Dialogue with LaRouche
Below is the question and answer period which followed Lyndon LaRouche's opening presentation at his Dec. 3 webcast. It was moderated by LaRouche PAC spokeswoman Debra Freeman.
[PDF version of the entire webcast]
Freeman: Good afternoon to everyone. My name is Debra Freeman.
We have a number of questions for Lyn, some of which have come in from some institutions around the world, and I'm going to give priority to those questions, particularly, because they come from institutions that are the parties to the Four-Power Agreement that Lyn has authored.
The first question comes from Russia. Actually, it's two questions. This comes from an editor at a leading Russian weekly newspaper, which, in the recent period, has drawn tremendous attention to the Four-Power perspective that Mr. LaRouche has put forward. His first question is about the Lisbon Treaty, on the ceremony that just took place, as well as the meaning of the nomination and confirmation of the new European Union leadership. He asks: "What are the consequences of this, especially for Russia?"
"My second question concerns the second phase of the financial crisis. Some people are saying that it has ended, and that a recovery is going on. What are the near-term prospects?"
The Four Powers and the End of Monetarism
LaRouche: Well, on the second question, I would say that the reports of the undeath of the dead is not yet well established. This system is dead; there is no possibility of recovery of this system. The only recovery possible, first of all, is, you take the dirty laundry to the laundry. And you wash all the monetarism out of it. And you come up with a fixed-exchange-rate credit system, which, in point of fact, was actually what Franklin Roosevelt had intended in 1944, when he rejected and denounced John Keynes' swindle.
The problem was, that in the entire postwar period, with the death of Roosevelt, the first thing Truman did—and Truman was a fascist: That's not an exaggeration. He was a Wall Street-promoted fascist from Missouri, and thus, he was a Churchill supporter. The reason he got in there was because Roosevelt had trouble getting re-elected for his fourth term, because of a right-wing turn in the United States at the time. And therefore, Truman, who was acceptable, because he was a pig, let Roosevelt be re-elected. And then Roosevelt died.
And you had the experience of the head of the OSS at that time, who went in to see Roosevelt, after he had been re-elected, re-installed in office, re-sworn in. And he came out of the meeting with Roosevelt, and he had gone into the anteroom. He was the head of OSS, and there was a friend of his, who was the head of the OSS operating in Italy, who was my friend, who was sitting in the hallway. And so, he came out, his face was ashen. "It's over; it's over." The right wing had taken over, because Roosevelt's death was the last bastion for what we were committed to. And so therefore, we got into this process under Truman, which was dictated, really, by Churchill and company.
For example, Roosevelt was concerned immediately with the elimination of all colonialism, all imperialism. And to create a system of free nation-states; so the idea of the United Nations was to have a repository, and take all the parts of the world which were colonies—especially British colonies, but other colonies, or semi-colonies, and to free them from colonial status. And to have a vehicle, which was the United Nations, which was supposed to be an entry-point for each of these countries to have national sovereign status provided to them as a vehicle by the United Nations.
Well, that didn't happen. The first thing that happened, is, in the case of Indo-China, the British went in there, with the backing of Truman, and the Japanese prisoners of war were released from the camps, and told by the British to resume their arms and occupy Indo-China until the British could get the French in there to resume the government. And this policy of Truman and of Churchill and company, was the policy of the United States, which was reflected, say, in the 1970s, by Henry Kissinger and company, who proposed that Africa's population should be kept poor—not grow, not increase—and should be prevented from consuming the raw materials which Britain and the United States reserved for their own future.
So, this Anglo-American tradition, which it became under Truman, was prevalent. And the basis was this, the key basis: Roosevelt had understood—as his ancestor [Isaac Roosevelt] had understood, who founded the Bank of New York and was an ally of Hamilton—that we are a credit system, not a monetary system. And what happened was, we were turned into a monetary system, which meant we became a part, in effect, of the Empire, the British Empire. The real British Empire, which is a monetary system, not a physical system; it's a monetary system. Where we, by Constitution, by commitment, are a credit system. And our policy, as Roosevelt defined it, was a fixed-exchange-rate credit system, which was actually the intention at the beginning, at the founding of our republic. Hamilton's role in establishing this policy of national banking, and then it was embedded in the Constitution, and still remains in the Constitution, as a principle. Under our Constitution, financial systems, monetary systems are illegal for the United States. And therefore, that has to be the change.
It is the free-trade system, and this globalization process, which have created the vulnerability, where the nations of Europe, central Europe, have no sovereignty anymore. No nation on the continent of Europe, western and central Europe, has any sovereignty today. They're colonies of the British Empire. That's what the Queen was referring to the other day, last week, when talking about, that the British Empire, what's called the Commonwealth, controls one-third of the world, and is out to control more, which is what she said. The Queen, the Little Queen, said that.
So, the point is, we have to eliminate globalization. To eliminate globalization, we have to eliminate monetarism. It's easy to do now, legally, because, as you see, after Friday and Saturday of this week, and yesterday, too, every part of the world is on the verge of bankruptcy, except Russia and China. Because the Russia and China agreement made just last month, that treaty agreement, establishes the relationship between them as that of credit system to credit system. The Chinese took their credit which they had, which was money owed by the United States to China, and said we're going to invest it. We're not going to sit there just with a bank account; we're going to invest it. We're going to get something good out of it. And the Russians said, we'll get something good out of it; we'll work together. And other nations in Asia, through Chinese negotiation and Russian negotiation, are pushing this with other countries. "We must cooperate." At least the present Putin-Yakunin-Medvedev government—they're pushing this.
And we want India in on it. We want the countries of South Asia to be involved in this, because with that combination, and the resources we have, we know that great good can be done there. If the United States is a partner in this, we know that we can secure the planet. And that's my goal. Other things may be beneficial, but that's my goal.
We must do that! We must secure the planet for that kind of alliance, that kind of cooperation. For a credit system, which is a fixed-exchange-rate credit system; that is, each of these nations must establish fixed-exchange-rate agreements among themselves. That way, with between 1.5% to 2% interest rates, we can create credit for long-term physical investments, which is what's needed. And we're talking about 25 years, 50 years, 100 years. We're talking about stirring up the imagination of the people of the world for what we can do, so that every child, when they become conscious of what they are, can say, "There is a better world waiting for me 50 years from now, or 60 years from now." And that's the bond that must tie people together, and peoples together, in that kind of thing.
So, the financial system is dead; it's hopelessly bankrupt. It could not be saved; no one can save it. Because the explanation is simple: It's my Triple Curve. Actually, back in the 1950s, when I was an executive with a consulting firm, one of my specialties was to take a number of industries, including the auto industry in general, and I was on top of this, in consulting activity. And I knew that the entire system of Detroit was one big fraud. And some of you are probably old enough to have remembered something about this, but it really was a fraud.
You had a system of automobile manufacturers and dealerships, and that's where the fraud was. The contract of the automobile dealer, who was an independent operative, but under the control, contract control, of automobile manufacturing firms, and by Wall Street, agreed that when they sold a new car, they would show on their books, the price of the new car at list price. Then, if a trade-in occurred, where a used car was used as part of the payment for a new car, you would take the shortfall, and you would charge that to the value of the used car taken in trade, in inventory. That was the contract, and all of these auto companies had this contract.
This not only happened in the automobile industry; under the Eisenhower period, from '52 on, '53 on, it had spread throughout all kinds of industries. So, the economy was based on a very large margin of these kinds of franchise arrangements, where products were sold, and the contract was that the list price, a manufacturer's list price, would always be shown as the income. And on a trade-in, the trade-in would be priced at what was needed to cover the full-cash-plus-trade-in value. So, in the Summer of that year, 1956, I said to my associates, colleagues, and so forth, "We're going to have a very serious recession. The most serious recession of the postwar period is going to occur about February or March of this coming year." Because that's the way the structure of the financial system of the United States was at the time. And it happened.
Now, since that success of my experience in that time, I've always done forecasting, not based on so-called market statistical forecasting, which is bunk! No person who engages market-based statistical forecasting is any good at forecasting. They may be good at something else, but they're no good at forecasting. They've never hit the button on this one; none of them! And there've been some big arguments. But the method I used then, back later in 1996, I codified it. I codified it because I was involved in a Vatican event on health care, and one of my contributions was to try to make clear what the principle was here; and it became known as the "Triple Curve," which I put out prominently in January of 1996. And the Triple Curve breaks down the most essential feature of an economic process into three elements, commercial elements. One, is the utterance of money—monetarism. The second, is the use of money as a financial instrument for trade and manufacturing. Thirdly, is the physical activity required to produce the product on which a nation depends. Three curves.
The model we referred to, was the model defined by the 1923 hyperinflation in Germany, which was, then, occupied Germany. And the occupation, which was determined by the British and French principally, with American collaboration—what they did was, they took Germany and put it under reparations conditions. The Germans had to pay the reparations in a timely fashion. When the French occupied the Ruhr, the pressure of this operation became unbearable.
So, from the Spring of that year on, a hyperinflationary process began in Germany, in occupied Germany, postwar Germany. And so, they began to print money by the state in order to pay the debt to their Versailles creditors, the nations. The result was a three-fold effect: You had the hyperinflationary growth in the emission of money. You had a decline, as a result of this, of actual trade, as denominated in financial terms. Thirdly, you had a sharp decline in actual production, physical production. So, by November of that year, the German economy blew out in the famous hyperinflation of 1923.
What we're now experiencing, is what I warned of during the entire period of the 1960s to the 1990s and the present decade, is that we were going in that direction. My first indication or communication with the new Administration of Bill Clinton, was that the danger was, under present policies, as I indicated to the Clinton Administration, that we were going to go in that direction. In 1996, I made this explicit by presenting this so-called Triple Curve function, which illustrates exactly how this kind of economy works. We are now experiencing, since September 2007, we're experiencing what I said was going to happen then: that the Weimar syndrome, the Weimar hyperinflationary syndrome, was now going to begin to hit the United States. And that's what happened with the breakout of the so-called mortgage crisis, which broke out a few days after my July 25 webcast, where I announced this.
Since that time, everything done by the U.S. government and by international agencies has been to feed that process. In Germany, in 1923, you had a country which was encased by its own borders, because the process was imposed on Germany by the Versailles powers. Now you have it where the entire world is under the same kind of process, which is not so legally precisely controlled, but the process is the same. What we are experiencing now is not a recession, it's not a depression. We're experiencing a global breakdown crisis with the characteristics of Weimar Germany in 1923. The utterance of so-called money, as monetary emission, is skyrocketing, relative to the physical output of the economy. In the meantime, the physical output and the so-called financial turnover of goods is collapsing, but there's inflation in that sector. So these three factors are working. There's no other way you can describe, actually competently describe, what is happening to the U.S. and world economy today, except that. That's what's operating.
So I know this. I'm the only scientific authority on this, and I know this. There are other people in the United States who have studied this, and know what I'm saying, and agree with what I'm saying, scientifically and professionally. But what I've proposed is the only way you can understand what's happening to the world now. And if you want to cure the problems of the world, you've got to start here. That's what you've got to fix. The Triple Curve is the only competent representation of what the crisis is we're dealing with. And by that standard, this system is now bankrupt, and is about to go into a steep Weimar-style collapse, unless we intervene to stop it. The only thing that has happened of any significance to tend to stop that, is what happened in the agreement between Russia and China, both on the Presidency, and the government levels, in setting up the recent agreement. That's the only thing that will work!
You can't do it in Europe, because Europe's a slave state, western and central Europe. They have no sovereignty anymore. They're part of the euro system. They're slaves! We would like to free those slaves, and then they'd behave better. But right now they're slaves. And we want to free them.
But the only way you can free them is an alliance of Russia, China, India, and the United States. If Russia, China, India, and the United States agree on this, we can save the planet. If we can not agree on this, we're not going to save the planet. And that's what the issue is. And I'm the authority on this, because no one else has ever understood this thing this way, except there are people in the United States now, who in their present study, have made the comparison of what I did before, and realize that I've been right all along. And that's the only way you can understand this crisis. And what I'm proposing is the only possible way, because you can not get Western Europe into this right now. They don't have the sovereignty to do it. They can't vote on it! Therefore, we have to free them. We free them by the Russia-China-India-United States policy.
The 'G-2' Concept
Freeman: The next question comes from the American Studies division of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He says, "Dear Mr. LaRouche, I would be very pleased to hear your views on the so-called Group of Two. This is the idea being promoted by Fred Bergsten, which says that the Chinese and the U.S. economies are so closely interdependent, that they are one economy. And this G-2 is the dominant economy in the world. The G-2 idea is also being used to put pressure on China to take more so-called "responsibility" in the current financial system. However, Chinese Prime Minister Wen [Jiabao] has said several times, including to President Obama, that there is no such G-2, that China has a long way to go to become a developed nation, and wants to keep its independent policy for international cooperation with many other nations. What is your view?"
LaRouche: China, in my view, is a civilized nation, at a time that Europe is not, especially the British. I don't know who's going to teach who the lesson! And what China and Russia did—I was in the area of this discussion as this approached and was very much for it. At the time when I was in Rhodes [World Public Forum: Dialogue of Civilizations, Oct. 8-12, 2009], and we had much discussion of this, with some relevant people there, and we had people from India and other parts of the world who were also there who were also involved in this discussion. And I was very optimistic about China's coming up with a treaty agreement of this type. I thought from my discussions with people who represent China here, and so forth, that my conclusion was that they understood their problem very well, and it was a matter of a production problem.
China has been used as a cheap labor market, and allowed to have certain industries, generously, but not allowed to have the technology it needed. China was cut off for various reasons from access to certain technologies which China should have, and that was a problem. And that is one of the things we're trying to fix now.
So, it was obvious to me that this kind of change should be made, and I was optimistic because of my estimation of what China had manifested as its own understanding of its problem, that if the Russians would make a certain kind of approach, that China would probably accept it. And so, when I talked to the Russians and others there in Rhodes, I assured them that my belief was that China would make such an agreement. And it did make such an agreement. And therefore, I'm rather enthusiastic about the fact that it worked out.
But the problem is, that China needs protection, of a fixed-exchange-system type of protection, and now that we have the agreement between China and Russia, what is really needed is the United States to quickly embrace that treaty agreement, that kind of treaty agreement, and join it. And to make it work, you must bring India in. However, I know that if Russia, China and the United States agree on this, India will be in, because India's problem is the British problem, on this. So, if the three countries—and the important thing is not the order in which these things occur, although that's significant—the point is, a commitment from leading circles inside the United States to bring about a Four-Power agreement of that type, comparable to what was struck between Russia and China, in this recent agreement between the Presidents and the state, the government, will force—the Indians will come along.
We also have all other kinds of problems, including this idiocy in Afghanistan. We have to break that! The Afghanistan problem is a British problem. The British are running a drug operation in Afghanistan. Everything is being run—the military operation is a drug operation. And this Dubai thing was a key to it. We have to break the British Empire.
And you know, England will survive nicely. A lot of people in England will be happy to get rid of the Empire, because of their sexual proclivities, among other things.
But, we need this kind of agreement, because in that strategic area alone, we've got an idiot who wants to put troops in there. I thought McChrystal was bad enough, but this thing from Obama is beyond belief. It's insane! We've got to break it. We've got to get it out of there. Because we know what the problems are.
For example, let me suggest something to you: Did you ever hear of Osama bin Laden? Do you know what part of Pakistan he's living in now? Do you know why he's never been caught? Certain British and Saudis and Americans are protecting him, that's why!
But he's not the guilty party. The guilty party was the British BAE, together with the Saudi influences which financed that operation called 9/11. And all of our people would like to have certain forces go in there and take them out, and bring them back to expose what they really are, and clear up this mess of what really happened in 9/11. Not the usual nonsense. But this is still there. It's a British-Saudi operation: 9/11. An orchestration of an operation against the United States, with complicity of certain elements associated with government, political elements, international elements, associated with government.
That's the kind of thing we have to deal with. So why not?
So therefore, what you have to understand is, the Afghanistan operation, like many organized wars which engage the United States—especially since the Kennedy assassination—were operations against us, the United States, by the British! The British have wanted to destroy us, and they've done a damned good job of doing it, by getting us involved in silly wars.
What about Indochina? Why did we get into that thing? MacArthur said no, and he was right. Kennedy said no, and he was right. You don't need to have these kinds of wars, so-called "revenge wars" or "special operations wars." You don't need them. We destroyed our military. We had a case of our friends in Germany when I was working on this SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] project, and we had a lot of German military, senior ones, who were working with us, as well as others, on the idea of trying to avoid, to deal with, the disintegration of the Soviet Union at that time. To deal with it in a way, by simply going to this SDI proposal, as an alternative. Because the Russians were disintegrating. We knew it! And therefore, why not make this kind of agreement to develop a system which eliminates this nuclear warfare system, and use that as a way of getting some economic cooperation and development?
And, of course, we had some of the people in the CIA leadership, and national security operations generally, and in the Presidency itself at that time, who accepted my proposal as a project, and tested it out, and the President agreed to it in January of that year [1983]. So, we know this kind of area, and we know who's against it. We had Brits who were for it, also, but the British monarchy, the British Foreign Office was against it. You should take the names of the people who were living then, general officers, the outstanding veterans of the German military establishment of that time, the leaders of the French military establishment, the Italians. There was serious consideration of cooperation from the government of India, because Indira Gandhi was still alive then. We had the ability to create the kind of arrangement which Roosevelt had intended. The cards were in our hands. I gave an address on the 12th of October in 1988, in which I laid out exactly this situation. It was in our hands. But, you had skunks inside the Soviet system, like Gorbachov and people like that, who were a complication. Andropov was also a big problem in this matter, a major problem.
What we're dealing with, is when you think of war as some kind of an institution all by itself. When you look at the history of warfare in Western Civilization, since the Peloponnesian war, you realize that warfare is often not an act of courage but of desperation and folly, because people use wars as the Roman Empire did: To control the Empire, they would use wars between peoples within the Empire, and play them against one another in order to win. You should read this in Machiavelli, for example, which is supposed to be the basic military education for a lot of people: Read it. The use of war as an enterprise in folly. You don't start from trying to win wars, you don't start from trying to run the world. You try to orchestrate events which lead to an event which should be desired by all parties. Peace is the objective. Peace, by the definition of history, since the Peloponnesian War.
Greece was a leading culture of that period, together with the Egyptian culture, the leading culture. Greece was about to, in a sense, defeat the Persian Empire, which was the greatest empire of that period, and the most repressive. They did, but then what they did is, they turned around, and Athens made war on Corinth, Corinth made war on Athens, and then they both made war against Syracuse. And out of this, the culture of Greece was still around, but it has never been the same since. So, war is more often a case of folly than of courage. And that's the way we have to look at this thing.
We have to understand that our objective is to bring the relations among the sovereign peoples of the planet into a cooperative order. Sometimes, military force is necessary to check something that needs to be checked. But the idea of a long war, unless you're forced to fight it, is the greatest folly I can imagine, at least from my knowledge of history.
And what really happened to us—you see it in the 9/11 thing. You see that! What happened? When did I say we were going to have a 9/11? I didn't call it 9/11. I said, in the beginning of January, that year, I said we had to expect a major terrorist operation inside the United States, used for the purpose of installing the authority of the George W. Bush Administration. We were looking all over the place. We had an operation in Northern Virginia, around Washington, very serious. We had this little event in Italy. Suddenly, we had this event in New York. I knew immediately what it was. It was what I knew was going to happen! Somebody on the British side, with complicity inside the United States, was going to pull a stunt like this, because you had a totally incompetent, intolerable President, George W. Bush, Jr. A piece of crap! How did this thing ever slide into the Presidency?
So, how do the British do things like that? And it's the British that do it, along with the Wall Street crowd and so forth. Why do they do that? Because the crisis was on. The situation was, by current standards of the time, uncontrollable. The Clinton Administration, with all its weaknesses, especially after the impeachment indictment, was weak. But nonetheless, we had made certain progress under Clinton. He was a two-term President. Now that's a very significant institutional fact. A two-term President tends to have a great influence on what follows his two terms. And we had a great crisis: The great financial swindle that was pulled under Bush and company, was now dead; we had a collapse of the great bundle. And I knew that they were going to pull a crisis, and that it had to be an act of terrorism. Either war or terrorism. We got the terrorism. And I know that the evidence exists that the BAE and certain high-level Saudi influences, ran part of the operation, and, therefore, probably all of it. It was run to ensure and install a relative dictatorship on behalf of the George W. Bush Administration.
To some people, that's a shocking thing to say. To me, it's not. Because that's the way I read history. That's what happened to us. And then we got this President as the result of the George W. Bush Administration.
What we have also in the Presidency and in the institutions, we have people with an understanding of this, though most people don't have the temperament to bring it out publicly, as I do. But, as is known to other people, my job is to say the "unsayable," especially when it's necessary. And they're afraid to shoot me, because I might get credit for it. It's my best protection.
But anyway, it's the case. It's a fact. And that's what we have to understand in this particular case: that we're dealing with that kind of problem.
China and the Dubai Crisis
Freeman: The next question is from somebody who operates in high-level diplomatic and academic circles in China, and he says, "Mr. LaRouche, this is on the question of the Dubai crisis. There are currently many warnings in China that we should take heed of the Dubai crisis for China's own economy, and that it is a much more dangerous speculative bubble than some Western analysts are admitting, certainly as you referred to in your remarks. My question is: Since it does appear that the Dubai crisis does mark a new stage in the current global financial crisis, how do you think that China should react?"
LaRouche: Well, the first thing we need—and China needs it as well as the rest of us—is a clear plan of what we're going to do, because the plan will define what our circumstances are. The first thing we have to do is get enough power together where we can actually define some policy which will stick. My view is that the agreement of Russia, China, India, and the United States is enough power to make policy.
Then we have to just simply be practical, scientifically practical. We have to work and have a discussion, because we know that one of the key problems here is that the openness to China, of shipping U.S. production to China, for example, without all the technology needed, was a device in which China never was paid enough for the development of China as a whole. So you suddenly have a collapse of the China external market for these goods, but you have left China with less—probably two-thirds of China has not really been developed.
Now, a country functions on the basis of the development of its entire people. You have to have a development process which is moving the entire population. And you have a lot of China which is not developed. The approach to the development of the railway system, which has become a China characteristic, is essentially an example of trying to deal with that problem. But obviously, we have to have a fixed-exchange-rate system, where China has some protection on the prices of its exports.
At the same time, the credit is being generated among nations, in which the amount of credit required will be generated. In other words, you've got 1.4 billion people, and they have to develop. Therefore, you start from a discussion with China's representatives, and with others: China has 1.4 billion people, and they're going to have more people. How do we generate a rate of net growth of the productivity of China itself, so that China is an integrated nation, in the sense that we understand an integrated nation?
Therefore, this has to be an agreement among nations, as parties to an agreement, which come to the effect of a contract among nations, to say we're going to have price regulation and technology rights regulation, under which China will be able to solve its own problems, within its own borders. And we have to do the same thing with the other countries.
We've got a problem in India: India's got a different kind of problem, but it's also got the same Asian problem of a vast percentage of the population which is terribly poor. Whole parts of India don't even know what electricity is, in the sense of having it available. You have the Asian problem, which is largely that. The African problem is another case of this. Africa's been treated as a slave, all of Africa. And China's behavior in Africa is one of the great embarrassments to London—because China honors its agreements. London never does. So, we need to have enough power, concentrated in enough hands, a few hands, so that these conditions can be reduced to contract agreements among nations, medium- to long-term contracts.
In other words, we have to sit back with the Chinese and others and say, what do we want to do? Let's figure out what we should do. It can be flexible and adjustable, but we have to have a working agreement on policy, on tariff and trade agreements. And we have to have enough power sitting at the table to make it stick.
My view is, if we have this power, the United States, China, Russia, and India, and other countries which would readily join them, as in Asia.
You know, the conflict with Japan is well known. But Japan and Korea will operate in the area of Russia and China. Therefore, their existence depends now, not on the British anymore, but on Russia and China, and on their relations with Russia and China. And we're in a period where Japan has a certain nuclear building capability, and we need all the nuclear power we can get in Asia. The development of northern Asia, in terms of the Russian part, is extremely important. We need all the technology we can get, to solve that problem. We can get it, if we have an agreement among these nations, because we have enough power to write a contract, a diplomatic contract, long-term.
And that's what China needs. It's got a big problem of its population, its poverty. All of Asia has this problem. Terrible poverty throughout nearly all of Asia, and we need a contract among nations which says we have a plan as to how we adjust things so we can solve this problem. I don't think we can do it on an individual nation basis, because it involves cooperation.
And essentially, we're going to have to create a fixed-exchange-rate international credit system, among nations. Get rid of this monetary system, and we'll create the credit to do the job. I'm convinced we can, but we need that contract.
The Next 100 Days
Freeman: Okay, moving to the United States: The next couple of questions came during the course of the discussion you conducted yesterday, in a dialogue with some institutional layers at a gathering in New York.
"Lyn, it's become increasingly apparent that Obama's policies are authored in London, and although the general assessment of those of us who have functioned institutionally as part of the Executive branch for quite some time, is that much will be decided over the next 100 days, and that those days will be decisive for this Presidency and for the nation. As of now, Obama has shown himself to be largely incapable—no matter how willing he may be—of delivering these policies into practice. And we have to assume that London is acutely aware of this. How, in your view, will they respond to this reality?"
LaRouche: Well, I think it lies with the American people. What we've had recently: We've had a mass strike phenomenon inside the United States, which came to the surface at the time in August when the Congressmen had fled back to their home districts, and wished they hadn't, because of the reception they got. The assumption has been, in Washington, that that mood in the population has waned since that time. Not true. What happened was—it's an understandable phenomenon if you understand dynamics in history, that this should happen. What the people did, the Members of Congress were going back to their constituencies, to do a routine re-election campaign kind of operation. And what they found were two things: the turnout for these meetings that they called was unprecedented, was enormous by their standards. And the people in these meetings, the constituents, would turn upon their representative, and say, "You shut up! We want to tell you something about you, right now." And that's what they did.
But these are citizens; this is a mass-strike phenomenon in the technical terms of the thing. Strategically, it's a mass-strike phenomenon. It's not a strike of masses; it's a mass-strike. That is, a popular uprising of emotion and ideas among the people, who feel that they have rights, and they've been subjected to a great injustice. And they go to their representatives: "Hey, you bum! We want to tell you that we think you're a bum, and we want you to do something about this."
But that's not the way you get the job done. That's the first step of getting the job done. What you've done, now you've said "Do it!" And they're not going to do it. They're going to go back to their masters in Washington and Wall Street, and they're going to do what they're told to do. Go along to get along! The usual song and dance. So, they got back there, and they gave them the treatment.
Now, the people were getting more and more angry! Now, in a case like this, you get to a very dangerous point, where the people who despair of a lack of competent response by their elected representatives and other officials, no longer say, "You do it for us." They begin to say, "We'll do it to you!" And you're getting into that kind of a period. And when you get into that kind of period, you get a very dangerous development, in which those in power will tend to resort to dictatorial methods to resist those who they represent. That's where you're at now! About that point; about Christmas time; right now.
So, it never went away. Every reading I have is that that is intensified. The hatred against the Congress has increased. Because, you see, the people, the citizens, don't really hate Obama so much, because they never thought he was worth much anyway. He was just a sort of Hollywood character who came on stage. They had no deep emotional attachment to him. But they did have a deep emotional attachment to the people they voted for. These were not strangers; Obama was a stranger who came in, a Hollywood figure. So, like a Hollywood figure, they had no feeling about him. How can you feel anything about Obama? I mean, that's sort of a masturbation toy, that's what that is, there's no involvement.
But they do have a great feeling about the people whom they thought they elected; because you're saying to them, not that this stranger Obama has come in to haunt you. They're saying, "You have betrayed us! We trusted you, and you betrayed us! You sold us out. You're sending us to be killed by this health-care policy. You're sending us to be killed by losing all our jobs, or losing our things, we're being junked, like junk on the horizon."
And the people come to a point in a mass-strike phenomenon, at which there is a turning point. At which they say, "No! You do what we tell you. No." It gets dangerous. And when you get a stupid and arrogant government, which is what Obama represents with his crazy behaviorist types, and when he's strutting with a Hitler-style health policy—and it is Hitler style. That mustache belongs on his upper lip. He may not have put it there, but it grew there anyway. It knew where to land. It's dangerous. And such times as this, with the breakdown of the system, is a time that you get chaos, you get riots, you get repressive regimes, dictatorships, and so forth.
And therefore, those who are not showing courage, to give proper representation to the people, when the people can no longer tolerate the government they're getting—it's a more dangerous point than any point in history. And a government, government forces, who refuse to recognize the lesson before them, are the cause of that.
This is what happened in the French Revolution. Take the case of Lafayette, as an example of this problem. Lafayette was a hero of the United States, but he was never quite the same as a hero in France. And even when he went back to France, in the company, with one of our great naval fellows, a great author—James Fenimore Cooper—and with the great man from New York and elsewhere [Washington Irving]. So, again, in dealing with the question of the French government in the 1820s, Lafayette goofed again, as he had goofed again, earlier in June, prior to the famous July 14th [1789]. And so, therefore, this is typical: when you face a change in government, or a change in government policy, which has reached a critical point, and you don't respond with good government, you create a vacuum in which all hell can bust loose.
And of course, this thing started in 1782, when the British dictatorship under Lord Shelburne made a separate peace negotiation process with the three allies—the United States, Spain, and France. And by making a separate agreement through the newly founded British Foreign Office, which was founded by Shelburne, they played France, Spain, and the United States against each other, in this process. And this led to a great crisis, where you had this great alliance, the League of Armed Neutrality, which had made possible the freedom of the United States—that condition was destroyed systematically by the British East India Company, by the same intellectual method that was used by the same people to organize the Seven Years War. And the Seven Years War just destroyed it.
And similarly, later, you had Napoleon. Well, Napoleon was the greatest hero that Britain ever had, because without Napoleon's warfare, modelled on the Seven Years War, Europe would never have been crushed and submitted at Vienna to the conditions that ensued. And so forth.
So, this is the kind of process we're looking at right now. And only what I'm proposing we do, will prevent this.
We must deliver, in the United States. We must deliver to the American people, the Great Majority, and the Great Majority is out there. The Great Majority is typified by what we saw in August in the streets, and so forth in these meetings. We must deliver a result—now! Not bargain about it; we must deliver! Obama is destroying the United States with his current policies. He didn't start this thing, but he's continuing it. We have to reverse those trends. We have to eliminate, entirely, his health-care policy—Obama's.
What we do instead, is, we go to a lesson, a health-care lesson. The health-care lesson is, that under Nixon, we destroyed our health-care system. We introduced the HMO [Health Maintenance Organization] system. Private insurance companies got control over medical care. Then later, we had a new thing which occurred in the courts: malpractice insurance cases. Tremendous fees, grants for malpractice injuries, by the courts, by the court system. The result was the insurance, which had to be paid by medical institutions, and by physicians for the practice of medicine, drove them essentially out of the business, and drove up the cost of medical care.
You look at it from, say, the drug policies, for example: what it costs to get a certain prescription drug in the United States, as opposed to Canada or places in Europe. Why? It's a swindle of what? Of the insurance companies. Shall we say, A-I-G? We bailed it out, and the bailout is now part of it.
Then we get the bright idea on top of that with Obama, to cut the right to medical care. We've got to kill you in order to save money to balance the budget. I would say, cancel the HMOs; go back to Hill-Burton, cancel the HMO system. It's a swindle from the beginning. We bailed these guys out; they shouldn't have been bailed out; they should have been bankrupted! We've got a Social Security system. Build up the Social Security system as an insurance system for the population. You don't have to rely upon these swindling insurance companies. But we didn't do that.
Now they say, "We are agreed. We're not going to allow modern technology. We're going green. We're going to have solar panels. We're going to have windmills. We're going to make gas, ourselves, and we're going to burn it." We'll feed ourselves beans, or something.
So, what has happened is that we're at a point where we have an existential conflict between the vital interests of the people of the United States and the nation of the United States, and the interests which Obama is serving. This is happening with an oppressive action, this insult to the American people, of putting 40,000 troops of war into Afghanistan. Absolutely criminally insane! Well, the President is insane in my view; or he's so stupid it amounts to the same thing.
But the point is, when we take our government, and put our government and even our own members of the legislature, you put them as threats to the very lives of our citizens! While you're destroying their homes, evictions are rising up; destroying the price of food, creating a food scarcity; everything imaginable! Everything that Louis XVI did in France, as economic policy, from 1782, 1789, that led to the great conflict between the French people and its monarchy, its government, and led to this horror show, is being done now inside the United States, under British direction.
And therefore, what you have to understand is that. We have to get this President under control! We have to get those policies out of the Congress! Otherwise, we're going to Hell! We've got our choice.
Now, how do you deal with that? People who are politically active and influential have to pull together, and make sure the changes are made; and the changes are forcibly put upon the relevant institutions of government, so we don't have the kind of thing that happened in France under Louis XVI. We're very close to that now.
The American people are instinctively a proud people. They're confident of themselves, and they've been degraded. There's a limit to what the American people can tolerate in degradation. I think the American people will tolerate all kinds of suffering if they believe that is necessary and warranted. It's happened before. But when the suffering is incurred, imposed upon them by either their own government, or when their own government is complicit with a foreign one in doing that to them, you are creating a very dangerous situation. And no patriot will encourage or tolerate what the Obama Administration is doing to the people of the United States right now. This guy has to be put under control; and he can be put under control, with people who have the intelligence and guts to know how to do it.
Copenhagen: The End of the Commonwealth?
Freeman: This is another question from yesterday's gathering. "Mr. LaRouche, one of the lead climate negotiators for India told us yesterday, after your remarks, that India would never accept any legally binding emissions cuts, that they said as much at the recent Commonwealth meetings in Trinidad. This led to an extensive discussion of India's role in a Four Power agreement, and it suddenly dawned on us, that India is, indeed, a Commonwealth country. Since you were undoubtedly aware of that when you included India in the Four Power arrangement, I was wondering if you would say a little bit about what this implies for the Commonwealth overall. Would India be forced to withdraw from the Commonwealth in order to participate? And what would that do to the prospects of the continued existence of the Commonwealth?"
LaRouche: This is precisely why I have talked about the Four Power agreement. You have to get India involved in it, and you can't do it unless Russia and China first agree, and the United States supports it. Under those conditions, yes. And you're talking about breaking up the Commonwealth? Of course, you're talking about breaking up the Commonwealth. I don't like to make wars, but I do like to break up commonwealths, particularly of that sort. And if the United States supports Russia and China on the policy I have outlined, the Indians will come along, because it's in their interest.
Now, let's take another case. It's not just India. How about Canada? How about Australia? The key thing is to look at the Copenhagen program. Who's for the Copenhagen program, and who's against it? India's against it; India can not tolerate it. It is Commonwealth policy; India can not tolerate Commonwealth policy. Australia can not tolerate this policy of the Commonwealth. Canada can not tolerate it.
Let's look at Canada. What is Canada? Canada has an Arctic region which is comparable, in some respects, to Alaska and Siberia. It has large resources. I mean, look at the map of the world. Where is the landed area of the planet located? It concentrates, gathers around the North Pole, where it looks out to the universe. And down in the southern part, you've got all this watery area, which trickles down to this little thing in Argentina, Tierra del Fuego. And except for the fine mineral deposits in the southern part of Argentina, there's not too much down there, not much population and so forth; maybe some Indians and a few other people. So, we have a common syndrome in terms of potential.
We now are at a point where the planet depends on our better management of the raw material resources which are left behind by animal and plant life which died a long time ago, above the Lithosphere. And therefore, we have come to the point where we have to increase our energy flux-density in production, and we have to look more to the development of the raw material resources, mineral types and so forth, which are located in these areas. Areas which tend to be toward the North Pole and toward the South, like the Southern Shield of Africa.
So therefore, we now have these countries, which have this territory within them, which have a vital interest in the development of these resources. Resources which they need, and which they must develop in aid of their neighboring countries—like China needs these resources coming from northern Asia.
So therefore, the natural cooperation in development between the country which needs the raw materials, and that which is using it, is an obvious thing. And that's the way this needs to be approached. India, for example, is very scant on some resources, very scant. India can not succeed without cooperation with nations which are going to supply a certain kind of large resources for them, or development of that.
So therefore, it's the vital interest of India, as of Australia, for complementary reasons, not the same reasons, complementary reasons, and Canada, not to be put under what the Queen has proposed: this environmental nonsense. And, since it's all a lie anyway, that has to be taken into account.
So, therefore, if the United States is induced to do what it should do, and must do, in concert with China and Russia, I say it's a fairly easy run to solve the rest of the problem. I don't think any government in the world could long withstand—if I have a hand in it—what I would suggest our friends in Russia, China, India, and others should do. I don't think anybody could stand up to it. And I'm determined, if I'm still alive, to make sure that happens.
A Keynesian Is Not an American Patriot
Freeman: Lyn, the next question comes from someone who is a rather well-known Roosevelt historian, and who is something of an economist in his own right. I guess you'd call him really an economic historian. He says: "Mr. LaRouche, I know you've addressed this before, but it continues to come up as an issue in our discussions, and I wish you would settle it for people, once and for all. Of course, what I am referring to, is the question of John Maynard Keynes. I continue to be astounded by the number of patriotic Americans who still refer to themselves as Keynesians. And this occurs, despite the fact that, as Robert Skidelsky stressed throughout the final volume of Keynes, Keynes spent much of his energies during the war fighting for Britain, not against the Axis, but against the ascending economic power of the United States.
"It is also the case that Harry [Dexter] White was well aware of this. As a matter of fact, one of the things that was found among White's personal papers at Princeton, was a yellowing piece of paper, salvaged from the first Anglo-American discussions, that said, 'In Washington, Lord Halifax once whispered to Lord Keynes, "It's true they have the money bags, but we have all the brains." Although White's personal papers did not name the author, it is widely thought that Dennis Robertson was the most likely candidate. But the fact of the matter is that the entire British approach to the talks that resulted in the formation of Bretton Woods, were directed toward preserving and continuing the imperial system. As a matter of fact, he envisioned the Clearing Union primarily as an agreement between the two founder states—i.e., the United States and Britain, with the United States included only because we were 'the money bags.'
"I'd really like you to address specifically, because any idea that key American patriots are Keynesian, is absurd. And it is in fact the case that, although White was forced to make certain compromises with Keynes, he did in fact see Keynes as an adversary. Would you please comment?"
LaRouche: Well, there's a lot of literature on this which comes from the Roosevelt circles as such. And Roosevelt was the determiner of U.S. policy, not Dexter White. Roosevelt understood what the British were. There's no question of this, and people just mystify themselves by not doing the relevant research, which is readily available on this thing.
Remember, that Roosevelt was a descendant of the [Isaac] Roosevelt who had worked with Alexander Hamilton in the establishment of the Bank of New York, which was the enemy of the British-controlled Bank of Manhattan, who were a bunch of traitors, that bank, and they were literally traitors. Aaron Burr's bank was the Bank of Manhattan, and Aaron Burr was an agent of the British Foreign Office since its founding, as well as being an assassin, and a punk, and everything else.
So, Roosevelt's understanding, and he documented this in a Harvard paper he wrote on this subject, when he was graduating from Harvard, that he always understood this clearly. He understood the American System, and he understood it better, especially after he had polio, where in his recovery from polio, he did extensive studies, and reaffirmed and deepened his understanding of history; and he already had a family understanding of what his family background was. He also knew what his cousin [Theodore Roosevelt] was; whose uncle [James Bulloch] was a real traitor.
So, in the case of the 1944 Bretton Woods proceedings, Roosevelt, for various reasons, was not there physically, but his messages were delivered there. And Roosevelt's purpose was, as was made clear, as he told Winston Churchill: "Winston, when this war is over, there isn't going to be a British Empire. I'm going to free these people. We're going to give them their freedom. There are not going to be any more colonies. We in the United States have had this too long—you, with your ways. And that man!"—pointing to an uncle of the present Consort of the Queen.
I was in India, you know, at the end of my military service in the postwar period, and I was involved in Calcutta. And, being in Calcutta, as I have told people a number of times, having time on my hands, I went to all these offices—I took the Calcutta telephone book, looked up all the political parties. And I made appointments to meet all the political parties in their offices in Calcutta. It was in my own private interest to do so. I just had the time there; they were there; let's find out what was going on here. So, I met and became knowledgeable very quickly with all these political parties. And I was beginning to operate, because I had a sense of what we as Americans wanted to do with India.
Particularly, I had one experience on the Maidan, of a couple of people who were coolie status. At that time, their income was annas-a-day pay for doing digging and so forth for the British Raj. And they, two of these guys, came up with a student, and the student said, "Will you talk with these guys?" They spoke just Hindi; they didn't speak English, and I didn't speak their language.
So, we had a conversation, nevertheless, by courtesy of this Indian student, and they said "What I want to know is, when you go back to the United States, are you going to send us machinery so we can develop our own weaving industries, and not be slaves like this?" That was typical of the question I was getting—well, Bengalis are noted for this kind of thing—but from my Bengali friends. This is the area where Chandra Gupta Bos was involved, and so forth, and so this is the kind of mood.
So, I was there, and on a day I was not in Calcutta, some friends of mine nonetheless, had a demonstration at the governor general's palace. It was a routine demonstration; they happened all the time, usually without consequence. But there was then a lathi charge, ordered by the British, by the guards, on these people. Now, these lathis are bamboo sticks with a metal tip to the thing, and they're quite nasty weapons in dealing with crowd control. And so, a number of people were killed, in simply an ordinary demonstration.
So, two days later, there was on Dharmatala, which is a street leading across Chowringhee, to the Maidan, the big area there. And a large crowd—I wasn't there that day—came down protesting against this atrocity by the British guards, or the hired guards, against killing these people, these students. And so the British police, who patrolled the area, took two heavy machine guns, and stuck them in the middle of the street, in the intersection of Dharmatala and Chowringhee, and as the crowd approached, they opened up with full fire, and kept firing. The following day, when I was there on the scene, the residue of blood on the street was unbelievable.
Now, the result was that, the Indian population crawled on tops of trains and every other way to go into Calcutta in response to this atrocity. And I saw a situation, which I was standing there in the middle of, at the time, and seeing this vast crowd of millions of people, marching day and night, for more than three days. And they were mixed, and the crowd—one section of the crowd—would emit: "Jai Hind" ("Up With India!"). And the echo would be in the same crowd: "Pakistan Zindabad" And you'd hear this resonating, and it was going on for these days. And the power of independence was in the hands of India at that moment.
And what happened is, Lord Mountbatten went to the Indian leaders and said, "We will promise you independent status next year. Stop it now." It rose, and it died. The next year, what did they get? The next year, the British organized religious riots, vast religious riots, which resulted in the partition of India, into India and Pakistan.
This is the kind of thing you're dealing with, in dealing with the British Empire and so forth. This is what we're against. And if we don't have the sense of this, we get into this problem.
Now, Keynes was a part of this. Keynes was an evil bastard. Look, in the 1930s, he wrote the first edition of his General Theory. This is in the 1930s. The first edition of his General Theory had a German translation, had a preface written by Keynes, saying that the reason he had published his General Theory in Hitler's Germany, was he thought Germany, at that time, had economic tendencies more favorable to his book than English-language audiences would have. Keynes was a fascist.
Now Roosevelt knew this, and understood it, and Roosevelt campaigned at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire, to eliminate Keynes as a factor. So Keynes, essentially, was out of it, and White and company were actually following the instructions and opinion of President Franklin Roosevelt, who made clear what his postwar intentions were.
But, unfortunately, conveniently for the enemy, Roosevelt had died in the meantime. So that Spring, on April 12 [1945], when Roosevelt died, things changed. On April 13, Truman was President, and the British were running the joint under Winston Churchill. And the first sign, clear sign of this, was, Keynes was reestablished immediately. What Roosevelt had proposed distinctly was a fixed-exchange-rate credit system, not a monetary system. So what we got again was a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, which then became Keynesian. And everybody who's an economist, who likes to get fed as an economist, will generally kiss butt and praise Keynes, because that's still fashionable. But Keynes was a fascist. He was a very evil fellow, sharp but evil. And to this day, that's a problem.
Now, the reason that's a problem is because of the ignorance in our universities. We have, in our university system, a certain toleration for garbage. It's an academic disease. And therefore, if your colleagues in university feel very strongly about something, and if the people who fund the universities are inclined to the Wall Street persuasion, then, anyone who knows that Keynes is a bum, is going to hesitate to say so. They may say so in a very roundabout way—you know, the usual kind of academic gibberish—but they're not going to say it straight up. And the problem is, I find people in Europe, the same thing: the Keynesian system. They all believe in this Keynesian system, which is nothing but imperialism.
It means, it always has meant, and it's meant in European maritime culture, ever since the Peloponnesian War, that you have a power—and this was true of the Persian Empire, in the same way—an empire is based on what's called the oligarchical principle. It's what it was called by the Greeks, and that means that a financial oligarchy, or a financially powerful oligarchy, runs society. It runs society by controlling the valuation of what is called money. Governments do not control money—not governments in the sense of republics. Self-governments by people are not allowed to control money. Money is controlled by an agency which is imperial. The meaning of empire is that. It's the control of a monetary system which is tyranny over trade.
Now, what happened that was peculiar about European culture, is that the defeat of the Persian Empire, at least its defeated attempt to take over the Mediterranean, meant that the Greeks were in the position to define a maritime culture as a hegemonic culture, together with Egypt. But what happened essentially was that Darius started the Peloponnesian War, so the Greeks got into a war with each other over who's going to control the value of money, between the mercantile cities of Athens, Corinth, and of Syracuse. And they destroyed themselves. And then, gradually, you get an empire by an agreement between this cult of Mithra and the candidate for the Emperor of Rome, and the Roman system which is an empire.
What is the empire? The empire is the control over the system of money! That's what it really was, and the empire will take different peoples, which are called different national groups, and they will pit them against each other in wars, local wars and killing.
For example, the Romans killed off a German population, as it was known as the German population of that period. They conducted wars among peoples as a way of controlling society. What happened in the Seven Years War, when the British got themselves an empire; what happened in the Napoleonic Wars, is, wars among nations on the continent of Europe, were means by which an empire was created. Not just by military force, but by use of warfare and similar kinds of conflict, among people; and they would weaken themselves by fighting each other, and the Empire would rule them.
And the money system works the same way: Who controls the value of trade? Look what's happened to us now! No nation on this planet, no large nation on this planet, has food sovereignty. What has happened through globalization is that every nation on this planet—if you have food, you sell it to your neighbor. If you want to eat food, you buy your neighbor's product; and the middleman, the monetarist, in the meantime, like Monsanto, controls the trade.
No longer do we have food security of any nation on this planet. We are the victims now of an international financial cartel, which controls the supply of food for every nation. You produce food, you produce it for another nation, sold through a middleman. You will find that the policies are to reduce every element of food sufficiency of every nation on this planet. And that is the Keynesian system.
And the fact that you get a fair trade, so-called, from an arbiter who says who lives and dies—well, we have an arbiter. We have a fair system. We have an arbiter who makes sure that we don't cheat on each other. But the arbiter cheats on both, like Monsanto, on food supply. And that's what the Keynesian system amounts to. It's an imperial system. We understood this when our republic was founded. Our Constitution prescribes we have a credit system. No credit can be issued except by the Federal government, by an act of Congress. The Federal government, except emergency grants which can be passed by some resolution by the Congress. We do not allow an international money system to control us.
What we do is, by treaty agreements among nations, we let each nation have its own credit system, but we make agreements among nations, among credit systems, for a fixed-exchange-rate credit system. We make treaty agreements by the sovereign power of the Federal government, by the Presidency. We make sovereign agreements with other sovereigns on trade agreements, on credit agreements. But the power over the society never passes to any agency above the rank of government, of sovereign government.
And what we have, is we have an un-sovereign system, which Keynes represents, an un-sovereign system of swindles, by which we're deprived of our sovereignty. We say we're free and independent people. We aren't. You don't even control the food you eat. Your own country doesn't control whether you live or die of starvation, because of what has happened in the recent period. That's what the problem is.
Blue-Collar Workers: The Real Intellectuals
Freeman: The next question comes from a member of Congress; you'll recognize who the question is from. He says, "Lyn, after your last webcast, I took up your proposal—which you mentioned again today—for job training for young people, and the particular way that you situated it. I thought it was a brilliant proposal, and one that directly addressed what has been in the ongoing discussion, both in the Democratic and Congressional Black Caucus, on job creation. So I happily raised it after a detailed discussion preparing for that, and I have to tell you, I was completely astounded to find that there was tremendous opposition. The argument being"—and what he says is that the opposition came especially from the Black Caucus, which said that we don't want those kinds of jobs. The Congressman says:
"I don't know what kind of jobs they want. Is the proposal to take young people and stick them in brokerage seats? But I wanted to make sure you were aware of this, and I was wondering if you would comment on it, because I'm at a loss as to what would provoke this, and of how I should address it."
LaRouche: You've got a certain kind of cultishness that goes on, and especially—it's just exactly that. Some people will say "I feel degraded, if I have to do work with my hands. I'm an intellectual." Now, a person who would say that is not much of an intellectual, because one should know that the wealth of the world depends upon production, which is largely physical production, or services such as health care. That the only thing, intellectually, which is of much value, is those ideas, the development of those professional and similar ideas, of discovery, which enable us to improve physical production.
For example, you have a hierarchy in manufacturing. You have people who come in on the lower end in manufacturing, and in a decent society, they will advance by pushing themselves to advance, through greater skill and greater authority. They will eventually become in a supervisory position, and the best supervisory position from the standpoint of productivity, is the scientist, or a skilled machine-tool-design specialist. That's the highest level.
All the things, the miracles, that we have done, in terms of building our own economy, have been based on physical science, to some degree intellectual things that pertain to physical science or health care, and to the things that go into machine-tool design. The superiority of the United States and to some degree Germany, in economy, has always been based on that consideration. On physical production, of food, improvement of food, improvement of production, increase in the productive powers of labor, breakthroughs in chemistry, in physical chemistry, these kinds of things. And that's what we need.
Therefore, the question is: What's the priority? The priority has to be people who are relevant to this process. We have a world full of hungry people. We have a nation full of desperately hungry people who don't have physical employment. They don't have it. They're thrown out of their homes. They're on the streets, the country's going to hell, we're running shortages of all kinds. We need more physicians in practice, we need more nurses in practice, and they're cutting it. They're cutting off the access to it. There is no possible way one can deprecate the importance of a scientifically trained or otherwise highly skilled blue-collar worker. The best people in the world, the most productive people in the world, are blue-collar workers, such as astronauts.
A National Campaign for the Congress
Freeman: The last question that I'm going to ask is a kind of composite question, that has come in from both supporters around the country, and also from many people who are full-time organizers. Everyone is extremely happy about the three Congressional candidates that Harley introduced this afternoon, but the question that comes up, is basically this: Our organizers say, Lyn, over the course of the last immediate period, especially since the last webcast, we get more and more questions from our supporters—and they're serious questions—from people who are saying, specifically, what does Lyn want us to do, what does Lyn want me to do?
Several supporters have written in saying, while I understand that LPAC's resources may be limited, there are Congressional seats all over the country, as well as Senate seats, where citizens simply have to file to run. There are no petition requirements, and there are only minimal filing fees. The question that is coming in is: Should we put out a call for citizen candidates to challenge these jokers in Washington, number one, using your program and policy as a platform; and, if not, can you please tell us specifically what it is we should do in the immediate days ahead?"
LaRouche: Mankind is distinguished from the animals by ideas. Animals do not have ideas. Men and women should. It's too bad our President doesn't have any ideas. He should.
Now, the campaign policy, our policy, as I've tried to emphasize to people who have gone into this business, the first thing is the quality of the way you organize your campaign. That's the first thing. Quality means, first of all, principle.
Now, the mistake in U.S. politics, particularly in a time of crisis, is the tendency to look at mass organizing as being something different in each area. Now, it's desirable to have something in each area, of course. But the crucial thing is, not to have everybody have their opinion, but to try to achieve—which is the goal of humanity, I presume?—is to have useful ideas and ideas that are coherent, and that are going to be effective. So you want to sort out the idea policy. That's the first thing, the first problem that comes to mind, especially, in a time of crisis like this, in having everybody run, which is good, but it's not necessarily very good.
The question is to decide on what kind of conception we're going to present, and is it going to be a national conception, or is it going to be a heterogeneous collection of various conceptions? What we did in the case of the three candidacies which were presented to you today, was to define a national campaign for the Congress. The idea is what should take over the Congress in terms of thinking about national policy and priorities, now. Therefore, what we want to have and must have, is a body of people elected, either as a majority, or a very large minority speaking, which is able to walk into the Congress and say, "Here is our faction's national policy."
Now, some people say we have that in the form of party organization, but I can tell you there's no such thing as coherence in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The reason they make such lousy agreements is because they're intrinsically disagreements: "I'll support you on this if you'll support me on that. I'll swindle guys out of this and you'll swindle them out of that." Go along to get along. Which means no principles are involved. Just "go along to get along." We all know how one hand rubs another. That's the way it's gone.
What we need is actually a sense, a consensus sense, of what is required for this nation, as a nation, at this time. The Congress must be regarded as an institution which informs the Presidency, and sometimes informs the Presidency in very strong terms, very influential terms. And that's right. That's the way the Constitution is designed.
But both parties, the Houses of the Congress, and the Presidency otherwise, are part of the Presidential institution. And the object is to come to a conclusion on what we're going to do now, or at least a good approximation, to deal with what the national problem is.
And therefore, if we're going to deliberate on selection of candidates, shouldn't we deliberate on that? Don't deliberate on how to go along to go along, to get along! Let's say the issue is, we want to make the right choice for our Presidency in this current Congressional election period. We're concerned about the issue for the nation, and we consider the relationship between the Presidency and the Congress—and the Supreme Court hopefully is all right—which is going to converge on this question.
And the vote, whatever happens, should therefore be posed, what does this nation need? And the Congress and the Executive branch must deliberate that question. It's not sharing—"you get a bit of this and you get a bit of that"—that's the idea that's used, but that's what destroys us. Because what happens is, we get into a situation as we do often: The Congress is a mess. There's no clear idea carried into action by the Congress. The Executive branch is a mess. And the problem is there. And none of this stuff that we're discussing in these terms corresponds with the national issue.
The problem of government is essentially equivalent to a scientific problem, and solving a scientific problem. We have a challenge before us: The next step. Where are we going from here? What's the right choice?
So, we have to achieve a national consensus. We achieve it in our system, essentially, by the population gathered around people who are running for office, or in office, in the Executive branch, in the Legislative branch, in the Judicial branch, and we're trying to solve a common problem by debating it among ourselves. We're trying to define interests which will meet and raise this issue of conflict. What is the right policy for our nation? And our system will work when it's treated that way. But when you treat it as a sea of confusion—"I'm running on this issue, I'm running on that issue," and so forth. No. There has to be a principled issue.
The principled issue is: What does this nation need? And you have a lot of other issues to discuss, some of them in particular. But the particular issues should be discussed from the standpoint of first defining what the national purpose is. The national purpose first, then the subsidiary issues. Not the other way around. When you get the other way around, you get the wheeling and dealing, and you're sold out.
How many times have people voted for a candidate and looked at the result of the election, and said they were sold out? Why? Because we have to, as individuals—if you want to be a politician, a good politician, a good statesman, you have to take the concern of the world and of our nation into heart. You have to be concerned about our nation and the world first! What's good for the world? What's good for our nation? Then, what should we do about that? And reach a consensus on what's good for this nation, what's good for the world, what do we do about that? And having decided that that's what is good, how do we implement that?
Now everybody chimes in—you each get your turn. You each make your own proposal—well, I've got a problem in this area. I've got a problem in this area. Now that we're agreed that the national issue is this, or the regional issue is this, how do we handle this particular problem? And then a candidate has to deal with that particular problem, representing the people in that area.
But the primary thing is the national policy. The candidate must think about the nation, first. And then apply, once there's a policy for the nation, now, given that fact, that that's what the nation needs, how do I deal, then, with what's needed here? How do I deal with even a simple thing like the question of justice, of a Congressman intervening, to try to have an injustice corrected? That simple.
But you have to start from the top, not from the bottom up. And we're told that we have democracy as long as we stick to bottom-up approaches. You know, "The firemen in this district have a problem. The fireplug was put in the wrong place. We're running on the issue of where that fireplug belongs." That's the kind of problem I see, and I see that in our political problem. We think small. We think stupid. And the people, who aren't actually stupid, think stupid when they go into politics. They say, "We're small, we think about the individual"—this kind of thing. "We like anarchy." And they do. But they don't like the result of it! And therefore, we have to remind them, that anarchy is not a good idea.
There is such a thing as individual right, individual preference, individual opportunity. But you can not provide them those things, unless you are concerned with the mother of all good things, which is the national and global policy; of relationship among nations, how should nations relate to each other, now? That should determine how you define national policy. How you define national policy comes down the layers. How do you now deal with this problem, and that problem? And the general idea of what is justice, and the idea of what is justice, is what do you think a human being is? What do you think the difference between a human being and an animal is? Or the requirements of a human being, as opposed to an animal?
We think small. We don't think scientifically. We don't think artistically. Our art stinks, and our thinking stinks, and our science stinks! And these are things we've got to fix.
Thank you.
