LAROUCHE'S BOSTON PLATFORM
A Real Democratic
Platform for November 2004
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
July 16, 2004
Letter of Transmittal
To The Citizens of the U.S.A.
My Friends:
For the sake of the Democratic Party, and for all of the citizens of the U.S.A. and their posterity, an unusually tough Platform —the attached Platform!— must be placed in general circulation at time of the Boston nominating convention. In presenting and adopting this, I am resolved that we must defeat the attempted continuation of the Bush-Cheney (or, is it not the Cheney-Bush?) Administration, by, first, dumping Cheney from government immediately (otherwise, there might not be a November 2004 election), and by, second, providing a new President and a new, bipartisan coalition within the Congress, without DeLay.
All that we might attempt to do to those ends, would become meaningless, unless, as I insist in this attached Platform, our Party abandoned the fantasy-life which has controlled the relevant majority of popular opinion, and of the mass media, during the most recent Presidential primary campaigns. To win today, our people must finally recognize certain crucial facts upon which even the continued existence of our nation, and more, now, urgently, depends.
Franklin Roosevelt said, in a circumstance similar to our onrushing situation today: We have nothing to fear as much as fear itself. This means, today, that we must state, now as then, that the greatest threat to our nation is the hysterical denials of reality expressed by many political leaders, and within the population generally. As Roosevelt said then, these expressions of fear, which are typically expressed as denial of that which is actually to be feared, are now, themselves, the greatest danger to us all. These denials are the delusions expressed by words such as: "They would never let it happen!" Or, "We have to go with the system!" "Don't give me big ideas; I have to worry about what is happening in my local community!"
Our people must be encouraged, therefore, to rise out of their personal foxholes of denial, where they have been waiting for reality to drop hand-grenades into their present ideological hiding-places. Our citizens must stop thinking like the habitual underdogs who roll in the aromas of popular self-delusions; our Party, acting in the tradition of that great President, must give them the courage to face, and conquer the interconnection of the deadly reality of an upsurge of economic depression and spreading world war today.
For example, there are certain leading political figures today, whom I shall not name here, who, it seems, were they parents who found themselves in a burning hotel, would argue as follows. One would say calmly, but resolutely: "We have to get out of here! Let's pick up and go." The other would yell hysterically: "Stop talking like that; you might upset the baby!" We must be calm, but bold, in resolving upon these actions which our nation needs from us today.
Thus, in summary: Our nation, and the world, are presently gripped by an onrushing, global, monetary-financial breakdown crisis, an economic crisis far more ominous, with graver uncertainties, than any similar threat in the world's recent memory. For those who actually know modern history and the present age of nuclear weapons, this crisis represents a greater threat-potential than that unleashed during the 1929-1945 interval. In this time of crisis, there are serious problems which, unless corrected, might not only doom the presumed Kerry Presidential candidacy, but send our nation into ruin. This ruin were probably inevitable, unless the Party's candidate were willing to adopt certain repeatedly tested principles from our nation's history of past crises, such as those of Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency, which could bring us safely through this peril to happier times. Therefore, I present the attached Platform.
We must win the Presidency; but, to do that, we must also fight with the knowledge that that is a victory which is by no means inevitable at this moment. While we fight for the Presidency as that reality which the present situation demands, we also need, urgently, the election of a coalition of common intent among a clear majority of both the Democratic and Republican members of the Congress. To win under the circumstances of the weeks and months ahead, the Party must now, suddenly, change its way of doing business.
The distinguishing, characteristic feature of the following draft Platform, is that it places the emphasis on the issue of the kind of future we intend for those young adults, such as those between the ages of 18 and 25, who are the emblem of our nation's future today.
Fraternally Yours,
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
A Democratic Manifest
Today's globally extended European civilization is already mired in the end-phase of what has been a more deadly repetition of the type of crisis which gripped the world, during economic depression and the rise and fall of fascism, from 1918 through the fall of the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and Japan, in 1945.
To see that connection more clearly, now, let four adult generations pass in review in your memory of that period of history, since that Versailles Treaty which set the stage for not only the so-called "Great Depression" of 1929-1933, but for that wave of fascist tyrannies which spread, like bubonic plague, across the continent of western and central Europe during the 1922-1945 interval.
First in that parade of memory, comes the generation of young men who went to war in President Wilson's time. Second, the generation of young men and women which went to war during President Franklin Roosevelt's and, again, President Truman's time. Third, the generation of our young adults which went to the folly of the U.S. war in Indo-China. Now comes the generation of adult youth menaced by Vice President Dick "Pandora" Cheney's unleashing of his doctrine, his pestilence of perpetual, preventive, nuclear-tipped warfare. Let all, in turn, pass in review before your eyes. Ask yourself, then: "To where is our republic marching now?"
Now, the world is already plunging into another global monetary-financial collapse, a collapse far worse even than that of the remembered 1929-1933 interval. 1933 began the post-Coolidge-Hoover period, during which the incomes of the people of the U.S.A. had already, suddenly dropped by one-half under Hoover's leadership. Like the crisis which accompanied the collapse of the post-1918 Versailles monetary-financial system then, the January 2001 inauguration of President George W. Bush, Jr., has reaped a harvest of folly, a plunge toward that new general crisis now menacing today's next President of the U.S.A. The January 2001 inauguration had already brought us into not only the threat of the spread of virtual perpetual warfare, as the end of the 1920s and early 1930s did. It has also brought, already, under the incumbent Administration, the presently onrushing resurgence, today, of that same fascist international, of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Laval, and other beast-men of the European continent, which was already the great menace of the 1918-1945 interval.
The most notable of the contrary, hopeful facts to be remembered, as those generations pass in review before your memory, is the election of our President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an election which not only rescued us from the terrible depression which we had inherited from the Coolidge and Hoover Presidencies, but provided the absolutely decisive margin of world leadership which prevented the Adolf Hitler-led forces of fascism from putting the planet under a world-empire which would have ruled and ruined us still today. The situation we face today, is not exactly like that which our President faced in March 1933; but, the principles which we deployed, under his leadership, over the interval of his incumbency, from March 1933 until April 12, 1945, are the relevant, historically defined, constitutional precedents of reference, for crafting the kinds of initiatives needed, right now, to pull our republic out of the presently deepening economic depression, that we might step back onto the road to recovery.
Therefore, let the Democratic Party become, once again, the party of President Franklin Roosevelt. We shall not simply copy that President's policies; but, we must remember those actions, and recall those tested constitutional principles, which brought us out of World Depression and World War, to emerge from the moment at which he died, as a U.S.A. which had been lifted from deep depression, to become the most productive, the most prosperous, and, if imperfect, most generous nation of the world of that time.
1. The Present Crisis
This present, post-FDR world of ours, is now living in the still resonant aftermath of a closely packed set of horrors, horrors including the terrifying 1962 missiles-crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It was in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy, that our nation made a turn, away from its earlier role, as the great producer nation of our planet, into a kind of long, dreary march downward, into the gullies and swamps of "post-industrial" utopianism. Later, during the interval from Richard Nixon's November 1968 election, through January 1981, we destroyed most of the architecture of those national policies which had resurrected our nation, Phoenix-like, from the fires of folly associated with the time of the Presidencies of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and of grey eminence Andrew Mellon.
Out of that 1968-1981 interval of change for the worse, we went downhill, step by step, guided by the decadence of that floating-exchange-rate monetary system launched by the Nixon Administration. We were transformed so, into becoming, today, a caricature of an ancient imperial Rome which had led Italy of that time into the disgusting notoriety of a culture of bread and circuses. We, like that decadent ancient Rome, have become a caricature of our former self, sucking our national subsistence chiefly from those foreign nations which we were able to pillage through the mechanisms of that post-1971-1972, floating-exchange-rate international monetary-financial, and free-trade system. We have largely destroyed our system of agriculture and industry which had been the object of envy, or admiration, of the pre-Nixon Administration world.
Looking backward from today, a lapsed-time view of the physical-economic geography of our nation, from above, over the 1926-2004 interval to date, shows an accelerating desolation of vast regions of our nation and its people, during, especially the 1977-2004 interval to date. During that time, farms, industries, basic economic infrastructure generally, our health-care system, our educational system, have been ruined to a degree that those who remember from the first two post-war decades, would weep in despair at the ruin which the past forty years of change from a producer society, to a predatory entertainment society, have done to our once great nation.
As a result of these wicked changes in our national character, those among us who entered young adulthood during the latter half of the 1960s, entered the economic life of our nation with little or no adult experience of the making of the kinds of policies needed for long-term success of a production-oriented national economy. Some of that generation may have worked for a time on farms, or in factory or construction jobs, but, from the top down, the orientation of the economy in which they were employed was less and less to those principles of scientific-technological and related increase of the productive powers of labor, a policy which had characterized our nation's long-standing policies of recovery, over the 1933-1963 interval, following Coolidge's and Hoover's Depression. With the onset of the official war in Indo-China, and the first step, during 1966-1967, in taking down President Kennedy's space-oriented science-driver program, our national economic and social policies have turned in the continuing direction of the Coolidge-Hoover legacy, and even much worse than that.
With President Nixon's fatal decision of mid-August 1971, and the Nixon Administration's leading role in the 1972 decision to transform the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into the engine of a floating-exchange-rate world monetary system, our national economy has undergone a transition from the growth of the immediate post-war decades, to successive downward directions of change, such as, first, attrition, and then, willful destruction of our nation's basic economic infrastructure, and of the system of regulation which had been indispensable for the long wave of economic recovery, from 1933 through 1963, and slightly beyond.
When we speak of "prosperity" during the recent decade, we are speaking of the largely illusory, debt-ridden appearances of not actual wealth, but merely the financial delusion called "the wealth effect." This delusion of prosperity is chiefly limited to the ranks of the largely suburban, upper, fabulously debt-ridden, 20% of our nation's family households. The conditions of life of the lower 80%, including our senior citizens, has been consistently downward, in net physical terms of homelessness, lost health-care, and the like, over the measured interval since 1977. If we study the transformation of the physical-economic geography of the entire territory of our republic, per square hundred miles, by county, and per hundred family households, over the interval since approximately 1926, we see from this up-and-down pattern, the great destruction of our nation's economy as a whole during the recent forty years.
If we compare the official and related reports of alleged prosperity during the recent decade, for example, with the physical picture of the nation and its population and areas taken as a whole, there never was an actual net improvement in the U.S. economy as a whole, but only a nominal improvement in combined purchasing power of income and incurred debt, a merely apparent prosperity experienced by a shrinking percentage of those households and communities which have become, increasingly, exceptions to the national economy as a whole. We have tended to argue in defense of the delusion, that if the picture of the suburban class is one of relative prosperity, then the nation is prosperous; the growing, stricken majority of the population, our great American economic underdog class, does not enjoy the luxury of agreeing with that delusion of the so-called "suburban class."
As our national current accounts deficit reflects this, to that degree there have been some evidences of wealth at the point of consumption, this wealth is largely an imported product, created, more and more, by virtual slave labor abroad, labor employed as so-called "outsourcing" replacements for employment of firms and labor-force here at home.
The principal evidence referenced in support of the mass-media-promoted delusion of alleged U.S. national prosperity, is the gains taken on financial markets, gains generated in large degree from the world of gamblers' side-bets called "financial derivatives." So, a world whose net output is estimated in several tens of trillions of dollars, is propped up by the illusion generated by an unpayable mass of financial-derivatives debt running toward hundreds of quadrillions of dollars! That great financial bubble is ripe for popping. When it pops, the reality of a world economic depression far worse than that of 1928-1933 experience can no longer be concealed, even from the most passionately credulous of our native fools.
So, now, as during 1928-1933, from the launching of what became known as "The Young Plan," through the February 1933 Reichstag Fire used, as a terrorist incident, to make Adolf Hitler Germany's dictator, so, the reality of the onrushing economic doom of the world's present, floating-exchange-rate monetary-financial system, is not only the economic reality of our global situation today; it is also the cockpit of crisis from which otherwise unthinkable wars erupt.
2. The War Policy of the Present Administration
Look at the war-policy of the current Bush 43 Administration in that historical light.
The history, and pre-history, of the recent, continuing, and spreading, still presently worsening, asymmetric warfare in the Southwest Asia and other regions, is the most prominent current example of the way in which international oligarchical-financier circles operate, such as those which backed the orchestration of a fraudulent declaration of war which was concocted largely through Vice President Dick Cheney's office. This is an example of the common, and also contrasting features of the way in which the oligarchy's agents, such as Adolf Hitler and Cheney, respectively, transformed a period of systemic breakdown of a world monetary-financial system, into the launching of the kind of program of intended perpetual, planet-wide warfare, which, unless prevented, would lead, today, not to an imperial military victory, but into the depths of a generations-long, planetary new dark age.
The political opportunist's lustful desire to be deceived into supporting the relevant such aspects of war-policy, as some members of our Congress did, illustrates the common features of the lurch toward generalized warfare in both, contrasted, present and past periods of global monetary-financial crises. This is a typical situation in which underdogs blame others for the way they are going along to get along, when our true political leaders, unlike those underdogs, blame themselves for not having broken away soon enough from such cowardly complicity.
The rise of powerful and tyrannical monsters, such as the Roman Emperor Caligula or Adolf Hitler to power, does not necessarily represent an achievement of their powers of intellect. The rise to power by which that thuggish, carpet-chewing type, the tool Cheney of today, came to play his recent role, happened in the following way.
The fall of the Soviet System, over the interval 1989-1992, established the U.S. under President George H.W. Bush, as the sole, functioning military superpower of the planet. Among some in both the British Commonwealth and the U.S.A. itself, this strategic development was seen as the opportunity to resume what had been the Truman Administration's doctrine of "world government through a virtual monopoly of terror, through nuclear arsenals." That had been President Truman's doctrine, as designed by Bertrand Russell, and adopted by the original, Truman-era Committee on the Present Danger.
However, back then, the mess which the Korean War became, combined with the news that the Soviet Union had developed a thermonuclear weapon prior to the U.S.A., had ended the Truman era and its war policy for decades to come, paving the way for the new, superseding doctrine of Bertrand Russell's crew, a policy of world management through the terror of mutual and assured thermonuclear destruction (MAD). This replacement for Truman's nuclear policy was called "detente." The mid-1970s revival of the Committee on the Present Danger was, fortunately, short-lived, chiefly because of the impact of what became President Reagan's adoption of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). That Committee of nuclear desperados, and its nuclear-war-seeking policies, has been recently revived again, in the environment created by the influence of the same circles behind Vice President Cheney et al.
Under the Bush 41 Administration, where Cheney served as Secretary of Defense, that Administration recognized the folly of Cheney's military doctrines, and squelched them, at least in large part, at that time. Under the present Bush Administration, under a less able President, George W. Bush, Jr., who has been, from the start, virtually a bad-tempered mere puppet of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the policy of perpetual war which had been rejected by the Bush 41 Administration, is policy today. That policy, crafted in the mode of preventive nuclear warfare, has been that Administration's continuing policy, not beginning Sept. 11, 2001, but from the day of the current Administration's inauguration, to this present moment. The Afghanistan caper produced conditions today worse than at the start; Cheney's crew produced the Iraq war, the planned attack on Syria, the planned nuclear attack on Iran and North Korea, and the exploitation of the potential for war against China, all of which, and more, are merely typical of what U.S. policy is, and would be, each day Cheney et al. are permitted to remain in office.
2.1 Cheney, Blair, and War
It must be made clear, that the war which Vice President Cheney and British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently launched against Iraq is not "a war." Iraq had been selected, from the January 2001 beginning of the Bush 43 Administration, as an opportunistic target of choice. That targetting of Iraq was set into motion as part of a doctrine of perpetual warfare throughout this planet. This is sometimes called "preventive nuclear war," which was intended to become, during a second Bush 43 Administration, a generalized spread of warfare throughout Southwest, South, and East Asia, into the territories of the former Soviet Union.
This was not exclusively a U.S. policy. Key elements of that policy had been set into motion, in concert with Blair's government, while Cheney had been still an official of Halliburton. The fact that Prime Minister Blair's Britain was the ostensibly weaker military power in this enterprise, should not blind us to the fact that the design of this policy owes more to that liberal imperialist faction of the Fabian Society, which deploys Cheney's accomplice Blair, than to the dupes and other supporters of Cheney et al. inside the U.S.A. The U.S. has been the principal military instrument of this perpetual-war policy, but Blair represents a factor which is equally significant, if not more so, for the design of the long-range doctrine itself.
As we have approached the assembly of the Boston convention, this coming week, the implications of the continuing asymmetric war in Iraq as such, must be understood within the larger, global framework of a Cheney-Blair doctrine of perpetual warfare, of "preventive nuclear warfare." The following observations on the Iraq war itself, must be read in light of that broader context. What must be said about that Iraq war itself, and Cheney's role in it, must be understood against that background.
Some more simple-minded, ill-informed citizens, who do not really understand the real world of today, would argue: "Therefore, vote Bush out of office, and use Cheney's bad reputation to help drag Bush down." Such childish arguments as that should not be treated as determining factors in making the relevant policies of government, at least not under conditions as dangerous as those now. Every day Cheney is not expelled from government, is a day in which the possibility of free and honest variety of November U.S. general election is increasingly in doubt.
It used to be said of automobile accidents, and the accidental shooting of innocent victims, that the problem is not the vehicle, but the "nut behind the wheel," or the "fool holding the gun." Cheney is the homicidal, hysterically compulsive nut behind the wheel, and the vehicle is the instrumentality of that poor, admittedly mean-spirited and intellectually challenged President George W. Bush, Jr., Cheney's virtual puppet. Cheney, the "nut behind the wheel," is the menace which must be removed from the situation if the viable body of constitutional government is to be protected.
Of this we might say: A cobra without its poison sac—a Cheney-free Bush White House—is not the same thing as a cobra fully equipped with its poisonous bite. Getting Cheney out of government is the primary issue for all clearly thinking people. President Bush as such, is a problem of less crucial significance; one does not remove an epidemic disease by killing the individual, infected patient. Without any reasonable doubt, President Bush should be replaced; but Vice President Cheney should be excised before our constitutional form of government is destroyed, excised as soon prior to the scheduled November election as possible. Cheney in power should be seen in the night-time light cast by Hermann Goering's Reichstag Fire, the coup d'etat of February 1933 which made World War II virtually inevitable, the fire used to enable the implementation of the infamous Emergency Law of February 1933.
However, although removing Cheney may save our form of government from the immediate short-term danger, that alone will not make the world safe from a slightly longer-term danger as bad as, or even worse than, Hitler's fascism, during the not-far-distant months ahead. The connection between monetary-financial crises and world wars must be efficiently understood.
2.2 The Imperial Impulse for War
Since an ancient time, long before the wars between Greece and the Persian Empire, what has emerged as today's globally extended modern European civilization, has been dominated by a still-continuing struggle for the establishment of a modern sovereign form of true nation-state republic, against various forms of culture in which a ruling minority, as in Lycurgus's Sparta, subjugated the majority of mankind to the status of virtual helots, as either herded or hunted human cattle. The modern sovereign nation-state republic, based on the primary obligation of government to serve the general welfare of the entire population and its posterity, actually emerged in three successive actions: the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and the 1766-1789 birth of the world's first true constitutional republic, based upon the natural-law principle of the general welfare, our U.S.A.
Since 1776-1789, the pivotal feature of globally extended modern European civilization, has been the struggle of imperial interests, either to crush our republic, or to corrupt it into becoming a thing of their own likeness. During the interval since the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which established the British East India Company as an empire in fact, our republic's principal existential foes were the rival British (Anglo-Dutch Liberal) and (pro-feudalist reactionary) Habsburg empires and their allies. The principal adversary powers facing our republic from within European civilization today, are the outgrowths of that rivalry among those European imperial predators which were our republic's enemies of the 1763-1848 interval. Still today, that residual oligarchical defect in the European system, that source of continuing conflict between our republic and its European partners must be understood, and overcome through appropriate forms of cooperation in combatting the present world crisis.
Although republics have emerged, and developed in often desirable ways in continental Europe since 1789, largely under the continuing, beneficial impact of European sympathy, even within the United Kingdom itself, for the aims of the American revolutionary struggle against British tyranny, the setbacks driving continental Europe back to the feudalist tradition of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal influence, have brought about a dangerous situation today.
This is a situation in which the nations of Europe today are hovering at the brink of abandoning their national sovereignties in favor of some supranational imitation of the Biblical Tower of Babel, a politically suicidal scheme slyly proposed by Tony Blair's Robert Cooper, and others to their continental neighbors; if that scheme were tolerated, the effect would be to tend to wipe the cultures of continental Europe, ultimately, from the map of future history. At the same time, the nations of continental Europe bear the oxen's yoke, the yoke of the overreaching, financier-oligarchical power of so-called "independent central banking systems." These are the systems which have been established as reflections of the imperial influence of those presently hegemonic, Anglo-Dutch Liberal forms of monetary-financial systems of Europe which were modelled upon the practices of the Venetian financier oligarchy.
Thus, it was this same set of political-cultural weaknesses of the European political systems so expressed, especially the overreaching role of so-called independent central banking systems, which had left continental Europe so pitiably vulnerable to the 1922-1945 spread of fascist tyrannies in continental Europe. Those are the vulnerabilities of Europe under present conditions.
When the inevitable crisis of 1928-1933 struck in Europe itself, the challenge to those governments was to do as President Franklin Roosevelt did, beginning with his March 1933 inauguration: to assert the natural sovereign power of the modern nation-state to put bankrupt private financial systems into receivership, as needed, for reorganization. In Europe, the 1931 establishment of the Bank for International Settlements and the creation of a related cartelization of Germany's war-reparations debt, created the circumstance in which the spread of fascist regimes across western and central continental Europe became almost inevitable. Those developments of 1931-1933 consolidated the power of the financier interests associated with the backers of fascism then, the Synarchist International behind Mussolini, Hitler, et al. The same choice is, essentially, the challenge of choosing between freedom and fascism, world-wide, today.
Whereas, unlike Europe of that time, despite the existence of our own Federal Reserve System, which was introduced to the U.S. by agents of Britain's King Edward VII, President Franklin Roosevelt, from his first day in office, invoked the legacy of our American System of political-economy, which was invoked by him to prevent us from becoming a fascist nation, too, and to enable the U.S. to play its leading role in preventing the Hitler-led alliance from conquering the planet as a whole.
So, within the institutions of power of the U.S.A. itself, there are two, historically determined, long-range tendencies in conflict with one another. One tendency, radiated largely through oligarchical financier interests which mimic the European models of government, is pro-imperialist by the organic disposition expressed in the existence of so-called "independent" central banking systems. The British liberal imperialists of Prime Minister Blair's government are typical of this imperialist impulse, as that impulse exists as a strong political force today, on both shores of the Atlantic. The opponent of that oligarchical influence, is the constitutional tradition associated with our American System of political-economy, the System underlying the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, like President John Quincy Adams before him, carried the impulse to make the world secure for ourselves, by fostering the spread of a community of principle among respectively perfectly sovereign nation-state republics. Our continued existence as a republic depends now upon our renewal of that President's commitment, in the crisis-circumstances of today.
Such was the conflict between the followers of the American System policy of President Franklin Roosevelt and the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model of those, like the Averell Harriman, the MacArthur-hating, influential associate of President Harry Truman, whose bank had rushed to the financial aid of Hitler's Nazi Party. This was the conflict between the Classical American military tradition of Generals of the Army Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and implicitly pro-imperialist impulses expressed by their adversaries among the pro-nuclear-war utopians, then, as now. This is the conflict today, between wild-eyed utopians such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the leading military professionals' circles who warned, with prophetic accuracy, against the follies of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's lunatic war-policies.
This conflict of sovereign nation-state with empire, was the motivating issue behind the work of the British Prince of Wales, the later King Edward VII, who, together with the British Fabian Society, bears sole historical moral responsibility for orchestrating what became known as World War I. This same motive was the impulse, supplied by Adolf Hitler's sponsor, the Bank of England's Montagu Norman, which had set into motion the fascist movement which came to be dominated by the Hitler insurgency during the course of the 1922-1945 interval. That is the same imperial motive behind the policies which Vice President Cheney and his and his wife's cronies in the government of Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Robert Cooper represent today.
It was inevitable, that the collapse of the factor of deterrence represented by the existence of a Soviet thermonuclear power, had prevented the full-blown recklessness expressed as the global imperial impulse toward perpetual imperial warfare, of what is called the "utopian," or imperial faction, in British, U.S.A. and other governments today. The tempting collapse of the Soviet power, combined with the arrival of what had been the inevitable general monetary-financial collapse of the planet today, have created the circumstances of crisis, comparable to 1918-1933, which set into motion the imperial impulse toward perpetual warfare.
This situation requires two general preventive measures immediately. First, that the imperial utopian policies symptomized by Vice President Cheney's antics, and those of his accomplice Tony Blair, be stepped on, very, very hard, without compromise, immediately. Second, that the presently erupting global monetary-financial breakdown crisis be addressed with methods echoing the measures taken, from 1933 on, by President Franklin Roosevelt.
2.3 U.S. Military Policy
The present key for defining a safe strategic future for the U.S.A., is examination of the fundamental difference in strategic outlook between President Franklin Roosevelt, and his successor Harry S Truman.
Roosevelt was clear in his statements to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on post-war strategic policy. Roosevelt rejected the "British Eighteenth-Century methods" of Lord Shelburne and such of Shelburne's flunkies as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham; he projected, instead, a world rebuilt by "American methods," by the methods of what U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton identified as "The American System of political-economy." This meant a U.S. commitment to an immediate post-war program of both liberating the nations held victim to the colonialist tradition, and the development of the efficient sovereignty of those regions of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, by "American methods" of large-scale engineering of basic economic infrastructure.
Truman, almost instantly, on the death of Roosevelt, committed the U.S. to the anti-Roosevelt policies of neo-colonialism of Winston Churchill et al.
As John Quincy Adams, in his capacity as U.S. Secretary of State, emphasized in his shaping of the so-called Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the U.S. perspective for the neighboring states of our Hemisphere, was the establishment of a community of principle among the sovereign states of the Americas, a community founded upon the acquired power of the U.S.A. itself to assist in defending those regions below our borders from such predatory forces as the British Empire and the British rivals and allies, among the circles of the Habsburg tyrant Prince Metternich. This policy was revived with full vigor by President Franklin Roosevelt, as by his "Good Neighbor" doctrine, and the sundry treaties with those neighbors to which the U.S. committed itself under that Roosevelt's Presidency. Roosevelt's quarrel with Churchill, over the doctrine for the post-war world as a whole, was nothing other than a natural outgrowth of the same policy set forth for the Americas by John Quincy Adams and Roosevelt himself. That must be the thrust of U.S. strategic and foreign policy for the world of today.
The increase of the world's population, and the urgency of accelerated scientific and technological progress which that entails, have produced a current setting in which war as practiced as an instrument of national policy during pre-1945 history, is no longer a feasible proposition. The kind of strategic situation on this planet, which the toleration of Cheney's perpetual war policies would ensure, would be a kind of asymmetric warfare in which the weaponry of the post-1945 era, partisan and other forms of irregular combat, blended with weapons of the present stage of the nuclear era, would mean that Cheney's or similar imperial policies could have no different consequence than the plunge of the entire planet into a prolonged new dark age.
The technological features of this situation do not preclude, but, rather, require the development and maintenance of capable means of Classical forms of strategic defense in depth; but, the kinds of utopian warfare which the Bush and Blair governments have unleashed since, in fact, January 2001, could have no predictable consequence but the unleashing of a planetary new dark age. The deteriorating present situation throughout Southwest Asia as a whole, today, is partly a result of the folly of the way in which war was orchestrated and conducted there; but, the situation emerging throughout the region augurs something gruesomely awful throughout both that region as a whole, and far beyond.
The broader implication is that we must rid the planet of empiricist Thomas Hobbes' and like philosophies from the practices and thinking of governments. Empires, of any form, can no longer be tolerated, nor could human nature long tolerate the folly of supranational Towers of Babel as bloc-systems. The essential strategic requirement of this planet as a whole, is the development of a community of principle among respectively sovereign nation-state republics. The mission of capable preparation of strategic defense, must be the service of that strategic mission. Nothing other than that could reverse the presently accelerating drift of the planet as a whole into a new dark age.
For deep reasons considered at a later point in this draft, the key to the cause of peace on this planet today, is the establishment of a system of respectively autonomous nation-state republics, committed to a common interest in the peaceful development and cooperation among perfectly sovereign nation-states, all for the purpose of promoting the improvement of the human condition both of each nation, and of all of them, for generations yet to come. The power of such an agreement to do good, as our Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin emphasized this, is the force which must become the guarantor of peaceful relations among states. That represents the physical power of nations; more important, it represents that moral commitment from which the relevant physical power flows.
In the case that we, as a nation, are obliged to act forcefully in measures of strategic defense, it is that commitment which must be our strategic intent, and be the informed conscience which determines what we may, and may not permit ourselves to do under conditions of war, or war-like conditions. It is the invoking of a shared, passionate commitment to that community of principle, which must become the law among otherwise perfectly sovereign nations.
Meanwhile, the policies of U.S. military practice of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld et al., have used forms which are intrinsically corrupting, such as a frankly larcenous conduct of privatization, to degrade the functions formerly performed by our integrated military institutions into a parody of the conduct of forms of warfare dominated by mercenary practices, in the cockpit of the 1618-1648 Thirty Years' War. The U.S. military must be functionally reintegrated, rebuilt upon the foundation in capability and practice, of the principle of the military corps of engineers, and adopt the added dimension, appropriate to our age, of the extension of its engineering functions, into a peace-time science-driver function which includes both the development of the exploration of space, and the bringing of the technology developed in that way back to Earth, for the benefits that will provide here.
We won World War II, not because ours were the best trained as fighters, but because every U.S. serviceman or women had the power of an unequalled logistical capability, per capita, at his or her disposal, a capability rooted in the development and application of science and engineering as the cornerstone of the capability of the military forces. Today, our military shall be, thus, a military, but also a complement to the functions of a global peace corps. We shall win our missions, chiefly, by conquering the obstacles to the progress of mankind, and less by inducing submission to our force. We shall maintain, and improve our military institutions by giving them missions, tools, and training for the kind of practice of strategic defense appropriate to this age of change: an age in which the primary national strategic mission is development and security of a cooperative community of principle among respectively sovereign nation-states.
3. The Presently Onrushing Global Financial Collapse
Today, the planet as a whole is gripped by what must be recognized as the terminal phase of something far worse than what would have been usually described, in the past, as a depression. The correct term for the presently ongoing, terminal phase of economic collapse of the world's present, floating-exchange-rate monetary-financial system, is a systemic breakdown-crisis.
That collapse is fully in progress at this moment. The exact date of the perceived general financial collapse is not yet absolutely determined. The best estimate is "soon," "soon" as measured either in days, weeks, or months. The physical-economic realities of the collapse, the implicitly hopeless bankruptcy of great chunks of the present international banking and related systems, have already far surpassed the standard of "finality." The system is on its death-bed, with no hope of that present system's recovery, ever; its staggering financial relic, is a dead man walking. Only the adoption of a replacement system will solve the problem; and, it had better be the right choice of replacement, this time.
From the standpoint of U.S. history so far, the U.S. is now presented with what are apparently three alternative choices of policy; but, in reality, there are only two.
There is, first, the apparent first choice, to continue with the present international floating-exchange-rate monetary-financial system, as that system has evolved since the 1971-72 destruction of the Bretton Woods, fixed-exchange-rate system. That apparent first choice, has now been eliminated in historical fact. The floating-exchange-rate system, in its present form, is now doomed to crash, very soon, with no hope of recovery, ever, for generations yet to come.
The only real medium-to-long-term economic choices are between immediately reestablishing a fixed-exchange-rate system modelled on the original, Franklin Roosevelt design of the Bretton Woods system, or the plunge of the planet into a form of chaos akin to Europe's experience during the Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age.
The choice of a plunge of the planet into chaos, were it made, would probably take the initial form of an attempted rebirth of fascist regimes, an attempt launched under the direction of the Europe-based international financier cartel of Venetian-style "family interests." Such a cartel would necessarily echo the characteristic features of Hitlerism, an imitation generated by the characteristics shared among the Synarchist International's financier interests which brought fascists to power on the continent and today's relevant financier-oligarchical class. These common characteristics, more than any love, or lack of love, for the discredited Hitler himself are the enemy we must defeat today. This pro-fascist choice of direction from among some of the international financier oligarchy of today, would unleash more fully the perpetual-warfare/preventive-nuclear-warfare policies currently associated with those fascists' current puppet, Vice President, and Prime Minister Tony Blair confederate, Dick Cheney. That would lead, in turn, to "A New Dark Age," planet-wide.
Howls, shrieks, and screams of protest against my warnings, even from the most powerful of political and financier circles, will not diminish that reality of the present crisis-situation, as presented here.
That those are the only alternatives available to the U.S.A. at this time, can no longer be denied by those well-informed leading circles of Americans which are presently intelligent and sane. Some among these circles have already either made the decision to go for the alternative of fascist dictatorship and perpetual warfare, or are already leaning in that direction.
The point is to be explained, summarily, as follows. I repeat: This is not a so-called "cyclical," or "boom-bust" crisis. It is a "final" collapse of the world's presently operating economic-monetary-financial system. Only a reversal of the wrong decisions of the U.S. made from 1971-72 onward could halt this collapse, and provide the launching-point for a viable, replacement form of monetary-financial system. It is not a matter of winners and losers in a game; it is the currently impending elimination of all of the contenders. It is the end of the system. For this collapse, there is no solution within the terms of the widely accepted doctrines of economics taught in universities, or employed in policy-shaping of governments generally, the leading mass media, or kindred institutions, today.
Therefore, by systemic, we should understand ourselves to mean, that the presently onrushing, terminal economic collapse of the world's present, floating-exchange-rate monetary-financial system, is a "programmed self-destruct" feature built into the "normal" behavior of the design of the currently operating system, a system which has been built up, since 1964-1972, into that set of laws and other habits of both governments, and taught by the usual so-called most expert authorities among economics professors and the like. To repeat the crucial point: This "self-destruct" destiny, built into the system itself, expresses habits which have been built, step by step, cumulatively, into the laws and related policy-shaping practices of government and business, and also today's popular and leading press opinion, during approximately the recent forty years.
Again, given the realities of prevalent academic and related popular ideologies, we are not overstating the essential point made above:
Again, I restate my warning: The general economic collapse we are now experiencing, is not merely the down-slope side of a boom-bust, cyclical crisis; it is the kind of collapse which means that if the attempt is made to continue the present world monetary-financial system in anything resembling its present form, under that condition, the system will, very soon, cease to exist: The system will automatically self-destruct. This is the kind of collapse from which no recovery of that system is possible under the presently prevalent principles of economic, monetary, and financial practice. Unless a suitable form of radically new system is introduced very soon, the world will soon enter a condition in which the very existence of most presently held financial assets will be wiped out, in most cases. There will be virtually no safe place, for almost anyone, "to hide my money." So, please do not waste your time and ours, by asking!
I remind those who would denounce this characterization as that of a "Cassandra," for saying these things: Cassandra was, in fact, proven right, and her critics doomed by their own folly in ignoring her warnings.
Without resorting to methods which, in effect, excise those current habits and those doctrines, there is no chance of preventing a deep collapse, a self-destruct action, even a virtually permanent one, of the world's physical economy in its present form.
In other words, to repeat the crucial point which must be put across for the present Presidential campaign: The presently onrushing economic-monetary-financial catastrophe, a catastrophe now in its terminal phase, is by no means what is taught in many textbooks and universities as a "cyclical depression."
As I have stated, summarily, above, a very radical change, in the very near future, is inevitable, in any case. Either it will be a change to some form of global fascist economy, somewhat like Felix Rohatyn's fascist-like economic and social effects produced by the "Big MAC" horrors in New York City, something which would be, under present circumstances, more vicious in its social effects than that under Adolf Hitler's regime; or, in the alternative, it will be an action which, in effect, recreates the successes of the U.S. economic recovery which was launched under President Franklin Roosevelt's leadership. There are no in-between choices. There is only a mass-murderous chasm of chaos ("self-destruct") in between the two choices.
There is no escape from this trap, except through action by governments to change the system. This means that certain fundamental features of the present, sick system must be removed, or shut down, and new features added. These are changes of a type which can be made by no agency less than sovereign government, or by concerted action of several sovereign governments. That is the action which the next elected government of the U.S.A. must put into effect. Only the U.S.A. has presently, in fact, the historically determined capability of leading the majority of the nations and peoples of this planet into making the necessary changes now.
It is therefore accurate to say, that our purpose must be to recreate the kind of economy we were rebuilding under the leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
That President's reforms, which saved the U.S., contributed decisively to the defeat of Hitler, and launched the recovery of a war-ravaged Europe, reflected a constitutional policy which had informed and shaped the preparations for and establishment of our republic.
These preparations were dated since no later than that attack on the patriots of the English-speaking colonies in North America, which was dated from the Treaty of Paris of February 1763. This was the treaty which, in fact, established the British East India Company of Lord Shelburne et al., as a new would-be replacement for the failed ancient Roman Empire. Thus, the victory of the U.S. republic, over the imperialist forces of that British monarchy, a victory effected with the aid of our allies France and Carlos III of Spain, established a new form of constitutional republic and system of economy. This new republic, based upon what Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, among other leading figures of that time, created, established what was defined then as the American System of political-economy.
Franklin Roosevelt's affirmation of that American System of political-economy, against the financier-oligarchical-controlled systems of Europe, saved the U.S.A. from the fate suffered under fascism in Europe, saved Europe, and provided the basis for the great march forward of the U.S.A., Europe, and other regions of the world, during the period through change, coinciding with the launching of the folly of U.S. official war in Indo-China, beginning late 1964.
It would be fair to say that we not only wish to approximate the relatively best features of the post-war, fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, as launched by President Franklin Roosevelt's initiative: Unless we take that course of action, our republic, as we have known it, and much else that was good in the world besides, would be doomed by the global economic breakdown-crisis already in full swing at this time.
To cure the relevant disease, we must discover, and apply a treatment which is specific to the disease we must cure. The relevant difficulty is that virtually none among economics textbooks, or professors of economy today either know, or wish to know, what that disease is, and, therefore, up to now, their expert diagnoses and proposed remedies are often worse than the disease itself. We must bring about a revolution in the thinking of those and our government's institutions, back to the model, successful precedents of the American System of political-economy as its revival was attempted by President Franklin Roosevelt.
The only developments which might change this grim forecast, putting aside external interventions from outside our planet, would be a sudden, systemic change in the system introduced by major governments. I, were I President, would take such actions, following precedents set by President Franklin Roosevelt; other, misguided Presidents, proceeding from a diametrically opposite, presently far more popular, but also reckless standpoint, might be panicked into resorting to, or condoning a replay of something like "9/11," like Hermann Goering's "Reichstag Fire"-like incident of terror, used to panic the U.S. institutions and population into accepting what would be, in effect, a new fascist tyranny.
In the meantime, all talk about specific recovery measures, or social policy promises, is simply babbling nonsense, when not intentional lying, from the mouths of persons with murky purposes. Unless the nature and cure of the present systemic breakdown-crisis is correctly understood, and appropriate measures are actually being taken, as sweeping changes in economic policy of our nation, in order to create the means needed to meet those social requirements. Without these measures of fundamental economic reform being taken first, there will be no benefit for our nation's, or, perhaps, the world's posterity, for the present, or even future generations yet to come. Therefore, forget all "single issues"; they are nothing but meaningless, wishful babbling, until the systemic breakdown crisis is understood, and appropriate forms of radically corrective measures are taken to create an appropriate new economic system, with new economic policies to match.
For purposes of comparison, the economic policies of practice of President Franklin Roosevelt did work; and, the standards of economic practice of 1945-1964 also worked, more or less well, if in a limited way, or even often badly. The fact that the present, post-1971-1972 world monetary-financial system's crisis is a terminal case, from which no recovery, within that framework, were possible, implies that we must compare several points of reference. 1.) What made Franklin Roosevelt's reforms so uniquely successful? 2.) What radical changes, from about 1961-1972 on, created the failed kind of world monetary-financial system now entering its terminal collapse-phase today? 3.) What changes in political-economic policy, between the death of President Franklin Roosevelt and the launching of the official U.S. Indo-China war, resulted in the shift of the U.S. economy, from an overall upward trend, to an overall decline into its present state of terminal collapse?
3.1 The American System and Its Foes
In the field of economy, most people have a rather fiercely impassioned dedication to their own ignorant prejudices concerning the reality of economic processes, matters about which they actually know little to nothing. Day-to-day experience, whether in ordinary chatter, in affairs of government, or academic circles, points out, that this ignorance is the greatest obstacle to making competent economic policies for either our government, business, or personal affairs. This incompetence is more extreme in the generation which entered adulthood during, or after the middle 1960s, than in the relatively older generations. Yet, times come, as now, when the very existence of our nation, depends on delivering those citizens at least a minimal dose of actual knowledge of the ABCs of real economy.
Therefore, it would seem that any competent leader of the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, for that matter, would think it necessary to inform the citizenry of the ABCs, at least, of how an economy works, before asking those citizens to vote for, or against tax, credit, budgetary, and regulatory policies of Federal, state, or local government. It were time that that remarkable oversight among Party leaders were corrected.
Today, the combined popular and official ignorance on this matter goes deep: very, very deep, and wide, wide, wide.
A case in point, is the notorious August-September 1998 collapse of the New York-based speculation in Russian GKO paper. With the post-1964 process of transformation of the U.S. economy, from the world's leading producer society, to a "post-industrial" utopia, the U.S. population has suffered an accelerating loss of conception of even those simplest aspects of economic reality which were more or less known in the times when our population actually produced most among the physical essentials of its own family and community life. So, in the recent decade, it was said to the credulous believers, that the "IT" revolution which would make those super-fast number-crunchers called computers, could make us all rich; it just didn't work out, and many people have still not understood why that didn't work exactly as had been promised in the instruction manual that came with the product.
However, even back when, during the immediate post-war decades, our labor-force still produced a significant amount of what it consumed, the understanding of the ABCs of economics was already shaky, to say the least.
The cause for that tragic popular ignorance of the ABCs of economic reality, is illustrated by taking up the clinical examples of delusional states of mind which should be recognized in the spread of two commonplace nonsense-beliefs about economy, met as arguments on the street or in the university classrooms of today. The first of these examples, is the widespread notion that the role of money as purchasing power, is the essential principle of national economy. The second, slightly less widespread notion, is that, raw materials, as extracted from the Earth, are the primary source and determinant of "real" economic values.
These two, widespread, explicitly anti-scientific delusions, have served as the usual premises of arguments against the constitutional system on which the U.S. republic was founded. Behind those two controversies, is the monetarist's and physiocrat's lack of any efficient working idea of the existence of an essential difference between man and beast. A typical monetarist is a professor of economics who might be suspected of intending to marry a monkey (possibly one of his students) for her father's money.
Since the world, which happens to include the U.S.A., is in deep, deep trouble economically, it is extremely important, especially during the coming three months of the present national election-campaign, that at least some among our political class, and other citizens, too, acquire some sense of what actually makes a healthy economy tick: especially when the entirety of the existing world monetary-financial system is now wobbling wildly at the brink of collapse.
Today, the most convenient evidence used to demonstrate the foolishness of the delusions of monetarists and physiocrats alike, is that knowledge of the concept of the Noösphere, a crucial discovery of one of the world's leading physical scientists of the Twentieth Century, the biogeochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky. The essential principles of that science of physical economy, as taken from the work of Gottfried Leibniz as the basis for the central constitutional principle of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, can be recapitulated today with much greater power on the basis of the implications of scientist Vernadsky's work.
Those principles of a science of physical economy, which were employed by the followers of Benjamin Franklin to develop a system of political-economy scientifically superior to anything yet produced by Europe to the present day, provided the basis for the U.S. rise, over the interval 1861-1963, to what was not only the world's greatest, and most progressive economic power on our planet, but the only presently existing doctrine of political-economy which exists as a serious alternative to the British system developed under Britain's Eighteenth-Century Lord Shelburne, to the present day.
The doctrines of Karl Marx and his followers, for example, are merely a rebellious derivative of the intellectually defective British system of Shelburne's Haileybury School. So, ironically, in the former Soviet Union, the application of scientific progress to military objectives, was outstanding, whereas, as a result of lack of regard for those principles of entrepreneurship which are peculiar to the middle-sized, closely held enterprise, as distinct from the large U.S. corporation, for example, the performance of management in the non-military sector was atrociously poor by comparison.
Vernadsky, working explicitly in the great epistemological tradition of European physical science traced from Thales and the Pythagoreans, defined the "historical" development of the geology of planet Earth as the combined effect of three distinct types of universal physical principles: non-living, living, and (human) mental-creative powers of the quality which the ancient Greeks identified by dynamis.
From the vantage-point of an enhancement of geology named biogeochemistry, he amassed evidence showing the transformation of the Earth's abiotic character by the superior long-term influence of living processes, processes governed by a universal physical principle of life operating at a qualitatively higher level of action than abiotic processes. That effect he defined as "The Biosphere." He also showed, by the same experimental methods of proof of principle, that those mental-creative powers of hypothesizing, by means of which mankind develops knowledge of experimentally demonstrable universal physical principles, were a quality of power superior to both abiotic and living processes as such.
Notably, contrary to the usual prejudices among our people today, these notions were already in existence among relevant ancient Greeks of the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato. Vernadsky's definition of the Noösphere, as a higher form of principle, and of existence, than the Biosphere, emphasized the changes, even by weight, in the composition of our planet, such that the effects, including fossils, of living processes are taking over our planet, more and more, and that the rate at which human activity, and fossils of human activity are taking over the Biosphere, is at least as awesome an independent factor as the effect of living processes.
Indeed much of the included purpose of the exploration of nearby intra-Solar space, and beyond that, is focussed on the objectives implicit in the impact of Vernadsky's seminal influence on Soviet space science, and the world's in general. Since the principle of life, and of cognition (noësis) are of the experimental character of universal physical principles, the obvious question is: What effect do such universal physical principles, which we find in life and human cognition on Earth, exert on the universe outside of Earth itself? What is the evidence to this effect we may discover in exploring not only the residues on the Moon and Mars, but in the way in which the Solar System operates as a whole?
Vernadsky's discoveries, as I have addressed these connections in my 2001 book, The Economics of the Noösphere, have been an echo of the setting of the founding of the modern science of physical economy, by Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz's uniquely original discovery of an infinitesimal calculus, in response to the challenge left by Kepler; Leibniz's discovery, with Jean Bernouilli, of the catenary-based, universal physical principle of least action; and his development of that concept of the Monad which his later successor, Bernhard Riemann, identified by a specific usage of the German term Geistesmasse; are each and all echoes of the ancient Greek science of the Pythagoreans, Plato, et al., and the foundations for the progress shown by later leading scientists such as Vernadsky.
Leibniz was also the original discoverer of the elementary physical principle of a science of physical economy, and, in a related way, that concept of the anti-John Locke principle, "the pursuit of happiness" which Benjamin Franklin and Franklin's youthful collaborators employed in the crafting of the Declaration of Independence, where this concept was adopted as the central constitutional principle of intention within the 1776 Declaration of Independence. This same principle, in an amplified form, is the adopted statement of governing principle over all other features of our Federal Constitution and Federal law, in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.
Focus upon the essential distinction, of physical principle, between man and the beasts: the human individual's power, as expressed by the discovery, and reenactment of an original discovery of experimentally validated universal physical principle. The present evidence is, that these discovered principles, such as Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, represent previously existing universal physical principles of the universe. However, that accepted as the best evidence so far, the fact that mankind, which has the apparent capabilities of a higher ape for sustaining a few millions individuals, has been able to evolve the development of its culture to sustain a population of over six billion living individuals. This gain in mankind's potential relative population-density, reflects the role of those uniquely human powers through which the discovery and use of universal physical principles is made possible.
That absolute difference between the higher apes and man, is the foundation of any scientific notion of what should be understood as "economy." True profit of production in society, is located essentially in the ability of the human species, through a capability for discovery and application of universal physical principles, to increase the net output of society's production, per capita, above the level of consumption needed to generate that output.
On this account, sanely organized modern society divides its productive activity into two general categories, public and private. Our public expenditure, as for institutions of health care, education, and what we call basic economic infrastructure generally, is supplied, chiefly, by government's role in the economy, to provide and maintain those preconditions of life and production needed for continued net growth of per-capita output and income. In the private sector, we promote the creativity of the individual operative and entrepreneur, with a view to stimulating those voluntary creative activities in design of product and production processes, upon which we depend for a continuing increase of total output of production over costs. On this account, the wise government regulates the economy as a whole, using means—such as "fair price" policy—to ensure that prices do not fall so low as to destroy the needed capital formation and advancement in the capacity of the entrepreneurship to sustain continuing progress in the net per-capita productive powers of the labor of the industry, the enterprise, and the society as a whole. This does not signify that the principle of entrepreneurship is necessarily absent from government operations; there, it is mission-performance orientation, as distinct from the factor of profit-motivation, which is immediately crucial for competence.
In all aspects of economy, for the competent economist, money is, at best, an idiot by nature. Money has no morality, no idea of what to do with itself, and no discretion about the places into which it tends to run. Money is properly a creation of the state, its issue and circulation regulated by the state in ways, such as taxation policies and tariffs, intended to facilitate the function of circulation which it serves. Consider some of the hilariously lunatic ideas about money which circulate among our suggestible citizens.
3.2 Strange Tales About Money
Most of the popular delusions about money met in the typical street-corner conversation or university classroom today, are traced to the influence of a significantly nasty gentleman of Mephistophelean attributes, Paolo Sarpi, a one-time virtual tyrant of Venice. This sulfurous gentleman, whom Galileo Galilei served as a household lackey, was responsible for a radical simplification of the dogma of Aristotle, the product of which became known variously as "empiricism" and the Eighteenth-Century French and Anglo-Dutch "Enlightenment." This doctrine, and its variants, provided the basis for the tainted ideas of Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Leonhard Euler, Jeremy Bentham, and numerous others of that same intellectual species, during those centuries.
The essential distinction of empiricism and its derivatives, has been a doctrine known as "reductionism," in which it is assumed that the universe is composed of little hard balls flitting about in an otherwise empty space of three linear dimensions, and a simply linear past-to-future dimension of time; a Cartesian system is typical of this. There is no allowance for actual creativity, by either God or man, provided in that so-called reductionist system; but, anything which seems not to be explainable within that empiricist system, usually turns up as some pretty wild stuff, such as the ideas of political-economy associated with such certifiable loonies as Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and the Physiocrat François Quesnay from whom Smith plagiarized much of his own 1776 anti-American propaganda tract, The Wealth of Nations.
Notably, Mandeville, notorious as the author of a 1714 work with the revealing title, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vice, Public Benefits, is today the demi-god of the Milton Friedman's and the late Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society. Reading Mandeville, Friedman, and von Hayek, one can vividly imagine little demons popping up from under the floorboards, leading susceptible sinners into those demonic vices which, presumably, are yielding profits to the proprietors of society.
Adam Smith, the putative Bogomil-like theologian, and plagiarist of François Quesnay, is no saner than his predecessor, Mandeville, only less playful. His principle of "free trade" which he extracts from Physiocrat Quesnay's "laissez-faire," implies little green men from under the floorboards casting crooked dice, to determine, by such statistical methods, the profit or poverty bestowed upon unsuspecting citizens above.
Quesnay's Physiocratic doctrine calls up none of the demons of Mandeville's and Smith's cultishness; he attributes the wealth of the estate to the magical powers of the titled landowner's possession of a scrap of paper awarding him title to that property, leaving to the farmers nothing but that which might be fed to cattle. The whole pack of empiricist economists rest their claims to a science in their economic abracadabra, upon nothing essentially different from the same kind of wild-eyed supernatural fantasies.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, emerging from a daily seance in his bathtub, mixes abracadabra with the Delphic jabbering of Pythia, saying actually nothing, but implying anything and everything, all to the effect of affirming his insinuated personal claims to magical powers. See how the gaping, awe-struck suckers fawn upon such charlatanry!
The key to all this fakery, which usually passes in classrooms for the solemnity of contemporary economics dogma, is Venice. The usual term for this fakery is usury, but that choice of term is misleading in the way it implicitly understates the gravity of the offenses perpetrated under this ruse.
3.3 The Venetian System
Venice did not begin the practice. The practice of usury by the Pythian Cult of Apollo at Delphi was there long before Venice emerged as a curious kind of imperial power with headquarters at the head of the Adriatic. For the purposes of this Platform, it is sufficient to focus on Venice's role as sire to its bastard imperial offspring, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal-imperial system of today.
By Venice, we signify the emergence of that maritime power and city-state which emerged as a dominant force throughout Europe and adjoining places, in the course of the decline of the former power of Byzantium. It was Venice's pact with the principal land-power of time, the Norman chivalry, which was the ruling, ultramontane power throughout Europe, the leading obstacle to the sovereign nation-state's creation, from approximately the beginning of the Eleventh Century, through that Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age which Venice's policies brought down upon Europe as a whole.
The point is to introduce thus, a few remarks about some relevant highlights of the history of that ultramontane medieval system, highlights which are necessary here to make clear some crucially relevant points about the presently onrushing global monetary-financial collapse.
It was not yesterday's events which shaped today's history; chiefly, it was the ruling assumptions, developed over centuries, which had brought forth those events, which had actually shaped the behavior of societies within any particular generation's experience. John striking Peter did not actually cause the ensuing war; it was a long preceding history which shaped culture and developments to prompt John to strike as he did, and Peter to react as he did. It is forces of culture deeply embedded within us from often many preceding generations before our birth, forces of culture shaped by intervening developments, which had set the stage and conditions for the immediate actions and their consequences on the contemporary fields of today.
Venice, with its Norman partners, was an empire of sorts. It ruled over all of Europe, although not without resistance, by the same method of divide and conquer which the British East India Company employed, in the so-called Seven Years' War of the pre-1763 period, to set all of the powers of continental Europe at one another's throats, with Frederick the Great's Prussia assigned the principal role, by Britain, in bringing about the emergence of Britain, in 1763, as the virtual empire it has continued to be to the present day. Medieval Venice, as the controlling influence behind money-lenders such as the House of Bardi's notorious scamps, Biche and Mouche, had financed wars of one petty tyrant against another, bringing them to common ruin, and bringing them into debt-ridden captivity to their Venetian creditors. The modern practice of Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperialism, has liberally practiced the same methods against the nation-states of continental Europe, and other places.
The collapse of Venetian-Norman power, in the mid-Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age, had created the opening in which the spiritual heirs of Abelard, Dante Alighieri, Petrarca, and others were able to launch those Church councils and other events, such as the rebirth of the Papacy around Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and his friends, through which the modern nation-state was finally launched in Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England, through coordination from the so-called Golden Renaissance of the Classical Greek form of Christian tradition in Italy.
However, late during the Fifteenth Century, the power of Venice had recovered to the degree that it could launch an anti-Renaissance, an anti-Renaissance which dominated, and ruined Europe through religious and related warfare orchestrated by Venice and its Habsburg clients, during the interval 1511-1648. It was in this process, especially as a result of the Treaty of Westphalia which established the modern international law of civilized nations, that Venice's power as an armed maritime power diminished to the degree, that it began the process of passing its armed power to an Anglo-Dutch financier oligarchy, allied to, and modelled upon the Venetian financier oligarchy. This continued to the degree that the ruling political party of Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Liberal Britain of the Walpoles, Shelburne, et al., was known, with the full connotation of notoriety, as "The Venetian Party" of that century.
Those developments are the root of the system of political-economy whose continued power and evolution has brought the world, finally, to the verge of a new dark age today. The Eighteenth-Century conflict between the imperial influence of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism, and the creation of the constitutional republic of the U.S.A., is still the key to all modern history since 1776-1789. This history, so viewed, is key to understanding not only the general characteristics of the world monetary-financial systems which have developed over the period from 1763 to the present day, but the pathological mental state encountered in popular ideas about money, not only in the academic classroom, but in the simple knee-jerk prejudices of ordinary citizens today.
Now, look at the other side of the story, and, after that, return to our concluding subjects. The remaining principal obligations of this Platform are now the following. First, to complete the treatment of the principled issues of economy as such, and, in conclusion, to outline the general actions to which the Democratic Party must be committed for the approximately quarter-century, perhaps three Democratic Presidents ahead.
The need for interrupting the account of the problems of economy now, will become clear in the course of the following portions of the text.
4. The Difference Between Man and Beast
The concept of the sovereign nation-state republic, from which the existence of our republic was derived, fills a peculiar page in the known history and pre-history of the human species as a whole. The notion of the republic, from which our nation was derived, is traced to ancient Greece, especially to the intersecting influence of both the scientific tradition of the Pythagoreans and Thales, and the intersection of Solon's concept of the republic with the congruence of Plato's dialogues and the Apostolic Christianity of, especially, the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, I Corinthians 13, most notably.
These conceptions are indispensable guides for building an efficiently just and durable world order among sovereign nation-states today. They are conceptions, apprehended as scientific conceptions, such as Cotton Mather's and Benjamin Franklin's principled commitment to do good, which were deeply embedded in the founding of the U.S.A. as a republic, as through the influence of the relevant greatest thinkers of Europe of that century, and earlier, such as Gottfried Leibniz, upon Benjamin Franklin and his immediate circles.
To understand the issues of economy today, we are obliged, for the sake of competence in choice of argument, to make the following references to the subject of religious belief. This is needed for the scientific purposes now set forth below, and also to address those morally corrupting abuses of the name of religion, as by the perversions of those lunatic followers of the Nashville Agrarians, which now threaten to sunder, and destroy our republic from within.
Although our constitutional republic has rightly refused to submit to the special authority of any specific religious denomination, this does not exclude the authority of those universal principles, which, like universal physical principles of science, are, not accidentally common to the relevant arguments of the Apostles John and Paul, to those of Philo of Alexandria, and other relevant figures of their generation of now more than 2,000 years ago. The center of all of those principles is the notion of a governing lawfulness in the universe, a notion which is also expressed as the immortality of the individual human soul, a notion which sets the human individual absolutely apart from, and above all lower forms of life. The notion of the republic, as this indispensable moral notion developed within European civilization since ancient Greece, were not possible without those conceptions which set man and woman equally above all other species, and as made in the spiritual likeness of the Creator.
These notions, as they bear on the conception of the special nature of mankind, are the foundation of that moral law, also known as natural law, upon which all legitimate government is premised, and to which it is rightfully subject.
In particular, for example, the Cartesian and kindred empiricist conceptions of political-economy, is, in and of itself, a violation of that natural law, an offense against the essential nature of any human being in general, and of society, and of a just order in political-economy in particular.
In respect to matters dealing with the internal matters of religious belief and observances, the state must not meddle in the Creator's business. Let Him sort it out. We will not tolerate another Inquisition, ever again. The very act of proposing an Inquisition, as Popes and others have virtually, or even literally wept over the record of the Inquisition, is a crime, and by its nature a Satanic quality of crime, against both God and man. By Satanic, we mean the way in which the Nazi Party of Hitler deployed channels of the cult of Hispanidad, run through Hitler's creation, Franco Spain, to use Church channels to promote Nazi crimes in various parts of the world, including Central America. There remain certain matters touching upon the subject of what is otherwise religious belief, which are the responsibility of government. It is to those matters which we should confine our attention here.
In the sweep of the history of European civilization's development since ancient Greece, this notion of a universal authority, the Creator, is not a vague, Deistic conception, but the notion of an efficient principle, a definite personality whose quality is that radiated in the form we know as the immortal aspect of the living mortal human being. On this account of a notion of a continuing, eternal, personal relationship to that Creator, we derive all efficient moral principles which are properly applicable to the internal and external affair of sovereign states, and respecting the natural human rights which society must honor respecting each and all of the individual persons.
Among the pre-Aristotelean scientific thinkers of ancient Greece, such as Thales, the Pythagoreans, and Plato, these implied distinctions of man from beast, were premised, centrally, upon physical-scientific proof that man, unlike the beasts, is able, willfully, to increase what modern terminology would name as the potential relative population-density of the human species: the power to discover those universal physical principles, by means of which man's power in the universe is willfully increased, as might be measured per capita and per square kilometer. The increase of the human population, in billions today, above the pitifully few millions possible for a species of higher ape, typifies this unique distinction of the human species.
That measurable, qualitative, absolute distinction of the human individual above all other species, points to the proper definition of the human species, as a species which changes the world in which nominally non-living and living processes exist, effecting changes in that world to the advantage of mankind, which only the individual human mind can effect.
For us, therefore, the living mortal individual has a double nature. On the one side, he or she is a mortal individual; at the same time, in the discovery, application, and transmission of those discoveries of universal physical principle which only an inherently frail, mortal human individual can effect, the individual betrays a quality of immortality which spills over from the domain of physical science as such, into an expression as the greatest compositions of Classical art. His or her contribution to the discovery and transmission of those Classical scientific, and specifically Classical artistic, qualities of ideas which set the human species apart from, and above all other living processes, expresses the individual personality as an immortal, personal influence occupying what some theologians have termed "the simultaneity of eternity." In that image of himself, or herself, that person humbly recognizes the nature of that Creator in whose functional likeness the individual person has been made. A personality with cognitive powers, akin in nature to those of the Creator, a person who is implicitly assigned to do the kind of work in and on the universe, which is consistent with the continuing creative work of the Creator himself.
Thus, the law of nations must stand in awe of this sacred, higher nature occupying the mortal body of the human individual personality.
The notion of both the sovereign nation-state republic, and of the appropriate relations among sovereign nations, is adumbrated by this notion of the sanctity of the individual person. This notion is the foundation of the true republic; there is no other foundation.
4.1 The Case for Education
At the close of the Civil War in the United States, influential liberal reformers campaigned for a system of education which would not educate the children of freed slaves above the level at which a person employed in the deprivation of the most menial labor would be encouraged to become discontented with his plight. This liberalism was hostile to the contrary policies of the great Frederick Douglass, who had mobilized the movement for freedom from slavery around the conception that a mind developed to its highest potential, through the available existing world culture, is free in spirit, and will work to make himself, or herself free in fact.
In the U.S. today, a moral perversion related to that particular case of post-Confederacy educational policies, is expressed as the characteristic feature of our present educational system. Virtually the entirety of the population of our young is presently subjected to an increasingly, morally and intellectually depraved form of "tracking" to effects similar to those which liberals applied to the education of the generality of children of freed slaves, effects akin to those prescribed in Aldous Huxley's utopian Brave New World. The changes in educational policies, at all levels of tracking today, have converged on the goals expressed by the perverted Congress for Cultural Freedom's work against the population of both the United States and Europe, as in the 1963 report on proposed reforms of education issued by the neo-malthusian Dr. Alexander King of the Paris office of the OECD.
The manifest policies of education, at virtually all levels today, have the effect of attempted mass-decortication of our youth in general. Presumably, this apparent goal warrants ironical references to George W. Bush, Jr. as "the education President."
The charge to be delivered against today's prevalent educational policies of practice, is that its expressed intent is to de-humanize the individual. By introducing virtual "blab school" technologies to rehearsals for passing scores on rehearsed, computer-scored multiple-choice questionnaires, as competitive standards for comparative scoring of competing school districts, and by combining the effects of that practice with dionysiac mass popular culture indoctrination of the young, virtually permanent brain damage of the type depicted in George Orwell's 1984, or the obiter dicta of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, is inflicted on a generation which, presumably, will run the world a generation from now. What is explicitly condemned is that Classical humanist mode of education which had produced entire generations of the most qualified leaders of society in the practice of statecraft, science, and the arts. What is not merely denied, but what the present system seeks explicitly to destroy, or to numb into virtual extinction, are those creative cognitive powers of the individual young mind from which we have obtained the greatest creative geniuses of our times past. These policies of education are turning masses of new generations of human beings into the mental and moral condition of virtual human cattle.
The clear intent, as expressed by the various career roles of the same Dr. Alexander King who released the 1963 report on education from the Paris office of the OECD, is to bring scientific, technological, and cultural progress to a virtual halt, even to reverse a significant portion of the progress which had been accomplished by mankind up to that time.
The point for consideration by our citizens, is not only that our continuing trend in educational and related cultural policies, is not only dumbing down the human species as much as might be possible, but it is working to stultify into non-performance those mental-creative, cognitive powers on which all valid discoveries of universal principles of nature and society have depended in history so far. We are working, by such methods, to ensure that our descendants, as many as are able to live under the conditions such educational practices imply, will be dumbed down, liberally rutting human cattle, the virtual yahoos of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
This deplorable trend has already become far advanced, relative to the talents and practices of the leading edge of the performance capabilities of the pre-1964 adult generation. In statistical cross-section, the young generation coming out of secondary schools and universities today, is no longer prepared to exhibit the quality of knowledge and skills typical of earlier generations. This effect is most readily visible in the way in which the progress of outsourcing has led to a vanishing of entire categories of relatively commonplace productive skills of earlier generations of Americans and Europeans alike.
The digital computer's usefulness as a computational device, or a control device, is beyond doubt. However, the potential advantage we might actually derive from such technologies, is that we have thus removed from man's labor much of those kinds of activity which are absolutely less than human, which should serve the intent of freeing the individual's mind for tasks of a higher, cognitive order, tasks better suited to those creative cognitive powers which the human individual has as potential, relative to the digital computer which has no such creative powers.
Typical of the undesirable side-effects, is the delusion of so-called "artificial intelligence," foisted upon the credulous by such Bertrand Russell clones as Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann, and such related delusions as so-called "information theory" and the cult of "information society." Information is not knowledge; it is, at best, a footprint which knowledge has left in the sands by its passing. By following the track of footprints, we may overtake knowledge; but, the footprint itself is neither knowledge, nor human.
Throughout the known history of European civilization, since the Greece and Egypt of the Pythagoreans, Thales, Solon, and Plato, all of the actual progress in the human condition, in human powers over nature per capita and per square kilometer, has been the fruit of what those ancient Greeks knew as powers, powers otherwise defined as experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principles, principles by means of which mankind has been able to increase the potential relative population-density, and related potential and conditions of individual life of the human species. When mankind might cease to practice the pursuit of such cognitive discoveries of knowledge, man's practice ceases to be in accord with the nature which the Creator has given to our species; we would thus, cease, in effect, to be human, and would, therefore, become a society in which man is a beast to man.
All that I have just said, respecting the decadence of our times, is true. Yet, there is something else of great importance to be said. In my experience with the development of a new youth movement, youth who are chiefly young adults of the 18-25 age-group, we have been able to prove, that despite all the injuries they continue to suffer from the accelerating breakdown of our economy and its educational and other cultural institutions, the very fact that these young adults know, in relatively large numbers, that they have no future in a society which might continue in the direction which their parents' generation has chosen, and, in the main, seeks to enforce—the fact, that these young people, recognize that the present situation affords them no future worth telling, puts a certain "fire in their bellies" which their parents' generation either never acquired or has abandoned for sundry entertainment, lived-out fantasies, and other forms of escapism.
These youth, at least a crucial ration among them, are prepared to act to reinspire the grown intellectually flatulent preceding generation, and to be the energetic spark-plug which awakens our nation, and others, to the action needed to rescue this decadent waning, seemingly doomed civilization of ours. For these young people who are awakened to the reality of our situation, education is not a meal-ticket; it is a weapon of knowledge with which to slay the beastly forces of prevalent decadence which imperil their civilization, and ours, today.
The function of a quality of education which produces the great new advances of knowledge and practice of principle in physical science, in Classical forms of culture, and in technological progress of economy, is to enable man to live as man. Human progress is man's nature; to halt such cognition-driven practice of progress, is to turn mankind into a herd of rutting yahoos, virtual beasts, man behaving as beast to man.
4.2 Education and Economy
We have now returned to the point at which we are prepared to take up, once again, the lunacies of monetarism and the Physiocrat's nostrums. We shall later take this up, once more, in a subsequent, relevant context below.
As the famous aphorism attributed to Heracleitus emphasizes: There is nothing except change. To read the intent of that aphorism, we must employ the mental language of the culture in which that statement was made, the culture of Thales, the Pythagoreans, and the Plato whose treatment of that aphorism has crucial weight down to present day.
The characteristic distinction of the human individual, and the human mind, the distinction which sets us apart from all inferior living species, is precisely this principle of change. This notion of change is inseparable from the fact, that mankind is the only species which, by the method of hypothesis, discovers those pre-existing universal physical principles, by means of which mankind willfully increases our species' power in and over the universe which we inhabit. Fixed tradition is for animals, or for those degraded to acceptance of the status of slaves; human beings distinguish themselves from, and above the beasts, by that creative power to change the universe through discovery and employment of universal physical principles. As Aeschylus' Prometheus denounces the Satan-like Olympian Zeus on this account, the known oligarchical tradition in human experience, relies for its continued political power over people treated as virtually human cattle, by denying those underlings access to that knowledge which, in practice, is the power to change things, the power lodged within the act of discovery of an experimentally validated universal physical principle.
That is the meaning of the use of the term power (e.g., Greek dynamis) in the Classical scientific tradition. It represents, in practice, man's acquired power to change the way in which his universe may be caused to respond obediently to mankind.
The actual history of the human species, is the history of its progress over successive generations. The transmission of progress, from those who are deceased, to those who are yet to be born, is the transmission of the quality of knowledge for practice which is typified by the discovery of a universal physical principle, as the tradition of the Pythagoreans and Plato treats such ideas (i.e., powers) and their transmission. Here lies the appropriate definition of education for the people of a truly free society. Here lies the most readily accessible practical experience of that immortality of the deceased human individual; here, exactly here, lies the proper choice of universal principle which must govern education.
Here lies that principle of truthfulness which separates a moral world outlook from the liberalism whose habitual practice of sophistry amounts to the vicious practice of reckless disregard for truth, in a hatred of truthfulness expressed in favor of what might pass for mere popular opinion. Thus, under Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, the principle of truth in law is virtually outlawed from today's society, that in favor of an extremely radical form of virtual "dictionary nominalism." in which he rewrites the dictionary as the occasion prompts him.
In mathematical physics, for example, this notion of education for immortality is expressed by Leibniz's notion of "best of all possible worlds" and the related notion of the law of society as properly "the pursuit of happiness" through that progress associated with the benefits and transmission of fundamental scientific progress in both physical practice on nature and as Classical artistic composition.
In the science of physical economy, true profit and a universal principle of change, are interchangeable notions. In first approximation, it is through fundamental progress in discovery of new universal physical principles of physical science, that man is enabled to increase our species' power over nature, per capita, and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface-area. This process is complemented by discovery of those universal principles of Classical forms of artistic composition which pertain to the way in which the discovered principles of social relations among minds are made known and applied to practice.
These relations of change of employed principle, connecting successive generations of society, are the practical expression of the functioning of immortality of the living human personality. The permanence of change, through the transmission of such knowledge for practice, from one generation to another, precisely because it pertains to principles, which by their nature are universal principles in nature, is the tangible expression of individual immortality. The systematic comprehension of those relations of immortality is provided, typically, by a Classical practice of the study of history.
Classical humanism, as that notion is properly and efficiently apprehended, is the transmission of a sense of universal history made known through the experience of reliving the process of discovery, transmission, and application of discovered universal physical and Classical artistic principles of composition, across successive generations. The progress of Classical Greek culture, from such reference points as the Homeric legends, through the study of tragedy as a reflection upon that Homeric tradition, and the emergence of that which lies above tragedy, in the Socratic notion of the Sublime presented by Plato's dialogues and the work of the historian and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, is, as Wilhelm von Humboldt followed his mentor Schiller in this regard, the proper standard of rule for policies of education in both Europe and the Americas today.
It is time to uproot those miserable current doctrines of practice of education, which, in fact, degrade students to virtual yahoos. By yahoos, I mean rutting hordes of nightly rave-dancers, like chimpanzees in heat, wiggling themselves into cognitive insensibility, fugitives from the specifically human passions of cognition. It is the combination of the worst in the educational practices of a pre-1964 past, with the literally savage assault on the legacy of Classical humanist education, which has done the most to destroy our younger generations in ways which suggest a descent into a species down-shift, from which the present civilization would never recover, until disgust with current trends of today had prompted future generations to return to those principles of practice which has been known in European culture, as Classical humanist practices. Practices of a happier time, in education and otherwise, prior to the rampages of the dehumanizing work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
In the case of monetarism and the physiocratic obsession, the problem to be considered is, that these obsessive systems of belief are premised on a refusal to consider those features of economic progress which are specifically human, as this notion of functional humanity has been outlined in these pages. In addition to what has been emphasized thus far, one more crucial, scientific point, respecting economic processes, must be stressed now.
4.3 How Economies Actually Work
Consider the fatal flaw implicit in even the relatively best practice of post-World War II U.S. national census of manufactures and agriculture. Typical is the linear approach of the now recently deceased Professor Wassily Leontief. The weakness in what was otherwise the useful practice of U.S. national income and product accounting, until the fraud of the "quality adjustment" factor introduced in an increasingly reckless form during early 1980s, is that although the effects produced by a real (e.g., physical) economy can be reflected, as shadows are reflected, by the descriptive methods of linear National Product and Income accounting, the process which produces those adumbrated results does not occur actually in a way which corresponds to those statistical methods of national income and product accounting.
Real economies, which is to say where the relevant action actually occurs, are not merely "non-linear;" they are specifically Riemannian in the sense I have employed that use of "Riemannian" for defining physical-economic processes since the early 1950s. By that, I mean, for the information of relevant specialists, the revolutionary view of Carl F. Gauss's general principles of physical curvature summarily presented in Bernhard Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, as enriched, most notably, by Riemann's treatment of the implications of generalized Abelian functions. Ironically, the crucial principle which Riemann sets forth in a modern way, is foreshadowed by the way the concept of powers is employed, contrary to a modern ivory-tower notion of Euclidean or Cartesian geometry, by pre-Aristotelean Greek physical geometry, a physical geometry such as that of the Pythagorean and collaborator of Plato, Archytas, and Plato himself. The argument proceeds as follows.
At the outset of his 1854 habilitation dissertation, Riemann outlaws from physics all Euclidean, Cartesian, or comparable a-prioristic notions of self-evident definitions, axioms, and postulates. He obliges physical science, and its correlative mathematical physics, to replace the notion of a-prioristic notions of "dimensions" by exclusion of all notions of universals which are not experimentally defined proofs of those Socratic hypotheses thus qualified as universal physical principles.
This emphasis by Riemann was an emphatic return to the Pythagorean and related notions of an efficiently physical geometry of the Gaussian notion of the complex domain, as first expressed public in Gauss's 1799 attack on the follies of Euler, Lagrange, et al., rather than an ideal, or abstract one: a geometry based on experimentally definable efficient physical principles of action. Gauss's standpoint is a rejection of one in which action is treated as an adumbrated effect projected upon an a priori abstract ("ivory tower") geometry. Another term for Gauss's approach is found in Riemann's adoption and further development of Leibniz's principle of Analysis Situs. For the purposes of physical-economic studies, this signifies the referents, for physical economy, of the generalized notion of Riemann surfaces.
This approach, which is implicitly common to Riemannian physics and that of the pre-Aristotelean Pythagoreans and Plato, defines the only approximately independent action by man upon the universe, as being the effect of the imposition of an experimentally validated discovery of a universal physical principle upon the relevant domain. This action, by adding a new principle of the known universe to the repertoire of human knowledge for practice, has the effect of changing the geometry of man's universe of practice in a fundamental way. Riemann's method, through applying this discovery, has the effect of creating a new physical geometry of the universe of human practice.
Ordinary action which does not involve the introduction of a new universal principle to the action in question, does not change the essential character of man's practice. It is only the efficient application of newly discovered, or rediscovered universal physical, or comparable principles, which changes the geometry of the universe of human practice in ways which foster the general increase of the potential relative population-density of the human species, per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface-area. That action changes the physical geometry of the economy as a whole; it is those changes in the geometry of the economy as a whole, which are the origin of generalized increase of the long-term productive powers of mankind. This is the only true physical principle which accounts for the actual generation of true profit within a modern economy; all contrary definitions are, in the end, when taken into account in economies as whole, frauds or illusions, as the onrushing general breakdown of the U.S. and world economy and its bankrupt monetary-financial system attest today.
In modern European history, since the revolutionary impact of the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance, the rate of discovery of universal physical and related Classical-artistic principles, and of realization of their application by man, has far exceeded all known, earlier human experience since the lifetime of Plato. The work of Brunelleschi, the general revolution in the conception of science first introduced by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia, the revolutionary impetus supplied by Cusa's follower Leonardo da Vinci, and the discoveries of that avowed follower of Cusa and Leonardo, Johannes Kepler, set into motion a rate of increase of experimentally validated, revolutionary changes in accessible human knowledge of universal principles merely typified in the relative extreme by Leibniz, J.S. Bach, Gauss, and Riemann.
From the beginning of this eruption of modern European civilization from the cultural and moral swamps of Roman and ultramontane imperialisms, the unprecedented progress in improvement of the human condition within the bounds of globally extended European civilization, has depended upon a new conception of political society, the modern sovereign nation-state of the form associated with the legacy of Dante Alighieri and the work of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII. Under the new, anti-feudal law introduced under the auspices of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, the process of elevation of the condition of the majority of the population, from serfs to citizens, and the fostering of the citizens' participation in the practice of scientific and related progress, has accelerated the improvement of the condition of mankind at per-capita rates far beyond anything known, or even suspected from earlier phases of human existence.
The American Revolution led by Benjamin Franklin, as aided by our friends in Europe, has been the greatest boon to humanity, through its impact and influence, since the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. The spill-back of our progress, back into Europe, especially since the world's experience of the stunning progress of our economy over the 1861-1876 interval, has been the principal driving political factor in global human progress since that time.
Thus, when we brush aside the flatulent, mint-flavored aromas of Nashville Agrarians' moral and intellectual decadence, looking from our view of our national history, we understand the underlying principle of American economic and related achievement which has, from time to time, astonished the wondering world. President Franklin Roosevelt's mobilization of the U.S. economy, in ways which made possible the victories over depression and fascism during his Presidency, is typical of that principle of progress of which we, from time to time, have been the world's leading beneficiary.
The remarkable accomplishments of our economy during such intervals, are a reflection of the reality of a Riemannian "non-linear" universal principle of a science of physical economy.
The primary action of the individual, in his or her contribution to the progress and welfare of society, lies in the Riemannian aspect. That is to say, the way in which the introduction of improvements by means of universal physical and related principles, transforms the functional physical geometry of the economy, to such effects, that even the individual producer who makes no immediate change in his or her modes of productive action, now is more productive, in effect, simply because the general principle of action which now characterizes the economy as a whole, has transformed the quality of his action to the effect of making him more productive than before.
The simplest example of such an effect, is provided by study of the history of generation and distribution of power, with emphasis given to the changes in modes of generation which elevate the manifest "energy-flux density" of power's production and distribution to qualitatively higher plateaus. The effect of the rural electrification program launched under President Franklin Roosevelt, is typical.
Similarly, improved water management on a continental scale, transforms the Biosphere in ways which, qualitatively and otherwise, increase the productive powers of labor, and raise the standard of living, even were there no other source of improvement in technology.
This Riemannian view of economy, as contrasted to linear methods of national-income and product accounting, enables us to view the role, and value, of the individual in history in a qualitatively better way. It is what the existence and activity of the individual person contributes to the effect of an upshift in the Riemannian characteristics of the economic process considered as a whole, which is, and which must be the central standpoint of reference for organizing the desperately needed economic rebirth of our United States, and the world today. We must, therefore, educate our people to that effect.
4.4 Monetarists and Physiocrats as Such
The ability of an oligarchy, such as that of Lycurgan Sparta, to maintain a controlling grip upon those populations which it treats as either hunted or herded human cattle, depends for its durability, as an arrangement dependent, to a large degree, on the victim's willingness to be cattle. Among animal and human domesticated herds of those kept by the oligarchs, such as the Physiocrats associated with the decadent François Quesnay, as a form of cattle, the preferred practice is the dumbing-down of the captive population.
Among domesticated cattle, except those raised amd killed as fighting animals for public amusement, the preferred tactic is a combination of genetic downscaling of the mental capabilities and impulses of the captive, with culling of those specimens which are considered, for formally rational, or utterly capricious reasons, as undesirable. With respect to the degradation of human beings as human cattle, similar, but also different methods are employed. The liberal lowering of the standard of education for the children of post-1865 freed slaves, is an example of this. The methods of education employed in the U.S.A. and Europe today, since, especially the combined impact of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the 1963 Paris OECD report, including the cancelling of Classical humanist education in Germany, under pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom's John J. McCloy, is an example of this.
This is key to the trend of increasing decadence in policies of education in the U.S.A., as typified by the introduction of the so-called "new math," and as accelerated in the extreme in the aftermath of the late-1960s spread of the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture," that is, the kind of dumbing-down of the U.S. population which has made possible public toleration of the way in which the U.S. economy has been self-destroyed, physically and morally, over the recent four decades.
The same trend was in motion earlier in the U.S.A. It has been a general policy, especially as associated with the spread of empiricism in modern European civilization in such forms as the frauds of Euler, Lagrange, et al., which young Carl Gauss exposed in his 1799 paper on The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. The campaign against Leibniz and his influence, as conducted by the combination of such creatures as Voltaire and the Paris-based Venetian ideology of Abbé Antonio Conti, has this essential political-cultural motivation and character. The Anglo-Dutch Liberal dogmas of political-economy, as expressed by the work of John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, are representative of this campaign.
Thus, the effective brainwashing of masses of Europeans and Americans, into belief in the functionally decorticating notions of what was derided by President Franklin Roosevelt as "British Eighteenth-Century methods," has been the leading edge of the dumbing-down of Americans, and also Europeans, in ways which have led to such pathological expressions as credulous belief in monetarism and the physiocratic delusion. The virtual prohibition of giving any consideration to the efficient existence of universal physical principles beyond the ken of an empiricist's Cartesian-Hobbesian-Lockean mind-set, has an effect like a surgical leucotomy on the mental powers of the victim of such indoctrination.
So, in the case of the moral and physical degeneration of the economies of the U.S.A. and Europe (among others) during the recent forty years, in particular, we have an example of a self-inflicted tragedy, a destruction of a nation by its own people, a people induced to create virtual national-economic suicide through their induced belief in ideas which are subsumed by radically nominalist forms of pro-monetarist conceptions. The passion expressed by "I need that money!" becomes the psychotomimetic drug of belief by which nearly an entire people becomes complicit in the destruction of its nation and itself.
5. The Purpose for Which the U.S.A. Exists
The European rediscovery of the Americas and founding of our republic, was fruit of a mission adopted by leaders of the Fifteenth-Century Golden Renaissance. When we recognize the circumstances and the motives for that discovery, and recognize that the subsequent founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later United States of America, was the outgrowth of a great, long-range mission for mankind, we are impelled, today, to adopt the actions which we of the United States must take today, to meet our assigned obligation to mankind as a whole. The outcome of that mission, which was first given to us, implicitly, in that fashion, during the Renaissance, should inspire in us a sense of national mission in the present world crisis, still today.
That mission, with all ups and downs since, has proven to be, still today, a crucial role of our republic in bringing about the great objectives of those Fifteenth-Century Renaissance figures, who launched that mission for humanity which is the proper national dedication of our United States today.
The rediscovery of the continents of the Americas was prompted by the influence of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, whose response to the successive fall of Constantinople and subsequent crucial military defeat by the Ottoman forces in the Balkans, was to propose voyages of exploration across the Atlantic and into the Indian Ocean. The purpose of that exploration was to bring about the conditions for peace of mankind, in face of the catastrophes of the middle to late Fifteenth Century which menaced those hopes of peace which Cusa had expressed in his great dialogue, De Pace Fidei. Through the personal circles of Cusa himself, a veteran Genoese sea-captain, Christopher Columbus, was inspired by the writings and scientific expertise of Cusa and that Cardinal's associates to use the map provided by a leading scientist and collaborator of Cusa, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, to launch the great trans-Atlantic mission which reached land on the other side within approximately the expected lapse of time.
From that time, as seen in the expressed intent of the work of the martyred Sir Thomas More, and the dedication of More's English followers to that intent, the English-speaking colonists, and other Europeans, were drawn to destiny on our continent, with the original and continuing intention of creating here a great republic, which would be, as the Marquis de Lafayette expressed this later, a temple of liberty and beacon of hope for mankind. The original, pre-1688 Massachusetts Bay Colony, under the typical leadership of the Winthrops and Mathers, was the original keystone of our national purpose.
In the meantime, our republic has been often set back, and ruined for a time by internal corruption, a corruption chiefly exported to us from powers abroad which were determined to destroy us, either by conquest or subversion. Not only have we endured and outlived these abuses, until now, but that original, noble intent embedded in our institutions by our struggle for liberty, our Declaration of Independence, and our unique Constitution, still lives within us. Let us recapture that treasure bequeathed so to us, and accept the mission assigned to us now, as if it were written plainly in the stars.
Therefore, let not arrogance, nor lust for conquest, nor riches from abroad, inspire us to the mission which we must now perform, once again, for all humanity today. Let us do what we must do because we are souls encased in a mortal body, which must give richer meaning to the brief years of life before us all, by doing some good thing, which it were within our reach to do, a deed which shall become an immortal benefit to future generations of presently imperilled mankind in general.
Our advantage and obligation for this mission, as for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in an earlier time, is that our history, and our Constitution, the most enduring on this planet to date, oblige us to provide the spark to bring together nations to unite, as sovereigns, in healing the great wounds, and the great menace which are suffered by all mankind in this time of onrushing economic collapse and threat of perpetual wars. Let us rise from the swamp of our recent decadence, this one more time, to act, not for our greed, but for our honor, and for the sake of all who have an interest in the outcome of this affair, from the past, present, and future of mankind.
Let us, therefore, so now proceed to action.
To that purpose, I present certain crucial points for action which must be on the plate for action from Day One of the new Presidential Administration, if not, hopefully, even before that time. Let us adopt a commitment to a series of types of actions, even as bare of resources at this moment as the President Franklin D. Roosevelt who entered his office in the Executive mansion for the first time, as it is written, without a pencil or scrap of paper on his desk with which to proceed to govern.
The list which now follows here, is not explicitly complete, of course. It shows, implicitly the kernel of the thinking which must govern our treatment of all areas of Federal concern, whether the topics were explicitly addressed here, or not.
5.1 A New Bretton Woods
The first general action our government must take, is the placing of the implicitly bankrupt Federal Reserve System, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, into receivership by the respective relevant governments, for the purpose of government-managed reorganization in bankruptcy.
The proximate Constitutional precedent for this action is to be taken from the prompt and decisive, if less drastic form of such action by President Franklin Roosevelt. This action is taken, according to the U.S. Constitution, under the powers implicit in that Preamble to which all interpretation of other parts of the Constitution, as amended, and all Federal law, are subject and accountable. The overriding constitutional authority demands action taken in consideration of the combined considerations of national sovereignty, the general welfare of all of our population, and the security of our posterity.
The intent of such action, as in the precedent provided by President Franklin Roosevelt, is both to ensure the stability of essential private and public institutions, including banking institutions even if they are bankrupt, to prevent a collapse in the levels of employment in production of needed goods, to ensure the stability of essential public and private institutions, and the preparations for immediate emergency measures to effect rates of net physical-economic growth sufficient to maintain the functions of the Federal government, and of each of the Federal states and territories operating at a level of economic break-even or better.
The general program which must be promptly launched, with cooperation of the Congress, to assure that a general collapse does not occur, is the use of the constitutional power of public credit unique to the Presidency with the assent of Congress, to unleash a mass of short-term to long-term Federal credit, most of which will be ultimately secured by the capitalization of long-term assets of infrastructure and production capacity. The balancing, against capital assets, of the Federal debt created by issue of such currency or credit against authorized uttering of currency, shall be the predominant means by which not less than $6 trillions of Federal credit shall be provided, in a manner akin to Franklin Roosevelt-era precedents, for large-scale, long-term investment in the creation of essential basic national economic infrastructure of, chiefly, the Federal and state governments. The employment so generated by these means will create the market for the revival of the private sector's work in agriculture, industry, and related modes.
What must be prevented, at all costs, is the resort to fiscal austerity of that type, by means of which the Administration of President Herbert Hoover translated the stock-market crash of 1929 into a collapse of the income of the U.S.A. and its people by about one-half over the interval from October 1929 into March 1933.
A nation and its government can not be treated as an ordinary victim of predatory creditors in foreclosure proceedings. Failure to enforce that prohibition against such foreclosure proceedings against the government and national economy of any nation, is a violation of natural law. Applied to the U.S.A., or a group of nations of Europe, such measures of so-called fiscal austerity would, under present world circumstances, be a crime worse than all that committed under Adolf Hitler. It would be a sufficient trigger to plunge the entire planet into a prolonged new dark age, worse than that experienced by mid-Fourteenth-Century Europe during its New Dark Age. We must act as we should have acted at Versailles, following the First World War, and at the close of the Second. The obligations of government must, in general, be honored, as Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton set the precedent for this. Private debt must be sorted out, often at leisure, in a way which places first importance on the principles of the general welfare.
An Example
During 1971-1972 a group of nations, chiefly under the domination of the U.S. Nixon Administration and British monarchy, imposed a willful collapse of the regulated, fixed-exchange-rate monetary system established at Bretton Woods in 1944. The predatory interests, largely those associated with U.S. and British interests, used the opportunity created by the role of the U.S.A.'s George Shultz at the Azores monetary conference, to subject the nations of Central and South America, one by one, to orchestrated speculative collapse of their currencies on the London market. The assistance of the IMF and/or World Bank was recommended to the governments of the nations which had been victims of that swindle. The international monetary agencies acting as advisors, which were chiefly, in fact, agencies of the relevant British and U.S.A. interests, recommended pegging the relevant, victimized currencies downward. Worse, they then charged the victim-nation with an arbitrary, artificial debt, to compensate the debtor-nation's creditors for the devaluation of the debtor-nation's currency. Thus, today, the nations of South and Central America, taken as a whole, have no honorable debt-balance owed to the foreign financial creditor-predators.
In such cases as that, or other cases in which overreaching force has been employed to impose a swindle of that sort, the relevant authorities dealing with resolution of debt-hangovers must take morally appropriate action to afford justice to the nations which were victims of such swindles.
5.2 Rebuilding the World Economy
The urgently required action putting the Federal Reserve and International Monetary Fund into reorganization in bankrutpcy, must be associated with immediate action establishing the premises for a return to a fixed-exchange-rate monetary order among nations.
In that connection, the recent fad of "free trade," which has been a principal contributing factor in causing the present collapse of the existing world system, must be cancelled, and a system of "fair trade" rules set in place.
The greatest impediment to the cooperation of foreign nations in such an effort to pull the world as a whole back from a general collapse, is a London-led Europe's continuing tradition of so-called independent central banking systems. At the close of World War II, a bankrupt Europe, including a bankrupt Britain, was poorly situated to resist the offer of U.S. leadership in the formation of the original Bretton Woods system. Those nations are in a terrible situation now, but the self-inflicted destruction of the U.S.'s economy and finances, and the folly of the U.S. under the present Bush Administration, has not only promoted Europe's stubborn wish to teach the U.S.A. "a lesson," for the abuses of the recent three years, but an impulse among the nations of the continent to plunge into what would be an ultimately suicidal folly of a European Union conceived as a kind of parody of the Biblical Tower of Babel.
This impediment is not insuperable. Once it is made clear by the onrushing forces of a general monetary-financial breakdown crisis, that such schemes are a tragic delusion, Europe would be inclined to accept a resolute leadership by the U.S.A., provided that leadership represented a clear return to the post-war recovery policies which had been proffered by President Franklin Roosevelt.
The creation of a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, and the use of one- to two-generation trade-credit as a stimulus for the economic recovery of a European continent engaged in long-term economic relations with Asia, would be a feasible arrangement likely to receive strong sympathy and support from the populations of a continental Europe already plunging into an apparently bottomless economic collapse.
Under onrushing world-depression conditions, the chief source of resistance to such needed reforms will come from the grandchildren of that syndicate of financier-oligarchical interests known, during the 1918-1945 interval, as the Synarchist International. What would appear to ordinary European patriots to be the happy prospect of a recovery, would be regarded by the contemporary Synarchist heirs of the Venetian financier-oligarchical tradition as the end of the control which they have long exerted over Europe, and in world affairs generally, up to the present time. In that circumstance, the President and institutions of the U.S.A. must have a clear-headed view of the deadly threat from that same financier-oligarchical interest which plotted a 1934 military coup against President Franklin Roosevelt.
The long-term recovery and growth of the world economy under the new form of Bretton Woods system appropriate for current trends and circumstances of economic development, would be mobilized around major, long-term infrastructural development investments, in which Eurasian land-route corridors from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and through the Balkans into Near Asia, will be leading features (Figure 5).
For such Eurasian and comparable long-term development programs, the crucial consideration will be the creation of a network of interlocking long-term treaty-agreements, at nominal, simple-interest rates, which pledge the assets represented by functioning major capital long-term capital investments, against the mass of newly created credit-debt generated for funding those projects. Without a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, carrying nominal, simple-interest charges, the needed long-term capital agreements would not be feasible.
Nullifying Globalization and Free Trade
Once it were agreed to establish a new Bretton Woods monetary system as a mechanism of global economic recovery, the additional sticking-point to be overcome, will be the corruption of public opinion and relevant institutions by what would be presently, a suicidal commitment to maintain recent trends toward "free trade" and "globalization."
This means that outstanding "free trade" doctrines and agreements must be nullified, as part of the preconditions on which escape from a prolonged and deep world depression depends absolutely. World policy must become a "fair trade" system, buttressed by the kinds of protectionist measures used in former times.
There are three leading considerations to be emphasized in educating public opinion on the subject of the insanity of "free trade" and "globalization."
First, the ability to continue to produce goods of a certain quality, requires that "fair prices" be maintained. The mechanisms of unchecked price-competition can not be permitted to drive the price of goods below the level at which fair wages and maintenance of essential capital investments in physical capital are paid. This means, that real-wage levels must not be driven below the level at which a healthy, fully employed labor-force and its households are maintained.
The case of the aggravated destruction of a looted Mexico, and a simultaneous wrecking of the U.S. producer economy through the NAFTA-related "outsourcing" used to loot Mexico, must come to an end. In this case, the urgent U.S. economic and security interest is to build up capital formation and relatively full employment at decent wages inside Mexico, by aid of protectionist measures, while also maintaining quality productive employment and correlated physical-capital investment inside the U.S.A. This can be facilitated by immediate negotiation of long-term development agreements respecting water-resources, rail networks, generation and distribution of power, and related programs for greening of the Great American Desert extending north, from between the Sierra Madres into the great arid region west of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S.A. The first step to be taken in this direction is to promote cooperation to this effect between the state of Texas and the relevant bordering states of northern Mexico.
This approach to relations with Mexico should be considered as setting a bench-mark for an economic revival of the Franklin Roosevelt Good Neighbor policy toward the states of Central and South America generally.
Second, we must no longer tolerate the folly of assuming that the productive powers and economic health of a nation are defined by the sum total of local areas of production and investment. It is the development of the totality of the area and population of the nation which is the overriding determinant of the productivity of the national economy as a whole. The pattern of decay of the U.S. economy during the recent thirty-odd years, as expressed by the junking of entire areas of former agricultural and industrial production, and of the infrastructure discarded because of the debriding of written-off areas of habitation, shows the insanity of the reports of alleged growth or stabilization of the national economy as a whole.
Thirdly, the development of the level of cultural development of the whole population, as this development predetermines the potential technological advancement in the economy, is a social-economic factor which acts directly upon the society and its economy as a whole, rather than area by area. This is typified by scientific development, as shown by the high rate of gain of the U.S. national economy as a whole, from the technology spun off from U.S. government investment in the Kennedy crash program for the Moon landing.
The members of the Congress, among others, urgently require extensive reeducation in the rudiments of competent national economic policies, on these accounts.
5.3 U.S. Social Policy
The decadence, in quality and productivity, of the U.S. economy over the most recent four decades, since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, was largely a reflection of a rot already eating, like a termite infestation, at the foundations of our national economic house. That rot is typified by the counter-cultural campaign for the promotion of decadence, which was conducted under the spearhead of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
This decadence was already under way during the post-war 1940s, and on the march under the banners of "White Collar" and "The Organization Man," during the 1950s. Cultural decadence spread like a rot through the growth of the mass media.
Suburbanization exploded into the countryside as a way of neglecting, and thus destroying the essential functional role in culture and economy associated with our great urban areas. The costs of suburbanization in misuse of land-areas, and in declining economic efficiency of social life and culture through negligence, even rot of our cities, has resulted in a monstrous loss of efficiency in our economy through the direct and indirect costs of "suburbanization." This effect of economic and cultural decadence through "suburbanization" has exploded in the ugliest way in the transformation of areas of our great agricultural and industrial potential into marginalized areas become outright economic and social wastelands.
The worst damage was not physical, but mental. Using the 1950s' and early 1960s' studies of the problem of Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process, as by prominent Yale psychiatrist Lawrence S. Kubie, as a marker, there has been a deep decline in the correlatives of creative scientific and Classical artistic thinking and productivity, already under way in the 1950s, but becoming rampant as the "new math" proceeded to displace the scientific-creativity mentality, beginning the close of the 1950s. Those attributes of the use of language which are essential to the Classical irony at the base of the ability to communicate valid original ideas, in science or ordinary social communication, have been disappearing from the mental and spoken vocabulary of European civilization. We can repair physical damage; but who will be available to repair the damage to the cultural infrastructure of the mental creativity of even the leading layer of the population? Look at the cacophony of political and kindred psycho-babble pouring out of TV "talk shows" of our national and other capitals' broadcasting channels!
It is difficult to do creative work, or even concentrate for simply serious thinking, when it seems that the folk in the apartment upstairs are simulating what might be imagined to be the mass mating activity of a herd of elephants. The noise level in every niche of mental life of the population, is creating a stress and a pandemic of outright stupidity, which is not only deafening, but virtually decorticating.
There are some who warn of terrible ruin caused by the influx of those who do not speak our variety of English so well. The damage to our national legal language from our immigrants is relatively insignificant when compared with the effects of the use of our national language for little more than carrying out the intellectual garbage.
In large degree, this destruction of our culture today, lower, lower, and lower, than the usages of comparable social and professional laws one and two generations ago, is the result of chiefly two factors. First, the intention to dumb down our population, as typified by both the work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the related impact of the Orwellian-like phenomenon once called "McCarthyism." Second, the post-1964 transformation of our economy, from the world's leading producer society, into a psycho-babbling, parasitical entertainment society.
Soon, we will be hit by a great collapse of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan's great real-estate bubble. Masses of what had been nominally classed as "home-owners," will be reduced to the rank of "squatters," or worse. This imminent social catastrophe is complemented by the transformation of key cities in which the cost of housing defines those locations as places where most citizens can no longer afford to live. Whole regions of the nation, such as the referenced cases of former agricultural and industrial belts, are sinking into rubble. More than forty years, but especially the most recent quarter-century, of rot, rot, rot, has eaten away at what we once had in the social conditions of life and work available to most of our population.
What is often referred to, currently, as the "Wal-Mart" syndrome, is part of this. The growth of mass-marketing malls, which drive competing stores and their vendors out of business, while peddling products produced in foreign cheap-labor markets, which our unemployed, marginally employed, and simply plain poor citizens can already ill-afford to buy, is the marker of a rotting national economy, and a rotting social life for more and more among a majority of our citizens. A political orientation to the likely voters among the upper 20% of family-income brackets, reflects a reigning political-party system which is, by and large, increasingly indifferent to the great majority of our people, and even to the future existence of our nation.
All this, and more, we must fix, as President Franklin Roosevelt would have done.
