This presentation appears in the June 23, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The LaRouche Plan for a High Technology
New World Economic Order
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Here is Lyndon LaRouche's opening statement to a June 15, 2006 video conference on "The Role of Oil in the Transition to Nuclear Energy," organized by the LaRouche Youth Movement and Executive Intelligence Review. His remarks to audiences in Mexico and Argentina (where the meeting was held in an auditorium at the Argentine Congress), were simultaneously translated into Spanish. Subheads have been added.
Moderator Ingrid Torres, of the Mexico LYM: I would like to welcome our audience here in Mexico, and also those present at the meeting in the Argentine Congress, on behalf of the LaRouche Youth Movement and Executive Intelligence Review, who have been in charge of organizing the event here in Mexico, and on behalf of our colleagues of the LaRouche Youth Movement in Argentina, who are linked up with this meeting. We would like to emphasize that this conference is the culmination of our first nuclear campaign, and at the same time it is the starting point, the beginning of our second nuclear campaign, whose goal is to end on December 1 [inauguration day] with the announcement by the new Mexican President of a program to develop nuclear energy. In that regard, we have been organizing in the institutions, in the universities, in the Presidential campaigns of the candidates, and among the citizenry in general. With us here today are representatives of institutions including the Union of Transportation Workers of the Federal District; the national security course at the Center for Naval Studies; the textile union Martyrs of St. Angel; the Secretary General of the Office Workers Union; and representatives from the Federal Electricity Commission. We also have students from various universities, such as UNITEC, Mexican University, the Mexican Autonomous University of Xochimilco and of Ixtapalapa. Those which I have not mentioned, please forgive me, but you are all most welcome. Without further ado, I would like to welcome Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, who will speak on the subject of his plan for the transition to a high technology New World Economic Order. Please join me in welcoming former U.S. Presidential pre-candidate, Lyndon LaRouche.
LaRouche: We are at a point in world history: At the present time, the international monetary financial system of the world is in the process of disintegration. That does not mean the end of the world. It means that we either make certain changes, or this planet will go, in fact, into a prolonged New Dark Age, comparable to what happened in Europe during the middle to late part of the 14th Century.
Now, there is a problem in forecasting, which very few economists understand, because most economists operate on the basis of statistical theory, and statistical theory does not apply to mass human behavior. Sometimes, it may describe it, but it doesn't enable you to predict mass human behavior. Because, first of all, human beings are not merely animals. Human beings can change their behavior, in the same way that we make fundamental discoveries of physical principles in science. And every time mankind either discovers a new principle, or applies a principle which is previously known, which had not been applied, you change the direction of history accordingly. We're now at a point, however, that as long as the world continues under the present international form of monetary system, the present IMF system, this world is doomed to plunge into a New Dark Age, and if we remain in that policy, nothing can prevent the entire planet from plunging into a New Dark Age.
The only thing that can be done is to change the international monetary system. The means for doing that, is to put the existing monetary system into bankruptcy reorganization. For example, in the case of the United States, we're now on a short fuse, where between March, just past, and September, under present circumstances, we must expect a general collapse of the U.S. dollar system, the international monetary system.
The collapse is already under way. You see it in two phenomena: a rate of acceleration of inflation in prices of primary materials, and at the same time, a crisis in terms of breakdown crisis, of whole chunks of the financial markets. So, the two processes going on represent a condition of turbulence, of increasing turbulence, which is very much like what happened in Germany between June and November of 1923. We're in a breakdown crisis of that type.
Pre-Conditions for FDR-Style Solution
However, if the United States were to change its policy, by putting the Federal Reserve system into bankruptcy—that is, putting the Federal Reserve system into receivership—you would then have an option for the beginning of a recovery comparable in model to what Franklin Roosevelt did when he came in as President in 1933. Without that kind of change, there is no hope for the United States.
If the United States goes down, Europe will collapse immediately. Russia more slowly, because Russia is now a somewhat different kind of economy. The Asian economies will collapse quickly, because a collapse in U.S. and European markets for Asian goods will mean a collapse in China, and a collapse in India and other Asian countries. So you would have immediately a general breakdown crisis of the entire planet. Some people want that to happen—people like Felix Rohatyn and similar people in the Synarchist International, who plan for the kind of world in which world population would collapse rapidly toward less than a billion people from over six billion today. Whole nations would disappear, entire languages would disappear in some cases.
That's the kind of problem we face. Therefore, everything depends upon the subjective factor: Do we know what the solutions are, and do we know how they work? Do we have the ability, the will, to make them work, to introduce them? We can do that. And my function is not only to warn people against a collapse, which is now virtually inevitable under the present system, but also to indicate clearly on the subjective level what the decisions are that can be made by the United States.
FDR Approach Is Necessary
For example, the U.S. government: What could be done now, right now, to prevent a general collapse of the U.S. system and also the world system? Only by presenting the concept of the changes in policy which are needed to save the world from this onrushing crisis, could the world be saved from a New Dark Age. That's our condition. Any other view of world history is an illusion, a consoling illusion. The idea that the present systems in the Americas can work, that is, the present monetary system, is nonsense. It could not work. We need a new system, and the system is essentially that which Roosevelt designed as the new Bretton Woods System.
Times have changed, conditions have changed, but the same kind of system, and the Roosevelt approach through reforms, is what is necessary. No Substitute for Nuclear Power But there are also other reforms, which we concentrate on today. The world has reached a point with over six billion people on the planet, that the world cannot go on on the basis of existing levels of technology. Without the immediate introduction, massive introduction, of nuclear power resources—both as power resources as such and as technological means involved in production, and without a rapid progress toward thermonuclear fusion as a power source, within say a quarter of a century ahead, 25 years from now, there is no possibility of saving this world from a catastrophe.
Why? The increase of population has meant that, to provide a decent standard of living for people in various parts of the world, for over six billion people, we are going to have to turn to what are considered relatively marginal resources, marginal mineral resources. For example, in many parts of the world, you have an impossible fresh water problem. That is, fresh water supplies available, drinkable fresh water, are not sufficient to meet human needs. We are drawing down fossil water reserves, we are drawing down the developed water supplies for human and animal consumption, and so forth.
We are also failing to develop the landscape, such that we can sustain a larger, growing population. Our systems of mass transportation have broken down, our organization of our cities has broken down. All these things have to be changed. This requires power; this requires nuclear power. There is no substitute for nuclear power on the planet today. Anyone who proposes that we can get along without nuclear power is seriously, dangerously misleading. Governments which say we do not need nuclear power are dangerously misled. We need it.
We also need to organize the world in a different way. We have populations, for example, in Eurasia. On the one side, you have a declining, decaying, decadent European civilization. You have a growing population, but a very poor population, in Asia. Over 70% of the population of India is extremely poor, with over a billion people, total. China, probably 1.4 billion people, some prosperity, but poor. China depends upon producing U.S.- and European-designed goods for U.S. and European markets.
If the United States collapses, and Europe collapses in its demand, then there will be a catastrophe in China and in India. There will be a collapse throughout Asia. So the whole planet is looking at the threat, immediately, of a chain-reaction collapse, coming out of Europe and North America, which would impact the entire world.
Systems of Continental Cooperation
To deal with that problem, as a world problem, we have to divide the world among certain continental systems of cooperation. For example, in order to deal with the problems of Asia, typified by China and India, we must concentrate Europe—including Russia—on the development of the materials and the technology required to bring the entire population of Asia up to a sustainable standard. This is one area where nuclear power becomes crucial.
For example, in India, there's a determination on the part of leading circles to go to the thorium-based high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, as a mass development of power sources for India as a whole. Also changes in technology. The same thing is needed in China, but India has the thorium cycle, as does Norway and as Australia potentially does—big concentrations. In other areas, we're going to have to accelerate greatly the development of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors as sources of power.
We're talking about hundreds, of thousands of new plants being put in fairly quickly. This means a change in mass transportation, a change in organization, a change in technology. It means looking ahead two generations, each of about 25 years; a transformation in populations' characteristics, as we increase the productive powers of labor. The first thing we're going to have to face, in terms of resources, is this water crisis. It's an immediate crisis. That is, an immediate crisis of suitable fresh water supplies. It's also a need for rebuilding the natural potential of agriculture and so forth in areas where this has been abandoned by modern agricultural changes. This means a long-term investment in capital-intensive modes of investment, in particular in Eurasia, to raise the level of productivity, the level of standard of living of the Asian population, through mobilizing European production as an aid to that end in Asia.
This means setting up a system of cooperation and financing of a 50-year duration in Eurasia. Back to the American Model We have a similar situation in the Americas. The Americas are different than Europe in many respects, because the Americas generally were based on the migration of European populations fleeing Europe, but bringing the advantages of European culture into the Americas. In some parts of the Americas, as in Mexico and Peru, you had large indigenous populations which blended with European civilization and, as they struggled to get free of some of the oligarchical influences of imperialism, they showed the same potential, particularly in the last half of the 19th Century.
We are a different kind of people in the Americas than you have in Europe. Europe is much more an oligarchical culture, still. We do not have princes, dukes, counts, and so forth much, in our part of the world. We are more a plebian population, and therefore we look at people differently and behave differently than Europeans today do, but we are based otherwise on European culture. Now, we have to get back to that tradition we have from this kind of development in South America, Central America, and North America. We have to go back to what was, in the latter part of the 19th Century, considered the American model, the Hamiltonian model of the economy.
But there's been a lot of ruin added to the stock of the countries of Central and South America. Mexico has been ruined since 1982. The change imposed by the British and the United States on Mexico in 1982 has ruined the country. The country no longer has its own banking system. The banks are controlled by foreigners. It has lost its nuclear power. It's lost many of its industries. The conditions of life of most Mexicans, on the basis of indigenous economy, is much worse today than it was in 1982, when the crushing blow came down on Mexico through October of 1982.
We've had in a similar period—remember, this is the period of the Malvinas War—we've had a similar pattern in the case of Argentina. We've had great problems in Peru, great problems continuing in Colombia, and so forth. So, therefore, we have a continent which has vast resources, which are largely undeveloped, many poor people; but also within the population, some people have a very high standard of culture by rural standards. Our job in the Americas, while cooperating with Eurasia, is to cooperate in developing the resources of the Americas, to correct the errors that have been committed, especially over the 1971-1982 period, to go back to a modern economy based on raising the standard of living, going to an agroindustrial high-technology mode of economy.
Basis for Cooperation in the Americas
Therefore, we have to have a long period of cooperation. This cooperation will be based on a number of considerations. First of all, we must have a new monetary system which is a return to a fixed exchange-rate system. We must have a fixed exchange-rate system worldwide, because you cannot invest long-term—that means, 25 or 50 years, or even less—if the interest rate, if the borrowing costs on loans, on capital, is rising. We must have a low-cost on interest rates for long-term capital loans. We must have a system that is a fixed exchange-rate, so the cost of those loans does not increase during the lifetime of the investment.
On that basis, on the return to a strictly regulated economy, away from a so-called free trade economy, a regulated system of cooperation among nation-states, we have to have a policy, a plan of long-term development and cooperation among sovereign states in that development. That's the only chance for the hemisphere. This chance depends upon the rapid development of nuclear power use in the hemisphere.
We have water problems, all kinds of problems. Without nuclear power, these problems cannot be solved. In Europe, we need a similar kind of thing, as I've indicated. In sub-Saharan Africa, you've had genocide going on since the middle of the 1970s. This is a deliberate Anglo-American policy of genocide against sub-Saharan African people, and sub-Saharan Africa has been ruined, from Sudan and so forth, on south. Ruined as a matter of policy, by policies adopted in leading circles in the United States and in Europe. We have been committing murder, genocide, against Africans.
The pretext, as Henry Kissinger put it, back in the middle of the 1970s, was the argument that the raw materials of Africa must belong to the United States of the future. Therefore, we must not let the African population increase, because they will use up more of those raw materials. We must not let the Africans raise the level of their standard of living and productivity, because they would use up more raw materials. We must reduce the population of Africa; we must destroy the Africans' desire for sovereign nation-states. So these countries, the British, the United States and others, have been committing a policy of genocide against Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa. We've had a similar policy in terms of parts of the Americas.
The cheap labor policies that we've been using, in the long term will mean genocide against whole sections of the world which are relying upon cheap labor as a source. These are our problems.
Can These Policies Be Reversed?
What are our changes of solving this, of reversing this? Well, we have a President and Vice-President of the United States who, if continued in office, would absolutely prevent any progressive development. If you are talking about looking at President Bush continuing in office until two years from now, you're talking about the doom of the hemisphere and probably of the planet. Unless these characters are replaced, there's no possibility of the policy changes being made which are needed to control the presently onrushing crisis and to lead the world out of the present danger. So, there must be a change in the U.S. government. If the change doesn't occur in the U.S. government, there's no possibility that other parts of the world will solve the problem. It must be changed in the United States.
Now, what's the problem here? The problem is an old problem. It goes back to the French Revolution period. The birth of the American Revolution, which started actually in 1763, when the British Empire first emerged, or as an empire, the British East India Company. We in North America, who had been content to live with the British monarchy, found ourselves in an impossible position after 1763. We were being crushed, our technological progress was being crushed. For example, during this period, during the last part of the 18th Century, the productivity per capita of the typical resident in North America was higher, almost twice that, of the typical person in the United Kingdom. So the United Kingdom was repressing many of its own people, suppressing technological progress, and was determined to crush technological progress in the Americas. This was a cause for our Revolution.
Our Revolution realized the aims of Europe, of a Europe free of oligarchical control. This was our Constitution. And since that time, they tried to crush us with the French Revolution, with various things in Europe, and the Napoleonic Wars, to crush the struggle to bring forth presidential systems, and constitutional power, like that in the United States.
When Lincoln won the Civil War, we defeated the British puppets called the Confederacy, the pro-slavery puppet regime called the Confederacy. The United States had emerged from northern border to southern border, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, as one of the most powerful nations on this planet, a nation which could no longer be conquered by invasion, but only by subversion.
Our problem has been, over these decades since, over more than a century since, subversion. We were subverted during the early part of the 20th Century, subverted by Teddy Roosevelt, by Woodrow Wilson, by Coolidge, by Hoover, and people like that. Franklin Roosevelt saved the United States and saved civilization from what would have been otherwise a Nazi rule of the world. After Roosevelt died, immediately forces in Europe and in the United States went back to the same thing, of trying to destroy the Roosevelt legacy.
We are now nearly a destroyed nation, from the inside. We destroyed ourselves since the middle of the 1960s, since the war in Vietnam, and especially since the election of Nixon. The destruction has been going on at an accelerating rate. We're now at the point that we have to change, because Western Europe is incapable of making the changes on its own, which must be made. They could make the changes if the United States initiated changes in the United States.
Those changes could be spread. If the United States and Europe go that way, if the United States goes that way, then there's a possibility that the patriotic forces which we see now freshly emerging in South and Central America, then these patriotic forces would respond quickly, for cultural reasons, to the potential which the Americas represent, on the basis of the American System. But as you know, from Argentina, from Mexico, you cannot be free while you have an Anglo-American foot on your neck.
But if the United States goes back to the other side, as it did under Franklin Roosevelt, then the potential of freeing the people of South and Central America for a kind of development which present trends in cooperation suggest, will be almost automatic. But the United States must take that initiative. Otherwise, there's not much of a change. In Europe, if the United States changes, you'll have tremendous pressure coming on rapidly, as you see from Shanghai and Beijing now, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the principal nations of Asia are uniting with Russia and reaching out toward Europe, toward Germany and elsewhere, for continental cooperation.
If the United States makes the changes it must make, then not only will the Americas change, but all of Eurasia will quickly change in a similar direction. We have the possibility of coming out of this, and building a new condition on this planet. That's where we stand, and that's what I'm working for. Therefore, the problem is, how do we change the government inside the United States? How do we get rid of the Bush/Cheney Administration and people like that who represent this process? You see what I'm doing, if you watch the United States. We have people in the Democratic Party, and also in the Republican Party, who realize—more or less reluctantly, or more or less courageously—that we must get rid of Cheney and must get rid of the Bush Administration.
Otherwise, there's no possibility that we can do the things we need to do. The time is short. Probably by September of this year, if we have not made the change we have to make, we probably will be going then into a plunge into a deep world depression, potentially a New Dark Age. If we change our policies within that time frame, or approximately that time frame, in the United States, then as I've indicated to you, all options are open. But if we don't you may be looking at a Dark Age.
