This message appears in the December 6, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
A Presidential Thanksgiving Message
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.November 28, 2002
Look ahead two years, to a better day, Nov. 25, 2004, when, if you are truly fortunate, I shall have been elected the next President of the U.S.A., and will be sending a Thanksgiving message to the outgoing President, George W. Bush, Jr. The only presently debatable feature of that outcome is, which political party had lived long enough to have nominated me?
There is not a single, presently existing major political party of any nation of the Americas (excepting, possibly, Mexico's PRI) which is presently likely to remain in existence as still a major political party two years from now. Two facts about the U.S. situation are clear. First, I would be elected as an echo of President Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party mission, and also the Abraham Lincoln tradition. Second, no existing U.S. party, major or minor, presently qualifies for that mission and tradition. A similar, paradoxical situation prevails in the currently principal parliamentary parties of the Americas and in Europe. In fact, unless the Democratic Party soon abandons its current "middle way," it were likely to disintegrate over the coming year.
As Senator Ted Kennedy made the point some years back, "This country does not need two Republican parties," a fact which his niece, then running for Maryland's Governor, seems to have overlooked recently.
It is a paradox which we, including the world's leading political cartoonists, must receive in good humor. Great calamities such as most of the world has brought upon itself today, must always be approached so, letting appropriate moments of laughter lighten and dispel the moments of darkness. That said, around Europe and the Americas today, there is hardly a single major political party which is currently worth shucks when it comes to the actually crucial issues of each passing moment.
A decades-long moral and intellectual degeneration of the political parties of the U.S.A. and western Europe underlies the the shameful degree of general failure of those nations' established parties to deal effectively with the two deadliest issues of the past two years. The first of these is that U.S.-led drive toward a global and virtually perpetual state of religious warfare pushed by such voices as the combined Clash of Civilizations dogma of Bernard Lewis, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel P. Huntington. The second is the currently spiralling economic collapse of the utterly rotten present world monetary- financial system. There have been spotty exceptions to this pattern, as late as during the recent election-campaign of Germany's Chancellor Schroeder, and from Italy's Parliament's support for a new Bretton Woods monetary agreement; but even these have been spotty exceptions, and no more.
You should all have foreseen this coming. I explain.
'Like a Bowl of Pottage'
The present virtual bankruptcy of leading party systems, is not an episodic coincidence; it is the reflection of a systemic form of moral and intellectual rottenness which has been the dominant trend in the politics of the U.S.A., Europe, and Japan, among other locations, since the combined effects of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the official launching of the 1964-72 U.S. war in Indo-China. The characteristic feature of this moral degeneracy, which also spread, after relevant 1971-1982 developments, throughout the Americas, has been a shift of the English-speaking powers' influence; a shift away from their earlier cultural commitment to the domestic characteristics of a producer society, to a morally degenerated form of imperialistic "post-industrial" "consumer society." The leading political parties of the nations assumed the internalized characteristics of that down-shift in morality.
This fungus of "post-industrial" moral and economic decadence spread its spores into the collective mind of popular culture and political opinion. So, the political parties spread their corruption into popular opinion; so, corrupted popular opinion impelled the leading parties into new depths of moral and intellectual decadence.
Now, the long-wave of decadence, launched from within the U.S.A. and Harold Wilson's Britain during the middle 1960s, has run out its skein. The economic decline has been but the most obvious of the markers of a culture, like the Biblical Belshazzar, now celebrating its imminent doom. A monetarist policy, reigning over a "post-industrial," "consumerist" practice, has used the lunacy of price-earnings-ratio capitalization to drive nominal financial assets beyond the limits of the real universe, while real physical values have been in an accelerating collapse, as measurable per capita and per square kilometer.
The system is doomed, but the political parties' view of popular opinion works to defend that monetary system, by methods of so-called "fiscal austerity" which accelerate the rate of destruction of the physical basis for human existence. The parties sold their souls as if for "a mess of pottage." Therefore, as long as they cling to their present values, they have become worse than useless for dealing with the crises of our time.
The Iraq Issue
It would be a foolish exaggeration to suppose that the possibility of an Iraq war has been put behind us. The madmen associated with the United States' Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle, have been blocked for the moment, but, those "foxes," so to speak, "are still running loose in and out of the hen-house." On that account, work remains to be done.
Nonetheless, the danger of a lunatic war was deflected. On this account, the political parties, especially the U.S. parties, were each more miserable moral failures than the others. The tilt toward sanity from within the U.S.A. came chiefly through the institutions associated, explicitly, or implicitly, with the U.S. Presidency.
This war-danger is inextricably mixed up with the global economic and monetary-financial crisis. If a general Middle East War is forestalled past February 2003, a failure to launch a counter-austerity, FDR-style recovery program, means that the issue of general warfare will be back on the table in late 2003.
We are in a period of world affairs comparable to 1929-33, but much more dangerous. If so-called democratic institutions remain as degenerated as the U.S. parties, for example, showed themselves over the recent two years, especially the past year, then the likely course of world events is generalized economic disintegration and a kind of warfare reminiscent of either the 1511-1648 interval in European history; or, worse, the Fourteenth-Century "New Dark Age." The history of Weimar Germany from the fall of the Müller government to the Jan. 30, 1933 appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor is worth revisiting for sources of insight into the present situation.
The failure of Germany's political parties, led to appointment of ministerial governments. When the German generals, a ministerial factor, also failed, by failing to prevent Hitler's appointment, in the events of Feb. 28-30, 1933, the horrors of Hitler and World War II became inevitable.
Today, we in the U.S.A. should be grateful for that recent intervention of the institutions, on which I placed my confidence in recent matters. However, no possible escape from a world depression is possible except through enactment of laws which nullify all of the 1971-2002 anti-FDR reforms in economic, monetary, and financial practices. This requires laws enacted in the Congress and the Federal states, as applicable. The enactment of such laws by means consistent with our Constitution, requires political parties. We must create that political combination by a mission-oriented regroupment of the viable elements salvaged from the presently failed political-party system.
What that needed regroupment must be is not yet to be seen. The starting-point should be an energetic effort to assemble some bi-partisan rallying behind certain specific missions. I have led in defining what is sometimes labelled a "Super TVA" of infrastructure-building to restart our collapsing national economy. However, that program requires a prerequisite, a clearing the terrain by a single, simply stated piece of general legislation, which a) states that we are presently gripped by a deadly emergency, a national systemic physical-economic collapse for which "fiscal austerity" is inherently counterproductive; and b) stipulates that laws on the books, which would prevent recovery programs such as those of the 1933-1964 interval, must be suspended for the duration of the present national economic emergency.
My personal role in this undertaking is unique, and at least virtually indispensable. Political parties which are viable, must emerge from a process of reconstruction. For this my candidacy is presently indispensable.
Whatever comes of that initiative, will determine the future politics, and party structures of the nation.
As Mathew Carey saw, long ago, the rot in our political-party system, is not a matter of a few bad apples in the barrel. The rot is in the barrel.
So, have a happy Thanksgiving, and let us hope that Christmas actually comes.
