July 25, 2007

LaRouche’s Forecast of the 2008 Depression: The End of the Post-FDR Era

Editor’s Note: These are excerpts from Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks and his dialogue with the audience, which were published in full in EIR Vol. 34, No. 30, August 3, 2007, pages 4-29.

We are republishing these excerpts because this was LaRouche’s proven, detailed forecast of the 2008 depression, whose effects are still with us to overcome today. Lyndon LaRouche addressed an international webcast on July 25, 2007 in Washington, D.C., which was attended by about 150 guests, and broadcast in full over the Internet. LaRouche’s opening remarks were followed by two hours of dialogue.

Pull Back the Troops in Southwest Asia

Now, the first thing we’re going to have to do: We’re going to make a decision right away, to pull back the U.S. troops in Southwest Asia. You have to pull them back into holding positions. The fundamental thing we have to do, and it won’t work by itself: The holding position means you’re pulling the United States troops out of the conflict, into holding positions. Therefore, you are changing the positions of the U.S. troops from combatants, and the issue and the target, to a factor, in which a group of nations will make the decision to solve the problem. That, from a military and strategic standpoint, and a diplomatic standpoint, will work: It can be done. The algebra is known; a number of specialists have presented the algebra. It will work! As far as its motion is concerned, its mechanics will work, but, it won’t work by itself. Not because it’s not a good idea, not because it’s not a workable idea, because politically, it’s not adequate. You have to come up with something more. You have to come up with a group of nations, a group of powers, who recognize that the instability of this region is a threat to the continuation of civilization. And therefore, a remedy has to be forced through. And the only way, is that a group, a dominant group of nations says, “We agree. We are going to take the concerted power of our nations and insist that this happens. There will be no resistance. It will happen. We’re going to have stabilization in this region.”

This means what I proposed earlier. It can not be done unless we induce the idiot who’s under adult supervision in the White House, without Cheney, to carry forth on what was started at Kennebunkport. Move in that direction, an inclination to move in that direction. Get Cheney out and go back into the Kennebunkport posture. [The Summit meeting of Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in Kennebunkport, Maine on July 1-2, 2007.] At that point, the President of the United States, or the Office of the President of the United States, has to make an offer to Putin, and Putin will, without question, accept the offer. And that is, to build a coalition immediately, in the context of moving these troops, U.S. troops, away from the area of conflict, where all they are, are targets; they’re not accomplishing anything, except being targets. If you want them to be targets, keep them there. The only function they’re performing right now is as targets. Get them out of the target range.

All right, now, if we approach Russia and Putin, Putin will accept the offer. If the United States government proposes to President Putin that the United States, Russia, China, with the support of India, become a sponsoring committee to build immediately a group among nations who are going to address these global problems which have to dealt with immediately—because, smaller nations, individual nations can’t do it. You have to change the world monetary-financial system immediately, and you can not do that with a couple of small nations. You can only do that from the top. You have to pull together the might of the world, the major powers of the world and those who will support them, and say, “We’re going to change immediately the world monetary system. We’re going to get rid of the floating-exchange-rate monetary system. We’re going back immediately to a fixed-exchange-rate system.” Because if we do not go back to a fixed-exchange-rate system, of the Franklin Roosevelt prototype, then there’s no possibility of preventing a general collapse and disintegration of the world economy. It can’t be done. Therefore, you have to have a power group which says, “We’re going to save this planet from Hell.”

One of the things which we’re going to do, which is a trigger point, is to get something done in Southwest Asia: to get the U.S. troops out of the target range, and pull them into a holding position where they become a factor in negotiating the peaceful reconstruction of the region. That will not work by itself unless you have a power group which includes four powerful nations of this planet, and others, who decide that that’s going to work. A power group which agrees that we’re going back to a fixed-exchange-rate system, by government decree, as made by governments in concert. We’re going to stop the floating-exchange-rate system, we’re going to take steps to clean up the financial mess.

Most of the financial claims and the financial assets and obligations in the world today, are worthless. You have play money; the stock market is a fraud. The Treasury Department is committing a fraud. Most governments are committing fraud, and the British government is the worst of them all. The British government and the British system is the worst offender that we have to deal with on this planet. They organized this war, they organized most of the evil that is done in the world today. So, they will not be considered as having any veto rights in this matter. But the major powers are going to say: We’re going to have to go back to a fixed-exchange-rate system. We’re going to do it immediately, by treaty agreement, by signed agreement among countries. We’re going to freeze a lot of things, and we’re going make sure that things that have to be paid, things that have to go on, go on. That production is not cut; farming proceeds, food is produced, infrastructure is built, and so forth. And we’ll have to build our way out of this process with steps which begin with these measures. And the measures are a matter of the will of a powerful group of nations, not just the four, but a powerful group of nations who agree that this has to be done, because Hell on Earth has to be prevented. And that’s the only way it is going to happen.

And therefore, to do this, we must remove Cheney. Anyone who is not prepared to remove Cheney, should immediately leave any official position in the U.S. government—right now! And they should be told to leave; they should be impeached, hounded out of office, or whatever is necessary. Get ‘em out of there. They’re an impediment! Because we’re going to return this government, in particular, to its people. And you see what has happened with this contempt which the leaders of Congress have shown toward the people, the contempt they’ve shown toward the majority of elected representatives in the Congress; toward the majority of people who are out there who are their constituents? What right do they have to say they represent the people, when they’re against the people? The people want us out of Southwest Asia, and anyone who is not prepared to do that is not going to have a hearing with a great majority of the American people. More than three-quarters of the Democrats insist on this; more than half of the Republicans insist on this. Others will insist and join it en masse if they think it has a chance of surviving. That’s what they want.

When you say you’re going to get us out of that mess in Southwest Asia—that’s even what the New York Times said today in an editorial column—when the American people hear that we are determined to actually get out of that mess in Southwest Asia, then, and only then, will the American people respond with confidence to their government. If you don’t do that, you’re worth nothing. You should get out of office; you’re an impediment; you’re an embarrassment. For the sake of your descendants, get out of office; don’t disgrace them any further. They’ve got enough trouble with the debt you’ve left them, on top of everything else. So, that’s the general outline of the situation.

So, you have to, on the one hand, if you don’t take the drastic action—get out now!—nobody’s going to listen to you. You’re a fool. Shut your mouth; no one wants to hear it. Don’t bother us with your babble anymore. Secondly, that’s not going to work by itself. But it opens the door for something else. It opens the door for the President of the United States [George W. Bush], under adult supervision, without Cheney, going to Putin and saying, “We need this.” I guarantee you, reading the situation in Russia, Putin will say “Yes.” The United States will say to China, and Putin will say to China, “We want you in on it.” “Yes.” China will say “Yes,” because China has a number of problems which I understand very well, and they will say yes, if you speak the right way. In terms of India: India will be somewhat reluctant because it was too long under British influence, and they have to get rid of some of that problem. But nonetheless, India is seeing what is happening with the Pakistan destabilization, and Indian leaders who understand what that means, will say “Yes, we, too, have a problem. We are being used as a cat’s paw in respect to Iran.” The Pakistan situation is a cat’s paw in respect to Iran. It’s a cat’s paw of those who are determined to destroy India, too. And Indian patriots don’t like the United States, particularly with the current treaty proposals being shoved down their throats. India will go along, in an Indian way; it’s not the same thing as China. China is simpler. If China says they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it.

All right. Now, four powers on this planet agree that we’re going to sponsor this type of approach, to getting out of the mess which has been created in the world today, and say, “The British have to be put under adult supervision.” Then we can begin to do certain things.

The Economic-Financial-Monetary Crisis

Now, the big problem we have to deal with, as I mentioned before, is the economic-financial-monetary crisis. The United States is disintegrating. If a depression occurs, the United States will see conditions you won’t believe. Nothing in the past century, no depression, is comparable to what will hit the United States if this system collapses now. We don’t have industry; we have destroyed our agriculture; we have destroyed our health-care system. We’re destroyed almost everything that we’ve depended upon. And if we lose the power of money—which we’re about to lose—as long as the U.S. dollar was around, and as long as world affairs were denominated in U.S. dollar exchanges, we had a certain strength in this world. Not because we were worth anything, we weren’t worth anything; we threw that away a long time ago. But we were worth something because the U.S. dollar was, in effect, a reserve currency of the world. Why? Because the currency of China depended upon the value of the U.S. dollar. The currency of many countries depended upon the value of U.S. dollar; the debts were denominated in dollars. And as long as we were respectable, people would respect us, and treat us nicely, because they were afraid of the collapse of the U.S. dollar. Once the U.S. dollar is collapsing, we ain’t nuttin’ no more!

Now, therefore, we have to put the dollar under a fixed-exchange-rate system again. And we have to start to rebuild what we’ve destroyed. We have to take what was being shut down, the auto industry—put these hedge funds out of business, foreclose them; they’re all swindles anyway. Start to rebuild the infrastructure capacity, the hi-tech infrastructure capacity, which existed in Michigan, in Ohio, in Indiana, in other places we’ve destroyed. Build up our infrastructure, our mass transportation systems. Restore the growth of our agriculture. Go back to a high-tech economy again, not a Baby-Boomer economy, not a synthetic diaper economy. And therefore, if we do not mobilize to go away from what has happened to us since 1968, to get away from the ‘68er mentality, to get away from zero growth, to get away from post-industrial society, to go back to high-tech, to proliferate nuclear power—we need it.

I mean, the future of humanity is nuclear power. You want fresh water? You need nuclear power. We’re just about to unleash a prototype of nuclear plant which is specifically designed to make not only fresh water for us, but to make fuels, hydrogen-based fuels, made synthetically from water. And the world is going to go to 800-1,000 megawatt power units, which are of a new type, a fourth-generation type, which are efficient for producing fuels from water, hydrogen-based fuels, whose waste product is water. Much better than coal; much better than anything else. And certainly much better than using up our food supply and starving people to death so we can run our automobiles, and still function.

So, therefore, we’re going to go back to the American System. We’re going to go back to an image of the United States as if we had remembered Franklin Roosevelt and what he did in the 1930s. What he did in the United States, saving the world from Hitler. Because without us, without Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler would have won. The British would have joined him. They already had joined him; they created him, after all. So therefore, we have to go back to that image. The world needs it.

Let’s take the case of China. Now, China has a population of 1.4 billion people, and India has 1.1. Now China is—people think China is very wealthy; it’s not true. There are some wealthy people in China, there are some industries in China, which are important, but also, the majority of the population of China is extremely poor. And therefore, without a revolution in technology, affecting the infrastructure and so forth, of the masses of China, the massive area, China has not got a future. Therefore, we have to think about that. We have India; we have probably 70% of the population of India, even though about 30% of the population of India, 1.1 billion people, is in fair shape, the majority is in worse shape than ever before. They’re short of water, they’re short of everything. They’re short of the conditions of life. They need development. All of Asia needs development. Desert areas need development. So, we have to go into a period of high-tech nuclear-fission-driven growth in basic economic infrastructure.

Well, for example, one case in which we just had some agreement on, in terms of the Bering Strait Tunnel project. If we proceed—and my proposal, of course, is magnetic levitation—to build this tunnel which connects this tip of Siberia with Alaska. Now, if we do that—and preferably if we use magnetic levitation as the mechanism—we build a line which runs throughout Europe, along the route of what Mendeleyev designed as the Trans-Siberian Railroad. We run a line down through Canada, through the United States, through the Isthmus of Panama, down into South America. We run the other line through the so-called Middle East, Southwest Asia, into Africa, and build trunk lines. If we do that, we can build a transportation system which has certain very interesting characteristics.

First of all, it’s fast—200, 300 miles an hour, or something like that. That’s good enough, isn’t it? It’s a lot cheaper than air flight, a lot more efficient, and it can carry more people, and does the job. And no airport jam-ups. It’s also for freight. If we can have an efficient system of moving people and freight across borders, across continents, the continent of Eurasia, the continent of the Americas, the continent of Africa: If we do that, we will have transformed this planet. If we do this with nuclear power, and go on to developing thermonuclear fusion technologies, including the management of the supply of our Periodic Table for the needs of humanity, we have then a prospect of a 50-year recovery program, because you’re talking about a lot of very long-term investment in very capital-intensive heavy works, among other things. And these are like large river systems, water management systems, power systems, all these types of things, are 25- to 50-years’ investment; some are longer. We have to change the character of the planet in terms of fresh water supplies, and things of that sort.

So, we have a 50-year perspective before us if we start it now properly. We have some very good ideas about what to do. We can begin to reverse the post-industrial society, and that’s what we have to do. We’re suffering from an ideology of post-industrial society.

Now, let’s go back one step on this: Why post-industrial society? Why did this disease of post-industrial society come about?

We have a famous play by a great author, Aeschylus; it had three parts, a trilogy, but the middle part is the one we’ll focus on: Prometheus Bound. You have this evil bastard, the god Zeus, Olympian Zeus, who proclaims to Prometheus, who has been taken captive, that he is going to be tortured—he can’t kill him because he is immortal—but he can torture him forever, sort of the Guantanamo effect. And that he is going to be tortured because he committed the crime of lifting mankind above the level of animals, by allowing human beings to know how to use fire to improve the human condition. That’s the crime that Zeus condemned Prometheus for.

The Oligarchical Model

We have lived in this world for most of what we know of it under the influence of what is called an oligarchical model. Sometimes it’s called the Persian model, in the times of the Ancient Greeks, but it’s generally known as the oligarchical model. The oligarchical model is typified in European history, by the Spartan model in Greece. It’s typified by the Roman Empire; it’s typified by the Byzantine Empire. It’s typified by the Venetian system, with the alliance of Venetian bankers with Norman chivalry, which is a form of empire; and it’s typified today by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, which has pretty much run most of the world, increasingly, since about February of 1763, when the British defeated the French and some others, and used a war in Europe to make Europe impotent; and the British East India Company—not the British Monarchy, but the British East India Company!—ran India, as a colony, with a private army, as a colony—not the British monarchy, but the British East India Company! The British East India Company ran a war against China! And they did all these kinds of things. And today, the British East India Company exists in the form of the BAE, which is being investigated for its connections to what happened on 9/11. It’s the one capability on this planet that could have done 9/11—and probably did.

So, this empire: This is an oligarchical system! And the oligarchy does not like a republican state. It does not like a state in which society’s policy is based on raising the productive powers of humanity, through science and technology, and the use of that, to transform the planet, to raise the standard of living, to raise the knowledge, to elevate man; but rather like something out of a nightmare of Quesnay: It’s to have peasants who are treated as cows on the estate, on the assumption that the profit of the estate, as Quesnay specified, and Adam Smith admired him for this—the profit of the estate is due to the magical powers of the ownership of the title to nobility! So, you pay your peasants, who work on the farm, on the basis that you support your cows, until you decide to slaughter them. But you don’t give them any more—you don’t give them any credit for creating wealth. You treat them like cattle.

That’s the oligarchical society. Whereas, somehow, the magical powers of ownership bestow upon the owner the riches which are produced by society: the oligarchical model.

So the historical struggle of humanity is centered around the struggle, at least in known history, the struggle for the republic, in which the commonwealth, the well-being of mankind in society as a whole, is the standard of government, the standard of policy. As opposed to government and the masses of people as an object of convenience, for a few wealthy or otherwise powerful landowners, or people-owners.

And that’s the struggle. That’s the meaning of the Roman Empire. That’s the meaning of the Byzantine Empire. That’s the meaning of the Venetian chivalry system. That’s the meaning of the British Empire. And that’s the meaning of every petty, tyrannical regime which has ever cursed this planet.

And therefore, the issue is, the nature of man, the nature of the human individual. Is the human individual an animal, who simply has dog-like characteristics, or cow-like characteristics, certain species-characteristics given by a biological endowment? Or is mankind the human mind? Is mankind the creative being that Zeus hated? The individual who can create, discover universal physical principles, and apply the knowledge of these principles to change the condition of life for humanity, and to conquer man’s problems as a whole?

Is the individual sacred? Is the individual human being different than a mere animal? Do we have the kind of society which fosters that fact, and bases relations within society on the basis of the knowledge that the human individual is not an animal, but has a power of reason, the power of discovering new universal physical principles, and artistic principles, which no animal can do? And that we desire a society, a form of society, which we call a republic, or a commonwealth, in which the well-being of all of the people in society, and their descendants, will have a constantly improved condition of life, a constantly improved realization of the meaning of their life in the eyes of their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so forth to come. And of other nations too.

And that’s what the struggle is about.

Democratic Desertion

The change came with Roosevelt’s death. Roosevelt represented that principle. He was the epitome of that principle, and for that reason, people like Felix Rohatyn hate him. There was a meeting in the Spring of 2005. As you’ll recall, I had some success in sparking the Democratic Party and others to lead in the defense of Social Security against George W. Bush. And we had a very successful mobilization in that respect. We did save the Social Security system. But unfortunately, beginning in the Spring of 2005, my fellow Democrats deserted one side of the cause. They continued to defend Social Security, but we’d also raised the question that we had to defend the birthright of the nation, as represented by its automobile industry. Not simply for making automobiles, but for making all kinds of things, like rebuilding river systems, and so forth, which that industry, because of its tool-making capacity, had provided us, during World War II, and so forth. And still could.

We had a rotting system in the United States, and we, the members of the Congress, allowed this capacity, this idle capacity of the automobile industry, which is the machine-tool sector, the infrastructure-building capacity—we allowed that to be disassembled, and destroyed! Instead of fixing up what had happened in Katrina, in Louisiana, and so forth; instead of fixing our rivers; instead of fixing our transportation system; instead of restoring our health care system; we destroyed a precious part of our capability as a nation, of taking care of our own needs.

Who did it? The leadership of this came from the Democratic Party. There was a meeting, in which the subject was me. The meeting was organized by Felix Rohatyn, who is a fascist. He’s a guy who played a key role in putting Pinochet into power in Chile, which tells you what his character is. If you knew what he did in Big MAC in New York, you know what his character is. The guy’s a fascist, together with George Shultz, and people of the same type. And his argument was very clear at this meeting. His argument was: We don’t want a LaRouche. Why? Because LaRouche is like Franklin Roosevelt, and we don’t want another Franklin Roosevelt. We have to stop another Franklin Roosevelt.

So the Democratic Party, which Felix Rohatyn considers himself a controller of, moved to sideline what I was doing. Backed off. And you saw the result.

The Democratic Party participated in condoning a takeover of the Supreme Court, or a near takeover, by a fascist organization called the Federalist Society! That fascist organization is built around the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the man who designed the Hitler dictatorship!

Are they Nazis? Of course they’re Nazis.

It’s just like the Bank for International Settlements is a Nazi institution too—how the thing was organized. So, they’re back at it. And Pinochet’s a Nazi. Pinochet’s also part of the British organization, the BAE. He’s dead now, but he’s still a part of it. Now his deadness makes him a much more confirmed part of it, and tradition.

Who else? George Shultz created that monster also. Others created it. Pinochet not only was Nazi in his thinking, but his government, with the backing of Shultz, and with the participation of Rohatyn, ran Operation Condor, which was a genocide operation in the Southern Cone of South America, which was run by a third-generation of the Nazis! Who were imported for that reason. This is what we’re dealing with.

You say, why is it that Nazis are bad? Well, it’s not just that Nazis are bad. Nazis are a product of the belief in oligarchical society. Look back in history. What did the Roman legions do? They ran extermination operations against populations too! That was their method. Exterminations as a method of controlling society. They ran the gladiator system, didn’t they? What is that? The same thing.

Now the problem is, you have a mentality which is loose, typified by Felix Rohatyn, and Felix is treated as respectable in the Democratic Party! He may not have a swastika, a Hakenkreuz on his sleeve, but he has one in his heart. That’s what he does. Look at what he does. Look at Big MAC in New York. It was a swindle. Highway robbery! They looted the city! They wanted to get the human beings out of there, and you had to conceal your membership card in the human race, and just show you were very rich, and you could live in New York City. Unless you came in as slave labor, or something, to maintain things.

But the problem here is this ideological problem. It permeates this society.

The Physical Conditions of Life Are Collapsing

We have, for example: Look at the United States, look what’s happened to it, since 1970-71. Look at what has happened to the lower 80% of the family-income brackets of our households, as opposed to earlier, under Roosevelt, in that Roosevelt tradition. Look around the world at systems. What do you see?

The objective physical conditions of life, the conditions necessary for human qualities of life, of our people, the lower 80%, have been collapsing at an accelerating rate since 1977. Collapsing, consistently: There’s been no prosperity in the United States! Not for the lower 80% of family income brackets. Anyone who says so is a fool, or a liar. Everything is worse. Look at health care. Look at the cost of housing. Look at the quality of education. For the lower 80% of the family-income brackets in the United States, everything has become consistently worse. And the means by which we had a higher standard of living, was destroyed, as part of the program of the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission. This policy destroyed the United States: destroyed our agriculture, destroyed our industry, destroyed our infrastructure.

It was continued under the Reagan Administration. It accelerated under the Bush I Administration. Clinton wasn’t on to it yet; he didn’t understand it yet. Bill Clinton probably now does understand it, but he didn’t understand it when he was President. He made the mistake of thinking that Al Gore was human; that’s a big mistake. Remember the coal mine—”16 Tons” and the company store. Al Gore owned that place, that got that song written about it. That’s Al Gore. The guy’s no good, and he comes from a background of a daddy who was no good either. Something that cross-bred with a possum up in the swamps of Tennessee. You know how they are.

Anyway, the problem is, the cultural problem is that our people have come to accept the idea of an oligarchical model in society, even in these United States. We accept the injustice which is heaped upon the lower 80% of our income brackets. We accept the injustice that’s done in many other ways, to our own people. We sit in awe about the upper 3% of family-income brackets in the United States. We kiss the butt of some billionaire who’s nothing but a thief. That’s what we do. We have destroyed the idea of the commonwealth. We destroyed what we prized when we built our Constitution, in terms of Solon of Athens. We tore apart and disregarded every tradition, noble tradition of humanity, particularly of European civilization. And that’s what we’ve done. And we’ve come to accept that! We’ve come to accept politicians who think like that. We’ve come to accept laws that practice that.

We look at other nations in that way. We don’t think, as we should, as we used to as Americans: We used to think of how we came here—like I can say, some of my ancestors came here in the early 17th Century, into Massachusetts and related areas, as colonists. People came here, in the original settlements—they didn’t flee from Europe, in the sense of having to escape from someplace—some people did fit that category, but that wasn’t the way the colonies were built. The settlements were built by people who represented the best of European culture, but an anti-oligarchical sense of European culture. People came here because they were looking for a place in which to take the best of European civilization, and move it out of Europe, where Europe was dominated by oligarchical traditions. To build a true republic based on the commonwealth model, which had been repeatedly tried in Europe, particularly beginning in the 15th Century, but had repeatedly failed, because of the return of the old oligarchical forces, who still represent nobility. You know, you bow before nobility, even to this day, in Germany. You bow to nobility, the Black Nobility, in Italy! These are the most degenerate people you can imagine. The same thing goes on in France. There are more policemen than there are people. And this is Europe. Europe is permeated with oligarchical culture. Look, you have these two Polish twin idiots in Poland, and the Polish put up with this crap.

And therefore, we came here, the founders came here, to bring the best of European culture here, to build a nation, to be a cynosure for nations of the world, as a model republic, the way that humanity should live. This is what is built into our Constitution. This is what is built into our Declaration of Independence. These are the ideas of Leibniz, and people like that. This is what Lincoln did. And we’ve always had a struggle in our country, between the oligarchical tendencies coming in, particularly, chiefly, from Britain, into the United States, as in New York City and so forth, but we had a republic.

A World Based on Sovereign Republics

And in the case of Franklin Roosevelt: Franklin Roosevelt found us in a low moment. We’d lost 30% of our standard of living, our income, in a short four-year period. And he led in rebuilding our nation, which was shattered. Not only rebuilding our nation, but moving to preserve this, to extend this, to eliminate colonies and similar kinds of oppression throughout the world. To promote a world based on republics, sovereign republics, which are each dedicated to serving their own people, by republican standards, and promoting republican standards of life among people of other nations, knowing that our security, and our well-being, and our purpose in living, depended upon what we did to promote these kinds of ideas, and these kinds of opportunities, among other peoples. The same rights that we desired for ourselves.

We have turned away from that.

This happened at the end of the war. Roosevelt died. Truman, who was a little bit of a pig, came in. (He was. I was there. And I saw the curly tail myself—figuratively speaking of course.) But we turned away.

The United States joined with Churchill and other Brits, in restoring colonialism! We took the Japanese troops out of the prison camps in Indochina, where they had surrendered to a force organized by the United States. Ho Chi Minh was an asset of the United States, an ally of the United States, in the freeing of Indochina from colonialism, and from the Japanese. The Japanese were put into prison camps. The ever-loving British came in, armed the Japanese, and told them to get out and take over the country, until the British could get the French in there to replace them.

We restored colonialism in Southeast Asia! The Dutch went in to conduct a long war to suppress independence in Indonesia. This happened throughout the world, in that form, and various forms. This was the Anglo-American policy. Which is what Truman represented. This is what Eisenhower understood, when he gave the speech at the end of his term as President. He understood what had taken over the United States. He gave it a name: “military-industrial complex.” But the military-industrial complex was what was unleashed on the day that Franklin Roosevelt died, when Truman took over. And the thugs who had been originally—like the grandfather of present President of the United States [George W. Bush], who’d been one of the people who had put Hitler in power in Germany—this crowd took over power in the United States, under Truman. And we haven’t gotten rid of it since.

So we have, in the United States, a tendency, this oligarchical tendency, of preferring an oligarchical society in which, a few of the rich, the beau-ti-ful people—they’re ugly as hell, I mean, actually. You see the way they dress. And the stuff they bare at parties. Oh! Disgusting. Anyway.

So that’s what’s happened to us. So therefore, there’s a factor, a rottenness in our culture, which the Baby Boomer generation was brought into, and that’s another story in itself, which I’ve told a number of times.

So, we’ve come to the point that we have a way of choosing. We can choose to do what I propose, which, from a strategic standpoint, is the only sequence of major developments which will get the world out of what would otherwise be a plunge into a Dark Age, something comparable to the 14th Century in Europe. We could do that. We could return to our character, as Franklin Roosevelt once did earlier, under conditions of crisis. And what I’m proposing could only be done, admittedly, under conditions of crisis. Only when these guys get down on their knees, and people admit that this isn’t working, that this is a danger to human life, and they have no choice, no acceptable choice but to do what I say, on this one—then they will choose it. They will be happier. And that’s the only chance for humanity.

Without the United States, it can’t happen. Europe couldn’t do it. Asia couldn’t do it. We must be the sparkplug. That is our destiny; that’s our legacy. Not to rule the world, but to be the sparkplug by which the world comes to rule itself. We have to be the sparkplug. We have to say: We’re going to pull our troops back, unilaterally. We’re offering everybody: We’re getting out. We’ll take the U.S. troops and move part of them out of Baghdad city, into the airport. We’ll move them into other holding positions. We’re not here to shoot, nor to be targets. Now, we’ve created a mess for you, haven’t we? Uh-huh, good. Now you guys, get yourselves together, we’re going to bring this fighting to an end. We’re going to bring this to an end.

Then we turn around, knowing that won’t work by itself. We’ll then go to Putin. The President of the United States [George W. Bush], whose one redeeming feature is that he seems to like Putin, or something. You never know, or understand exactly why or what goes on in that funny mind, if there is a mind at all. But this is one thing he seems to do—and we encourage that, not because it’s very good, but because it’s the only virtue we can find with the guy.

So, he goes to Putin and says, “We, the United States, need your cooperation. We’ve got to cooperate, and get these Brits under control.” And Putin will say, “That’s a very good idea.” And “We’ve got to have China involved in this.” Putin will say, “Yes, that’s true.” “And India has to be involved.” Putin will say, “That’s good, that’s good. A better balance.” And then four of the most powerful nations on this planet agree that what we’re doing in Iraq, in pulling back, is the right thing to do.

But it’s not sufficient, because we have a world financial crash coming down. It’s fully in progress. Therefore, we have to act also together, in unity, to take certain emergency measures which will stabilize the situation, and enable us to organize our way out of this mess. If we do that, you will find that Germany will probably be the first to desert Britain on this kind of thing. They’d love it, because the Germans are really getting sodomized by the British. And they really, despite appearances, they don’t like it. The Italians will laugh, and say, “Ah!” and they will be happy. The French will say, “Mmm-hmm.”

But what will happen is that you will find, very rapidly, immediately, and if we solve this problem, we take this whole area of Southwest Asia, which is now a terrible crisis area, and we say, “This thing is going to be settled, peace is going to come here now,” it will happen. It will happen.

Because, you know, one of the things that feeds the problems in this region, in particular, is the fact that it’s a region of injustice. And the Saudi royal family is not an asset. I tell you, it’s not an asset in this area. They have their own agenda, and people like Prince Bandar are really a menace.

But in this area, if we get this kind of agreement, we can bring about peace in the Middle East. It will be tough, but with that combination of power, we can do it. Because we will end the injustice. We will present a plausible, clear alternative to a perpetuation of the injustice.

And by our initiating that, initiating the measures which bring this about, we will give the United States back a position of moral leadership in the world.