LYNDON H. LAROUCHE, JR.:
The Crucial Issue of This Crisis
LaRouche gave this videotaped address to the Schiller Institute Conference in Germany, on Nov. 25, 2012.
My subject is "The Crucial Issue of This Crisis," and I proceed as follows:
The set of trans-Atlantic nations, and beyond, is now gripped, by the most immediate and most menacing crisis in modern history. There are three, physical qualities of economic issues to be considered:
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First, we must end the current commitment to an accelerating, monetarist hyperinflation.
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Second, we must end an already deep and still-deepening collapse of physical economy.
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And third, we must end the presently immediate threat of the outbreak of a general thermonuclear war. That would be a war, which, if it occurs, is already an early and immediate threat to destroy civilization worldwide. Such a war, during such a brief required lapse of time, of approximately an hour and a half of thermonuclear warfare, would send the leading powers of the world to an obliteration of civilization.
These three categories of present threats to mankind are to be traced to the effects of the presently continuing, and presently accelerating, hyperinflationary policy of the United States, and the nations of the Western and Central European regions. These present trends in North America and Europe have created a presently hopelessly accelerating, hyperinflationary system. And this leads to a consideration of three conditions.
There are first, therefore, three conditions which must be adopted immediately, if the danger of an early outbreak of a thermonuclear phase of the present acceleration of a march to war is to be prevented, and if true economic recovery is to be launched instead.
The first of the three essential preconditions for recovery is that the relevant, combined leading nations of both the United States and the leading parts of Eurasia, must immediately enact the Glass-Steagall law, which is to be modeled on the successful economic recovery action launched originally by United States President Franklin Roosevelt, during the 1930s. The enacting of that Glass-Steagall law, will suffice to halt the hyperinflation which is now leading the principal nations of the north trans-Atlantic region. This will prevent them from leading into a hyperinflationary collapse, and an increasingly probable certainty of thermonuclear warfare.
Second: A recovery of the economy of the relevant nations depends upon the actual creation of a set of systems based on the principle of national credit, among respective nations. This means that the future investments must be those rightly deemed physically worthy of the credit which is uttered under the authority provided by the credit systems of the respective sovereign nations. The presently accelerating rate of trans-Atlantic-centered hyperinflation must be terminated with the appropriate full force of appropriate measures of physical reforms.
Under such a reform, the composition of national funding of sovereign national economies, will be composed of a combination of existing and supplementary modes of credit extension of the physical-economic advances for, and by, the respective nation-states as such. Think this through as follows: There exists presently a widespread practice which locates wealth, mistakenly, in money as such, or in terms of similarly fictitious assets, rather than the physically effective credit systems of the economy.
Whereas, any actual recovery will demand that presently hyperinflationary practices among nations, must be superseded by national systems, of national physical credit, from both within and among those cooperating nations.
Third: It must be recognized, that it is the increase of physical wealth which must be made practicable by the respective nations' extension of systems of public credit. This must be a system of credit, which is duly warranted as an investment in the creation of future, physically productive, rather than merely nominalist forms of monetarist wealth, per capita and per square kilometer. The future wealth of nations and of the enterprises must warrant the extension of national credit, within and among cooperating nations. That economic policy shall serve for both the public and private investment, in the creation of that which will exist only through the means of the productive future of the nation and mankind in general.
The Unique Quality of Mankind
Now, as to essential facts for mankind on this question. The essential fact, which must be added to economic reforms among nations, is that mankind can no longer isolate itself to life on Earth alone. Furthermore, the known history of the evolutionary process of all manifest imaginations, viable ones, of living species, has thus always depended upon the relative increase of the characteristic energy-flux density of the existing categories of surviving species. The fact is, that mankind is the only living species known to us, as depending for its power to exist, through the willful development of progressively higher evolutionary states of existence of leading creatures.
The relative fact is, that for mankind, the successful future of any living species, depends absolutely on perpetual and accelerating increases in the energy-flux density, per capita, as this is expressed by the progress of the human species, to higher levels of energy-flux density. Mankind is the only known species whose existence is defined by the controlled use of fire. Mankind's prospect of a continued existence depends hereafter on progressing beyond the limits of mere sense-perception to increasing power to command mankind's growing, willful role, within regions beyond Earth and Mars, to other planets in the Solar System and beyond. Any contrary policy would promise to lead our human species, implicitly, through the hazards of asteroids and comets, toward the prospective human species extinction.
Now, there are certain economic trends to be considered. In the meantime, during the period since the launching of the worse-than-useless U.S. war in Indo-China, a war which was launched by means of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy—even despite the progress which had been embodied in President John F. Kennedy's launching of the famous space program of the U.S.A—since that war in Indo-China, the general trend in the United States, and the economies of Western and Central Europe alike, in particular, has been the increasingly downward movement in net effects, measured per capita, over the course of the subsequent decades.
The loss of physical-economic potential by formerly leading nations, has been accelerating in terms of loss of actively productive skills, as measured in crucial terms of what is known as energy-flux density, over the entire span, since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That has produced the effect of a greater rate of net decline of physical productivity in nations, per capita, than in useful additions to productive employment made by a total labor force.
A Strategic Defense of Earth
In addition to those considerations just stated, mankind's existence is now in peril from the threats from the roles of both asteroids and comets, within the region between the orbits of Mars and Venus. We must create the needed means of program defense.
Russia's scientists have properly referenced the need for intention of a Strategic Defense of Earth, the SDE policy, on this account. These just indicated challenges typify the necessity for those kinds of specific, physical-economic reforms, on which the avoidance of thermonuclear warfare, and that of more general kinds of threats and economic catastrophe for mankind, must be included, because they are to be considered as matters of primary means for both the defense and the improvement of the conditions on which the continued existence of human life now depends.
In particular, it is now urgent that the United States, among others, return to an expanded version of a space program, not only for reasons associated with an improved space program including defense as such, but, with the urgency of a great, and early, great leap forward in technology, in physical space generally.
Progress is not an option. The continued survival of the human species demands it, now, more than ever.
Beyond Sense-Perception
In conclusion, our policy must be as follows: Science is no longer to be limited to operations within the bounds of sense-perception. We must enter that higher domain of physical principles, which exist only beyond the reach of mere sense-perception, and thus, into the true domain of the human mind, into the domain of the discovery of true principles as such, those which reign beyond the reach of mere sense-perception. We must now enter, as Bernhard Riemann had emphasized in the closing sentence of his habilitation dissertation, into the inclusive quality of the domain of mind, as proposed by the collaboration on that specific subject, of an all-inclusive physical conception of mind, which had been implied in the pioneering collaboration between Max Planck and Wolfgang Köhler.
Thank you.
