Will Obama Jump On LaRouche Lifeboat?
Special to EIR
Aug. 28—In response to the escalating popular revolt, and the leading role of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC), in catalyzing this mass repudiation of the White House euthanasia plans, disguised as "health-care reform," top leaders of the Democratic Party held a series of closed-door meetings in Washington in the past two weeks, according to several participants. While no agreement was reached over how to deal with the famous LPAC "Hitler mustache" poster, the level of hysteria spread to all levels of the Party, further jeopardizing President Obama's political survival.
When the President, clearly exhausted by the pandemonium back at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., announced that he was taking a four-day vacation at Camp David to "recover" from his week-long family vacation in Martha's Vineyard—interrupted by the panicked press conference announcing the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Fed—even the slavishly propitiatory media could not resist drawing parallels between Obama and ex-President George W. Bush, who famously took a month-long August vacation in Crawford, Tex., during his first year in office, only to return to Washington to face the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The President needs all the rest he can get. As LaRouche has warned, the weeks ahead are going to see the full-scale blowout of the entire global financial system, as the U.S. Federal government reaches the end of the current fiscal year; as every state in the nation reaches bankruptcy; as true unemployment soars towards 30% of the labor force; and as the full magnitude of the bankruptcy of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal government becomes transparent.
That is when the President is going to face his first real moment of truth. LaRouche has spelled out exactly what must be done, to avert a worldwide plunge into a genocidal dark age. The President must replace his entire White House team of economic advisors, beginning with Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Rahm Emanuel, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. The Federal Reserve System must be put through bankruptcy reorganization, and replaced by a national banking credit system, as provided for in the U.S. Constitution.
If President Obama, with the backing of key personalities within the institution of the Presidency, takes these unavoidable measures, he will have also taken the pivotal first step toward a Four Power agreement with Russia, China, and India, to create an international credit system, based on Alexander Hamilton's American System model, and the original Bretton Woods System of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, free from the vise-grip of the thoroughly bankrupt London-centered financier oligarchy and their monetary system of private central banks.
This lifeboat, offered by LaRouche, is already in the water, just off to the side of the Titanic. Will the President climb aboard the lifeboat, save his collapsing Presidency, and, with it, the United States? No one yet knows the answer to that question, but the time is here and now, when that decision must be made.
The Alternative
If the President fails to take up the offer extended by LaRouche, to save his Presidency by a dramatic policy reversal, and a thorough housecleaning, it is fair to say that the Obama Presidency is finished.
It is also fair to say that the Democratic Party, following the electoral victories of 2006 and 2008, will soon disintegrate, unless its leadership, too, embraces the policies offered by LaRouche, to deal with this worst crisis in the history of the nation and the modern world.
So far, the closely knit circle of Presidential mis-advisors shows no signs of facing the reality, instead, choosing to feed on Obama's notorious Narcissus Complex, by coming up with one desperate scheme after another, to boost his "popularity."
While still refusing to give up on the delusional idea that they can sell brutal Schachtian austerity to the American people, under the guise of health care for all, the White House spinmeisters are now promising a bold new foreign policy initiative, soon after Labor Day, which, they claim, will boost the President's popularity back to Inauguration Day levels.
From sources close to the White House, it appears that the foreign policy "miracle" is to be revealed during the President's address to the UN General Assembly, in mid-September. Obama, according to these accounts, will announce a dramatic breakthrough in the Middle East peace process, and the planned convening of a Madrid II/Annapolis II regional peace conference.
The problem with this latest White House scheme is that it won't work. Despite the best efforts of Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell, none of the major regional players are ready to make the kinds of tough concessions necessary for such an initiative to succeed. Certainly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not about to seriously meet Mitchell's demands for a total freeze in Israeli settlement expansion any time soon. Leaks from Jerusalem for the past week have peddled the lie that the Obama Administration has made major concessions, excluding Jerusalem and 2,500 West Bank housing units from the freeze, and linking any Israeli action to new, harsh, international sanctions against Iran.
Were there any truth to the Israeli leaks, the Middle East would be further from peace than at any time since the Oslo Accords of 1993.
A survey of the regional political map reveals no credible prospect of an Obama peace "breakthrough." The Palestinians remain divided, between a Fatah-run West Bank and a Hamas-run Gaza, with Egyptian mediation largely stalled; Britain's leading Persian Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia, has refused to make any concessions to Israel (while giving a wink and a nod for other Persian Gulf states to make them); and Egypt is entering the terminal phase of a succession crisis, as President Hosni Mubarak's health continues to deteriorate.
In short, Southwest Asia remains deeply locked in the tragic, century-old imperial Sykes-Picot dynamic, that can only be broken from the outside—by a strong intervention from a strong U.S. Presidency, which, right now, does not exist.
Therefore, the same pack of White House advisors—David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, and company—who have engineered the biggest collapse of public support for a newly elected President in the history of the Republic, are at it again, wildly dreaming about a political rescue scheme, totally divorced from the hard realities of Middle East politics. And what's worse, by all accounts, the President is buying this latest swindle, "hook, line, and sinker."
Admininstration sources have confirmed that the White House has sent out orders to the State Department and the Pentagon, putting all other foreign policy initiatives on hold—while the "reset button" is activated on the incredible shrinking Obama Presidency.
Henceforth, the President will be forgoing the stage-managed town hall meetings and media appearances, in favor of well-scripted speeches, the Administration sources report.
LBJ's Vietnam Redux
If the President's well-scripted speech on Aug. 17, before the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) in Phoenix, Ariz., is any indication of the new White House campaign strategy, then things are going to get far worse. Addressing an audience of 5,500 veterans and family members, Obama signaled that the United States is about to plunge even deeper into the war in Afghanistan. The President called the war "fundamental to the defense of our people," telling the veterans that, "The insurgency in Afghanistan didn't happen overnight. And we won't defeat it overnight. This will not be quick. This will not be easy. But we must never forget, this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." Sounding a favorite theme of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and, in a mocking parody of President John F. Kennedy's announcement of the manned Moon landing objective, the President concluded, "Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again." It is that British puppet, President Obama, who is doing this to us, on British imperial orders.
The President's VFW speech anticipated the long-awaited Afghanistan War review by the new U.S. commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which is due any day now. News leaks indicate that McChrystal will ask the President to send 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, right away, as part of a "new" counterinsurgency strategy, aimed at defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the field of battle, while securing the Afghan countryside, village-by-village.
If this "new" strategy sounds remarkably similar to the U.S. plunge, deeper and deeper into the quagmire in Indochina, following the assassination of President Kennedy, it is because it is a near-perfect replay of that Lyndon Johnson Vietnam disaster.
If the President, as anticipated, goes along with the Afghan troop "surge," the revolt of the American people, triggered by the bailout of bankrupt banks, the foreclosures, the job losses, and the health-care swindle, will be the real surge.
'Over His Dead Body'
A senior Democratic Party strategist warned this week, in discussions with EIR, about another looming White House miscalculation. With the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, White House strategists plan to try to revive their euthanasia policy, by invoking the late Senator's name. While such a transparent "bait-and-switch" manipulation may win a few votes in the Senate, where Kennedy championed genuine health-care reform for decades, such efforts will have no impact whatsoever on the American people, who are in no mood to be flim-flammed by a President they no longer trust, and by a Congress they despise.
"The single biggest factor that killed 'Obamacare' is the end of life provisions—from the Medicare-funded counseling, to the planned cuts in vital life-prolonging care for the elderly," the source emphasized. "Every poll shows that it is this issue that defeated the President's scheme, and the White House has the same polling data as every other leading Democrat and Republican.
"They can't admit it publicly, because it means that LaRouche won the fight. The vast majority of Americans are convinced that the White House policy is to cut off care—that is, euthanasia."
