what we have to do. That is what you need a President for. Under our system of government, the President is a very important person, very important institution. It has a kind of moral authority that no other head of state in any other part of the world has. And if we have a good President, and we've had a few, the institution shines. It's the best form of government in the world. What you have to do is select a President who has that kind of vision, the kind of vision that Franklin Roosevelt typifies for us in our recollection of the '32-'45 period. And the kind of thing that I've outlined for you today.
What is needed is for the people of conscience in the United States, in government, in positions of influence outside government, to say: We must have a President who performs that kind of function in a time of crisis, who brings us together, and brings the nations together for that. Because if we don't do that, we're all going to go to Hell together. The way Roosevelt used to do it. I'd probably be tougher than Roosevelt. But that's the way it should be done.
And that's what we need: Don't sit back and say, "What kind of garbage are we going to have to eat?" Go into a greasy spoon and eat the garbage on the table? No. Go into a different restaurant. Get something that's fit to eat. Get a President that's fit to eat, so to speak. Make the President--define the President: You get some joker in the White House, and I tell you that joker in the White House is going to behave, generally, the way he thinks the people demand he behave. See the people like you, all of you, you want a President who is going to do what you really expect of him, or her. You may not know what that is, but you want a President, who on the morning after he's done, you're going to say, "Hey, that's my President. Who's done what I was afraid wouldn't be done. He's taken some action of the kind we need."
You know, take the case of Johnson, and the Civil Rights bills, under his administration, the '65 Voting Rights Act, for example. Johnson took a position. Now, Johnson wasn't a perfect man, but Johnson, when he woke up in the morning, had done the day before, what you wished he'd done. And you were glad for that. We were all glad for it. And that's what you expect of a President. You want someone that's an individual who has the confidence and commitment, and wants to think of himself as that kind of person, to do that kind of thing. And you want that fellow to be tough enough to take on any institution which is trying to prevent him from doing what he should do. You want to say, "That is my President. Yes, I understand exactly what he's doing in office. He's my President. He's my man. He's doing the job for us. And he's using the office we created, we the people created, to get that job done."
I tell you, and I could explain it in many ways from my experience. The world as a whole, at least most of it, wants the United States to have that kind of President. So why don't you get the Electoral College to give us that kind of President, by your demanding it.
Thank you.
