Make California `Recall' Fight
Cheney's Waterloo
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche gave the following speech to a town meeting, attended by 450 people, in Burbank, California, on Sept. 11. An audio archive of his speech, including the following question and answer period, is available for streaming or for download.
I'm going to talk about the subject of Constitutional law, from a very specific standpoint, and dealing with the state of California, to illustrate a problem of our nation, and a problem of the world at large.
Recently, the Governor of California, Gray Davis, stated that he knew that, in the matter of deregulation, he had committed errors. He did not add—at least not on that occasion, as he should have—that practically everyone else in the legislative process who had pushed through deregulation in California, had voted the same way, whether Republicans or Democrats. So Gray Davis was not guilty of anything that every representative was not guilty of, either by participation, or by negligence. And negligence is also a way of voting: You don't vote, and you get what you don't vote for. That's the danger here in California, right now. If you don't vote against Recall, you may not have a state to vote for, the next time around.
Now, this involves two levels. On one level, you have the mistake that was made by many people, including the present governor, in adopting and tolerating deregulation. That was a mistake; it was a mistake based on bad judgment, poorly informed judgment. But it was not an intent to commit a crime. They were sold on the idea that deregulation was somehow—might be good for the country. And since it was also seen to be popular, the political parties had better go along with it. Because if it wasn't bad for the country, and it was popular, then, the popular will must prevail. And they went along with it. And there's been a great suffering as a result of it.
Then there came a point in which, by some mysterious process, the dumbest man in America, George W. Bush, was seated as President. They offered him a chance to choose between muscles and brains—and guess what he chose.
In any case, this brought us in something a little worse than George Bush—I mean, George Bush is not a good person; he's essentially a bad person, mean-spirited, he just seems not to have recovered from the full effects of three problems: cocaine, abuse of alcohol, and being raised by the Bush family. But, he's a dummy; he makes Mortimer Snerd look like a genius. So, we can't blame him too much for intention; how can we blame a man for intention who doesn't know where he is, or what he's doing?
But there are some people who may not be too smart, but are a bit too clever, and whose intentions are very clear. Such a creature is Vice President Cheney. And, he's admittedly qualified at vice; I guess many people are fooled into assuming he's therefore qualified for that office. He came into the picture early. Now, Cheney is a thief by disposition; he's a thug and a thief. Back in the days of high school, back in Wyoming, where he was raised among the cattle, he had a girlfriend: his wife Lynne. And he's sort of her dog, and always has been, since back there in high-school days, where he'll sit there, like a scowling jock, not too bright, not too articulate. He knows better than to talk, because people hear how stupid he is. And she's out there, the queen of the campus, so forth; goes on to Chicago University; becomes educated by the top fascist in America, and plays that role today. And he's her dog, and he runs in office.
Cheney Pushes Preventive Nuclear War
So, he has the qualities of a pirate, or a thief. For example, when he went into the first Bush Administration, so-called "41," he was Secretary of Defense. Now, his particular "thing," shall we say, was, at that time—remember the Soviet Union was disappearing, and there were those, not only in the Republican Party, but elsewhere around the world, who thought that the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that the United States was the only superpower in the world. And they therefore said, why shouldn't we become an empire? Why shouldn't the rest of the world simply be our slaves? And they moved in that direction. The older George Bush was, under advice, a little bit more cautious. Cheney was more on the enthusiastic side, a real jock. So he had—two things: First of all, he was pushing a policy of preventive nuclear war, as a policy of the United States, a policy whose object was to bring about the establishment of an empire, which would be run by the United States, and the United States would be run by people of his persuasion.
At that point, the older Bush Administration declined to go along with Cheney. So Cheney's demand for an extended Iraq war, at that time, his plans for development of a new arsenal of nuclear weapons, to conduct preventive nuclear warfare against many nations, including those which had no such weaponry, those which had no capable military threat against the United States: He would go to war. He was restrained.
Then, we got Clinton. And Cheney and his crowd, the crew with him, continued with this project. In 1996, they drafted a document for the worst fascist in Israel: Benjamin Netanyahu. Presumably for a Netanyahu government in Israel. It's called, in a sense, the next step. And this thing was read by Netanyahu to the U.S. Congress a few days after it was presented by this crew, Richard Perle and company, who were the Cheneyacs in question. It sat there. It was the policy of the right-wing government in Israel; but it was not the policy of the United States. And it sat there. George W. Bush was inaugurated. And it sat there.
At that point, the time that George Bush was about to be inaugurated (for reasons which remain obscure, to both voters and the Constitution), I gave a public address of some significance. I'd been involved in this actively, in this mess of Nov. 7, 2000, which, as an election, had been an indecision; we had, not a constitutional crisis at that time; we had an election crisis, particularly in the state of Florida.
Now this election crisis, whatever they say, was largely created by the Democratic Party, which, under the leadership of Al Gore, and people like that, had gone and done. So in the state of Florida, they had a law on absentee ballots. The Republicans did their homework on this law, and prepared for the election, and got their absentee ballots through. The Democrats were a bunch of lazy bums! They didn't do their homework, and they were sitting, not knowing comparably, what to do on the absentee ballots. And they actually won; the Republicans actually won, in the state. The worst of it: Al Gore, if he had been anybody but Al Gore, would have won, would have not bothered with Florida, because all he needed, at that point, was the Electoral College vote of Arkansas. With the electoral vote of Arkansas he was in, dragging that piece of filth with him—Joe Lieberman. What the cat dragged in, sort of.
But he didn't go into Arkansas, because Arkansas had been my state, where I got the number of votes that the Gore people stole from me, from the Electoral College, that year. So, they ignored Arkansas, which they had a quarrel with. And they went on to the great and glorious state of Florida, where Joe Lieberman, whose connections are with the right-wing Cubans—people who kill people, and push drugs, and do wonderful things like that—and who robs Indians, through these Indian gambling operations. Joe Lieberman thought he had a lot of pull with the right wing in the state of Florida—especially with these Cubans. And therefore, he thought he—and he said—could carry the state. But that isn't what he carried; he carried George Bush into the White House!
In any case, so this was the situation. So, under those circumstances, there was great confusion about what to do about the hung-up election of 2000, and I became very actively involved in that issue by various media events, and so forth, during that period, up into the first part of January 2001. And I had some influence on broader people who were persuaded that I was right, and persuaded we ought to go that way. But it didn't work out that way. And so, George Bush was about to be inaugurated as President.
Forecast for Bush Presidency:
A Reichstag Fire
So, I gave a forecast of what we faced, under a George W. Bush Presidency. And there are two points in particular which I emphasized: That the U.S. economy and the world, were already being plunged into one of the greatest monetary/financial crises in known history—something which is coming on now, as some of you who may have been acquainted with that gentleman as he walked around the streets and neighborhoods of the country: poverty, depression. And since George Bush was very dumb—that's what I said; I tend to speak like that. I would refer to this man as being dumb. Don't accuse him of being these other things, that he doesn't know what he's doing. But he is dumb. And he's very serious about being dumb and mean.
So that under those conditions, I had forecast, that we should expect during the early period of a George Bush Administration, that the depression, which was already coming on, since the Spring of 2000, would tend to hit with fuller force in the coming two years. Well, it did. That at the same time, under these conditions in the world, I said, we must expect what happened in Germany, in 1933, as a threat for the period now; this is in January 2001.
I referred to the situation in Germany in 1933, when a certain interest, including some people in the United States and Britain, had financed the Nazi Party to come out of bankruptcy, to prepare for Hitler's being put in power. And these people who financed Hitler in that way, both in London and in New York, put him into power, through a consortium which staged a two-stage coup d'état, in January and February of 1933, at a time that Franklin Roosevelt was only elected, but not yet inaugurated. And the government of Germany at that time, under Kurt von Schleicher, was committed, in part at least, to a policy very much like that which Franklin Roosevelt was to implement in March of 1933. And it was well known what Franklin Roosevelt intended to do in March of 1933. So that if nothing had happened, and Kurt von Schleicher had been the Chancellor of Germany in March 1933, the United States and Germany would have been on the same general road, to a world economic recovery—a hard road, but a successful road.
To prevent that, Hitler was put into power. But he was still a fool, almost like an Arnie Schwarzenegger of his time. He was a nothing, dumped into a high office in Germany. People laughed at him. He would be out at the next election, the next crisis, parliamentary crisis. Why wasn't he out? Why did the fool become a dictator? Because Hermann Goering, in February of that year, less than a month after the inauguration of Hitler on Jan. 30, 1933—Hermann Goering set fire to the Reichstag. Hermann Goering was the most financially connected member of the Nazi machine. He was also the head of government of the German state of Brandenburg, at the time. So, he, as he bragged about this on various occasions later: "I did the Reichstag fire!" He set fire to the parliament of Germany, the national parliament in Berlin. No one was in it at the time, except, presumably, some poor fool called van der Lubbe, who was later indicted, and convicted.
But the destruction of the institution, resulted in the invocation of the doctrine of law, of a fellow called Carl Schmitt, who became known as the "crown jurist" of the Nazi system. Carl Schmitt, of course, is the same fellow who sponsored the career, in the United States, of a fellow who could not get into the Nazi Party, because he happened to be Jewish. So, this Nazi, Carl Schmitt, sent Leo Strauss, by way of England, into the United States. Well, he ended up at Chicago University, as Professor Leo Strauss, and was the chief breeder of this nest working around Cheney today, called the neo-conservatives.
The point being, what I was afraid of: something like Sept. 11, 2001, would happen in the United States, by agencies within high positions in the U.S. government! And that is exactly what happened. And that has been used as hype ever since, to say, "Well, some Arabs and so forth," and the idea of having a war with Islam was already the policy of Cheney and company, before this happened. They were seeking a pretext, and who knows what so-called evidence was cooked up, in order to create that impression.
California Was the Prize
So, at the same time, Cheney intervened into the state of California, in the case of Williams Power, and similar cases, Enron cases. Remember, Enron was the largest contributor to the Bush campaign of the year 2000. Williams and these other companies, were the same type. They all belong to the same general breed of cat.
Now, there had been a collapse of the power system of California, in the Summer of 2000. This collapse was the result of a breakdown in the system, mechanical system, of the production and distribution of power as a result of deregulation. Chaos was being introduced. I'll get back to this later, in the report here.
But Cheney moved in, once Bush was President, to play a key role in orchestating the way deregulation hit a number of areas of the United States, including, especially, California. California was the prize: It had the biggest possible potential loot—for the crowd around Enron—was the state of California.
So, what you have today, is the state of California has been looted, by this operation, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, that we can trace, apart from the implicit losses of the state, by this looting. The key person who did this—Cheney—partly by his influence in suppressing a report which would expose what was going on in the Williams case, by suppressing that report, the thing became worse in California. And that was the worst period of this power crisis in California. That, essentially, combined with the collapse of the IT industry, and with the real-estate mortgage-based securities bubble in California, were the key factors in the collapse of the California economy, from a notoriously rich state, by comparison with other states, into a notoriously impoverished one, or bankrupt one.
And this was done by courtesy of Dick Cheney and company.
On the Verge of Dictatorship and World War
We are now living on the verge of a dictatorship. The Patriot Act was a step toward dictatorship. It's modelled on the Nazi laws, introduced under a Leo Strauss protégé, John Ashcroft, who was trained in the tradition of Carl Schmitt's law, through Chicago University, in the Strauss circles.
We're headed toward fascism, in the United States, now! The Patriot Act is a step in that. And it's worse. We're also, in a sense, because of what Cheney is doing, and what others are doing with this doctrine of preventive nuclear war, with this "axis of evil" list which was promulgated in January of 2002, we're headed for, somewhere down the line, for a new world war. Not the kind of world war which Dick Cheney imagines might happen, but a different kind. It's a land war in Asia, or a land war with nuclear and aerial complications in Asia, in which the existing triad, the nuclear triad on which U.S. power is based—it certainly is not based on our troops, as Iraq shows us—but a nuclear triad of power, the use of nuclear weapons delivered by air, or by stratosphere; by submarines, large nuclear submarines; by carrier-based methods, to dominate the world through sheer terror, of nuclear weapons. That weapon is not invincible militarily. And other nations which have some power, know it, and have the capability of developing weapons systems, and modes of warfare, which are asymmetric, with respect to the U.S. capability. They are prepared now, on the basis of the behavior of the Bush Administration, especially under the Rumsfeld-Cheney operation—these nations are preparing to fight such a war—an asymmetric nuclear war, during a period corresponding to the Administration of the next President of the United States.
That does not mean they're committed to a war. That means they are committed not to submit, to the kind of preventive nuclear warfare which Cheney represents. That's what we face.
We also, in the meantime, face a world depression, a world monetary-financial collapse, unprecedented in modern history. The system is bankrupt. People who are talking about a recovery, must be Dracula. And only the suckers would join that, too.
So, that's the situation, in general, we face.
So, now look at the situation. On the one hand, we have the American people, who behave foolishly. We have Gray Davis, who admits that he made a mistake, and he should speak also for all the other legislators who voted for this abomination, or abstained from voting either way on the abomination. They all made a mistake. The citizens and voters who supported them, made a mistake! Those who thought deregulation was good, made a mistake, a very painful mistake, and they are to blame for their mistakes! They're not criminals because they made a mistake, but they ought to accept the blame for their mistakes. Not in order to shoulder blame, but in order not to make the same mistake, or a similar one, next time. To learn the lesson of admitting: "We made a mistake."
The Democratic Party made a mistake. The voters, the majority of the voters of California, made a mistake. The elected officials of California, made a mistake. This mistake is painful. It's costly. It's life-threatening.
All right, that's one side.
But, having known that this is a mistake, what do we say of people who now come back, from high positions, who were the profiteers and racketeers who've been looting this state of tens of billions of dollars through deregulation alone, such as Dick Cheney? What do we say of Dick Cheney as the thief?
Let's go back again, to the 1991-1992 period, of Cheney's reign as Secretary of Defense. His gimmick, in those days, apart from preventive nuclear warfare, and similar kinds of fine enterprises, was privatizing the U.S. military. That is, to look over the entire military establishment in the United States, and look for various functions of the military, which could be performed as for profit, civilian operations.
Now, in this connection, he cultivated a relationship with a corporation called Halliburton, from which he gets this million-dollar pension. And he built up Halliburton. The privatization of the U.S. military went apace, even under Clinton, as a continuation of this process. We see the mess now in Iraq. Actually, the place has been turned over to some soldiers, who really are not equipped, or led, to deal with the situation there—but for the profit of whom? Nominally for the profit of the two large corporations which specialize in this privatized version of military operations! The civilian form of military operations, now privatized. Bechtel, under George Shultz, who pulled together the neo-conservative apparatus of the present Bush Administration. Second, Dick Cheney, of Halliburton. Halliburton and Bechtel.
Now, a problem has arisen. Bechtel is not getting its share of the government payoffs and bailouts. So, there's a little conflict between the two allied thieves, like two pirates squabbling over the spoils.
Now, the President of the United States, poor, sanctimonious, stupid George, goes before the TV cameras, with his fat face hanging out, and not much behind it, saying, "We need $87 billion, right now." For what? Guess what? Chiefly, Halliburton. Halliburton needs money. So, we can shut down our schools, we can shut down our health care, we can shut down this, we can shut down that, and we can do another tax reduction, and pay out $87 billion, largely to Halliburton, and call that a patriotic memory of the dead in New York City, from Sept. 11, 2001. And that is a parade that is going on today, on the television set, in New York, and in Washington! A parade—of gloating! They died. Now we're going to get revenge—we're going to give $87 billion to Halliburton and company, out of the U.S. Treasury. That's what the operation is.
This is not a mistake. This is something else. It's something closer to the forces behind Adolf Hitler, which I've dealt with a great deal.
What's Wrong with the American People?
Now, let's look at the other side of the thing. What happened to the American people? Where were they, when all these things were happening?
I have a certain advantage, that is, two advantages, complementary. I have a certain age, and experience. I also have, unlike some people my age, a certain kind of vitality, and also a determination to do things, and some skills as well. And therefore, I can tell you things, first-hand, as an insider into much of the history of our country, especially in the recent quarter century, and of the world. I can tell you things which I know better than most people do. There are a few people around the United States, who are of my age group, and who also know these things. Some of them aren't in such good physical condition these days. Former Senators, former dignitaries, of our country, who understand some of these things. But, I can tell you what's wrong with the American people, because I was there. I experienced it from the 1920s, as a child, and a young person. The 1930s, as an adolescent. I experienced going into World War II. I experienced it coming out of World War II. Each of the steps we've gone through as a people, during this period, I have personally experienced. And I can tell you what happened.
When I was a child, we were terrible. The people of the United States were terrible. You have no idea how bad they were. (At least so I thought, until I saw what came along in the 1960s and '70s.) They were wastrels. This was a Coolidge era, the Flapper generation. This was referred to as the "fast" people: They'd burn themselves out fast.
You had some famous novels in that period, which pertained to this kind of thing. They were disgusting, and I thought so at the time. I was a child, but I knew they were disgusting. I also knew my parents, like most people, honestly lied, most of the time, especially when speaking to neighbors and friends. They invite the friends, or the neighbors in, for company. They talk politely, lie to each other pleasantly throughout the whole proceeding. And once the neighbors, or visitors, are out the door, my parents would start to gossip about the people they just had received. Typical American behavior! Typical American hospitality! Frankness. Sincerity.
I saw the same characteristics in my fellow students, of my age group. I saw the same thing in the schools I attended. The same things in the officials I observed. I saw this in the pulpit—they were the worst.
Then, we went through a terrible time. We went through the onslaught of the depression—and you have to think from late 1928, until 1932, the income of the United States, that is the physical income at an estimated rate, dropped to half of what it had been five years earlier. Ha! Now, this meant for many people, absolute destitution. In the northern states, in the cold winter of 1932-33, many people who had been dignified citizens, with houses and jobs and so forth, died, froze to death, along railroad sidings, where they'd taken up habitation, in hobo jungles. This was typical of what had happened.
We had Hoovervilles, in lower New York City, cardboard crates, packing crates, in which people were living on the streets. And then Roosevelt came in, with a commitment to what he called the "Forgotten Man," which was the theme of a campaign address he gave in West Virginia, at that time. Roosevelt was well prepared. He was prepared by ancestry. One of his ancestors, Isaac Roosevelt, the one who he particularly honored, and who you can find in the Hyde Park house, which is now a museum: the portrait of Isaac Roosevelt hanging there. Isaac Roosevelt was a New York banker, who was allied with Alexander Hamilton, to defend the United States at that time, from things like Aaron Burr, who was a traitor to the United States, and did a great deal to set up the kind of bad practices we have in the United States today.
Roosevelt, in his dissertation, that he wrote as a Harvard graduate, referred to the American tradition of Hamilton, and his ancestor Isaac Roosevelt. He understood it well. When he had poliomyelitis, was incarcerated, very severely crippled, in bed, as an adult victim of poliomyelitis—he fought his way back, with the help of his wife. And during the years of fighting his way back to functional health, he did an extensive study in American history, to illuminate what he already knew, about his own ancestry, and the history of the United States.
He became the Governor of New York twice, and, under conditions of crisis, became the President, And he walked into the Presidency, about as prepared as anyone could be under such circumstances. He led this nation, with all the difficulties and shortfalls imposed upon him, and inherent in his assembly of government forces, and led the nation on the road to recovery.
Roosevelt and Churchill vs. the Synarchists
And then one day—I didn't know it at the time, but I knew about this sort of thing—Franklin Roosevelt had a discussion with the then-Defense Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill. And it was a moment where the German troops were being held back, temporarily, at Dunkirk, for a very nasty reason. If the British expeditionary force, which was largely concentrated then at Dunkirk, were to fall into German hands, then England would be stripped of all power. And there were people in England, like Lord Halifax, the Beaverbrook circles, who liked Hitler. And these people were prepared to bring the British Empire, and the French nation and its imperial assets, and the fascist nation of Spain, and the fascist nation of Italy, and the fascists of Belgium, and the fascists of Rumania, into a grand alliance, which included a naval alliance, of the forces of Japan—which was a partner in this—the forces of the great British Navy, the forces of the Italian Navy, the German Navy, and the French Navy, into a force, which, after the destruction of the Soviet Union, which they thought would be short work, they would take on, attack, and destroy the United States.
This group is called the Synarchists. I'm not going to go into much on them today, as such, because that's a whole subject in itself. But it's the same problem we face today, and it's what Cheney represents today, the same thing. So, we're not dealing with mistakes; we're dealing with evil.
And on that basis—Churchill and Roosevelt did not agree on much of anything—but they know that if they could mobilize the patriotic forces of the United Kingdom and the United States, around the idea of stopping a takeover of the world by Adolf Hitler, that they could save the world from that horror, which a Hitler takeover would represent. And they succeeded.
But then Roosevelt became ill, and died. He became very ill at the time he was running for his fourth term of re-election, Summer of '44. And those people who had been Hitler sympathizers, before 1940, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, and in France, among other places, turned the other way. They went back to getting rid of Franklin Roosevelt, knowing that he was about to die of complications arising from poliomyelitis, and the strain he put upon his system, as a result of his labors as President, particularly under the wartime conditions.
So, they put in Harry Truman as the Vice President, a man who was skilled at vice.
Now, the importance of this is, what most of you thought, probably, that Truman was a good Democrat: Be disabused. The reason that we voted for Eisenhower—I didn't happen to vote for Eisenhower; I was prepared to vote for him in 1947, when I had a correspondence with him on this subject—we who returned from the war, found the following facts: First of all, we had been betrayed, implicitly betrayed. Everything that Roosevelt had promised, about the postwar world, had been betrayed! Roosevelt promised a postwar world, based on American supremacy in fact—nobody could say no to it—saying the colonial system would be eliminated, and we would establish a world of sovereign nation-states, as a community of principle. No more colonialism! Truman put the colonial powers back in. Truman, with no necessity for doing so, dropped two nuclear weapons on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman and his friends staged the firebombing of cities of Germany, for no military purpose. They actually prolonged the war by so doing.
What we found back in the United States, those who had gone off to war and come back, with the anticipation of a better world, as a result of having defeated Hitler, found they were living under a kind of fascistic mood in the United States itself. This was accelerated quickly, by the so-called Cold War, the Churchill Iron Curtain speech. We went into a kind of dictatorial mood, like that which you have from Ashcroft after Sept. 11, 2001—this Patriot Act kind of tyranny. People afraid.
Now, during the period from 1945, into the Eisenhower election, the people of the United States were increasingly afraid. They call it McCarthyism today. To understand the truth of it, you call it Trumanism. And people became cowards. They said, "Keep your mouth shut. Don't get into trouble. Don't get our family in trouble. Say what they expect you to say. Don't say what you think. Watch out! You'll lose your job. Something will happen to you."
They turned the generation which returned from war—my generation—largely into cowards. I saw it, I experienced it, many of these people were my friends, I watched the process in them individually, as well as collectively.
Now these people, who returned from war with me, many of them moved out into suburbia, or other things, and they raised families. There was a rush to build up a family lifestyle, after five years or so away at war. Wives especially were pushing. "We've got to get our family established. We've got to get a house. We've got to start the children, now. We've got to find a better place to live. You've got to get a better job. Get a white-collar job, get a white-collar job. Move to suburbia." And they did.
And they taught their children: "Be careful! Be careful! Be careful! Don't say what you think! The neighbors are watching! Lie! Stick to popular opinion. Don't express your own views. Don't think! It'll get you into trouble."
So, we had a generation that came after that. So, after the shock of the war, and the Hitler period, this shock hit the returning veterans of World War II. And they began to raise children, to whom was transmitted this impulse for cowardice, moral cowardice, which we see as characteristic of the U.S. population today.
Terrorizing the Baby-Boomer Generation
Now, these children come along, they like the civil rights movement, they like these kinds of things, many of them. They seem to be the beautiful children. But then, 1961: Bay of Pigs. The fascists are back at it again. Allen Dulles is a fascist. 1962: Russell and company organize what became known as the missile crisis of 1962. And everybody, or nearly everybody—I felt like a person standing in the street, deserted street, with everybody hiding in holes—nearly everybody, in a few days' period, of the height of the nuclear missile crisis of 1962, was terrified, as they had never been before. Because, all this period, that had the buildup of how bad nuclear warfare would be: You had these so-called science fiction movies telling you how bad nuclear warfare would be. The ants would suddenly grow large and eat you all, because of nuclear radiation, and things like this. They were terrified.
Then, came the assassination of Jack Kennedy. The terror increased. Then came a useless war in Indochina, again, completely incompetent, immoral. MacArthur warned Kennedy personally: "Don't get into a land war in Asia!" Which is what Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and so forth are trying to do today. "Don't get involved in a land war in Asia! You won't come back, at least not in the same form you went."
So, at the end of the war, a younger generation, with whom some of you may be acquainted, were coming into adulthood, decided they didn't like who we had been, up to that time. Up to that time, we had been a producer society. We were the most productive nation on the planet. You could even find remains, and traces, of those industries around Southern California, that used to exist here, where people could make a decent living, in jobs with dignity to them, and not fake their way out around it. We were the production machine of the world. We took pride in the fact that we were useful. We made things. We made better things. We made it possible for other nations to have better things, to have a higher standard of living. We had the objective for our own people. We had the objective for our own children, that they would have something better than we had, through our power to produce, our power to increase our power to produce! Our power to solve problems, our power to be human!
That went away. Because these young people suddenly had this sense of betrayal. Producer society had betrayed them. And all the witchdoctors came along to tell them, "Oh, you're right. You're so right. You're consuming too much. Producer society—blue shirts—are bad. White shirts are not so good either. Go shirtless! Go naked! You want pleasure? Take it from your neighbor! And then inquire what sex they are afterward. As long as you have the pleasure!"
So, we became a post-industrial culture. We became increasingly that. We became a consumer society. We lost ourselves, at that point, for about 40 years ago.
Then we had the change in the monetary system, in which we became a predator nation. By the floating-exchange-rate system set up in 1971-72, we had the ability, with the British, to control the value of the currency of every country on this planet. All we had to do is rig a raid on the currency, against some national currency, and then go in and say, "Oh, you want help? Call in the IMF. Call in the World Bank. They'll advise you on what to do." The advice was, lower the value of your currency; put on sharp austerity to pay your debts; and accept an increase, fictitious debt, which is imposed upon you, to compensate your creditors for the devaluation of your currency.
Ibero-America, Central and South America, has more than paid, many times over, everything that was ever owed, to the United States or other countries, since 1971. In point of fact, morally, by strict, honest accounting, the nations of Central and South America owe not a penny of foreign debt. This includes Argentina: not a penny. It was all a big swindle.
But the big swindle was important, because we got the poor nations of the world, to become even poorer, and to work harder for us! To produce things for us! We shut down our factories. We didn't produce any more. We became an unproductive, post-productive, who has lived as a predator nation, by having the financial power to compel the rest of the world to work for us, cheap, for whatever we wanted. And we got cheap stuff, believe me. Go into a mall, and see what you can find in the mall. That bunch of rags would make "Old Rags" blush in shame.
So, that's what we did to ourselves.
So, in this era, the idea that we're going into a post-industrial society: No more big infrastructure! No more big government! And all of these things we depended upon, we destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed, increasingly, especially in the past 30-odd years.
And here we are today.
So, our people developed, under the impact of fear! Successive fear, from generation to generation, fear because of World War II, and what came out of it: the nuclear age. Fear: a prolonged fear, of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Fear, heightened by the experience of 1962-63. Fear, now heightened by a new terror, the terror and so-called myth of September 11, 2001.
Popular Opinion Stinks!
We've got a bunch of scared people out there. If they're irrational, you have to understand why they're irrational. And to take the role of leadership that I must take, and others I hope would take, you have to understand your own people. You don't go up and say to them, "I represent popular opinion." I tell you, popular opinion stinks! I was there when it was born! My job is to try to save the people from their own opinions, or the consequences of those opinions. Not by imposing opinions upon them, but by getting them to recognize themselves, the error of those opinions, and thus become stronger, more accurate, less susceptible to error, because they have used their own minds to be able to understand these kinds of problems.
Like understanding economics, for example: Most of you guys don't know anything about economics, and you, compared with the guys outside the room, are geniuses! Anybody who can vote for deregulation—obviously there's something wrong with them.
So, therefore, the problem in politics, is a problem of leadership, because, even though we're all human, many of us have not been able to live up to what it is to be human. We don't have a true sense of immortality. We don't have a sense that our life, which is always mortal—it's going to end, you know, in every case—we can't escape that. We can maybe postpone it, but we can't prevent it. The question is, therefore, what does your life mean? Now if you're convinced that your life means something, because you are taking something from the past, which you've been given; you're transmitting it, as culture, to the future; you're adding something to this store of what you give; then you know, just as you know the value of Archimedes' contributions to you, from over 2,000 years ago, or others, or the work of Plato—others, you recognize the work of people before you, as individuals, whose ideas you can replicate, as in any proper school, and as you can replicate, you know that you are experiencing their discoveries, discoveries which only a human being could make, no monkey could make it. No George Bush is likely to make it.
You know that you're experiencing this. You know that you can use this for human benefit, this knowledge. You know that you can transmit this knowledge, or assist in transmitting it, to coming generations. And you know that you, in a sense, live for the human species, in thousands of years to come, even after you're deceased. Because what you represent, does not die—provided that we organize society to ensure that the great gifts, which are transmitted to us, and given to us by individuals, shall not be allowed to die. They shall live, and the names of those who gave them, shall be honored as much as we are capable of doing, for all time to come.
Now, it's that kind of courage which enables a soldier to fight war, as a man, and not as a beast. People can fight wars as beasts; they often do it, to kill the enemy, who does something you hate. And you go out, and you kill him. When you fight in war, in this kind of war, we fight war for the objective of achieving peace. The peace we achieve, will be based on the people, of our own people, and the people in the opposing nations—the resources and institutions we rescue, as the end of war.
The Principle of Our
Constitutional Government
We then are devoted to using these things, that survive the war, as the instruments of building a better peace, than before the war which we had just entered. This is the famous principle of modern civilization, set out in 1648, under the initiative of a great diplomat, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, of France, called the Treaty of Westphalia. The purpose of peace among nations is, each nation must think in terms of the advantage of the other. You must think of what we do, which is useful for other nations.
This is easy in the sense of me, from the standpoint of the United States, because I'm proud of the history of our nation, and what it represents. I'm proud of what Benjamin Franklin represents; of what Winthrop represents from the 17th Century, in the colonization; of what Cotton Mather represents; of the influence of Leibniz on the formation of the ideas of Franklin. Franklin's role as a man who created a youth movement, which became the government of the United States. And in those great leaders we've had, who stood out among many bums, but who were great leaders, like Lincoln and like Roosevelt, who have contributed to mankind.
And, if you think like that, and you think about your nation as important to the world, which means as important as the benefit of your existence as a nation, is to the world around you. And if your role as a leader of a nation, is the benefit you represent, not to yourself, but to your people, and through your people, to the other people of the world, then you have a sense of being able to do anything that's necessary. You're not afraid to die. You don't seek to die, but you're not afraid to die, because you know your life means something. And they can't cheat you of the meaning of your life!
If you achieve that, and it's my purpose, and it's been the purpose of every leader that is respectable, of our nation, and our civilization, to do that, to somehow aid society, in discovering that as a natural condition of man within society. This is the true meaning of general welfare, of the term general welfare, as traced from the term agape in the Greek of Plato. Or in the I Corinthians, 13, where the same term is used in the Greek, as is used by the Apostle Paul, agape: that you live for the others. You are a necessary being. You are a necessary person, who is going to contribute something to society, and you live for the others. And if they wish to succeed, as you try to succeed, they will try to do the same.
The function of government, of constitutional government, in our way of thinking, as Americans, of a melting-pot nation, our Constitution, as in the Preamble of the Constitution, is based on these principles: the sovereignty of our people, and its institutions; the obligation of government to promote the general welfare; and the obligation of the citizens to participate with government in promoting the general welfare, that's agape: the commitment, above all, to posterity, to do such things with our life, as will be also beneficial, to those that come after us.
That's the purpose of true constitutional government.
Economics and Power
Let me just turn, for a final note, on the question of economics; on the question as it applies to infrastructure.
This egoistical thinking, that says, "I earn this," well, buddy, you don't earn anything. If I put you, with all your skills, on a deserted island, with nothing at hand, what are you going to produce? And we're talking about California—the effects of deregulation.
Now, regulation is very simple. Let's take something called power. I think you know something about power. You know the price of power impresses you. The reliability of power, or the lack of it, thereof, impresses you. The price of water, the availability of it, impresses you. Sinking aquifers impress you, or at least they depress the land. Maybe you, too. Places where you used to have rich agriculture, which is now dying, or rich forestation, which is now dying, because of lack of management of water, and other things. And you say, well, production depends on what? Production depends upon society preparing the ground in which the producers live and work.
For example, take the case of power. The productivity of labor depends upon the power available, efficiently available, to people in that area, and to that enterprise in particular. Power available. Now, the measure of power is not in watts. The measure of power is actually energy flux density—that's a better approximation. That is, energy sources, of higher intensity, such as the transition from burning fuels, to petroleum, to nuclear power, to thermonuclear fusion, are reaching higher degrees of power. And the quality of the power, which you're able to generate, by these and related means, is the means by which labor is transformed in its ability to produce—one of the aspects. Even the greatest genius, without adequate power, can not produce a successful society.
So, therefore, we, recognizing that—in the United States, recognize that there's a certain aspect that can not be left, in the economy, can not be left to private interests as such. Because these are things that pertain to all the people. Who is responsible for all of the people? The government. Who is responsible for all the land? The government. For the development of all the land. Who's responsible for the conditions of production, which are needed in society? The government. Who's reponsible for health care? The government. The doctors may provide it, but the government must provide the conditions under which the doctors can function. And more important than even health care, is sanitation. And government must provide the chief source of sanitation.
So, therefore, the degree to which this is available, is significant.
Take another case: Transportation. Now, Los Angeles used to have a mass-transit system. What do you have now? Traffic jams. Now, what are you doing in a traffic jam? You're wasting your life. You're sitting there, becoming angry, you're probably turning into a beast, slowly, enraged. Sitting in a traffic jam means less time with your family. It means family life is disrupted, characteristically, in areas which are dominated by traffic jams. And if you understand what family should be, the idea of the family table, at least the evening table, is very important in a family. The sense of family caring, is extremely important.
Therefore, we must be concerned, not with what people get paid at their job alone; we have to be concerned about what condition of life do they have, when they get home. What are the conditions of life in the schools? Do they have schools near the neighborhood? Do they have a community which will tend to care for children? You used to have grandparents, and neighbors, would care for a lot of the children, you know, when there was trouble in the neighborhood. They cared, and they would help. They weren't always the best neighbors in the world, but they all had the sense of mutual responsibility for helping. And they would help each other.
We have problems today that we didn't have before, precisely because we've fragmented society, with these crazy ideas. We have people who commute—how many hours a day do some people travel, commute to and from jobs? How many jobs do they commute to? How many members of the family commute in these kinds of jobs, in these kinds of conditions? What kind of social life is left? What happens then, to mass entertainment? What has social life become? What does your human life become? You work? Yeah, that's fine. Preferably, your work is something you feel useful at. But, what do you become?
Think of your children, for example. Maybe not your children, but the next-door neighbors' children. That is your future. Their children are your future. The grandchildren of any generation are the future of that generation. And those who think about having a meaningful life, think about what they are giving to the generation of their grandchildren—if not their own, at least the others'; just the way neighbors would help care for children. If you don't have your own children, well, care about what happens to the others.
And think about what you're giving to the next generation.
Therefore, if we think about these physical values, of adequate power. In the case of power, we say, "We have to regulate it." The responsibility of the production of power, is to make sure we have enough power; that we have a system for increasing the amount of power available. We will have the capacity of delivering the quality of power, and the amount needed, to areas which come into new needs for applying this to production. We want a high-density, a high-energy-density mode of production. We want less of the emphasis on the muscle side of labor, and shift the emphasis more and more to the mind. In production; not just in thinking about things, but in production.
You know, the happy worker in production, in the old days when we were still a productive society, was the fellow who went from the factory job, of a routine type, with a skill, without a skill, who would get into research and development. And you had a guy who was just a regular employee, a skilled employee, in a plant, and he would be upgraded, because of his development of his skills, and he showed intelligence and ingenuity, into a better kind of job. He might get more pay; he usually would, in research and development. But he got more than better pay. He got the satisfaction of being able to do something creative in a more explicit way, on his job, and make better things than existed before. And to play a part in doing that.
The excitement, for example, of somebody doing a proof-of-principle test, on some new kind of process. This is a permanent change in the power of mankind, to produce things. This fellow has a sense of being personally involved, in a very satisfactory way, in production.
So, our job is to produce this kind of society, to produce this environment, in which the individual entrepreneur can function, as an entrepreneur, usually a small entrepreneur, not a big corporation, but a perfectly small entrepreneur, a few hundred employees at most, trying to move in that direction, that form of production, that form of quality of product, that quality of service. If the function of government is to provide and ensure what only government can do, that these essential means of infrastructure, which are needed to promote those changes in the nature of our society, that those can be made.
Our Relations With Mexico
For example, what's happening now. Let's just take the one example, illustration of this point. The key feature of my policy, and what I've done, is: It's very important, I think, for California at this time. The second paper, which will be distributed among you, in the coming weeks, before the Recall comes around, will be a paper which is titled "Sovereign States of the Americas." Now, as many of you know, especially in California, the largest minority group, in the United States, today, is the Spanish-speaking minority, or people of Spanish-speaking ancestry. The largest single group.
Now, you think of California in those terms. All right. You have the Spanish-speaking part, which also covers Texas, the border areas, and so forth. Then we take another part, another aspect of California. How about Asian population? Asian immigration? How much of Asia is represented in the nation of California? How much of other parts of the world? California is a special kind of melting-pot nation. And how we think, as a nation—whether it's a state or a nation as a whole—is reflected in the way we are able to engage, with neighboring countries. And the most relevant neighboring country, for the United States today, is, of course, Mexico. Mexico has the largest impact of any single area of the world around us, upon California.
Mexico is in a stressful state.
Now, we have this great area, which runs from the Arctic, down through the Great American Desert, between the coastal ranges, and the Rocky Mountains—the Great American Desert, has not been developed. No progress has been made of any net effect since 1910. None, since Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt stopped development of the Great American Desert. In the name of conservation—to conserve the desert. A man with a deserted mind.
Now, you go down into Mexico, across the border, and you find, between the two, the branches of the Sierra Madre mountains, you find another branch of the American Desert, a similar condition in Sonora, in northern Mexico. You find, Mexico is now—what are we doing in Mexico? We have a problem, a cross-border problem. We have first- and second-generation Mexican immigrants, in the United States, who are adapting to the United States, southern states, and largely California. Then, we go across the border. These people are supporting California! Their cheap labor, in large degree, is supporting the state of California.
Now, we go on the other side of border, you got these maquiladoras. We in the United States are forcing Mexico, for its own defense, to employ its people at wages that can not support a family—physically. We're increasing the death rate in these areas. So, therefore, we're looting Mexico, directly, through the slave-labor operations, which are being run in the name of maquiladoras, across the border.
We are also using a cheap Mexican labor pool inside the United States, especially concentrated in first- and second-generation immigrants, into residency in the United States. Therefore, how we think about ourselves, how we think about the world, is epitomized by the way we think about these people of Spanish extraction, Spanish-speaking extraction, on both sides of the border, especially this particular group.
And therefore, what I've proposed, to indicate the kind of world which the United States should find itself in, a world of a community of sovereign nation-states: We have to think in concrete terms, especially in the Americas. We have to think of our relationship, as a people, to the people of neighboring countries. We have to take the advantage, that we are a melting-pot nation, the most distinctively melting-pot nation, in our Constitution, on this planet: We have no race in this country! Except idiots who think they have one. We are a people, one people. We are in the process of developing a similar language, the same language culture, which is essential. But we are one people, we are one race, the human race. And therefore, having that character, we at our best—and I saw this in the war, for example, World War II—we at our best, we care for other people, people of other countries. And we practice that, especially in conditions in our own country, where some group in our own population, is victimized—the way that group corresponds to some foreign nation, as a source of extraction.
Therefore, I've featured this relationship, for a programmatic development, of this Great American Desert, to move this water project, which is the old Parsons NAWAPA project, to move that thoroughly down, from the Arctic Ocean, all the way down to the border of Mexico, southern border of Mexico. where southern Mexico has lots of water, and high mountain ranges. To bring this water up, as the Mexicans have planned for a long time, along a canal on the Pacific Coast, and a canal on the Caribbean. And also to move it midway, up through the higher range, into areas like this area between the two Sierra Madres.
If we at the same time build a new railway system, of a modern type, down into Mexico City, now what we've done, is we've created the environment in which the potential, potentiality of production, the product of productive improvement, in the whole area increases. The wealth of both sides of the border will increase through this kind of cooperation, while the sovereignty of both nations will be protected.
And this is what I'm pushing. We're pushing the same kind of thing in Asia, as Eurasian projects. In Africa, the situation is hopeless unless we take power. There's genocide in Africa beyond belief, Sub-Saharan Africa. It's deliberate, the United States government is responsible. The British government is responsible, the Israeli government—these are the three governments most responsible for genocide in Africa.
People Need Infrastructure
So, therefore, this is both economics; it's also humanism. We produce infrastructure because people need it. It happens to be also essential for economy. We produce economic relations with other countries, based on these human considerations, because we need them economically. We produce these conditions, because we need it, because we're human. Because we don't want again, ever again, to get into a situation where we find sovereign nations of the world, killing each other, because somebody's manipulating them over some conflict which is orchestrated. We want a community of principle of nations on this planet.
My belief is one thing, in this connection: I know the world fairly well, because I'm an inquisitive, nosey person, as I guess you could say. I look around at cultures all over the world. I have friends and collaborators in many parts of the world. When you're a little bit older, it helps the process. You get acquainted with more people. I've travelled a lot, as some of you know, as some complain. But I know Europe. I know it well enough. I now how to pick these things out; I'm an old management consultant, I know how to pick things out fairly quickly.
I've dealt With Russia. I have a longstanding relationship with India, going back to World War II times. And I know other parts. In parts of the Arab world, I'm probably the only American that they consider civilized.
So, I know the world, and I understand the world. The time has come, I'm convinced, that the world is ripe to do, what John Quincy Adams and Lincoln, intended, and what Roosevelt had hoped to do. The time has come to end this kind of conflict, a Hobbesian world conflict, and to establish on this planet, a community of sovereign nation-states, as a matter of principle. And to make this work, by defining groups of economic projects of cooperation, which also have a certain human quality, which elevate man's sense of man, his nature.
We in the United States, are the only nation which was created with this mission assigned to it, at the point of our creation. We were created by Europe, with the idea that we could accomplish this mission. The greatest minds of Europe at that time, especially during the middle to late 18th Century, concentrated on the figure of this genius, Benjamin Franklin, who the leading scientists of Europe, looked toward, as the leader of a new nation in North America. A nation which was intended to become, as Lafayette put, a beacon of hope, and temple of liberty, for all mankind.
We have that tradition! We have embedded in us, in our national tradition, the capacity to play that role. We are hated under George Bush, but the American idea is still respected as an idea, in many parts of the world. We have the moral authority, if we exert it, to say to the nations of the world: "Come together. Let us attack this financial-economic problem. Let us work together on common interests, and let us develop a community of principle among each of us, as sovereign nation-states. And we're going to make the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, finally, the law among nations of the world."
Thank you.
