PREPARED WRITTEN WEBCAST TEXT

`Preparing for the Post-Cheney Era'

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The below is a written draft of opening remarks prepared by Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche for delivery at his Oct. 22, 2003 Washington, D.C. campaign event. See also the transcript of Mr. LaRouche's opening remarks. Here are links to the media archives of the entire event.

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The principal topics to be addressed on this occasion are the following three.

1. The California Recall aftermath coincides with a deep shakeup within the Democratic Party's following;
   
   
2. The acute phase of the international monetary-financial crisis;
   
   
3. The continued threat of neo-conservative war policies.

That principal part of the presentation will be prefaced by opening remarks to the following effect.

Time grows short. It is now approximately a year and three months from the day on which the next elected President of the U.S. is to enter office. That, and the present shake-out of the list of Democratic Presidential candidates, bring us to the time at which I, who continue to be a leading candidate for the Presidential nomination, must now go beyond arguing for my policies, and begin to give our citizens a feeling for what life under my Presidency will actually be like.

Therefore, before turning to the three principal topics of my report today, I begin by giving some of the flavor of the first hour after I am back at the President's office, after being sworn in as President. Among my other actions during that hour, I shall take the following on two areas of executive action. First, are the actions I shall take on the present health-care crisis, which is now threatening more and more of those adult Americans who were still adolescents at the time of the 1962 nuclear-missile crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the official start of the Indo-China war. Second, are certain changes in our military services.

Health-Care Action

My friends and acquaintances of the World War II generation are now dying out rapidly. But, their children's generation is beginning to be hit seriously with the problems of aging which tend to come on at about the age of fifty. We also have a new batch of veterans from U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially Army reservists and National Guard members, who are being returned from those battlefields in increasing numbers as trauma victims who have earned, and must receive, a quality of care which is less and less available under current U.S. policies. In these matters, a President must act.

Therefore, unless the presently incumbent President were to take these actions before I am authorized to do so, during the first hours I am in office I shall take the following measures of executive action to address these issues.

I. Restore D.C. General Hospital. First, to led the nation and world know I mean business on the issue of health-care, I shall act not only to restore the D.C General Hospital to a full-service public general hospital, but set into motion steps to make that hospital a leading edge of our improved national security and health-security capabilities, and a leading national hospital-institution of its type in the world.

2. Restore Hill-Burton. Second, in that same hour, I shall send a draft bill of about five to seven pages length to the U.S. Congress, restoring the Hill-Burton Law as national policy, and repealing President Richard M. Nixon's HMO law.

3. Revitalize the Veterans Hospital System. Third, I shall issue a set of executive orders and draft legislation restoring the Veterans Hospital system.

4. Re-energize Public Heath System. Fourth, I shall act to reactivate the Public Health system which, among its other functions, is a first line of national-security defenses.

5. Respond to Our Aging Population. Finally, on health-care issues, it was pointed out to me by a relevant former official, that a part of the worsening national health-care problem of our people, is that the improvements in the standard of living which occurred under the impact of changes made during and following the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, have enabled more of our citizens to live long enough to reach the age of experiencing certain sicknesses. Two corrective reforms of our degenerating health-care practice system must be introduced in the same spirit as my intended action restoring the full functioning of D.C. General Hospital.

a) Restore Physician Rights. First, given the importance of preventive health-care actions, we must bring to an end the kinds if corporate accounting practices under HMO and related practice, which have worked to prevent physicians from treating the patient and the patient's health-care needs as a whole. Given the importance of preventive health-care in reducing the incidence of preventable health care crises of citizens, it would be immoral, and also economically foolish, to allow non-medical accountants and financial managers to cut back on health-care costs by eliminating certain crucial categories of preventive medicine from effective reach of the relevant average citizen. It is the physician, not the accountant, who shall practice medicine; it is the medical profession which shall determine the needs of the patient.

b) Special Measures on Diseases of Aging. Second, the fight against the diseases of aging is one of the principal frontiers of research into better methods of health-care, and also non-medical measures of public sanitation taken by governments and others.

B. Military Reforms

6. Honor the Veteran. It is also my present intention, that during the first hours of my Presidency, I shall present a proposed bill to Congress restoring national military service of qualified citizens. We may recall, that it was the lunatic folly of the so-called preventive U.S war in Indo-China which led to the destruction of national military service of citizens. As we have seen lately, the reform ending the draft did not solve the problem we experienced in Indo-China, but actually made it worse, as we have seen the same great folly re-enacted in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It has been largely forgotten that national military service was the tradition upon which our constitutional republic was founded. In addition to our experience in that war, under Presidents Monroe and John Quincy Adams, we also assimilated certain important lessons from the wars of 1789-1815 in Europe, especially from great military reformers such as France's Lazare Carnot and Germany's Classical humanist military reformer Gerhard Scharnhorst. Instead of the lunacy of nuclear preventive war, especially the preventive nuclear war policies revived by Vice-President Cheney, we must return to that principle of strategic defense which was introduced by Carnot and employed by Scharnhorst, a principle has been the policy of all of our great Presidents and military commanders, such as MacArthur and Eisenhower, since. Among these lessons learned were the emphasis upon the role of an Army Corps of Engineers, and the importance of shifting the training of soldiers and sailors to the principle of mission-orientation introduced under Scharnhorst.

I would be the most likely candidate for the President who could keep our nation out of new wars. I have earned an international credibility on this point throughout much of Eurasia and elsewhere, a credibility which no recent President, or present candidate commands. There would be only foolish leaders of nations from around the world who would think they must prepare to defend themselves from an unjust attack by my government; and only reckless fools who underestimated me greatly would risk thinking of making war against our nation under my Presidency. Nonetheless, despite our healthy abhorrence of war, national military service is an integral part of citizenship in a functionally sound republic. The urgent need for building up the Army Corps of Engineers at this time is a relevant example.

We have a social problem of first magnitude of importance among the generations of young Americans who have little or no qualification for the kind of productive employment in which they could expect to support a normal family household. In Franklin Roosevelt's time we attacked this kind of problem with the quasi-militarized Civilian Conservation Corps. On my first day in office, I shall take a series of related actions on this problem.

The fundamental solution for the present bankruptcy of our nation, lies in halting the cutting of general levels of good-producing employment in the misused name of balancing budgets, and, instead, expanding the level of total productive employment, up to the point that the value of the goods produced exceeds the costs and expenses currently incurred for the operation of the national economy. We must bring the level of productive employment up, such that current output exceeds the current component of costs of maintaining the nation. The measures we must take immediately to bring this problem under control, must include measures which remedy the lack of competence for good productive employment among a very large ration of young Americans.

Our experience with World War II war-time selective service, when combined with the experience of the CCCs, shows us the road to transforming presently marginal employable young Americans into a quality of employable labor-force needed for a successful national economy recovery effort overall. Since more than half of the economic recovery effort needed today will be in basic economic infrastructure at the Federal State and County/Municipal level the combined role of an Army Corps of Engineers with auxiliaries resembling the CCCs is an obvious leading element of the national economic-recovery process.

These forces both military and civilian shall function under a principle of mission-orientation. The orientation will proceed from the role to be accomplished for the nation and its economy as a whole by the infrastructure-building program as a whole, and from the integral importance of the function of the particular project to which they are currently assigned. We must shift the idea of labor back to the personal satisfaction of the worker in getting the job well done which is needed for the nation.

Now, look at the world crisis today from the busy first day in the President's Executive Mansion, as the viewpoint from which to oversee the state of the world today.