PRESS RELEASE
LOUIS UCHITELLE, NEW YORK TIMES NOV. 26:
The Gibberer in the Times
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
November 26, 2006
Is the New York Times' Louis Uchitelle operating on LSD? That is fair question after reading Uchitelle's Nov. 26th New York Sunday Times Week in Review feature, "Here Come the Economic Populists."
The Democratic Party has just won a crucial mid-term national election. It could have been a much greater victory had the Party organization really tried. As it was, not only did the Democratic faction and its partners carry the Senate by a very narrow margin, but gained a landslide victory in the House of Representatives.
The post-election studies now show, that the critical margin of these victories was won during the last few weeks preceding the polling; the crucial margin of that victory was a sudden surge of turnout of young voters of the 18-35 age-group, a surge which, in crucially significant degree, reflected my own LaRouche PAC youth mobilization. This was shown in a curious way by the connection between the youth turnout for Democrats and the LPAC's exposure of the scandalous evidence of Mrs. Lynne Cheney's efforts to suppress academic freedom, as Virginia's Webb victory, for example, attests.
My own intensive warnings on the issues of the presently onrushing global collapse of the present world monetary-financial system were a significant factor, although of undetermined magnitude in these developments. My attention, like that of many other economists, was focussed momentarily on both the fruits of Mr. Alan Greenspan's bubbling follies, and the current threat of early chain-reaction form of global collapse of the present world monetary-financial system. Putting silly things, like Mr. Uchitelle's rant, in a prominent place in the NY Sunday Times, is not notably helpful to the cause of humanity at this moment of global monetary-financial crisis in which the recent mid-term election has just occurred.
Mr. Uchitelle's shocking ignorance of even the rudiments of each and every aspect of the entire sweep of the history of modern political-economy since the crucial February 1763 Peace of Paris, was a certain, perverse kind of accomplishment in itself.
However, to be brief: with the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the U.S.A. made certain significant and sudden shifts in post-war economic policy; however, we retained the rudiments of the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system until the 1967-68 monetary crises led by the United Kingdom's Prime Minister Harold Wilson. From 1970-1972 onward, with the adoption of the guidon of Professor Milton Friedman, the Bretton Woods system was shut down and then wrecked; at this point, the policies which Uchitelle now claims were authored by the 1993- 2001 Clinton Administration, were introduced as the policies of the now recently deceased protege of Arthur Burns, Professor Milton Friedman, and Mr. Friedman's ally George P. Shultz,
It might astonish the bewildered Mr. Uchitelle to learn that those policy-changes, already implicit in the wrecking done by the U.K.'s Harold Wilson government, have been continued from President Nixon's first administration to the present day. Every administration since that time, Republican and Democratic, has been equally guilty of the same folly for which the late Professor Friedman was most notable.
That policy, which has reigned over these decades, has now failed in a manner and degree far, far worse than the combined efforts of the administrations of Presidents Coolidge and Hoover. It is now, in a manner of speaking, time to reverse course, back to a seemingly forgotten state of sanity in economic policy.
The most crucial related matter of the moment, is the fact that the present Bush-Cheney administration is not capable, intellectually, or emotionally, of making what should be seen as the urgently needed, obvious corrections. The critical fact, is that the general collapse of the present world monetary-financial system is ongoing, at a time when no nation of Eurasia is both prepared and qualified to lead that needed change in monetary policy which might do for the crisis-ridden world of today what Franklin Roosevelt did for a crisis-ridden world of 1933.
It is the acquired habits of decades, especially the recent four decades, which are now doing us in. The greatest danger, and the most important political issue of the moment, is the reluctance to part with those specific habits, the reluctance to turn to the kind of thinking which enabled a bankrupt U.S.A. to lead in making possible the defeat of Hitler and the launching of the 1945-1964 period of recovery.
This is, therefore, the nature of the crisis with which the continued existence of the present Bush-Cheney administration threatens the welfare of our nation, and the world, during the weeks of the December-February sessions and related work of the U.S. Congress. How will that crisis of leadership be addressed; how will the crucial, needed changes be brought about in a timely way? Uchitelle's nonsensical, totally misinformed rant, is a far, far less than sensible contribution to the urgently needed dialogue.
