Dialogue with LaRouche
On April 18, U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche returned to Monterrey, Mexico, where he addressed 240 people, among them, 200 students, at one of the country's most elite universities, the Monterrey Institute for Technological and Higher Studies (ITESM), where he has spoken twice before. He was hosted by the student associations of both the International Relations and the Economics Departments. Following LaRouche's main presentation, the following doalogue occurred.
Question: If the financial system is in crisis, what is the alternative, and what are the problems of implementing that alternative?
LaRouche: Well, the problem is fairly simple, in some respects. You have certain people who represent power, including political power on this planet.
We have certain people who have power—like bad Presidents of the United States. You should never elect a President who had to be cured of a cocaine habit, to President of the United States. Which we did. He said he was AWOL. He was taking anti-cocaine drug rehabilitation for one year, while he was ducking military service in Vietnam while serving in the Texas Air National Guard. And the story was that he was AWOL, because no American voter would vote for a President whom they thought was a coke addict. And since—don't worry about it, he never uses his brain anyway, so the impaired brain is not important. He has Cheney. And Cheney is not too intelligent, he's brutish; more animal than human being. But Cheney himself has people who tell him what to do. So, what you have in a sense, is an oligarchical system that runs the United States.
Now, it's obvious, that the lower 80% of the family-income brackets of the people of the United States have no real responsibility for any of this. They are victims of the process. Their only folly is: They've accepted it!
And my job, and the job of people who are political leaders, is to try to awaken the people of the United States, the lower 80%, to assert their right, to use their brain, and to be assisted in using their brain in deciding what's good for them! The people of the United States do not like this war in Southwest Asia. They don't like it! They don't want it! They didn't want the Vietnam War! They don't want any of the things that are killing us. But they feel they don't have the power—they represent 80% of the population! They have the power to vote! But they're manipulated, humiliated into accepting misleadership.
And one of the problems we have, which I have, because of my political activities, is trying to get these dear Americans, these dear lower 80% of family-income brackets, to get up on their hind legs, be human beings, and realize that they have rights and the powers to know, to take charge of their own lives!
And that's the problem. And the same thing I say for every part of the world: The point is, the worst crime, is to deny a human being of their understanding of the difference between them as a human being, and an animal.
I like pet dogs. Pet dogs like me. But I don't want to be a pet dog! And I don't want my friends who are human beings, to be dogs either. That's the point.
What Controls the Governments?
Q: It's known that central planning does not generate prosperity, and what it does achieve is at the expense of restricting individual freedom and civil liberties. What is your view of this?
LaRouche: Well, the problem is, it's not just governments. The problem: What controls governments? Anyone, a Mexican patriot who's well-informed, gets some smell of what controls government. Is it the Mexican government that controls the government? No! International financial powers, and related powers, imperial powers, give governments a suggestion they dare not refuse. And governments under pressure of foreign agencies, capitulate, because they believe they don't have the power to resist. And they say, "We're sorry. We're sorry. We had to do this to you, our people, we had no choice. We weren't allowed to."
And therefore, to me, the important answer to this, is alliances among peoples to join together. For example, my proposal very simply, was that the United States government, the next government or the incoming government of the United States—which will probably be Hillary Clinton, and in her case, she probably would do it—that this government will join with Russia, with China, and India, who are already inclined in this direction, and other nations, to form a group of nations which represents sufficient power, to shove freedom down the throat of the rulers of the world! Most governments would like that. Most people would like that.
But the question is, assembling the power which gives people the confidence to make this demand.
We can solve the problems of this planet. Most of the solutions are already known to me: They are feasible, physically feasible solutions. They could be implemented, not all at once by miracle, but they could be implemented as a progressive process—if we had the unity to do that.
And thus, my view is, we need a government of the United States, which by itself, is not powerful enough to do this. But if you have Russia, which is the leading power in terms of raw materials in Eurasia; if you have China, with 1.4 billion people or more (they continue to breed, you know; they haven't forgotten that art); and you have India with 1.1 billion people. You have Japan, which sees itself as an Asian country and sees its destiny in cooperation within Asia. You see other countries of that type uniting, to say, "we want a new system." Then, if you have powerful leaders, in the United States and other countries, who agree, we can free this planet. And that's the only way it's going to happen.
You know that Mexico can't do it by itself. Mexico could be crushed if it tried to do it by itself. It tried to do it under López Portillo. When López Portillo was isolated, Mexico was crushed. That lesson is not forgotten: I know the lesson, I was part of it, part of the experience.
So therefore, we need to have an assembly of nations, which out of a sense of desperation of the dangerous nature of this situation, are willing to unite, and give up a lot of their differences, to cooperate, to force the planet to change in the direction that simple humanity requires.
Just look at this place—Mexicans coming out of the United States, being forced back into areas such as Sonora. Sonora has the PLHINO project available. It's the most efficient program possible, that is what could be done in the least time, with the relatively least effort, to provide employment for returning Mexican farmers, to build communities as well as farms again, in a time of great food crisis in the world as a whole, including a food crisis in Mexico itself.
These countries need the permission, and the backing, strength, to be able to make those kinds of decisions. And if we can create a united effort among some more powerful nations, to bring all nations together, or most of them, at least, for this kind of purpose, we can change the planet and solve this kind of problem.
Q: Is there appropriate technology to make food grow in the desert?
LaRouche: Yes. Oh, absolutely. You can grow food in the desert by eliminating the desert. How do you eliminate the desert? Well, by making it un-desert. How do you do that? By simply bringing living growth to a desert area. This has been done many times: You can turn yellow land to brown land, and brown land into black land, and you have agriculture.
Hillary Clinton's Fighting Spirit
Q: Who would be the most apt candidate for the Presidency of the United States?
LaRouche: Well, actually, we haven't decided who the next President of the United States is going to be. Don't let anybody tell you that they've decided that. It's not decided. The best qualified candidate, presently, is Hillary Clinton. This is not a question of my enthusiasm for her; it's a question of fact. She is the best qualified. She's the most human, and that's a good quality. And she's also extremely intelligent. Her husband is more informed, but she has a fighting spirit, I think, which is greater than his. And therefore, her fighting spiritual regard for the people of the country is a good sign.
But that's not ended. The thing is not going to be settled by June. The settlement of who is going to be the next President of the United States, will go on into the Summer. We don't even know what the results will be. New candidates are being considered, may be brought in. We don't yet know, what the list of possible candidates for President will be. I can merely indicate presently—and I'm working on this problem in many ways, not just on the Presidential thing, but on trying to bring together a coalition of forces among leading circles within the United States, to deal with the challenge to any new President of the United States. That's what my concern is.
But right now, if you had to make a choice today, you would have no other rational choice but Hillary.
Q: How do the financial forces impose their policies?
LaRouche: What you have is an international financial-monetary system, which is centered in London, but it's not British entirely, it's other things as well. It's an international financial system, very much like the old Venetian system that pulled the world into a big mess in the New Dark Age in the 14th Century.
But this concentration of the financial and political power controls the world.
If you have a power which wants to destroy this, and I can tell you that Russia, China, India, and some other countries would like to destroy this power; and the people of the United States, in their own interest, should want to destroy this power, if they thought there were a possibility of doing it. And I'm sure there are people in South and Central America who share the same view.
We have potentially, a rallying of the forces, which can give the mandate to government, to do what has to be done. And it's my job, and it's the job of others to promote that, because without that, we don't have a chance. We must bring a new political force in this planet, to lead it. And that force is a group of nations, with their people, especially the participation of the poor people who will demand the changes needed, so that they can live, so their children can live.
Q: How can you reconcile the requirements of making practical decisions with the philosophy of wanting to change the world to make policy decisions?
LaRouche: Well, I have the arrogance to do just that. I mean, it has to be done? I wasn't very important in the military, but I had military training, and I did military training for troops during World War II. And sometimes, you do the job because it has to be done. And one hopes that you find enough people who have the courage and resolution to do just that.
I have the will and the commitment to do what I've proposed. I push people I know to make their contribution to that effort. Sometimes, particularly as things become much worse, every day, every week, in the United States and around the world, I find that I have more and more influence. The worse things get, the more influence I have. And that's because people sense the situation, and they want some leadership. And they're looking for a new leadership, to replace the junk that they have that calls itself leaders.
How To Make Long-Range Forecasts
Q: In my studies I have learned that no one has been able to predict a financial collapse—there are too many variables involved to be able to do it. On what do you base your confidence that you can do so?
LaRouche: Okay! Many people fail at forecasting, first of all, because they try to predict rather than forecast. And I'll explain that. The answer's a little bit trickier than to the previous questions. And secondly, because I know how to forecast, which most economists don't know.
I have been forecasting, actually, first of all, as a management consultant—I was an executive for a consulting firm back in the 1950s, and I forecast the day that the 1957 Recession would break out. And on the basis of that success, I became bolder, and began looking at longer-term forecasts.
Now, most people make a mistake of using Cartesian statistical methods for forecasting, and relying largely upon monetary statistics. None of that works. Do it, and you will fail! Everyone who uses that method fails. Sometimes they will hit luckily on a stock market forecast. But on an economic forecast? Never!
Because forecasts involve long-term processes, which cover generations. For example, if you want to know the forecast of military-strategic crisis policy, today, you have to go back to the period before 1890: before the day that Bismarck was fired by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Because it was the firing by Kaiser Wilhelm II, of Bismarck, in 1890, which set into motion the process which led to the war of Japan against China, which was fought, actually, from 1895 to 1945, off and on, a continuous war, directed by the British Empire. The British Empire enlisted Japan as an ally, for bombing the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor—this was done in the 1920s, not in the late 1930s. Japan then changed alliances from the British to Hitler, but they went back to the bombing of the same Pearl Harbor that they had intended to bomb, by agreement of the British, back in the early 1920s.
Most events of any crucial significance, in the history of recent civilization, are long-term processes. And you have to approach them by understanding two things. First of all, they're long-term, they're never short term. They involve multiple generations. Sometimes you can locate that something's going to break out, because it's become mature, like an apple on a tree that's ready to drop off. But the existence of the apple started long before then; the tree long before that.
You have to realize, that, first of all, mankind is a living process, not an inanimate object. Secondly, that human behavior is not animal behavior, even though we sometimes suspect some people on that account. So therefore, my forecasting is based on what I know of this, and I indicated in part, in the question of the Noösphere and Biosphere.
We are dealing with the Noösphere. In the Noösphere, the characteristic is free will. But what you know about free will is that free will is influenced by the policy decisions, which you might call axioms, that societies make. And therefore, you can forecast, on the basis of the assumptions which are adopted by a policy, that these policy-assumptions will lead to a certain development at a certain point. And you can understand what caused this failure, and you can understand, as I indicated today in my presentation, main remarks here, today—you can understand what the cure of the problem is, by understanding what the cause of the problem is.
Great Prophets Always 'Fail'
Q: What kind of mechanism would there be to ensure citizen participation in decision-making, so that people are actually interested in these matters?
LaRouche: Well, that's what I work on. I think that you don't have a safe society, if you simply give society instructions. I mean, to be the wisest person on the planet is not sufficient. Even the second wisest, or whatever. You have to engage the population in understanding what the process is, so it is their belief, and it's their correct belief, not simply their confidence that you were a great prophet or something. That never works. Great prophets "fail"—that's why they're martyred: They always fail. And they're considered heroes, because they're such great failures, hmm?
So thus, the problem is, the development of our citizens.
Now, what we do, and what I do, is not by me. You know, I'm 85, I'll be 86, this coming September. I'm in fairly good shape for someone of 85 to 86, and much better shape than my enemies would like to have me—especially George Bush and company.
But! The point is, the question I face, as a forecaster, is: Am I doing something to produce a new generation of younger people who can do what I do, better than I do it? That's the essential function of forecasting. Can you forecast the policy needed? And can you forecast by promoting the development of young people who are going to become the leaders of the future? The forecasting is based on what kind of leadership, that you might develop, is best for leading society into the future? You will be dead. They will be alive. But what they learn to do, what they learned to know, because you helped them learn to know, will probably be better than anything you have dreamed yourself. And that's the best kind of forecast you can make. One that does not depend upon your knowledge, but depends upon a process of development among younger people, who are going to continue and go forward to a higher level, with what you're able to help them discover.
