This speech appears in the November 24, 2000 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
LaRouche Teleconference:
`Now Comes the Aftermath'
Speaking by teleconference to a Washington, D.C. EIR seminar, and by webcast to a live international audience, former Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche on Nov. 14 addressed the current electoral crisis in the United States, as a unique opportunity for dealing with the stench of corruption from the entire political process of the election.
The following is the text of the conference. See also the Questions and Answers.
Debra Hanania Freeman: Good afternoon to all of you. My name is Debra Freeman. I serve as the national spokeswoman for Lyndon LaRouche, who, as you all know, was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, and is one of the most prominent living economists in the world today. I'd like to welcome you to this afternoon's event. As you know, this is a seminar sponsored by Executive Intelligence Review, which Mr. LaRouche is the founding editor of. This title of today's event is "Now Comes the Aftermath." It is designed for an international audience. It is being broadcast live over the Internet, and it will be re-broadcast from Mr. LaRouche's website.
Mr. LaRouche will be addressing you today on the subject of the international crisis, which has exploded to the surface, in the immediate aftermath of last week's election. Mr. LaRouche will be addressing several of the most important leading issues that are posed by that crisis, and he will discuss them in a manner that I think is important for consideration by leading circles in the United States, and abroad.
After Mr. LaRouche's opening presentation, I will open for questions. What I ask all of you to understand, is that, in addition to taking questions from the live audience, we do have a phone hookup, so that people who are monitoring this broadcast globally, can also ask questions, and we do have a mechanism, whereby written questions have been submitted. So, I'm sure that we will have time for everybody to ask their questions, but I will apprise people of the order in which those questions will be presented, when Mr. LaRouche is done with his presentation.
I'd like to thank all of you for your presence here, and I'm quite sure that you will find Mr. LaRouche's remarks quite interesting.
Without any further introduction, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce to you, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche.
Lyndon LaRouche: Thank you very much, Debbie.
What I'm going to say today, will be unusual, but it's being said under unusual circumstances, and anything different would be irrelevant to the reality of the situation in which the United States, in particular, but also the world at large, finds itself in the aftermath of the recent Nov. 7 Presidential elections in the United States.
What the question, which is posed by the aftermath of that Nov. 7 event, is: how do put the stench back inside the shell of a cracked rotten egg. The problem we have, is not the problem of the election. We have an election crisis, but that is not the problem, in and of itself. As you probably know, that I scheduled this event to occur at the time, at about a week before the election, because I then knew that the world would be in the kind of post-election crisis which it's in now. And I wished to leave about a week to pass before I said what I had to say on this subject because I thought it would take a week before the audience was ready, and had experienced enough frustration over these results, to begin to listen seriously to what I had to say.
I shall make seven points about this. And my concluding point will be a statement, which I shall read into the record, which is a written statement, which I shall read, written for this occasion, because what I have to say is a matter of Constitutional law for the United States. And these things should be stated very precisely, as to wording.
Now, what happened, was not a bad election. What we had was a bad election, which was the result of a corrupt and bankrupt election campaign. Nothing happened on Nov. 7, which was any worse than what had happened during the preceding ten months. This election campaign, was, from the outset, especially from abougt February of this year, has been one of the most corrupt campaigns that the United States has ever known, at least national campaigns. We have, typical of the problem, if you were following the press in Europe, including such press as the leading press in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom itself, you would see that the two leading candidates for the Presidential election of the United States, were characterized by this leading press in the same kind of terms which have never before been used, except to describe some comic-opera dictator from a banana republic. The world is horrified, not by the results of the election, but by the candidates who presented themselves as Presidential candidates for election.
The campaign, as it was run, has no relevance whatsoever, in what it discussed, to the situation which is faced by the world, and the United States in particular, beginning now, and especially as we go into the early part of the year 2001. The candidates did speak about what they call "issues," but this was in the nature of slaves lining up at the back door of the mansion to beg for a few handouts. Nothing was said about the health-care crisis: a handout was promised. Nothing was said about pensions: a couple of handouts were promised to the slaves, which may or may not be delivered, as the case may be. The policy of the Governor of Texas, was nothing but a promise to bankrupt the United States by cutting tax payments, at a time when the tax revenue base is already going to collapse. What the Vice President promised was gobbledy-gook which nobody could make sense of.
This campaign was, therefore, corrupt in every sense, both in vote-stealing, in racketeering, in greatest amount of money ever spent for a campaign, in the conduct of the national news media, nothing was real. It was something like a Nuremberg-Hitler rally, without substance, but much pomp, and much money, and not much in the way of public speakers.
Now, the first issue to consider, in that connection, recognizing the problem was not the election; the problem is the election campaign. There was nothing worth voting for. And the people who were trying to steal the vote were a bunch of crooks--so what else is new? Who should be surprised by the fact that we have this kind of situation. Perhaps no one will ever know who actually won the election. The stealing and the corruption was that bad! So all this business with the courts, and trying to find out who stole the votes, is a worthless waste of time. We should find out who committed fraud, so something about it, but we should not postpone the selection of a President for that reason.
Now, the way we should handle a crisis like this, where nobody may ever know who really won the vote--because the corruption is that bad: how many judges, and how many courts, and how many trials, will we require, and how many recounts, to figure out anything, in almost any state? All we know, is it was a tie, and, as Letterman said on television, they both lost, so let's leave it that way.
Now, what do we do? We simply pass the problem over to the legal, constitutional process, which is called the Electoral College. The Electoral College is supposed to convene, by communication from various states, on the 18th of December. This is not yet the 18th of December. There's nothing yet to worry about. It begins on the 18th of December, when the Electoral College will meet. Now, the Electoral College is created by the Constitution has been modified in this respect, but it's still the original intent. We've had election problems before, election crises: in the year 1800, the selection of Thomas Jefferson, was done through the Electoral College process, the intent of Congress. The election of John Quincy Adams, was done similarly. In 1877, we had a similar crisis, in the Hayes-Tilden runoff, which was done under provisions of the Electoral College. So, when you have two candidates, neither of which is elected, you have to processes to go through. First of all, you have the Electoral College, which is constituted as a deliberative body to decide who's going to report as the elected candidate. So, no matter if the vote's bad, the Electoral College, as constituted, can still decide the choice of President and Vice President. If it's hung up in the electoral college as of Jan. 5 or 6 of this coming year, when the Electoral College reports to the Congress, then if the Electoral College has not made a decision, as to who the next President would be, then, in that case, the Congress has procedures to go through, specified by law, to select who shall be the next President.
If, by chance, then Jan. 20 rolls around, and the selection of a new President has not been made by either the Electoral College or the Congress, in that case, we do have a national constitutional emergency. Something will have to be done. And, one would hope, that somewhere between Dec. 18 and Jan. 5 or 6, that people will begin to think about that kind of problem: What do we do if neither the Electoral College, nor the Congress can select the next President by Jan. 20, when the present President's term runs out.
Don't worry about it too much, but think about it. I'm sure they're thinking about it at the White House and elsewhere. Think about it. But we have time. We have a Constitution. We have a procedure for selecting a President. Don't panic. Don't run to the courts. Don't create confusion. Be calm. We'll find a solution. But begin to realize that you've got two bums, and you don't want either of them to be elected. Most of the voters who voted for either, were just voting to get rid of the lesser evil, which they thought was the other, the lesser one, they were going to vote for. Not because they thought they were any good, but they thought the other was worse!
Now what happens when the public is choosing between two lesser evils, what do they get? They elect evil! In this case, evil had a standoff. So, we would hope that the Electoral College would do better by us, than we have--in terms of the contenders for the Presidential designation--by the Electoral College, the Congress, or whatever.
So that's the situation.
Now, anybody who tries to get rid of the Electoral College process, who tries to short-circuit it, they will create a chaos, a constitutional chaos, which their children will curse them for for two decades or so to come. You might destroy the nation by trying to overturn the Electoral College. The Electoral College route is the only way to ensure that we do not create chaos. So, whether you like it or not, stick with the Electoral College, and fight for the Electoral College to make a rational decision. That is the institution which goes to the next step in selecting who will be the actual President. If they find no virtue in the Presidential contenders, they may look for the Vices, as the alternative to the lesser evil. Then, if the Electoral College fails, count on the Congress. It's a procedure. It will give us certainly something better than the mess we have now. Stick with it.
But, how did the present crisis come into being? How is it, that the United States, after spending the greatest amount of money on Prsidential candidates every seen--they even had to invent money for the purpose; there wasn't enough otherwise going around--how is it, with all the news media, and all that money, that all you could pick is two bums, who were described as comic-opera dictator types, by the French, German, United Kingdom, and other leading press? And they knew what they were talking about. And why was the European press so upset about these two bums, these two bozos, running for President?
Now, go back a little bit in history. Remember that Kennedy was assassinated, and that Johnson got into trouble because he supported two Civil Rights bills, including his personal backing for pushing through the Voting Rights law, 1965. At that time, the Republicans, led by Richard Nixon, came up with what's called the "Southern Strategy." Now, the Southern Strategy of Nixon, was to meet personally with Ku Klux Klan representatives, and people like Trent Lott, who he considered an honorable, or dishonorable associate of the Ku Klux Klan. So the Republican campaign for election in 1968, was based on an appeal to the Confederacy, of the legacy of the Confederacy. An appeal which was based largely on the racist rage at President Johnson for having pushed through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the middle of the 1970s, the Democratic Party, in choosing Jimmy Carter, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination and election, extended the Southern Strategy of Nixon, in a Democratic Party form, into the Democratic Party itself. Over the course of the period since the ousting of Jimmy Carter, who became disgusting to so many voters, that he created "Reagan Democrats." Other than that, we've had a gradual takeover of the political institutions of the United States, the top levels of the parties, and much of the political processes, by party machines, which were Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. Both Democratic and Republican branches of the pro-racist Southern Strategy launched by later-President Nixon, in 1966, in his meetings in Mississippi and elsewhere, with Klan representatives, and with people like Trent Lott, who is now the Republican leader of the Senate.
The takeover of this process, this party process, Republican and Democratic, amounted to a unification, in both parties, of Dixiecrats and Carpetbaggers. The Carpetbaggers being the Wall Street crowd. The upholders of what is called "shareholder values." In other words, if you go back to the Confederate Constitution of 1860-61, you'll find that the Confederate Constitution is based on the arguments of the enemy of the United States, or the enemy of what the United States was founded to be: John Locke. And John Locke was for slavery, as was the Confederacy, and they were also for something which we call today, shareholder value. What has happened is, people in the upper twenty percent of the family-income brackets in the United States, are matched up with people who represent the pro-racist, Dixiecrat tradition. Now, the people in the upper twenty percent, generally are people in suburbia, who no longer produce agricultural goods--because the farmers don't get any money; they can't be in that upper bracket any more--they're not enterpreneurs, machine-tool operators and others; they're not the producers of physical goods--we ship that to slave labor overseas; we don't employ people for that any more. These are people who live on things like financial services, selling real estate, things of that sort, which we used to consider fairly useless forms of employment, years ago, but which have the highest-paid positions in the United States today.
So you have people living in suburbia, who are talking about "my money, my investments." How do they get their money? Well, they borrow most of it. That's why they're so much in debt. But they also get a little bit on the basis of their income, and they're prepared to kill, virtually, in order to secure what they think is their advantage. Over this period of time, since the inauguration of Carter in 1977, the eighty percent of the lower family-income brackets, which used to represent an overwhelming majority of the national income of the nation as a whole, have now dropped to much less than is gained by the upper twenty percent of family-income brackets. And most of the family-income brackets, the higher levels, are engaged in occupations, which we would have thought of, say before 35 years ago, as pretty much useless kinds of employment. Paper shufflers, who don't produce anything but get overpaid.
So, this is the basic problem. This is what horrifies Europe. The fact that the United States is being run by a bunch of lunatics from suburbia, and from the tradition of Dixiecrats. People who are lunatic, but who have become very powerful, because of their domination of the parties' electoral process. And so, the Wall Street financiers and lawyers, who have run the country, who are called the Establishment, ever since McKinley was shot, these people have dominated the country. The makers and shakers. The makers and shakers called into being, through the Southern Strategy, in the Democratic as well as the Republican Party, called into being a monster, which in comparable in many of its sociological features, to the Nazi Party in Germany. This machine, these fanatics in suburbia, these fanatics about shareholder value, these fanatics, who are really racist, or something similar, or similar dispostion, they have become a political machine, like the Nazi machine. The Nazis were brought to power by bankers, and a bankers group, bankers in London, bankers in New York, like Harriman, are the ones who funded Hitler's rise to power. But by 1936, after Hitler had successfully occupied the Rhineland, the Nazi machine had gone out of control, and the bankers who had called it to power, could not get rid of it. And we ended up, beginning 1936, preparing for the war we fought, because of this Nazi phenomenon, whose echo, equivalent in the United States, is this union of the Southern Strategy crowd in both the Republican and the Democratic Parties.
So, therefore, this was the essential corruption: the party system is morally corrupt, because it is a creature largely controlled by these madmen, these lunatics, these fanatics, typified by Trent Lott, the Republican leader of the Senate, who have taken over the political machines. They're determined to exert their power at any cost. They don't, they're not rational. They're not in the real world. And, as they say, as you see with HMOs, with medical practice, with pensions, with the welfare conditions, with community conditions, these people are prepared to loot the people of the United States, to defend them, and to make them richer. It's a very dangerous crowd. And that's the essential corruption.
Now, the second point of corruption, under the roots of the present crisis, is the fact that we face the worst financial crisis, worldwide, in three centuries of the history of European civilization. And it's coming on now. As of sometime very soon, probably half of the people in the upper 20% of family income brackets, in the United States, will be, in effect, on the streets, bankrupt, with no prospect of employment. Correspondingly, the people of the lower income brackets, will become increasingly destitute, as a worse depression, far worse than that of 1929-31, hits in the weeks now oncoming, onrushing. This financial crisis cannot be prevented. It can be attacked, it can be cured. But it is coming, it is unstoppable. And all the news talk about "it's a soft landing," is nonsense. You're going to have the hardest landing European civilization has seen in three centuries; it's coming on fast right now.
None of these issues were allowed to be discussed, in the election campaign by the Presidential candidates. They were addressed this subject in passing once or twice, and they ducked the issue. So the real issues which face the American people, and the world, were not mentioned by people running for the highest office, of the United States, presumably the most powerful nation in the world. That's corruption. Not answering the question that should be on everybody's mind
The United also is in a terrible situation strategically. Now, some of you may recall that in October of 1988, October 12, Columbus Day, I gave an address in Berlin, in Germany. The subject of that address, which was later rebroadcast, on a national television program, in October of that year, later, was my forecast that, in the immediate future, we would see an economic disintegration of what had been called the Soviet system, starting in Eastern Europe. And that we would foresee for the immediate future, the reunification of Germany, with the re-establishment, at some early future time, of Berlin as the capital of the reunited Germany.
At that time, I indicated the policies which should have been followed. Now, those policies were not followed. The only good thing that happened, is, Vernon Walters, who was the ambassador of the United States to Germany at the time, managed to persuade George Bush not to go along fully, with Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of England. So, things were not as bad as they could have become, because of Vernon Walters' warning to President Bush. But otherwise Bush did everything wrong.
Now, what happened as a result, was that the United Kingdom, then represented by Thatcher, and the United States, represented by Bush, set into motion an attempt to set up an Anglo-American world empire. That is, as a result of these developments of 1989 through 1992, every nation in the world which had been a part of NATO, or otherwise an ally of the United States, was degraded into second-class world citizenship. As we saw in the case of Desert Storm, as we saw in the recent Balkan things, and we see now, that important allies, like Japan, Germany, France, and so forth, were degraded to mere satrapies, mere errand boys, who would do as the Americans told them.
The same thing was done in South and Central America. A horrible genocide was unleashed in Africa, under the backing of the British and other legacies of the Bush administration. Similar things were done to nations in Asia. Al Gore was part of that problem, at a later point.
So the United States has been living as an oppressive empire in the eyes of the world, on the backs of not only the nations of Central and South America, and Africa, and Asia, but also on our closest former allies in Europe. There's a deep resentment, and even growing hatred, against Washington, around the world, because of this policy.
We face the point, that in the very near future, the American will probably collapse by as much as 40%, in a fairly rapid order, as this crisis takes over. We now have a current account deficit, running probably at about $600 billion a year. We're keeping the U.S. markets afloat, by stealing over $3 trillion a year, sucked into the United States to support Wall Street. When the U.S. dollar collapses, the effect of the current account deficit, and the effects of the withdrawal of those financial supports from abroad, will collapse the U.S. The U.S. will then be in a situation, where we desperately need partners and friends abroad, to work with us to put the United States, as well as other nations, back together in this same way.
We are in a situation which is described by the great English poet, Shelley, in his poem Ozymandias. The United States, the world's greatest superpower, at the apparent peak of its power, is about to collapse into the desert sand, its parts strewn upon the desert, and a sign, "Behold all you, my wonder, the wonder of my power." That's where we're at.
To fail to recognize this is the situation, is a form of corruption.
At the same time, in the United States generally, the lower 80% of family income brackets have been suffering increasingly over the past nearly quarter century, as you see in the clear figures. The conditions of life, of senior citizens, of the so-called minority groups, and others, the condition of labor, the conditions of farmers, the conditions of lower communities, everything is getting worse, and rapidly. Life itself is becoming precarious, and nobody behind the Presidential candidacies, cared. No one addressed that problem, and proposed measures to solve it. They proposed to give a few handouts, maybe, to the slaves at the back door of the white-painted mansion, nothing else. That is corruption.
Now, we have some lessons we can learn from the past, which are relevant to the future. I shall deal with two types. First of all, certain lessons from past experience.
The United States was ruined, as a result of the election of Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson were southern-born boys, with Southern pro-racist legacies. As a matter of fact, Wilson himself was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. And while he was President in the White House, he launched the second revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which was bigger than the first one. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the early 1930s, was the Woodrow Wilson Klan, which he launched officially and publicly from the White House. So they weren't too good.
Coolidge was not better. Andrew Mellon, who was the thing that is being imitated by poor Alan Greenspan, was evil and powerful.
Under these presidents and their policies, over the period 1901 until 1931, the United States was ruined step by step, ending up in the Great Depression of 1921-1931. Along came a candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, a cousin, but absolutely different from his cousin Teddy, who turned the thing around. Roosevelt addressed the common man. Roosevelt addressed the needs of the forgotten man. Roosevelt revived the policies on which the United States was founded, which you can read in the first three paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, and the Preamble of the Constitution. The concept of the general welfare. That is, the only legitimate basis for government is the efficient commitment of government, to promote of the general welfare of each, and all of the people, and their posterity. That's what Roosevelt insisted upon. That the United States government must use its legitimate authority, as the promoter and protector of the general welfare, as well as of the national defense, in order to attack the problems represented by the depression, and to reverse the rot, which had been created by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow, Calvin Coolidge, and Andrew Mellon.
We face a similar problem today. We came out of World War II. Roosevelt died, unfortunately. So the things that he planned to do, were not fully done. But some good things were done, especially in the relations between the United States and Europe, from about 1945 through 1965. As a result of that cooperation with Europe and the United States, the United States prospered from its relations with Europe, and Europe prospered from the cooperation of the United States. We did well. Our conditions of life in the United States improved. The general welfare improved, The standard of living improved, despite all the bad things that did happen. But in net effect, we progressed.
Then, in 1966, we began to go downhill. Not fast at first, but we went downhill. We've been going down hill ever since, under the influence of the Southern Strategy, which has taken over the control of both the Republican and Democratic parties at the top.
So, today we've come to the same kind of situation, in which the United States, which had been successful, was ruined, by the adoption of bad policies, under bad leaders. Just as we had Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Coolidge earlier, we've had Nixon, Carter, George Bush, since. These Presidents have ruined us now, as the presidencies earlier before Roosevelt ruined us then. So the obvious answer is to learn from the lessons of history, and recognize that it was a great mistake ever to depart from those principles which Franklin Roosevelt used to life the United States out of a great depression, to defend it in war, and to lift it to the prosperity we came to enjoy increasingly over the 20 years immediately following the war.
What is needed is a return to those policies, and to overturn, repudiate, scrap, junk, eliminate, those policies of Dixiecrats and Carpetbaggers, the policies of slaveholder and shareholder values.
In the postwar period, we had problems in reconstruction. Roosevelt was for eliminating all colonies, specifically the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French colonies, and to establish these areas which had been colonized, as independent nations, with cooperation from the United States of the type we gave to Europe in the postwar period. For the development of these newly independent nations, into truly prospering republics. We didn't do that, because Churchill opposed it. When Roosevelt died, Truman, under Churchill's pressure, immediately used various military force to restore colonial power on nations which had freed themselves temporarily, from colonialism during the war.
We have that policy today. We treat South America, Africa, and parts of Asia as colonies. They are being neocolonized in a way typified by the genocide which the United States and British are conducting with U.S. military and other means in Africa, and the genocide in Africa is one of the most horrible spectacles in this planet today.
The problem we face in war was a result of the same kind of situation. Montagu Norman, who was for a period of time the head of the Bank of England, who was a controller of the Averell Harriman interests in the United States, was the man behind Hitler. It was Montagu Norman who brought Hitler to power in Germany, with the support of Averell Harriman, of the Harriman clan. That's the clan of George Bush and some other people. That was done... The way in which it was done, is important to recall today.
At the end of 1932, people in Germany had already adopted a policy for dealing with great depression. This policy was formulated by an organization called the Frederick List Society, or, in German, Friedrich Lists Gesellschaft. This group had made a policy called the Lautenbach Plan, for doing the same thing, in effect, that Roosevelt did for the recovery in the United States. That is, to use the public credit, to create mass employment, to create an economic revivial, in infrastructure and other means.
Hitler was on the downslide at the end of 1932, because of various reasons. But in this period the Germans brought to power a man, Kurt von Schleicher, who was for a time the Chancellor of Germany. And if he had remained in power, until Roosevelt, who had just been elected in the United States, became President in March of 1933, there would have been no World War II. Because if von Schleicher had remained in power, Germany would have been a partner of the United States, in a worldwide recovery. The Nazi party would have vanished, and no war. No great penalty.
But that didn't happen. Montagu Norman, with the backing of Averell Harriman and his friends in New York, including the father and grandfather of George Bush, the later president, the great-great grandfather of Gov. George Bush. Now I don't know if Gov. George Bush knows what a grandfather, but, in any case, nonetheless, he is the great-grandson of the person who, together with his grandfather, worked with Averell Harriman, to bring Adolf Hitler to power in Germany under the leadership of Montagu Norman.
So, you don't have much confidence, naturally, in a Bush candidacy, a Bush presidency, do you? But in any case, the lesson to be learned is, that you must act always, when you see something coming, like the Nazis in Germany, or like the takeover of the United States in the form expressed by this election scandal, this election crisis, by the Bush-Gore duo, Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee (and George Bush obviously is Tweedle-dum); when you see that, you say, "Stop it now, before it's too late. Learn the lesson of Hitler." If we had stopped Hitler when we could, by supporting von Schleicher, and preventing the Harriman clan from pushing Hitler into power in Germany in January of 1933, we would have never had World War II, and the horrors of the Nazi show. Stop it now before it's too late. And stop it with the kind of policies which--FDR may not have been perfect, but he typifies still today, the state of mind, the attitude, that a President must have, to lead this nation out of this kind of crisis. And we can do it again.
Let me give you one example from history. A page from history, from strategic history, which typifies what is required of us today.
In the beginning of the 19th century, a Napoleon Bonaparte, who was in a sense, he was the first modern fascist, Napoleon Bonaparte. Of course, he had better military qualifications than Benito Mussolini, but otherwise he was very much of the same mind, of the same policy. Napoleon became very quickly, as emperor, a tyrant; subjecting all Europe to an empire modelled upon that of the Caesars. Even introducing old Roman law as the Code Napoleon to France. This tyranncy of Napoleon, looting France of its own bodies, looting the neighboring countries, became a tyrant as bad a Hitler was in our time.
And the time came, in 1812, when Napoleon decided to teach Russia a lesson, and to break its will, as he had most of the other nations of Europe.
At that point, some Germans, including those very close to Friedrich Schiller, volunteered, with the blessing of Gerhard Scharnhorst, the leader of the German military, to volunteer for Russian military service, to assist the Czar, and Russia, in defeating Napoleon.
Now, for that purpose, the German advisers, including a fellow called von Wollzogen, who was an inlaw of Friedrich Schiller, devised a policy, which was later revived after the beginning of World War II, by the Soviets in defending the Soviet Union against the Nazi invasion, the same policy. And that was to take a daring strategic effort to draw--don't fight Napoleon at the borders of Russia; draw him, step by step, back into the depths of Russia. Lure him to Moscow. Let him go into Moscow, a city which had already been mined, to destroy the city and burn it down around Napoleon's ears. Do this in the wintertime. Catch Napoleon without resources. Force him to retreat. And then take the Russian army, which you had refused to spend on taking him on earlier, follow his rear and crush him.
This tactic succeeded. And it led to a great battle at Leipzig, called the battle of the nations, at which the power of Napoleon was broken almost permanently. And the follow-on battles eliminated Napoleon's power in Europe forever. That was the first war against fascism. It was fought against Napoleon, and successfully.
But what I want to point out to you about this strategy, is that to conduct that kind of strategy--and the czar of Russia was very frightened by what was proposed to him, by von Wollzogen and others--it took nerve, to have the courage to retreat. It took nerve, to give up territory to Napoleon's army. It took nerve, to mine the city of Moscow and burn it down around Napoleon's ears. It took nerve not to fight a battle too soon, or not to fight a decisive battle too soon. It required a clear head, clear ideas, correct ideas, and a steady nerve.
Now we're coming into the worst financial crisis in all modern European experience. It's coming on fast now. There are clear solutions. It is not a desperate or impossible situation itself. The only impossible thing about this situation is the fact that we have the two worst dummies in the world contending for the position of President of the United States. And the desperate thing is, we must somehow get the United States into cooperation, not only with the nations of Western Europe, but also Russia, with China, Japan, Korea, other nations of the ASEAN plus Three group, and nations who are south of our borders, to end the adverse relationships among us, to bring us together for a common cause. To take the old rotten stinking IMF, and the bankrupt banking systems, and to pull together by agreement, to put these things in order, to create a new international monetary order, of cooperation among all these partner nations, and to set forth, to stabilize the situation, and to launch the kind of growth which Franklin Roosevelt had intended to be U.S. policy, had he not died prematurely at the end of the war. We must have this kind of partnership.
What is needed is a policy which I might call Partners for America, in which this nation corrects its great error, the error typified by the very existence of the Southern Strategy's control over our two political parties. Let us take the fact of the crisis, the fact of the crash, the fact of the financial disaster, to recognize that his disaster proves, that we have been swindled by party leaderships, by organizations, and by a press which has lied to us, and that this financial crash proves that everything they've been saying is wrong. That shareholder value is wrong. That slaveholder value is wrong. That Dixiecrats and Carpetbaggers are wrong, old-style or new-style. To reassert, as Roosevelt reasserted the American principle in the conditions of depression then, in the financial crisis now, respond to the crisis by mobilizing, to pull this nation together, to give it a President and a Congress which functions. Maybe we could intimidate some of these Congressmen into becoming good--sometimes it's the best way to educate them.
And to enter into partnership, rather than adversity, with our friends in Europe, and Japan, Africa, Asia, South America, Central America. To cooperate, to build up trade, to stop this stealing. And to establish as a principle, like a beacon that everybody in the world can know, that we nations agree, as the foundation of our new global partnership, we agree that the only efficient authority, the only moral authority, of government, of sovereign government, is its efficient commitment to promote the general welfare of all of its people, and their posterity. And to engage with one another, as nations, in promoting the common welfare of us all.
On that basis, if we take a long view, of the great financial mess--and we're going to have to put in things in bankruptcy reorganization. We're going to have to wipe out and that; we're going to have to manage to make sure people don't go hungry. We're going to have to keep firms going, communities functioning, all of those kinds of things you do in a crisis like this. And it's going to take us 25 years, of long-term steady investment in infrastructure, in new industries, in improved technologies, and in trade, to build up the kind of world which we want to build. A world we bequeath to those children who will come to adulthood 25 years from now. And we as grandparents, or great-grandparents, can take satisfaction, that what we're doing today, is for that purpose. And we can look forward into the future, and see the happy faces of those who will bless us for what we've done.
We will live, we will survive. It'll be tough times. But we'll make it. And take that attitude.
Now, what I want to read to you just briefly is this prepared statement, on the constitutional question. And I've written it in this form, to be precise, so that this can be properly placed before relevant institutions, particularly in the United States. It's as follows:
Two constitutional questions are posed to us at this juncture. Considering the present circumstances, in which this election-crisis has erupted, does the U.S. have both the right, and the obligation, to pause now for calm, sane, and sober reflection, during these weeks the Electoral College is being prepared: to consider the implications of that present danger to the very existence of our constitutional republic and the welfare of the world at large? Have we the national will, as well as the constitutional right, to consider thus the causes of that vast corruption which permeated the process leading into the Presidential election-crisis of Nov. 7th?
My reading of the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, my reading of the circumstances of the choice of Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr, the selection of President John Quincy Adams, and the Tilden-Hayes crisis, indicates that we have not only precisely that right, and also that solemn obligation, to the founders of our republic, to our Constitution, and to our posterity, and to the world within which we have exerted great power, to use the means which our Constitution has prepared for like contingencies, to ensure the continued existence of our republic according to that solemn, constitutional intent to promote the general welfare, that commitment to the common good, upon which the very existence of our republic was premised.
Thank you.
