This transcript appears in the October 15, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Priority Campaign Issue
Is President Bush's Insanity

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Mr. LaRouche gave this speech to a webcast conference of LaRouche PAC in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 6, 2004. The moderator was LaRouche's spokeswoman Debra Hanania Freeman. Video and audio archives of the event are available at the LaRouche PAC website.

Debra Freeman: ... Let me just say, that with now less than four weeks to go, to the election in the United States, we find ourselves in what is undoubtedly an extremely tense situation. The strategic crisis continues to deepen. The global financial crisis, and the global economic crisis, is undoubtedly what is driving that. We see the manifestations of that in every aspect of life in the United States. I think that, for those of you who listened to the Vice Presidential debate last night, we would all have to agree with Senator Edwards, that it's very unlikely that this country could take four more years of this policy.

But, it's also the case that the policy did not begin four years ago. Even George Bush and Dick Cheney could not do that much damage in four years. The fact of the matter is, that we find ourselves now at a crossroads: a crossroads in the history of the United States, but also a crossroads in the history of modern civilization. And what this election will, without question, determine, is what direction we take. We have an opportunity right now; we have an opportunity to reverse what has been 35 years of an extremely destructive policy, and a policy which flies in the face of the intention of the Founding Fathers, when this nation was established.

As I think everyone who is listening knows, Mr. LaRouche has played a critical role in this election campaign, first as a candidate for the Democratic nomination; and then, following the Democratic Convention, with the formation of LaRouche PAC, Mr. LaRouche endorsed the candidacy of John Kerry, with the understanding that the most important thing for us to accomplish right now, is the absolute smashing of the Cheney-Bush Administration. And we have proceeded to do precisely that.

But we've also done it, with an eye toward the policies which must dominate the new administration. And those policies will not be implemented, and can not be implemented, without the active participation of Lyndon LaRouche. That is the case inside the United States, and it is also the case internationally.

To be fair, I think we do have to give some credit to President Bush, who I think proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt last week, that he in fact can tell people everything he knows in less than 90 seconds. And he can do it, with dramatic pauses! I have to admit, that for myself, every time—and I may be dating myself by saying this—but every time George W. Bush talked about what hard work something was, I kept hearing the voice of Maynard G. Krebs in the background, screaming, "Wo-o-or-r-k!!"

But, while we can joke about it, and while we obviously have to joke about it, one thing that I think alarmed Americans, and it is a theme that Mr. LaRouche has hammered away at, is the fact that we currently have the United States, the world's remaining superpower, under the guidance of a President with extremely serious psychological problems. And I think that those psychological problems were manifest before the eyes of the entire world last week.

There's certainly more that can be said about this. And there is more that can be said about Mr. LaRouche's role in this drive to defeat the Cheney-Bush synarchist crowd. But rather than taking the time to do that, now that everyone has settled in, I'd like you to join me in welcoming Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche: As I indicated, the problem which I'll address today, has to do with insanity. Not only, however, the insanity of the incumbent President, George Bush, which I shall refer to, but also the insanity of two other types: We have mass insanity, as typified by the role of religious fundamentalism in shaping the policies of the United States today; and secondly, we have cultural insanity, expressed in the form in particular, over the past 40 years, of the transformation of the United States, which had been the world's most powerful, most productive nation—the one that had rebuilt the world, or led in rebuilding the world, in the post-war period—40 years ago, began to transform itself, into the junk heap, the bankrupt junk heap, we are today.

This was not done merely by bad Presidents, such as the cowardice, in a sense, of Johnson, who was frightened that maybe the three guns that shot down Kennedy might shoot him next; but also the insanity of people who supported President Nixon, a virtual fascist regime, which launched the actual wrecking of the U.S. economy in a large degree.

The mass insanity of transforming this nation from the world's greatest producer society, to today's bankrupt society, post-industrial bankrupt system, in a bankrupt world, which we have led in bringing about.

So therefore, we have three kinds of insanity: One, the insanity of the President himself—and that is a major factor in our problems: Because we, as the United States, are crucial in this planet. If the United States goes insane, there's no other part of this planet, or no combination of other parts of this planet, which is prepared to prevent a global disaster, even potentially a new dark age. So, we have to be patriots, for the sake of the world: Because only the United States, in all its rotten condition today, still has the potential, in a time of crisis like this, a time whose precedent is that of the incumbency of Franklin Roosevelt, without whom the world would have gone to hell. And Roosevelt is to be credited for that, in part, but Roosevelt is to be credited also, because he was a President of the United States, in which are embedded the potentials which no other part of this planet has, for dealing with a crisis of the type which confronted us then, in 1933, and which confronts us again, today.

And therefore, that has to be our approach.

Therefore, an insane man in the Presidency, is a crisis. It's a crisis for the world. It is not something the rest of the world can overlook. There's no hope for the rest of the world, unless the United States is able to play the role it must play, under terms of the present crisis.

There's a mass of insanity, which is associated in this country with religious fundamentalism, both of the Catholic anti-Pope type, and of the Protestant fundamentalist type. Neither of which are Christians. And that, I will have something to say about, because that's an important part about this.

There's mass insanity in form of belief in free trade, which I will demonstrate today in a serious presentation of the subject, but brief, that this is a form of mass insanity. And if we don't get rid of it, we're not going to solve any of our problems.

Then, we have the cultural insanity, which is taking the form of fascism today: the fascism represented by the Bush-Cheney Administration. The support for what Bush-Cheney represents, is a form of mass insanity.

Now, so far, there are hopeful signs from the population, especially from the "unusual voters"—not the usual voters, the ones who have voted for insanity repeatedly, often, over the past four Federal election cycles. But rather, a kind of more serious kind of voter, the poor, the lower 80% of family-income brackets, and young people, young adults, particularly the age-group of 18 to 25. These layers are beginning to turn out. The role of youth, young adult youth, turning out to register to vote, and their role in inducing others to turn out to vote, from the lower 80% of family-income brackets, is the most positive factor in our population today.

Because the customary voters, the ones who voted at three out of the last four Federal elections, have performed very poorly. Bill Clinton managed to overcome that difficulty among them, and won a lot of them to his side. Al Gore couldn't do it—he became part of the problem, not the solution. And so forth.

So, these things have to be dealt with. They have to be understood.

Now, my position is, of course, I'm supporting Kerry for President, and have seen him as a second choice for a Democratic Presidential nominee since the New Hampshire primary, and have said so repeatedly. So, my support and endorsement for him, in the course of the convention in Boston, should have come as no surprise to anybody who was paying attention.

But I considered him actually my third choice, because there wasn't a second choice. What that means, essentially, is that he does not have the qualifications, presently, in and of himself, in the policies expressed and in his behavior, to be the kind of President the situation requires. So today, we're considering—and my role here is crucial—we're considering what has to be added to a successful election of a Kerry-Edwards ticket, to produce a Presidency which is actually qualified to deal with the challenge which a mere Kerry-Edwards team would not be qualified to do.

In other words, we have to bring into process, not only victories in the Congress, not only victories in state elections; we have to bring into the United States government, not just political appointees, not the usual hacks, not the usual people brought in as favors for financial contributions. We have to bring in some people who are not necessarily the richest people in the United States, but who are senior representatives, who are diplomatic, intelligence, military, and other governmental professional people, who may no longer be in government, but who have the knowledge, as a group of people, brought together for a dialogue, of providing a Presidency with the kind of guidance it requires to get through this.

I've worked with these people, directly and indirectly, for some time, people of this type. I find that our Americans of this type are among the most reliable for policymaking in the world. The problem is, they have not been brought together as a force. And I think if the Kerry-Edwards team wants to be successful as a Presidency, as well as merely elected, they're going to have to bring these people in, as their key advisors in various parts of government, rather than bringing in the so-called "financial angels" who come in as appointees: Because, at this time, the financial community of the United States, and the world, is insane. As I shall indicate today.

That's our problem. Take the case of Argentina.

In 1971-72, the Bretton Woods system, as established under Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, modeled not upon the Keynesian system, but modeled upon the American System of political economy of Alexander Hamilton and company—that system, the Bretton Woods system, enabled us, the United States, to take a shattered, bankrupt world, and reorganize a recovery for over two decades in the post-war period, notably in Europe and other places.

In 1971-72, Nixon, under the advice of Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Paul Volcker, destroyed that system. And George Shultz, the following year in 1972, at the Azores Conference, destroyed the system on which the post-war recovery and development of the United States and other nations had depended. We have been going downhill ever since.

Now, what has happened to us, is something similar to what happened in Europe during the 1922-1945 interval, when continental Europe was taken over, step by step, by fascist governments, starting with Mussolini in Italy, and continuing with Hitler to 1945.

But, at the end of the war, although the United States took some notable Nazis, and hung them at Nuremberg, the people that put the Nazis into power, including financial interests in our own country, formed the right wing in the United States, typified by Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and so forth. The right wing was there. The Truman Administration was a right-wing turn against everything Roosevelt fought for. We have long-term tendencies, where the same people, from the United States, Britain, and from Europe, who financed Hitler, for whom the Truman Administration covered up at the end of the war—names like Harriman, Morgan, du Pont, Mellon, and so forth. The people behind the planned military coup against the United States government of 1934: These people were brought back in, and the right-wing turn occurred.

Now, these people, again, are coming to the point that their system, that they created, is bankrupt. It's hopelessly bankrupt. This system is finished. Every major banking institution of Europe and the United States is presently bankrupt! And hopelessly bankrupt! Don't believe anything else: It's all lies.

But look at Argentina: Argentina, at the end of the war, had the fourth highest standard of living of any nation on this planet. It now has people living on garbage, today! Why? Because of the policy changes introduced under Nixon in 1971-72, the so-called floating-exchange-rate system. And what is happening? Annie Krueger (the mother of Freddie Krueger), the chief spokesman of the IMF, is imposing Nazi-like repression against the people of Argentina—accelerated death rates. And the same people in the United States, under George Bush and Cheney, would do the same thing to you, in the United States, in the coming year or two ahead.

Therefore, we've come to a point, where Kerry's and Edwards', but particularly Kerry's flopping, and Kennedy's flopping on the economic issue, from the Democratic Party side, is no longer tolerable! We're going to face a situation, like those faced in Argentina! Our lower 80% of the population's income brackets, our youth, are going to be faced with the same kind of measures, from a Bush-Cheney Administration, that Argentina faces from the IMF today.

This is fascism. This is the way this works, under the so-called "liberal" system, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, the so-called "free trade" system. You go along—free trade. Everything is free trade, fine! "We have democracy!" You don't know what you're talking about, but you have a right to say it. The politicians don't know what they're doing, but they have a right to decide. It's called "liberalism," as opposed to truth. Truth is measured in the consequences of a decision, not in the right to express it.

What happens then, when the system fails, as it always does? The history of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, since it became a power over the period between 1688 and 1763, has produced this kind of cycle repeatedly, including the Napoleonic dictatorship in Europe, and similar kinds of things. What it does, it practices liberalism for a certain period of time. It gets rich. Then it comes to the limit of its getting rich by those methods. And the question is, who's going to pay the unpayable debts? And suddenly, the liberals turn into fascists, or the equivalent: They start to skin the people, rather than save them, in order to pay the debts.

This is fascism. This is what happened in Europe in 1922, in particular, beginning with Mussolini, but actually plotted at the Versailles Treaty, concluding World War I: A group called the Synarchist International, which are international private bankers, who control most banks, they plotted to set up a system of fascist regimes. The first choice, set up by a banker called Volpi di Misurata, who was a British-controlled banker in Italy, put Mussolini into power. And you had, over this period, a succession of appointments of fascist governments all the way to 1945, on the continent of Europe.

The issue was, as in 1931-1933 on, the same thing that faces the United States and the world today: It's what's going on in Europe today, with the so-called "Hartz IV" program, in Germany. It's fascism! It may not be political fascism yet, but it's economic fascism. Similar proposals in France, in Italy, elsewhere in Europe. Europe is on the road toward fascism, as it was in 1931-33, right now!

And we, here in the United States, without a Roosevelt as President, face the same threat here.

Therefore, in order to stop the fascists, who are clearly marching behind Bush-Cheney, we have to get them out now. But we have to make sure that a Kerry Administration does not, out of liberalism, capitulate to the demands of the bankers, in the way the Europeans capitulated to the bankers in installing fascism in 1933, in particular, in Germany.

This is the problem.

Now the problem here is, that the people I'm supporting, for President and Vice President, have not yet shown the ability, or the willingness, to understand this problem. Well, I'm not going to fuss too much about it with them right now. Nov. 2's coming up. But the day that they are elected, on Nov. 2, this is what I'm going to fuss about! We're not going to turn a Kerry-Edwards victory into a license to introduce fascism into the United States.

And that's why this PAC exists. For that purpose.

My constituency, and I propose the constituency of the Democratic Party, has to be primarily two groups: the lower 80% of family-income brackets who have been looted and ruined over the past 40 years, by the change from a productive society to a post-industrial utopia; and secondly, the generation of young people typified by those 18 to 25 young adults, who are given now, no future. Look at the income standards of people reaching the age of 18, who should be going to universities, today; and look at the universities they're being sent to—and weep! And look at the incomes they have; look at the futures they face for the next 40 to 50 years ahead, if they have a future at all! That has to be the constituency.

The political constituency of a true republic, has to be the poorest people, the least fortunate. And the test of good government, is the ability of a President (in our case), and the Congress, to look at the conditions of life of the poorest layer of our population, the least privileged, and to say, "Justice for them, is a measure of our conformity with the Preamble of our Constitution, with the sovereignty of our nation: Which means the bankers come second, and the nation comes first." The general welfare of our people, the test of which is how do we treat those who are in the poorest layers of our population? Our posterity: How do we treat our youth, and those coming after them? Those are the three principles, the great principles of our republic, which must govern us in this period ahead. And that's what I'm going to fight for. That's what I shall continue to fight for.

We have to support Kerry and Edwards now, because they're the only available choice. We must stop the Bush-Cheney proposition. Kerry's an intelligent guy. He's got many good qualities. Edwards is a younger man, but we have hope for the whole crew.

But: They are going to have to have some guidance. Because they have not shown, yet, a comprehension of the real problems that face the nation. I think Senator Byrd probably should also have something to say about this thing on the question of War Powers Act, in particular.

Now, so let's start this outline of the parameters of the ball field. Let's look at this case, piece by piece.

Now, let's start with a picture—there's a wonderful book, published by an honorable, distinguished psychiatrist, called Bush on the Couch).

A very good book. What it does, it takes material from the public domain, and with the expertise of the psychiatric profession which has developed techniques for understanding how to profile political figures, and political movements, in the same way that a psychiatrist would look at an individual patient. And he has shown us, with facts which are available to us, which can be substantiated by psychiatrists professionally, but which are understandable by citizens: that the President of the United States is, in effect, clinically insane.

And, if you didn't believe that, you have to look at a few clips from the Bush-Kerry debate.

[[VIDEO CLIPS FROM FIRST BUSH-KERRY DEBATE]]

You wanted to have that, for the President of the United States? In a time of crisis? A man who will kill, without even knowing who he's killing or why he's doing it?

Well, then I've got another one here.

[[EDWARDS AND CHENEY AT DEBATE]]

I've got a short cut from the Edwards-Cheney debate. How is that? All right. What you're looking at here, you're looking at an honest fellow, Edwards from North Carolina. But you're looking at something else. Now, Bush personally is a psychopath. What you're looking on the left-hand side there [Cheney] is a sociopath!

Now, Edwards didn't know how to deal with this sociopath, because he didn't know how you deal with a sociopath of that type. It's sort of like an organized-crime hitman type of sociopath: Think of a hitman, an organized-crime hitman. You're dealing with a very similar type of personality, right there. The Vice President of the United States, or the President in Charge of Vice.

What should Edwards have done? He took the wrong approach for dealing with a sociopath. This is a killer sociopath, a conscienceless killer; and a conscienceless liar. How do you deal with him? Accuse him of cowardice. And he will respond by showing you his other side. Then the sociopath will come clear to the surface. Just imagine telling a mafia hitman, "I understand you're the biggest coward in the neighborhood." And he will then demonstrate his propensities to you, in all probable cases.

What I want to turn to here, is look at the effect of what has happened, recently, in the United States, and what is happening now, to the lowest 80% of family-income brackets....

This is what is happening! This is fact about the economy! Forget the financial figures.

Most of the financial figures reporting on the U.S. and world economy are totally fake. The financial figures are largely related to so-called financial derivatives. These financial derivatives have no direct correlation with physical economic reality. In terms of physical economic reality, as I shall emphasize here, today, the United States is disintegrating! It is disintegrating under Bush-Cheney at a faster rate than at any time previously! And if you keep them in here, the disintegration will be total. And Bush himself, and Cheney himself, have, in the two recent debates, avowed their commitment to continuing those policies which have caused this. Now, if you want to starve to death, you vote for these clowns!

Let's take a series of these: Let's take, first of all, what has happened to aluminum.

And I'm going to explain in the course of this why I'm using these methods. These are called animations. They're not charts, in the sense of the kind of charts you get in printed publications, they're animations, and I'll explain what the importance of these is. That's one case.

Let's take the next one, steel.

This is over a century.

Take the next one: nickel.

This was the effect of Roosevelt's mobilization for the war, and the results after 1970, when the change occurred.

Okay, take the next one, zinc.

Another crucial one, similar kinds of characteristics. World War I; now World War II, hmm? It's called the "kitchen zinc."

Okay, copper.

See again, you see a similar phenomenon, a little different, because of the electrical wire and related industry with copper. Again, but the same factor.

Now, look at something else: Look at the collapse of the rail system, which is our basic transportation system—rail and water. This is one section, that section of the United States.

You could correlate these things with industry. Now, we also have some others I don't have here. But you look at the collapse of steel, the steel industry, and you find the collapse of the steel industry, together with the collapse of the water-transport system, that is, locks and canals and dams and so forth: They correlate, of course, with this collapse of industrial power, industrial might.

Now, this is our friend "Smiley." One of my associates likes to give this.

What has happened is that Wall Street and finance, which has been growing, and which is accounted as a source for the growth of the economy, is not the growth of the physical economy; it's not the production of the physical standard of living on which people depend; nor does it represent production by people. It represents a hyperflationary (actually) inflation of the nominal value of money, which has no necessary correlation with the production of physical goods.

Look at one other thing. We've got one here on flux-density and technology, just to make a crucial point, which explains why I'm using animations. We'll come back to this again—I want to repeat this—but, first explain what I'm talking about here.

In ancient Greece, before Aristotle, there was a development of culture around Greek figures known as Thales, the Pythagoreans generally, a Pythagorean by the name of Archytas, and Plato. In this period, there was an understanding of science, which the ancient Greeks, or these ancient Greeks, acquired largely from Egypt. And if you go back about 5,000 years, to the Great Pyramids of Egypt, you will observe that these pyramids were astronomical instruments. And the ancient Egyptians had a method of developing physical science, which was based on a study of the universe as observed, as the astrophysical universe.

This was called "spherics." Instead of looking at the universe in a silly way, in a Cartesian or Euclidean geometry, which only silly people will believe in, you look at it from the standpoint of the ancient Egyptians and what's called "spherics." You're looking up to the universe. Sooner or later, you get the idea of normalizing your observation position on Earth, when you're looking at the stars at night, because the Earth is in motion, in orbit; the Earth is rotating. And therefore, you have to take that into account, in correlating what you think you are seeing, from this platform called Earth, when you look up to the universe. And you see things which are the so-called "stellar constellations." And there's motion there. And you have the non-stellar motion such as the planets and the asteroids and so forth, which are also part of the picture.

So, from the standpoint of trying to understand this spherical system, which the ancient Egyptians understood from the science of spherics, the ancient Greeks, as typified by Thales, and the Pythagoreans, and Plato, and so forth, developed a concept of physical science. Now, this modern physical science, and modern technology, is actually based on the principles which the ancient Greeks, the ones I referred to, developed. It was called the concept of "powers." Not energy, but "powers." Only idiots measure things in energy. Energy is an effect, it is not a cause. Power is what's important.

What do we mean by power?

This goes back to the very nature of man: Only man, among living creatures, knows the concept of power. By the concept of power, we mean, that we think we understand things, once we get past purblindness. We look out at our experience. We think we see objects. We call them "sense-perceptual objects." Well, there are sensual-perceptual objects, but are they really the physical objects which are causing the effects we're seeing? No!

And modern science, as typified by people like Nicholas of Cusa, who was the founder of modern experimental science, or one of his key followers, Kepler, and followers of Kepler, such as Leibniz, developed this concept in the form which defines the most effective form of modern science: that man, through our use of the principle of hypothesis, the principle of discovery, is able to define, not visible, but visibly efficient physical processes in the universe. By understanding these principles, and applying them, man is able to increase our species' power in and over the universe.

Thus, for example, if the human species were a monkey—or a Dick Cheney (comparable: one gorilla knows the other)—then the human population of the planet, in the past 2 million years could never have exceeded much more than 2 million people, living individuals. We now have on this planet, more than 6 billion living individuals.

How did this happen? Because of the principle of powers: Mankind, in his history, has accumulated discoveries of principles, principles which are things which can not be seen, but can be proven to exist by the mind. These become the mental objects we call "principles" in physical science. Also the principles we find in Classical artistic composition. Principles. These principles enable man to increase man's power to exist in the universe. To raise our standard of living and culture.

We reflect these changes, in modern society, as technological progress. Using technological progress in the broad sense, to mean not only discovery and application of scientific principles, but on the basis of the use of discovered scientific principles, to create what we call new technologies. It also applies to culture, to Classical culture; it applies to poetry, to music, to artistic composition, to the stage, which enables people to understand history, through great tragedies enacted on stage, as those of Shakespeare, or Schiller.

So, this is man's notion of powers, or technology.

So therefore, man's increase in power, per capita and per square kilometer, is the result of the development of this knowledge and its use. So therefore, we can measure progress in terms of the rate of density of technology—more and more uses of technology, to solve human problems, to enable human beings to live better, to become more numerous, to master the land, to master, eventually, the Solar System.

So, that's how we measure progress. When we have people, for example, in industries, like small businesses which are high tech, which produce most of the technologies on which large corporations have depended; or small firms, usually less than 200 employees, sometimes much less, in which the large corporation depends upon them for developing the technologies on which these large corporations depend for the quality of their product (if they pay attention to them, which they do less and less these days; and we write these people off).

So, we measure progress in terms of the development of our people, that is, development in terms of technology proper; development in terms of Classical artistic principles in music, art and so forth, the things which go together to enable us to cooperate, to solve problems, technological problems, in cooperation. The great effect of this, is in the form of small industry: which means the progressive farmer, the progressive entrepreneur, who hires anywhere from 3 to 200 people, typically. These are the people who are dedicated, not to making a profit. Yeah, they don't want to lose money; they don't want to go bankrupt. But, their primary motive is not profit per se. Their primary motive is a sense of achievement: To build a firm which makes a successful contribution to society.

A firm which will continue to live, which will employ perhaps members of their family, or people they've adopted, as key employees. These firms will have principles that will go on from generation to generation. They used to have great reputations. We used to have firms in existence for three or four generations, and you would look upon them, reliably, as sources of good technology. You would call them up, if you wanted a problem solved. You would rely on a brand name, associated with that firm.

The purpose of an individual, who is a human being—and I shall get to that in a moment—the purpose of the individual, is to do something with their life! To do something with their life, not only for themselves, but for the people who come after them; and to bring honor to their grandparents and parents for what they've done. That's the great motive of humanity. Not a financial motive. It expresses itself, in the fact you can't keep a business going if you keep losing money. But the purpose is not to make money: The purpose is to be able to do something good, for it to grow, the way a farmer tries to make a crop grow better, and to pass something on to coming generations. And also, to honor their ancestors, whose suffering they may remember, and whose sacrifices they may remember.

Therefore, we have a system in the United States, which is called the "American System"—it's not the European capitalist system. It's the American System. The American System means, that 50% of the national economy will be associated with infrastructure, because to produce, we require water systems; we require power systems; we require mass transportation systems, as well as ordinary water systems; we require public education; we require health-care systems, and so forth. And therefore, about 50% of a total, healthy, modern economy is in the area of public infrastructure.

Some of it's financed by the Federal government. Some of it is organized by state governments, perhaps with the assistance of the Federal government, with credit organized by the Federal government; some of it is organized by municipalities and counties. But these are all things, from water systems on down, the public services which are necessary to maintain and improve the structure of the country, as a precondition for all kinds of private production.

But while these things are government operations, in one sense or the other, they also depend upon their function in fostering individual initiative by private entrepreneurs, because there's only one source of human progress: It's the creative powers of the individual mind. And therefore, we want to foster the opportunities, for the development and utilization of the creative powers of the individual mind, for the benefit of us all.

So, then, the American System, as Hamilton summarized it, that's the kind of system we want to have.

Now that means that our point is, is, we have to increase the technology-density of the United States. And that will be a measure of how powerful we are, per capita, in meeting our own needs. That contrasts with the fact, that during the past 40 years, we, who because of our high technology-density, were the leading world's power in productivity, have destroyed ourselves, with the post-industrial, so-called "Greenie" ideology of anti-technology society! We destroyed ourselves.

We now live, in the United States, by shutting down our places of employment, and getting what we eat and wear, from the slave labor, or virtual slave labor, of other countries. And our country is being destroyed, because we are no longer earning our own income. We are stealing it from other people. And the people from whom we're stealing, are going shut up, like the case of Argentina, or the case of Mexico.

We are not losing our jobs to Mexico. The Mexicans are not benefitting from what's happening to them in their relationship to the United States. Mexico is becoming progressively poorer, as a result of producing for us, at incomes in Mexico below the level needed for Mexicans to survive.

So that people in our country are taking our jobs, and shipping them out to Mexico and other places, where Mexicans work at slave labor conditions; or, Mexico as a nation, lives at slave labor conditions, in order to provide cheap goods for Wal-Mart, the same Wal-Mart that's firing the firms that used to supply the stores in their area. In other words: We are destroying both our own country, and the country from whom we steal, in the case of Mexico.

Look at the case of Mexico in particular: Take the immigration into the United States of both illegal and legal immigrants. Look at the generations among them. Look at the effects. What we are doing: We are taking the bodies of Mexicans, and we are looting the bodies. Look at where the employment is in Mexico, and among Mexicans coming to the United States: There is a negative rate of employment, among Mexicans who have been in the United States, legal or otherwise, for more than four years! There is an increase in employment, among Mexicans who have come into the United States within the past four years! What does that mean? We are stealing the cheapest labor, and looting it!

This is not the United States. This is not what we were created to be.

Look at our own country! Look at these areas we just indicated here. Look at Ohio, where there's a big turnout for Kerry. And we're helping to organize it. Look at Michigan. Look at western Pennsylvania. Look at other parts of the country, where there are similar things. Look at the Northwest of the United States. Look at the Southern states of United States.

Look at the ruin. We've come to a point, a real cycle, a 40-year cycle: Most of the long-term infrastructure, such as rail systems, mass transit systems, locks and dams, water systems and so forth—. Electrical power production and distribution systems, usually have a capital life-cycle of between 40 and 50 years. Now 40 years ago, approximately 1964, we started to go into a phase, of phasing down from being a high-technology society, to a post-industrial society. Now, look at the installations we had then! Look at the dams! Look at the locks! Look at the water systems, the reservoirs, which are used by the counties and so forth, for freshwater systems. Look at the systems of dams on the county level, within states. Look at power distribution and generation: These systems are now collapsing!

Why? Because 40 years ago, we had created these systems! And now, the systems we created 40 to 50 years ago, have run the life-cycle where they had to be replaced or replenished. And we have no allotment for doing so.

So, the obvious conclusion is, that the great challenge before the United States today, with a Kerry Administration, is to create between 8 and 10 million new jobs, immediately, by utilizing labor for what it can be utilized for. Initially, the great emphasis will have to be on basic economic infrastructure, on the Federal, state, and local level.

We have to create Federal credit the way Roosevelt did, using the Constitutional power of the Federal government to create credit. Put the bankrupt banking system into bankruptcy; don't let them close their doors, force them to stay open, keep the thing functioning. Pour credit into the system through the Federal government, the state government, and the local government. Get the infrastructure projects going. Build up the paid income of people in these areas, to the level that the states are at a breakeven level! If you bring all the states above breakeven level, then you've brought the Federal government's operations above breakeven level.

This means that now you've created, by infrastructure projects, you have created the stimulation, for participation through contracts, by private contractors, all the way through the system—contractors or suppliers. So suddenly now, you take the private sector, by activating the 50% of the economy, the infrastructure sector, you now stimulate the market, on which the private sector depends. And it will go into growth. That's what we have to do.

But that means we have to put the system into bankruptcy reorganization.

Now, look back at this chart, these flux-density technological leaps.

Each of these things represents what you measure, in crude terms, as increases in energy-flux density. The burning of wood is the least efficient, in terms of energy-flux density, and the effects on nature in the long term are not too good. Remember, in the 16th Century in England, England was almost in a crisis, because it had relied upon charcoal, which is a product of this combustion of wood, for its fuel. And, as it tried to go through a primitive level of its industrial development, as for making cannon and so forth for warfare in that period, it soon reached the point there was a crisis. So the English were forced to discover the use of coal, and promote the use of coal, which is a higher level of efficiency, in terms of density, than wood. We then went to higher products in terms of fuels, in terms of fuel development and so forth, and we went to nuclear energy.

Now, nuclear energy—there's no system, no non-nuclear system, which can match nuclear fission as a source of power. It's qualitative. So when you stop having nuclear fission as a power source, you're nuts! You've ended technological progress. That's not adequate. You have to have better nuclear fission systems. You have to have also thermonuclear fusion systems, which are a still higher order of magnitude. And we'll probably get to matter/anti-matter reactions, sometime in the course of this century, if we don't collapse in the meantime.

So these kinds of things. New technologies, improved technologies in every area, in biology, chemistry, whatnot, are the essential thing. And the more we can employ people, at higher levels of technology, higher levels of educational development, which go along with higher technology, the more productive and the wealthier our people are.

What we have done, with the post-industrial ideology of the past 40 years: We have destroyed that. We have destroyed our economy. Our infrastructure's collapsing. We're about to go into a breakdown.

Let's get to the next aspect of this thing, the next category of insanity: mass insanity, of the type of pseudo-Christian fundamentalism, both the nominally Catholic anti-Pope variety, and also the fundamentalist variety that comes out of the Nashville Agrarians, well known to us, but not endeared by us. This is not Christianity. And it's important to recognize it's not Christianity, not merely for factitious reasons, but because it's not Christianity! Christianity is a religion of love. It is coincident with the Classical Greek principle of agape. It's the principle that man is special, because man is in the likeness of the Creator; that all persons are born in the likeness of the Creator; and therefore, this is a quality which man must regard as sacred, as existing in every individual.

You don't try to create categories of hate against human beings! If you hate some class of human beings, you're not a Christian. This is the great argument that was made by Plato in The Republic, where, through the voice of Socrates, there's the denunciation of Thrasymachus, the prototype for the Vice President Cheney; or Glaucon, the man who was the formalist in law; in defense of the principle of agape. This is the great principle which the Apostle Paul cites in I Corinthians 13. There is no law that is any good, if it is not governed by this principle of agape, this love of mankind. Christianity is a religion of love of mankind.

Now, you take the case of Moses Mendelssohn, who was born and died an Orthodox Jew, who was one of the great apostles of modern Judaism. One of the great founders of the Classical humanist Renaissance in Germany, during the 18th Century. The man who inspired the Yiddish Renaissance, in Eastern Europe. This great man: same principle. The immortality of the individual soul.

What does that mean? Now people teach that as a religious teaching, but do they know what it means politically? Is it just something they have in a church? Or is it something they really understand? What does it mean politically? It means that man, unlike any other living creature, by virtue of our power to discover universal physical principles—"powers" as the ancient Greeks called them. The same powers we associate with technology; the same powers we associate with Classical artistic composition. These powers define man, as what? It's the ability to discover what no animal can know: the great principles which define the order of creation, made, for example, as physical scientific discoveries. Mankind, having discovered what the Creator has constituted in the universe as these principles, is then able to apply these principles, to man's work in the universe. And thus transform the universe, including Earth, to a higher level of existence.

For example: Geologically, you have three principles operating in the planet Earth. One, the so-called "abiotic" processes, processes which do not depend upon any notion of a living principle; secondly, you have biotic principles, living principles, which correspond to the Biosphere; thirdly, you have something which only man represents: the creative powers of the human mind, which make man in the likeness of the Creator.

And if you look at the Earth, geologically, you look at it first of all, in terms of abiotic processes. Then you see that if you weigh the Earth, you find that historically, the percentile of fossils of living processes is growing relative to non-living ones. The Earth is becoming a living process. It's being transformed into a living process. Then we discovered another one, especially in the recent half-century or so: the power of the human mind, as unleashed by the 15th-Century Renaissance in Italy, has increased the fossils produced by man's effort, at a higher rate than the fossils produced by living processes as a whole.

The planet as a whole, is becoming not only a living planet, as a whole, as living processes take over, more and more, but the planet is becoming an extension of those creative powers which are unique to the human mind.

Now, every human being on this planet represents the embodiment of that potential! The identity of a person, is not whether they're born to die as, in the flesh. People have immortality, as no animal does. The immortality lies in what they are able to do, in the discovery of powers, and utilization of powers, and passing that knowledge on to successive generations from previous generations.

So, every human being is, in the eyes of the Creator, immortal, and has an immortal personality, as distinct from being an animal, or something in the flesh. And therefore, when we look at our fellow human being, there's a certain law, which is implied in this: that if man is created in the image of the Creator, who has a right to touch human life? Who has a right, to touch the human soul?

So, if you want to call yourself a Christian, what I've given to you is a more scientific explanation of what the theology is—but the Christians have always, the true ones, have always looked at it this way: that man is something made in the image of the Creator, and therefore individual human life is sacred! And must be protected. And must be promoted.

And the kind of evil that we see, in racism and so forth, is a demonstration of an anti-Christian attitude. But, what is it? Well, we have an example of an anti-Christian attitude in the case of the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition was not Christian. My report is that Pope John XXIII wept when he read the records of the Inquisition. It was anti-Christian! You had the famous Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky has a character in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the figure of the Grand Inquisitor, which is the figure of Tomás de Torquemada, is presented as what? As Satan! As Satan. Saying, "I triumphed over You, Christ, once, and I'm going to triumph over You permanently now."

The image of that section of the Catholic Church, is purely Satanic. Just as is the image of the Protestant fundamentalist, who says that God loves you because you're a piece of dirt.

But Christianity, as Moses Mendelssohn's Judaism, or the Ummayyads of Spain for Islam, understood this principle. And therefore, when we develop the economy in this way, we are expressing ourselves, as citizens of a republic which is dedicated to this principle. We may call it Christian; some others recognize it as Jewish; some recognize it as Islamic: But it's the same principle! And it's the principle of the sacredness of the individual life. Not in the flesh, as such, but what that life means, in terms of the individual personality.

And that's what we've lost! That's what we've lost in our philosophy of economy! That's what Adam Smith takes away from us! That's what free trade takes away from us!

The purpose of economy, the purpose of our republic, is to provide for each individual, access to participation in that personal sense of immortality, to give them the opportunity to do so. To educate them, to develop them, to the extent we have the resources to do so, in that direction.

When you say, "No! Free trade has to take over," what's free trade? There is no principle of free trade. There's no profit that was ever made from free trade, no true profit was ever earned from free trade! It's only a form of stealing. What's the philosophy? You had this fellow Quesnay, a physiocrat, and he was a feudalist in France. He was trying to restore the feudal system. And he insisted that all wealth comes from the earth. Ah! But how's it come from the earth? What about the human beings who're supposed to do this extraction and growing and so forth? "No! No! They are only cattle! They are human cattle! The wealth is created by the Creator, who so loves this contract this landlord has, that the landlord's possession of the contract creates the profit."

This was copied, this principle of Quesnay's, was copied exactly—or plagiarized from Quesnay—by Adam Smith. It's the philosophy of the British Empire. "We have the power, the power to steal from you! That is called profit." And what we've done, in our country, we said that since the financiers must have more profit, we must loot our people by free-trade principles, and destroy—as we have done in the past 40 years, since the beginning of Nixon, in the United States. We destroyed ourselves.

We used to be a country of citizen-farmers, and producers of other kinds. People who invented ideas, or teachers who produced students who were qualified for great careers. That sort of thing.

We stopped that—in the interest of free trade! Or the nominal interest of free trade, which is really the right of parasites to steal, with the backing of the Federal government. You buy the Federal government: You contribute a fund to George Bush, you have the right to steal. Look at the case of Cheney.

Cheney is a creation: He's a sociopath, who was brought into politics in the Nixon Administration. And because he was more of a consistent sociopath than his initial sponsor, Rumsfeld, he's now Rumsfeld's boss—because Rumsfeld is not the complete sociopath that Dick Cheney is.

What is Dick Cheney? He's a thief! A pure and simple thief, by all moral law. And what are he and his friends doing? They're stealing—from the Iraqis, from the U.S. government, from everything else. And some people say, "In the name of free trade" we're going to support them?

No. The issue is very simply here: We have to go back, in this time, and Kerry and Edwards and others have to come back to reality. We have to take this Democratic Party, and this nation, back to Franklin Roosevelt's tradition. Not because Roosevelt was a perfect man. Actually, I think Abraham Lincoln was a much greater President morally, and if you read and study the writings of the two of them, you'll recognize that. But because Roosevelt in 1933, when Hoover had destroyed the U.S. economy, destroying it by one-half—the total product and total incomes of the United States were not destroyed by the '29 Crash; they were destroyed by Hoover, by his policies, in reaction to the '29 Crash.

The income, and the total product and the income of the American people, collapsed by one-half in less than four years. We were on the road to joining Germany, in global fascism. And if du Pont, Mellon, Harriman, and so forth, had succeeded—and remember, it was the firm of Harriman, the controlling firm, enterprise of Harry Truman; whose Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent idiot here now, was the guy who signed the paper that released the money in Germany, to finance the Hitler Nazi Party out of bankruptcy, as a part of the step in making Hitler the dictator of Germany.

Now, these people backed off from Hitler, at a later point, though up until May-June of 1940, key people around Beaverbrook and so forth, were still planning to make a deal with Hitler. The only reason the British did not go with Hitler, was because Winston Churchill did not want to sacrifice the British Empire to rule by a German dictator. That was the issue.

Roosevelt exploited the fact, that the British were willing to join with the United States in fighting Hitler. But Churchill was not a good guy. He was just one thief, contending against an upstart thief from the continent. And you saw, in the post-war period, that the people associated with Churchill, and the people associated with Harriman, including Truman, went immediately to bring the right-wing group that had financed Hitler and the Nazis into power, into power in the United States—and they are still the problem today.

This is what is behind Cheney and Bush, today.

Bush may not know what it is. He may not know which way is up or which way is down. But he's an instrument of policy, who out of sheer meanness does what he's told to do, what his ambition inspires him to do.

Cheney is a sociopath, who's only good for killing and stealing. He does what he's supposed to do.

You have to look behind them, at who is behind them: And I'll tell you who is behind them—and I know it. My research, and the research of my friends—we know it cold. I knew when I came out of World War II, and came back here, and I saw the right wing here, coming back into power, in 1946 and on. And through 1946 and '48, I saw these guys taking over our country as the right wing.

I rejoiced, when Eisenhower became President, because he put the lid on them for a while, and got rid of Truman, the fascist, who I knew was a fascist.

Later, in the course of life, because I've been fighting these guys all my life, I found out a lot more about them, who they are. Who they still are, today. And that's the problem.

We have, right now, as I said earlier, we have in Europe an attempt to take over Europe for fascism, in the name of the European Union. The Hartz IV policy is an example of that attempt to take over Europe for fascism, right now. It won't work—it will lead only to confusion and hell. But it's in process. That's what we face—exactly that.

So, we have to understand these issues, in these terms I've indicated. We have to tell Kerry and company: "Look, you're a very useful guy. We want you to be President. But we want you to be a good President. Don't be a fool, who goes with the bankers against the people. Don't come in to us and say, that you have to impose the kind of conditions which Freddie Krueger's mother is trying to impose upon Argentina now, on the American people. We're not going to take your austerity. We're not going to take your looting. You, Kerry, if you're elected, belong to the American people. And your primary duty is to uphold the Preamble of the Constitution: to defend the sovereignty of our nation, to defend the general welfare of our people, and to promote the posterity which is represented by young people today, young adults of 18 to 25. That's our policy."

And we have to become conscious of what this is.

So you have the third form of insanity: You have the form of insanity, which is the culture of hate, which some people call "Christianity," like the followers of the tradition of Torquemada in the Catholic Church, the enemies of the Pope, the followers of Torquemada. Or the Protestants, the racist Protestants, one of those sects. That is a form of insanity.

But then, you have the cultural form of insanity, which is more pervasive in the country, which is found among the liberals, in the form of saying, "Well, we have to go by free trade. The bankers have a right to their payments on their ill-earned money, ill-earned credit." They're looting us.

So, we in the United States have to do, as Roosevelt did: We have to put this system into bankruptcy reorganization. The U.S. government must take the lead in doing so. This is coming down now! The banks are bankrupt, now! Every one of the major banks in the United States is bankrupt. They're bankrupt, now! And what you're seeing in Fannie Mae is only one of the rumbles, about the general collapse, which is coming on—maybe next week; maybe January, maybe February. But it is now inevitable.

This U.S. financial system and the world financial system are about to go into a general crash, far worse than anything of the 1930s. This will be a permanent collapse of the system. The only solution is the intervention of government, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt acted in 1933: The Federal government must put the banking system into receivership, government receivership, for reorganization. The Federal government must maintain the banking system in operation, bankrupt or not. The Federal government must create the credit, and the laws, to get the credit out there, to get the employment up, in infrastructure first, and a supply of credit to private entrepreneurs, who come in on the benefit of the growth program. That is what we must do.

If we do not do that, this nation will go to hell. You don't have a choice; there is no real choice. You must do it. That is the meaning of law. Law in principle: What you must do, for the sake of principle. And that's what we must do.

We must get Kerry elected. We must assure it occurs. But we must ensure, also, that he adopts instruments of government, and personnel in government, which have the guts, to do what I would do.

Freeman: Well, as I thought we would, we have a significant number of questions that are coming in, many of them, institutional questions.... [station id] Lyn, I'm going to take a couple of questions first, that have come in from the press, and I will get to questions from the people in the audience here, but I do want to take some institutional questions, first.

This is a question that came in from Maddie Carlisle [ph] from The Progressive, which is a magazine produced out of a Democratic think-tank here in Washington. She says:

"Mr. LaRouche, there's been a great deal of talk during the Presidential campaign, on the question of the deficit. Last week, former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, in a speech in Kansas, said that the size of the Federal deficit had emerged as a national security problem, and he said, that we faced a situation like that of Argentina, which I thought was particularly significant in terms of your remarks.

"Last night, Senator Edwards said, that the truth of the matter was that we could not fix the deficit in four years.

"My question to you is this: How big a problem is this issue of the deficit? Was Robert Rubin right? But also, is John Edwards right? Is it the case that we can not deal with it, in the course of four years? What would you do, if you were President?"

LaRouche: Well, let me say, first of all, Bob Rubin is one of the few figures, prominently in public life, on these kinds of questions, who knows what he's talking about. Most of the leading figures, who were in the under-63-years-of-age bracket, know nothing about banking or economy today. They're so steeped in the ideologies which have been promoted during the past 40 years, that they don't know. I mean, my big problem was with President Clinton, he had absolutely no comprehension of what an economy is!

And Clinton I cite, not because he's such a bad fellow, but because he is very intelligent. He's probably the most intelligent President we've had, since Roosevelt, at least—among Presidents. Whatever his defects and mistakes may have been, this guy is one of the most intelligent Presidents, with the ability to carry a concept from one side of the room to the other! Which most of them couldn't do. And he may have made mistakes—but he's one of the brightest. And he does study, and he does think. Which is something most of them consider too painful to undertake, any more.

But, Bob Rubin is one of the few people, who has any comprehension whatsoever, of what I'm talking about, in politics. He's absolutely correct.

Now, the problem here, is: These poor guys don't understand what capital is. They call themselves capitalists, and they think the British are capitalists—which means they don't understand what capital is.

Capital is very simple, in concept, as I define technology; as I define, for example, things like water systems, or transportation systems, or power generation and distribution systems. The systems on which we largely depend in infrastructure, and in manufacturing, are long-term investments. That is, for example, power system: You're talking about 50 years, a 50-year investment. It is not buying something over the counter at Wal-Mart! These guys don't know the difference.

They think that somehow, if you balance the accounts—the way poor Clinton tried to deal with the so-called budget question, under pressure from crazy, fascist Newt Gingrich, hmm? He had no understanding of what he was up against. He did not have the concept, needed to cope with what Gingrich was saying. So, he collapsed under pressure from Al Gore, and others, to a compromise with Gingrich. So, he's the best—among politicians. And, after Clinton, an intellect, generally, except for a few politicians who are less well known, you're going all the way down, to a much lower level of intellectual power.

But, Rubin does understand this problem, from a banking standpoint: The entire international monetary system is hopelessly bankrupt. There's no way you can keep it alive—except artificially, by decree of government.

It can't be done.

There's no way of balancing the budget. It is impossible to balance the budget, as defined presently. It's impossible. If you wanted to balance the budget, go back to 1968, when you should have balanced it! But, what you've done, since 1968, the thing is hopelessly out of balance. No one can balance this budget.

What you're going to have to do, is, you're going to have to wipe off the books most of the financial claims of the world: Because they're fraudulent! Most of the financial claims, today, are actually subsidy for financial derivatives, which is a category of fraud, invented by Alan Greenspan, when he took over after the 1987 stock market crash, from Paul Volcker. Financial derivatives are one, gigantic fraud, and they're the biggest factor today, in the financial market. All financial derivatives, were I President, would be cancelled—just simply cancelled. These are side-bets on the economy. They're not investments in the economy, they're side-bets on the economy: Therefore, cancelled!

Why? Because they're frauds! The fact that something is approved of, and has a precedent, if we find it's a crime, you don't continue the crime. It's like slavery: We don't continue slavery, because somebody says a slave is property.

You cancel slavery to financial derivatives, on the same basis! It enslaves whole nations. It causes genocide. Cancel it! It's a crime!

Now, there are certain things, which have some legitimacy, or don't have legitimacy, but you'll handle differently.

What you do in a bankruptcy: You got a firm that's going bankrupt, if you don't do something as government, the thing is going to shut up, close up, the next week. People'll be out of a job, you can't re-start the company all over again, so government intervenes, and says, "We now have a public interest action." Government must step in, through the courts, or some other institution, and it must say, "We're going to freeze this thing, and keep it in suspension and functioning, keep it alive, because the community needs it." A hospital, for example, goes into bankruptcy—you need it. You're going to keep it open. You're not going to foreclose on it. You may take it into receivership, but you're not going to close it down. So therefore, government must act in the public interest.

All right, now, what we do then, is, we freeze, we reorganize these debts. We take all the debts which are like financial derivatives—criminal, wrong, cancel 'em! Write 'em off the books, right away. Eliminate the pain, by a quick incision. Other things, which are doubtful, or have other things—you don't have to make a decision right away. Government says, "Freeze it. It's in receivership." It's going to go through the courts. It's going to go through the Federal government. The Federal government will intervene with laws, which will affect the way courts make decisions. But you're going to put it into receivership.

First thing you're going to do, is, you're going to keep everything that's essential, operating. So then, you're going to figure out, if you're going to re-capitalize it, you're going to define what the term of payment will be. You're going to reduce—first of all, you have to do, in a situation like this, you have to reduce the basic interest rate to between 1% and 2% internationally. And you're going to have to rewrite loans, which were written at higher charges, you're going to have write them down to that level.

You're going to have to, because you have to save society! So, don't worry about the creditor/debtor relationship—it's gone beyond that. The system is insane. And therefore, you have to cancel an insane system. And even the fact that it's gone on for so long, does not mean you have to respect it, because it's gone on for so long. You have to change it now, because it's gone on, altogether too long.

Well, what happened is, today, is, that the so-called assets which are registered as being the assets of the international financial banking institutions, could never be paid. Therefore, in the larger part, they never will be paid. What would happen, if you attempted to collect them, as happened in the famous 14th Century in Europe: In about 1339, the King of England repudiated his debt obligations on the land, or the sheep fields, the sheep, and the wool, of England. A chain-reaction collapse of the entire Lombard banking system occurred. There was an attempt to collect the debts. Military measures were used. As a result of that, the population of Europe collapsed by a net one-third, in several decades. Half of the parishes of Europe disappeared from the landscape. And the entire civilization went into what's called "a new dark age."

If you try to bail out this system today, you have a system which is more bankrupt, than the Lombard banking system that dominated Europe, under Venetian-Norman control, during the 14th Century: You can't do it.

That's how bad it is!

But, we're the government. We are the people, we're the government. And so, what Edwards said, is really mild—it's almost irrelevant. What Robert Rubin said, is very much to the point. These debts will never be paid.

The Federal debt will be; the Federal government debt will be, for the reasons that Hamilton gave, in his famous paper on credit and also on banking. But, also the contingent things, the Federal Reserve debt is a different matter. U.S. Federal government debt is the one which is Constitutionally protected. No other debt is protected. And, we'll have to do it.

Now, what're we going to do? The problem of lack of understanding, is a lack of understanding of the function of capital in society. When people say "capital," they think you mean "money capital." You really don't mean money capital. You mean money capital, only insofar as money reflects physical capital: a plant, a farm, functioning equipment, essential hospital facilities—these are real, physical capital!

Now, these things, when government buys one of these things, what do you do? You put up a dam, you put a power station—a power station will take, say five years to construct; say, 1 gigawatt power system, will take five years at minimum to construct it. How long will it last? It will probably last 30 years. Now, what you will do, therefore, you will probably finance this, at the Federal government account, you'll finance this as a 25-year loan, at 1-2% simple interest rate, for the loan, to build the thing. So therefore, you will have a debt—which is a debt, which is secured debt; secured by a physical investment. The people will put up the money in the short term, within a five-year period, for something that's going to have an asset value for 25 years or more.

The problem has been, that we have destroyed the physical asset base of the United States: our rail system, our power system, our water management systems, our hospital systems, our educational systems; we've destroyed our farms. Look at the farms around the country.

So therefore, we have to go to a completely different conception, and that is what these guys don't understand: Because, if a Bill Clinton, and others, would look at the figures of what's done to the United States' economy since 1964, they would have to look at these capital accounts. And they would say, "We're bankrupt today, because the policy of the Baby-Boomers was insane!" So, what're you going to do? Melt down the Baby-Boomers?

No, the United States has been running under an insane economic policy, which does not understand the nature of physical capital and the relationship of physical capital to financial capital. And therefore, only a banker like Robert Rubin would understand the things, that the other guys think are acceptable ways of managing money, are insane. And, Robert Rubin is saying, "Well, I'm telling you, it's insane. I have to tell you it's insane because it's coming on now, and I can't keep my mouth shut at these times. Besides, I might become appointed as the next Federal Reserve chairman, or back as Treasury Secretary." So, therefore, he has to tell the truth.

But, he knows that Bill Clinton—probably Bill may have learned something since I was last in touch with him on this thing, and much less the other politicians—I'm sure Kerry has no comprehension whatsoever of this stuff. I'm sure Edwards doesn't. But, we do have people who are capable of understanding this, in the system. We have it in the intelligence system. We have it in certain people who are veterans of government. We have people, veterans in the financial community, banking community. We have it in terms of people who are diplomacy; because, one of the ways we are going to raise credit, is by long-term agreements, treaty agreements, among countries.

For example, if we decide we are going to give a loan to Argentina, to bail Argentina out of the mess it's in now, we're going to make a long-term treaty agreement with Argentina, between the United States government and the government of Argentina; which is going to completely refinance the situation in Argentina on the basis of a program of reconstruction and growth.

For example, China and Europe. Europe is bankrupt. Western, continental, and Central Europe are bankrupt, totally bankrupt today, hopelessly bankrupt; nothing they can do about it. But, Europe has a potential for long-term capital development agreements with China, with India, with Southwest Asia, and so forth.

All right, how's it going to work? Now, under European constitutions you can not do this. You don't have a Federal system of the United States. What they will do is, they will make agreements among a group of countries; say, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, and so forth. These will be a package of agreements of 25- to 50-year agreements; agreements on terms of investment and trade, and cooperation. That will enable Europe to supply China, and so forth, with technology that China needs to meet the requirements of its total population, for example. This would mean credit required to develop the mineral resources of Central and North Asia for the development for the needs of all of Asia, South Asia and so forth, as a whole. This would be a treaty agreement, 1% or 2% simple interest kind of treaty agreement. There has to be a fixed-exchange-rate system, a re-establishment of the original Bretton Woods principle, now, in order to do this.

So, what we have to do, what is implicit in this situation, and implicit in Robert Rubin's remarks, is we have to go back to the Roosevelt way of thinking; take these kinds of methods; look at real, physical capital standards, as Roosevelt did in rebuilding the economy from 1933 to 1944. And, that's what you have to do.

But, that problem is, yes. Rubin is right. Edwards is right also, even though he doesn't understand the situation. But, I understand it and there are some other people who do. In cooperation with the Kerry Administration, we could bring the thing under control.

Freeman: By the way, for people here who have questions, if you'll just put your name and affiliation on a piece of paper or an index card, I will get to you in due course.

Lyn, we have a question from Abdullah El-Amin, who is from the Muslim Observer in Detroit, Michigan. He says, "Mr. LaRouche, in Michigan, Representative Pappageorge caused a stir when he said the Republicans have to suppress the Detroit vote, because Detroit is over 85% black and heavily Democratic, in order to win Michigan for Bush. His statement was considered racist, and he later apologized for it. This served as another wake-up call for Detroit citizens. My question is, how do you plan on increasing voter participation in the political process, without consciously singling out ethnic groups and cultures and races and genders to do it?"

LaRouche: Well, I don't have any problem with that. I find, myself, no problem in dealing with all kinds of groups of people. I don't have to make any distinction among them, essentially. I mean, if you are for the rights of the lower 80% of the population, if you are dedicated to the future of youth, of 18-to-25 age group, whatever their background, you really don't have any problem—you're going to have work to do, but you don't have a problem, in principle, in trying to bring them together for cooperation. The point is avoid division. Go at the principle of justice.

People have a sense of group rights in the United States; it's acute today. But, if you say, "We don't care about group rights, as such. That's not the way to fight." You have to say that there are certain things that are rights. And, if one persons rights are threatened, then all persons have to defend that right. The best way to do it, we find, and you look at our experience with the youth movement; you bring youth, 18 to 25, the way we're doing it, and the way the Democratic Party has not caught on to how to do that yet. We don't have any problem doing it. We have problems in doing it, but we don't have problems with doing it.

The problem is the people in the Baby-Boomer generation have one hell of a problem of doing it. Because, they're so interested in defending their Baby-Boomer ideology, that they have a hatred against youth.

And, this is international. A hatred against youth which they don't even realize; and the youth know it. And, therefore, the best people to bring groups of people together, in a common interest, is youth. The best group for this is adult youth, that is, youth in the 18-to-25 age group, where they think like adults, not as adolescents. They are the ones who can bring—as you can see with the youth movement—we don't even know about race. Yeah, we sort of see something going on in the landscape, but everybody comes in. There's no difference. We are all doing the same thing. We're all for the same cause. We have problems—so, we have problems. Everybody has problems.

The problem is, if you don't have a youth movement, it is very difficult to bring the older generation together. And, therefore, the way to do it is, we, like the questioner, we have to work together. But, in deciding that we're going to work together for common interests and not get ourselves divided, because the enemy will always do that. They try to play one off against the other. "Well, we got to give you this much, because we got to give this guy that much." No! Crap. We want a uniform standard of justice.

The way to do it, is we have to cooperate. But, we know that the only way we can bring the larger number of people into cooperation is through a youth movement. Youth, 18 to 25, can unify the population of older generation, and bring about what is otherwise not possible.

You've got this steaming, stinking prejudices in this society, of all kinds. It stinks. I hate it. It's hard to get people to cooperate, because they are so blasted competitive about old grievances and old problems, you can't get them to cooperate. They want to settle old grievances first. It's like trying to renegotiate the Treaty of Westphalia all over again.

But, if you get young people in, who say to their parents' generation, "Cut the crap, Daddy. Cut it out! We want a future! And, if you want to have great-grandchildren and grandchildren, you better give us a future! So, get together! Let's crack this nut. Let's not play games any more, about 'our' interest group and 'that' interest group. Forget it!"

The enemy enjoys that. The Bush crowd enjoys that. Look how they play games. Everybody, I think, in this room, knows it from experience; anyone in politics. They always come in and try to play one against the other. "Well, you can get this much, so forth, if you do this for me." Eh? No. Crap. And, the whole thing goes down the tubes.

It's like the unity around the Kerry candidacy. Everybody knows we need the Kerry victory; if for negative reasons, not positive ones. We know, for purely negative reasons alone, we need that candidacy. Therefore, there's no trade-off on that. That's not something you trade off for. You don't trade off your vote for Kerry on that basis. No. You look at the question of winning the war. If you don't win the war, you all lose. If you divide the troops on the basis of who's getting what deal, it won't work.

I'm not supporting Kerry because he's giving me anything! He hasn't given me anything. So far, nothing. He hasn't even met me. He hasn't even spoken to me. I haven't given any demands on him as conditions. I support him, despite the fact that he's done nothing for me, because I'm committed to a principle. I'm not for sale. And, none of the rest of us should be either.

Freeman: John Kerry hasn't done anything for Lyndon LaRouche, but Lyndon LaRouche has done an awful lot for John Kerry. [applause] You can quote me on that.

I'm going to take a couple of questions from people here. You don't have to write your question down. All you have to do is give me your name, if you'd like to ask it yourself. Either is fine with me.

This is a question, Lyn, from Rep. Juanita Walton of Missouri. And, I know that this is also a concern that has been expressed by Representative Clay from St. Louis, Missouri.

It says, "Mr. LaRouche, I feel that you think, to overcome election fraud, we have to get as many Democrats out to vote as possible. But, what about the computers that are being used for voting that we know can cause massive fraud? How do we address this?"

LaRouche: I think there's only one way to deal with it, and that is to have an overwhelming, mass turnout. Youth are the answer. Look, for example, we are getting a very good result in Ohio, where we've got a special emphasis, now. We've picked out Ohio as one of our concentration areas, because the Ohio-Michigan area, it touches Pennsylvania and northern Kentucky, are typical. We also have something different on the West Coast, and something different in Texas, and whatnot.

But, in this area we are getting a storming of turnout for youth and other voters. The registration turnout is massive. Now, what we are hitting, is exactly what the enemy thought would never happen, including the Democratic Party enemies. Some people in the Democratic Party wanted to limit this to the "usual" voter—you know, the three out of four of the last Federal elections—ignoring the lower 80% who haven't voted, because they're disgusted, and ignoring also the youth layer, 18 to 25, because they're also estranged.

Now, what we're getting, and we're getting as a catalyst of our activity in Ohio and Michigan, we're getting, especially in Ohio, we're getting a massive—. Our people are deployed, singing and so forth, our youth, or otherwise. They go out and they're organizing, in the way they organize. People come around and now the Democratic register teams, which are not able to do much otherwise, have gotten onto the fact that if they come around to where we're doing the organizing, they can work the crowd and get the signatures for the registration. And, we're getting a lot of that.

So, the key thing here is, we're acting as a spearhead, because we know it's a lot of gutlessness on the part of the Democratic Party. We know that the Democratic Party does not know how to deal with youth. They don't know. They parade them. They organize them, like cattle, and try to parade them into an event! That is not the way you organize youth.

What you do, is, you turn them loose and hope they don't set fire to something. We do a little better than that, but, the point is, you use the youth as a catalyst, and use other groups, who will work with youth on this basis, as a catalyst. We have to turn out the vote. The number of non-voters in this country, who should vote, is disgusting.

We are getting, in some areas of the country—now, Ohio is crucial. Ohio is the pivotal state, because it was the richest state in the country at one point, and now it is one of the poorest. Western Pennsylvania, michigan—these areas. What we saw around Louisville: That area is a very good area, because it has some trade-union people and so forth, in that area, as a constituency. It has issues and can organize. You have things—Arkansas has a potential. You have Texas, has potential. We are running a very serious challenge to DeLay down there, with people who are opponents to DeLay, who are able to put a factor in there, with our organizing, which otherwise wouldn't occur.

Like, for example, one of the big problems of this campaign has been Kennedy's in-law, Schwarzenegger. When Schwarzenegger came on, Clinton went in there, in a normal way to support the Democratic cause against this fascist. And, this guy is a fascist, period. His policies are fascist. His pedigree is fascist. His background is fascist. He's fascist on every question, including women and so forth. But the Democratic Party said, "No. We're not going to fight." Our youth movement, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles area, where we had forces we could concentrate, fought. We won! In every other area of the state, the Democratic Party threw the election to Schwarzenegger. And, it's that throwing of that vote to Schwarzenegger which is the curse hanging around the neck of the entire Democratic Party campaign, from that time to the present, which is the key problem here.

You have a certified idiot, George Bush. The guy's a psychopath! You saw him! Now, Justin Frank gives you some of the parameters to understand, when you think this guy's nuts, you got a good psychiatrist comes around and says, "Yeah, you're right, he really is nuts." Then you see Cheney, and I tell you he's a sociopath. And everything you know, I mean—for you for example, you've had experience in politics, you know what these sociopaths are like. And, he's an extreme case! So, you have a psychopath and a sociopath running for President and Vice President.

Don't you think we could defeat those easily, under normal circumstances? You think any less competent President ever existed, as compared to this poor dummy, mean-spirited dummy in the White House now? I was thinking of putting cotton batting around the thing to suppress the screams until the election is over.

We threw it. And the Kennedys, and others, blew it! When they should have fought, they didn't fight. We came in. And, when Bill Clinton came in seriously, and convinced Kerry to be more serious about trying to win, the campaign changed. So, we're coming from way behind. We should have been at this stage we're at now, in May or June of this year.

But, I think with the crisis, we have the potential. The turnout for the debate, with a cliff-hanger, where Kerry actually did, relative to Bush, a good job. Not as good as I would have done, in terms of taking the issues. But, on the issues he did well, he did very well. And, he showed Bush up for a psychopath to an international public. I think Edwards did fairly well. I don't think it was a cliff-hanger in the sense that Kerry did a cliff-hanger against Bush, because I don't think Edwards understood, that Cheney is a sociopath. He probably has not run across that kind of thing in court room in his career as a litigator. So, he didn't know how to deal with a sociopath.

You tell a sociopath he's a coward. "Why are you afraid to tell the truth, Cheney? Why are you afraid to tell the truth? Why do you keep telling lies? Why are you afraid to tell the truth?" A sociopath would blow up. And what we wanted was a blow-up. And what the Democratic Party appeared not to want is a blow-up. But, to deal with Cheney you had to cause a blow-up. To deal with Cheney the way Kerry dealt with Bush, you had to risk this explosion. And the way to risk the explosion is to make the guy unmask himself. And he didn't do it.

So, I think the key thing here—we're coming from behind. It's our own fault. It's the Democratic Party. We have to, at this point, count on trying to use the youth factor as much. And trying to use also, in a state like Missouri, the spill-over factor that we can get in some states, to spill out over quickly into other states. Because the key thing we're up against, is a psychological factor. The people are more than ready-ripe to turn out to vote. They're not inspired to turn out to vote. What they need is examples of successful campaigns which they can use.

The most effective thing so far, to this effect, apart from our youth work, would work with others in the Michigan-Ohio area, where we had full cooperation with development Democrats, so, we were able to do what we should do with our limited forces. I think Kerry's dealing with Bush opens the case, because now, no one can deny it. We have to exploit that. But the only thing we are going to win this way against the fraud is, right now, overwhelm the ballot by turning out the youth, and getting people to be turned out, by the youth turning out.

Freeman: Now, during the debate last week between Kerry and Bush, I was invited, here in Washington, to MTV studio to do commentary on Mr. LaRouche's behalf, and one of our friends in the Democratic Party—he's actually playing a key role in the Kerry campaign—certainly didn't have the guts to wear the tee-shirt himself, made me a tee-shirt, which said "LaRouche says, 'In your guts, you know he's nuts.'" Which I actually got offered a lot of money for, but I'm keeping it.

The next question is from someone here, Councilman Zachary Turner. Do you want to come up to the mike right here? Councilman Turner is from New Jersey.

Question: I was pretty impressed last night with Senator Edwards. But, I wasn't comfortable with his international policy. So, my question to you basically will be, what would be your plan to exit out of Iraq?

LaRouche: The problem in there is that, both Kerry and Edwards are trying to look like good machos. Kill, kill, kill. I don't think the President of the United States should say, we're going in there to kill anybody. Kerry obviously has a distinguished military record, of a certain type at a certain level. But, he's not really a strategic thinker. What should have been said—and I don't think Kerry or Edwards could have carried the ball on that one; we have some military people who could—he doesn't understand the principle of strategic defense. You don't kill anybody! You may end up killing somebody, but you don't go out with the desire to kill people! That's wrong.

The modern policy of strategic defense was developed in several ways. It was developed in part by the defeat of Napoleon in Russia. The interesting thing was, is the Russian generals, originally, under Czar Alexander I, intended to say, "We're going to stop Napoleon at the border." And, some Germans, Prussians, including an in-law of Friedrich Schiller, based on the studies by Schiller of the Netherlands War and the Thirty Years' War, said, "No. The way you do it is you have a staged retreat to draw Napoleon's forces into a postion where they can be defeated, crushed."

Now, there were two objectives that Napoleon could have marched to, Petrograd or Moscow. Napoleon fortunately made the worst possible choice, Moscow. So the Russian troops carried out the order, accepted by Alexander I as policy, not to decisively engage Napoleon's forces, but to retreat, rearguard action, all the way to Moscow. He finally got to Moscow in the wintertime. The joint was mined. The Russian forces, which had been conserved, by not going to a decisive battle with Napoleon, were sitting outside Moscow. The city blew up. Napoleon had to retreat. The forces which had been conserved, plus an asymmetric warfare force, mobilized the Russian people, fell upon the heels of Napoleon and destroyed his army by the time he reached back to Poland.

Since that time, as in the case of MacArthur's conduct in the Pacific, our role, as in the United States, our best people, always used the policy of strategic defense. We did not go out to try to deliver an attack, a winning attack, a crushing attack. Our long-term thing is political. We have to establish our security, therefore, let us not seek war. Let us try to force a situation, in which we can bring about peace.

Now, take the Middle East, for example. It is true the United States can not cut and run from Iraq now, because, you'd just make things worse. But the question is, how would we get out. The first stage came, and the problem after the error of going in, in the first place—the first stage, was, in the time that Bremer was ordered from Washington to discharge the Iraqi army and the Ba'athist politicians from government. Had he not done that, then the Ba'athist Army, now working under U.S. occupation, and the Ba'ath bureaucrats working under U.S. occupation, would have organized and stabilized the country. And, then we could have gotten out in a peaceful way. They did the absolutely worst possible thing.

Now, the problem here is, which was not said by Kerry and was not said by Edwards—I don't think either of them understood it really, or maybe they didn't wish to understand it. The problem here was that, the intention of Cheney to go into Iraq occurred during the first Bush Administration. And, it never changed. So, that the only reason they went to a war in Iraq, was because of a policy which Cheney had supported against President Bush's advisors, such as Scowcroft, during the close of the so-called first Iraq War, Desert Storm. So, that's why we went to war.

Now, if you want to talk about this thing, you have to talk about that. You don't talk about what the issues of going to war were. And, also the problem that Kerry has, he showed gutlessness in the Senate, political gutlessness—unlike Byrd, unlike Senator Byrd—he voted for an act empowering the President. It was a blank check, a signed blank check to President Bush, which Byrd correctly denounced. It's a violation of our Constitution. It's a violation of the War Powers principle of our Constitution. Kerry supported it, along with others, who acted in a cowardly, opportunistic manner! That's the inception of the problem. Therefore, they won't tell the truth.

The truth is—and where Kerry also goofed up, and where Edwards goofed up—they didn't talk to me, or they probably wouldn't have made that mistake: They said, "You've got to kill people in North Korea." You're crazy!

The Bush Administration—we had a peaceful situation, in negotiation with North Korea, on all issues under Clinton. The Bush Administration came in and cancelled it! So, now we've got ourselves into a totally unnecessary situation with North Korea. We have insisted, under Bush, in perpetuating and aggravating that situation ever since. We participated in overthrowing South Korean governments, who wanted to cooperate, opposite to the Bush policy.

So, the point is, is that Kerry and Edwards did not tell the truth about the thing. Therefore they got themselves into a bind, and said, "We're machos, we want to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill."

Well, you want to talk about Osama bin Laden—who created Osama bin Laden? Vice President George Bush, together with Jimmy Goldsmith. They went and they recruited this guy, as an organizer for the Afghanistan War. They set them up in business, and then later, he was cut loose. But, he's still operating, and I wonder if the British are still running him.

And, why did, as Edwards emphasized, why did the United States cut and run when they had him in a box, and go into Iraq? Because the policy of the Bush Administration, under Cheney's direction, was to go to a series of nuclear armed wars, involving targets that included Jordan, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and ultimately China and Russia!

Their policy is to set up a world empire, a world Anglo-American empire, which is a deal they cut with London, with Tony Blair, by a series of wars, which would destroy nation-states; end nation-states in Europe by setting up the European Union, to end the existence of nation-states in Europe! Finish off Russia by causing it to disintegrate, by operations from the North Caucusus and similar kinds of things. That's the policy.

Well, if I'm President, I wouldn't have a problem, would I? First of all, in the Arab world, I'm probably the only American politician the Arab world would trust, right now. The only one. If Kerry wants to get out of the problems in the Middle East, he'd better come and talk to me: Because I have the credentials, he does not. And he didn't help himself, the other way around. What we do then, if they would trust me, they wouldn't trust anybody else, and they'd watch me like a hawk, because they're very suspicious.

But we could get it, because we have to get one thing, and this is where Kerry and Edwards will not bite the bullet: You have to deal with justice for the Palestinians. You can not scream that the problem Israel has, is a bunch of crazy Palestinians. You've had a war going on, between Palestinians and Israelis for some period of time. You had a relatively sane phase under the Labor government, and I dealt with the Labor government back in the middle of the 1970s. And we had a plan for a peace plan for the Middle East. At that time, Labor government leaders, including Shimon Peres, were supporting me and praising me for what I was doing: Because what I proposed is a development program, including water development and power development for the region, so that people would have enough water and power to live and develop together. That without a constructive economic development plan, there can be no peace in the Middle East.

You have to have a broker who sort of forces it down the throats of the parties. The only effective broker would be the United States, as Clinton correctly thought. He may not have handled it perfectly. He may have been misled on some points, but he had the right idea, of going in that direction. Only the United States can bring about the condition of Middle East peace. If you can not bring about Middle East peace between the Palestinians and Israelis now—and it could be done—you have no possibility of settling the general crisis in the Middle East today.

And with the circumstances we have now, in Iraq: You have Turkey engaged, by the threat from northern Iraq; you have the whole Transcaucasia area engaged, against Russia; you have Iran engaged; you have all the Arab countries engaged.

And the way this Dafur thing is being mishandled and misrepresented, including by Kerry, is part of the problem. The target is of certain people to try to destroy Egypt, by destroying Sudan. Garang is a U.S. agent. Garang's agents are part of the slaughter. That's the genocide—Garang, the U.S. agent—is supporting the killing in that area. The other agent is al-Turabi, who's a British agent, of Muslim Brotherhood pedigree. A former supporter of the government of Sudan. So you say the Sudanese government is doing it, it is the United States government's that's doing it, with the British. They created the situation in which this happened. There is death occurring there. Yes. It should be corrected. But who's doing it? It's the United States government, who is as guilty as anybody else in doing it. And it's holier-than-thou "we're gonna get the government there": The purpose is, they're going to grab the water and oil of the region, from Sudan. And while they grab the water, they're going to collapse Egypt. You collapse Egypt, you want peace? You want Hell on Earth?

This is the kind of problem we have. As you say, you get into this situation, where it's obvious that what they're saying doesn't really make sense. It smells. You get uncomfortable about it. When you know the facts as I do, you know what the problem is. All they have to do, is, say that I'm going to negotiate in this area. Ask me as a special negotiator for the U.S. government in the area, and we'd get some results.

Freeman: [identifies the webcast] Lyn, a question has been submitted from Yarin magazine, which as you know, is a Turkish journal. They say:

"Mr. LaRouche, what we have heard here is that Mr. Bush is much occupied with religious philosophies. Now, with all respect to every faith, we want to know, if a President claims that he gets divine revelations from God, if he thinks that to start the Armageddon war, Israel has to be victorious over its enemies as the first step, because that's what it says in religious prophesy, and if we hear words like "Push God to start Armageddon, by fulfilling all the preconditions of the incident, i.e. by crushing Arabs and Muslims because they're Israel's enemies," how are we to claim that these are the manifestations of a sane mind, and how do you propose that we react?

LaRouche: First of all, one should never accuse Bush, unjustly of having a sane mind. He doesn't. The guy is insane, frankly.

As for his Christianity, I've dealt with it here. Bush is not a Christian. He has better claim of being the man from Mars. Or maybe a Jovian something-or-other, cult. The man's not a Christian! Why do we say, because he says he's a Christian, we have some obligation to regard him as a Christian? He's not a Christian! He's an idiot! That's his religion.

No, the guy is a basket-case. However, the religion that he pretends to adhere to, which calls itself Christian, is not Christian either. It's like the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, who claims he's the Grand Inquisitor, the defender of Christianity. And he reveals himself to be Satan. So that, actually, in effect, you would say that Bush is better qualified, if anything, as a Satan-worshipper, than anything else.

Freeman: This question came from a member of the professional staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It's also very similar in its content to about a dozen other questions that we've gotten from young people who are listening via the web, and from other activists. The question is:

"Mr. LaRouche, what do you think the current implications are of the recent statements by Bremer and by Rumsfeld? Is there a split right now in the neo-con cabal?"

LaRouche: It's not so much a split. What you're dealing with, you're dealing with a psychotic President and a sociopathic Vice-President, who are absolutely hysterical.

Now, what Bremer said is partly true, but it's not true. What Bremer was saying was that, when he went in there, he found himself—. Now, Bremer's not a good guy. Bremer was a close enemy of mine, shall we say, from back in the days when he was on the other side, opposite to me and Ronald Reagan on SDI. He comes from that circle, around former Vice-President Bush, who was then running around Contra. So that's where he comes from. He has British credentials as well. He has British intelligence connections. But, he's a professional, in the sense of being in his business.

So, he's sent in there, and he gets there, and either then or immediately afterwards, he's given the screwball order, in replacing General Garner, to disband the Iraqi military and Ba'athist establishment, who had been engaged already, under the Garner administration, to participate in the orderly reconstruction of an occupied Iraq.

That would be a normal procedure for a military occupation of occupied territory by the U.S. military. In other words, when you go in, and you occupy a territory, you are now responsible for the people and that area. And you have to see to its administration and care as if it were your own territory. You've taken over, you're now responsible! So you don't go out to kill the people, who have surrendered. You say, "Okay, you've surrendered. Fine. We're obliged to protect you, and assist you, until we can get out of here."

What happened is, he came in with an order: "Don't do it. Cut it out. Fire them." So what we did is we threw the force, an organized force, a government capability and a military force—a capable military force of sufficient dimensions to handle the problem—we fired them. And then we did provocations, which provoked the outbreak of full-scale asymmetric warfare from within the population, we had thus doubly abused. We continued to do these insane things on the impulses of the Defense Department, and the White House, and the Vice-President's Office, from that point on. We did everything possible to turn this into a bloody, asymmetric warfare.

Now, what Bremer's saying, which is in a sense correct, that his problem was that he was doomed to fail from the outset, because he never had enough troops to do the job.

Well, we didn't have the U.S. troops to give him, to do that job. We've got a maximum of about nine divisions, even though some people are talking about creating five new divisions under Bush, but that would take four years, to build up a qualified, combat-ready five divisions.

So, he is actually double-talking his way. He's saying what is true in one sense—he didn't have enough troops to do the job. But on the other hand, he didn't say that the idiots forced me to fire the forces, that would have prevented that situation from developing. So he was telling the truth and lying at the same time.

That's the usual problem these days. You can never get a straight story out of any of these characters.

Freeman: Okay, the next question is from Sen. Joe Neal of the great state of Nevada. He says:

"Lyn, you've said that the industrial economy of the United States has been replaced by a predatory, entertainment economy. Since I come from the state, where entertainment is dominant, would you please explain the predatory nature of an entertainment economy?"

LaRouche: Well, I would say, that this is a good old tradition of ancient Rome: bread and circuses. This is the fine old tradition. I think the guy who really is most notorious in this area, for his accomplishments, is the Emperor Nero, who killed off most of the leading ruling class of Rome; who performed a homosexual marriage with himself and a male partner for public edification; and did other kinds of wonderful things while there. And this is what it is. We have become a—well, it's actually poorer, there's not much bread. And less and less bread, and more circuses. We are probably the most decadent modern society on record.

Look at how decadent we've become. We've become decadent by aid of electronics. Turn on your television set. Look at your mass entertainment. Look at the dependency of many in the population upon entertainment. You have a brainwashed population, which is fleeing into mass entertainment of the most decadent imaginable type, as an escape from reality. That is their comfort zone. They have this compassionate participation in axe murders, and so forth. This is entertainment!

Just take a sampling, as I do sometimes from time to time, of what is on, on the movie screen, on the television screen. Look at it! There's no script! There's no plot! There's no issue! All there is is a sequence of obscene acts, and what they're looking for, what is called "a spectacular." Each is trying to do something more horrible, more shocking, more degraded, than the next. It's worse and worse. They imitate each other. You have remakes of atrocities.

So what you have is a population, which is demoralized, in the literal sense of the term. And what we have to do is bring them back to morality. This is part of the Baby-Boomer problem.

It also a part of the youth problem. When young people in the 18 to 25 age group, fall out, where do they go? They go to the sex programs. This sex cult, of finding more and more exotic varieties of what they call sex: the taste of forbidden fruit.

You see what's going on. When our youth are demoralized, they become like their parents. They tune in on the sex sites.

Freeman: Lyn, I'm going to group a bunch of questions together, because, we just have so many on this topic. A number of people have submitted questions by e-mail, expressing concern with the statements by both Kerry and Edwards, on Iran and North Korea. And what people are asking is, number one, is there actually a threat coming from these places? And if there is, isn't there a better way to address it?

LaRouche: Simply, on all these questions, very simply: What is happening from the Democrats is plain, good, old, disgusting opportunism. That's all. There's no reason for wanting this. There's no reason for desiring to kill anybody. I don't desire to kill anybody on this planet. I mean especially the President. This is a precious exhibit. It took many centuries to produce a freak that absurd, even with all the Bushes doing all their effort for successive generations to bring this thing forth!

No, I don't believe in killing anybody. Personally, I would never kill anybody if I could possibly avoid it. I hate the idea of killing somebody. I don't like going in to bomb anybody. I don't want to throw bunker busters on North Korea. It's totally unnecessary. I don't want this blasted war. There is no good reason for war on this planet today, unless we are under attack. No reason. [applause] The desire to exhibit manliness, by professing to go to war or kill somebody, the way Bush did when he was governor of Texas: This is degeneracy, this is moral degeneracy, per se.

Look, you've come to a point, in humanity, at which with modern technology, and with the consequences of the alternative in asymmetric warfare, you come to a time, that if you're starting wars, you're not going to bring on a victory for anybody. You're going to bring on a collapse of humanity into a new dark age, in which the population of this planet will suddenly drop from about 6 billion, to less than 1 billion—and maybe much below that. You may be finding that most languages, now existing, disappear; most senses of nationality disappear, as has happened in dark ages in the past. That kind of thing.

So therefore, under these conditions, the policy, now, has to be the policy of the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended religious warfare in Europe, which had been going on from 1511 to 1648. The policy is that nations have to exist, number one, because if you don't have a nation, with its language and culture, you have no way of integrating the human being as an individual into society. Therefore, you must have a nation and its culture. You must have a sovereign nation.

But: the nations must be related to one another, as the Treaty of Westphalia laid down the fundamental principle of modern international law. Each nation must be dedicated to doing something for the other nations, and define itself in that way: the "advantage of the other." Because, if we're helping the other nation, and each of us accepts that obligation, that enters into cooperation among nations, and the objective today should be to realize the implications of the Treaty of Westphalia: of perfectly sovereign nation-states, individually sovereign, as our republic is a standard, Constitutionally, a standard of sovereignty.

And to define cooperation. For example, you have different cultures, as opposed to European culture; in the culture of China, the culture of India, the culture of Southeast Asia, in particular—Japan, Korea—they're different. These are Asian cultures. They're not European cultures. Therefore, we have to recognize, what their needs are, not because we believe the same things they do, in the same way they do, the same traditions, but because we're different. We have to say, what can we do for China? What does China require, need, from us? What are we going to do for Myanmar? What are we going to do for Southeast Asia? What's our relationship to the Philippines, which is a bastion of European culture in Asia? What's their role going to be? What's our commitment to them? What's our commitment to India? What's our commitment to the Muslim world at large? So therefore, we have to negotiate with them, in a sense, terms of mutual long-term cooperation, in which we're helping them and they in turn, are either helping us, or they're helping somebody else.

Take China, for example. China has a population of over 1.3 billion people. Most of the population of China has been concentrated in a strip of a relatively coastal area. Most of the population of China, like that of India, is poor, extremely poor, despite that a nation of 1.3 billion people happens to have within it a lot of modern technology, which it has acquired and developed. But the problem, for the long term, China must have a development of infrastructure throughout its whole territory. It requires that. This means large-scale water management systems, of the type they're working on; power systems; new cities, probably a thousand new cities, major cities in China.

So, to take the entire area of China, of China's sovereign territory, and to bring it under development, which would require a generation, and to bring the population of China to benefit from that development of the territory, will require an additional generation. So therefore, we say, "All right, China has many resources, but it doesn't have enough. Why don't we, in the United States and Europe, cooperate with China, to produce things they need from us—not what we want to dump on them, but what they need from us—why don't we have long-term agreements?"

Now, one of the big things they need is mineral resources. If you go from a population of low technology, which most of the Chinese population is, to one of high technology, you're going to consume minerals much more rapidly. Now, this involves two problems. First of all, we have to tap into new sources of minerals in that vicinity. We have two places to go to, for large amounts of mineral resources. Central and North Asia, number one. And, number two, the ocean. The greatest source of minerals on this planet, is the ocean and the area of the seabed. So therefore, now what we have to do is not simply exploit these areas. We have to develop and maintain the supply of minerals, on a cooperative international basis.

Therefore, China requires that. It can only be done, if we go into Central and North Asia, which is an area of Russian technology, which includes the territory of Kazakstan. Go into that area, and develop this area, because you can't just take minerals and rip them out of the soil. You've got to develop the area, where the minerals are. And develop the minerals from the areas whee they are, by having a population and infrastructure development. We can do that.

So, therefore, our policy should be, to get into this kind of understanding, of the need of each of us, as nations, to consider the advantage of the other, and to define our interest, in cooperation with other nations, in terms of what we can do, to make ourself indispensable to the others. The best way, the best alliance, is not based on a treaty agreement, as such. The best alliance is based on the fact, that people need each other, and know it.

Freeman: Lyn, the next question is from a group of medical students, who are listening from the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore. They say:

"Mr. LaRouche, going into yesterday, we were already very concerned about the impending flu epidemic, and there were questions as to how we could most efficiently vaccinate the population. Yesterday, a story broke indicating that almost instantaneously, 50% of the supply of serum was wiped out, because of a manufacturing problem. It does seem to us that the other shoe suddenly dropped. Our question is, can this be considered a problem of health care, or is it a problem of infrastructure? Either way, what do you do about it, when the flu season is immediately upon us?

LaRouche: The question is two. First of all, what should you do? And secondly, how effective can you be? What you should do, you're going to have to do anyway. This constitutes the basis for defining an international health emergency. This means that we have to have a crash program approach to dealing with this problem. This also means a restructuring of the implementation of our health-care policy.

What are our problems? First of all, we don't have hospitals. Why don't we have them? Because we destroyed them. Take the D.C. General Hospital, for example. It was destroyed. The best resource for the defense of the citizens of this area against infectious disease and other problems, was destroyed! In a swindle, a financial swindle. A rip-off, which my friends at the Washington Post had something to do with. And if somebody dies in your family, you should get them to pay for it. Because that's what happened.

We have gone away from a policy of having a reserve. We used to have all kinds of reserves, medical reserves. It was something which we insisted upon, from the experience of World War II, for example. We learned a lot of lessons from World War II about this kind of problem.

We destroyed it! So, therefore, we have to say, "First of all, this was a mistake. To put the human race at risk in this way, was a mistake. We have to adopt a policy of correcting that mistake, by reversing the policies which led to that mistake."

Now, that means, on another level, you treat it like a military emergency. You have all the relevant institutions tasked to come up with an approach to this, and whatever it takes, do the job. Whatever it takes. I don't know what the full resources are, but obviously, it has to be treated as an emergency, and we can not accept, in order to balance the budget, etc., etc., "we have a problem, it's going to take more time." It's not acceptable. Whatever we have to do, is what is acceptable. And if we can't do it, at least let's kill ourselves, in a sense, trying to do what should be done. And let's minimize the damage, if we can't absolutely prevent it. But we have to be considerate. We have to take it on.

Look what we've destroyed, look what we've done? Look what we've done since 1973, since the HMO law was put in! We have destroyed essential parts of the medical defense system of the United States. And we're killing people by that! What we're doing with HMO policy, the way they regulate physicians. A physician can't spend too much time taking to a patient. How else is a physician going to practice preventive health care, if he can't talk to a patient, in order to diagnose what the patient's problems may be, as opposed to what a specific, authorized category disease is?

Freeman: The next question is from Intisar Pierce. She says:

"Mr. LaRouche, would you kindly expand on your assertion that Hassan al-Turabi is a British agent? What evidence do you have that supports that claim?

"Further, you assert that sufficient water and infrastructure development would bring peace to the Palestinians and the Israelis. But, let's suppose for a moment, that there was enough water and basic human necessities for both the Israelis and the Palestinians? With a hate-monger like Ariel Sharon in power, wouldn't the violence continue, in spite of there being enough water for everyone? Wouldn't one party continue killing the other, just because they're Israeli, or just because they're Arabs? How do we address this?"

LaRouche: Well, first of all, you start from what you must do. Osama bin Laden, of course, the case is well known. There's no lack of evidence on this thing. It's how he was brought in—there's a complete admission of this by Bush circles, among others. Osama bin Laden was brought into the picture as a part of the Afghanistan operation, which was set up by the Trilateral Commission group under Zbigniew Brzezinski. And Bush as Vice President, by a special appointment by President Reagan, had a special position as Vice President which put him in the opposite end of the National Security Council, opposite to where I was working at, in terms of my work on the SDI. And these guys ran this operation. And it was run initially with the relevant Saudi family. The Saudi family is a close business associate of the Bush family. And you had Jimmy Goldsmith who was also on the case. This is how the thing was run.

Then, in the aftermath of the Desert Storm war, Osama bin Laden was pushed to one side, and all these guys who had been recruited as Islamic patriots against the heathen Soviets, were suddenly dumped to one side. But they weren't dumped! They weren't reallly dumped. They were denied—there's a difference. And as what Edwards emphasized is quite relevant, last night, and what was emphasized by Kerry otherwise: At the point that U.S. military forces were about to close in on the core of Osama bin Laden's forces, they were pulled out. So that point has been made.

Now, on the question of the Middle East. From the standpoint of policy, U.S. policy, we have to do what is right. We are not responsible entirely for the outcome, but we must do what is right. What is right is to proffer justice to the Palestinians. Now, the big problem here, is—the big problem that makes it almost insuperable, is that you have people in the right-wing in Israel, who are allied with the Bush-Cheney forces. That is how this acceleration of violence has occurred. Without the alliance with the Bush-Cheney crowd, they would never have done it.

Look, Clinton was moving in the right direction. Why not say, that the escalation of Middle East violence is the result of the stupidity of the United States, in allowing Clinton to be replaced, or succeeded, by poor Al Gore, who blew the election. I mean, Bush didn't steal the election: Gore blew it! He did everything possible to blow the election.

Clinton is the only Democrat who's ever served two full terms since Franklin Roosevelt. The smartest and best vote-getter the Democratic Party has had in the post-war period. And they didn't listen to him—and they blew it. But Clinton, with all the mistakes he made, which I would put down as honest mistakes, in the case of the negotiations for Middle East peace, was moving in the right direction. And had he been succeeded by a Democrat who was worth shucks, that Democrat as a President would have continued what Clinton had started, with Clinton's continued support, personal support, and assistance. We would not have the situation we have today.

So, yes, there is a reservoir of hatred built up in the Middle East, but intelligent Israelis—and there are intelligent Israelis, who are not right-wing nuts—understand, that if this continues, there will be no Israel! How can you defend Israel by a method which will result in its extermination? The only thing that will defend Israel is peace. And the United States has to intervene as a guarantor, in a guarantor role, in the negotiation of peace. But you can not treat Arafat the way it was done. Arafat was the recognized leader of the Palestinians, until they decided to replace him. And they haven't decided yet. Therefore, if you're not negotiating with Arafat, you're not serious. You're not serious about peace, and of course they're not serious about peace. Cheney had no intention of allowing peace to break out in the Middle East.

So the first step is, do the right thing. It may not work: but it's the best shot you've got. And any contrary policy is wrong. If you do the right thing, you've got a chance of winning. And if we, as the United States, are committed to do the right thing, I believe we can succeed. The problem is our standard of morality at home, and our standard of morality in the world, stinks. I don't think anybody trusts us right now around the world. We've got to earn that trust back. But if we go to earn that trust back, and the right people get in the picture, we've got a shot at bringing about peace. If you don't do that, you've get the very worst result. In that case, what do you do? You take your shot.

Freeman: [identifies webcast] Lyn, there are a number of questions, that have come in from youth. There's a question here from Treva [ph] Ross, that kind of epitomizes it. I'm going to combine them. Treva says:

"After reviewing the platform, I'm still confused on how to organize students in this time of great urgency. Just a decade ago, Howard University was one of the most politically motivated universities in the nation. But this morning, I saw a report that the students there are writing anti-vote articles in their Hilltop newspaper. Other students are saying, that there isn't a sufficient difference" (this is coming in from all over the place) "that there isn't a sufficient difference, between Kerry and Bush, and that young people should make their voices heard: That they should vote, but that they should vote for Ralph Nader.

"Would you please address, number 1, the question of getting youth out? And how to address this issue of Ralph Nader?"

LaRouche: I know something about that operation, not the Howard stuff as such, but it's pure corruption. It involves money. Pure money. People don't give a damn about the nation, and say, "We'll take the money." It's Bush money. The Nader campaign is Bush money campaign. It's the Bush League campaign.

Now, the other side of this thing, which is more substantive, apart from the simple thing of taking money from Bush; the other side of the thing is, you've produced a situation in which you have a bunch of crazy leftists and rightists, who have developed among demoralized youth—. Look, we've tracked the Bush operation on campuses around the country. The Bush operation is a racist operation. I don't care where it goes, whether Howard University or anyplace else, it works on a very simple system. "Look, what you've got to do, is realize"—they say, the way the Republican party organizes on campuses—"what you've got to do," they say: "Look, there's two kinds of people. There're winners and losers. You have to decide: Are you going to be a winner, or a loser? Are you going to be the consumed, or be an eater?"

That's what you're getting. "Look buddy, you want a career? You want money?"

You get somewhat demoralized, somewhat enraged [growling]: "I hate everybody, I hate everybody. I'm going to be a winner. I'm going to make it! Give me the gold. Give me the cash. Give me the opportunity."

And they're also told, "If you want a career, ahem— you'd better talk to the right people. You'd better be seen doing the right thing." That's it.

But, on the main, I think this is exaggerated, as a national phenomenon. Yeah, they are people who will sell out. They'll sell their brothers and sisters out, into slavery. But, in the main, this isn't working. Because most of the people in the country, like Howard students, most of them, are the ones who, the ones who say, "I'm not going to be eaten, I'm going to eat," most of them are the intended eaten. Are you going to tell people, just because it's supposedly a black college, that they should eat, when those they're supposed to eat, are the other black kids? That is not a very popular way to go.

So, I think the point is, is to realize that there's a certain amount of corruption there. It stinks. It should be recognized for what it is—and outnumber them. Our job is to do our job: To organize those who propose not to be eaten, and not to be a society, in which you say some people make it, and the others are going to be eaten.

Freeman: Laura, from Seattle. You want to come up and ask your question?

Question: Hi Lyn. I have another question about mobilizing youth as well. I was thinking about the role of understanding that man is made in the image of the Creator, and in terms of making discoveries, because I think that it's key in mobilizing youth that they recognize their immortality. That's pretty challenging for most youth, who come out of a culture that's really afraid of talking about anything relating to God, or being made in the image of the Creator. But if we're going to understand that this is not an election, but a fight for humanity, we're going to have to recognize that, in our individuals. So, how do we get youth to kind of loosen up, to talk about the fact that there just may be a God, and that it's okay to talk about that?

LaRouche: The chief problem here is—[having microphone problems].

Anyway, take the case of Jesu meine Freude. Remember, I had two programs on youth, and these should not be underestimated in terms of their implications: The first program, some of you may recall some years ago, at a conference in Virginia, where about 200 of these young fellows were gathered, and said, "What're we going to do for an education?" And I said, "Well, I recommend two things to you: Gauss, which is the history of science and ideas. And then history, from the standpoint of the history of ideas." Then, when we began to organize on the West Coast, or East Coast, for this campaign period, I said, "All right, let's take Bach's Jesu meine Freude, together with the associated motets of Bach, and let's do these as the fulcrum of a musical program.

Now, this worked. It worked so much so, that the Democratic Party Convention in Boston was transformed, by two things, which we did: One, was the issuing of a Platform. The Democratic Party had no platform, and what it claimed to be a platform wasn't worth mentioning, and they didn't bother mentioning it too much after that (for good reasons). The second thing was the youth singing. We had over a hundred youth singing on the subways and around the convention in Boston.

Now, how did that work? The magic of Bach, and the choral work of Bach. Because in Classical art—in the things we used, we used two things: We used largely Negro spirituals in the modern Classical mode of the Negro spiritual, which was Roland Hayes and so forth, this tradition. And then, the Bach. The two things, with some other things thrown in. These songs, this singing, both here, in the United States, where the youth are singing Bach's Jesu meine Freud, in German—choral motet. In Germany, the same thing. In Europe, we sing Negro spirituals—the Classical mode, Roland Hayes' tradition—has the same effect. Bach, the same effect. Why? Because, in Classical forms of art, and the Negro spiritual as developed by Burleigh and so forth, is a form of Classical art, which was refined with the assistance of Antonin Dvorak, who was the mentor in this business.

So, this thing touches upon a power, which is particularly human, in the human mind, which has a mysterious influence on people. What it does: It touches their souls. Now, one of the greatest geniuses in history, Bach, perfected this method, this conception. And so therefore, it is in things, which address two areas, science and Classical art, are crucial. Science represents the discovery of powers, that is, lawful principles to the universe, by the individual human mind. These are things, powers, which are not objects which you can touch and feel directly, but they're principles which explain what you can do with what you can touch and feel. This is the relationship of the individual human mind to nature. The other is the relationship of the individual human mind to the social process, by which man deals with nature. Art deals with the second. Physical science, the first.

So, when you are communicating, not with so-called argument, not campus argument, not with formalism—when you are communicating in that way, then you reach people, you change them. That's why it works. Therefore, we concentrate on it. For example, we had a session—Jessica [Tremblay] was involved in it, with some others—after the celebration of my birthday (you know, I get these, every once in a while). So afterwards, we had John Sigerson came in, and did, shall we say, a refinement, a polishing, on the use of the German language in the Jesu meine Freude. And you could hear, just in the two hours that they did it, you could hear the increase in vocal transparency, very visibly, as a result of this particular refinement that John worked on.

So, this is something you keep working on, to perfect. You work on music to that effect. People work on the spiritual, to that effect. We used to have people who were great artists, who keep dying out. Some of the greatest singers, Classical Negro spiritual singers, they die out. But you work with them, to try to perfect this jewel, to perfect how to perform it, how to understand it. And it's by the use of these things, by putting people through the experience of actually discovering universal physical principles, and seeing their own mind do it; the idea of discovering beauty, as Classical art conveys beauty.

And when you do choral work, as opposed to individual singing, you're doing something else: You're defining what social relations are. You have at least four different voices. They're singing in apposition to one another, but they're singing to common effect. What is that, but society? It's the exemplification. Young people who do choral singing: They're actually learning social relations, because you have to make beauty come out. You can't make raucous noise. You can't have shouting and screaming. You have to have something, which they themselves can recognize as beautiful.

The way that sometimes, in musical training, with choral training, you take a child chorus—you start with children—you take children choruses and student choruses, that sort of thing; you put it together. How does a good church work? A good church service is based on a good chorus, and good choral work, because what does it do? It introduces a connection among people, where the older generation listening to the chorus, or listening to the choir, are happy. Why are they happy? It's not because of the words. It's because of the relationship, among the people, both the choir, and the congregation: They are sharing something together. Now, when they share something together around these kinds of things, they're touching upon the difference between man and the beast. And whether they know it or not—.

See, I don't bring religion into politics, except when I have to chase the Devil out. You shouldn't do that, because politics has to be ecumenical. But what you do is you try to bring in the principle, which is the same thing as the religious principle in the proper sense. And that comes out in the form of this cooperation with people about ideas, ideas about beauty, ideas about nature, about man. And that's how you do it. You don't try to, in a sense, preach at people. There's a place for that if you want to do it, but it's not out in the streets! We don't preach at people. What you do, is, you do something which is beautiful. And if you can do something which is beautiful and social, they're going to say, "I want to know more about what you're doing." And that's what you do. You don't try to sell something. You try to demonstrate something. And it becomes attractive.

Freeman: We have far more questions than we can possibly entertain. What I've tried to do in some instances, is to group questions so that Mr. LaRouche could get to more of the questions than have been sent in, more broadly. For those of who you have submitted questions, who haven't gotten an answer, I'm only going to take one more question. I will actually organize the questions that we have, and get them to Mr. LaRouche, and hopefully, for those of you who do have unanswered questions, they will be answered in due course.

You always can submit questions to Mr. LaRouche, via the website, and I would encourage people to continue to do that.

One thing that I'd like to say, before I read the last question: Many people have expressed both today, and over the course of the last couple of weeks on the website, they've expressed varying degrees of dissatisfaction of the performance of the Kerry-Edwards ticket, and have asked what they should do, and how to proceed, and how important a Kerry victory is, and how much would it really change?

As far as how important a Kerry victory is, I think that one of the things that Lyn did today, as any military commander frequently does do, in some of the remarks that he made regarding the Bush Administration, is, he did the equivalent of placing landmines behind us. We better make sure that Bush doesn't win this election!

As far as people's concern, about the performance of a future Kerry Administration: I don't think it was ever Lyn's intention, and I think he made that very clear in his opening remarks, it was never Lyn's intention, nor our intention, to provide apologies for John Kerry. If people are concerned about what the nature of the Kerry Administration might be, the best way to address that in the next four weeks, is to deliver a landslide vote of the lower 80% of the population, in support of the policies that Lyndon LaRouche has presented, both in his Platform, and in his pamphlet It's the Physical Economy, Stupid! If, in fact, the next administration is put in office, with a mandate of that type, then the fact of the matter, is that that administration will essentially be hostage to the constituency that put them in the White House. And that's how you can ensure proper performance.

No one in this country has the right to say, "Well, I don't think I'm really going to vote, because I don't think there's anybody who I really like." It's precisely that kind of mentality that has gotten us into the situation that we're in, today [applause]—we have to make absolutely sure, in the next four weeks, that we mobilize and organize the citizens of this nation to carry out the responsibilities of citizenship. Because as a citizen of the United States, you get many benefits, but there is a responsibility that comes along with it. And I think that we have been remiss, in carrying out that responsibility.

Lyn, we've gotten a lot of question, especially from the youth, about what happens after the election? I'll read you a question that was submitted by Mary Lawson from Seattle, who's here today; which I think, more or less, sums that question up. And that's the last question, that we'll ask Lyn to answer this afternoon. Mary says:

"Lyn, the future is very uncertain. And I see the United States being thrust in either one of two directions, either into a Renaissance or into a dark age, and I think that depends on who the next President is. But what do you see the LYM doing after the election and beyond?"

LaRouche: [chuckles] Well, I see it growing. I see it, in a sense, reforming the Democratic Party. Look at what we've done with the campaign so far. We've been out in the streets, with the youth movement. We've been organizing about the youth movement. We've been looking around, to try to find if there's something equivalent to what we're doing. It doesn't exist.

Now, if you look at what the youth movement represents: What it represents is the typical aspirations of the non-demoralized section of the 18 to 25 generation. Look at the composition. Everybody's in it" There is no stereotype in the youth movement. All kinds of backgrounds: But coming together for a common purpose, or a common search for a purpose. The youth movement is the most powerful political idea of organization, on this planet today. We've seen that in Europe. We see it here. There is no rival to the youth movement as a concept of organization.

Now, the problems are not going to go away. The difference is going to be, there's going to be a better chance of doing something about influencing the situation. Therefore, if Kerry wins in particular, we will have a certain claim for that, not something that we can collect on or intend to collect on, as such. But a claim, a moral claim which says, "We helped to do it, and there was no one else like us to do what we did."

Now, if you're serious, then what does that come down to? We've been working with what? We've been working not only for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. We've been working, to try to work with candidates for Congress and for other positions, especially Congressional positions, and to get some re-elections of some good candidates, and to get some new ones in.

We've been working in Texas to try to defeat Tom DeLay. We've been working in California in a similar way. We've picked up a lot of friends in the Democratic Party, who are some of the old party operation, who work with us. So, we're doing a job. Our job is going to be to try to get this—.

Well, look, what do we got? Pick out cases, without getting too specific: We have people who've worked with us, especially over the past two years, in trying to prevent this Iraq War, and to try to get it dealt with properly, and other problems. We've been working with a selection of people, each of independent positions, they're not part of our organization as such. We've been working with people, who represent the cream of the crop of retired military, their friends; retired diplomats, their friends; retired intelligence figures, their friends; people in Congress; staff members of committees in Congress, and so forth. We have a similar approach to people on the state level.

So this youth organization is not limited to running Presidential campaigns. The youth organization is a growing part of the political process of the United States, which will represent a repository of discussion and influence, on the most important questions of our time in national and international life today. This youth movement, small as it may be at present, is the future of the United States. It also is, in a sense, the future of the world.

This youth movement is going to grow, now, and after the election, and after the inauguration. [applause]

Freeman: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, to those of you gathered here, and to those of you listening via the internet, you've been a wonderful audience: Now, let's get out there and build a movement. And join me in thanking Mr. LaRouche.