LAROUCHE WEBCAST
The End of the
Post-FDR Era
Here are excerpts from Lyndon LaRouche's July 25, 2007 webcast. The full transcript appeared in the Aug. 3, 2007 EIR.
... If the United States government proposes to President Putin that the United States, Russia, China, with the support of India, become a sponsoring committee to build immediately a group among nations who are going to address these global problems which have to be dealt with immediately—because, smaller nations, individual nations can't do it. You have to change the world monetary-financial system immediately, and you can not do that with a couple of small nations. You can only do that from the top. You have to pull together the might of the world, the major powers of the world and those who will support them, and say, "We're going to change immediately the world monetary system. We're going to get rid of the floating-exchange-rate monetary system. We're going back immediately to a fixed-exchange-rate system." Because if we do not go back to a fixed-exchange-rate system, of the Franklin Roosevelt prototype, then there's no possibility of preventing a general collapse and disintegration of the world economy. It can't be done. Therefore, you have to have a power group which says, "We're going to save this planet from Hell."...
The Economic-Financial-Monetary Crisis
Now, the big problem we have to deal with, as I mentioned before, is the economic-financial-monetary crisis. The United States is disintegrating. If a depression occurs, the United States will see conditions you won't believe. Nothing in the past century, no depression, is comparable to what will hit the United States if this system collapses now. We don't have industry; we have destroyed our agriculture; we have destroyed our health-care system. We're destroyed almost everything that we've depended upon. And if we lose the power of money, which we're about to lose—as long as the U.S. dollar was around, and as long as world affairs were denominated in U.S. dollar exchanges, we had a certain strength in this world. Not because we were worth anything, we weren't worth anything; we threw that away a long time ago. But we were worth something because the U.S. dollar was, in effect, a reserve currency of the world. Why? Because the currency of China depended upon the value of the U.S. dollar. The currency of many countries depended upon the value of U.S. dollar; the debts were denominated in dollars. And as long as we were respectable, people would respect us, and treat us nicely, because they were afraid of the collapse of the U.S. dollar. Once the U.S. dollar is collapsing, we ain't nuttin' no more! ...
Let's take the case of China. Now, China has a population of 1.4 billion people, and India has 1.1. Now China is—people think China is very wealthy; it's not true. There are some wealthy people in China, there are some industries in China, which are important, but also, the majority of the population of China is extremely poor. And therefore, without a revolution in technology, affecting the infrastructure and so forth, of the masses of China, the massive area, China has not got a future. Therefore, we have to think about that. We have India; we have probably 70% of the population of India, even though about 30% of the population of India, 1.1 billion people, is in fair shape, the majority is in worse shape than ever before. They're short of water, they're short of everything. They're short of the conditions of life. They need development. All of Asia needs development. Desert areas need development. So, we have to go into a period of high-tech nuclear-fission-driven growth in basic economic infrastructure....
So, we've come to the point that we have a way of choosing. We can choose to do what I propose, which, from a strategic standpoint, is the only sequence of major developments which will get the world out of what would otherwise be a plunge into a Dark Age, something comparable to the 14th Century in Europe. We could do that. We could return to our character, as Franklin Roosevelt once did earlier, under conditions of crisis. And what I'm proposing could only be done, admittedly, under conditions of crisis. Only when these guys [oligarchs] get down on their knees, and people admit that this isn't working, that this is a danger to human life, and they have no choice, no acceptable choice but to do what I say, on this one—then they will choose it. They will be happier. And that's the only chance for humanity.
Without the United States, it can't happen. Europe couldn't do it. Asia couldn't do it. We must be the sparkplug. That is our destiny; that's our legacy. Not to rule the world, but to be the sparkplug by which the world comes to rule itself. We have to be the sparkplug....
