`The Awakening of a Great People'
by Harley Schlanger
"I've never been political before, but I knew I had to be here."
These words, spoken by a demonstrator to a local television reporter, outside a $3,000-per-person fundraiser last week, at a ritzy hotel in San Francisco's "[S]Nob Hill" district, which "starred" President Barack Obama, have been repeated by a growing numberof Americans across the nation. The mass-strike process, which Lyndon LaRouche first identified in the Summer of 2009, when angry Americans turned Congressional town hall meetings into demonstrations against Obama's Nazi health-care policy, is evolving, and maturing into a "monster," which is terrifying the once-complacent so-called political class.
While incumbent Congressmen and their media flaks initially tried to dismiss it as a momentary explosion, manipulated by Republican operatives against a Democratic administration, they are now praying it will disappear, as they see it gaining momentum, and increasing in ferocity, seemingly everywhere.
(As for this process being under the control of Republican operatives: Anyone who has ever heard the boring and unimpressive former U.S. Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.)—who is being given credit, by many in the media, as the organizer of the demonstrations—would know this is not possible. As we say in Texas, "That boy couldn't organize a two-car funeral procession.")
What seemed at first to be an inchoate, disorganized response, has forced its way onto everyone's political radar screen, as its participants are no longer content to merely demand explanations at town hall meetings. In San Francisco, in Trenton, in Phoenix, there are ever-larger demonstrations, with participants from across the political spectrum. And these people are increasingly marching into voting booths, as a "throw the bums out" mentality is becoming hegemonic.
The San Francisco demonstration may be indicative of where this process is heading, as the leadership provided there by the LaRouche Youth Movement's (LYM) campaign of Summer Shields for Congress shows the potential for delivering a decisive blow to those who insist that there is no alternative to "globalization." Prominent among the thousands of demonstrators were members of Shields' campaign, with banners calling for the impeachment of Obama, and the famous photo of Obama, with a Hitler-style mustache.
Though the Shields campaign activists were not the only ones carrying signs calling for Obama's impeachment, they were interviewed by local television reporters, and drew a response from the President himself. In his remarks to supporters, Obama tried to joke about his unpopularity, but came across as defensive, when he acknowledged that it has been a tough year for him, adding that there are even posters of him with a Hitler mustache!
With the President's popularity ratings plummeting, and those of incumbent Congressmen collapsing to Cheneyesque levels, the mass strike can no longer be ignored, or dismissed.
The Scalps Are Piling Up
The number of incumbents whose scalps have been taken by this process grows each week, as the 2010 primary process unfolds. Despite attempts to spin it, there are two major characteristics that describe this process.
First, its victims have been incumbents from both parties: Three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett, a Republican from Utah, was dumped at the state convention, at which he received less than 26% of the votes. His opponents used his support for, and continued defense of, the TARP bailout, as the reason for ditching him. West Virginia Rep. Alan Mollohan, a Democrat and 14-term incumbent, lost his primary by 12%. Voters there cited his vote for Obamacare, and support for cap-and-trade legislation, as the principal reasons for taking his scalp. And Sen. Arlen Specter, who switched parties to become a Democrat last year, was smashed by voters in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, where he ran with full support of President Obama.
Second, while voters may not agree on the solutions, they know what they don't want. For the most part, they don't want anything supported by the Obama Administration, as they see his administration as acting on behalf of private interests, such as Wall Street banks, and British Petroleum. In the three cases cited above, each incumbent supported the $24 trillion-and-counting bailout of Wall Street/City of London speculators. Despite strenuous bipartisan efforts to defend the bailout—which was initiated in September 2008 by the Bush Administration, and escalated by the Obama Administration—there are few Americans who support it, and a vast majority rejects the line that it was necessary to "stabilize the financial system" first, before addressing "Main Street" problems, such as jobs and housing.
Further, as real unemployment, bankruptcy filings, and home foreclosures continue at post-Depression record levels, and as city, county, and state governments fall deeper into debt, with some considering bankruptcy, and as the Administration expands the bailouts, now adding the rescue of financial institutions holding worthless Eurozone debts to its list of new obligations, there is a growing awareness that none of the trillions committed by this government will do anything to relieve the suffering of an increasing number of Americans.
Though citizens may not know a "naked short" from Barney Frank's jock strap, any incumbent perceived to be part of the Wall Street protection racket will face the ire of the voters.
Glass-Steagall 'Litmus Test'
The recent mobilization by LaRouche PAC in support of legislation to reimpose Glass-Steagall standards on financial institutions thus fell on receptive ears among citizens from both parties, and independents. While the media attempted to black out the existence of the amendment sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to Sen. Chris Dodd's (D-Conn.) phony financial reform legislation, an amendment which would have restored Glass-Steagall, the three LYM members running for Congress—Kesha Rogers in Texas (who won the Democratic nomination), Rachel Brown in Boston, and Summer Shields in San Francisco—took the lead in a national mobilization to get it passed. Congressional offices reported being "flooded" with calls to support Cantwell-McCain, generated by the mobilization by LaRouche PAC, and organizers for the campaigns report strong backing for it in rallies in major cities, small towns, and even among some bankers in financial districts!
Yet, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) shut off debate, with the full support of the White House and Wall Street lobbyists, defending their right to continue to speculate with their depositors' money, thus preventing Cantwell-McCain from being debated in the Senate, all but two Democratic Senators—Cantwell and Russ Feingold (Wisc.)—voted to back Reid. And four Republicans voted with Reid, including Scott Brown (Mass.), who was swept into office by the mass strike last January, when he campaigned as an opponent of the Washington, D.C.-Wall Street alliance, but went crawling to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) for an assurance that the Boston "Vault" financial institutions will continue to be protected. Brown's constituents, when briefed on his treachery, have responded with anger, with callers to local radio programs saying they will now work to defeat Brown, when he comes up for re-election.
As for the Republicans who voted against the Dodd bill, not one fought for the Constitutional principle of regulating banking and financial services, as embodied in Glass-Steagall, thus forfeiting the right to claim they stood against Wall Street.
Following the vote for Dodd's bill, which has been accurately characterized as a "piece of crap that only a Wall Street speculator could love," the three LYM candidates joined LaRouche in vowing to continue the fight for Glass-Steagall. LaRouche said that, without Glass-Steagall, the U.S. economy was finished, and there would be nothing to protect citizens of any nation from a chain-reaction crash, leaving mankind to face conditions worse than those during the New Dark Age of the 14th Century.
To make matters worse, Obama is now appealing to Republicans to join him in imposing bone-crushing austerity measures, to "cut the budget deficit." With the social safety net in tatters, the drive to "save money" through cutting health care, privatizing Social Security, and eliminating every other New Deal and post-New Deal program designed to protect Americans, will dramatically increase the death rate, especially among the elderly, the sick, and the new poor, who were formerly part of the middle class.
In the worst financial/economic collapse in U.S. history, any Congressman who supports this call for budget cuts deserves to be put on trial, for supporting measures identical to those imposed by the Nazis, whose "useless eaters" policy was a model for Obama's health-care legislation.
Jacobinism or the American System?
There is much more that could be said of other disastrous policies that are adding to the already white-hot anger driving the mass strike. The President's protection of British Petroleum, in the threat coming from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, has catalyzed even former Obama-lovers, such as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, to ridicule him as devoid of emotions, like the Klingon, Dr. Spock, of "Star Trek" fame, but lacking Spock's logical mind. In San Francisco, the demonstrators included self-described "leftist environmentalists" calling out the President, side-by-side with opponents of his lunatic cap-and-trade legislation.
And it did not escape notice that the 1,000th fatality among U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan occurred just prior to the Memorial Day weekend, when Americans honor those who died in wars. Obama's retreat from his campaign promise to end the war is one more reason that the fury of the mass strike has turned against him.
What remains to be seen, is whether this mass-strike process can be elevated, to move beyond the sentiment of "Impeach 'em all," to become a movement that enforces the Constitutional principles upon which our nation was founded.
Toward this end, LaRouche has just drafted a new statement of principle, which takes up two main points, which must become the commitment of leaders of the mass strike, if we are to avoid a descent into such anarchy as the British were able to foster in 1789, by steering the legitimate mass-strike sentiments of the French population away from creating a Constitutional republic, modeled on the American System, imposing instead, the Jacobin Terror, and later, the Napoleonic dictatorship.
The first point is that President Obama must be "unelected"—impeached or convinced to resign—as the only way to enact a serious change. Obama, who has functioned as a puppet of London interests, opposes any policy change which would defend the interests of the United States, both for today, and for the future, and thus, would block any legislation—such as Glass-Steagall—which would impinge on the predatory requirements of his controllers.
The second point gets to issue of the "post-Obama era." Dislike of Obama, though widespread, is not a solution, and will not prevent a Dark Age. To do this, LaRouche has offered two solutions: the adoption of Glass-Steagall globally, through a Four-Power agreement (U.S., Russia, India, China), to end the power of the British financial interests responsible for murderous "globalization," and which presently control Obama and the Congress; and a commitment to science and technology, centered on space exploration, to lead the way to a productive future. These themes are the subject of a new LaRouche PAC video, "The New America," which is available at www.larouchepac.com.
The mobilization for a "post-Obama era" is providing much-needed optimism to those who have decided they must get involved in politics. At a recent fundraiser for Rachel Brown, in New Bedford, Mass., which featured Classical music presented by her campaign workers, and at a town meeting near NASA's LBJ Space Center sponsored by Kesha Rogers' campaign, citizens, activated by this mass-strike process pledged to increase their activities in "educating the mass strike."
For the mass strike to succeed in "the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution," in the words of Percy Shelley ("A Defence of Poetry"), there is no alternative to adopting this optimistic course provided by LaRouche, and the candidates allied with him.
The author is Western States spokesman for Lyndon LaRouche.
