Dialogue with LaRouche
The following is a transcript of the question-and-answer period following Lyndon LaRouche's opening remarks at his Oct. 5, 2012 webcast.
[PDF version of this question and answer transcript.]
Ogden: Now, we're moving into a period of discussion, and we will have two interlocutors, Leandra Bernstein and Jason Ross. I'd like to ask Jason to come up first, and he'll be presenting a question that came in from layers inside the United States intelligence community, who are watching this live broadcast.
Hyperinflation Looms in Europe
Jason Ross: So, the question for you, Lyn, is:
"Mr. LaRouche, the Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, has criticized the too-big-to-fail bailout provisions of the Dodd-Frank bill, and has said that he'll replace Mr. Bernanke as chairman of the Fed, if he is elected. This has caused considerable concern among European Union and European Central Bank officials, who fear that the deals they have struck with Bernanke to continue to provide Fed funds to bail out the European banks could be cancelled with a Romney victory. How do you see this? Might the European banks and allied institutions attempt to intervene in the U.S. elections, to preserve the hyperinflationary deal?"
LaRouche: No, we wouldn't preserve that deal at all in hyperinflation. No, what we have to do, essentially, is recognize that the European governments that oppose this Glass-Steagall—and you have a very significant faction of leaders in Britain, who have actually initiated a very vigorous proposal for ending ring-fencing, as well as anything other measures, in favor of Glass-Steagall, explicitly. In the recent couple of years, there's been suddenly a surge in support for Glass-Steagall as a policy-conception, including in Britain, which did not exist at all, or barely at all—just as a curiosity—in Europe previously. And that's the right clamor.
Now, as for the banks: Look, these banks that you're talking about, without going into lists of names, these banks are all engaged presently, in an accelerating rate of hyperinflation. The most recent agreements on the euro have done exactly that. These banks are not long for this world in any case. So why are you trying to save a dead man walking?
If Europe is going to survive, it has to go to the equivalent of a Glass-Steagall law. Only two things: First of all, yes, we do have a shortage of money in the banking systems in Europe, even if we reform them by a Glass-Steagall law. Therefore, it means we have to go to a general credit system, and manage the recovery under a credit system, in order to kill the hyperinflation, because the hyperinflation that these European banks would like to have for themselves, would kill them. We're talking weeks, or something in that order of magnitude. The entire Western and Central European system is ready to disintegrate in hyperinflation, that makes 1923 Germany look like an entertainment event.
Ogden: Thank you. Now I would like to ask Leandra Bernstein to come up. Leandra is responsible for having authored and produced not only the recent video that came out, called "Unsurvivable," on the reality of a thermonuclear confrontation, but also what was publicized a year ago, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which was called, "9/11: Ten Years Later."
What Is Bill Clinton Doing?
Leandra Bernstein: I would like to ask a question that's been kicked around through a lot of Democratic circles, about the recent endorsement by Bill Clinton of President Barack Obama, which resulted in an immediate boost in Obama's approval. Now, there's a certain idea, among these circles, that, because Bill put his support behind Obama, that it's somehow possible that Obama could be "tamed" in a second term, by the circles around Bill Clinton.
Now, this endorsement of Clinton for Obama has been definitely taken note of in international circles. A question came in from one of our Irish activists, who took note, saying that Clinton is widely esteemed in Ireland, but it's very difficult to reconcile his actions in supporting Obama, and he asks,
"On what grounds, personal or political, could he do this?"
LaRouche: If you have a very dear friend, who makes, in a very curious way, a commitment to suicide or some major criminality, which you know is the reflection of some intimidation, a great intimidation, of threats to himself, or to members of his family, and he says something and does something, as Clinton did, with this case; and he acts like a damned fool, as Clinton did, and I'm sure he knows it, in supporting Obama in this recent period. So, if Clinton says "Do it," are you going to do it, because he says it? When you know he's under heavy blackmail, that his wife is terrified; she changed her personality, practically, under the threat from this thug, Obama. When you know that Obama is a killer, you know the number of people that Obama has killed, who they are, how they were killed, why they were killed, how they were threatened—you're going to let somebody who's under blackmail from this thug, this mass murderous thug, Obama, and just because a frightened President or his wife or others, are trying to save their personal lives against this monster, you're going to do what this monster begs you to do?
What kind of morality would that be?
So, Clinton is doing something which is damned foolish and evil; I don't know exactly why he's doing it, but I know what he's doing is contrary to what I know his personality to be.
So I'm just going to leave him alone, and tell people not to pay any attention to any foolish thing he said. And just think about the old Bill Clinton you used to know.
How a Credit System Works
Ross: With the Presidential debates taking place, sometimes people are pulled into questions that maybe aren't all that relevant. The economics discussion that we were treated to the other night, on television [during the Presidential candidates' debate], left out many of the essentials of what actually has to be discussed—you know, the real threat of thermonuclear war, the real threat to the economy. For example, on the food front, we're literally, as you said, being starved to death, where corn supplies are at a near all-time low, and the President has refused to lift the biofuel mandate, where even as food supplies are shrinking, corn and other crops are still being used to make gasoline. This, despite the opposition of some 200 members of Congress.
Now, in terms of getting things going again, we hear discussion about setting tax rates, or monetary policy, and as you said, the problem of monetarism is that it neglects real economics. I was hoping you could say more about the kind of thinking behind the use of government to propose and finance specific projects, you know, a dirigistic policy approach, as opposed to setting monetary policy in hopes that something good will come out of it on its own.
LaRouche: Well, you look back to American history, and we've gone through this before. When the monetarist says, "You've got to constrain everything to fit monetary values, monetarist values," the President of a nation which is sane, does not do that. The President of a nation which is sane, says, "Okay, we looked in our Treasury. We don't have, in the national Treasury, the amount of funds available to buy the things we need, or to do the things we need to do." So what do you do? You go to national credit.
In all these countries now, the United States, in particular, right now, we don't have the money. So you're going to kill people, because you don't have the money? Or starve them to death, which is even worse than killing them? You're going to do that? No. What you're going to do, is you're going to change the system.
You're going to send the Federal Reserve nuts out to be eaten by the squirrels. And what we're going to do, is simply close that thing down, reform it; it's been subjected to a swindle, it's not trustworthy, it's not honest. We don't have, in our Federal Treasury, the funds available to keep the nation going—what are we going to do? We're going to go to national credit. We're going to a managed national credit system, where we will have promissory notes of the Federal government, on the basis of selection of projects, on the basis of judgment, which will increase the actual net wealth of the nation.
NAWAPA's a perfect example of that. You talk about the benefit of NAWAPA, in many respects: 14 million potential jobs, and other jobs coming as a byproduct, all these jobs, which we are going to finance on Federal credit. But how is it going to work out? By building these projects, you're going to change the productive powers of labor in the United States, in a way that the world has never imagined before this. The NAWAPA project is the greatest project ever undertaken by man, if it's done. And we can get the credit for that.
Because what happens is, you put this credit to work in the employment of people, who eat, and are paid to work, and who have all these kinds of skills they're getting at jobs, in increasing their skill-power, by giving them these kinds of projects as challenges for their work, and for their careers, and for their families. For building educational institutions, and all the kinds of things that do happen, out of such great projects.
So therefore, we simply have to do that, and use those orientations, of saying we can no longer operate on a monetarist system. Money as such can not run our economy. What we have to do, is we have to have a national economy, in the sense that the nation has certain assets it already has, in terms of monetary equivalent, uses them as credit facilities, and then says, "What can we in the Congress, and by other means, do to employ people, to produce more wealth, than the value of the wealth we're investing in?" And that's what [Franklin] Roosevelt did, with some success; that's what was done under Lincoln, with great success, under the greenbacks.
So we can use the concept of the national credit system, and then you get into something like NAWAPA, as a driver. Do people realize what this is? It's the greatest single project of this type ever conceived by man! It's all planned out, and it's perfectly feasible.
What we have to do, is we've got some older people, who are a little bit like me: They don't bend as well as they used to, but they know these skills; we have the charts, the graphs, everything, the evidence is all there, or it's implicitly available, and we can put people to work, instead of on starvation. It's not a dole, it's not a bailout. They're getting paid to work. And they're producing while they're working.
Roosevelt did this in the 1930s, with projects of that type. Yes, you're giving credit to get people working. You don't want people on the streets, on the dole, as it was called; you want them working. You want to find out what you can do for them, to make them capable of working, improving their own condition, improving their family life, these kinds of things. We did that. And that's what Jack Kennedy was doing.
And at a lesser scale, at different points in our process, that idea has often been used, in the United States. That's how government does things right: Make a list of the things that must be done, look at the way they're integrated, try to have an integrated, national program of production, and people employed in producing, and increasing their productive powers of labor. And that's what the value of the nation is: its ability to produce; its ability to enable its people to produce, to meet its own needs—and to conquer the next step on Mars. Not out of Curiosity, but something much bolder.
Benghazi: What Did Obama Know?
Bernstein: I'll just say that a lot of the organizing that's taken place at the state level has been along the lines that you indicated in your response; that at the level of state legislators and others, there is, in a sense, that sense of self-interest in productivity. And I'd encourage people to take up what LaRouchePAC, and specific organizers with LaRouchePAC have done, at the state level, in organizing for these projects, in particular NAWAPA, which is ready to go. We have all the material on the website.
I say this, because our next question comes in from, really, a slew of state legislators, who have similar questions on what's happening in Libya, what's happening with Obama's complicity and criminal complicity and coverup of what some have called "Benghazi-gate," but could more accurately be called "9/11 Part Two."
These are questions that have come in from legislators whom we've reached on a variety of aspects of our program, but they all want to know how it is, that the United States supported and armed al-Qaeda militants. How it is, that the administration has gotten away, so far, with its negligence.
And I'll just say that two state representatives, [Gage] Froerer and [Brad] Daw, in Utah, wanted to know specifically, on the events of Sept. 11, 2012, in Libya, how much did Obama know? And if there's evidence that he did know beforehand, what are the steps that we need to take to get rid of him?
LaRouche: Well, the easy one is to get rid of him. If you just throw him out of office right now, or if you put him through impeachment proceedings, as criminal proceedings, for impeachment, which he's entitled to receive, that's what he's earned.
Now, for the other part of this thing, you have to look at 9/11. Because 9/11 has an expression, but it also has an origin. Now, the origin, what happened? You have a new, dumb President, a really dumb one: young George Bush, about as dumb as you can get—when he's sober. This guy, this pitiful little fool—and that's what he is, from a standpoint of statecraft. The guy's a pitiful jerk. And they bounced him around, and they laughed about him, and so forth, but they didn't do it too loud, that's all. They didn't want to make the old man, who's not too bright either, who's now not in the best of health—he's younger than I am, but he's in terrible health, I think, relatively speaking. And we don't want to hold that against him. But, the point is, this thing was done; it was not done like somebody breaking into a store and stealing something, and that's the usual kind of argument that's made.
But on the other side, looking at it: Here you had leading legislators in the United States, and others, who had the evidence on what the real story was about 9/11. Now, I personally happen to know a lot about 9/11, and who did what to whom. It was a British-Saudi operation, with some American accomplices thrown in. This was not an American project, but it was an attack on the United States, and it's a precursor of a bigger attack, which could hit the United States, again, now. And which is already hitting Europe and the rest of the world.
The Saudi kingdom and the British monarchy are the two greatest criminals on this planet right now. Most of the operations, like the thing that happened in Libya, again: Saudi-British. British-Saudi. Not British, as such, British as Royal Family. British-Saudi. Right? And you have people in government who have access to the findings about the funding of 9/11, by the Saudis and the British. We've already published our knowledge of this thing, there's no doubt about it. This was an operation, done by the British monarchy, in collaboration with the Saudi kingdom.
The Saudi and the British monarchies are essentially one piece; they're financially one piece. They have one, big financial organization, a defense equipment organization—one piece. The oil traffic, one piece. The mass murders throughout the Middle East, one piece.
So therefore, the first thing you have to do, is throw this President out of office, because he swore that he was going to disclose the information available.[1] And he reneged. Well, the man's a liar, a chronic liar. So how do you deal with a chronic liar? Well, take the next lie you pick up on him, look for another one, and another one, you'll find them—and then incriminate him. Throw him out of office! Anyone who does not want to throw Obama out of office, is either gutless, or there's something wrong with their brain.
Why Would Anyone Launch Thermonuclear War?
Ross: This is a question that's come in from a number of people through the website: that the situation you're laying out is very frightening, and in many respects, it's a totally new one facing humanity. Nuclear weapons, thermonuclear weapons, are a recent development in history.
A number of people are asking and wondering, given that there's no winner at the end of a massive thermonuclear exchange, given that there's the potential for the complete elimination of the human species, who gains? Would they really go that far? What would be the motive for pushing a policy that's so reckless?
LaRouche: All right, let's look at the history of mankind: What in the history of mankind bespeaks exactly that kind of decision? The people who carried it out. Let's take the fall of the Roman Empire. Let's take the siege of Troy, which we now know is fact, not myth; and other cases. How often have there been total exterminations of populations, under these kinds of conditions? The case of the siege of Troy is an example, and it was very good that at the end of 19th Century, and the beginning of the 20th Century, the question of what happened at Troy was solved: And it's physical evidence, it's not rumors.
What happened, is one group, an assembly of oligarchical groups, took on a city-state in a maritime position, in the connection between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. This state was significant in that area. And so they pursued it, they found a way in with the famous wooden horse. And then they killed the people—they killed all able-bodied people, most of the younger people, kept a few older people; and they not only destroyed the city, but they salted the entire ground to such a degree that crops could not grow there again.
You've got the same kind of thing has happened elsewhere. You see cases in the Roman Empire, a comparable thing: The Romans did the same thing at Tunis. Exactly the same thing. It's been done again and again.
See, the interest here is not human interest. What about sub-human interest? Morally sub-human interest? What do you think that most of these tyrants have done? What about Obama, otherwise known as the Emperor Nero? And I tell you, it's no joke, it's no exaggeration. My profile which I worked up on him, shortly after his entering the Presidency, and I saw his health-care program, and investigations that other people had made of him, which I picked up on and investigated, and cross-checked: Obama is emotionally, intellectually, a virtual carbon copy, maybe a little bit twisted here and there, but a carbon copy, in effect, of the Emperor Nero.
There are such people in history, in leading positions, in powerful positions, particularly some stupid jerk, a corrupt jerk, who rises as an oligarch into some position of power, has no real motive, but therefore, wants to kill people to show how powerful he is. In other words, he's a homicidal maniac. He's a criminal. He's a criminal mind.
Now, if you have people with a criminal mind, in charge of the Roman Empire, guess what they can do? And Nero kept doing this killing. He fornicated with his mother, raped her, and then killed her, and then later killed himself. So this means you've got a certain kind of personality you're working with here, not a normal personality gone awry. And this kind of thing happens in history, when it comes to the question of power.
The oligarchical system orders that the oligarch himself must sacrifice his own life, at the pleasure of his community, and kill the children and others of his family and so forth. This has happened repeatedly in oligarchical cultures. It's one of the characteristics of oligarchical cultures. And Obama represents exactly that. He has a perverted personality; he's not a sane person, but he has a kind of criminal insanity. And, he'll do it.
Why would the British want to do this? Well, it wasn't the British people, it wasn't the ordinary Brit. It was a certain group, an oligarchical group, which is tied to oligarchies not only from Britain, but from various other parts of Europe and other parts of the world. There's a whole club of leading oligarchs—you know, the ruling aristocracy. They're a club, and they think of themselves as still ruling the world. They think of themselves as an empire, in which they elect one group for one time, is now the ruling group; the others go along with it, and so forth, and that's what this is.
So you get a mentality which says, "We will not tolerate our system being defeated. We will kill everybody rather than consent to our being defeated."
And you have now, what's the policy? What's the British monarchy's policy? What's the whole issue? You've got two forces which are the forces of evil: the British monarchy and the Saudi kingdom. These are the two forces of evil you're dealing with, and their accomplices in the United States, for example, things like that.
And so what we have to do, is, we have to recognize that when you get a monster like Obama, or like Nero—and the two are very much alike. I dare any competent analyst to say that Obama is not like Nero. He has a Nero complex. And I don't know how they found him, because a Nero complex of that type, you don't find on every street, fortunately. But unfortunately, you get one in place, once in a while. And that's the case.
This guy's a criminal. The Saudi kingdom is a mass of precisely that type of criminals. These guys deliberately did 9/11. Deliberately did it! We know the Saudi representative in the United States [Prince Bandar], who is now in charge of the Saudi intelligence operations, is the guy who orchestrated much of the organization of 9/11—personally. He was personally hands-on, in organizing the pilots who were deployed in 9/11. And he's now the muckety-muck in Saudi Arabia. And you've got people in that neck of the woods—you get some of the stories of some of the Saudi princes and things—real degenerates. Morally, they're just not really human. And therefore, when you get people like that in power, or a group of people which thinks like that, or behaves like that, they will do that. They will say, "You will never get power. We will kill all of you, before you let you get power."
It's been said to me a number of times, personally: "We'll kill you, we'll put you in prison—next time we'll kill you." Why? Over the SDI. Because I created SDI; they were very upset. And therefore, especially when I organized the President of the United States in this operation, we conspired together on it. And they wanted to kill me. And they did everything possible to kill me and to terrify everybody associated with me. And that's the way the oligarchical mind works. In this case, the British mind.
And the key issue: Why do they hate me so much? Well, not just for SDI—that was a big one. They hated me because I attacked the drug-trafficking of the Queen of England. And now the Queen of England is now on a rampage, to reduce the population of the planet, quickly, from 7 billion people, to 1. And what the devil do you think is happening now, since that resolution was made? That's what's going on in the world.
Therefore, we who understand these things, and know other people who also understand them, have to stand together, and recognize that this is a criminal organization, and it has to be treated as a criminal organization, under moral and national law. That when a person enters government, a power of government, and starts to use it in a dictatorial manner, and use intimidation, like the British did it—who funded Obama's Presidency? Who funds this stuff? And 9/11-Two is what's on, and what happened there [in Libya] is exactly that.
And if we don't stop these guys, if we don't crush their power, you're not going to have a civilization. When you have thermonuclear weapons existing, and I say thermonuclear, because now, there's no way in which a war with thermonuclear weapons will not lead to destruction, maybe the extinction, of humanity. Just think of what a thermonuclear Winter is.
You had this thing with Khrushchov: Khrushchov had a super-bomb as a demonstration bomb. He set it up on Russian territory, and you should see the pictures, day after day, of the ricochet of that thing. And you see an image, in that ricochet, of exactly that, a nuclear Winter.
But now, you've got a thermonuclear Winter. Now, you think what it takes, how many of these U.S. submarines, with their load of thermonuclear weapons, are going to be deployed, if we go to war? How many Russian, similar systems are going to be deployed? How many Chinese? In addition to the British and French? This is what we're dealing with.
People have got to grow up, and stop playing childish games, childish games about how things work. It's passions, and it's what we call morality, is what's important here. And morality is a commitment to recognize that the human species, with its creative powers, which no other living creature approximates, that these creative powers which must be cultivated in the individual must be protected and promoted. Because this is the finest thing that we know of.
There's no other living process on this planet, except the human species, which is capable of seeing the future. Of creating the future, as a willful act of creation. This is the most precious thing that we know of, of all living things, is the human being which has a creative power, which no other species has. And the promotion, education, and culture of that human being, is the most important moral mission in all human existence. And anyone who's going against that, like the Queen of England, and like the Saudis, is wrong. They're wrong! And they have to have their power taken away from them, before they use it some more.
Forecasting and Immortality
Bernstein: This next question is somewhat of a personal question—and it's not whether you'll run for President, because I think that the celebration of your 90th birthday is unfortunately answer enough for that; but, your first Presidential campaign was in 1976, and you made the primary issue of that campaign, preventing thermonuclear war at that time. You also arrived at taking that position of responsibility, off of the success of your 1971 economic forecast of the takedown of the Bretton Woods system. This led to your pivotal role in the Strategic Defense Initiative, really a program to end world war.
But given your success as an economic forecaster, not in statistical trends, but your form of accurate economic forecasting—if you were to take just the current situation as it stands today, you would be looking at death to mankind, as Robert Frost said, "by fire, by ice."
I'd like it if you would elaborate your forecasting method, and how it is, that you can hold onto the principled stance, your program, as a way out for humanity, despite everything that appears to be in front of us?
LaRouche: Well, it started a long time ago. I really don't know, fully, how it started. I have an idea of how it started, but that part I can't really explain clearly. What I can identify is the result. And this became clear, as I went through military service during World War II, and what followed that. And this came into many areas, especially a fascination with Classical poetry, and a recognition, in doing some compositions of that type, a recognition of how the system works. And to understand what there is about the human mind that no animal can do. They can't do that. They can not actually engage in creating a new state of the mind.
Now, what happens if a society is dedicated to progress, just normal economic progress, or improvement—the education of children, for example, is a good example of this. You take a child who's a defeated child in a sense, in terms of development, and you can sometimes promote that child to become a creative personality. And therefore we know, somewhat, from Classical music in particular, from Classical poetry, and from other things of that type which you get in physical science, you understand how creativity functions. And you also realize that no animal that we know of is capable of creativity in that sense.
And therefore, you say, well, what is the progress of mankind? And you look at the history of mankind's progress. The qualitative changes in technology, in understanding, in poetry, in everything which is represented by that: The normal condition of mankind, the normal healthy condition of man, is to be creative. Not to be creative to get accolades of success, but because that's the way you want to live. That's the way you want to live in your own mind, is by being creative. You don't want to bore yourself to death! Which is what I think a lot of people tend to do. They just get miserable and nasty, because they get bored, bored of being what they are.
And there's another aspect of this thing, which is sort of a consequence: We now think of the death of people, we think of that as closing something off, as the end of something. Well, that's wrong. When you think about humanity, you realize that people who've progressed in developing the advances, cultural advances, their death is not the end of things. It's a part of a beginning of something, a new beginning, because their creative activity becomes, as creative activity, infectious among those who follow them. And it's that infectiousness of creativity, from generation to generation, and person to person, which defines the meaning of life over the span of entire successive centuries.
And therefore, you have a sense of immortality, not as the immortality of the embodied person, but the immortality of mankind, as expressed through the ascension of mankind's condition through successive generations. What we think of, "When I grow up, I'm going to be this.... When my children grow up, I want them to become like this, and I want their grandchildren to look even better." And the idea of a love of a society, where the idea of love, is loving creativity, loving this process of creativity.
And therefore, you look forward to what you can do for the future. And what gets you, what grips you, is you don't want that ever to go away. You want this continuity of the progress of mankind, mediated in part through yourself, into a better future for mankind as a whole. This is the kind of immortality which people can actually enjoy, without trying to make mystical dreams out of it. If you can get people around you to become better people than they are, in this sense, and that they in turn will make people coming after them, become better, that's what is the joy of living.
You're all going to die, so why aren't you so sad? Because there's a meaning to life, that you know that what's been engendered by what you've contributed to, means something for centuries to come. And you determine that those centuries to come will not be destroyed, so that that will happen.
The idea of going to Mars, why? Well, I don't particularly want to go to Mars. I don't think it's a good health bet for me! But in any case, why should we want to go to Mars. I don't really particularly think we have think about going to Mars. I think we have to be able to plant things on Mars, like Curiosity, plant things there, which will give us benefits for mankind, within the Solar System. And that we can do. And anyone who wants to shut down the space program is an idiot—or worse.
And therefore, the idea of progress, not as some getting richer, but the idea of achieving something, where what you are doing is going to mean the generations coming after you are going to benefit, and they're going to be the beneficiaries of others. And it's the idea of the fight to maintain the continuity of that kind of moral progress and intellectual progress. Because, you know, the Sun in 2 billion years will be gone! It'll be flat gone, and it will not be a pretty death, it will be an ugly spectacle, and we will want to scatter away from that Sun, at that future time, because it's not going to be there. And we're going to look at other parts of our galaxy, and see what we can do there.
But we can't do any of that now. We're going to have to encourage scientific progress, which enables mankind to achieve things that mankind could not achieve. And we'll say, "What? So, the Sun has blown up? Yes, we knew that, it's too bad. But we're living now, somewhere, which we chose."
And that idea of immortality that we have, embodied in us, something which is boundless in terms of what we must contribute to the future of mankind, that's what's important. And that's the only thing you can really trust.
Cooperation for Planetary Defense
Ross: All right, this will be the final question for tonight. What you just said about having a mission that you know has an enduring value, that's one of the greatest missions, one of the greatest jobs of government, is to be able to provide the people a reliable sense of self-worth that they can reflect on and realize they're being part of what they know has an enduring value.
On space, we've seen, in terms of technologies, in terms of economic growth, space has been an incredible driver for the economy overall, figuring out how to meet the challenges of space exploration, both with people and with equipment, has driven a lot of the technological breakthroughs that we take for granted today, the so-called spinoff effect in medicine and other fields.
Now, while this is undeniable, obviously, as you referred to, we're seeing with Obama, everything's being shut down, NASA's being taken down. If you think about the need to be able to defend the Earth against, in the long term, the end of the Sun, in the shorter term, the threat of asteroids, I was last month at a conference in Ukraine, an international conference on the defense of the Earth, using space technology, against asteroids, on the prediction of earthquakes, etc. And what you're saying about developing an infrastructure on Mars and elsewhere, where there's a real need for us to develop an inner-Solar System infrastructure, where we're able to have speed-of-light, near-instantaneous communication in this system, as opposed to now having to send things off, and wait.
So, what I'd like to ask you about, is if you look at what you did with the Strategic Defense Initiative, saying the basis of defense is this new kind of progress, that's [not] specifically opposed to the anti-ballistic-missile agreement, you said, "We need new technologies. We need new scientific principles: That's how we assure survival." So, today, we also need things like fusion energy if we're to develop the real power to be able to deflect these asteroids.
So, do you have more to say on planetary defense as a mission, and what it could mean internationally, for a real prospect for cooperation?
LaRouche: Well, first of all, it's something we've got to do, because we know it has to be done—not necessarily because we personally have to do it, but to the extent we can, we have to put our little personal bit into the process that's leading in that direction, and hopefully be sure that you're doing the right thing and going in the right direction.
You know, it's occupied more and more of my life, so far, this accumulation. And a lot of it's not just brilliant breakthroughs or something of that sort that happened when I was younger, but it's the fact that you have an impetus to do that. And you know that there are people out there, younger people, who are sort of scratching at the edge of the doors, or the glass windows, trying to get in! And you realize the most important thing to do, is to promote the adoption, by them, of the kinds of policies and commitments which I can foresee will be—. For example, take the problem: You have all these satellites out there, a great mass, they're uncounted. We don't even know where they are! We've got these comets, we don't know how to control them, yet. We don't even have the track of them, with our systems.
Well, the obvious thing is, here we are, we're a species, we're caught between a Sun which is going to blow up on us, some time within probably about 2 billion years or less; the weather's going to get very terrible. We're in a planetary system, within that system; we are becoming more and more aware of the galaxy, we're finding that, as we go to higher orders of power, beyond just ordinary thermonuclear power, and getting into that area, you realize that we're in a direction which, if continued, will lead to even solving those kinds of ultimate problems.
And therefore, you think about, would you want to have a universe without mankind in it? And what I see in the conditions of life, even in neighborhoods and communities today, and the collapse of society, U.S. society, under bad Presidents, a succession of bad Presidents, or foolish Presidents, or weak Presidents, or unable or incapable Presidents. You say, the protection of the future of mankind, for this purpose, for this mission, is something in which every human being should be sufficiently educated to desire to participate, as the mission of their life, in some sense or other.
I think that's the only true morality. Because morality has to be practical. It can not be admiring your own navel. It has to be something which is practical for mankind. It has to be something which is consistent with the purpose of the continued life of mankind. And there's a lot of things we know about that now. Very few people do, because the educational system stinks. It doesn't stink because it was bad, it stinks because it was broken down. And the more you see damage, the more you see damaged minds of young people running loose on the streets, and things like that, the more you know and the harder you have to fight, to ensure that creativity, the progress of creativity, does not get snuffed out.
[1] A reference to the redacted 28-page section of the 9/11 Commission Report which was never released to the public. Obama promised to do so if elected President, but has not done so.
