Dialogue with LaRouche
The opening presentation by Lyndon LaRouche, which preceded this dialogue, is available here.
[PDF version of the entire webcast]
Freeman: The first question that I want to ask you, comes from someone in Russia, whom you have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with on these very questions. For people who have been following this on the website, this is the third in a series of questions from one of Russia's leading bloggers on economic issues, who has asked Lyn in the past to explain what he meant by various elements of the recent Russia-China economic agreements. And Lyn has answered those; those answers are public, and as I said, you can see them on the site. But as Lyn answers, he has more questions.
He says: "Lyn, you say, without an essential change from the present world British-run monetarist system to a credit system, all of the currencies of the world would become worthless very soon. This point is, at the very least, it seems to me, disputable.
"If we look at, for instance, the Russian economy, we will see that it does not have as huge an internal debt, and so many financial bubbles as we see in America. So, even if the dollar collapses, it does not necessarily mean that the same will happen with our ruble. All that we would need to prevent such a scenario is to leave the foreign exchange market, and start using the ruble in international trade. If someone needs energy supplies from Russia, he will have to offer something useful to us—technology supply and industrial modernization, for example. Please comment on this.
"Secondly, you say, the U.S. dollar's ties to China's economy mean that an increase in per-capital value and output of the Chinese economy engaged in the presently agreed China/Russia agreement, would mean a revival of the value of the presently collapsing U.S. dollar through the increased value of the U.S. debt to a rising Russia/China economy. I will put my question to you in slightly different form. Do you agree that Russia and China are able to perform this project even if the dollar collapses?"
You Need the U.S. To Defeat Globalization
LaRouche: On the latter question, no. Without the United States, Russia and China's collaboration would not be successful.
This other question to consider here—the deeper one—is, there is no such thing as an autonomous economy on this planet today. There is no self-sufficiency; nor is there any pair-wise self-sufficiency. If two nations decide to try to cooperate, and tell the rest they can go to Hell, they'll go to Hell first. They'll be delivered the next day, in fact, to that destiny.
Now, you don't have a "rules" system; you don't have national economic systems any more. You don't understand globalization. The problem in Russia today is largely a result of the failure to recognize the menace of globalization. Because that was what was done to Russia, was globalization. Russia's potential does not lie very much in its own existing industries, that is, on the scale of those industries. And trade within that country, or trade with other countries, or a few countries, is not going to solve anything. You've got to increase the productive powers of labor of each country and all countries, and you can only do it with cooperation, because of globalization.
For example, take the case of grain. Helga [Zepp-LaRouche] went through this in her presentation just a few weeks ago, on this question. There is no such thing as any independent nation on this planet! If you're not prepared to destroy Cargill, you don't have independence. If you don't look at the firms that control your food supplies on this planet, and go in there, if necessary, with troops, and straighten them out, you're not going to have a food supply. You need an authoritative international force, composed of sovereign nation-states, but an effective force which is powerful enough to go in and shut down Cargill. Otherwise, you don't have a chance!
You're in a globalized system. What's a globalized system? It's an empire! You tolerated Cargill! You tolerated similar kinds of firms. You tolerated globalization, and you thought you were smart. You had legislators who did that in country after country. You talked about globalization; the Tower of Babel back again, with similar results promised, for now. That's the issue!
What we need is a consent of the people, consent of nations. Now, we know that Europe presently, under the euro, has no sovereignty! Continental, western, and central Europe no longer have real sovereignty. It doesn't exist in any of those countries! We have to take a bunch of nations which do have enough power to represent sovereignty, which is largely the United States, Russia, China, and India, and a few neighboring countries, which will share their emotions in this matter, and that will constitute a representative body of the human race. And that representative body of the human race is going to go out and crush the imperialists.
I'm declaring war! And, as Franklin Roosevelt said: I hate war!" But that's why I got to declare it.
That's the solution here.
We have to create an economy. No economy presently exists, no sovereign national economy presently exists anywhere on this planet. You want to talk about trade within and among nations? You don't have sovereign nations anymore. There's no nation on this planet that's sovereign; it's all under globalization. It's under the empire.
What's the empire? The empire is the British Empire; the enemy is the British Empire! And the British Empire does include Buckingham Palace (or, there's another name for the place, but I won't use it here). And there is Threadneedle Street—that exists. But the Empire is international; it's an international monetarist system. The system which is typified by the globalizers—the ones that control the food supply of the world, that control the mineral supply of the world, that control the industries of the world. These bastards have to be shut down, in order to get our national sovereignties back. And what we have is, we have a nasty pact of nations who say, we're going to take our national sovereignty back.
We're going to eliminate globalization. We're going to have equitable treaty agreements among cooperating nations. We're going to think in terms of 50-year projects—in some cases, 100-year projects. The development of northern Siberia is a 100-year project, which is extended across the Bering Strait, through a tunnel through the Bering Strait, into Alaska, into Canada, and down into the United States. We're going to take the Arctic region of the continents, and we're going to start to develop them, because they contain essential resources, and we do know how to deal with them, at least some of us do.
We're going to deal with Africa. We're going to build a modern type of railway system which unites the world. We can devise it, we've reported on this repeatedly. We can today, create the equivalent of a high-speed rail system, including a magnetic levitation system, with a high degree of automation in it. We can create an entirely new transportation system for the entire planet. We can connect all of Eurasia with Africa and with the Americas, with, effectively, a single stroke—one continuous set of railway systems, going down into Africa, and transforming Africa. And you can't do it without railway systems.
Look, for example, take Africa: Africa has a great amount, especially in the Southern Shield, of the mineral resources of Africa as a whole. Well, why aren't the Africans rich? Take a picture of this helicopter study, which was done from helicopters, travelling over various parts of Africa, and looking down at these parts in daytime and at night. What's the condition of Africa? Africa is a British crime against all humanity. Africa has one of the greatest agricultural areas of the world. Why don't they have farms, for food? Why is there no light at night in most of Africa? Why is there no mass transportation system? Why is there no effective system of disease control? Why is there no development? Why is Africa only raped of its raw materials, and not developed? Why is the water system of Africa not developed? Why was the Nile River system never completely developed?
That's the problem. And therefore, we have to have ground rules for nation-states. Our basic point is nation-states, because nation-states involve the concept of culture.
Now, the power of creativity, which does not exist in monkeys, but should exist in people, even among some politicians. The power of creativity is unique to mankind. All processes on this planet and beyond, are creative. Inanimate nature is creative.
Look what happened: You had a Sun; the Sun is sitting out there, it's all by itself. It's spinning around rapidly, not knowing where to go, in this neck of our galaxy. You got that little Sun. And the Sun spun off some things. It created; it just spun out there, and it began creating the Periodic Table; the complete Periodic Table, which keeps growing and developing all the time, through isotopes, some of which are generated by the aid of life, living processes. And so, suddenly, the Sun suddenly became a whole solar system. And all these kinds of developments occurred.
So, the Sun itself is creative; the universe is creative, inherently. Animal life is creative. But none of them can think; none of them have the ability for voluntary transformation of the universe. Only human beings have the mentality for the voluntary creation of new states of organization in the universe. And we need more people who are creative. We need to get rid of this uncreative nonsense, which was introduced in the postwar period.
We have to develop populations; therefore, we have to realize that when you're dealing with a language culture, which is a very complex thing—it involves not just the language, but a whole lot of other things: If you're dealing with a language culture, you have a certain depth of a faculty called irony, which exists in every language culture. Which is generally expressed in the music and the poetry, the art and so forth of that culture. And therefore, when you touch that aspect which is deeply imbedded in national culture, you are getting close to where the creative powers of the individual lie.
So, what our objective must be in a nation-state, is based on the idea of nation-state culture. You must bring into play the creative potential of a people through its culture. Therefore, you want them to represent themselves in terms of the fulfillment and enrichment of their own culture. Therefore, we want the consent of humanity—we don't want a consent of pigpens, we want the consent of different cultures, because creativity lies within the culture. Therefore, we want an assembly of peoples which are respectively sovereign peoples, in order to mobilize their cultural potential, for becoming truly as human as they can become.
And it's the consent of these sovereign cultures, which we must bring into play, in order to finally achieve what Franklin Roosevelt intended, when he designed the idea of the United Nations: to eliminate all elements of oppression from this planet, and to create a system of sovereign nation-states, of developed sovereign nation-states, which will then take over the entire territory of the planet, leaving no room for empires, or similar kinds of phenomena. And bringing that together, that should be our purpose. So therefore, we have some nations which have, together, the power—sufficient power—to free the slaves among other nations. And our job is to free the slaves.
Europe is a bunch of slaves; South America is largely a bunch of slaves. We must free them, and those nations which have the ability, the power, and the determination to do that, must join, on behalf of humanity as a whole, because we're going to create another thing. We're going to go to Mars! Not this week, but we've got to get there. I won't be there. I will be there in spirit, and you never know what I'll be able to do as a spirit. I'll do the best I can.
So, therefore, mankind has a destiny. All nature is creative. Inanimate nature is creative, as we see when we study the inanimate processes of physics, of physical science. Living processes, all living processes are creative. Look at the emergence of species, new species and varieties which have come out of the existence of life on the planet. Life itself is creative. The human mind is creative, and the human mind is the only willfully creative power on this planet. And that's what our purpose is.
Therefore, we, as mankind, must look to the future, and the future is not what might happen next week. The future is what we can cause to happen, which is a higher state of existence of mankind than has ever existed before. For that reason, we know we must go to Mars, and there are a lot of problems which some friends of mine and I are working on, on this question of how we're going to get to Mars. We're very serious about it; we're determined to get there. I may not see it in this incarnation, but—. Nonetheless, it'll take us about four generations to do that, and we can solve, in that time, we can solve the problem.
So therefore, our objective here is to bring nations together, recognizing that no nation has sovereignty—not now. But we're going to have a system of sovereignty on this planet—of sovereign nations—because we need it, because human culture demands it. Therefore, we nations which are strong enough to do this, who represent enough power to pull this off, have the obligation to exert that power we have, when we're acting jointly to get rid of the British Empire. And when you think that way, you're thinking strategically. Get away from those lower forms of thought, which are petty ones. We're going to change this planet; to make it a respectable planet, that other planets don't have to be ashamed of.
Our Job Is Creative Development, Not Trade
Freeman: The next question comes from Australia, from the Australian Movement for Sustained Development. And the question is: "Mr. LaRouche, if Russia and China use their existing dollar reserves to undertake massive infrastructure development, does this not have the same effect as dumping the U.S. dollar, when those dollars are spent and don't come back into the U.S. economy? And with it is the increased pressure toward hyperinflation? If there is no common agreement between those nations, and the nations of the West, with the U.S. as the linchpin, it seems to me that there still would be no resolution in international finance and economics, and the downhill slide will not only continue, but will accelerate. In my calculation, the actions of China and Russia may be sensible for them in isolation, but will only exacerbate the dollar collapse, and thus accelerate the global economic event horizon into view. I'd greatly appreciate your opinion."
LaRouche: Well, that's a completely mistaken view of the situation. First of all, if you want to talk about human beings, make sure and check that you're talking about what distinguishes a human being from an animal. Now, human beings are creative. They're creative in the sense that I use the term creative. What most people call creative today is not creative: It's filthy, it's dirty, it's confused, it's chaotic. People think innovation. I mean if people are at rock concerts, you can't expect them to have minds when they leave the place, hmm? And people who think in terms of what we have as popular entertainment today, are not creative people. As a matter of fact, they don't have creative powers; they lost them somewhere along between childhood and adolescence, probably with the monkeys, or something like that.
No, the essence of humanity is creative; creativity as such. And the power in Russia, as I know the power in Russia, is in institutes like the Vernadsky Institute, which has a headquarters in Moscow, in what used to be called Red Square. These people understand how to make a creative development of the planet. And our job is not money; it's not hakem makem as they say in Israel. It's not money. It's not trade. Trade is nothing. Trade is a divorce court; that's trade. That's the trading market these days.
No, we're talking about creativity; we're talking about transformation. Do you know what the Vernadsky Institute represents in Moscow? Do you know what Vernadsky represents in terms of Russian science, and in world science? Do you know what we can do if we unleash technology, which is now being suppressed? Do you know what we can do to this planet? This will require a lot of nuclear power. It will require all the things that go with nuclear power. It will mean the development of thermonuclear fusion. It will mean the use of a space exploration driver, as a program for driving human technology in the Solar System.
In other words, if you want to create something, really—and unfortunately most people in the world don't know what creativity is anymore. They think it's, I don't know, taking your pants off in public, or something like that. I mean, things almost like that are called creativity today. Take rock music—does somebody call that creative? The mind that does that is not creative; it may not be any mind at all.
Now, we look always at objectives. In artistic creativity, Classical artistic creativity, and scientific creativity: We define objectives. The objectives are beyond the reach of what we can do today, but we're able to define the objective we wish to reach, often by negation. So therefore, the way you run a world economy today—in every part, you start with, what? We're going to Mars! When? Well, it's going to take a little time to do that.
How are we going to get there? Well, we've got a little problem right now, that we're talking about very much among my circles. When the astronauts landed on the Moon the second time, they discovered a deposit left by the Sun, called helium-3. And helium-3 is the most useful, and the most accessible, and desirable fuel for thermonuclear fusion. Now, if I want to go to Mars—and this is the way you have to think, pose a question. You want to go to Mars? What does it take to do that? How is thermonuclear fusion developed in the first place? How were weapons systems developed in World War II? Completely new kinds of systems—how were they done? Because somebody asked the question: How can we do this? When somebody else said, "Oh, that's impossible! I can't find it in the textbooks."
So, we're going to go to Mars. And I pose this here as a very serious answer, implicitly, to this question and others which are coming up. We say, if you want to know how to think about humanity, talk about travel to and from Mars. Because by asking yourself to work out all the questions and solutions to those questions, which that question asks, you're giving mankind a sense of a future, a destiny, of mankind. And you're forcing yourself to find in yourself the creative powers to determine how this could be done. And you work back and forth over generations. People are excited about it; they're excited about this thing today. Young people are excited about going to Mars. And we know that we are on the verge of losing the ability to do that, because humanity may be going back to the apes, the way we're going now.
So, therefore, we pick an objective beyond what we think could be done, and we say, maybe some of this stuff can be done, can't it? And you think about travel to Mars. Well, to travel to Mars by ordinary methods people think of, it would probably take 200 to 300 days. But, if I wanted to send a vessel to Mars, an automated vessel, we could probably try it—it's a shot—within about 3 to 6 days. We would use helium-3 as a fuel, build a fusion-impulse device with a potential thrust equivalent to one gravity, as an acceleration factor, and you can probably make the trip in 3 to 6 days.
Now, whether a human being could survive that treatment or not, is another question. Possibly, and so forth. But that's just another thing to ask about. We know we can send things to Mars, including some politicians perhaps, hmm? And see how they come back, what condition they come back in. Maybe it's a very interesting test to run.
But, by challenging ourselves to look at these kinds of questions, and challenges which are on the fringes of the imagination, and sorting out those which we realize we have some capability for solving, that is the process of creativity. That is the case in Classical art; that's the case in Classical poetry; it's in everything of any importance. Always look ahead beyond what you are today, what you're capable of doing today, what your nation is capable of doing today, and take that as your objective.
Now, that is not a thing in itself. What you're doing is, you're forcing yourself to bring forth in yourself, what is particularly, specifically human—willful creativity. Real creativity; to making an original discovery, how? It's stimulated by kicking yourself in the butt, and saying, this ought to be possible to do. What do we know about it? Could we actually do it? What questions do we have to answer to solve that problem? Everything that mankind has done, whether in art, in poetry, in physical science and so forth, in achievement generally, is done that way. And therefore, that's the way we have to approach this. We have to say, our objective is to go for progress.
Once you define that, and once you take a factor in Russia, which is one which I especially like—the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow, headquarters in Moscow—and I think about what that institution represents, and what Vernadsky represents, as the unfinished work of Vernadsky and some other people associated with it. Now, if I talk about Russia, or Siberia and so forth, aah, so what? But then I say, what are some of the questions which are posed by Vernadsky and his associates? Suppose we start to look at some of the things which are made possible, once we take Vernadsky's questions into account. Now, I have oriented society toward that.
What we want to do, is take young people, not to give them a job, not to train them to do something. We want to put them through a training program, yes, as a context, but we want to give them a destiny. We want to give them a mission; a mission which takes them beyond themselves. We don't want to give a guy a job at a shop, producing something. We want to make him a machine-tool designer; we want to make him a scientist, that sort of thing. And the secret here is to do that; is to take the view of society. We're not going to the same old, same old, same old, all the time. We're going to take our young people, and we're going to inspire them with what they can become, not just what the Army promises them. The U.S. Army, "What you can become." This is the standard.
We don't want routine education. You know, I take people, I say, "Cut the mathematics! You're stuck in routine. You're not thinking; you're not thinking creatively. You're not posing any questions of principle, and testing those questions of principle in your own mind." And when you do that, they start to think, if they're talented, young people.
If you go through a routine, go through the mathematics and learn this, and learn that—that's nothing. That doesn't get you anywhere. And that's what we have to do here.
We have to realize that what we're doing, we're taking people who are being stultified, who frankly are being drugged by a routine, who have no future; they have a skill, probably better than their grandfathers', or less so, than their grandfathers'. And you're giving them a job, and they're "trading"! What the Hell is that?! It's nothing.
It's giving them the challenge of bringing the creative powers out which result in an increase in the creative abilities of the human being. New technologies, new frontiers. This is the answer. And we do that by going into the culture of the people, and we try to promote the creativity which lies within the culture of a people. Provoke that culture, challenge it, bring people into cooperation around this kind of cultural opportunity, and you increase the productive powers of labor.
Don't talk about trade. Don't bring this idea about trade, or dollars, or currency, or prices! Forget it! It's irrelevant. We have to make the future, we have to shape the future, not try to dig out some old routine.
Russia's now dead. Without the stimulus of taking what Russia can do, in terms of some of its people, its scientific traditions, its cultural tradition, Russian familiarity with the resources of its own territory. Take the case of Mongolia, which doesn't have any ocean borders, but has large resources. Take the case of China, where two-thirds of the population are in miserable conditions still. And, if we can bring these nations into cooperation, in going to new frontiers, to new technologies, the higher energy-flux densities, we can, by that very cooperation itself, we can raise the standard of living and the standard of production.
And that's what a society is. It's a culture. It's not a trading organization. Forget the trading organizations. Forget the businessman. You know what I would like to take, you know, Russian businessmen? I would like to put them in a cage, because Russian businessmen have been the worst curse that Russia's experienced since Gorbachov.
Currency Has No Intrinsic Value
Freeman: We have, actually, almost identical questions coming from someone on the professional staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and then from someone at Brookings. What one of the questioners says is:
"Mr. LaRouche, I have found your discussion of this new China-Russia venture to be most interesting, and I agree with you that it can serve as a stepping-stone for very significant developments. Not that it's going to solve all of the problems in the world, but again, that it at least puts us in the right direction. What I do not understand, and which I wish you would explain a little bit more, is, in some of your recent comments that I've seen on your website, and that your spokesman has discussed with us, you have said that what the Chinese are doing is, essentially, by investing hundreds of billions of dollars into this project, i.e., their investment is essentially denominated in U.S. dollars, that they are in effect giving those dollars more value than they have under current circumstances. That they are taking what is U.S. debt, and turning it into an asset. This is what I do not understand, and I wish that you would explain it in a little bit more detail."
LaRouche: People believe in fairy tales, and the fairy tale is that value lies in a currency. A currency has no intrinsic value; no currency has an intrinsic value. See, what's the value here? The question is typical, though. It's typical from Russia, it's typical of some people from China, it's typical all over the world. They don't understand money! They think they do, and that's the biggest mistake. And I would like to take money out in the backyard and shoot it, and then give it a new name—not money—and then people might understand it.
But, the essence of human existence, and of economy, is increase in the productive powers of labor. There is no intrinsic value in any substance or any currency, especially currency. It has no intrinsic value! A currency is simply a convention. It has no intrinsic value! The intrinsic value is physical, but it's physical in a general way, not in simply a way that's something tangible.
What is an investment, you presume? You invest certain assets, like physical assets. Don't talk about money, just talk about physical assets. A guy wants to start a business. He wants to start producing something, and he needs the following machinery, he needs these other physical assets, and these skills and so forth. He's going to put these together, and he's going to try to do, what? He's going to try to produce more, as a result of combining these resources, than he put into it. He's going to get more value, in terms of physical reality, out of production than he contributed to start funding the production. Sometimes it's called profit. Profit is a lousy, dirty word, but you can use it sometimes, with my permission, under my strict supervision, because people abuse it very much.
Therefore, the value of a currency, insofar as it represents purchasing of something useful, is expressed by its profitability, its physical profitability, not necessarily its monetary value.
So therefore, if I take a trillion dollars of U.S. obligations to China, a trillion dollars worth of obligations which are denoted in Chinese assets, and they're just sitting there. No use, nothing's happening to them. And I come along, and I say, let me buy, or guarantee, or pledge myself to support a trillion dollars' worth of Chinese activity, pledging these funds, these trillion dollar debt funds, for this purpose. Now why am I going to do that? Because by investing that trillion dollars, or what it can buy, in terms of the development of the economy of Asia and other things, I'm going to produce more than a trillion dollars' worth of value, and therefore by investing that in physical production, which involves a factor of growth of values, I'm increasing the wealth of the world. The wealth of the world does not lie in those dollars, or those other currencies. The wealth of the world lies in the activation of the productive process.
You see, most people say their accountants make money. They make money, unfortunately, which is why we have to put them in prison at times! Right?
What we invest in, we invest in the power of labor, the power of human labor when equipped with certain means, to produce more value for human beings than that labor and those resources represented beforehand. So, if I take a trillion dollars that the United States owes to China, and instead of letting it sit there, as a debt, waiting to be collected by China—which never will happen—we say we're going to take that debt, and we're going to tell the United States that we're going to invest that debt it has to us in this investment, then everybody benefits. Because we bring together the means for creating the wealth.
You get this hakem-makem crazy stuff that goes on, and people talking about money, money, money, money. Investing money, investing money. Stop it! Get it out of Russia. I mean, the Russians are poisoned by this stuff about investment in money. They're brainwashed into thinking, ever since Gorbachov—they're brainwashed into thinking that investing in money, that money is the secret of wealth. It is not!
As we should know, money has been destroying the real wealth of the world. Money can be slavery. No, the key thing here is this wealth is, to the degree that it's invested, or its equivalent, what is represented by it, is invested in a way which results in an increase of the amount of real wealth—not money wealth—real wealth, and therefore, if you have a sane system of economy, the money value of wealth should conform to and follow the actual physical wealth increase. In other words, if there's an increase in profit, without an actual increase in physical wealth, it's a fraud: typical of what goes on in the United States these days. You get less than what you pay for. By investing in things which result in a greater gain for humanity, in terms of efficient physical values that you're investing in, and if you're investing in improving your nation in physical terms, you're profitable. If you're investing in money, you're a parasite.
The Power To Smash the British Empire
Freeman: This next question is from a member of the Stanford group who is now assigned with leading a new section that's dealing with some international questions, and his question—he phrased it as relating to the question of gold, but I think it goes a little bit beyond that. He says:
"Lyn, if we've learned one thing, it would seem—and, as I'm sure you're aware, this was at the heart of President Clinton's drive for a new financial architecture—it is that we must abandon the system of floating exchange rates and interest rates in favor of a fixed currency and fixed interest rate. And that unless we do that, we are not going to have any hope of ongoing economic cooperation. It's the only way that, it seems to me, we can proceed, where you don't end up with one currency as dominant, but with a common agreement among different currencies.
"The question that I have in all of this is the role of gold. Some of my colleagues here have argued that the 1944 Bretton Woods system was based on a gold standard. Now, I'm not at all sure that that is even true, but in any case, I see a problem with using gold as a standard of value, and without going into the details of why I say that, I think you could probably figure it out. My question is, couldn't we use production as a standard of value?
"So, what I'm asking you is, number one, in terms of discussing a new financial architecture, how do you see the role of gold? And, number two, concretely, if you agree with me that we wish to use production as a standard of value, how would that work?"
LaRouche: Well, you've got several problems, including some historic ghosts in this question. Go from April 12 to April 13, 1945. You had, in the previous year, you had the Bretton Woods conference, and in this conference, Franklin Roosevelt had denounced the policies, the British policies, of a monetary system, the Keynesian system. This prevailed until the 12th of April, 1945, when Roosevelt died. The following day, Harry Truman was President, and Harry Truman went with Churchill to a Keynesian system, as opposed to a Roosevelt dollar, a fixed-exchange-rate dollar. And then we produced a monster, which was an attempt to return implicitly to the gold standard, rather than a fixed-exchange-rate system, based not on a monetary standard, but a credit standard.
So, if you think about the gold question as a credit system, not a monetary system, most of your confusion is eliminated. But the confusion comes, once you ignore the fact that there was a revolution against the United States, a virtual act of treason under Truman, on the 13th of April 1945. Where Roosevelt had denounced monetarism at Bretton Woods, had fought against it and suppressed it, defeated it, as soon as he was dead, Truman, the traitor, brought Keynes in, and the world system, since that time, was Keynesian, not U.S. That was the beginning of the return of the British Empire, was that event.
Now, there should be no gold standard, for the same reason that Roosevelt opposed Keynes: The use of gold is as a denominator of a credit system, saying that a uniform price of gold will be a reference point, but for a fixed-exchange-rate system; and therefore, the gold is simply a mechanism to facilitate a fixed-exchange-rate system, as a credit system, not as a monetary system.
The thing is to concentrate on the essential question. It comes up in this question of law. We're going to tell those idiots in the Congress to vote up a law, and the crooks in the back room are going to fix that law so that by the time what comes out is going to have no resemblance to the initial intention of the members of Congress. We call it the "dis-Members" of Congress, often for that reason.
The problem is, that we don't go by the idea of production values, and in a fixed-exchange-rate system, the motive is production values. And what happens is, we absent ourselves, by the way we allow crooked behavior in the Congress generally. We allow crooked behavior. We allow people in the Congress to go behind doors and devise laws, which are cheating on what the public thought the intent of that law was. It's happening right now. What are legislators? Legislation is a form of lying! You don't know what you're getting. It's like getting a krait snake in your bedroom, you know? It's not what you intended. So, that's the problem here.
And therefore you have to go at the question of how the system will operate.
You know, the other aspect of this in respect of law, is our lawmaking is increasing law-less. The U.S. Constitution, which is the only decent constitution in the world, really—when it's respected—was based on certain principles. It was not a farrago of this and that, with a multitude of different kinds of nooks and crannies, not like a British parliamentary system. But we've been corrupted by adopting the habits of practice of a parliamentary system, not a constitutional system based on credit, and therefore we put up with this nonsense.
But there has to be a general overhaul of our system of law, and the behavior of the legislatures, because our legislative process, over the centuries, has become increasingly corrupt. For example, the Hill-Burton standard of health care. Why should anyone ever change it? The change was a piece of thievery and robbery. It's a fraud! So we talk about health-care reform! Why don't we just go back to Hill-Burton and end the HMO system, which was a fraud from the onset?!
What's being proposed by the President is a fraud! It's mass murder of our citizens! There's no excuse for it. We have legislative doubletalk all over the place. This is mass murder! What President Obama is proposing is nothing other than what Hitler enacted in 1939, in September-October '39. We called it genocide, later. And this creature, this Obama, wants to practice genocide against the American people, the same way Hitler did, and the same way that's being done in Britain by the sponsor of Obama, Tony Blair.
This is what's happened to our law. The constitutional intent has been betrayed. You see, our conception of law is based not on trading, not on parliamentary horse-trading. Our conception of law is based on a principle of respecting the nature of man. The rights of man. Our Constitution was the greatest constitutional instrument of any part of human history, and it's been made a shambles by these prostitutes called Congressmen, and others, who sell themselves for their own convenience. We don't have people like John Quincy Adams. We don't have men like Abraham Lincoln. We don't have these types of people. We have imitations, cheap imitations, and that's the problem.
So, the problem here is not in the question of gold. Roosevelt's intention was clear; it was clear in 1944 in Bretton Woods. He wasn't there, but he made the remarks. And the intention of Truman was different. Truman was not an American patriot. I would [come to] consider him a scumbag very soon. I was in Kanchrapara, I was on my way going from India, up into northern Burma, where I spent the concluding war years, and some soldiers at Kanchrapara, American soldiers, came up and said they wanted to talk to me at night. I said fine. So they came up, and they said, we wanted to ask you what's going to happen to us now that President Roosevelt is dead. And my answer, which was memorable to me because it was short (that helps sometimes, doesn't it?), I said, well, I haven't thought much about this until now, but I can say this: We were governed by a great man, Franklin Roosevelt, and now our President is a very little man, and therefore I'm afraid for our people. And I was right. And as soon as I got back to the United States, I really knew I was right. This guy was a menace, and he's typical of the political corruption.
The problem we're going to have to deal with in this, is to recognize that these problems exist. They lurk all around in the institutions of government, and we're going to have to clean the mess up. But we're going to have to do this by a radical move of this Four Power agreement. The assembly of four of the most powerful nations on this planet, nations which are of a diverse cultural character with respect to one another, but which therefore are more suitably representative of humanity than a group of nations which simply agree with each other in their cultural characteristics.
We're now representing humanity, rather than a bloc or a group, and we're taking the most powerful group, and assembling around them to have a powerful enough group to smash the British Empire! To destroy the British Empire, once and for all, in order to free mankind of Satan. Want to get rid of Satan? Close down the British Empire.
So therefore, this is the kind of situation we're in, and therefore, we do have to establish a law for mankind again, which is not essentially different than what the intention of our Constitution was. We're going to have to do it in terms which are understood, as Roosevelt would have agreed, among nations which have different cultural characteristics. We're going to bring nations with different cultural characteristics together for a common understanding of the aims of mankind, and that's what the thing is. And we're going to have to realize that we're cleaning up a mess, we're cleaning up the outhouse, in the process of doing this kind of negotiation, in reforming the United States. And presumably, we'll have an angry group of Congressmen who will do something, who will no longer go along to get along, but will do the job which their conscience should require of them. That's where we are, and these problems will occur. Don't worry about them, as long as we're doing something to fix them.
Measuring the Increase in the Productive Powers of Labor
Freeman: We have another question here from the Stanford group: "Mr. LaRouche, as you know, we have labored over the distinction between a monetarist system and a credit system, both from the standpoint of historic function and from the standpoint of an urgently required restructuring. Utilizing your Triple Curve Function, it became apparent to us that what had been a decades-long process of economic disintegration, reached a new and more dramatic phase in approximately the middle of 2007, when the price of monetary aggregates, as opposed to regular financial aggregates, began to skyrocket.
"At the same time, net physical income for physical consumption began to spiral downward. The result was a collapse in the market for products, especially for products of production, and as that occurred, employment also began to move in a rapidly accelerating downward spiral. But, the volume of monetary aggregates soared, contrary to financial transactions related to the real economy. This process grew even more critical with the effort to prop up and sustain these monetary aggregates, at the expense of America' s physical economy.
"The Obama Administration, contrary to its promises, has adopted policies that have not only continued this, but actually have accelerated the process. And it's our conclusion that this series of facts is absolutely indisputable scientifically, and we're prepared to defend it.
"Now, in terms of a transition to a credit system, when you discuss a return to a Glass-Steagall framework, and putting the current system through bankruptcy reorganization, it seems very apparent to us that what you are discussing and what former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker is discussing, are two very different things. Our question to you is, aren't you really talking about eliminating the monetary curve entirely? It would seem that then, the primary measure of economic value becomes the interaction between the financial curve and the curve which represents the physical economy, and that that is the basis of what you refer to as a credit system. Are we correct in concluding this? And if not, could you please shed more light on where we are making a mistake?"
LaRouche: Okay, got you. Well, no, there is a little discrepancy here. The discrepancy is simply this: I do not believe in monetary value. I believe in an assigned monetary assessment of value, but that is not mathematically interchangeable, as value is physical. Monetary value is not physical; it's a conventional value, not an actual value.
See, you've got to go back to the question of what is an economy. Money has nothing to do with a real economy, as such. That is, in terms of the essential value terms. Money has nothing to do with real value. Money is a convention; it's a piece of workable fakery, in terms of, like, promissory notes. And the promises are what they are, and the outcomes are not necessarily in accord with the promises. I've referred to this before; let me put it to you in this way.
What's involved here is, first of all, the increase of the productive powers of labor, as measured in the level of population density and productive powers of labor of the population as a whole. That's value. This value is determined by a rate of growth, which is not necessarily a simple increase, but it's an increase in productive powers of labor. It's an increase in productivity. That the idea of profit itself, real profit, as opposed to nominal profit, is located in: Is there an increase in the physical productive powers of labor, as measured per capita and per square kilometer? That's your fundamental measure. That's your measure of value. And it's a measure of value of development, not of a fixed value.
There's no such thing as a fixed value of money. It does not have fixed value. If money sits there and is not invested, it deteriorates. If somehow the process becomes more productive, it suddenly appreciates. It has no intrinsic value. It's a convention we use in society in order to organize trade and investment; that's all. Nothing wrong with that; but we have to keep it in its place. Don't make it a god! The monetary ideas are the ideas which are the typical poison.
So therefore, what we're talking about is the increase in the productive powers of labor.
You've got two problems here. Let's take the planet, the Biosphere, which includes the Lithosphere. We're on this planet Earth. Now, are we increasing the potential population density for human beings on the planet Earth, or are we not? That's the number one estimate of value. Are we increasing the potential population density of this planet, of human beings? Are we, or are we not—value! What's that got to do with money? Nothing!
Are we increasing man's power to increase this gain? Aah! Now, we're touching upon money. It came up earlier, when we discussing this thing about China's investment, a trillion dollar investment. If I take a trillion dollars of Chinese claims against the U.S. dollar, and if it sits there, it has one value, which is pretty much that of dung. If I say, this same $1 trillion of credit is going to be invested in a science-driver program to transform the productive powers of labor throughout much of Asia, well! And you get a lot of growth of value. Aah! Then, that trillion dollars is worth something, isn't it?
So, value is based on these kinds of considerations. There is no such thing as an intrinsic monetary valuation, except among people who believe in the fairies, or something. So, that's the difference.
As we do with the Triple Curve, what we're looking at, is we're looking at a physical relationship to a monetary process. In one case, we're looking at it from the standpoint of the money system; in another case, we're looking at it from the standpoint of a credit system, a financial credit system. And we're looking at it, thirdly, from the standpoint of a physical system. So therefore, the success of the process means that the physical system is increasing, in terms of man's power to exist in the universe; that's the physical part. The monetary part is simply fictitious; it's imperialism. Then, you have in between, the credit system, which is the credit uttered for the purposes of promoting actual productive activity in sales and so forth of real goods, which are invested as consumption to support people, which is good, or as investment to increase the productive powers of labor as such.
So therefore, the real values are these relations, which are essentially physical, mental relations. They're physical in the sense that mankind is physical; they're mental in the sense that they deal with the creative powers of the human mind, and the development of the creative powers of the human mind. Those are the real values.
And the function of government, if it's sane government, is to regulate finance, economy, government, according to these understandings. Their objective is to increase the productive powers of labor, through developing the mental powers of mankind—and improving their health, of course, at the same time. And everything else is simply things we take into account in managing the productive process. But money is not the productive process. Money is a convention which we use, presumably under policies which govern the way we use money. And it's the policies that contain the value, and the expression of those policies, not the value as such.
So, if you just stick with the Triple Curve, and realize that by eliminating the monetary curve, which is the imperialist curve, and going to only a credit system, which is what is in the U.S. Constitution—the U.S. Constitution proscribes a monetary system, and prescribes a credit system; and that's explicit. It's explicit under Hamilton's initial efforts, and it's explicit in the Constitution. We have been corrupted by the intervention of the British system, which is a monetarist system, an intrinsically imperialist system of at least 3,000 years in existence. So, that's the distinction.
What we would do, for example, if we cancelled this several trillion, $20 trillion or so of monetarist debt. Sshwish! Gone! Get thee gone, devil! If we do that, what happens? We say, "Aah! Aah!" And then we say, "Ah! But we now can create a number of tens of trillions of dollars of credit," which is no longer this monetarist crap! We are now going to assign credit to rebuild our industries, for rebuilding our infrastructure, for developing our health-care system, and so forth. And this will produce real physical value.
And therefore, the end result is the real physical value, and the end result of physical value is determined by how many people we have; what is their life expectancy, how long is it? What's their health condition? What's their productivity? What's their education? What's the rate of improvement of life among a population in general? These are the real issues that we deal with. How creative are we? How smart, how creative are our people? How many inventions have they made? How many things have they done that are brilliant?
Those are the real values. And we have to simply take the process of government, and use the instruments of management of government, and self-management of government, to bring about these results. What we really are talking about is increasing the productive powers of labor, which is another way of talking about increasing man's power as man.
What we are talking about is immortality. We're talking about a process in which mankind is a creative species, the only willfully creative species on this planet Earth, or any other planet we know of. And we're defending the essential immortality of man, or what should be the immortality of man. Animals? We're born and we die. We have animal bodies; they're born and they die. We try to make that as comfortable as possible, and as happy, and as long as possible, but that's not what man is. Some people call it the soul.
But, you look at the factor of creativity in human existence and culture, you realize that when a person makes a creative contribution to society as a human individual, it doesn't end there, or begin there. What happens is, the process of humanity as a whole, is generating creative products of the mind. Culture is being developed, the powers of mankind are being increased. This has no beginning that we know of; this is humanity; this is culture. This has no end that we know of. As long as there's progress, it goes on indefinitely, and as we may come and go, be born and die, we are a participant in a process which we can call creativity. And creativity was there before we were born, and will be there after we die. And we have, in a sense, immortality in time, by virtue of participating in this phenomenon called creativity.
And that's what the moral purpose is. And the moral purpose should dictate government. We want to produce people who are more powerful in terms of their development, who are maintaining the heritage of the people before them, the great ideas, so that when people die, what they have done does not die; it's embodied in what happens to society later. And what came before them did not die, either, because it is embodied in them. And you have a sense of a human interest as being the interest of mankind, who, on one side, is merely a mortal creature like an animal, who is born and dies. But the role of mankind in this process is not that of an animal. The role is a process of creativity from earlier generations to the future.
So, you live not as an animal; you live as a creative part of humanity. You live eternally in what you came out of. You live eternally in what comes out of you. You are really mankind, and you are mankind by being a creative process, by being a creative part of this process which is specific to mankind, as not to any form of beast. Be man, not beast, to be a participant in that great force of creativity which is unique to humanity, which began before you were born, and lives on as creativity after you die. And you have a permanent place in space time, in physical space time, in that creativity. And that's what you have to think about.
Citizens Must Speak Up Now
Freeman: The next question was submitted by the governors of two large states on the East Coast, who are officers of the National Governors Association. And they say: "Mr. LaRouche, while we fully understand your point that the solution to the current crisis has to take place on an international and national level, our question really is a very concrete one, and it's one that affects the immediate well-being of millions of Americans. If you were the governor of a major state, and were constrained, as we are, by the boundaries of state budgets, what would you do? How would you act to alleviate the immediate crises that our constituents face? Is there anything that we can do, short of just picking ourselves up, and going to Washington?"
LaRouche: No, we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens. And the responsibility is to kick them in the butt, because they're not in doing what they should do. Most people are concerned, honest citizens are concerned with these matters, but they're not doing much about it. Or, they're saying, "We can't do much about this." Well, I don't agree.
Now, I have successfully gotten into a great deal of trouble by doing that sort of thing, but I think that's the right thing to do. If you have a sense of immortality, then you can have more strength to do it. If you're afraid that you're not very important, and your little life is going to be snuffed out, or you're going to be rendered permanently unimportant among your friends and neighbors, you might lack courage, and you might give in. But if you think of yourself as a leading citizen, who cares about the country, you're not going to sit back. You're not going to say, "I don't dare talk, I don't dare speak up." You're going to speak up. You're going to do something, you're going to get something in motion, real fast. Because you won't let our nation go to hell, just because you're scared; just because you're afraid of being denounced by somebody. I mean, do you care about humanity? Or are you just trying to get ahead, and do what you have to do to get ahead? And find out that you don't have a head!
That's the point! We have to stand up as citizens, and we have to say that really the highest rank in our society is that of citizen, an adult citizen who should be able to figure these things out. And we should realize that our mission here is to make sure that the citizens—our citizens—they're not a bunch of scaredy cats, afraid of what somebody will say about them. And if you have some more ability, use it! Scheme! Conspire! Do what is necessary to get this thing under control. And that's what we have to do. I do the best I can, what do you want? Want me to do more? I'll do more.
Glass-Steagall: Path To Ending Monetarism
Freeman:: The next question comes from a think tank here in Washington that is working on various aspects of economic policy. And they say: "Mr. LaRouche, we recently participated in a roundtable discussion with James Galbraith, and in discussing the current crisis, the point that he made most emphatically, is that this crisis could have been prevented. That the people in a position of authority two years, three years, five years ago, did know how to prevent it, but that they simply chose not to act, because they were getting a political and an economic benefit out of this speculative explosion. The Federal Reserve, in particular, knew that the dam was cracking. Alan Greenspan, regardless of what one might think of him, surely knew this, and chose to wait until it had washed away.
"Dr. Galbraith insisted that they let all of this run, because they were getting at least a superficially stronger economy out of it. And that, basically, what they were running was a scam, that was designed to lure people in. So, people who could never have afforded certain levels of mortgages accepted them; and the process continued. Certainly, any rational person in the securities industry knew that this could not last. But their view was, that when it blew up, they would be long gone.
"Now, I'm not an attorney, but by any measure, it would strike me, that this is simply criminal fraud, and there was a huge amount of it that went on. The Bush Administration chose not to actively investigate the fraud, even though they knew it was occurring. And the FBI knew it was occurring at least from 2004 onward.
"Now, our position—and I would like to know if you agree—but our position is that you can not legalize financial fraud by looking the other way, and that the bottom line is, that if we are going to proceed and go through any kind of restructuring; if we're going to, for instance, reorganize under Glass-Steagall, that still there has got to be a full-scale investigation and cleaning up of the residue. If you don't do this, you will never have any confidence in the financial sector, and that is a process that needs to get underway. Some people disagree, and say that we should just proceed with a clean slate. We disagree, and think that you have got to prosecute this; that you have to give appropriate punishments, that we have a system in this country that is designed to be able to do that.
"We'd very much like to know what your overall view is, because unless we do that, any kind of new regulation that is discussed, we believe, will be incapable controlling these institutions."
LaRouche: Go back some years ago, back in the 1980s, it was '82 approximately, or '83. Paul Volcker came up to a table we had in some street someplace, and asked then if I were a "kind" person. Because in the preceding period, from 1979 or '80 on, I had made some very strong observations about Paul Volcker's policy, that what he had allowed to occur, in terms of the savings & loan associations, was what I considered criminal, morally criminal in many ways. I refer to this to make a point in this question coming up.
What's the problem here? Of course, I agree with what you say, but how are we going to skin this cat? I don't like to frighten any cats present, but we have to do something about this. The problem with Paul, then and now: Paul did believe, and does believe to the best of my knowledge, in defending a commercial banking system, more or less, in accord with what our Constitution implies. That's not where the problem is. The problem is, that Paul refuses to recognize that you can not reconcile what he probably considers, as he said recently, his moral standpoint in banking, with monetarism. That the evils which he complains about, are inherent in monetarism.
And therefore, he's got a problem. On the one hand, opposing this thievery, which it is—he's probably a little less critical than the questioner is on this question about morality, and which leads to my answer of this thing—but he's not willing to give up monetarism for the sake of what he asserts to be his principle of honesty. That's where the problem lies. The need is to eliminate monetarism, and Paul's sympathy for London is based on his defense of Keynesian monetarism. And the problem is, the disease of this nation and the world, is the disease called monetarism. The source of the principal evils in the name of finance today, are products of monetarism. So, Paul has—like many other people—this problem. How do you reconcile Satan and Christ? I think it's not going to work.
So, the problem here is, we have to do something very simple—and Paul won't like me for this—we have to eliminate the monetarist system, his toy. We have to solve this moral problem for him, because he doesn't seem willing to do it himself. So, we'll do it as a favor for him, out of my kindly regard for him as a person. We'll solve this problem by eliminating the monetarism, and then he'll be free of sin, forever more.
But the point here is simply this: We have to take effective action. Punishing people for evil is not a sport that I like to play. I think I want to get at the business much more quickly than going through the business of torturing the poor creature. But, simply, we take away his toys. We put the entire financial system through demonetarization. We use the Glass-Steagall standard, which he would say he would tend to agree with, for commercial banking.
But we have an ulterior motive in doing that. I admit an ulterior motive: We are going to shut down this monetarist system. Because what we're going to do is, the people have had enough of this monetarism; they want the $23 trillion back that just got stolen! And we're going to get it back for them, or at least a good part of it. We're going to simply say, it's cancelled. You don't have anything; it's gone. It's not fungible. Whoosh! "Sin; you're purged of your sin. We took your sins away from you, you're no longer guilty." Can't you like us for that? We removed your sins, your monetarism, by cancelling it.
And then what we do is, we go back to the U.S. Constitution, which always was and is the U.S. Constitution. And it's very clear—there is no honest, sane person with any knowledge of anything, who can defend this stuff. It can't be done. It's crime, and in a crime, the easiest punishment is to take away the temptation. Take away the crime; don't kill the person. "I'm not going to kill you today. I'm going to take away your crime, and I'm going to review your case." Because if there's something decent in you, we'll be able to recognize it. But we have to remove this stuff. That $23 trillion? We're removing it now. Then we can go to a credit system. We no longer have this $23-odd trillion and so forth, probably $100 trillion. Who knows what it is? It's a fantastic amount. We're not going to let you have that.
So, now we utter a debt. Credit of the United States, voted up by the Congress, implemented by the Presidency, and we create also, at the same time, a national banking system. Because now, we take this question of money between commercial banking, related banking, and the Federal system, the Treasury. The Treasury is separate from national banking, and we have national banking as an intermediary for dealing with the banking function both of national banking, in terms of the national banks, state banks, bridge banks, and also international banking.
And so now, what we do is, we take this fund of credit that we define, both from available sources, and from newly created sources, and we decide where to invest it. Not invest it like a miser investing, but in international trade, international projects. We make agreements; we share agreements with China, with Russia, with other countries. And we begin to get into great projects.
For example, we have to have a lot of nuclear power. We're going to have to do something about plutonium, because plutonium is necessary for charging nuclear reactors. And if we could take some of the plutonium that was tucked away here and there, and use that to assist in charging reactors, we could get more of the regular, conventional types of reactors, nuclear reactors. And we could also do the thorium cycle, which for countries like India, which has an abundance of thorium, is very useful. And thorium reactors of the type we require, are much more quickly put into place; they're needed in places like India, where you have the water problem, and similar kinds of problems.
So therefore, we simply create a debt, which is an investment in things we can produce and need, and need for humanity as a whole, and a fund of debt of investment, of international systems of national banking, which cooperate in long-term agreements, to develop projects of a quarter-century to a half-century or longer period, which will transform this planet. And we have to do the things that go with that. That's all we have to do.
I don't think it's necessary to worry too much about punishing everybody who committed evil, because there are very few, as the Bible says, who have not sinned in this matter. So therefore, simply, clean the mess up, launch the thing properly, don't go hanging people here and there—they smell bad under those conditions—get this thing moving. Create a world system which is based on eliminating greenies! They can live if they reform, and give it up. But the greenies and the imperialists and the monetarists and similar types simply have to go out of business. And those of us who are more committed to humanity, will have to conduct things. I'm prepared to do the job.
Conspire To Reverse Our Immoral Culture!
Freeman:: This question comes from a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a Congressman. He says: "Mr. LaRouche, last week, after a Caucus luncheon, one of our members brought up the fact that right now there is lobbying going on from the financial institutions that we just bailed out with taxpayer money, and they are lobbying basically about the various proposals to regulate and re-regulate the financial system. This particular member pointed out that this is just outrageous. And I agree with him. But, I think that the outrage that we are seeing from the population is not simply limited to the kind of anger that we saw on the streets of Chicago a couple of weeks ago, when the American Bankers Association met. (Although I would point out that the only institution in America that has a lower approval rating than the U.S. Congress is the Federal Reserve.) But the anger in the streets of Chicago was not all that dissimilar from the anger that we saw in the streets of Washington, from people who were protesting the President's health-care proposal. I think it was also evident in the elections that took place last week, where the phenomenon was not simply the ouster of Democrats, but the ouster of incumbents. It is also the case, as I'm sure you know, that right now, a greater number of voters identify themselves as Independents than as Democrats or Republicans, and I believe that this is a first in America's political history.
"But the bottom line is that while I may agree that all of this anger is justified, it does raise the question, where this anger is going to go. If there's not a constructive program that people can identify with, then my fear is that there will be a destructive program that they will identify with, and that this will come along very soon. You've done a great deal of writing and talking about the parallels between the situation we face today, and the situation that the world faced in the period prior to the Second World War. My question to you is, in addition to the immediate economic crisis that we face, my fear is that we also face a major social crisis, and that if we do not find a constructive solution to the economic problem, what we are going to find ourselves with is an extremely destructive social problem. And I'm wondering if you would comment on how you see this overall."
LaRouche: Well, we're living in a society in which the President of the United States is totally immoral, in the most extreme sense of the term; in which the behavior of most Americans has been immoral for a long period of time. They may not think so, but I know so. You see, I was there. I watched many of them get born, I watched their children get born, and I've been watching this process, and I must say that the manufacturing of people has not been a very good example these days. So I think that we have to look at—yes, we do have to worry about these kinds of things, but I think we also have to think about them in much more constructive terms.
Let's go back: Where did this happen? Go back to the post-war period, post-World War II period, and I can tell you what happened, as I referred to this earlier today, on the question of what I said in Kanchrapara, where these guys asked to meet with me and I discussed this question of the implications of the death of President Roosevelt. Before Truman got in, what had happened is, that in Roosevelt's last term, once, in particular, the Normandy invasion had succeeded, all Hell began to break loose, and we saw this also in the election campaign of 1944, where the Republican line, and some Democrats', was downright evil. Here we had gone through, against evil, in the 1920s: Woodrow Wilson was evil, Teddy Roosevelt was evil, Coolidge was evil, Hoover was evil. We'd gone through this.
Roosevelt steps in like a miracle, and helps us save the United States. And this continued—there was much opposition to him, but he continued. He did the job. He returned us to the American Constitutional standard. Then what happened? June 1944, the beaches in Normandy were breached; the German military—the Wehrmacht command—was ready to negotiate terms of surrender. But with the help of the British, the Wehrmacht commanders who were ready for peace at that time, were assassinated, betrayed by the British. And then we had a continuation. Roosevelt died. His last election campaign was bitter. A swine from Wall Street, effectively, Truman, came in, and by the time I got back to the States in the Spring of 1946, Hell had taken over. The American people were very cowardly, changed, corrupted, filled with greed.
Then we had institutions that went along with this, trying to go to war with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union never had intended to attack us, particularly Roosevelt's United States. We started the war. The British organized it; it wasn't done by the United States, it was done by the British. Bertrand Russell was one of the organizers, a man of evil. And so we got into this question of war.
We shut down much of our productive potential, because the British wanted us to shut it down. We went back to supporting colonialism, where Roosevelt had worked to wreck it. And we destroyed ourselves by cultural warfare. We had things like the Congress for Cultural Freedom in [Europe], organized by pigs like John Train and people like him, who I came up against, one of my enemies. These kinds of things.
You had the same thing in the United States, where people talk about, "I don't believe in conspiracy theories." What's that? That's outright moral degeneracy! You don't believe in conspiracy theories? What kind of a moral degenerate are you? No! Because mankind operates on the basis of conspiracy. How else can you communicate? If you don't deliberate the question of what causes are, and what results are, and what the relationship between the two is, how can you govern?
No, by saying this, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, or the behaviorists, such as the Authoritarian Personality crowd, all these kinds of things, or what was quoted by Paul Krugman in the New York Times editorial page yesterday—Krugman acted like a pig! Repeating that kind of garbage, for the Times, against the protest movement against what Obama is doing with health-care today. That's completely immoral.
So, as a result of that, and as a result of the anti-Classical culture modalities, the existentialist mode and culture in Europe and in the United States, we destroyed the morality of the American people. We particularly destroyed their propensity for creativity. The American people became less creative, generation after generation. The 68ers were complete pigs! That whole generation, students in the leading universities, in large numbers—like Mark Rudd and company at Columbia and elsewhere—actual pigs! The whole movement was one of pigs. Degraded. So, we lost the cultural characteristics of creativity by this kind of change, and that's what our problem is today.
And in my view, there are only two things you can do about it. I've always fought against this stuff. I've hated it. It's rotten. It's evil. But the only thing to do is, first of all, don't just complain about it: Conspire against it! Number one. Number two, let your conspiracy be of the form of going to the area of the imagination of what we can do to change these things, to make things better, to go back to a higher standard of morality, to think about future generations, to think about what we look like to future generations, that sort of thing. Go back to it! Because you have to deal with this evil, which dominates the United States' people today, which is mostly the way we afflict ourselves with these problems. By degenerate culture. The rock-drug-sex counterculture was evil. It destroyed the people who believed in it, who participated in it. They lost their morality, their ability to judge; and they became miserable. They hated productivity, they hated people who wear blue shirts—and their shirts were not exactly white, themselves, when you think of the places they rolled in.
The point is, we are in trouble because we lost our morality as a nation, as Europe did too. We gave it up, and we began to behave like pigs, and we went after especially science and Classical art, Classical artistic composition; because creativity does not come from mathematics. Some mathematicians may be creative, but it's not the mathematics that made them creative. Creativity comes from the imagination, but in a very special way. It comes by recognizing what lies beyond what you already know.
How does this function? It doesn't function in mathematics. Creativity is not mathematical. Creativity is artistic. How? The imagination in drama, in music, in poetry, in painting. What do you do? You are exploring the imagination. You're not just doing whatever you imagine. You're exploring the imagination, to try to find out what is true! That's what all great scientists, all great creative people do. They go to the limits of the imagination, and try to sort out what it is that they believe, or would like to believe, is true, and what is false. And by testing the frontiers of your own imagination, with a moral purpose of sorting out what you know is true and what you know is not true, this is where human creativity is expressed. Without this habit, without this kind of culture, you don't have morality, you don't have the imagination, you don't have creativity. And what we have done by this culture, the post-World War II culture, typified by existentialist culture: We destroyed that. We destroyed it in its most vulnerable places, in Classical artistic composition. And when you take the violin away from Albert Einstein, you have lost creativity, hmm? And that's what we've lost.
So therefore, what we must do today is to go to the limits of the imagination, a habit which has more to do with art than with physical science; but apply that to the thinking about physical scientific work, and drive the society through, the imagination, to discover what must become, rather than merely what is. And when you do that—when people realize what it is for the first time to be really human, because most people in this society don't know what human is, because if they don't have a sense of beauty, of the aesthetic beauty, in the imagination, they don't know what human is. They would like to have something that feels good, but they don't have it, because they're denied a sense of Classical artistry, and the role of the imagination in Classical artistry.
That's where morality comes from. It doesn't come from mathematics or how you calculate somebody; it comes from what you imagine is the beauty of the way they function. You talk about a beautiful person, a beautiful soul, a person who exhibits qualities of humanity and the imagination and creative insight which makes you say, "These are good people." That's the purpose of society. And when you destroy creativity, and destroy the Classical culture of a people, in which the deep powers of creativity are located in their Classical heritage, you destroy them as people. You destroy their morality. You reduce them to something like animals, which is what's been done.
And when we fight, when we fight against odds, and fight against the pricks, and kick 'em, then we are discovering our own morality. And the first person you're saving, is yourself, when you fight for your own moral view of the nature of man and man's future. And when you see this filth—like the destruction which is occurring now, with the Obama Presidency, which is even worse than the George W. Bush Presidency—when you see that and you see people defending that, when you see people defending Obama and his health-care policy, which is a Nazi, Hitler policy, with the IMAC program, then you know you have no morality. And when you see a friend of yours who's in that rut, then you know that he has no morality either. And you begin to wonder about where the nation and the world is going. And it's only when you fear and hate that degeneracy and think about practical ways to destroy it, that you find the way out.
Looking Ahead 50 Years—to Mars!
Freeman:: We have time for one more question, which comes from a friend of ours who generally thinks on a pretty high level, but who sometimes slips into pragmatism, and who I kind of beat up yesterday, so I thought that I'd ask his question.
He says: "You know, ultimately the United States is a large and powerful country. In fact, I would say that it is probably the most powerful financial entity in the world, and I think, given that, if we chose to, we could employ our work force in a useful way—if we chose to. The reason why I say this, is that I don't really believe that the major obstacles that we face are themselves economic. We do have major economic problems, but I believe that the economic crisis is solvable, if we wish to solve it. I think the more difficult question is really almost a moral question. It's a question of what our overall objectives are, of where we want to be 30 years from now, 40 years from now, 50 years from now. And how we get there.
"Ultimately, while we do have to solve the immediate problem of unemployment, problems regarding our health care system, and other such issues, I think really, it's only at the point that we can agree that it's not a question of how we return to full employment in five years, but really how we solve the more fundamental problems that we face, in a way which gives us one to two generations of steady progress, and really, in that light, what I'd like to ask you, Lyn, because I think it would be useful for people who are trying to understand what it is you're proposing and why you're proposing it, is where you'd like to be 30, 40, or 50 years from now."
LaRouche: Me? It may occur to some of you that I'm 87 years of age, and while I do have a certain vigorous view, a fairly long view of what humanity must be doing over the coming years, I don't know how long I'm going to be in it. But I do enjoy the question very much.
Where should we be? First of all, we have to really—well, let me go back, put it the other way. Let's take this question of the Mars colonization program. And as I said earlier, the Mars colonization program is something mankind has to do, practically. But, the fun is getting there! The morality is getting there, because this forces us to examine ourselves creatively, and to identify the obstacles to realizing that objective. And to facing the problems.
I mean, can a human being ride in a craft which is being accelerated, as I've indicated, in a short trip—and maybe a short round-trip—between Earth orbit and Mars orbit, in a matter of days? Now, if I take that as a challenge, and say that we must mobilize the world economy to feature that mission as the principal objective around which we organize all the other things, then I think we'll have met the moral challenge. Because we will have posed a problem and proposed getting a solution which would solve a great problem for mankind. What is the human race's future in the universe?
That's a pretty good goal. It's a pretty general goal, and it subsumes a lot of other questions. But what's most important is the state of mind it requires of you, is what's most important. Because that impels you to adopt a state of mind, a creative state of mind, which exemplifies what a human being is. And it's a concrete way of saying, "I'm a human being, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, I'm a human being. And even after I'm dead, I'll be there, because I was part of this process."
