This transcript appears in the March 18, 2011 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Dialogue with LaRouche

[PDF version of entire webcast transcript]

[The transcript of Lyndon LaRouche's opening address, which preceded the dialogue period below.]

Freeman: Before we move on to questions, although I've had the opportunity to do so privately, I'd like to now, publicly, extend the warm congratulations of LaRouchePAC, to Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin, for their very significant victory.

I had the opportunity to meet Gerry Adams for the first time some years ago, when President Clinton reversed what had been a previously insane policy, and brought Mr. Adams to the United States. I was very impressed with him, then—and that's no small thing, because the last person I was impressed with was Lyn, and I've been with him ever since! But, as impressed as I was, at that time, I have to say, I have never been more impressed, than I was at the manner in which both he and his party conducted themselves, during the course of what was an extremely difficult electoral campaign. And I think it provides a real lesson, for republicans everywhere.

I would like to introduce Matthew Ogden, from LPAC's editorial staff. Matthew is one of the leaders of the editorial staff, and he is going to share with you, some of the remarks that Mr. Adams made, on that occasion.

Matthew Ogden: Just so people know, and as Debbie just mentioned, Sinn Féin won a very significant victory in the Feb. 25 election, tripling their seats in the Dáil [lower house of parliament]. The formerly ruling party, the Fianna Fail, was completely decimated. And now that Labour has joined a coalition with Fine Gael, Sinn Féin stands as the only opposition party in the Dáil. And Gerry Adams, who resigned his seat in the Northern Ireland Parliament, to come down to the South, and lead a full slate of candidates in the elections there, Sinn Féin candidates, received 22% of the vote in his constituency in County Louth, and ranked as one of the very top vote-getters in the entire country, out of any candidate, in any party, in the entire election. So, that's a true mandate.

And as Debbie mentioned, yesterday, in the opening session of the Dáil, Gerry Adams delivered an historic inaugural speech, which Mr. LaRouche has asked me to read a few excerpts of, for you today. And I'd encourage you to read the full speech, or to watch it.[1] But I just want to give you a few selections to give you just a gist. Oh, and much of it is in Irish, but I will only read you the English portions.

"Sinn Féin is an Irish republican party. Our primary political goal is a United Ireland.

"Our focus in the new Dáil will be to advance this goal and to deliver on our manifesto to the very best of our ability and to hold the government to account....

"Sinn Féin is part of a proud continuum of struggle for a real republic, for freedom and equality, and against oppression which goes back to 1916 and beyond.

"The economic oppression suffered by citizens under a native government in these times is as unacceptable as that visited upon us by foreign governments in past times. This must be stopped.

"The Fine Gael and Labour program is a far cry from the Democratic Program of the 1st Dáil in 1919.

"That document declared that sovereignty extends, 'not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation's soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation'....

"Sinn Féin will demand that this new Government hold a referendum on the banking bailout....

"Citizens are looking for a new kind of politics, a politics which empowers and includes them, a politics that does not pander to the elites and to the greedy, and seeks to build a new kind of Ireland. It means making a stand for Ireland, standing up for our people, standing up for our country.

"I am calling on citizens, to make a stand for themselves, for their neighbors, for their communities, for the vulnerable, and for the disadvantaged....

"This is a time for active citizenship, for democratically and peacefully asserting our rights as citizens.

"There is no more important time; there's no more relevant time than this for republican politics and core republican values.

"The people of this island are no mean people.

"We live in a great country.

"There is a genius, a brilliance, a wisdom and culture, history and tradition in our communities....

"The Taoiseach [prime minister] talks about recreating our proud Republic. That means, Taoiseach, giving expression to the words of the Easter Proclamation of 1916, and the democratic program of the first Dáil, which demanded freedom, equality, inclusivity, sovereignty, and the empowerment of all citizens.

"Change never comes easily....

"Those of us who stand by the Republic, the real Republic, a new truly National Republic, will have our work cut out in this institution.

"But, out there, despite the distress, there is a vitality which cannot be extinguished.

"The Irish people may be bruised, but we are not beaten.

"And so, my friends, there is hope. And because of that, everything is possible."

Vernadsky and his Legacy

Freeman: Thank you, Matt.

I'll start with a question from Pavlo Viknyanski, who is the leader of the Student Republic Movement in Ukraine. They recently completed their Winter Student Republic event. It was called "Teams for the Future," and I understand that the participants were able to watch a video message from Peter Martinson of the LPAC Basement team, which combined a strategic briefing, with a more in-depth discussion of strategic method.[2]

Pavlo asks Lyn—he's interested in the fact that the title of the event was "Ireland & America," and he says, "People here often compare our country with Ireland, because of parallels between the colonial history of Ireland with Britain, and of Ukraine with Russia. In that context, Mr. LaRouche, how do you see the possibility of a more free development of Ukraine as a nation-state, in a community of equal nations, considering that we have such a powerful neighbor, who is not always completely interested in the fair and just development of Ukraine?"

LaRouche: Well, my first answer on that question is, let's unite around Vernadsky and his legacy. Because Vernadsky is an embodiment of both the best of Russia, and of Ukraine, both. And he was impassioned, though he was Russian in terms of sense of nation, in passion, he was also much more moved by Ukraine. So that that's the character of the situation.

The prospects: We have to look at these things, not as eligibility of nations, as such, for priorities in these matters. What we have to do, without which nothing will work, is to bring about a sudden new order of cooperation among nations at this time. I'm talking not about some distant future thing; I'm talking about a general upheaval, which is now in progress, whose successful outcome, if it were successful, would be a simultaneity of a change, which had been intended by Franklin Roosevelt, in particular, in his approach to the postwar period, during World War II.

Unfortunately he died, and a British butt-kisser, shall we say, Truman, took over and turned everything over to Churchill. So you had a great reversal of the policies of the United States, as they had been under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a true representative of his own ancestry; his ancestor Isaac Roosevelt, for example, who had founded the Bank of New York, and been a close collaborator of our first great Treasury Secretary [Alexander Hamilton]. So that, we have come to a point where there is a general breakdown crisis of the planet. The crisis is rather complicated, but let me outline it in a few rather elementary features.

First of all, the entire planet is going down the bucket, as of now. Now, you would say the situation in China is somewhat more stable than in Europe or South America, or even the United States. You would say that India, while not like China, is a very large nation with very powerful resources, and a great number of very, very poor people, which represents a great problem. But despite the fact that these nations of Asia are not immediately presently caught up in the problems which face the European sector generally, and the trans-Atlantic sector, does not mean that they would survive what is now a threatened immediate collapse, chain-reaction collapse of the entire world financial monetary system, centered in the trans-Atlantic region.

If the United States goes down, as it could very easily now—the British Empire is already doomed to go down—and if the United States doesn't go down first, the British Empire will carry the world down first, itself. Because the British system, which is an imperialist system, a monetarist system, is itself hopelessly bankrupt. And the British system of banking, which is Jacob Rothschild's creation, the Inter-Alpha Group, has a bad bank subsidiary called the BRIC. Russia now depends, under ministers such as Kudrin and so forth, on the BRIC. The BRIC is the lodestone around the neck of Russia.

So, the survival of Russia has a great deal of bearing on the survival of Ukraine, because Ukraine depends very much on its relationship to Russia, and when the relations between Ukraine and Russia are bad—they don't have to be integrated—but when the relations are good, and scientifically oriented, you have a good situation for Russia and for Ukraine.

But this depends upon the situation in the trans-Atlantic region, because the British Empire—which is what the BRIC is controlled by—this empire is going down. This empire can not survive. It is already doomed; its prospects are hopeless. The British system, the Inter-Alpha Group, is hopelessly bankrupt, and is existing by sucking the blood of neighboring nations such as Ireland. The Irish debt is largely to these institutions, which is a great bloodsucker which is going down now. On what date it is going down is uncertain; but it is hopelessly doomed. And under the present policies of the British Empire, there's no succor for it; it's finished.

So, the world is now faced with a global situation, where you can not pick and choose one part of the world by itself, and say, this part of the world is going to do this in its sovereign way—nonsense! You have to have an international view. The international view has to be a moral view, as well as a technologically and scientifically sound one. And I think, if the crisis we're going through now, the rate of increase of hyperinflation, and the looting of the food supplies upon which the existence of the present human population depends, is accelerating at such a rate, that I don't think that the present governments of the United Kingdom and the United States could outlive this present year, without a great catastrophe.

And when you say that the British Empire is going down—and the British Empire which controls pretty much all of Europe, and Russia and Ukraine—the fate of Ukraine and Russia is controlled by the British interest. Either through the British influence directly, or the British bad bank, which is the BRIC, which is what controls Russia.

Now, to me this is not a problem; that is, if I have the power to do it, I know exactly what to do, and I could let this bankruptcy go; it's called a Glass-Steagall standard. All banking practices which do not conform to a Glass-Steagall standard, which is in the U.S. Constitution actually, are simply going to be wiped off the books. Because it will be returned to the banks, like the New York banks and the London banks, and say "Well, these are your assets and these are your losses. Eat them! Because we don't need you anymore. We never really did need you."

We can, under government law, we can establish a Federal banking system, or similar thing, in every country. We can also bring these countries together under a common fixed-exchange-rate agreement among their respective currencies. And that is necessary because the great tasks which we have to perform are not simply the recovery tasks.

We have a planet, and the characteristic of this planet is that we use certain resources for mankind. The degree of development of resources requires increases; there is no such thing as a fixed standard, or a society that can exist in perpetuity without any changes. The changes have to be increases in the power of productivity of mankind. And the resources become relatively depleted, so man's power must increase more than the depletion of resources we use. The means for doing this are all there; in science, it's all there. We use a science-driver program, which raises what I call the platforms of economy, on which economies depend. And simply go ahead and invest.

The Great NAWAPA Project

For example, we have a great project—the NAWAPA project—the North American Water and Power Alliance. This system would change the character of the territory of North America, from Canada, Alaska, the main body of the United States, and down into northern Mexico; and would spread its influence. The project is far greater than any of the projects in China. The water project alone involved in this is greater than the Three Gorges Dam, as a project—far greater. And these kinds of projects are based largely on the use of nuclear power and thermonuclear fusion power, and beyond, and will give mankind the ability to change our destiny on this planet, beginning now, at any time we choose.

What we need to do is trash this present system. Simply re-establish the concept of sovereign nation-states—no more empires, no more such things as the euro alliance, which is a desperate effort. Then, take our scientific knowledge and what we can develop. We can develop projects which will perform what people today would consider miracles. We're involved in the investigation of these kinds of things now. In the Basement, for example, what people have flinched away from for a long time: that life on Earth has been conditioned by the characteristics of a galaxy, the galaxy to which we are attached. The galaxy is not a stranger out there; the galaxy is what our Solar System is sort of a pygmy attached to. And life on Earth has been shaped by the influence of processes within the galaxy.

That is, the pattern of life on Earth is developed, is governed by these kinds of principles. These principles are accessible. We can transform the Earth into a beautiful place—forever. But this would mean we would also be reaching out into other parts of the Solar System and beyond, to exert an influence from Earth, which is necessary for us to exert, in order to protect life on Earth.

This requires, among other things, an emphasis on the language cultures of peoples, because it is only in the language cultures of people that the history of their ideas can be preserved. And therefore, they may have equality in other respects, but they have to translate that equality into their language culture, which is not just the language, but the language culture. So, they have to express, in terms of the children coming up—what's the language culture of the children? You want the whole society, and its children, to participate in this thing, but you have a unity of a sense of mankind of different cultures, same intention, same mission, same principle, but according to what our cultures let us do.

So you need the independence of the respective cultures as independent societies, but you need also the cooperation among them, in the form of a fixed-exchange-rate system among nations. We need then cooperation among these nations in the great projects which define the foundations for the future of all mankind, as benefits for each part of mankind.

And it's that kind of approach, which I believe now is within immediate reach, and placed in reach by what we've seen as the mass strike movement. The mass strike movement as being an assertion of principled ideas as to the nature of mankind, which we have seen spreading out from deep in the Arab world, throughout North Africa, throughout Europe, throughout the United States, and, we know, below our borders. That this movement, if it gains the authority which it deserves, in reshaping the practices of nations and among nations, will provide us with the opportunity, with the scientific potential which I know presently exists—on which we are working, precisely this—means that we can create, as if in an instant, as Franklin Roosevelt had intended, had he not died when he did, to reorganize the world. To bring the nations of the world together under a fixed-exchange-rate system, to start to rebuild this world, and rebuild the nations within this world, as a cooperative body under a fixed-exchange-rate system.

I think what's happening now, is that the terrible conditions which inflict us, the threats against society, the hopelessness of these threats, give man no choice but to reach out to those ideas which represent a safe haven in the future. I think that's an immediate thing, not a long-term thing. What we need to make is not a reform; we need to make a revolution. And that's the revolution.

In that case, then, the present problems of Ukraine and Russia—whoosh—gone. But we can still talk about it.

Without Glass-Steagall, Mexico Is Doomed

Freeman: The next question comes from a great nation to our south; it comes from Mexico. The questioner is a Mexican Senator, Alfonso Elias Serrano, from Sonora, who recently spoke at a LYM [LaRouche Youth Movement] event in the Mexican Congress on NAWAPA and the PLHINO [Northwest Hydraulic Plan for Mexico]. And he says

"Next year, we Mexicans will elect 500 Congressmen, 128 Senators, and the President of the Republic. With about a year to go before the political campaigns begin, there is a lot of talk about who the candidates will be, but little discussion about the vision and the projects that the country needs in the future. Therefore, I would like to ask you:

"Leaving aside parties and personalities, what do you believe are the central themes the candidates should focus on in 2012? What are the public policies which the candidates should address in their campaigns, in order to increase investment and employment in the country? And finally, what changes should the candidates promote in the political, trade, and economic relationship between Mexico and the United States?"

LaRouche: My policies for Mexico have not changed significantly since my discussions of these matters with the then-President [José] López Portillo. And the program which we had discussed with López Portillo, and with the leading members of the PRI in particular at that time, are the same program we need today.

What López Portillo was planning to do, was first of all, to commit Mexico to developing ten nuclear reactors for the purpose of changing the character of the territory of Mexico. That is, not only to supply power inwardly, but to supply sufficient levels of power that the virtually uninhabitable, for productive reasons, the coastal areas of Mexico, could be made habitable, if we had enough engineering in terms of nuclear power, to make these coastal regions functionally habitable by the people. And if we develop the systems to bring water into the heart of northern Mexico, to enable agriculture to flourish in an area which is largely desert. And at that point, if that had been allowed to go ahead, as López Portillo was actually implementing it, in August and September of that year, it would have succeeded.

This was crushed by a British initiative which enlisted the support of the government of the United States. Mexico was crushed by British direction, in which the American figure, key American, was Henry Kissinger, who played a key role in this process of butchering Mexico. Mexico is now afflicted with a great drug problem; a loss of lots of things which were destroyed in the period since then, since September that year, the destruction—1982 on—the destruction of the people and culture of Mexico is that.

What we have is a few people who are either my age, or somewhat younger, who were significant figures in their potential in Mexico back in '82. These people represent the seeds of re-creation of what the intention to Mexico should be. And we had then, the prospect of an alliance—until it was broken up—in which I designed this program of recovery to extend throughout Central and South America, which I thought was the proper mission of the United States to assist in making this possible. It was to bring together—we had three Presidents, or three leaders—the President of Mexico, the President of Brazil, and the honcho of Argentina at the same time. These three Presidents, or equivalent, had agreed on a mission orientation of this type, and it was great outside pressure, led by the British Empire, with complicity by people in the United States, to crush these developments.

And therefore, I don't say we can go back to the past; we can't. But we can take our experience from the past, knowing what was right then, and judging how we can do that which was right then, now, under present circumstances.

My view, now, is that the development of Mexico depends upon the immediate installation of a great reform in the United States. And the reform is as follows: By implementing what is called the Glass-Steagall reform, which is absolutely essential to anything good ever happening to Mexico, within the foreseeable future—without the Glass-Steagall reform, Mexico is doomed; there's nothing you can do about it. The Glass-Steagall measure must go through! The Glass-Steagall measure would take all those junk debts, those approximately $15 trillion of junk debt, accumulated by criminals since a few years ago, since 2008. That junk debt, by the simple enactment of Glass-Steagall, which is a law which implements a principle of our Federal Constitution, would take all that junk debt and say, "Buddy, it's all yours! It's not ours."

Now, what that means is, we would go back to a fixed-exchange-rate system in principle; that is, we would go back to a Roosevelt standard, Franklin Roosevelt standard, which he had intended for the postwar period. And that would be the system we would operate under. We would proffer to nations of Europe, and other nations, cooperation on behalf of that kind of reform among nations, as relations among nations. China would be happy to have that agreement. India would probably be happy, with some qualifications, with that arrangement; other nations. It would save Western Europe.

Take Germany as an example of how this works. Germany is not a nation which is known for its natural resources as such, such as mineral resources. It depends upon other countries. Well, there are areas in South America, there are areas in Africa we can develop. We have a project for the Lake Chad area, to rebuild it, a European project, with the aid of nuclear power. We can bring the excess water from the Congo, which is just going into the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic. People in the Congo will never miss it; it's going out to the sea anyway. We take some of that water, we take it over the mountains into the area of the northern part of Africa, into the Lake Chad area, which is a natural lake. We pump this stuff over there, and suddenly you have changed the character of the nation of Chad by this kind of project, with a combination of nuclear power and engineering of water projects. It's true throughout much of the world.

In the case of Mexico, the NAWAPA project, which would, if installed—and it would be installed under the Glass-Steagall reform—that project would create immediately, directly, 4 million jobs in the United States. These are largely, more or less, high-skilled jobs; these are high-skilled engineering projects. However, to support that project, which involves 4 million people, according to the engineering study done for it, would take 3 million more people, from areas such as the area of the United States, from the Atlantic coast and up to Salt Lake City, and along the northern coast, which is the old engineering section of the United States. That section would have to build the railroads, the magnetic-levitation systems, and so forth, which are necessary to build the NAWAPA project, which is one of the greatest engineering projects ever attempted by mankind on this planet.

It would change the character of the climate, the fertility, of the United States. It would be a stimulation to the development of the potentiality of the Siberian section of Russia, which contains a great amount of raw materials underneath very difficult territory, which my friends in the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow know how to deal with. We would develop a Bering Strait tunnel-railway system connection between Alaska and Siberia. The Russians would develop a rail system to connect to the existing rail system, the Trans-Siberian, into this junction point. This would then be used as a device for going into these territories in northern Siberia—a very much unpopulated region—to locate and develop the mineral resources which are desperately needed for the development of countries to the south of Siberia, such as China, and into India. So therefore, a cooperative development of the territory of this part of Asia, with this kind of cooperation, with these kinds of projects, is required for the future of a hungry Asia, among other things.

And this means, again, you're going to enlist the potential, the productive potential of Germany, of other countries in Europe, to participate in this. So what we need is a fixed-exchange-rate credit system based on long-term credit, of a credit-system type, which will enable us to move credit around, from area to area, on support of projects of common interest among nations. That is, we want—and need—the successful development of Siberia for the benefit of people south of Siberia. We will have to supply some of the facilities to assist Russia in doing its part in that job, and other nations. And assisting China by a more free attitude on technology with China, so they can do these things.

We have to do the same thing with South America; we have to do the same thing with Mexico; the same kind of system. We need a global understanding of the kind that Franklin Roosevelt was struggling to define at the time he died, for the postwar period. We need a global system, which, as de Gaulle said later, a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. We need a system of sovereign nations around the world, which are cooperating in a fixed-exchange-rate credit system, not a monetarist system, but a credit system, in order for the mission orientation of developing those projects which are, indeed, the common aims of mankind.

We have different languages, we have different cultures, but for mankind as a species, we have a common aim. And it's the common aim that reaches beyond Earth itself, into what we can do in our neighboring territory of the Solar System. You know, several billion years from now, the Sun's going to be intolerable, we can't live here anymore. So, we better do something about that now, while we still have the time left to take that job on. You probably have to build a new Ireland somewhere out there in space; but that's not a big problem—somewhere in the galaxy.

But, it's that kind of mission orientation, which must be shared among the thoughtful representatives of leadership of various nations. That commitment to those kinds of projects and intentions, which we can physically put into effect immediately. We can not put the benefits entirely into effect immediately, but we can put the commitment and the starting of the program into effect immediately. A change within the relations among the peoples of mankind, based on the sovereign nation-state and its culture, and cooperation with the common aims of mankind.

And that's not really so difficult; it's not so difficult. It's getting the old system out of the way that's the problem, including the British Empire. And we've been dominated by Roman-style European empires ever since the future emperor, Caesar, was having a strange relationship on the Isle of Capri with the cult based on the old Persian cult, and they created an empire, which is an empire of monetarism. And the way the monetarist system worked, as it still does today, as the British Empire still works today, it works by killing off, assassinating, abusing, doing similar things, to various nations which are caught within the orbit of that empire.

The empire is a monetarist system, which imposes the rule by money, control by an empire, a monetarist system. A rule of money over nations and peoples. And the use of the rule of money to control, and even to destroy, people who become subjects of that rule of money. We have to create a worldwide credit system among nations, in which the states create credit for those projects which are necessary for their own peoples, or for assistance of another people. And by basing the credit on what is feasible, scientifically and otherwise, we no longer gamble on profits; we now invest in the development of mankind, and the encouragement of those people who are able to show that they are capable of making a contribution to these necessary scientific and other benefits for mankind. But we have to have the idea of the sovereignty of the nation-state, the sovereignty of the people.

And the case of Mexico is exactly that. If we in the United States adopt the right policy, and we have agreement among nations in our neighborhood, we could immediately return to the intention, which was my commitment, with President López Portillo of Mexico, and other leaders of South America and so forth at that time. We can do it. The job is more difficult now than then because so much ruin has happened, including the abuse and conditions of life of the people. The Mexican people are not in as good condition as they were back in 1982. They've lost a lot. We're going to have to fix it, and that's going to take some time; but we can start the fixing right away.

How To Finance Public Works

Freeman: We have two questions that have been submitted. One from Italy, from Dr. Marcello Vichi, who was the author of the original Transaqua project. And ironically, an almost identical question submitted by Manuel Frias of Mexico, who is one of Mexico's leading water experts, and someone who has been a very active proponent of NAWAPA and the PLHINO. And what both of them are addressing is the fallacy of attempting to apply cost-benefit analysis to such great projects. I'm going to go with Dr. Frias' question simply because it's a better translation.

He writes,

"I congratulate you for your broad knowledge and accurate vision and forecasts of world economic events.

"With regard to the important, ambitious, and necessary projects NAWAPA and PLHINO of the 21st Century, when they are presented in forums and interviews in my country, the question always arises: How will these important public works be financed? I would like your view about the answer that I give:

"If everything in the Universe and Nature evolves toward perfection, that which is created by humanity must be brought into concordance with universal natural laws and processes. With all the money issued under the economic theories of mercantile-monetary idolatry, you cannot produce a single drop of water, a milliliter of air, a ray of light, or a liter of petroleum. Only man is dedicated to exploiting resources, to achieve high levels of welfare and development....

"Do you agree that what is of greatest value in a country is not money, but resources and natural wealth magnified by the productive work and creativity of its inhabitants? Do you agree that economy must be at the service of humanity, and not—as happens today—the other way around?"

LaRouche: Well, in general, that's a fine sentiment. Let's be more concrete, because it's often in the detail that you lose the cause. In this case, what we've got to use, introduce, is a concept which I've insisted upon in recent years: is to eliminate these conceptions about individual entrepreneurship. Not that we're against individual entrepreneurship, but the way it's used, misused, by the various freaks of the right wing in Europe and in the United States, and by the British in general, has got to be cancelled. The fact is—let's take the case which I use often, the case of Charlemagne.

Up until Charlemagne, European civilization as we knew it from around the Mediterranean, was limited largely to a maritime culture. There was an ability to move in, to a certain degree, among the large rivers of Europe and so forth, as into the Nile, and so forth, but there was no real entry of mankind into development of the internal territory of Europe, for example.

What Charlemagne did—and he did a great number of revolutionary things, including, he was probably the first economist known to exist in European history in the way he organized things—but what he did is, he decided not only to develop the utilization of the inland water systems, like the streams and so forth, within European territory, from essentially the Spanish border all the way into near Poland, that area. But he also built a system of canals, which created an internal water management system, which exists as an essential part of the productive potential of Europe to the present day.

Now, Charlemagne, when he died, his area and many of its features were destroyed in the partition of what had been Charlemagne's domain, among three parts then. But Charlemagne set a standard.

For example, we in the United States went first to developing river systems, and added canals. In other words, we were doing essentially then, in moving into the Ohio and toward the Mississippi in our development of the territory of the United States, the same thing that Charlemagne had done. We were developing canals like the Erie Canal, and other canals, and then, when we introduced railroads, beginning with the Reading Railroad, the railroads would move along the banks of canals, of rivers and canals. So it was a more high-speed, more capable and faster means of transportation than you could do by barge, for example, by inland barge.

The change came, essentially, as we approached the middle of the 19th Century—we made a revolution which the British have never forgiven us for. They hate us for many reasons, but this is one of them, one of the big ones. We developed, under Abraham Lincoln, using the Corps of Engineers, which then was really a project coming out of the West Point Academy, and we developed a Transcontinental Railway system for the first time.

Not only did that happen, which the British hated, because that meant we are unifying the territory of the United States as a productive territory, but then our student in Germany—and he was a student of our work through various intermediaries—Prime Minister Bismarck of Germany, made a revolution beginning about 1877, a revolution in Germany, which was the German engineering revolution, and was also the birth of the concept of extending transcontinental railway systems throughout Eurasia.

For that, the British never forgave Germany or us. Because when we develop the inland territory, as we had done with the canal systems and the river systems under Charlemagne, and had imitated that in our initial development of the United States territory; when we had gone to a transcontinental railway system, we could move freight quicker, better, and deeper than any maritime system could ever do. So suddenly, we had strategically outflanked the British Empire, which depended upon control of the oceans, by a transcontinental railway system as a concept: that the territory of nations must be developed through railways, and then going on to a more—. We're now going about things as in China, the speculation of 1,000 miles per hour in a supported environment inside a [vacuum] tube. So you would have people sitting with a controlled atmosphere inside a tube, and they'd be transported from one place to another at 1,000 mph.

Now that beats, I think, any other mode of transportation, available, including flying an airplane. We have one method, which I worked on back in the 1980s, for a better system than the lift system we had for the astronauts, but they never did it. But this is the fastest. This is the fastest. One thousand miles an hour is the best we can do for you, within sight now. And it's going to take some time to get there.

But the point was, this meant the end of the British Empire, the end of some maritime power, a monetarist power, which, combining monetarist power with the physical power of control of ocean freight—that power to control the mass of humanity. And that's what it was. The British Empire depended upon preventing the continent of Europe and North America from developing its internal resources as long as maritime power, combined with the power of money, the control over our system of money internationally, was the control by which we were enslaved. And by freeing us with the transcontinental railway system, we opened the gates. The British Empire is doomed!

And the British immediately went, by firing Bismarck first, which was done by the British monarchy, and that point started us into the war which became first, the alliance of Japan and Britain against China, the alliance with Japan against Russia, and so forth, through all this period, leading into what became known as World War I, were all a project of this British imperialist reaction against the high-speed transportation system, developed as the transcontinental railway system by the intention of Germany, and by the action of Russia in the Trans-Siberian Railway system.

Platforms of Human Development

So this is the principle which we should be attached to today. This is where things lie. We have to understand the strategic problem, and understand that we have to develop these projects among nations, and secondly, we have to understand a more important consideration, which some people call infrastructure—which is a very bad word, because it has connotations which lead people to a practice which is not workable.

What you need is to build a platform—that's why I use the word platform.

For example, mankind's history on this planet, as a civilized mankind, starts with the use of fire. No animal willfully uses fires. If you want to find out what is a human being, look for the signs of fire. Only mankind uses fire as a tool of human culture. Every other living species is terrified as hell by the idea of fire.

So therefore, since we are depleting the concentration of certain natural resources—and what we call natural resources are actually things that were deposited by living processes on this planet in earlier times, before we had a good oxygen atmosphere. So, what happens is, now, when we mine, we are not getting, shall we say, pre-life forms of ores. The ores that we are mining are there because the processes of living processes put them there. So when we come along and use iron, we go to areas in which the iron has been concentrated by the activity of living processes, whose little dead bodies contain this iron, because they fed on iron.

So now you find the area where they're dead, like the Mesabi Range, and you mine this iron where it's concentrated, where these dead creatures left this concentration. That means that when we try to use more iron, we're using less concentrated iron, and it's more costly. Well, we have to increase our productivity.

So we have to use fire, in a sense. We go to higher energy-flux densities. We go from burning wood, to the improvement of charcoal, and up the scale. Up to nuclear power. Up to thermonuclear power. And the destiny of mankind is always to go to these higher stages of power, because the Earth is not a fixed system. The Earth's system is always being changed. We're using things up. Therefore, we have to make up for what we're using, and do more by increasing our productive power, which generally means more fire, or higher forms of fire, more management of the Earth, management of the water systems, management of the growing areas, these things. And so that's the way you have to approach it.

So therefore, what you need, you need a planetary-wide system of cooperation among respectively sovereign nation-states, which cooperate with one another in building up these platforms of higher levels of technology, to compensate for what we're using up, and to go on to other things in space and beyond. And thus, then we base our production not on some jerk who's got a little firm, as such. He's not going to change this society. It's these large-scale developments, which can only be organized by governments, and combinations of governments. We agree to make an improvement in the preconditions for production on this planet, in this nation, in this territory. We share that, because it's in our interest that they progress in this respect, as we do.

And therefore we come to the common aims of mankind, to develop the platform on which production will occur, which means the general technology and so forth, all in one platform. We are raising that platform of productivity, so that man is outracing what he's using up. And therefore nations must cooperate in developing these platforms, and understand that credit for the utilization of these platforms in forms of technology applied to produce things we require, is what we have to do.

So I would make that modification. Don't think just about individual production, or individual territory. Think about a dynamic process, a human process, in a planet where we're using up what we call natural resources, which were left by living creatures before—not something which was infinite, not something which was naturally deposited. It was naturally deposited by dead bodies of living processes. So now we go to higher and higher forms of power, of energy-flux density, as we call it. Higher forms of power. And these higher forms of power and their expression in the management of water, in the management of everything, these things are the platform on which production depends, and the progress of life depends.

And those platforms then provide the basis, which is done by nation-states, not just by individuals but by nation-states, which cooperate with other nation-states in developing these platforms. And then the nation-states, in turn, then have national projects by themselves, or in cooperation with other nations, which are production programs which depend upon this steady progress in raising the level of these platforms. And that's what we have to do.

And so therefore, we need to understand that mankind is a unity. The idea of competition is overdone. The issue of nationhood is not competition. The issue of nationhood is cooperation among people whose culture is different, because you can only develop a people in the culture of its children. So therefore, you must have sovereignty of nations because of the culture of their children. You must then have cooperation among these nations, in common aims of mankind.

Therefore, we need to eliminate the monetarist system, have a fixed-exchange credit system among nations, and then work together on the common aims of mankind, and fostering those things within other nations which we agree is useful for mankind to do. And that's what we need. We need something with much more bite to it than the idea of doing good things. We have to be really revolutionaries.

Britain 'Delenda Est'

Freeman: This is a question from Argentina. It's from the activists of the National and Popular Movement, who are a part of the government coalition of Cristina Kirchner and includes politicians, economists, philosophers, and system analysts from around the country, and they send greetings in these moments so crucial for humanity as a whole, and they compliment Lyn on the fact that he anticipated the mass strike that is currently extending across the globe.

Their question is this, and as I said, it's a similar question that's come from several other countries

"Mr. LaRouche, do you think that a suit by sovereign nations against the IMF and World Bank is a viable idea, since an audit of the debt will prove the fraud which we all know occurred, and which has the potential to take down the most visible side of the Inter-Alpha Group as well as those two institutions? Thank you for your legendary battle against the British Empire, our common enemy and the enemy of all humanity."

LaRouche: Well, the British Empire is something which I intend shall be destroyed.

You don't negotiate with a hole in the road, you fix it! You fill the hole up. The British Empire is not a nation, it's not an interest. It's a disease. And it's a disease for the British. Look at the British when they're walking down the streets in London. They're wider than they are tall! You'd think that instead of walking, they should roll. It's not a good condition of life. I mean, getting that fat is not good. You've got a bad diet. Your brain is probably going to suffer from carrying all that stuff. And I don't see that it's done any good to the British people, the English people in particular. They're more prone to that. The Scots tend to be a bit leaner, but the British tend to be a bit fatter.

So there's no need for this British Empire.

Look, my intention is—and I'm not ashamed of it—is to destroy the British Empire, and to destroy monetarism. Because I think that human beings ought to think like human beings, and not think like creatures of this passion of crazy liberalism. It's immoral. Look what it does: It makes people stupid. It makes them immoral. We don't need liberalism. We should keep a museum for it, but we don't let children into that museum, because we don't want them to see what goes on in that museum of British culture. No, that's the situation, and that's the way we've got to think about these things.

In the case of Argentina, we had some work done, years ago, on that. I was very much interested in what was being done scientifically, in terms of production, and nuclear power, and so forth, in Argentina. And guess what? The usual suspects tried to crush all the good things that were happening in Argentina, which were very progressive. Argentina had one very unfortunate thing—it had no Indians. They killed them. Eliminated them. But the point is, otherwise, the three groups—the Spanish-speaking, the German-speaking, and the Italian-speaking, which were the predominant characteristics of the population of Argentina—had a great propensity for scientific progress. They developed. They also grew a lot of meat, which people around the world were eating. I don't know how they're doing nowadays.

It's a very good country with great potential. We've gone through some of the territory. Down there in Argentina, they've got a territory which is virtually untapped, river systems and everything of the sort you can imagine, which most parts of the world would be delighted to have access to. So I think the Argentines themselves ought to have a chance to have better access to their own territory. That's my view of the thing.

But the point is, we still—this problem is like the other problem we've been discussing here now. The point is, we need a global system of sovereign nation-states, with common aims of mankind, like platforms and things like that. And then a credit system, as opposed to a monetarist system, by which those nations which think something is good, and they can show that it is good, that it's going to work, and show that the thing is going to perform on time, so they're not going to have a bunch of bankruptcies all over the place—these projects should be encouraged and assisted by cooperation among nations, by willing cooperation.

And take a country like Argentina—it has much potential. It has much potential for the realization of science in terms of production. And I think that should be the objective. It also can grow a lot of good meat. We have a lot of hungry people in the world, and I think that they would probably enjoy that. So that's the thing.

It's the same thing that I've said otherwise. Argentina has a very important special place that's unique in its characteristics relative to other countries in South America. It has a history of scientific potential of which there is still a residue left down there, for nuclear power and things like that. And I would think that our objective should be to foster the ability of Argentina to realize these, what are now relics of their promising moments of the past, just as every other nation.

But again, we need a global view, not a fix-it, nation by nation. We need a global view, because we're ruled now by an international monetarist system which is essentially the British Empire; it's a British system which rules us, like fools, because we believe in liberalism. Get rid of that, and decide that national sovereignty and the development of the mind of the children, not the sense-perception of the children, the mind of the children is what's important. If you inspire the minds of our children, you don't have to worry about the sense-perception.

Get away from sense-perception. It's what's killed us, what makes us prisoners of the British system. They bribe us with corruption, offer corruption. "Well, this is going to be a pleasure, don't you know. There's going to be pain. You don't want pain, do you? You want pleasure, don't you? Well, then go along with us. Stop your quibbling. We offer you pleasure. You want to be a prostitute? You can do it, if that gives you pleasure!"

The problem here is the sense of the nation, the sense of mankind, the sense of what the human mind is, and that it's the exercise of these creative powers of the human mind which should be the essential form of our pleasure. The pleasure we experience by receiving discoveries of great ideas, discoveries by our predecessors, and thinking that we're making a contribution, perhaps, to something that will astonish our successors.

And that's what we should do. That attitude of creating a system of sovereign nation-states on this planet based, as President Roosevelt intended, on a credit system, not a monetarist system, promoting a level of platforms of mankind's ability to produce, to meet its own needs, and common aims of mankind for the future. We have to deal with the problems around us, not only on Earth but around Earth. That's a scientific question, but it's there. And that's the way you have to think.

We have to change the idea of competition in the Brutish sense of competition. Competition is fine, as long as it's not Brutish. If competition means we're going to exercise our capabilities to contribute something to humanity, that's fine. That's good competition. Competition in the sense of being destructive, is bad. And we need cooperation. And we need to have respect for what the other fellow's doing. Maybe it's useful to us; maybe we should take a look into it. And I think it's that simple.

I've said it in answer to questions before; I don't think I need to say it again. That's the way to go. A system of sovereign nation-states on this planet, which we should be able to establish immediately, in the course of this present breakdown crisis, when the choice is between the breakdown of the planet and civilization as a whole, or survival. And survival means going to a new system, a credit system based on national sovereignties. Cooperation in a fixed-exchange-rate system among national sovereignties, to develop common platforms, common levels of platform, and common intentions. That's the choice of goals. No conflict. Just do it. The time has come, we should be smart enough to do that.

The Mussolini of Wisconsin

Freeman: I'm going to move on now to questions from the United States. Let me just say that in the wake of last night's events in Wisconsin, we have a lot of questions regarding what occurred there, expressions of outrage, etc. I don't have time to ask all of them. There is one thing that was brought to our attention by a national labor leader who is more thoughtful and more militant than the leadership of the labor movement generally in the United States, and certainly more so than in Wisconsin, so I will take his question and I'm going to go through some others.

Our friend says

"Mr. LaRouche, I think that, ultimately, what occurred in Wisconsin last night is that the truth won out. Governor Walker and the Republican senators proved what we have been saying all along, which is that their actions had absolutely nothing to do with the state budget, and had everything to do with ending collective bargaining for most public sector unions. I think that they made an erroneous assumption that they could cloak their intent to break the unions in the budget negotiations. But, now it is clear that that Emperor has no clothes. The only thing that he has succeeded in doing is what Democrats in Washington and many of my fellow labor officials failed to do, which is, he has successfully mobilized the Democratic base in Wisconsin, and actually across the country. And for that, many people will pay dearly.

"But there is a more important question that I wanted you to comment on, because what is going on in Wisconsin—this attempt to end collective bargaining—is also something which is on the legislative agenda in more than 30 states. It is also coupled, again under the guise of reducing budgets and balancing state budgets, with various pieces of legislation which are now active in 12 states, to reduce the size of state legislatures. This is particularly alarming, because the creation of much larger legislative districts would make it extremely difficult for independents to seek those seats. It would introduce a requirement of large sums of money, and it would also, without question, alienate individuals from access to their legislators—something that state legislators have as a great advantage over members of Congress.

"It is our view that ultimately, this must be looked at as a national effort which is nothing short of an attack on the Constitution, and that, in fact, we saw signs of this earlier in the year, when various Republican members of Congress stood up and attacked the Constitution. In the midst of the crisis that we face today, and the crises that we are to face in the immediate weeks ahead, this is something that I would really like your thoughts on.

"Also, just as a secondary question, looking at the action in Wisconsin, and looking at what I expect will be an attempt to repeat such action in places like Ohio, one thing that does greatly concern me, is that what we have discussed as a mass-strike process could turn very ugly, very quickly, without adequate leadership. And I was wondering if you would comment on the possibility for this. So far, what has gone on, has gone on without violence and without anarchy, but I don't know how long that will hold."

LaRouche: Well, first of all, the people behind this are for the violence. They are deliberately moving to incite it, and to create it, and to launch it. Typical British trick; but this character, this Walker, is dumber than Mussolini, and probably more crude. I mean, he's a guy who is consumed by one thing—his egotistical ambition. He's shown no brain power whatsoever in anything he's done. He's a puppet of some string-pullers, because no man of any political intelligence would do what he has done. He makes Louis XIV seem like a genius. So, he's doomed.

The question is: Are we going to get chaos? We're not going to get dictatorship; there will be attempts at dictatorship, of which this is one. This is plain fascism; that's all it is. This is Hitler. You look at the health-care policies of the Obama Administration, which are from that degenerate Tony Blair of Britain, one of the worst and slimiest degenerates I know of on this planet today. Who I've run into; who is my enemy. For whom I have generous contempt, if anything at all. He's nothing; he's a degenerate.

They killed a man, David Kelly, he's an honest man, although a Brit—but you've got to give them credit sometimes when they're honest. He's an honest man, who got involved with me—not directly—I was invited on the BBC at the relevant point, because I was known to be an expert on the question of the war in Iraq. So, I was invited twice on the BBC evening radio, to present these views, and then that infuriated the Brits, who hate me anyway, particularly that crowd, the Blair crowd. And, then, David Kelly stepped in, and said this is crap. The whole claim about these weapons is crap; there's no truth to it whatsoever. And he said it plainly, and they killed him.

And then the Blair government arranged to have a special proceeding take place, violating all British law at the time, to declare that it was a suicide, period. And all the evidence is no, that it wasn't a suicide, simply because it would have been impossible for him to have killed himself in the way described. And also, somehow, miraculously, the dead body had been moved, which certainly could not have been an act of suicide. That's typical of this, and this Blair is exactly that type.

And this guy [Walker] is a reflection, a crazy ambitious nut, who probably ought to be dismissed because of insanity. It's too bad we don't have a fourth stipulation of the 25th Amendment to apply to governors of states, so we could chuck him out on that right away. He's insane; just carry him off to the relevant institution and be done with the process.

But no, you have a group of actual American fascists, who are British directed, who are playing a game. And what they're looking for, is they're looking for a bloody chaos within the entire U.S. population. Because he's not the author of this; he's the tool of it. He's a stupid jerk; a disgusting creature. He has no civility whatsoever. He doesn't belong among human beings; he should be in some kind of a zoo, where we keep these people, keep them away from children; that sort of thing. No, he's not a serious person, he's only a tool. He's a whore, looking for the next customer; that's what he is.

But the danger is, that he's a whore, like many others of his type, the same type of political whore, prostitute, who is doing something, who doesn't know what the hell he's doing, but I do! Because I know who is causing him to do it! This guy is a stinking fascist; a cheap imitation Mussolini of Wisconsin, and he's going to end up probably for the nearest voluntary guillotine available to deal with him, because he's not headed in the right direction.

No, don't treat the guy as serious; he's a serious disease, he's not a serious person. He's just a man who has a very perverted ambition, who is being funded by a known group, who deployed him in the aftermath of this Republican achievement in the House of Representatives, this past time, Nov. 2. He's a piece of filth. The sooner we get him out of there, the better.

But, what he's up against, is an international mass-strike movement, of a type which has not been seen in human experience in a very long time. Just look at the facts; just look at it. So, it should be treated accordingly.

What we have to do is, we've got a mass-strike movement in process. We have to serve it, support it, assist it, and so forth. We have to realize that the most precious people are these teachers and their students there. We know this thing is spreading; it's going to spread in Ohio. And you're headed for a bloody confrontation between these forces and the people. In this kind of situation, under the present circumstances, I would say the guillotine will probably win. And wherever they're headed, it may be without their body.

There Is No Room for Compromise!

Freeman: This is from a labor leader in Ohio, who holds a national post. He says,

"Mr. LaRouche, as I know you know, there are currently 26 millions of Americans who are out of work, and trillions of dollars in household wealth has seemingly disappeared. In the face of this, what is Congress doing? Congress is aggressively looking to eliminate what they call 'regulatory excesses' that are supposedly hindering our economic recovery. And I find it outrageous that they are doing this, just a week or two after the Angelides Commission, which they appointed, issued a report concluding that the crash was caused by 30 years of deregulation.

"The fact is, that what has happened in Wisconsin represents only the most dramatic side of a much broader strategy of absolving Wall Street, and scapegoating public employees and unions with blame for the current crisis. Obviously, to anyone who bothers to look at this, it certainly was not these workers, nor was it the 'invisible hand of the free market' that caused the crisis. It was the result of direct action, and perhaps inaction, by Wall Street, and by the failure of Congress to keep them in check.

"With all of that said, I am happy to report, or at least what has been reported to me, is that within days we will actually have the introduction of a Glass-Steagall bill in the U.S. House [of Representatives], and I am told that that bill will be sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans."

And we have the same information, I should just say. But, what he goes on to say is:

"We have been, here in Ohio, and really across the country, heavily involved with you in insisting that Glass-Steagall had to be reintroduced, but it occurs to me that the people who are promoting this in Congress, really have very little understanding of what is actually going on, and what has to be done. And I raise this for a very specific reason.

"One of the things that was brought up to me early this morning, was that it would be much easier to pass Glass-Steagall if we all could agree that the rules and regulations of Glass-Steagall would apply from this day, or whatever day the bill was signed into law, from that day forward, and that, in fact, whatever happened before would not be touched. Now, I could say a lot about why this would be an extremely inefficient approach, since the damage has already been done, but I think that this also underlies a critical problem that we face.

"When Glass-Steagall was first passed, as a result of the Pecora Commission, it was passed under conditions where we had leadership in Washington that was prepared to take on Wall Street, and to take them on head-on. The fact is, that the current grouping in Washington—even those individuals who I'm grateful are introducing Glass-Steagall—are not prepared to do that. And, I think that, unless they are prepared to do that, not only will they not win the fight on Glass-Steagall, but they won't win any other fight. Wall Street has got to be challenged. It's the only solution that we have. I don't think that they understand this, or are willing to do this, and I really would like your comments on it."

LaRouche: Well, my comment is a harsh one. Don't make the mistake that the future of the United States is going to be determined by a democratic process of that so-called sort, legalistic sort. You have a mass-strike movement, which is now international. It's trans-Atlantic, it embraces the entire Mediterranean region, and it's spreading. You have people who are expressing this who are confronted, as a relative intelligentsia of the people, as typified by teachers, and as pupils, who are determined that they have no future as long as this present system goes on. They are determined that the situation which they face is immediate. There is no room for compromise!

This is a revolutionary situation, and a classical revolutionary situation. You can't stop it by chatter! You are taking people's lives away; you're killing their children. You expect them to calmly negotiate terms with you? They want you gone! And they will not be satisfied with anything less than your going. And if you're smart, you'll go peacefully. You're at such a time.

The problem with the Baby Boomer generation which dominates the political process in the United States today is, they're a bunch of cowards. They talk tough, but they're gutless wonders in fact. And I know them very well. You look at the pathetic creatures, like from the [1968] Columbia [University] insurgency of these fascist characters, who are peddling gonorrhea from coast to coast, as they left Columbia to go out and travel around the nation to plant the glories of their achievement. And what came out was gonorrhea, the largest epidemic of gonorrhea we'd had in some time. Mark Rudd and company—we used to call him "Mark Crudd" for that reason. These guys are gutless wonders. Who are they?

We bred some children in the postwar period. We bred them out of families who were successfully prostitutes; prostitutes in the sense that when a fascist, in fact, Truman, tried to destroy everything Roosevelt had accomplished, until Eisenhower got in there to get this Truman out of there, but did not fully remedy the damage that had been done in the meantime. We had a fascist tyranny, being organized under Truman. Because, remember, who was Truman? Truman was a Senator from the Midwest, but he was a Wall Street tool, and he was of the same Wall Street crowd which had put Hitler into power in Germany on behalf of the British Empire.

So, we had Churchill, who was a British fascist in his own right. Look at his history; look at his history in Africa. Look at his other history; the man's a fascist. He happened to be loyal to the British Empire, as Chamberlain was not. As the King Edward at that time was not. Another king came in, who was. And the point is, they were defending the British Empire. They were not prepared to take a chance on Adolf Hitler, which the Chamberlain government did. They knew exactly what they were dealing with; they knew where it was coming from, and it was the British that created Hitler with the help of Wall Street. And Truman was one of those Senators who was on that side in Wall Street.

When we had won the war, essentially, with the breakthrough at Normandy, then the British, who had been so nicey-nicey to Roosevelt up to that time, moved in an opposite direction. They extended a war which could have been won within that year, within 1944.

It was ready: The breakthrough through the Siegfried line by the Third Army was about to occur. The breakthrough at the Siegfried line under the Third Army would have meant the collapse of the Reich. What happened? A British general, commanding the Allied First Army, had the crazy idea—not crazy, it was intentional, intentional evil, because the British did not want to win the war that quickly. They wanted Europe to go into Hell first, so it could never come back. The United States, typified by Eisenhower, was determined to prevent that.

So, the de Gaulle factor: De Gaulle was put on the sidelines by people who were part of this fascist crowd from Wall Street, to try to prevent the war from being won too soon. To keep some fascists in power in France, rather than de Gaulle, that sort of thing. So, they had this objective, the First Army objective. So they moved two parachute units into an advanced position to occupy, to be supported by a follow-up of the First Army. The parachutists dropped in there, but no sucker came; no support. Why? Because the First Army, to get to its destination, had to go through a one-lane highway through that region, and the First Army never got there in time. The only reason that the paratroops were able to survive at all, was the Third Army forces were diverted to support the rescue of the First Army. And therefore, the war continued for another six months, and the results were that.

These are the truths of the matter. The British had an idea which was totally opposed to ours. They needed to be succored, because they had gotten themselves into a mess they thought would not happen—they thought! But the French army, which was not qualified to fight a war, because it had been deliberately organized in a way that was not qualified to fight an actual war. So, they [the British] counted on their agreement, their influence on the Nazi regime. That the Nazis would send the German army to die to a large degree, in the Soviet Union. And then, they [the British] would come back and overrun Germany. There was a plan.

Well, the Wehrmacht generals were not that stupid, and they had already prepared their onslaught. The onslaught was sufficient. The French army, the Belgian army, the British forces, crumbled as if they were nothing, before a simple onslaught of that type, a well-prepared onslaught. And everything that the Allies did was stupid, but deliberately stupid. What they were out to do was destroy Europe, and then turn around and destroy the United States.

Then, they found themselves in a fix. They dumped their Prime Minister; they brought in Churchill, and Churchill was determined to save the British Empire. So, he went screaming to Franklin Roosevelt, "Help! Help! Help!" And we could not declare war against the Nazis at that time, because we had too many fascists in the Republican Party in the United States, of the Wall Street-fascist types.

And so, only when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred, which we knew was going to occur, but until it occurred, we could not declare war against Germany. We had to have the Japan attack on Pearl Harbor; not that we wanted it, but we knew it was coming, and we did not have the means inside the U.S. political system, to organize to deal with that problem.

This thing was known since 1922-23, when the British had made an agreement with Japan for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the early 1920s. And what Japan did in 1941, was nothing but what they prepared to do, with British assistance, since the 1920s. The problem was, for the Japanese—which is why the Japanese troops and commanders waited before launching the attack on Pearl Harbor—they said, this may be a loser, because they no longer were allied with the British. Because the British were so desperate in trying to save their own butt and their own empire, that they sacrificed Japan. Japan then went ahead with a full-scale war, which was a very well-prepared attack, very well-equipped, which we defeated.

But then, what happened to MacArthur; what happened to Eisenhower? Eisenhower became President later, but in the meantime, Truman, who represented the Wall Street crowd, had done this. And this is the kind of circumstances we're dealing with here. We're dealing with the British Empire, which may be weaker in many respects than it was then, as the British Empire in 1939, but we're weaker, because we have been corrupted. Just like the French were corrupted in 1939-40. The corruption, the fascist corruption of the French government sat there, sat there, just waiting to be crushed, and then, when the Nazis overran France, they weren't unhappy. Pétain and the rest of the crowd were quite content with that arrangement, and it was tough to wean them from it, even later on.

The Enemy Is Sealing His Own Doom

These are the kinds of realities which we have to understand, in dealing with this problem. We depend, not on forces at our disposal, we don't depend upon might. We depend upon an essential weakness in the enemy, by which he will bring about his own destruction. And what this enemy is doing, in attacking this international mass-strike movement, is sealing its own doom. Because people are people; typified by these strikers in various countries, who see themselves faced with no option for life, as long as they are subject to the authority of these institutions which now rule. These people are determined not to submit. And you see that even in these mild teachers, who are not violent people, who are simply defending their students. You see this in Libya; you see this in Egypt; you see this in Bahrain. You're going to see it in state after state in the states of the United States. This empire, these arrogant characters, who think they're the kings of something—who are trying to dictate things in the state of Wisconsin and elsewhere—they are going to be crushed, either by us, or by their own means. Their own desperation, their own folly will bring them down.

This is the worst of all kinds of wars, in a sense. It's a war in which one can either win, or no one can win, and that's a dark age; a dark age of mankind. And the temperament of the people who are mobilizing, in increasing numbers, and at an accelerating rate, are faced with another thing. Right now, the debate on the table is another round of bailout. Another round of the bailout now, would mean the explosion of hyperinflation internationally, which would mean the disintegration of the world monetary system in a modality like that which Germany experienced in 1923, in the Fall of 1923. It would be worldwide.

So, we're not playing with dominoes here. We're playing with the fate of humanity. My bet is based on the people. I believe, that in this condition, where mankind is threatened with the greatest holocaust against the world's population that has ever been imagined, that a people faced with a perception of something like this, as oncoming, will not surrender. Because they know they can not; they find nothing in them which will allow them to surrender. And as the Maquis in France did, under the leadership of de Gaulle, starting from the beginning, they will fight. They'll fight. And I think we can win.

But we have to understand what the war is; who the enemy is. Because if we don't understand what the enemy is, who he is, who are you going to defeat? You have to know who you have to crush, because this is war. It's war of a special kind. It's not war of just armies marching against each other. It's war of people against evil. Will the people find the courage? I think they will find it in desperation. A combination of something good within them, and desperation at the same time. They will fight because they cannot accept surrender, and I think they will win.

Get Rid of the British Empire!

Freeman: The next question is a brief one. It comes from one of the leaders of the Stanford Group, and actually one of the sponsors of the Stanford Group.

It says

"Lyn, in reviewing your recent paper on de Gaulle, we saw you visit many themes, that are the themes that we have been working on for a couple of years. But if we're reading the paper correctly, you raised something which really threw us for a bit of a loop, and we would appreciate it if you talked about it a bit more.

"It seems that in the paper, what you are saying is that the sabotage of the SDI initiative was a direct generator of the hyperinflationary crisis that we're dealing with right now, and we had not really looked at it in that way, and we'd appreciate it if you would explain."

LaRouche: Okay, got you. Well, probably in a sense that's true. That's exactly what's true about it, for a fair description of the situation. The dynamic is a little more interesting. Again, you're talking about things like the mass strike. You're talking about de Gaulle, who I characterize for what I recognize in him—I never met the man personally, but later in my work on the planning, for what became the plan for the Defense Initiative, which I worked on with leading circles in France, military circles and diplomatic circles in France, leading circles in Germany, military and so forth, leading circles in Italy and other countries.

This was not a light thing. We were in a position to win—except the British and related interests were against it. We understood—as de Gaulle had said—prior to the breakdown which occurred in 1989-1990, that the strategic purpose had to be a Europe from the Atlantic to the mountains, and that is correct strategically. And all the stuff about conflict, about the Soviet Union, all these kinds of things, they didn't mean anything. These were secondary subordinate features of the strategic situation, a leftover from World War I and its planning by the British in the 1880s.

So, when you're talking about who's the enemy in strategy, you're a fool. Unless you have a British enemy, and then you're not a fool. No, it's true, it's absolutely true, because that's the Empire. Your enemy is the Empire! Why do you think we get stuck in these two wars in Iraq; this crazy war that's been going on with the Soviet Union and us in the mountains? Why do we get stuck with these things? Why did we go into the war in Indochina? There was no reason for us to go into a war in Indochina. The thing had been assessed by experts. President Kennedy was not going to let it happen. Douglas MacArthur said: "This is idiocy, don't go into it! No land war in Asia for the United States!"

The only way they got the war was by killing Kennedy! Don't kid yourself. It was those who wanted the war, who wanted the United States to go down, who killed Kennedy, because Kennedy would not allow that war to start. And Johnson only allowed it because he was terrified that he was going to be killed next. And when Kennedy's brother was about to win the nomination for the Presidency, they killed him too. That's the reality of these things.

And so, we're in that kind of situation. We're in a war. So, what de Gaulle represents for me is a man who had come from highly qualified military [background]—a genius, actually, in military science. The way he prepared the defense posture for a tank command, an armored command for the World War II period, was a work of genius, in opposition to practically every other French general in there, leading generals. The way he conducted himself during the period where he was operating out of Britain, and out of North Africa, was actually also a work of genius.

But then, his rear view of what had happened then, in approaching the new condition of warfare: He showed himself as risen to a much higher level of insight than he'd had in an earlier stage. He showed a real genius: His conception of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. He understood the principle. The idea of winning war is not the purpose of strategy. The idea of winning a reasonable objective, without war if possible, is the proper objective. Don't get into war unless you have no other option,

The same thing in Germany: Bismarck's problem. Bismarck was dealing with a monarchy which got itself into a war with France. The war with France was caused by France. But the minute Napoleon III was out of the game, the vital interest of Germany was to say, okay, we won. We got rid of this guy. We got rid of Napoleon III, this British agent. That would have been the proper answer: for Germany to immediately go into negotiations with France on peace terms. Okay, we got rid of Napoleon. He started the war. We don't want the war to continue. That would have been the thing, and that was Bismarck's view. Bismarck's view was that it was a mistake to continue the war past the point that the Emperor had been overthrown, because Germany's interest, in the face of the British Empire, which is the enemy of the occasion—it was the British Empire that had organized Napoleon III. So the point was to get the British Empire. By making the conflict between France and Germany the issue for the future, you caved in to the British Empire. And Bismarck could have handled that problem. And the same thing as otherwise. We get into wars we should not get into.

The object is not to win a war, like it's a boxing match, or something like that, or a tennis match, or a football match. The football match idea is crazy. You know, the playing fields of Eton, or the masturbating fields of Eton, whatever. This is not the purpose of strategy. The purpose of strategy is the goal. The goal is to bring about an acceptable condition among the peoples of mankind. Don't give up what you can not give up, but don't demand that you have an all-out war, going from generation to generation. If you are forced to fight and have no option, you fight. But if you think that you can go to a higher objective—.

What's our higher objective? Our higher objective is very simple. For me, I think I made it clear: Get rid of the British Empire. And we can handle these other problems, but we would have to handle them with a certain diplomatic nicety. You have to sometimes bend over, let the other guy feel he's got the better of you, that sort of thing, in order to achieve the objective. The objective is to bring about a set of cooperations among nations, which is what we want to lead to—a world of the nation-states, in cooperation, in sharing the development of Earth, and conditions of life on Earth, and going on to whatever is beyond that. Our purpose is not war, as if we were playing some schoolyard sport or some sports field's sport. Treating war as a sport is insanity, it's immoral. You fight war only for an existential issue which has no other solution. And you'll fight even a losing war because you have to, on principle, fight that war. But you don't invite war.

So the point here, in my concern, is exactly that. I understand the Soviet Union. I understand Russia, not perfectly, but I know enough, and I've dealt with it enough, and I've done enough analysis of the Soviet system and the Russian system. I know how it works. I know the incompetence, I know the problems. So what! I say, so what! Yeah, the Russians make this mistake, they make that mistake, they got a lousy this and a lousy that. They're stupid on this, but I've got some friends in Russia who know better.

And our objective is to build a community of sovereign nation-states, and the question of Europe the same thing. So my objectives were always in that direction, but I never had the objective of saying, I know how to win this war. I know what war is like. I've had enough experience in dealing with the strategic question to know exactly what it's like. And if you know what it's like, you don't do it so damn easily. You don't go to war so damned quickly if you know what it's like, if you know what it may lead to. And you don't prolong war beyond what you have to, if you're forced to fight it.

And my view is simply that. My view is not the negative thing. My view is a positive view of what we had to achieve, knowing that if we didn't achieve it, we would find the negative factors would force us to act accordingly. And that was the case. In the time where we had the Fall of the Wall in Germany, if the British Empire with its toadies, the President of France, and the President of the United States had not intervened to prevent the Chancellor of Germany at the time, from simply reunifying Germany, East and West, and going on to cooperate with the nations that border that region, we would have had a solution for the European problem. Not a perfect one, but a good one. By forcing the situation, by creating the plan for the euro, which is a British imperial subjugation of continental Europe, and going ahead with the "creative destruction" of Russia, Ukraine, and so forth that followed, we created a potential for Hell on this planet. We avoided some of that hell, but now we are creating a worse hell under the British Empire's direction and control of the government of the United States.

And that's the enemy, is the British Empire. Get the British Empire out of the picture, and we have the basis for coming to an accommodation among nations. It may not be perfect, but it's better than the alternative. That's all I was doing. Planning for the good future, which means you have to fight that which is the opposite.

Organizing the Platforms on Which Life Depends

Freeman: I timed this poorly, because right now we are coming to the point where I can only ask Lyn one more question, but what that means, there are scores of questions that I have not gotten to. There are questions from Ecuador, there are questions from Africa, there are questions concerning the current situation in Libya, the price of oil, and other related things. But we don't have time to do all that. I do want to ask Lyn this question from the Stanford Group, and I will also hand off to him some of these other questions, and hopefully some of them will be answered in due course.

What they say is,

"Lyn, some recent events have touched off a great debate among us that we would like your thinking on. A couple of our associates were involved in a report that was issued by the New America Foundation on the costs of the infrastructure deficit. And what they did in this report is, they proved that underinvestment in infrastructure carries costs for households, for businesses, and actually, even for the government, because it increases maintenance, it wastes time, it allocates resources inefficiently. And that, in fact, what the conclusion is, is that the failure to invest in infrastructure actually has not only impeded economic progress and growth, but that it actually has set off a devolutionary spiral.

"Now, this caused a big problem among us, because while undoubtedly, those conclusions are true, what some of us have argued is that it is absolutely the wrong approach to take, because what it does is it approaches the problem from the standpoint, or at least within the confines of, a monetary system, as opposed to a credit system, and it also addresses the underlying questions involved in economic value, and of the new conception that you've developed, of platforms.

"We would just like you to comment on it based on some of our thinking. The argument that we raised, or that some of us raised, against our associates who were involved in the issuance of this report, is that these kinds of measurements, per se, are not useful because economic value is not tied to these particular parts of an economy, and this gets back to the question that we've been discussing now for months, of the need for a more physical and scientific approach to the science of economics.

"What some among us have argued, is that the measurement of a substance doesn't have anything to do with defining the properties of that substance itself, because, in fact, these things don't have any value, in and of themselves. This is much clearer when you look at it from the standpoint of physics, but it's also very clear when you look at it, as one of our spouses pointed out, from the standpoint of music: That the individual notes in any musical composition really don't have any particular value, and you could take the best musical composition and the worst musical composition, and you'll find similar notes in each. Which is true.

"So that really, what we have argued is that because of limited time and limited resources, that the only thing that really is worth discussing are not these component parts, because these component parts will not give us the solution. That what we have to discuss is what the directionality of our economy is. We have to discuss where we want to be, where we want our economy to be, three generations from now.

"Now, that does indeed make it difficult when you're talking to people who are saying, well, how the hell am I supposed to put this in a piece of legislation; but others here have argued that really, if you want to talk about the idea that's behind the insistence of a return to Glass-Steagall, that you'll find it in this debate sooner than you'll find it anywhere else. We could say more about this, but we'd like your thoughts because otherwise we're going to kill each other."

LaRouche: The two points that I have to develop carefully here: First of all, I agree with the criticism that is proposed in the question. It's perfectly correct. But then you have the problem of this. How does this function? Now, in a discussion I had recently, in early February, Feb. 10, which is now distributed, it's published in various forms [EIR, March 4, 2011], we had a discussion in which I involved my associate Sky Shields for that particular discussion, anticipating that that would be crucial at that point, because I sensed the ripeness—I said we've got to bring him in at this point on this kind of discussion.

And since that time, Sky has gone ahead with various things, and others with the Basement group, in tackling exactly this kind of problem. What you need is, since you're dealing with an economic process, a physical economic process which is intrinsically decadent: Your productivity is constantly being lowered, per capita and per square kilometer, if you have a fixed technology. Therefore, you have to increase the power of productivity, to a higher level, to outrun the depletion of the kind of resources you've been using. Which means that you have to have a scientific-driver program.

Now, you can call this the "rate of anti-entropy": that in a society, we can reduce the character of that society to a moving point in a process, and the moving point defines the rate of increase of productivity, physical productivity, per capita and per square kilometer, to account for the depletion of area, account for the depletion of waste, and so forth. To compensate, you have to go to a higher level of efficient energy-flux density, in other words, anti-entropy.

So therefore, instead of trying to measure an economy by a fixed point of reference, like a monetary point of reference, you say, monetary equivalency, the same rate of profit or something like that; the same rate of income per capita, which you think, is going to work, but it doesn't, because the process of depletion is occurring, unless you are anti-entropic.

Mankind Is Not a Fixed System

Now the way to look at this, which Sky and others are doing in the Basement, is looking at from the standpoint of the 62 million-year cycle, that cycle, of the galactic system, of which the Solar System is a part. It's a fringe element. Our Solar System is a fringe element of the galaxy, our galaxy. And we're circling around, dancing around the edges of the galaxy, and we have these cycles which we're subject to, and life on Earth is subject to the effects of this 62-million-year cycle. And there are other cycles also involved and similar factors.

So here we are, we're trying on Earth, in the Solar System—which is simply an appendage of the galaxy—we're trying to find a way to deal with the Doomsday elements, which are included in the character of the galaxy. Which means we have to race ahead, in our role in life, to deal with these problems, as well as the problems which occur directly on Earth. So they have a moving point, a degree of anti-entropy, which you have to establish in order to maintain equivalence of standing still. If you want to have the effect of standing still, you have to progress. If you're not progressing, you're not standing still, you're falling behind. So that's the question which is posed.

Now, generally, the way this is done with respect to platforms, is the platform defines the basic structure on which you produce. In other words, you have a system, of, we might call it infrastructure, but it's a system of the organization of the planet. And the way you can define this is by going to higher orders of energy-flux density. That means you're going from burning wood, through coal, and so forth and so on, into petroleum and natural gas and so forth, and now you don't have an economy, unless it's a nuclear-fission economy.

We have already passed the point where a nuclear-fission economy is sufficient for man's needs. We now need a thermonuclear-fusion economy. We will then go on to a higher order of economy, as is anticipated in the work of Riemann, for example. So we are going on to higher orders of energy-flux density, or the equivalent. That's higher-quality energy. It's not the number of calories. It's the number of units of heat per square kilometer, and the greater the intensity of the heat, the greater the energy-flux density. And that is the net determinant of your ability to progress.

So, if you're building windmills, you are anti-human, because windmills are long gone, past! That's the dead past! Go back to the Stone Age, you're getting close. You want a Stone-Age existence and a Stone-Age level of human population and Stone-Age culture? Build a windmill! And doing solar collectors is simply a more complicated way of doing an even worse job on the environment. Solar collectors are most useful for destroying the environment. You call them environmentalists? The consumption of carbon is the most essential part of the progress of human life on this planet. You want to cut down the carbon? Kill the people.

So therefore, the point you're getting at, which I would emphasize, is that this is the characteristic: Mankind is not a fixed system, a fixed mathematical system of economy, which functions. You take the history of life on Earth, as our Basement team has pulled this stuff together, going back to the pre-oxygen level, to the emergence of more than single-cell organisms, to the development of the characteristics on which life on this planet now depends, to protect us against the Sun! This process! And this process has been an ongoing process of development, an anti-entropic process of development, which has now come into the process, where existence means, going to higher rates of energy-flux density, which means departing the base of natural gas (especially from the mouths of Liberals), into the level of nuclear power, nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, and the forms we know exist beyond that, which are several orders of magnitude beyond that, which are several orders of magnitude greater, which is essentially what Riemann said a long time ago.

So therefore, we have to set a standard, where we say we are raising the level of the platform, in the general level of technology, on which the economy of Earth is based. One of the platforms is to get control of water. Now water is one of the most important constituents, of the existence of this planet, especially for life on this planet. It's the water system, the water system on which we are based.

Now, therefore, it's not surprising that the immediate reform we have to make, the most urgent, important reform we can make right now, is NAWAPA. Because NAWAPA is a step to increase, in a crucial way, the use of water on this planet for the benefit of humanity. And by using nuclear power to power the design of the Parsons Company, in NAWAPA, which will mean a project which they figured with 4 million people required. And we've come up with an estimate, of the characteristics, we've come up with the same thing, the people we talked to who are in that area.

This also means that by simply creating water, we're going to change the rainfall pattern across the United States. The additional water we are pumping through the system—we are not consuming it, we are just passing it through, through the various stages that water is normally passed through. Water is one of the most abundant creatures on this planet for us. And this leads to an increase, where we have the desert areas of the United States that are becoming rotted out, they suddenly come back again. The rainfall across the course of the planet, through successive layers of rainfall, caused by the moisture moving across the territory—it changes the character of the planet!

Going into this area, into the Arctic Circle area, which is the sort of the navel of life on Earth. You look at the way the territories on the planet Earth are organized, the Asian territory, South America, and so forth. They're concentrated around the North Pole. The North Pole is a very interesting place. We have to do a lot more investigation up there, to get some more insight into how life has been working in that area, for better insight into the future. But the territories of the planet, are moved upward. They gathered around the North Pole. And that area we're going to go into, we're going to explore life implications and other things there, which we know exist, but we haven't explored yet.

So that's the way we have to think. We have to think about organizing the platform on which life depends, for work in the planet, and recognize, we have to go to higher and higher levels. We can not be satisfied with nuclear power, nuclear fission—that's not good enough any more. Nuclear fission is not sufficient to meet the needs of humanity now. We need to have thermonuclear fusion, controlled thermonuclear fusion. And we're going to matter/anti-matter reactions, beyond that, of a different type, probably three orders of magnitude greater. And this process, and our ability to control these high energy-flux-density processes, is the thing by which we're going to progress, on behalf of man, inside this Solar System and beyond, and this galaxy.

And there are so many things we don't know. We've got to reach out there, and study. And these students, of these teachers, being developed in the direction of those kinds of accomplishments, is what the future of mankind is.

No. Be absolutely correct on this: It's the platform that you have to develop. And it's the application of the technologies which the platform makes possible, makes feasible, which is the means for the improvement of the conditions of man's life on this planet and beyond! We're already at the point, where what we've studied so far, indicates that if you don't have intellectual control over the processes which are going on in the galaxy, you can not know what to do with the Solar System, and ultimately, what you can do here on Earth.

So, we've got to get better education going, we've got to take these subjects up, we've got to assign them to the relevant institutions, and push forward, to discover how our next achievement, which surpasses all previous achievements, is going to be found. And that's the way you have to look at mankind.

We have to be the junior Creator.

Freeman: With that, I, unfortunately do have to bring today's event to a close. I think that it is abundantly clear, from Lyn's presentation, and from the exchange of ideas with people, that all of you witnessed today, people in the United States, and people abroad, that while we are in the midst of a crisis, that has remarkable depth and breadth, that is, in fact, existential in nature, it is still the case, that there is a process which is sweeping this planet, which has a certain vitality to it. And, especially in our United States, it is not going to be easy. And certainly, it's not going to be possible, if we have any say in it, to crush that. You see that vitality! You see it in the faces of the teachers in Wisconsin, of the Social Security workers who—you know, everybody attacks Federal workers, but you see these Social Security workers who come out and demonstrate, not because they're facing cuts, they're not! Their salaries are secure, for the moment. They're out there demonstrating against cuts, for those people who are the beneficiaries of Social Security. You see it in high school students and college students who come out to defend their teachers.

All of that is cause for great optimism and hope. But, we know, that in order to implement what Mr. LaRouche has addressed today, we need several things to happen:

Number 1, we do need Glass-Steagall, and I think we've made some very important steps forward on that. But, we need Glass-Steagall, now.

The other thing that we need, and if you're going to get Glass-Steagall, you have to be prepared to do it: Is that, Obama has got to go! Not in 2012, but now!

That's what we have to do. It's going to take money, and it's going to take some real energy from people. But, certainly, Mr. LaRouche has made clear, that he has that energy, and I think we have to replicate it in ourselves.

So, with that, please join me, in thanking Lyn for another extraordinary event.

LaRouche: I can only say, that the Old Geezer is still alive!

Tanscript of LaRouche's opening statement .

[1] See transcript or video

[2] "LaRouche Basement Team's Martinson Addresses Ukraine's Student Republic," EIR, March 4, 2011.