Revive Civilization
When we measure the physical changes in standard of living and productivity of the populations of the Americas and Europe over the interval from the close of World War II until today, we see three successive patterns. We see, thus: a.) a long wave of continued growth in the Americas, and economic recovery in Europe, from the end of that war, until the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy; b.) a clearly defined slowing of growth, despite the brilliant successes of the Kennedy space program, spreading from Harold Wilson's Britain, during the latter half of the 1960s; and, c.) a long wave of decline and collapse over the thirty-five-year period since the 1970s plunge into a "floating-exchange-rate" monetary system and shift into emphasis on substituting a "services economy" for productive economies.
If we measure things in monetary terms, rather than physical realities, we have a contrary picture, a picture of soaring monetary expansion. In late 1995 and early 1996, I illustrated this seemingly paradoxical situation in what I named my "Triple Curve" function, showing soaring numbers for monetary and financial aggregates, but an accelerated rate of decline in net physical output per capita and per square kilometer. In 1999-2000, I showed a modified situation, in which accelerating physical collapse in the economies of the Americas and Europe, was matched by the absolutely dominant role of financial derivatives. Now, we have entered the general breakdown-phase of the process of economic corruption which began with the globally radiating, 1964-68 effects of the first Harold Wilson government of the United Kingdom.
Clearly, the Bush-Cheney Administration—or, should we not say, "the Cheney-Bush Administration"?—did not cause this forty-year collapse of the economies of the Americas and Europe. What they have done, amounts, in effect, to an attempt to drain the sinking economic ship by detonating a hole in its bottom.
Generational trend-changes in economy are a common fact of history. The trend of raging hatred of the "68ers" against "blue collar" industrial and agricultural operatives, was the political driver used by the Nixon Administration and Brzezinski's Trilateral Commission to push through that shift from productive to "service" economy, which provided the social mass-base for the policies of practice which have ruined the American and European economies over the recent forty years. It is the generation of young adults, as only typified by the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), which must now supply the energy needed to free the world from forty years of failure.
Members of the older generation represented within the ranks of the elected officials and staffs of the U.S. Congress, must now lead in putting the nation's policies back onto the road of economic recovery; but, it is that passionate desire to create a better future for humanity which the young-adult generation supplies, on which the Congress will rely for the mass-based impetus on which the success of the Congress's bipartisan collaboration will depend.
The combination, in this issue of EIR, of my featured presentation of the science-driver principles of economic recovery and the accompanying contributions of the LYM, lend needed substance to the virtual "New Tennis Court Oath" heralded by Representative Nancy Pelosi in her celebrated recent Harvard address, and in Bill Ford's letter on the challenge to today's automobile industry.
—Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
December 17, 2005
