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This transcript appears in the December 26, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

`What's Needed Is Leadership
With a Sense of Mission'

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Here is Lyndon LaRouche's keynote speech to a Presidential campaign webcast in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 12, 2003, along with a selection from the questions and answers. The transcript was released by the LaRouche in 2004 campaign committee. Windows Media archives of the entire webcast are available:

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Since the new European currency was introduced, the value of the U.S. dollar has dropped by almost 50%, most of that directly under the present Bush Administration. In the most recent period, the rate of collapse of the dollar has accelerated, so that the most recent phase, short-term phase, has been a 20% collapse—and it hasn't stopped collapsing, yet.

Think of it: A nearly 50% collapse in the value of the dollar, in terms of the leading world market. And it's not stopped yet.

The current account deficit of the United States brings us toward bankruptcy. The insane policies of the present administration, in terms of budgetary policy, tax policy, and so forth, have brought the nation to bankruptcy. It is worse than that: We are now in a crisis, which, fully is as serious as that which Franklin Roosevelt faced in March of 1933.

Worse, the structure of infrastructure in the United States: Probably we have a capital deficit of about $4 trillion, minimal, in basic economic infrastructure. We've lost railroads. Where have you seen a railroad recently, outside a museum? We've lost power generation and distribution. And where we have it, we have Enron-style pirates, who are mismanaging it. We've lost water management. We've lost our health-care system, a catastrophic collapse in health-care system, under the combination of recent developments in general, but also simply the collapse of hospitals, as in the willful collapse of D.C. General here in D.C.

We've lost an education system: We do not produce qualified students from high schools and universities any more. And there's a reason for that: We produce people who pass tests, but the tests are rigged. An idiot could pass them—and does, often. Because the system is designed that way. We don't have teachers to teach. We don't have programs of education that are worth anything, in general, with very few exceptions.

So, that which made the United States once the leading producer society of the world, at the close of the Second World War and beyond, that has gone.

We should remind ourselves of what happened with ancient Rome, following the Second Punic War, that is, the second war against Carthage and Tunisia, and so forth; and the following period, the conquest of Southern Italy, the conquest of Greece and so forth. Rome was transformed from a place which produced, largely farmers—the military system was based largely on farmers, with a volunteer reserve system, essentially. All that ended. Rome changed its character under the Caesars, after a period of civil wars. It introduced large-scale slavery. It reduced the population of Italy to living largely on what's called "bread and circuses," the way the majority of the population of the United States is living today!

We are in a post-industrial society, which is decaying. The situation of the lower 80% of our family-income brackets, since 1977, has been plummeting. There has been no recovery in the U.S. economy! The report of a 7% or an 8% growth recently, is a lie! The government, this government, as usual, lies! The way they lied, or Cheney lied, with his associates, to get us into an unnecessary war, which we don't know how to get out of, in Iraq, today.

Soon, this collapse will hit, with full force. Soon, we will experience events which remind the press of what occurred in 1929 to 1932: We are going into something worse than a depression; we're going into an economic breakdown crisis, globally.

The situation in Europe, or continental Europe, is not as bad as it is in the United States. We're a parasite nation. Japan prints money for us, to keep our stock market from collapsing! Europe has been investing capital to keep our markets from collapsing. We are a parasite nation! And the people we suck upon, to support ourselves, are running out of the means to continue to support us. The entire world, the entire present world monetary-financial system, is in a terminal state of collapse.

There are solutions for this: In general, the solutions follow the pattern that was followed by Franklin Roosevelt, from 1933 on: the same state of mind, the same policy, the same kind of outlook. The solutions are a little bit different—and the challenge is much greater. The danger is much more severe.

There's no way that we will get to the November 2004 election, with the United States which continues to represent what most foolish people believe it represents, at this moment today. This will not happen months down the line: We're on the verge of a total collapse. The breaking point could come at any moment. It could come in your Christmas stocking—or in the hole in your Christmas stocking. It could come later, because the ability to print money indefinitely, and using electronic means, as well as printing-press means, does give governments the ability to postpone a collapse which is already onrushing. Such methods of postponing a collapse, however, only make things worse. But, we're in that period, at which, in a fairly short period of time, in the near term—during the course of the coming year, if it doesn't happen before Christmas—this thing is going down!

Now, I've been discussing this with people in Europe, leading people in Europe—bankers and others—and their view of the United States is much franker, much more accurate, than you get from here: This is coming down. It's coming down, soon.

And, it's coming down, among other places, in Washington, D.C., where this primary is now in process. And by Jan. 13, we're going to have a somewhat different world than you have today, not merely because of the primary.

But, let's look at this world situation, and then turn, at the end, to the solutions, in terms of the experience of Washington, D.C.: both the Executive branch, which is here, or centered here; the legislature here, the Supreme Court—which I don't know where it is, but it's supposed to be physically/biologically here.

And look at the thing from these two standpoints: The poor, the massive poor, of Washington. The ones who were told, "Go off and die!" in the Spring of 2001, when they shut down D.C. General Hospital. They said, "Go away, and die! Go across to Maryland, to Anacostia. Get outta here! We have a big speculative plan along the river-front. We're going to use that hospital site, for a big this-or-that." And the rich fellows in Washington, D.C., who really run the Washington Post and run the government, as sort of a private club, will make a lot of money on the speculation, on the kinds of projects we have planned, along the riverside. "And we'll get the poor people outta here! Where you won't see them."

That's the attitude. And it's happening in Washington, D.C. On the one side, the government, which is indifferent to the reality that faces the people of this area, the population; and the people themselves, who look at the government with a sense of hopelessness: "We live here. We don't know where else to go. What's going to become of us? Nobody cares."

And the government is responsible, because the government put this city into receivership, this District. The Federal government took over the city, through the Congress. They deprived the city of any sort of degree of real self-government. Then, they collapsed the facilities of the city, which are all being broken down—all the security services, the fire service, the police service, hospital service, and so forth: all breaking down. And they managed it. And they created this mess, insofar as it affects the people of this District. They're going to be confronted by this.

And this primary campaign is the opportunity to confront the Congress, with its responsibility, or its irresponsibility, in dealing with the situation of the people, who you see, as a foreigner, coming to visit the nation's capital. This is the image of the United States, in the world: A United States, which has, since January of 2002, since the President's State of the Union message, and that magic phrase, "axis of evil," was uttered by him, the attitude toward the United States, around the world, is at a low level not matched in memory! The past two years have been Hell, for the reputation of the United States, in the eyes of the world—and it's getting worse, day by day.

So, that's the situation we face.

Roots of the American Republic

How'd this come about? To understand people, you have to get beyond the usual kind of talk about politics. You have to get serious. You have to look at history. We're talking about essentially—the United States is an essential part of the long span of European history. It goes back to the time that ancient Egypt, through its culture, contributed to a group of people, who later became known as Greeks: the beginning of what became known as Greek civilization, and particularly Classical Greek civilization. That became European civilization, over 2,500 years ago: the time of such figures as Thales, and Pythagoras, and Solon, and so forth. We are part of the continuity of European civilization, which has certain special characteristics.

And to understand ourselves, even if we're immigrants from different parts of the world than Europe, we reflect in ourselves, the transmitted effect of the history of this European civilization, from over 2,500 years ago, to the present time. We live in the shadow of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, as European civilization. And you have to go back to that point, to understand what we are, what our potential is, and what our faults are, and our errors have been.

Similarly, you have to understand the situation here: The United States was created, largely, from the support from Europe. It was created by people who settled here, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Winthrops and the Mathers. It was developed around the followers of the Mathers, that generation: Benjamin Franklin.

In the middle of the 18th Century, the British monarchy had defeated the French in a war. This war gave the British imperial power, through maritime and financial power over the world. It had conquered India, in the process, or nearly conquered India, in that period.

The British were then challenged by principally one state in Europe: France. The one power which was just defeated by the British, in the treaty of 1763. But, at that point, Britain was taken over, the leadership of the British East India Company—the company, which as a company, had conquered India! Subjugated India! A company! Not a nation, a company. The army was a company army. Like the type they're trying to put into Iraq, today. The company, not the nation, not the national military forces.

Well, this company, which was headed up politically by a fellow called Lord Shelburne, in 1763, made a decision: Number 1, he was determined to prevent the development of the English-speaking colonies of North America. Second, he had a long-term commitment to the destruction of Britain's chief rival, France.

In this process, in this period, leading intellectuals of Europe, including from England, concentrated on the figure of a bright genius, in our country—Benjamin Franklin—and began to give him the support he needed to prepare what became the United States for independence. The greatest intellects of Europe participated, through Franklin and similar people, in doing that, created this nation. The nation was led by a youth movement, young people, like the 18- to 25-year age-group here now; were the people who were organized around Franklin, and typified by young Lafayette from France; or young Alexander Hamilton; or Jefferson, or all the other leaders you know of from the history books of the 18th Century: These were all part of a youth movement, led by Benjamin Franklin. And with George Washington somewhere in the middle, there, along the line.

They focussed on, at that time, from Europe, on bringing forth, in North America, a true republic, hoping thereby, by establishing a republic here, that the effect of that would reverberate back into Europe, and help Europeans to free themselves, from the Anglo-Dutch Liberal and Hapsburg tyrannies, which dominated Europe at that time.

So, we were a nation created with a mission. We were given a Constitution, under these circumstances the only Constitution in the world, which has survived, since the time we adopted ours. No other nation has been able to create a Constitution, with the durability of our own. And that Constitution is an embodiment of our history. It's a Constitution conceived in the memory of Solon of Athens. It's a Constitution created in the memory of Plato. It's a Constitution, which was shaped by the influence of a then-deceased Gottfried Leibniz, the greatest scientist of the 17th and 18th Centuries; whose book, on the New Essays on Human Understanding, was the basis on which the group around Franklin conceived the policy on which our Constitution was premised.

That's what we were.

British Counterattack

But, then, the second phase of the British operation came into place, the British Empire, under Shelburne: the French Revolution. Now, the French Revolution, as taught to you in history books, generally, or by rumor or gossip, is a fake. It never happened that way. The way the French Revolution happened, it started in the 1770s: The British East India Company, under Shelburne, created around Lyons, France, a group which became known as the Council of Ten; also known as the Martinist freemasonic lodge. This was run from London, and this is the group that made the French Revolution. Philippe Égalité and Jacques Necker, who organized July 14, 1789, were British agents, agents of Shelburne. Danton and Marat were British agents, trained in London, dispatched from London to Paris, who delivered speeches in France, written in London by Jeremy Bentham. It was succeeded by the Jacobin Terror—also a product of the Martinists. That was succeeded, in due course, by Napoleon Bonaparte, who was also a product of the Martinists.

And so, France was torn apart, and continental Europe was torn apart, from 1789 until 1815, with the Vienna Congress, which was a bad system.

We were isolated during that period, which is why George Washington told us not to get involved, entangled, in foreign wars at that time, or foreign affairs. Not because we were against being involved in foreign affairs, but because he understood—as every leader understood—that the situation in Europe was one we should stay away from: It was a sinkhole!

So, we went through a period—slavery was spread, again, in the United States, when we were about to get rid of it. We had Presidents who were traitors: Martin van Buren was a traitor! Jackson was a stupid fool, who worked for him! The Land Bank bankrupted the United States—Martin van Buren's idea, implemented by Andrew Jackson. Polk was a traitor. Pierce was a traitor, President Pierce was a traitor! Buchanan was a traitor. And a few people, associated with our military, with West Point and other places, managed to keep the United States together, centered around a great diplomat, a great statesman: John Quincy Adams. And John Quincy Adams had picked, among his protégés, one young man, who played a key part in opposing the war with Mexico: Abraham Lincoln from Illinois. And Abraham Lincoln didn't go away. He came back, as President of the United States. And he saved the United States from destruction, by his unique role of leadership.

We emerged from that war, the Civil War. We emerged as a powerful nation. Britain had repeatedly conducted wars against us, directly and indirectly, trying to destroy us. The Hapsburg interests in Europe, the Spanish and so forth, had attempted to destroy us, in the 19th Century. The Spanish, for example, were the biggest slave-traders of the early 19th Century, and continued that practice until late into the 19th Century. The Spanish monarchy was one of that group in the 19th Century, which supported the Confederacy; which, with the British and the French, invaded Mexico, while we had a Civil War, and put a dictator in there, Maximilian; imposed a tyranny, which was really a fascist tyranny, upon Mexico, at that time.

But, we emerged, in 1865, as a power. Under Lincoln, we had built the railroads, completed the great project of building the railroads. We had opened up the development of the West. We increased our economic power, and our unification of our nation, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, to such a degree that no power on Earth would ever dare to attack the United States, from that time, until recently.

At that point, foreign forces relied upon corruption. Lincoln was assassinated. The actual investigation of the assassination was aborted, because there were U.S. forces, as well as British forces, behind the assassination.

We went on. McKinley was shot—similar process: Get rid of a President. A man who was a product of the Confederacy, Teddy Roosevelt, became President, by the virtue of the shooting of President McKinley. Taft was Taft. But after him, was a man who was an heir of the Ku Klux Klan—Woodrow Wilson, who was brought into power, by aid of Teddy Roosevelt; who gave us the Federal Reserve System. And, Woodrow Wilson, the "great Democrat," organized the revival of the Ku Klux Klan by an appeal from the White House. That's how the great Klan movement of the period of World War I, through the 1920s, was organized: by Woodrow Wilson, the "great Democrat." And under these policies, and policies of Coolidge and Hoover, and so forth; and, Mellon, du Pont, and Morgan, the United States was headed into a Great Depression, along with Europe.

And a great patriot, Franklin Roosevelt—no similarity to his cousin: Franklin Roosevelt traced his ancestry to Isaac Roosevelt. Isaac Roosevelt was a banker, a New York banker, who was personally allied with Alexander Hamilton, against Aaron Burr. Roosevelt, from his childhood on, was a devotee of that tradition, of the Hamiltonian tradition of economics. At his graduation processes at Harvard University, one of the papers he delivered, was on that subject.

He was stricken then by poliomyelitis, or something similar. And, in recovering from polio, fighting back, with the aid of his wife, he refreshed his knowledge of his tradition, his American tradition. Becoming the Governor of New York, he prepared to become the President of the United States. And he stepped into the breach, and he brought the United States, like Lazarus, out of its grave, the grave that Coolidge and Hoover dug for it. He made us, again, a great nation, of which we were proud, up through V-E Day.

But we weren't so proud at V-J Day, because of those two unnecessary nuclear weapons dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We went into a right-wing turn, under Truman. Truman was leading us toward nuclear war. The policy of this crowd in the United States at that time, was preventive nuclear war. We had developed the first operational nuclear weapons. We didn't have many nuclear weapons, because we'd thrown the last two, which were experimental types, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So, we were occupied in developing the capacity for significant serial production of large numbers of nuclear weapons. The intent at that time was to drop them on the Soviet Union. But we didn't have the dropping means prepared, or the number of bombs prepared. But nonetheless, Truman went ahead and bluffed. It put us into a great crisis in the United States, a big right-wing turn, which demoralized many of our people; put us through an unnecessary period of recession, in 1946-47; and got us, through tomfoolery, into a war! Because, the Truman Administration had assumed that, because the United States was going to have an arsenal of nuclear weapons, which it was going to throw on the Soviet Union, in order to bring about world government, under Anglo-American government, that everybody would cringe. But, the Chinese and the Soviet Union didn't cringe.

And while Truman was bluffing, one morning, the North Korean army came stovepiping down the Korean Peninsula, and the United States was left with almost no allies, sitting in Pusan, the Pusan perimeter at the southern tip of Korea. And, we'd probably be still there, if MacArthur, who was opposed to these guys, didn't make the Inchon landing, over the objections of many of the other crew, at the time.

But, about that time, shortly after that, the Soviet Union developed the first operational thermonuclear weapon—which meant the Truman policy of preventive nuclear warfare against the Soviet Union was out the window. That's the way we went!

So, then we dumped Truman, which was a good thing. And we brought in Eisenhower, which was a good thing. Eisenhower was opposed to this kind of military adventurism. He was—whatever his shortcomings may have been otherwise—he was a military traditionalist, who followed the American version of the Carnot-Scharnhorst version, of Classical strategic defense: And therefore, he was against the wild-eyed guys, who wanted to make war. He was a traditionalist. And we had eight years of relative security, and peace, and relief from the wildness of Trumanism and McCarthyism, under Eisenhower.

But, then Eisenhower retired, finished his term. Kennedy came in. Good man. A lot of potential, but didn't know the ropes, yet. He was hit by the Bay of Pigs, which really confused him, and put him into a strategic peril. He was hit by the Missile Crisis of 1962. He didn't really know what it was doing. He tried to learn the ropes by doing. Then, he saw MacArthur, at MacArthur's bedside, and he was told what the game was. He went back from that kind of discussion, with MacArthur and others, and told Robert McNamara, the lunatic (who's still alive, unfortunately), got that lunatic into the White House, and told him, we're not going into a war in Indo-China. We're getting out. He made that fool, on the front steps of the White House, give a press conference, and say, we weren't going to go into that war.

Next thing you know, Kennedy was dead. Johnson was terrified. And we went into that war—from which we have never returned. We're still there. We lost it there.

A Cultural Paradigm-Shift

What happened then, as a result of these experiences that the American people went through, our people—both my generation, and the generation which followed, the people now in their fifties approximately; who are running the United States, largely, including my rival candidates, most of the them! Kucinich is younger. But most of these guys are Baby-Boomers, '68ers. They're running the United States: And there's where the problem lies. We had many problems, up through 1963 and '64. But, we were still the leading producer nation on this planet. We were the model for the recovery of Europe, and other parts of the world. We still had our tradition, with all the blemishes we'd acquired.

But then, we lost it!

We lost it, with what was called a "cultural paradigm-shift." We were going to go from being a producer society, to a post-industrial society.

This brought us, of course, into Nixonism, especially after Nixon met with the Klan, in Biloxi, Mississippi. And he re-formed the Republican Party, around what was called the "Southern Strategy," a nice name for "Klan followers." Under those conditions, with Henry Kissinger as the real President, followed by Brzezinski, another "real President"—the National Security Advisor—we then went to the logical succession: We went through the financial collapse, which was inherent in the ongoing policy, which was called the 1971-72 change from the fixed-exchange-rate system, which had served us very well since 1944, to a floating-exchange-rate system.

Under this system, the United States and Britain, through their banking institutions, began to dictate the value of currencies to other parts of the world. We drove the value of currencies down—like a panty raid: We moved in on a country, to the London market, we made a run against the currency. Then, we would tell the country in question, "You want relief from this run on your currency? Call in the IMF or World Bank to advise you." What would the World Bank and IMF do? They would tell them to drop the value of their currency, "and then we'll let you out."

"Okay, fine. We'll pay. We'll accept that."

"Oh no! It doesn't go that far! See, when you drop the value of your currency, as we tell you, that means your creditors are going to get paid less. We can't have that. You will now create a new debt, which we will negotiate, which you will carry on your back. A debt, not based on what you are paid, but based on our instruction for you to cut your own throat."

We then turned around, and used the leverage of this debt, to turn other countries, gradually, into slave labor for us. We shut down our factories, bit by bit. We shut down much of our farming, bit by bit. We destroyed our infrastructure. We let our infrastructure rot out. We destroyed our power generation and distribution. We destroyed our mass transit system. We destroyed our urban society. We became like the Romans, living off the backs of countries we had subjugated and people we had subjugated. We looted them.

And we let our own production go down. We didn't want to maintain our labor force any more. We closed down our factories. We closed down the opportunities for skilled, productive employment. We didn't need education any more, real education, because our people weren't supposed to be productive. They were supposed to be entertained!

What's the definition of an industry, these days? Your community is bankrupt? No places of employment any more? Bring in a casino! The casino comes in, robs everybody in the place, and then moves on to the next spot. They specialize in robbing Indians. The Indians have been scalped again—this time by the casino operatives (who are generally gangsters from South Africa, and places like that; they know how to do that).

So, what happened is, that the generation which rose to positions of influence, since about 1963-64, under the cultural paradigm-shift, changed their character. And the older generation began to go along with it, particularly as they got older and more frightened, and said, "You have to go along to get along."

So, our national character changed. Our politicians changed, as younger people replaced older politicians. We became the politicians of a post-industrial America. The politicians of "bread and circuses." We didn't invest any more, in things that made us powerful before. We invested in the stock market! We invested in financial swindles: Look outside this area. Look into Maryland. Look into Northern Virginia. You're about to see the greatest wave of bankruptcy you've ever experienced: It's called a mortgage-based securities bubble, which is about to pop. And fluctuations in the interest rates on the international markets can pop that bubble! One percent change can pop the bubble. People are living in shrink-wrap-built tarpaper shacks, with plastic exteriors to make them fancy. These shacks are going, at mortgages of $400-600,000 typically, in the area around here. What people are paying for acquisition of residence, as a percentile of their total income, is impossible!

What does it cost to have a place to live? What's the characteristic of homelessness in the United States? Real estate speculation has determined what it costs to have a place to live, a community in which to live. Most people don't have a sufficient level of income—especially if they work at Wal-Mart!—to be able to sustain a living, in a place. The communities are disintegrating.

So, what we're looking at, at $400-600,000, or $700,000, or even $1 million, in terms of these shrink-wrap-built tarpaper shacks, dotting the former cow pastures of Maryland and Virginia, these are not worth that money. This is a purely speculative bubble, like a stock market bubble.

The interest rate goes up; reverse leverage takes effect; and shacks which were listed at $600,000, soon are probably listed at $150,000 on a resale market. And the person in it is bankrupt, and they don't throw him out, because they'd rather have him stay, as a squatter, than leave the house to be raided by anybody who happens to come through the neighborhood.

This is the kind of reality we're in!

Look at the real estate situation in this city, Washington, D.C.—the same kind of thing. We have not designed our cities, as places in which people work, to make a living, and in which people can afford to live! We drive our people—.

Look at, around the country, for example: Go into Detroit. The population of Detroit has dropped by almost around a half. Why? No industry. We don't manufacture automobiles any more! We assemble sub-assemblies from all parts of the world, and we don't know what some of the components are in those assemblies.

You used to be to able to go to a parts shop, and get a part, specified for that particular vehicle to repair it. If you couldn't repair it yourself, you had a mechanic repair it for you, at the local gas station or some other place. You can't do that any more. He doesn't know what the parts are in that thing: It's an assembly. You want a replacement, you've got to buy the whole assembly.

So, we are no longer a productive nation.

America's Real Power and Potential

So, we've come to the end of that road: Therefore we have to go back to becoming a productive nation. What's going to happen is this: There is no possible way, that the outstanding debt of the world can be paid. It's impossible. If you try to collect the debt, the outstanding debt, of the international financial system, you will have to commit mass murder, because the money doesn't exist. There's no way you can settle that debt; it's too much; it's gone on too long. There's no productive force.

So, we're going to simply have to cancel all that debt. We're going to have to put the world through bankruptcy reorganization, in a way that Franklin Roosevelt did, but it's going to be a tougher one this time. Roosevelt revived the economy with an infrastructure-building program. We have a much tougher problem before us, in infrastructure. We had a sweet dream of a prosperous economy, in '32, compared with what we have today, when it comes to production.

Now therefore, the task is this: The advantage of our system of government, is embedded in our history, and in our Constitution, as the history is embedded in our Constitution. We have the only Constitutional tradition on this planet, which is capable of dealing with this kind of problem; because we have a Presidential system, not an Anglo-Dutch Liberal parliamentary system run by bankers, as they do in Europe. Europeans, today, have some good ideas about what to do; but they don't have a conception in general, a political conception, of a form of government, which is capable of dealing with this kind of problem. We, in the United States, if we recognize our tradition, do.

Now, we're bankrupt. Most of the world now hates the United States—one of the great accomplishments of the current Bush Administration. We don't have any friends any more. "Good!! Here we are! Got rid of them!! No more friends." You know, the President just affirmed that yesterday, on the case of Iraq: "We have no friends in Europe! We say, `Go away!' We want to steal from Iraq. It's all ours. We stole it, fair and square!" The President hasn't got much in the way of brains, but he's got a mean spirit, and that stretches a long way. And he's not really responsible for much of the mess; he's not a responsible person, by intellect or other attributes.

But he's still the President, so we'd better deal with that fact. Cheney's another question.

So, this is the kind of situation we face: We have one value, in the world at large. And, I can tell you, with my travels abroad, everything I know about the world, and I'll tell you a few things about where we might be going, optimistically, in the world: We have a great advantage, that we, in our history, have something to contribute, by our history, by the character of our original Constitution—the only one that's survived this long is ours—to prod an element of leadership, among nations brought together to deal with this great international financial crisis, that we, in the United States—a President of the United States—if I am the President of the United States, today it could happen! If I were the President of the United States, at this moment, it would happen right now!

If I were the President of the United States, right now, with the people I know in Europe and various other places, and I called for an emergency conference of heads of government and state, on the question of monetary reform, they would come on the next plane. And we would have something worked out, on an emergency basis, to control this crisis, within the next 48 to 72 hours.

That is where the power of the United States lies. Not the power of bullying; but the power of what we were created to be. We were created to be a true republic, on these shores of North America: to become, as Lafayette said, "a temple of liberty and beacon of hope for the benefit of all humanity." Our Constitution, our tradition, has that embedded in it. If we can summon ourselves, in a sense of these forebears of ours, and their intention; and if we understand the world, its problems, and what it can represent positively, we, from the United States—a President of the United States—can, as Roosevelt did in his time, lead the United States out of this mess.

Fortunately right now, we don't have a Hitler. Roosevelt, by the time he was inaugurated in office, Hitler had already been not only inaugurated, but had been installed as a dictator, as a result of what happened with the Reichstagsbrand [Reichstag Fire]. We don't have that yet. We had to go to war, over that one, because Western Europe was dominated by the spread of what we called "fascism," then; called "Synarchism," now. It was something that Roosevelt's enemies—the Mellons, the du ponts, and the Morgans—had helped to put into power in Germany. And the only reason that these guys supported Roosevelt, in fighting Hitler—the same reason that Churchill went to Roosevelt, to fight Hitler—is because these English-speaking guys didn't want to be run by a German tyrant. They liked the system, but they didn't want to work under that guy, which is why we had some of the things happen to us, that happened to us.

But, we're now in a situation, where we don't have a tyrant overseas. We do not have a serious enemy, outside the United States. Our biggest enemy, is, fortunately, right here at home! It's here! We, we are the enemy! So therefore, if we can control ourselves, we have no significant enemy on this planet.

I'll tell you, for example, we just had some Duma elections—parliamentary elections—in Russia. And some friends of mine made it, rather seriously. Now, we've been discussing with people in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Russia, in China, India, so forth—I've been involved in this for some time. These discussions are very clear. We understand one another! If I were the President of the United States today, those discussions, and those relationships would come into play, immediately, to get us out of this mess.

Rebuilding the Economy

What we have to do, is create a new monetary system, which will function largely on the basis of the most acceptable precedent, which was the original Bretton Woods system of 1944-45; that would get us through. We have to launch a tremendous infrastructure-building program in the United States. We must earmark $5-6 trillion, over the coming period, for rebuilding infrastructure. We're talking about—remember, the U.S. economy is rated at about $11 trillion a year. So we're talking about approximately $6 trillion, at least, for the coming period, of capital investment: in power generation and distribution; in water management; rebuilding the rail system; mass transport, generally.

Build a mass transit system, so we don't use superhighways for parking lots, at rush-hour time. Use mass transit! You think cars on a highway is an efficient way of transporting, mass transit? Of course not! Efficient rail, or magnetic levitation, or monorail, all of these options, for long-distance, or intermediate- or short-distance, or intra-urban transport, will relieve most of the problems.

Now, remember, what it used to be like in the United States, before this catastrophe struck, before the paradigm-shift came, in the beginning of the 1960s: We used to have cities, and city planning would mean that you think of a city as a community; or a town as a community. Now, people live in that town, so you think of a place where people live. Now, you want to have their occupations, the places they work, and study, and so forth, within convenient walking distance, or some kind of convenient mass transit. So they can, conveniently and in a short period of time, less than a half an hour, preferably, get from one part where they live, to another part, where they work, or they go to school, or so forth.

So, we would organize a city as a community. We would build the infrastructure into it. We would think of having several different kinds of industries, in that city, so people could go from one place of employment to another place of employment. You could keep the family together. You would have dinner together, at night! You weren't out on the parking lot, called a superhighway, waiting to get home, or running to your second or third job. One job per family, per principal wage-earner. A normal life. A normal school relationship. A normal education. A neighborhood, in which the children would feel safe, because the neighbors are also concerned about your children as well as other people's children. You have an implicit security system, in a good city.

We destroyed that! We destroyed it for real estate speculation. We destroyed it, when somebody took the Eisenhower conception of the National Defense Highway System, and decided to move out of the cities, destroy the cities, and move out to super-settlements outside the city; using the national highway system as a way of building up communities, putting up things like Wal-Mart, in the middle of a lot of huts, hmm? Shrink-wrap-built huts, called $400,000 houses, or something like that.

No. We have to rebuild our society, as a productive society. We have to launch new industries. We have to use the space industry, as a science-driver, actually—not the way it's being done now, but a science-driver program to develop new technologies: the use of nanotechnology, which is one of the important technologies; other technologies coming along.

So, we will have to employ people on a large scale, as Roosevelt did, in public works, based largely on either government—that is, Federal, or state, or even local government—utilities; or we will have public utilities which are chartered by state governments, like we used to have public utilities, for things like power and so forth: high-volume; certain large-scale government projects, to local public utilities. People can invest safely, their savings, in these kinds of public utilities, because we regulate the system, to make sure these things are safe for them.

So, we have a large scale of investment in this direction.

By going into public works, in this way, you, then, generate the market, which stimulates private investment. Now, one of the characteristics, and destructive features of what's happened in the recent 40 years, is industry, big industry, is not really where our technological progress came from. Big industry tends to be Wall Street-oriented, corporate-oriented. It's concerned with profit.

Actual technological progress tends to come from a person who is involved in a smaller industry—maybe 10, 15, 20, 50, 200 employees. These people are generally engineers, scientists, or something similar: just like the independent farmer, or multi-family farm of 200-400 acres, in the days we still had that kind of agriculture.

This is the person who uses their intellect, their creative powers to make an improvement in something. They devote their lives to it. They tend to build up firms, as employees or as owners, with the idea of passing the legacy of this accomplishment on to their descendants. They are the ones who invent things. For example, in Northern Italy, you have a whole stratum of middle-sized industries, which have very little association with large banking, large finances. They're largely locally financed. They operate rather well, in the export area. They'll move into a country, and rather than trying to dump a product in the country, they'll go into the country, find some partners, that is, some prospective partners to work with in that country, work together, to combine the technologies they know, to produce a joint product, something which combines the capabilities in that country, with what they can bring in. And they design products to fit this opportunity. That's real entrepreneurship.

If you look around the world today, you used to find, in any large corporation, which produced a good product, you had a whole litany of supporting firms, which were high-tech, which produced the things fairly well, on which the large corporation's product depended for its quality—where the improvements came from. We have in the United States, we have destroyed that. We've done it in Europe—what you see has happened in Germany, in the past 12-15 years. When I was involved in Germany, say, in 1987-88, I was involved, heavily in the aerospace area, which was an offshoot of my involvement in the Strategic Defense Initiative. Many of these firms which existed then, and the supporting small industries which existed then, have disappeared. They've been wiped out as a matter of policy. A company like Daimler-Benz, which used to be a very good company, absorbed other companies, gobbled 'em up, and destroyed them, and then started to destroy itself, with these new kinds of new-fangled policies.

So, what is called the Mittelstand in Germany, is disappearing. Similar kinds of firms in France: disappearing. The large industries in Italy are disappearing. In the United States, that kind of industry is disappearing. But that is the gut of the way the government functions to provide the impetus of large-scale public infrastructure, together with the opportunity, through credit mechanisms and others, to promote the proliferation of these kinds of independent firms, who come in as bidding on jobs, which are spun out of these infrastructure projects.

We have to rebuild America, with an image of what it once was, when it was a better nation, but around the new technologies which are emerging now. In that direction, we can survive.

Now, on the question of foreign relations—and then, back to health care, again, which is a key one here.

No Need for Wars

We're in a situation where there is no need for war on this planet. Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a Classical concept of strategic defense. And, as some of you know, I'm committed to restore universal military service. For one reason, as Charles Rangel has proposed, because if your military does not feel that it's a part of the people, and the people don't feel the military is part of it, then, you really don't have a true Classical strategic defense capability.

Also, as we know from World War II, our great ability, relative to, say, German soldiers, was not the combat capability—they were much more skilled at combat than our people were. We improvised; we took people from the streets and farms; in 16 weeks and more, we took them out and made soldiers of them, and threw them overseas. Our achievement, our power, was logistics. Our power is, implicitly, engineering. A good military force is based on an engineering capability.[FIGURE 5]

And what we need now, is we need to transform a lot of our young people, who have not been qualified for serious work, to upgrade themselves. And therefore, we need various kinds of training and employment programs which will bring these young people into the mainstream of a new wave of production. We've got to get about 10 million people who should be employed, employed! The best way to get out of a depression, is have more people working at a higher level of productivity. If you're producing more wealth per capita, in a state or city, you've got the means to pay the bills. If you're cutting down production and lowering the pay-scale, and leaving a lot of people unemployed, you're going to find out that the people don't have the income to pay the bills, for the state and city. We have to do that.

But, around the world, we have a similar thing. A very interesting challenge. You have now emerging, on the continent of Eurasia, between Western Europe, especially France, Germany, Italy, and so forth, Russia in the middle, and South, and Southeast, and East Asia on the other hand. You have, in South, and Southeast, and East Asia, the greatest concentration of population on the planet. The greatest population densities on this planet, inhabited areas. We have in the middle, a vast area, of Central and North Asia, very lightly inhabited, almost uninhabited, but with tremendously important natural resources, mineral resources, in that area. Resources which are needed by the growing populations in East, Southeast, and South Asia, as the population grows.

You have China, which has a policy of moving away from the seacoast, toward inland development, through infrastructure. China is the nation today with the greatest commitment to long-term, large-scale infrastructure projects, starting with the Three Gorges Dam. China is building a national railway system network, pretty much following the lines of Sun Yat-sen's design, almost a century ago. And there are many projects of that type. So, large-scale infrastructure, with the cooperation of North Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, India, so forth. Moving across from one side, the Atlantic side, to the Pacific side, across the Eurasian continent, technology flowing from Western Europe, into China and elsewhere, across Russia. With a Russia revived, contributing its knowledge of the area of Central and North Asia, with technologies which have been sitting fallow in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union; putting these to work, in partnership with Western Europe and Asia.

We have the great potential for a dynamo of growth, throughout the Eurasian continent.

We should be a partner with that. We have to our south: We have Mexico, and Central America, South America. We have ruined these parts of the world, especially in the past 20-25 years. We have ruined our neighbors! As our "Bad Neighbor Policy." We loot and suck the blood of Mexico, and we complain about the fact that the cheap labor from Mexico comes over here to do our dirty work for us, or in Mexico. We have to change that. We have to go back to the kind of policy toward the Americas, that John Quincy Adams set forth in the speech that he wrote for James Monroe, called the Monroe Doctrine. We have to promote the security and development of a set of independent republics to ourselves in the Americas. And we have to, in this process, be partners.

We have to be committed to ending the genocide which the United States, Britain, and Israel are perpetrating against the population of Sub-Saharan Africa, now. They can not do it themselves; they've been looted to the bone. You have children, 10, 12 years old, carrying automatic weapons, fighting mercenary wars. It's a nightmare. You want to talk about their ability to pay, to rebuild their economy? Don't kid yourself. We have to. We, in the Western Hemisphere, in the Americas; we, in Eurasia: We have to come across with some development capital for large-scale infrastructure to start these countries moving again—the way Franklin Roosevelt proposed in 1942, in Casablanca, when he laid this out. We can do it, and we have to do it. We have to give them the start—get the swine off their backs, the murderers, the genocide architects, off their backs.

And then, under those conditions, who needs a war? We don't need a war. There's nothing we wish to conquer, except space, or ourselves, or our own follies. We need to be able to defend ourselves. The world is not yet quite that civilized!

But we don't need a war. We need to avoid war. We need to use the weapon of progress, of economic justice, of hope, as the tools of diplomacy, to bring about cooperation, even in the toughest areas. Like the North Korea thing: It's not a difficult thing to deal with; not if we're rational. A rational U.S. government could deal with other people in Asia with that problem. It's not a great problem. There's no reason for these wars.

Israel, for example: There is no reason for not having immediate Palestinian-Israeli peace. No reason. Why? Israel is a nuclear hand-grenade, poised to be thrown at its neighbors. Now what happens to a nuclear hand-grenade when it's thrown? What happens to the hand-grenade? Now, even a hard-core right-winger in Israel knows, that what Israel is committed to doing, means the death of Israel, in the sense that Rabin understood this, and stated that in his time, before he was assassinated.

So therefore, under rational influence of U.S. policy, with cooperation of nations in the region, cooperation from Europe and Asia, we could bring about peace in the Middle East. There is no situation I know of on this planet, in which that should not be U.S. policy. The problem is this; the crisis of the United States is this: It's the same thing we faced with Hitler in the 1930s. This time, the Hitlers are here.

What's the problem? The United States has become a great parasite, a great parasite of financier speculation, as a power. Now, that financial system, that monetary system, is bankrupt. The question is, when the firm goes bankrupt, who pays? These fellows say, as they said then, "The people will pay. They'll pay, because we loot another country to pay these bills. Or, we'll loot our own people to pay these bills."

And therefore, the essential conflict is between the national interest and the financiers. Hitler was not a creation of a bunch of dummies in brown uniforms. Hitler was the creation of bankers: the head of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman; the banking firms of du Pont, Mellon, and Morgan, in the United States, who were allies of that. The Schröder bank in Germany, and so forth and so on. The bankers of this type, the private bankers, created Hitler, because there was a financial crisis, and under conditions of financial crisis, if the government is accountable to the people, it is the bankers that will pay, not the people. And therefore, the bankers say, "It's the people, it's the government, that has to go."

That's what you have with the Cheney phenomenon. What is Cheney? Cheney is a coup-artist. He's not much intellectually; he's a coup-artist. What's the bunch around him? A bunch of scum! They're fascist scum! Richard Perle, for example. Look at his history. The errand-boy of the Senator from Boeing. These guys are the fascists. They are determined to impose a form of fascism on the United States. They came close with Sept. 11. It didn't quite work. Ashcroft is a good approximation—his appointment was a warning that fascism was intended for the United States at that time. Cheney's the same thing. The people around him are the same thing.

The Democratic Party, the leadership, is either part of the same thing, because they're tied to organized-crime elements or similar kinds of elements—or because they're frightened. Kerry, for example, is frightened. Kerry's an intelligent rival of mine, but he's scared. He won't tell the truth. He won't do the right thing. I could use him in my government, but he shouldn't be President. Howard Dean shouldn't even be in the United States [laughter].

National Health Security

All right, let's get down to this final thing: this health-care situation. At the end of the war, some very wise people used such references as the model of military experience, military medicine, as a model for our health-care policy. We had about 16-odd million people engaged in war, in World War II, and the medical support for this was a lot. A lot of it was just ordinary problems; it was jeep accidents, or plane crashes, or sicknesses—like we had a real amoebic dysentery epidemic, and a strange disease called then "tsutsugamushi," in Burma, during that period. And we had a system, which had been developed by the experience of mankind in warfare from the time of Ambroise Paré back during the period of the Norman wars. So we used that, to say a good medical system can incorporate the private and public practices of medicine, in a single policy.

And you had a wonderful bill, called Hill-Burton, of merely a few pages—that was all that was required—which specified a mission-orientation, centered upon the institutions of hospitals, and similar kinds of institutions, to engage the entire medical profession, private practice and other, in a single effort, to provide a standard for improving the medical care and health security of the nation, on the annual basis, by simply counting the number of beds, and the staffing and support for them, in each county of the United States—each county setting an objective, so that the care would be provided.

This overlaps another area of health care, apart from the care itself—is, preventive health care, which laps into what's called sanitation. And this is an essential part of our security system. Now, right now, say in Washington, D.C., especially since the shutting down of D.C. General Hospital, the security system of Washington, D.C. is in grave jeopardy, increased jeopardy because of the shutdown of D.C. General Hospital. For example, who is most susceptible to infectious disease? Poor people. Who gets the disease? Everybody. Who tends to spread it most easily? Poor people. Therefore, adequate care, sanitation and care, of poor people, is the first objective of health security of any community or nation. It goes together with sanitation.

So therefore, the job of health care, from government's standpoint, is how do we make sure that this provision is met? What we did under Hill-Burton, we said: Well, we have public hospitals, like general hospitals, teaching hospitals; we have various kinds of private hospitals, voluntary hospitals, clinics, and whatnot. Well, let's take a budget. Let's see where the money is coming from to sustain these institutions, both as they are, and as they have to be for the coming year. How many beds of what type do we require? What facilities, and so forth? How much is it going to cost? Where's the money going to come from? Well, you've got various health-care plans; you've got Blue Cross Blue Shield, for example; you have other facilities. You raise money by public appeal, as a fund, for a hospital fund, or health-care fund, which they used to do, before 1973.

And how does it work? Do you figure out what it's going to cost? No! You don't. You may do some actuarial estimates on this thing, but you don't do it on the basis of individual paperwork, on how you fund every inch of care!

The classic case is, someone falls down on the street, in the old days in New York, under Hill-Burton: Somebody says, "Call a cop!" Somebody else says, "Yeah, call a cop." So, somehow, mysteriously, a policeman arrives; he calls an ambulance; they take the person who's fallen in the street or somewhere else, and take him to the nearest emergency ward—I guess what you call a trauma center sometimes today. The person is treated, is probably put under observation in the center, and then, perhaps, is probably transferred to another institution for continued care. Somewhere in the process, in the days that follow, someone walks in, and says, "How is all this going to be paid for?" In other words, who's going to pay for it? Well, you got, in a lot of cases, no one's going to pay for it, because nobody can. What are you going to do? You're going to care for them anyway. You let the doctors decide what to do, what that patient needs, and that patient will get whatever that patient needs. How's it paid for? Well, it's a percentile of the total cost of health care. So rather than trying to negotiate every iota of health-care costs, you have a system which can absorb people who need care, but who can not pay for it. You don't need all the paperwork. You don't need an army of accountants and thieves! HMOs.

But in 1973, under the Nixon Administration, we put through the HMO bill, which looked bad enough at the start; what it resulted in was a rotting out of the health-care system. And during the recent period, there has been an avalanche of looting of the health-care system. So, the United States today does not have national health security. We have not even taken up the question of preventive health care.

What do we mean by preventive health care? Just take one aspect of it. There are many aspects to it, but just one illustration, which any layman should understand: You go to a physician. You've got a problem. Now under the HMO system, the physician is hamstrung, because he's got to fill out forms by certain procedures. Then, he's going to make a diagnosis, and on the basis of the diagnosis, there'll be an approval for what kind of various clinical procedures will be applied, and treatment. And that's it!

Now, if the physician says, "Wait a minute. There's something going on here. I want an additional test for this patient, because I think this must be looked into; this must be looked into, because something might be developing here, which is not fully manifest yet. Let's look into it." Now, if you catch something before it becomes certifiable, under HMO, the cost of treating that will be a lot less than if you wait till the effect of that problem hits the patient. So preventive health care, and the provision of having preventive health care, is necessary.

How do you do it? Well, you do it with medical institutions, with physicians and other people of relevance. You simply say, do we have the capability of dealing with the kinds of things we weren't able to deal with before? What kind of procedures can we build into this health-care system to provide for this kind of thing? And you provide it. It's a part of our national health security. What's the national health security? It's the health of our people. It's just as important as protecting people from being shot. And even that's a problem these days, getting the care. So therefore, what we need is that.

Now, in the case of Washington, D.C., where we have enormous, grinding poverty, at present, among the majority of the population here, the health-care provision for this city, this District, is a matter of prime national security concern. Say we had an attack of something like SARS, hitting New York City. Who's it going to hit? Well, it will tend to hit the poor very quickly, who will be low resistance, probably badly fed, badly housed, and so forth, more susceptible. And then it will spread to everything else, as we saw with this anthrax scare.

So therefore, how do you defend the nation's capital against something which has the effect of bacteriological warfare? It may not be bacteriological warfare, but has an effect like it. You have built into the city, the capability of responding as it should respond, wherever something like this may be breaking out, and promptly dealing with it. That's your security system. This is certainly as important as any other security system, as law enforcement, or anything else, in protection of people. It's a part of our security. You look at the history of disease in European civilization, and that's what we see.

Strategic Issues of the Campaign

So therefore, here's where we are. We're now at a point, here today: We're on the verge of the greatest financial collapse known to any of you. And it's coming on soon. Unfortunately, none of the candidates I'm up against, none of the rivals, so-called, are prepared to even discuss it. They certainly have not discussed it in any of their so-called debates—which are not really debates, more clown-shows than debates, I must say.

So therefore, it has to be dealt with. There is a precedent. The only allusion, apart from what I've said about this, it was an offhand remark, in the course of a debate in New Hampshire, by Senator Kerry, who made a passing reference to the Mt. Washington, the Bretton Woods Hotel, where this famous Bretton Woods Conference was held. We're now at a point where we have to think about an international monetary reform, like Bretton Woods, now. And that should be number-one on the hit parade of any serious politician. The economic well-being of our people, and how we're going to provide for that, ought to be number-one on the hit parade of every politician. Say, "Don't talk to me about your little single issues. About whether your neighbor is doing this or that. We don't want to hear about that. We'll let the local politicians take care of that." A man running for President, a woman running for President, must deal with the issues which are of primary importance for the security and future of the nation, and not get involved in all these little, local, social this and that affairs.

But these issues are not being faced.

The issue of war. Look, we all know now; it's out: Dick Cheney and his crew faked the figures to get the war Dick Cheney had been trying to get, since 1991! The war in Iraq did not start on Sept. 11, 2001. It started, essentially, in 1991, when Dick Cheney was pushing for that war, preventive nuclear warfare, as a policy. We all know it. We all know his crowd, the Lutis and the others, lied, bamboozled people, to get us into a war for which there was no reason! On a weekend! The UN Security Council was going to meet again on Monday and Tuesday, to deal with the question of Iraq. The President of the United States was induced, on the weekend, to go to the war in Iraq, pre-emptively, over the United Nations Security Council. We're now in there. Everybody knows there was no reason to be there. We're now in exactly what the military warned against. And what others warned against.

Let's give a picture of what this is. What we face is this: Since World War II, what has emerged, is not only nuclear warfare, and what that correlates with, but what's called asymmetric warfare. How does a nation deal, as we saw in Korea, or we saw more clearly in Indo-China, or we're seeing in Iraq now—how does it deal when it's invaded by a power with relative superweapons? The nation says, if it has military planning: Let them invade. Because when they invade, they're here; they're next door. They're down the street. They're a few feet away from me. At that distance, that proximity, superweapons don't work. You're going to throw a nuclear hand-grenade at the guy standing next to you?

So, on this kind of basis, what happens, as it happened in Indo-China, in particular, idiots went in there, after MacArthur had told people not to do it; others said don't do it—they went in there anyway. And they found that, aided by the Soviet Union at that time, even though China did not intervene, the attack on North Vietnam failed. Why? Because the Soviet Union advised the North Vietnamese how to fight that war. And the Soviet expertise, apart from superweapons that they'd developed, was asymmetric warfare.

Now people say this idea came from China. Well, it did, in a way, but the book that was used, Sun Tzu, was translated by the Soviets. So the Soviet military policy, as a result of the experience of Russia and the Soviet Union, with the First and Second World Wars, was asymmetric warfare.

Now we're talking about, today, about asymmetric warfare. That's what we're faced with in Iraq. Asymmetric warfare, which everyone who had fought in Vietnam—commanders and so forth, who had the experience—know about; and warned against. But these idiots, Cheney and Company, went with them anyway. They went into a war which need not be fought! There was no reason, there was no problem in Iraq that required that attention. But, they went into a situation, where,—for a needless war, which put the United States in jeopardy, in asymmetric warfare.

Now we've got troops sitting there who are increasingly known as targets, targets of asymmetric warfare. You're sitting there. You have no place to go. You have no rear echelon. You're there. The enemy is all around you! Behind you, under you, on top of you! At firing distance, at close-encounter distance. You have no place to run for security.

Now, let's take that problem. Now, let's say the United States pushes toward preventive nuclear war, that is, war fought on the anticipation that somebody might become an enemy in the future. You're going to kill him now. What happens? What comes into play is not only asymmetric warfare, but asymmetric warfare with sophisticated weapons, including nuclear weapons. Now the guy you're fighting against is using nuclear weapons, or deep-diving submarines, not the big submarines which are targets for that kind of warfare. Missiles may fail, because somebody screwed up the GPS system, at just the time it's about to go off.

That's what we're faced with. An insane warfare for no purpose, except the purpose of these lunatics, and no one in charge, including my rivals in the Democratic Party, are willing to take that issue on by name, and say, "Let's not do it." They'll criticize the way the war is being conducted. They'll say it's too soon, or maybe they're second guessing; but stopping it now, before it goes another step? No! Dealing with the danger of the spread of war from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in its present form? No! Someone has to say: "This stops, now! We retreat."

My Mission

And therefore, my situation is that. My age is not my great impairment. I'm able to function much better than my rivals. At least my brain still works!

So therefore, I have a mission. My mission is not my ambition for 20, 50 years from now. My ambition is my mission. I'm uniquely qualified to carry out a mission, the mission of a President of the United States, within the kind of emergency circumstance which we face now. My mission is rather unique to me, because of my experience, and I've been tested by fire a few times. I'm willing and prepared to face the issues, that others are not willing to face. I'm prepared to take the risk, which others will not take.

Take Kerry, for example. Kerry's problem is, he's like a Hamlet: Senator Kerry. Remember, Hamlet—as he expressed this in his famous Third Act soliloquy. He's a soldier, who puts his sword through somebody behind a curtain without a thought. He's willing to fight, and kill, and die on the battlefield, without a thought. That's his profession. He's a soldier! He's out there killing. You know, slaughter Pollacks on the ice, and things like that: his favorite sport. But what frightens him? What frightens him, as he said, is the fear of immortality, the fear of what comes after death. He goes to death willingly, knowingly, because he's afraid of having to think about what comes after death. And that's the problem with a Kerry. Kerry was undoubtedly a courageous soldier, and probably would function as a courageous soldier, in a situation as a Senator or otherwise. But he would lose his nerve, or he has so far, like Hamlet, when faced with taking the risk of looking at immortality.

Well, an older guy than Kerry doesn't worry about that. And that's what you need. You need a dedication to a mission. And if you're dedicated to a mission, whether you live or not, in the conduct of the mission is not what's important. It's accomplishing the mission. And those who die, as Jeanne d'Arc died, for example, who complete their mission, can be satisfied with having lived: They can face immortality.

Those who do not have a mission, who can not face a mission, can not. And the problem with our politicians now, is they're incapable of accepting responsibility for that kind of mission.

What's needed now in the White House is leadership with a sense of mission. What is the problem? What are the problems, what is the solution? What can we do? What is the potential in our people, and people of other nations, to do it?

And, above all, to follow in Western civilization, which is European civilization, the legacy of Plato, the legacy of the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13: agape. Out of the mouths of Plato, Socrates, and I Corinthians 13. It's not the law, it's not the rules that are important. It's not what you achieve in this or that which is important. Do you express, in your life, that love for mankind, which gives you a sense of mission, that you are an instrument expressing love for mankind? And that's what these guys lack.

Some of them will be useful, but they shouldn't be President. And by selection, by a process of elimination, I've been chosen to struggle to become the next President of the United States, soon.

Thank you.


Dialogue With the Candidate

A few of the most important exchanges from the hours-long question-and-answer session of the webcast are published here, from the full dialogue with LaRouche which is posted to his campaign website, www.larouchein2004.com.

Question, former Clinton foreign policy advisor: Mr. LaRouche, recent elections in Russia have been described in much of the American press as a setback for Russia. Some leading Americans, including former Vice President Gore, have said that gains were made by a faction of the former Soviet political spectrum that he has described as reminiscent of national socialism.

One of the representatives of that grouping, a gentleman by the name of Glazyev, has appeared as a guest at conferences that you hosted in Europe. Can you give us a more detailed view of what actually occurred in the Russian elections?

LaRouche: Well, there are always a few caveats in a situation like that. What the process is, is this. Russia has made a transition from being a victim of the Bush Administration, and the Gore Administration under Clinton: Remember, Gore, interestingly enough on this question—and I think the questioner knows this—was involved in 1996 in the election campaign of Boris Yeltsin, then president of Russia; and Gore was involved in a gangster organized crime group called Golden ADA, in arranging the funding of the Yeltsin re-election campaign. So, Mr. Gore has no right to make any criticism of Russia today. Gore is one of the problems of crime, a supporter and accomplice of crime, which is the problem that the present change in Russia is aimed to eliminate. So Mr. Gore should shut his mouth. I think it would be better for all concerned if he'd just do that, once and for all. Maybe he can whisper to Tipper or something, if he feels like talking. But this guy is bad news.

History of the Change Underway in Russia

Anyway, what's happened is this. Russia was systematically destroyed—as the Soviet Union and Russia—actually in a process which goes back to the early 1980s, in which—I was involved in this. I had, from 1977 on, I had become aware—even before then, in 1975—that the Brzezinski crowd was aiming for a provocative nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. I got some of the details on what they were up to. And for that reason, I happened to run as candidate for President of the United States in 1976, with an improvised party called the Labor Party—a sort of a Whig party—and I exposed that the plan of the Brzezinski Administration under Carter had staged that provocation.

My exposing that, succeeded in doing several things. First of all, it stopped it, because the exposure caused a chain reaction in various circles that recognized what was going on, and it stopped. It also made me a target of Brzezinski and company. They wanted to get me killed, for doing such things. But then when Reagan became President, because of a certain personal contact I had with him; I met with his people, who were assembling their administration before the inauguration. And the point was for me to make a wish list of suggestions to the incoming government as to what I thought ought to be done. Among the things on my list was a proposal for what became known as the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative).

I'd been working on this since 1977. The idea was that if the United States and Soviet Union could agree on the development of certain technologies which existed scientifically, that in itself would not prevent a nuclear attack, but the fact that they had agreed to develop such systems would change the policy away from Mutual and Assured Destruction to a new policy. And this would work, particularly if we would use these technologies—which had multiple uses, shall we say—to help developing countries as well as benefit in terms of military application.

Reagan, who, apart from all his other problems, was actually a Roosevelt Democrat by breeding, was struck on this. On economics, he was unreachable. You couldn't touch him on economics; he was just gone. And also, of course, he adapted to Truman and the right wing, in Hollywood, famously, in the post-war period. But on this thing, the SDI, he agreed. There has to be an alternative to MAD [Mutual and Assured Destruction].

So, I was then put in a situation of back-channel discussion with the Soviet Union on exploring this possibility. Reagan at some point—I don't know exactly what point, I think it might have been around January of 1983—finally decided to go with it, and had a meeting with people to make sure that he would say in his speech—in a five-minute segment of his March 23, 1983 speech—that he would say in that speech exactly what I had been saying to the Soviet government in these back-channel discussions. He said it.

Well, Andropov turned it down. Yuri Andropov, the general secretary of the Soviet Union at the time. It was dangerous. Because Andropov was part of something rotten, and Gorbachov was part of the same thing. The connection to Gore was there already, because Gore was a creation of Armand Hammer, and Armand Hammer was a combination of American, Soviet, and British agent all in the one. Had been ever since something like 1919, or something like that. His father was in the jug for abortion, and he went over to negotiate with Lenin; and he became then a triple agent of the United States—through Morgan—the Soviet Union, and the British monarchy. And Gore was a proteégée and a creation of Armand Hammer, so Armand Hammer's connection to the old Soviet system and his use in the matter is tied to this. This guy Gore practically qualifies as a Soviet agent. In the old days, you'd put him in the jug as a Soviet agent. But he was actually an Armand Hammer asset.[FIGURE 21]

Andropov was part of a group, like the Gore group, which were out to steal. They set up a system. Andropov, who moved in 1956, from the foreign ministry side of the Soviet system into the KGB side, set up a kindergarten of young Soviet talent—including Berezovsky, for example—who were sent for training by the British, and sometimes by the Americans, but usually the British, in Western financial methods.

These guys already at that time, seeing the Soviet Union as a lost cause, were plucking the chicken. And what happened is the Soviet Union went to hell, step by step, especially from 1985-86 on, because it was being looted from the inside by this apparatus which was associated with Andropov, who in the meantime had died.

Reaction Against the Looters

When the Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact fell apart, the Soviet Union began to fall apart. What happened is, a looting operation came from the British, the United States, and from inside the former Soviet apparatus of these guys, who later became known as oligarchs. Note they were stealing from their own country, and became billionaires. From being proletarians to billionaires, in a short period of time, by looting their own country.

And this has gone on as a power game, up until the recent time. Russia has been a colony of the looters. But Russia is Russia, and therefore what's come back is Russia.

Now, there are two Russias today. The Soviet Russia is gone. Communist Russia has gone, and it's not coming back. The Communist Party is now largely controlled by the oligarchs. I guess like the U.S. Communist Party used to be controlled by the House of Morgan.

What Russia is today, as I know it—and I think I know it very well because of being on a hit list of the Soviet Union in 1976; and today I have many friends in Russia who know all about that, or a good deal about it—and because of my role then, I've gained a kind of influence and respect after the Soviet Union collapsed, when they recognized who I was and what I had done. So, the Russia today is essentially a Russian Orthodox Russia, not a Communist Russia, not a Soviet Russia. The typical people I know, including people who are the former heads of the KGB and similar kinds of institutions, are generally Russian Orthodox believers. And you generally get two directions. One is the Orthodox of the type from Peter the Great, on; and the other is the Old Believers, but they're Orthodox. That's the characteristic of the institution. The central characteristic is not Communism, it's not Marxism, it's the Russian Orthodox Church and what that implies.

The struggle has been, especially with Putin, to try to make a transition. Remember, he is a former foreign service specialist with the KGB, who specialized in the Dresden and Saxony area on scientific, high-tech operations. He came up through Petrograd to become a significant figure in the apparatus. He's an apparatus figure, but around him are all the institutions of Russia. The institutions of Russia are generally the scientific academies, the military, and a few other institutions. These are predominantly dominated by the Russian Orthodox believers, close to India, with a special relation to China, and so forth. They have been determined to get their country back.

Russian Policy, LaRouche's Role

Russian policy under Putin has three directions to it. One, cooperation if possible with the United States. This is a Russian instinct. Once, the Soviet Union was a power, together with the United States. If the two former great powers can get together, maybe the rest of the world will have a change. Policy number two, is close cooperation with Western Europe, especially Germany, France and so forth, in the development of Eurasia. The China policy, the India policy. That's clear. Third policy: If Cheney remains in power, or what he represents remains in power in the United States, then Russia will be prepared for thermonuclear war with the United States.

Three policies. Now we in the United States have to decide which we want. Do we want nuclear war, fighting against a whole group of nations, including Russia with some very sophisticated weapons, China, India and some other countries? Do we want, several years down the line, such a war? If we don't, what do we do? We talk to the Russian government on those terms.

If you simply tell the Russian government, assure them that I'm going to be the next President, we won't have a problem. It's a simple fact. Why? Because my relationship with this is: I was recognized as a genius by leading circles in Russia because of my work in economics, on what is called the science of physical economy; and they recognize that I have been right, where the Soviets had been wrong. And so a whole section of the scientific academies welcomed me.

For example, in 1996, I was invited to a meeting in Moscow with a group of celebrities of the Russian system. It was a public meeting, it was videotaped at that time, and the purpose of it was to signal to President Clinton that what I was offering as a policy of cooperation with Russia and so forth, was something they were offering to the United States—using me as a figure who represents my own policy, and they were simply endorsing what I'm saying as something they're interested in. And chiefly because of Gore and Gore's influence, things came against me and against that policy approach. Other things developed in the same period. So we lost it.

But that's still the same thing. I was invited by [Sergei] Glazyev when he was Chairman of the Economics Committee of the Duma of the Russian Federation, to give a presentation to the Duma. This was a major event. I laid out there—and in other meetings we had in Europe and elsewhere—laid out my policy. And that policy is the direction in which he's going, his circles are going, which is the direction I propose. That's one example of a number from around the world, of what happens if I'm President, and this is the policy which I tried to, shall we say, persuade people around the Clinton Administration to adopt. It's the right policy today.

In this case, don't sit back and say, what are they going to do? Predict what they're going to do? No. Why don't you take a hand in determining what they're going to do? Why don't you do the thing, knowing you have the options, when they're offering something which is in our interest, why not accept it? And that's the way to look at it.

What's going on, now, between the Duma elections, there will be a change in the composition of Russian politics. It's already started. The day of the oligarchs is gone. And that's what these guys are screaming about. They want to steal it. Now they're going to a second phase in March, when the Presidential elections occur in Russia, in which Putin will be running for re-election. It looks as if he might make it, the way things are right now. That means that, by the end of March, the world situation will change—for many reasons, including the present financial crisis onrushing. It will also change because the Russian process of change of direction of government, away from the day of the oligarch, will have been completed, and you will now see a new Russia, with new commitments and new orders. And the ideas which Glazyev represents and where I have a lot of agreement with him, will be the ideas coming from there.

The policy of Russia will be, under those conditions, cooperation with Western Europe, based on a relationship to Germany and France, in particular; cooperation relations between Western Europe, China, India, Korea, and Japan and so forth, across Eurasia. This is the Eurasian development orientation. That will be the policy of Russia, as of March of this year. And that's my policy. Why not? I've been pushing it long enough.

A Political Movement in the Primaries

Barbara Lett Simmons: Greetings. Great speech, Mr. LaRouche. More history in that hour and a half than our students get in 12 years in school. I want to thank you for being on my education and learning radio station last week. I think you gave to Americans, to people in particular in D.C., some history in those 12 minutes that they hadn't received in their newspapers in the last six months, to say nothing of the last three years.

My question is one that you answered on the show, and that had to do with the primary in the District of Columbia, the first primary in the 2004 election year. We all know that the Democratic Party is resistant to change. Who knows it best is Senator Levin from the state of Michigan, who tried desperately to get some consideration of a resolution in the DNC meeting, to simply revolve the first primaries, so that no one state cast in concrete, such as New Hampshire and Iowa, would always be the first primaries. Those two states, as any of us know looking at the demography, are not at all typical of American states in general; and why they would use these two unique ones to always be the kind of cast in stone, is illogical, imbecilic, and I haven't figured out why, when you've got a dumb idea, you keep perpetuating it.

Anyway, Senator Levin got absolutely—they wouldn't even consider it. It wasn't even up for discussion! You know, Levin is a very respected Senator. And, as Senators go, in our present Senate, we all know that he's one of the better ones.

The D.C. primary has been legislated by our city government. Now, we all know that there may be some questions as to whether elected officials have any right to introduce legislation that will, in fact, bear upon a party's official program. They did it; and we know that the national Democratic Party did not approve of it.

I believe that it was done for the same reason that I did not cast my Electoral College vote, in 2000, for Mr. Gore. Because all of us, as educators, know that there is a window—a particular window that may never open again—for information and knowledge to take place. The master of that is Mr. LaRouche; and he's always seeking to fill that window when it occurs—because it occurs for different people at different times. . . .

I was trying to seize upon that brief window to educate people, not only here in the District, but across this country, that the District of Columbia is a colony—has been; continues to fulfill all the responsibilities of citizenship, but fails to receive the privileges of citizenship, such as having representation. . . .

So the Primary will be held. And I think it's terribly important that people participate in that primary. That voting—we have to put this in the context of what black people in this country, in particular; and all people in this country, in general, know: that the vote is a terribly significant weapon.

The mission of the Primary on Jan. 13, in which Mr. LaRouche will be one of the candidates—there are only four others out of those nine, that will be participating, because you know what the others have decided. They've opted to ingratiate themselves with the status quo and the leadership of the DNC, rather than to take a principled stand and participate in an opportunity which is given to them, to show that we aren't proud, as the greatest democracy on planet Earth, to have, in fact, a colony as its capital! There's a great paradox there!

I would like for Mr. LaRouche to just speak briefly, if he would. He did it on the show. I think it's important that people know how a man with a mission feels about democracy, and the kind of economy that will give us a humane and just world; and who wants to start it here in America.

LaRouche: There is something I would like to say to that, in addition to what I've said. In the case of Philadelphia, where we were invited to help the mayor defeat John Ashcroft there, in the mayoral election: What happened was that Harold James, on [Oct.] 22, in the evening when we had this meeting, discussed this. He asked me if I was committed to do something. I said, "Absolutely. It's a go for me." So he put together, with others, a package; and I sent my requested statement on the matter to a meeting that was held in Philadelphia.

Now, the bringing together of these forces, aided by the participation of members of my youth movement, had the effect of crystallizing the situation, to transform an "If—no—maybe so" election into a landslide victory for Mayor Street over John Ashcroft, which is sort of a fun thing to happen—a very good thing to happen, these days.

The difference is this; and it's a difference in politics. From populist politics to real politics. The function of politics is to get the people of a country—or at least, a large number of them—to understand that they, as an individual, as an immortal person, have a stake in the future of humanity in that country. And we express this in terms of an idea. They say, "This idea is needed for this country (or this locality) at this time." And the way they go at it, is not to try to get the number of votes to say "yes" or "no"; because "yes" or "no" doesn't mean anything. Many people, when they vote, go into the voting booth, and they don't know what they're going to vote for until they get in there! And they're surprised at what they did after they get out of there.

So the casting of the vote is not, in itself, a sacred act. It's often, of itself, a disgusting one, when you see the result. What is important is that you organize people, individually, around ideas. And what you then have is a movement for ideas. The most famous case in recent history, of that, is Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King understood, as others in the Civil Rights movement, in leading positions, did not understand, the principle of a movement. Martin said, repeatedly and in many ways, "I've been to the mountaintop." That is, they may kill me, but I've been to the mountaintop, and what we are doing will never die.

It's that quality of leadership, which he expressed and got others to echo, which represented real leadership; which created, not people saying "yes" and "no," raising their hand or not raising their hand; but a movement, a movement around an idea, dedicated to a mission. And what was the mission? Was it the mission of freeing people from oppression? No, it was a higher mission! It was for the cause of humanity! The kind of world we want to live in.

And the key thing here: We've got a lot of poor people in the Washington, D.C. area and around it. Very poor people; very abused and demoralized people. What does their vote count? Well, we want their vote to count. But what should the vote be? Just a vote? Or should it be an affirmation of their humanity? Saying, "Hey, buddy, we're human! You've got to pay attention to us."

And we are coming out as a movement, not as a bunch of voters to be polled outside the poll, but as a movement, to move in and let them know we're there. We are a movement. We are no longer going to be stepped on. We are a movement! And that's what we need in politics in this country today. We need a sense of mission. And the test of the ability to do something with this country, is to go to the poorest people in the country; the ones with the least; the have-nots; and if you can not make them a movement, you have not touched the heart of the country.

And what we want, is we want a real mob-scene. Not a violent scene, but a real mob-scene. Where you get the heaving of a movement, coming out of that part of the city; the heaving of a movement that will not be suppressed. This movement gets out there and heaves on Election Day. It moves in on the polls!

Moderator Debra Hanania-Freeman: Lyn, the last question comes from a Democratic consultant.

Mr. LaRouche, I've watched you deploy young people in two slightly different campaigns; one in California, and one in Philadelphia. In each place they were deployed against a Republican opponent, and they did a very effective job, so effective that some people think that it was part of a clandestine cooperation between you and the Democratic National Committee. [laughter] I wish that were true, but I know that it's not!

It appears to me that the tactic you are deploying now in the D.C. primary—and I would assume in future primaries—is that what you are saying is that, if the DNC doesn't come around and do the right thing, and include you in the discussion, that you simply plan on turning this election upside-down. Is that what you plan on doing?

LaRouche: No, what's going to happen is this. Reality is going to strike. Any part of the Democratic Party that doesn't get with reality is doomed. Not by my hand, but by their own.

Look, in terms of what counts—not deep-pockets' money, but in terms of contributions and support from individual citizens; that is, in terms of street support—I am second-ranking among the Democratic candidates of the whole field right now.

Now, I also represent nothing but, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, a revival of the Franklin Roosevelt approach to a crisis of a similar type. That is supposed to be the Democratic Party. That is what most people believe the Democratic Party more or less corresponds to, despite the so-called "suburban strategy," which is really the sewer strategy—but anyway, "suburban" is a nice term for sewer.

So what happens then to the Democratic Party if it continues to exclude me? It dies! Because there is no one—if I'm not running as an acknowledged candidate of the party by the party machine, then none of the candidates will ever make it.

That's why this strange poll said, of the candidates who are running—acknowledged by them, by name, by the Democratic candidates—each and all would be defeated by Bush; but an unknown candidate would beat Bush.

That's what it amounts to. If they don't vote for me or don't include me in the process, they are dead meat.

Have fun.

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