The Aesthetical Education of America
by Sky Shields and Peter Martinson, LaRouche Youth Movement
The operation to install New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as the fascist dictator of the United States, has been identified and described, prominently and, so far, uniquely, by that nation's most talented economist, Lyndon LaRouche.[1] In short, were Hillary Clinton to be defeated by Barack Obama as the Democratic Party Presidential nominee, Obama would be swiftly destroyed politically by a press scandal firestorm, leaving the population to vote for either Independent candidate Michael "Sleazy" Bloomberg, or perhaps for an unhealthy Sen. John McCain—with Bloomberg as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. Either choice would be a disaster for the United States, and indeed, the world.
Michael Bloomberg has been "not-campaigning" for President over the past few months, on the platform that the United States is facing a crisis.[2] The nation's infrastructure is crumbling, and the Federal government is doing little or nothing about it. A vast construction program must be launched soon to deal with this crisis, and Bloomberg has found a way to pay for it. Instead of asking the Federal government to initiate construction of infrastructure, Bloomberg advises that the cities themselves bypass the Federal government, and beg private corporations to build infrastructure with their own capital, to be financed by the population directly.
The nation does, indeed, need infrastructure. In fact, only a sudden shift of the nation's economic policy back towards the type of thinking typified by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's response to the economic depression, can save our country and the world from a quick descent into a deep Dark Age. Infrastructure is the skeleton and circulatory system of an integrated national economy. From the perspective of commuter traffic jams, millions of Americans have the gut reaction, that maintenance and quality of specific forms of infrastructure are necessary for the promotion of productive forms of human labor, and also human happiness. Lack of investment in maintenance and new building of infrastructure appears, first, as a slowdown in production and increasing loss of jobs, and second, as rolling catastrophic collapses in its human life-support functions, providing fertile ground for such famines and diseases recognizable from the 14th-Century New Dark Age.
Investment in basic economic infrastructure is, thus, absolutely necessary for a productive and happy nation. Bloomberg's plan, however, which is actually the plan of that New York fascist, André Meyer protégé Felix Rohatyn,[3] calls for infrastructure to be financed by private companies. Looking at some recent examples such as the breakdown of the overpriced Bechtel Big Dig in Boston, and the skyrocketing tolls on the foreign-owned, 14-mile-long Greenway parking lot between Leesburg, Va. and Dulles International Airport, privately built and maintained infrastructure is very expensive, and dangerous. Furthermore, the price of the infrastructure, and also, the profit overhead demanded by the private corporations, would ultimately be paid for by a more and more impoverished population.
A More Ominous Design
This Rohatyn-Bloomberg plan has a much more ominous design, though. The world is now witnessing the complete breakdown of its financial system, which had been used, since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, as a tactic by London and its Wall Street lackey financiers to exert more and more control over national economies. In this final phase of breakdown, these same oligarchic financiers are demanding direct ownership of the infrastructure necessary to keep people alive. Like the Mussolini option in Italy, or the similar Hitler program in Germany, in order to push true national government out of the way for private domination of key national programs, the financial oligarchy needs a strongman with the stomach to cut right to the bone.
On the other hand, LaRouche has proposed that the U.S. government take its banking system into bankruptcy receivership, and proceed much further into deficit spending, in order to fund productive construction of basic economic infrastructure. If the Federal government attempted to finance the construction of new high-speed railroads and nuclear power grids, it would necessitate spending whose scale is only comparable to the waging of total war.
The initial financing will take the form laid out in the widely supported Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA).[4] A national moratorium on housing foreclosures would allow homeowners to negotiate low, fixed rental payments with local chartered banks, for a period of several years. These rental payments, combined with fresh infusions of money from a nationalized Federal Reserve system, would then be earmarked for low-interest investments in things like basic economic infrastructure. Interest on loans from our new National Bank to entities outside the country, however, would be kept quite high, not only to dry out the speculators now attacking our U.S. dollar, but also to effectively fix the value of the dollar for secure, long-term investment.
Organizing the population for this solution, against the "Bloomberg operation," faces the challenge of a population whose culture has been immensely degraded since the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The rock-drug-sex counterculture, as an offspring of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, created a generation which, by and large, was conditioned to fall for fascist policies, over and over again, while the current youth generation, whose concentration span has been reduced to 30 second clips, has had no referent to a productive American economy presented to them in their education. How does a revolutionary body stop the outbreak of true fascism, and organize a true economic recovery, if the population is virtually blind to the principles involved?
Beauty: The Organizing Principle
With the completion of an 80-minute documentary video, entitled "Firewall: In Defense of the Nation-State," the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) is positioned to expand its political-educational outreach along lines specified by LaRouche as far back as 20 years ago. A new generation of pedagogical material is being produced which is capable of educating the American population and the world, not only with regard to content, but also with regard to form. We are faced with the same paradox today as that presented by Friedrich Schiller near the beginning of his "Aesthetical Letters": It is only through the constant pursuit of wisdom that an individual can become wise. However, wisdom requires work to attain, and so, at first glance, it is always less attractive to the uneducated mind. Therefore, we would seem to encounter the paradox that, in order for an individual to become wise—to enjoy the pursuit of wisdom—he would have to already be wise to begin with.
This paradox, says Schiller, is resolved by his principle of Beauty in Classical culture. That is, the possibility of bringing the world of sense into conformity with truthful, yet invisible, principles. Or, better said, it is the organization of the objects of sense, such that the inherent paradoxes of sense perception become unavoidable, and the observing mind is driven to search for higher causes. This intentional wielding of paradox, with the intention of releasing the human mind from its dependence on the testimony of sense perception, is known alternately by the names of irony, and metaphor. This principle, properly understood, is the basis for the approach taken to the LYM's guided study of the works of Johannes Kepler, and now Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann.[5] Originally called "animations," this pedagogical approach represents just the beginning of an expanded educational capability now deployable by the LYM.
The fact that the LaRouche Movement exists as a political movement worldwide gives us a unique advantage in the production of this material, if our resources are adequately utilized. There is potentially a vast store of photographic and video raw material at our disposal, generated in every region of the world where the LaRouche Movement is active.
There are already numerous creative ideas emerging for deployment of the video, from regular showings by campus clubs, to a looping presentation at the California Democratic Party State Convention. This comes on top of the deployment, directly into the organizing field, by means of various portable media devices, which was already shown to be a success with the earlier, four-minute video ("Fed Copies Weimar Hyperinflation"; see www.larouchepac.com).
Additionally, to complement the centralized work of the LYM "Basement" team on generating this type of pedagogical content, an efficient structure has been established to disseminate this work throughout the movement, and to assist in the education of new recruits. Because of this, the entire educational structure developed for working on Kepler's New Astronomy and Harmony of the World is already organized to absorb and utilize this pedagogical material, in whole and in part. That is, either to organize showings of the entire video in the various youth locals, or to take various portions of the video (most likely animations) for use in more specialized discussion of specific topics.
Ideally, as our movement is more and more thoroughly steeped in the methodological approach of Gauss, Riemann, and LaRouche, this Monge Brigade apparatus will be deployable also in the production of new material in the form of animations and video product.
This type of educational program, combined with advanced Classical choral work, underway throughout the LaRouche Youth Movement, along with an extensive outreach program of on-the-ground organizing, should put us in position to reestablish the United States as a functioning sovereign nation-state. As Schiller describes in his "Aesthetical Letters," we can create the necessary moral and intellectual foundation to create true citizens, immune to the type of fascist subversion of our constitutional republic now being implemented.
[1] See LaRouche's mass-distributed broadsheet, "Mitt Romney Walks Out."
[2] Bloomberg appeared at a Jan. 19, 2008 press event in California, along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rockefeller Foundation head Judith Rodin, and duped Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, to promote his Presidential platform.
[3] At a press conference in Washington, D.C., March 27, 2006, Rohatyn responded to a question from LaRouche, delivered by EIR's Paul Gallagher, on whether Rohatyn would support FDR's method of large-scale public credits and modern infrastructure. Rohatyn erupted: "No! We have a lot of new financing mechanisms since the days of the New Deal. And Roosevelt did marvelous things because he had nothing—no alternatives with respect to financing these projects. We do! We have the private sector; we have state and local governments; we have union pension funds; we can create special-purpose bonds. Some of it may come directly from the budget.... But we are far away from the days and methods of the RFC [Reconstruction Finance Corporation]."
[4] Available at http://www.larouchepac.com.
[5] See the pedagogical websites, designed by special science teams called, collectively, "the Basement," available at http://www.wlym.com/~animations.
