LAROUCHE WEBCAST
Why Obama Must Be Removed
from Office Immediately
[PDF version of this transcript]
Here is Lyndon LaRouche's Friday Webcast for Nov. 22, 2013, edited for EIR. LaRouche was joined by moderator Matthew Ogden, and LaRouche PAC's Dennis Mason, Ogden opened the program by noting the solemnity of date, which marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and then read a statement that LaRouche had issued Nov. 20, titled, "An Emergency Statement by Lyndon LaRouche":
"Given the fact that we are on the verge of the complete breakdown of the economy, we cannot tolerate a chaotic situation under this President. Therefore, there must be an impeachment now. There are plenty of grounds to do so—the paramount reason is that the United States must be saved. There must be a moratorium on foreclosures, and there must be a review of the outstanding claims of Wall Street circles, but the key to survival is to get Obama out of office before the collapse occurs.
"There is every ground to do so. His administration has been a systematic failure, so that his competence must be challenged. In fact, he is a completely unstable person that can't continue to function. He has to be kicked out because he is doomed in any case.
"The key thing is that we can't have the collapse occur with such a President in charge."
Matthew Ogden: We have question which has come in from an institutional contact, based out of Washington, D.C. It reads as follows: "Mr. LaRouche, President Obama is now perceived as a weak President, even a lame duck, very early in his second term. This is not only the view of the American people, and of the Republican opposition. Increasingly, this is the view of leaders from around the world, particularly in the Middle East. How do you see your chances of passing Glass-Steagall under these changing circumstances? Clearly, there is a renewed momentum in support of the passage of Glass-Steagall, and there are growing fears of another major financial crisis, perhaps at this year's end. The question is whether the weakening of President Obama reduces his ability to block the passage of Glass-Steagall, and whether in your view, he might ultimately realize that passage of Glass-Steagall with his support, may be the only way to redeem his Presidency and salvage his personal legacy, which means the world to him.
"Your comments?"
Obama Must Go!
Lyndon LaRouche: Well, there's no way that Obama can remain in office and be President, actually. It's not possible. He has no capability of actually making a decision which would assist the United States in dealing with its problems; he just can't do it.
Now, the danger is, that the crisis comes before he's out of office. If the crisis hits, and the crisis is about to hit—I mean, the whole end of the month of November, but certainly the early part of December, is a time when this is to be expected. If he were to leave office only after the crisis point had been hit, this would result in a disaster. So therefore, it's important that he be removed from office, or remove himself from office, perhaps by the aid of his Vice President, who probably is standing by, and is perhaps capable of dealing with this problem. I would suggest that that is the proper solution to this situation.
He must be thrown out of office. There's no way that the nation can survive with him in office, because we're on the verge of a general breakdown. It could happen almost at any time; it's almost an act of will, not a matter of consequences. It's just when somebody is willing to do that, and the time for that is, now.
So the important thing is that he be removed from office before this action is taken. And that would give us a means of actually having an orderly proceeding: That's the most crucial thing, that's the fact of the matter, the essential fact. And we're talking about now, completing November and going into early December. My estimate is, that it can not be sustained into January. There are too many things that come with dates at that time, it just can not be handled under these circumstances. And therefore, we have to have a reorganization of our government, starting with the process of getting him out of office, and take a number of steps toward reorganizing our government.
It's going to have to be a real reorganization. It can be done, however. And we will find ourselves with the possibility of agreement with other nations at this time, to make this thing stick. But we have to have a very cold-blooded, in a sense, and very calm resolution: He must simply be thrown out of office, or leave willingly. In either case, we have to at that point, be prepared, prepare ourselves now, for the initial decisions that have to be made to prevent a breakdown which is now oncoming, to prevent the breakdown from becoming a chaotic process. We can not have a situation in Europe and elsewhere, when the United States might go into a breakdown crisis. We're on the edge of it already.
Therefore, if we do this now, and get this matter cleaned up now, then we will have the options of taking gradual steps, to bring things under control. And this idea of bringing things under control is the crucial issue. He's now an impediment. You can't do it with him in office. And if you wait until he's thrown out, the nation will be in no condition to deal with the situation that's resulting.
So, he has to be out, voluntarily. Perhaps the Vice President would help and assist in getting him out. That would be a useful approach. I think I trust the Vice President to be able to handle that situation.
The Filibuster
Ogden: As people probably know, yesterday, in the U.S. Senate, a dramatic event took place, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accomplished something which even George Bush wasn't capable of accomplishing, which is sacrificing a large part of the filibuster, the historic power of the minority to assert itself in the institution of the U.S. Senate. Harry Reid, first thing in the morning, gathered the entire Senate together, and announced that he was invoking the so-called "nuclear option," and this is over nominations from President Obama, which would otherwise have been blocked....
What the "nuclear option" does, is it changes the threshold from 60 votes, which the power of the filibuster would involve, in order to get a nominee through, down to a simple majority of only 51 votes, for Senate approval of executive and judicial nominees. The only exception to this is Supreme Court nominees.
Now, this passed, and 52 Democrats and Independents voted along with Harry Reid. Interestingly, three Democrats voted against Reid, one of them being Joe Manchin [W.Va.], in the tradition of Sen. Robert Byrd [W.Va.], who traditionally stood up for the Constitution and the institution of the U.S. Senate; the other was Mark Pryor of Arkansas; and the third was Carl Levin [Mich.].
Now, very interestingly, Carl Levin took to the floor in opposition to Harry Reid, in opposition to the Democratic Majority Leader, and quoted Democrats from 2005, when Bush was trying to do exactly the same thing, trying to destroy the filibuster and ram through the "nuclear option," and you had Democrats, including Harry Reid, coming to the floor of the Senate and saying "We can not let George Bush destroy the United States Constitution."
Carl Levin quoted Sen. Ted Kennedy at that time, in 2005, who said, "neither the Constitution, nor Senate rules, nor Senate precedents, nor American history, provide any justification for selectively nullifying the use of the filibuster."
Levin also quoted Reid in 2005, saying that the nuclear option would have been an "abuse of power." And then, Levin even quoted Vice President Joe Biden when he was a Senator in 2005. And Biden said, "I said to my friends on the Republican side, you may own the field right now, but you won't own it forever. And I pray God when the Democrats take back control, we don't make the kind of naked power grab that you are doing."
So this was a very clever thing for Senator Levin to do—to take the words of the Democratic Party in opposition to what Bush had tried to do in 2005, and then to turn right back around on Harry Reid and on Obama.
Now, one of the reasons the "nuclear option" was defeated in 2005, was because of an emergency overnight mobilization that you [LaRouche] launched. And you issued a statement that went out in leaflet form, all across the United States, called "Save Our U.S. Constitution Now." What you said then, in 2005, was the following:
"The immediate target of this attempted illegal coup d'état is the institution of the U.S. Senate. The purpose is to overturn the U.S. Constitution, in favor of a White House dictatorship, by breaking the Constitutional powers built into the Senate's power to impose checks and balances against an out-of-control Presidency or temporary errant majority of the House of Representatives. This provision to defend our Constitution was centered in the powers of advice and consent which the Constitution assigned specifically to the U.S. Senate." And you said, "Do not allow that original Constitutional intention of advice and consent to be thrown away by the kind of panicked parliamentary majority rule which gave Hitler dictatorial powers on Feb. 28, 1933."
Now those were the remarks you made during the Bush Administration in 2005. Now, we find ourselves in 2013, and those remarks apply directly to what the Obama Administration is doing. So what can you say about the actions of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid?
LaRouche: Well, there's something funny about Harry Reid, and it's always been the case. You know, he's a famous boxer. And he's a queer duck in many respects, so I'm not surprised by the manner in which he acted. That is, his temperament. Sometimes he's cautious, when he thinks that's his only choice; sometimes he's not cautious. Sometimes his fists from the ring come into play, and he strikes with the fist and not with the brain. And this is another case of it.
But obviously, he has some kind of an opportunist scheme in someone's mind, and he was simply acting on it. Because he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knows it stinks, and he know that most of his colleagues in the Senate know that it stinks. And a smell like that, if it radiates too long, will cause public opinion to express its disgust.
U.S. Life Expectancy Plummets
Ogden: What I could like to do next, is to follow up on the broadcast that we presented last Friday. As most of our viewers know, we presented a dramatic series of pictures of the collapse of the U.S. economy, under the past five years of the Obama Administration. We used charts, maps, a series of graphics, to demonstrate this case.
Now, on Wednesday [Nov. 20], a hearing was held in the U.S. Senate [Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging] that served to complement the picture that we presented last Friday. It was a hearing that was sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And the hearing was called "Dying Young: Why Your Social and Economic Status May Be a Death Sentence in America." And through a series of graphs, the witnesses demonstrated how the economic policies of the recent administrations, both the Obama and the Bush administrations, are causing Americans to live far sicker lives, and to die far earlier deaths, than previously. And for the first time in our country, we can expect to die, on average, at a younger age than our parents did.
Mortality rates have actually increased for many areas of the country, and life expectancy has plummeted. One witness showed that, in just in the span of 14 years, life expectancy for women fell in 43% of the counties of the United States! Almost half of the counties of the United States show a declining life-expectancy for women.
Also, if you look at the discrepancy between the counties, between even neighboring counties, even counties within one metropolitan area, between the maximum life-expectancy and the minimum life-expectancy, you see that the gap between the average maximum and the average minimum is growing rapidly. For women, the gap in life-expectancy goes from the longest on average, which is 85 years of age in Marin County, Calif., to the shortest at 73 years of age in Perry County, Ky. That gap has grown to a difference of 12 years, depending on which county you live in.
And then for men, it's even more dramatic. The highest life-expectancy for men is 82 years, right here in Fairfax County, in northern Virginia. And the lowest is 64 years in McDowell County, W.Va.: That's a gap of 18 years—almost an entire generation.
In fact, the witnesses presented the case, that if you look at McDowell County, life-expectancy for men is actually equivalent to Botswana and Namibia, two of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. And then, if you look at the women, in McDowell County, the women die younger, on average, than the women in El Salvador and in Mongolia.
You can also take certain neighborhoods, maybe not necessarily counties per se, but if you take certain neighborhoods in Boston and in Baltimore, you'll find that the people who live there have a lower life-expectancy than many of the nations in the Third World, including Ethiopia and Sudan.
And then, the rate of premature births, premature infants for the United States generally, is equivalent to many of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the infant mortality rate in the United States is higher than in many nations in the Third World.
So this is the picture that was presented. One of the witnesses, Prof. Michael Reisch, from the University of Maryland, showed that just in the past two years, between 2010 and 2012—so that's right in the middle of the Obama Administration—the number of people officially living below the poverty line in the United States has increased by 3 million people. That brings the total to 50 million people in the United States, who are officially poor. That's the largest number of people in poverty since we started measuring those numbers, and it's the highest rate of poverty per total population in over a generation.
And what Reisch said, is that the official poverty rate is 16%: That's 16% of the U.S. population living beneath the official poverty line, which is calculated at $23,000 a year for a family of four. But, he stressed that this percentage is probably underestimated by half, if not more, because it excludes homeless, it excludes incarcerated, it excludes those who are forced to move back in with their families; it fails to take into consideration the fact that the cost of living in many metropolitan areas is far higher than is estimated.
He said that three-quarters of all Americans, 75% of all Americans, have incomes below $50,000 a year, which is considerably below what it takes to live even a minimally decent life in a major U.S. city. And this has not been adjusted since they started calculating the poverty-level index. So, if you raised the poverty level index by just 10%, which would be appropriate, he shows that one-third of the entire U.S. population would be officially poor.
So, what was presented in the testimony at this hearing, is that, if you directly correlate poverty with life-expectancy, the increasing poverty over the last three [Presidential] administrations, can be directly correlated with decreasing life-expectancy in the United States.
So, to say that the policies of the Obama Administration are murderous, is not an exaggeration at all. And while you have had poverty increasing in the Obama Administration, as we demonstrated last week, with our series of charts, along with a collapsing rate of employment, a rising dependency on food stamps, an increasing inflation in the price of basic necessary goods, and, the systematic elimination of critical medical care, now you have parts of the United States of America, beginning to resemble the most desperate nations in Sub-Saharan Africa. And we know very well that the genocide we've witnessed in Africa, for generations, has been the result of the policies of the British Empire. And now, Obama is bringing those policies right here, to the United States.
So I want to give you a chance to speak on that.
The Queen's 'Green' Policy
LaRouche: Well, there are several things that are of cardinal interest in this process. First of all, in order to understand U.S. policy respecting our own population, we have to look at the Queen. What's the policy?
We're on the verge of celebrating the [Requiem] mass [of W.A. Mozart] for a former President [John F. Kennedy]. And why was he killed, and why was his brother killed? I think that my view on this matter is by no means extraordinary, but is rather accurate.
The policy of the Queen has been openly, in more recent times, a policy of reducing the human population of the planet, to 1 billion people from 7 billion. That has been her policy, it was the Copenhagen policy she announced then, and it was repeated all over the place. But we know the policy was earlier.
The effect of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was that the result was a war in Indo-China, which decimated, for a span of at least ten years, the population of the United States, in a cruel way. This was associated with the introduction of a massive drug-addiction policy. So what we had is, with the onset of the assassination of President Kennedy, and then his brother Robert, a trend of decline of the living standard of the U.S. population.
This has been aggravated by things such as the drug problem. Now, the drug program has been the biggest factor in the destruction of the minds and health of the people of the United States. This has been a trend ever since.
The Green policy is also a genocide policy! If you look at the drug policy, and the reduction of the quality of life in general, during the virtual decade from the advent of the war in Indo-China, you see a pattern of legalized genocide against the U.S. population. And if you look carefully, that has been the trend ever since.
One of the dirty tricks was to reduce the productivity of the population, by what? By promoting the drug policy. Now the drug policy in Indo-China that was spread back into the United States, had been one of the principal reasons for the collapse in the standard of living of the people of the United States.
But look against the background: the Queen of England's policy of genocide—the stated intention of that Queen is the reduction of the human population from 7 billion people to 1, at a rapid rate! The drug policies, the similar kinds of policies which we see in the United States, we see in Europe and so forth, these policies lowered the standard of living, the standard of nutrition as well as the standard of living generally: This is reducing the population of the planet, especially in the trans-Atlantic region.
Now, the significance of the trans-Atlantic region—it was generally the highest income-bracket in the world. So what they did, is they went at that first; and now, the attack on India and China—China most conspicuously is now a target. In other words, we're at a point where, under present policies, where China had been increasing its productivity, they're now in the process of having it sunk, because of the cutting off of the market for goods which were produced in China and so forth.
We're Dealing with the Oligarchical System
So we're not dealing with some little problem, some issue of negligence, we're dealing with the oligarchical system. If you look at the history of mankind, the oligarchy has always pulled such tricks. But it never had the kind of technology before, which would enable it to do it on such a broad international scale. So, this is not a problem which has been neglected; this is an effect which has been intended!
And you look at Wall Street, for example: What is Wall Street? Wall Street is typical of the forces which are actually causing the collapse of employment, causing the collapse of the income standards, of the health-care standards, the nutritional standards. This is systemic murder, mass murder, intended on a global scale! And this is the crime against which we have to fight. This is the enemy! Wall Street and what it represents typify the enemy of mankind! What you have in Britain, Europe, so forth—same thing. This policy is a policy of genocide, and it's done through things like Wall Street, with the financial system, the financial gambling system.
And therefore, this is going to be a tough fight. Because we are morally compelled to crush the policies of the Queen of England and her Dutch partners, and other people who pursue the same policies. We must crush this policy! It's crushing us.
Look at the situation in Portugal, look at the situation in Spain, look at the situation in Italy, look at the situation in Greece—in Europe! What is this? This is genocide! It's voluntary: The policies that are causing this are intentional. They're led in Europe by the British monarchy, and the Dutch system. They're being led in the United States, where the policy now is actually causing a collapse in income per capita of our people. Look at the expenses, look at the prices, the inflation that's going on under this Wall Street system of speculation! This is what's destroying our people. But this is not this thing that's causing the problem, the thing has a human motive. And the human motive represents the oligarchical system. Of which the Queen of England is merely a leading example.
But this has always been the case. Mankind has always been in this struggle, as far as we know. Because we are a human species, which has certain qualities, excellent qualities. The human mind is the greatest thing on this planet; there's nothing on this planet living, which can match the potential of the human mind! But that's being destroyed. It's been destroyed before. The Roman Empire did it. What was done in the city of Troy was the same kind of thing: It was genocide. And the genocide is the characteristic of the oligarchical system. The Queen and her Dutch partners are representatives of the oligarchical system.
We founded the United States, essentially back in the earlier period, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, under the influence of the great Nicholas of Cusa. Now, Nicholas of Cusa proposed and initiated the program, to move people out of Europe, and move them across the ocean waters to areas on the other side, where they might be freed to develop their powers away from the victimization by the oligarchical system.
Our United States has been destroyed, again and again, by having bad Presidents, or killing good Presidents. And there are a number of good Presidents who were killed, murdered, other people were murdered. Why? By the oligarchical system! What has controlled our banking system in the United States? Well, the banking system in the United States has been largely controlled from London. It's been controlled by British banks which settled around Boston and around New York City. They organized this system to destroy our United States, and they did a fairly systematically good job, shall we say.
So the point is, let's not assume that there are conditions which are being "neglected," which caused these problems, these statistical phenomena. What causes this is the intention of the oligarchical system, which is still a dominant feature in civilization from the top down. And the Queen of England and her Dutch partners are the typification of that evil. And once we understand that what the evil is, and who it is, we understand what the Roman Empire was, why it killed people the way it did, why this has been going on around the planet, again and again and again. The oligarchical system! And the struggle of mankind is against the oligarchical system! We talk about conditions which we wish to remedy, but what are the conditions that we really have to remedy? They're the conditions which are induced by the oligarchical system and its legacy.
So therefore, don't say somebody's being bad, when they're actually engaged as accomplices in intentional mass murder.
Kennedy vs. Malthus
Ogden: Well, just as a follow-up to that, one thing that people do not know about Kennedy is that he was an anti-Malthusian, explicitly. In a speech that Kennedy delivered to the American Academy of Sciences, he attacked Malthus by name, directly contradicting what every British-sponsored, so-called scientific institution was pushing at that time, which was population reduction, population control, carrying-capacity, and all of these Malthusian ideologies. What Kennedy said—this is just an excerpt from this speech:
"Malthus argued a century and a half ago, that man, by using up all of his available resources, would forever press on the limits of subsistence, thus condemning mankind to an indefinite future of misery and poverty. We can now begin to hope, and I believe, know that Malthus was expressing, not a law of nature, but merely the limitation then of scientific and social wisdom. The truth, or falsity, of his prediction will depend now, with the tools we have, on our own actions, now and in the years to come."
And then Kennedy spent the rest of his speech promoting the breakthroughs in high-technology scientific discoveries, that he challenged the scientists of his time to make.
Now, Kennedy's opposition to and hatred of Malthusian ideology is perfectly consistent with his personal family history. Kennedy's great-grandfather had been forced to emigrate to America, to come via ship to Boston, to escape the great Irish Famine of 1848, which had been created, as a genocide policy, by the British. And it was explicitly, at that time, a direct application of the ideology of Malthusianism. There were members of the House of Lords, in the British Parliament at that time, who were arguing: No, we cannot give food to the starving Irish people, because it will break the principle of the great Parson Malthus, that we actually need population reduction in order to reduce misery and reduce the poverty of those lower classes.
Genocide occurred as a direct result of the policies of the British Empire, on the island of Ireland, where half of the population, if not more, either died of starvation or were forced to leave the country. This is the family history of President Kennedy. His relatives, also, had been leaders in the 1798 uprising against the British rule in Ireland, which was led by many veterans of the American Revolution; County Wexford, which was his ancestral home, was the epicenter of this insurrection. And then, going all the way into the 20th Century, relatives of Kennedy back in Ireland were fighting in the revolution to kick the British out of Ireland.
So this was something that was in his bones. And I wanted to bring this up at this point, because it's consistent with our theme from last week: Kennedy's role as the representative of the historic mission of the United States, in its role in the struggle against the oligarchical principle which is a policy of intentional depopulation through four tools: famine, war, poverty, and disease. This has been consistently the method by which the oligarchical principle has reduced the human population. And these are four evils which Kennedy directly fought against. Peace, the refusal to be sucked into war, the refusal to be sucked into a pointless war in Indo-China, and the refusal to allow the Cuban Missile Crisis to erupt into a thermonuclear war. The evil of poverty, the evil of disease, and the evil of famine, all of which are conquered by the increase in the energy-flux density and the productivity of the human race.
Now, I know Dennis Mason has more to present on this later, but I thought this was an appropriate time to connect the legacy of Kennedy to what you elaborated last week as the identity of the United States, as the leader of the struggle against the oligarchical principle worldwide.
LaRouche: Well, you go back a little bit earlier, and take, on the Irish question, the slaughter of the Irish that was done by the Dutch. And the same Dutch became the British monarchy. Because that war, the first war against Ireland, the invasion of Britain, concentrated on the extermination of the Irish. And of course this had great significance for the American Revolution: We note the number of people from Ireland who had been involved in leading positions within the struggle for our freedom of our nation, the same thing.
It's always the same. And that is what the meaning of this thing is. It's always the same. It is anti-human. What did Rome do? Rome engaged in vast genocide against its own population—the Romans did! Other cultures of that type have done the same thing. What happened in Troy, for example, was genocide! Intentional! And so therefore, you have a class of human beings, who biologically are human, but in behavior, they're not. They consider themselves the overlords of the mass of people, and the thing that worries them the most, is that there will be an excess of the people whom they kept poor. And that is what's happening today. First, drive them, make them poor, and then, kill them, for being poor.
JFK and Nuclear Power
Dennis Mason: I have a couple of questions, one of which will get into some of President Kennedy's policy. The first one is on nuclear power. Now, in India, the chairman of the prime minister's Scientific Advisory Council has reported to the press that their 500 MW prototype fast breeder reactor is ready for commissioning next year. This is a molten sodium-cooled reactor, which uses depleted uranium oxide-plutonium oxide as fuel. It has blanket assemblies containing depleted uranium, to absorb neutrons generated from the fission reactor, in order to generate more fuel. Two more of these prototype fast breeder reactors are under construction. India intends to have six in total by the year 2020.
While the current prototype harnesses depleted uranium, the plans are to move forward in the next decades to use thorium-232, which is rather abundant, for the blanket assemblies, the breeder part of the reactor, which would then turn into uranium-233, which in turn, could be harvested as fresh fuel.
This is an exciting development for the world as a whole, and for India in particular, as the design of this particular reactor was entirely a product of the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research, and if successful, will place India at the head of nuclear energy development.
On the one hand, I think it's noteworthy to keep in mind what you had drawn attention to, Lyn, a few weeks ago, when it was announced that Saudi Arabia could procure nuclear weapons from Pakistan, with virtually a phone call, and how that could be used to have a go with the tensions between Pakistan and India as another potential catalyst for a thermonuclear war. And I think another factor to consider, is that we in the United States are quickly being left behind. You'll find on the front page of the website [www.larouchepac.com], there's a report authored by Michael Kirsch, "Fifty Years Behind; the President from the Future," which details several of the policies of President Kennedy. The first chapter actually starts off with the breeder reactor program. He goes through the breeder reactor program, the nuclear desalination, national water projects, farming the ocean both for minerals and for food, Operation Plowshare, and a nuclear rocket.
Concerning the breeder reactor, Kennedy had received a complete report as early as 1962, on the question of how we, in the United States, then, would be implementing this technology. And it was more than a suggestion of mere projects; it was a program of how to completely leave the fossil-fuel-driven economy and move on to a nuclear economy. The report stated that some of the reactor prototypes at the time would reach full operational scale phase by the early 1970s, and suggested that breeder reactors would be the standard nuclear reactors by the early 1980s.
At the time, they concluded there were three simultaneous phases that could be pursued under the U.S. economy. First, that we have early construction of the most competitive existing types of nuclear reactors; and secondly, development, construction, and demonstration of reactors which produce some fuel but less than used; and then third, intensive development of the breeder, which produces more fuel than is used. This is under Kennedy.
And when he opened up the Hanford reactor in Washington, during that speech, Kennedy had the following to say: "I am also glad to come here today, because we begin work on the largest nuclear power reactor for peaceful purposes in the world. And I take the greatest satisfaction at the United States being second to none. I think this is a good area where we should be first, and we are first. We are first."
Now, we are no longer first. Kennedy thought we should be, and I agree with him. If you could address this question.
Beyond Nuclear: Thermonuclear
LaRouche: Well, that priority has been outdated, and that's not unfortunate: When you consider the needs of the world, rather than looking at the thing from objective conditions, and local conditions, we have a different conclusion. The most urgent thing for the world as a whole, is the immediate progress in developing thermonuclear fusion as a driver program.
This is not a question of a competition with different kinds of computers or technologies. This is a global responsibility. It involves many things. It includes such things as the fact that the threat of large objects hitting Earth, that some of these large rocks rolling up there in space, all they have to do, at that size, say about one year's distance [to hit the Earth], and you can wipe out the human species.
So the ability to treat the [controlled] thermonuclear process, at this level, as thermonuclear fusion—which is a technology we had actually got into in the beginning of the 1970s, which is where I got into this business—with the development of that, we had made a leap beyond the so-called traditional types of nuclear production.
We have not made them obsolete, but they became subsidiary to a policy which had to be a thermonuclear policy. And what's been happening, ever since the 1970s, when I got, shall we say, into the business, with the Fusion Energy Foundation; since that time there's been a constant prevention of any progress in this direction.
Now, we've reached a point, where the problems we have go to the range of the Pacific Ocean, and the whole Pacific Ocean basin, and other parts of the planet, require a much larger, more unitary thermonuclear program. And this is not just for energy, not just for power: This is for dealing with the challenge, not only on Earth, but the challenge which mankind faces, because of these asteroids. We don't know that the human species is not going to go out of business, some day soon, by being hit by a relevant size of asteroid! So therefore, our concern is, we just take the area from Mars down to where we live, and that whole area is full of this potential. And we have presently nothing available to do the job, if it were to come upon us now.
So therefore, we have to think in global terms, really global terms, not just Earth global, but at least a whole section of the Solar System, which must be our concern. Because all it takes is one of those things, of a suitable size, hitting the planet Earth, and you're all dead. And the smaller things, that will take out the population of one-quarter, or half or so forth, of the population of Earth.
So the issue is not just economy. The issue is complex; it involves everything. And the driver has to be thermonuclear fusion, because without that perspective available, it will be impossible to really organize the defense that mankind will require.
There are threats to mankind other than those, from nasty people like the Queen, and the Dutch operation. They're evil, and we must defeat them. But, the danger is, will the human species continue to exist? And the speculation—which is not just speculation, it's just a fair estimate of what the probabilities are—at an appropriate size and speed of a mere asteroid, hitting Earth head on, you're all dead.
So it's not just the economic issue, the fact of thermonuclear fusion power and so forth, but that thermonuclear fusion represents the kind of technology, and the extent of mobilization which mankind has to begin to develop, in a rush, to show that we can secure mankind from extinction.
So when you raise these issues, that is what comes into play. It's no longer an economic issue.
Human Space Exploration
Mason: The Congressional Budget Office has come up with a list of 103 programs which could be cut to save the Federal government a couple of bucks. Among these is the elimination of human space exploration programs. As it stands now, the U.S. exploration of space is limited to the missions to the International Space Station, and as it stands, we're responsible for operation, maintenance, and supply, for half of that ship.
Now, the CBO report argues that this could save us the whopping sum of $73 billion between 2015 and 2023, and also states that advances in technology have generally reduced the need for humans to fly into space; that robots can replace absolutely any human presence in space, whatsoever.
You, Lyn, have called for instruments to be sent to Mars in lieu of sending people, but this is very, very different. Here, the only consideration is money—we don't have it. That's the excuse, while the real motive is to completely shut down technological development altogether. But every time we send someone into space, we learn something new. And I think that's what the real target is.
Now, while you've indicated that we have no need to send mankind to Mars in person, for its own sake—you know, to plant a flag and die shortly thereafter. That's not science. As we begin to master the domain of the inner Solar System as a whole, traveling out there will be a natural expression of that dominion; and, if and when the overall mission of the development of the Solar System as a whole, warrants that. Today, it doesn't. But it could have.
I could go back to the report that's on the site [www.larouchepac.com] by Michael Kirsch, the nuclear rocket chapter, which reiterates that man on the Moon, what President Kennedy is often most remembered for, was only one step of a broader space program, which knew no finality, no limits. As early as 1962, the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, or NERVA, was carrying out tests in Nevada, which indicated operational status by 1967! With every expectation that we would have nuclear propulsion in operation in the '70s.
By 1966, we achieved an operating time of 30 minutes at the full design power, the equivalent of 55,000 pounds of thrust. In 1967, a full-power test reactor had operated for 62 minutes, which is longer than would be required for most operational space missions. The ability to throttle the nuclear engine, changing the power output, while maintaining the operating efficiency, was demonstrated and achieved. The flight test program was cut, to save some money, by 1965, and in 1973, it was cut altogether by Nixon.
If we had, as a nation, continued on the Kennedy trajectory, we would be having a very different discussion. But that didn't happen.
So, as you have said again tonight, man in space has to part of an entire program, not as something in and of itself. It's clear that Kennedy was of that mind, as well. In fact, in 1962, on May 25, at the White House Conference on Conservation, when he was talking about desalination on a national scale, he said: "I have felt that whichever country can do this,"—the desalination of seawater—"in a competitive way, will get a good deal more lasting benefit than those countries that may be even first in space." And he went on to say how desalination would be a prime accomplishment of science in improving the life of people in the long history of the world.
But at the same time, it seems folly to completely abandon our toddler steps into space, especially under the auspices of budgetary considerations. So, how do we approach this question from where we are right now, of man operating in space, in person?
LaRouche: Well, I've just written something as an appendage to something else, which deals with this other issue. It's a completely different issue. And often in life, you have people inventing things which are all fine at the time, but then, somebody comes along and makes an invention which just cancels all of that, because something far superior has come up.
Now, this is not quite the situation, yet. But the thing which I pose, which we are aware of, in what is going on in our Basement [science research] operation, for example, is a lot of attention to the fact that the asteroids that are out there, represent a problem far beyond anybody's imagination! And it would take something of about a mile or so in diameter to hit the Earth just right, and the whole human population is dead! Now, we take the number of the asteroids which fall into that kind of category, and we haven't yet done anything to begin to count the number of these hazards which are running around the tracks of Earth in the Solar System, even that particular part of the Solar System.
The Miracle of Curiosity
Now, I've been fussing on this thing which the question raises, since Curiosity. Now Curiosity, this man-operated landing on Mars, was a great achievement. It demonstrated the ability, above all other things, that man had now reached the point, even though it's a relatively primitive stage, to put things that function, from Earth—no human being touching any of this process, except manufacturing the product; being there, doing it? None! Nothing! It's all done by automation.
Now, we've progressed in that direction, and Curiosity demonstrates the level of technology which has been developed by NASA, and related operations, which show what can be done with an apparatus like Curiosity, which is still, I believe, operating on Mars.
What we need now, is a system of defense. Not some economic question, but a system of defense of the existence of the human species, on Earth. And my view is, as I've stated, let's take the area of the Solar System, the smaller part of which includes Mars, and Earth is a part of that whole panoply. Now we know that we have to defend this area of space, of solar space, because we're in it. We're in the area, we're among the targets! I think that that suggests that there's a little priority lurking around these matters, about getting these big rocks under control.
What Curiosity demonstrates is not that Curiosity is the model that's going to solve the problem, but the fact that we, through the space program, have gone as far in success, as Curiosity has gone, despite Obama! Therefore, the defense of the existence of the human species has a certain amount of priority, over some other concerns.
And in point of fact, if we realize that we have to do that, and prepare to defend the human species within this area of the Solar System, in particular, by defenses stuck up there, to operate as active defenses, but also directed, from Earth, by a complex of systems which are on top of some of the garbage out there, like the large asteroids, and build up a system, an information system, to be able to put systems out there, that are able to intervene in preventing one of these large objects—it doesn't have to be too large; about one mile diameter might do it—so therefore, we have to have a defense of Earth, from within a territory of defense, which includes the orbit of Mars.
And now, therefore, to do that, we have to accelerate our nuclear program, in order to be able to develop and deploy the systems which are necessary for this system of defense, which is required.
And that's what I've been working on, on exactly this question. I have not got a design to solve the problem. What I have, is a certain categorical kind of knowledge of what might be required to solve this problem, and not to conclude things with my design—that's not my style—but to make sure that I'm stimulating people who are competent, to pay attention to this kind of complex, in order to defend the existence of the human species!
I rather think that, contrary to Obama or other idiots on Earth, that that is an important thing to consider. And therefore, what that means is, we will be using everything we have, in terms of nuclear technologies, thermonuclear technologies, and so forth: We are going to use everything! But this time we've upgraded the war. The war is now against the threat to the sudden extermination of the human species on Earth! That's the war! That's the mission. And if we take that mission as our primary concern, our primary objective, our overriding concern, it probably will happen that all the other, lesser-grade threats and problems, will fall into place, under the leadership of a campaign to defend the very existence of man's life on Earth.
