THE LAROUCHE SHOW
On the Edge of a New Era:
LaRouche's Big Idea—NAWAPA
Merv Fansler and Michael Kirsch joined host Harley Schlanger Aug. 21, for a discussion of the work of the Basement Team[1] on Lyndon LaRouche's proposal to transform the Biosphere, and with it, create an economic renaissance throughout the planet, with NAWAPA. The LaRouche Show, an Internet radio program, airs every Saturday afternoon at 1 p.m. Eastern time, and is archived at (www.larouchepub.com/radio).
Harley Schlanger: Good afternoon, and welcome to The LaRouche Show.
We are in the midst of the approximate two-month time period identified by Lyndon LaRouche, back in mid-July, as the time during which we must have a decisive break with the imperialist monetary system of the British Empire, or we will be plunged into a 1923 Weimar-style hyperinflation, which will destroy human civilization for the next several generations.
In the last week, we saw two things happen: One, the confirmation of the accuracy of LaRouche's forecast, with the decision made by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, to go with what is now universally acknowledged as a hyperinflationary policy. That is, they are not wiping out the bad debts, they are not reorganizing the banking system, they are not going with a Glass-Steagall; they are creating funny money in huge volumes, and pumping it into the banking system at the expense of the physical economy.
But in response to that, and the sense of urgency in LaRouche's forecast, there was a specific means by which this break can be made, which has been under development. And on today's program, we will be discussing the revolution in the self-identity of man, which emerged from the work done in the Basement, as of last night! I am talking about the broad outline of NAWAPA, the North American Water and Power Alliance, that is, NAWAPA in its true form, not simply as an infrastructure program, or a jobs plan, although it is both, but as it was envisioned by LaRouche, as the means by which mankind self-consciously asserts its authority over the Biosphere, at the same time moving into space.
This project was posted last night on the LaRouchePAC website [www.larouchepac.com], and joining me today, to discuss this, will be two members of the Basement Team who were involved in making this revolution, getting it done on time, and have quite a bit to say about how we are going to succeed, in waging this fight.
So, joining me will be Merv Fansler and Michael Kirsch, from the Basement.
Michael, why don't we open with you giving us a sense of what Mr. LaRouche had to say this morning?
Michael Kirsch: Well, he said that we have now done a job, which has given us a chance to save civilization. And that, what you do in strategy, is you choose the impossible, and then you carry that out.
That was the long and short of it. That's the summary of what he said this morning. Because, now, in putting this forward as a concept, which is real, it's a concept that can now move and inspire the United States and the rest of the world, to carry out these types of projects.
Schlanger: What I'd like to do, is start by talking about what was posted, and then, what that demonstrates or shows in terms of the idea—and I mean the idea—of NAWAPA.
So, Merv, I know you were very much involved, probably into the wee hours of this morning, in making sure this thing was posted. What is it that we now have on the LaRouchePAC website, on NAWAPA?
Thinking on a Continental Level
Merv Fansler: Well, what we wanted to put together, as just a first attempt to get the concept out there, to start teasing people with it, was to take the NAWAPA project, the North American Water and Power Alliance, which was originally proposed by the Ralph M. Parsons Company back in 1964 (Figure 1)—and they had been working on it, I guess, since 1962 or so—they faced the fact that there was no way that you could solve the water crisis. It was apparent from the direction, not just of the United States, but of Mexico and Canada, that there were going to be water demands which were impossible to be met if we were just going to continue to focus on regional solutions, local solutions. That there was no way in which you could conceive of a local solution which would actually mean its successful survival. You might be able to ensure momentary survival for your town or city for another five to ten years, for each project, but there was no way that you could get a total vision of the project, there was no way that you could resolve the fundamental issues, until you started thinking on a continental level. And so they proposed the North American Water and Power Alliance, to bring down water from the Northwest, a huge Pacific runoff area, where Alaska, and the Yukon and British Columbia territories of Canada lie, where this water precipitation occurs.
So, what we did, is, we took their project, and dug through all of their maps, everything they had on it that we could find, and we made a 3-D interactive map [www.larouchepac.com/nawapa]; there are narrated tours, that walk you through some of the principal functionality of the project, and sort of pose some of the fundamental problems that we will probably discuss some more today.
And then, also, it's fully interactive, so people can explore it. I mean, the magnitude of this thing, the reason why you need the 3-D interactive map, is because the NAWAPA project itself is not something you can perceive. If you try to perceive it, you would have to go to space, because that's the only way you could see the entire thing.
Schlanger: Now, Merv, when you say that "We went back to the Parsons plan," I know that in the early '60s, there was a video that they had produced, there were a number of papers, there was even a study commissioned by the Congress. And this was picked back up in the late '70s, early '80s by Lyndon LaRouche. In fact, we had a major conference here in Houston, Texas, I believe in 1981, which included former Sen. Frank Moss [D-Utah], who was one of the sponsors of the Congressional side of it. But what we did, was, we had to go back to these old documents, back to the last century, so to speak. There has not been much done on this in recent years, has there?
Fansler: No, not at all. Essentially what happened was, the LaRouche organization in the 1970s and '80s, was going directly against the no-growth, zero-technology movement, that was saying, "We are going to exhaust all of our resources in 20 years; everybody's going to be wiped out. We have to stop growing technologically." And what happened, immediately, as NAWAPA was getting this motion that you were discussing in the Congress, and studies were being done, was that a lot of the key territories that were supposed to be developed, that were going to be completely transformed, they were going to be the crucial, sort of pivotal points of the project, a lot of funding went into closing all these things off, sort of Teddy Roosevelt-style, and saying, "No, this river—it's illegal for the government now to even do a feasibility study of building a dam there." You can't even bring a motor anywhere near these areas. It's like a zero-technology law, that was put into place in a lot of these areas. And a lot of this was funded through different British networks, like the World Wildlife Fund, and things like that. They were going in to stop the U.S. from developing.
It's striking, that when we went back to the reports, and looked at the projections of where they say the United States should be, in terms of energy consumption, water consumption, the state of technology, and the magnitude of our economy—where it should be, if we would have continued on the same path that that Kennedy-era—that trajectory, where it was headed, going to the Moon, compared to where we should be, we have collapsed!
The only reason we exist today, [without even more devastating water shortages] is because we kept destroying all the industries that used water. And there are tremendous water crises all over the place.
So you look at where we were going, and it's sort of striking, because there was a sense that we were going to continue to develop, and you look at where we are today, and it's nowhere near where the projections were.
The Purpose of the Nation
Schlanger: Well, this is the same thing, if you go back to the idea that Lincoln and his allies had, coming out of the Civil War, where they projected the Transcontinental Railroad would allow for massive development of the Western States, that this would be the true realization of a continental nation. And, of course, this was why Teddy Roosevelt was brought in, to destroy the Lincoln revival of the American System, economically and also, in terms of that continent-wide development. So we have seen this kind of thing before.
And now, Michael, I would like your thoughts on the difference that is behind the thinking of the way LaRouche is approaching it, and the otherwise commendable, but still somewhat limited thinking of the people during the Kennedy era, who had an idea of the destiny of going into space, and who definitely thought big—but what is the difference that LaRouche has brought to this?
Kirsch: Well, the difference is that mankind does not objectively observe the wildlife in the different areas of the country, of the continent; but mankind is part of the whole process of continuing what the Biosphere has done for an estimated 4 billion years, of shaping whole continents, and continuing that process in a way in which now, what you have a sense of, is that you are controlling and regulating a system.
And now, the things that are happening within that system, are happening with an ability to carry out, essentially, experiments, in which the principle of cognition can see what's happening on the Biosphere and the abiotic levels, because you are creating a whole continental management system. Let's say, in this case, we are plugging ourselves into the water cycle; but now, we are creating this regulated environment, in which the things which naturally would objectively be observed, as by a person going out in the woods—well, now, you are creating that system.
And so, how that system operates, in terms of the weather, in terms of migration patterns of animals, in terms of the different resources that exist in the northern part of the Earth, in Canada and Russia—we are looking at all of those things now, existing within the bounds of the cognitive organization.
And so, it's a real sense that we are not accidentally having to abide by any one local region. And that is really what the point of the nation is. One of the people who wrote about it, during the time of the TVA, was confronted with the fact that the Supreme Court would find that watersheds are illegal, because watersheds naturally cross state lines. And he was pointing out, that there is nothing in Constitution, that took into account this water basin management. But instead, what he was saying, which comes up in the original TVA, was the realization that this type of regional management is the purpose of the nation; that you are organizing things that cross state lines, for an overall principle, an upshift of the human species.
And this was just referenced by Merv and by you, that we have done these things, and then we get set back. We do these things, we get set back.
Schlanger: What you are bringing up, I think, is a profound point, and this is something that is not just implicit, but absolutely explicit, in what LaRouche is talking about, which is the application of the scientific ideas of Vladimir Vernadsky. And I would like to know, if you think there was any indication, in either the Franklin Roosevelt or the Kennedy era, that people were guided by this. Or, did they just have a certain kind of embedded American instinct? And if that is all they had, we now actually are entering an era, where there is a willful, voluntary decision by man, to transform the Biosphere. Would that be accurate, from the work that you are doing, to say that is a difference?
Thinking of the Earth in Space
Kirsch: I think it definitely is there. There are people that we are looking into now, that were looking at this, in terms of managing the entire continent and its resources, in the TVA, and making the case that, on the log books, yeah, it was a question of navigation canals—making sure they didn't flood—therefore, you've got to realize that you are going to have to have dams; you are going to do all these things that go along with this. And in the log book, all you say is, you are building a navigation canal. But there were people who were realizing what they were doing, as they were setting up the whole system.
But yes, the difference here is, really what Lyndon LaRouche is putting forward: Is that when you are thinking of NAWAPA, you are really thinking of the Earth in space. And, as Merv said, you can't really even sense-perceptually see this thing; there is no way, and so, it is a space program, because we are talking about the kind of scale we are going to have to be thinking about, in managing Mars.
Initially, you are going to be regulating the use of chlorophyll, and you extend that to how you are going to change weather patterns, based on the fact that this water is going to be multiplied in its use, which is something that people had a very good sense of in the TVA, as well. But now, you are having a sense that, we want to start looking at weather, as something that mankind itself is regulating, and controlling all the way out to Mars: taking the Earth's magnetosphere, the Earth's interaction with cosmic radiation.
And what you have down at NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], looking at space weather: We want to look, not at just us observing space weather, but we want to look at being able to control the effects of the Sun, and the Earth's orbit. Not necessarily changing the Sun or the Earth's orbit, but controlling the effects, from the Earth all the way out to Mars, the magnetic fields involved, and the weather patterns involved, the whole water cycle, and plants, and life—because we want to manage and organize the whole Solar System.
So, we start here, with the continent, and you look at NAWAPA, you go through these tours, look at this interactive map. You can pause them at any time, and you can zoom in, move around, and restart the tour. And just really go step by step through this thing. We will have more material as we add to this, but you start to realize what it means to start thinking about not just this dam and this river, my local industry here, but what it is, this view of how the whole system can be tapped into.
And that is really what you are saying: That is where Vernadsky becomes very important. You start to look at this thing, from the lawful scientific view, versus, local projects, water rights, regional, state, issues.
Schlanger: Now, just to follow up with what Michael was saying, Merv, about three weeks ago, when we started moving more aggressively into this perspective, Cody Jones, who is one of your colleagues, was on this program, and he described this as "an identity shift for mankind." And in a sense, I would assume this identity shift includes the idea of the extraterrestrial imperative, as Michael was just discussing it.
How do you see this, Merv? When you think about why people should be excited about this, what is it we are saying about this time in history: You have a crisis, but you can't just do crisis-management, or try to dig our way out of the crisis, but need something totally new.
Is that a useful way to look at it?
Fansler: Definitely. To step back and to look the question in a sort of a broad way, mankind, we develop ideas about the nature of the universe, not just individually, but as how we, as man, interface and interact with the universe in which we are situated. And we develop conceptions about what our role is in that. And, through the history of mankind, it's a lot like a child: How does a child have a sense of another person, or a principle, or the things that the child needs? The child knows that he or she needs food, or things like this, but when you are a young child, you think of all these things as objects, which you need. But, the larger conception of the process which makes everything possible, and the fact that these things that you need are actually taking you somewhere: When you are a child, and you are going to school, you know, not everybody's experience in school is the greatest—at first you don't really get a sense that you are going somewhere, to do something, that you are here for a purpose and that you are developing yourself, to actually contribute something to future generations.
And it's true, not just on that sort of personal, individualistic level, but it's true on the level of mankind, of humanity as a whole, that when you have these people who are discussing NAWAPA, or things like this, they are beginning to have concepts of, "Well, these are important things, that we need them." But it still hasn't approached a level of self-consciousness about the principles which are determining the development of the universe, and the fact that we actually manage them.
And I think that's where the Vernadsky conception comes in: That Vernadsky is saying, "Look, all we know about the universe is that it changes, and it's constantly changing. There might be cycles, like seasonal cycles, or the Earth going around the Sun, or your heart beating. But every time any of those sub-cycles occurs, the universe has developed, it's moving somewhere, it's going somewhere." And Vernadsky's conception was that you could see there were, clearly, three well-defined phase-spaces in the universe, that are interacting, that comprise that creativity, that development of the universe. That it's not just some cyclical process, but it's actually going somewhere.
And I think what the NAWAPA is, in LaRouche's mind, and what we are getting at now, is to begin to communicate to people, that mankind is at a point, where it must begin to have a self-conscious conception of developing the universe. And that's why it's a space program: Because we live in a Solar System, which we know has been developing, and that created the Earth; and a Biosphere evolved on that—it's sort of like our womb. But now it's time for us to begin to expand that development process out into the rest of the Solar System. And there is a lawful principle involved, with us actually becoming conscious of that.
An Identity-Shift for Mankind
Schlanger: Now, this is an important point that I want to get at: Because a lot of our listeners are out there, saying, "Well, I kinda like NAWAPA. It sounds like a good idea. I sort of get what you are saying; but shouldn't we just go out and sell this as a jobs program, because, under Obama, we've seen a collapse of employment"—actually under the last 40 years, we've seen a collapse of productive employment. People who studied to become scientists and engineers are now finding no work: We are shutting down the space program. Many of these construction companies and firms that hire hydraulic engineers, they've had massive cutbacks and bankruptcies and so on; so wouldn't it be best, to just be practical, and sell it as a jobs program, as something that will maybe turn around the collapse?
But that is not the way we are approaching it.
Fansler: No, not at all. That is sort of like the infantile way to think about these effects. That people want to turn jobs into an actual, substantial object, rather than just being an effect in a process. And until we can have this much higher, top-down conception—you know, a job is a singularity in a process, it is not an object. And a lot of people just want to latch on to these things, and say, "We need these objects," or, "I need money," you know, because money represents for people, the means by which they can get all the "things" that they need, to eat, to have a home to live in, etc.
So, money represents an object, and they lose the conception of the actual process that's involved in the creation of an economy in which they can exist.
Schlanger: And I think this is the identity shift, that we are actually talking about. Michael, you and I had a discussion some time ago, about this question of, are some people more oriented toward a scientific outlook than others? Can you really move a population to start thinking more in terms of science and discovery? How do you do that?
Kirsch: Well, this is what the United States was intended to be, because this is what the freedom of self-government, is about: It's never been about this silly, "I just want to have the right to make money," or something. And the United States, if you look at every time we've had anybody who has held to the Constitution, and the people who formed the Constitution, that's what we've been doing. The initial Army Corps of Engineers was to build canals, rivers, manage the territory; John Quincy Adams started the railroad development, started the different mining industries in the 1820s and 1830s.
And then we carried that forward, and we finally got free of a bunch of muck, and we finally carried that out with the Transcontinental Railroad. And this was the fight in Europe, with Leibniz earlier, before that; and even before, in getting technology applied throughout a region.
But without the sovereign nation-state, that wasn't a feasible thing, because this struggle, this fight of mankind, is typified by the Zeus versus Prometheus concept.
But this is the United States: We are not just trying to fix some bridges, we are not just trying repair broken infrastructure or something, and putting people to work. And people who worked in the Franklin Roosevelt Administration had a sense of this, as well. I mean, there is a purpose and intention for why, what the next step is that you want to do, as you are looking at the whole continent.
I think people have been demoralized, and they may want to latch onto anything.
What we are doing here, is slightly, if not entirely, different: What we are doing here, now, is, we want to connect, to bridge the gap that has been created by the Baby-Boomer generation, since 1968 to the present. And we are going to reach back to the skilled and engineering workforce that is laid off, or too old to work, and we are going to tap into that knowledge, with now a reinvigorated sense, and a unique sense of this arc of scientific and artistic development, all the way, which Lyndon LaRouche has built with this political movement, since the late '60s.
And then, then we are going to connect the new generation to the past, with an initial CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] effort, total transformation of the economy, but, yes, for this much bigger purpose.
But I would just stress to people who are listening: We are going to organize this, a nationwide force, to put this thing as a real concept, and I stress that, on every level that we are talking about.
Exploring the NAWAPA Map
<Schlanger: I think, Michael, what you are saying, is that everyone who is listening, should not just be consuming this, and saying, "Oh, that sounds interesting." But the reason the project was done, to put it up on the website, was to give you the means by which you, the listener, can take this revolutionary conception from LaRouche, and organize people in your neighborhood, in your community, in your barbecue club, to get these ideas out.So, what I would like to do, Merv, if you can take us through a little bit of what people will find when they go to the website: what they need to know when they first log on. What are they going to see, and how do they use it?
Fansler: Well, when you get to the website, I think we have it right now, like the top icon in the center on our website, is a link to the interactive map, and you need certain operating system requirements, if you have Windows or Macintosh; and then, you might need to download the plug-in, to be able to view the map in your browser. But then, once you have done that, and it loads up, then, first, you have a picture of the Earth, and you can use your mouse to turn it around, and zoom in, and see all the development.
Then, below that, you will have a list of four tours that we have put together, and you can just click on one of those. And we recommend just watching the four in succession. If there's a part that's not clear, you can pause it, or you can move back, and listen to it again. And when you pause the tour, you can actually go, and look around, and zoom in on a dam, if it wasn't clear. And you can even click on some of the dams, and it will give you more specific information about what the size of it is going to be; or, if it's a hydroelectric dam, the amount of power it might be producing; or if it's a lift, the amount of power that's going to be required to pump up the water to a certain extent.
But if you follow the tour through, there is first an overview, that gives you a general sense of what the NAWAPA program is; and then, there are three tours, that will bring you through: first, the collection area, which is Alaska and the western third of Canada, in the Yukon Territory and British Columbia; and then down into what's called "the transfer area," coming out of the Rocky Mountain Trench, which is in the "collection area"—it's in British Columbia; we will have a transfer area along Montana, Idaho, Washington, in the Northwest; they are border states with Canada, the water will be transferred into those states, and then brought down. In Idaho and Montana is the brunt of the energy consumption for the project. Because there, we are going to lift the water: To get it out of this Columbia River basin, you have to lift the water thousands of feet, literally, to bring it over and out of that river basin, and into the southern river basins, and the Pacific river basin; so, that's the transfer section. There is a video that will go through the transfer section and how that's accomplished.
And then a third video goes through the amazing distribution section. It's just phenomenal to think about the level of irrigated land we would have, once the NAWAPA project has reached full capacity. It's a decades-long project to actually get to full capacity. But once you reach that, the amount of irrigated land that you would create out of arid and semi-arid regions, currently, would be comparable to a little more than half the entire size of California. It's huge, it's a phenomenal amount of land that you would create, to the scale that it's going to transform the Biosphere as a whole.
The Effect on the Biosphere
Schlanger: What's the effect on the Biosphere, of this scale of irrigation and expansion of water? What's that going to do to the planet?
Kirsch: Well, it's going to change it into a Noösphere, I think. Because, one reference in the Distribution Tour that one of our associates made, was, "You know, these rivers here are not doing much by themselves. You have large rivers running through the middle of deserts and they don't seem to be very active." But, in a sense, it is going to be turning the whole Biosphere into a Noösphere, because it's all a regulated environment. But this time, it's going to be for a much bigger purpose.
But I think what you are asking is some of the ratios and amounts of water we are bringing into the area. It's 70 million acre-feet—through the distribution section is a total of 110 million acre-feet that's available for distribution as a whole, but 70 million acre-feet go down in there. And as Merv just said, that's half of the area of California that becomes, now, green. And so, people can find in an article, still featured on the LaRouchePAC website, "NAWAPA from the Standpoint of Biospheric Development" (http://tiny.cc/suku3), what we are doing is, plugging ourselves into this normal water cycle, which happens on both the East and West coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. You know, the law of nature, "What goes up, must come down," and it is going to come down in the form of rain, and freshwater. But if you don't have dams and regulation systems for erosion, you are going to get flooding, you are going to have silt in your reservoirs and canals. And so, what we are tapping into, is all of that, now, as basically utilizing that resource, which is otherwise just either flooding through this desert, which gets flooded once in a while, or running off into the ocean.
And it's going to have effects, which, really, we are not going to know, until we figure them out. There is some analysis that can be done, and we are going to be creating, as we go here, in discussions with people out there—maybe some of you listening, and other people around the country—exactly what kind of effect this is going to have.
First we have got this map; but what we really want to get into dialogue with people about, across the country, is exactly how this transformation is going to be occurring, in terms of where the rails are going to be laid; where the industries to build this stuff are going to be set up; where the cities to support those industries are going to set up; where we are going to need nuclear power. For all the agriculture, we are going to need lots of power, for all the fertilizer and related things. And exactly how this is going to begin changing the water cycle—we can also map that out.
All of this, and the specifics of the transformation, and then being able to look at it as a system, as we have been studying with the concept of the tensor, and develop a real, more "science of economy-conscious understanding" of what transformation will take place, rather than, it's just sort of "happening" to everybody. That is something we are going to be doing.
Schlanger: I think we can say, from what you just described, that the science of the thing is either relatively predictable, or it will create the opportunity for us to make new hypotheses to solve problems; but it is doable.
The bigger question then comes up, for a lot of Americans, who have been crushed by this cynical Baby-Boomer culture, who say, "It will never happen. We'll never do it. Congress will never vote the funds"—and I think this is, again, where we see something very interesting, from the kind of political strategy outlined by LaRouche: Namely, that to get this, we are going to have to remove President Obama. Because he represents, in a sense, the force of the British Empire, that is doing everything possible to make sure the United States has no way out of this crisis.
Kirsch: You know, what LaRouche said today, is exactly that: that the only way you are going to get Obama out, is by having this alternative, an alternative that is not simply pie-in-the-sky, but is every step of the way. And that is why, in the coming weeks, we want to have a clear, discussion with people of how this is going to work—that we want to have this thing, as such a real and thought-through idea, that people are not going to tolerate this clown being in there. We are forecasting the recovery here.
We have to essentially echo Roosevelt and the Vernadsky Institute—that this is going to be a unified program, and we are orchestrating this unified program. And I can tell everybody right now, that we will do this, because we are going to organize it to be done. We are not just putting a bill in, and hoping it gets passed.
'Creative Destruction'
Schlanger: We have an e-mail from a listener who asks about "creative destruction," i.e., the fact that the fascist economist Joseph Schumpeter[2]—and you can call him a fascist because these were the ideas that were part of the Nazi outlook—the idea that you have to destroy an economy to have innovation—that people like Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers—all the top people who have shaped the current economic climate in the United States, represent "creative destruction."
Now, in a certain sense, someone might argue, if they are were literalist, "Well, don't you have to create new ideas, which means get rid of the old ideas?"
But Merv, I'd like you to comment about what actually is this process. Because we were talking earlier, about how what we are reviving in the idea of a nation are ideas that go back to Cusa, and Kepler, and Leibniz. And in a sense the difference between that development on the backs of those kinds of geniuses, as opposed to this idea of "creative destruction."
Fansler: I think the real difference in thought, is, the only thing we need to destroy is the idea of creative destruction! Because, it's at the heart of the imperialistic mindset, and it's what has driven and created the basis for imperialism to exist and expand and control the way that people think. And it's done by these conceptions: Force people to not think about what really is the nature of man, and how they should be thinking. It is not in this Apollonian/Dionysian creative destruction, but instead, it's a conception of Prometheus against Zeus: Zeus in the form of the oligarchy, and the Apollo Dionysian cult, that was deployed to destroy the concept that had developed by the most noble Greek thinkers, who had a concept of man as immortal, of man as discovering new principles, and bringing new principles under their control.
Schlanger: It's the idea that immortality comes from the creative mind, not from a birthline.
Fansler: Yes, exactly.
Schlanger: And I would also say that Zeus was the first major practitioner of creative destruction.
Kirsch: The other thing, is that, it's just scientifically incompetent. It's just a bunch of schmucks who are incompetent and controlled politically, top-down. But all the arguments that any kind of economy begins with fixed cycles, money, deterministic ideas—it's all frankly, just scientifically refutable and absurd. And all the real scientists in history, their work has refuted the Sarpian/Newtonian model, and everything that is based on it.
Schlanger: Michael, that brings us to this other point, if you look at the two major arguments against NAWAPA. One, of course, we have already exposed as the phony environmentalism; but you were just now talking about the other one, "Well, we can't afford it, we don't have enough money, we can't do it." And of course, this is coming from people who just spent $24 trillion to bail out a bunch of swindlers who ran up the bill against the American people on collateralized debt obligations and things of that sort.
Kirsch: First, let me just say—I will come back to that—but anybody who presents any of this stuff, just tell them to shove it. And tell them, to present a scientifically valid study to show that you can't do this.
But secondly, the fact that we didn't do it [NAWAPA] in 1964—if you want to talk about it in this way!—has already cost probably four or five times the initial $100 million, and the problems of the water crisis, agriculture, and everything else. So that is really there; that is all you have to say to that.
But, the other thing is, yes, money is not the measure of anything, nor is there a finite amount of it. It's something that's controlled through the will of governments. So, when you think about this from the standpoint of real, competent science, which starts from the fact that our economy is about human economy, and the humans and their minds that are in sovereign economies, then you just start from there. All this other stuff is politically motivated garbage, and if somebody wants to put it forward, you just tell them to look at LaRouche's record, and ask them to put forward a plan that would say why they are proposing what they are proposing, and I will look it over and get back to them.
Getting Obama Out
Schlanger: We have a couple of e-mails here, asking, "All right, so how do we get Obama out?" I think both of you have addressed this, but you could think one more time about the person who is sitting there saying, "It sounds good. It sounds good; but how do we get Obama out?" What would either of you say?
Fansler: I would say: "Organize for NAWAPA!" It's only when you get a self-conscious conception, in the individuals in society, that you are going to have a society that can actually think and function. And once you organize for that, then the other things will fall into place. And the political goons, they go along with whatever. There are people who have inclinations to do the right thing, but a lot of these people are just sellouts. And they are going to do whatever is moving the population. And so, the task now, is to create this concept, to invigorate this concept in people's minds.
Schlanger: Let me just add: LaRouche has made the point over and over and over: that Obama is heartily disliked, by the vast majority of the population. They may not always say that publicly, but we see it show up in polls, people thinking the country is going in the wrong direction and so on. So, I think the question is a somewhat false question, "How do we get Obama out?" Because it's largely coming from people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for something to happen.
I'll give you an informal indication, anecdote about this: Obama is now on his 37th vacation of the last 38 days, he's up in Martha's Vineyard. And last year when he was there, they couldn't get enough T-shirts to sell, because everyone wanted T-shirts with pictures of Obama, saying, "I vacationed with Obama." This year, they stocked the stores with them again—and no one is buying them! Do you know what is, by far, the most popular T-shirt being sold in Martha's Vineyard, right now? A T-shirt with a picture of George W. Bush with a characteristic shit-eating grin on his face, that says, "Miss me, yet?"
Fansler: Omigod!
Schlanger: Now, that tells you something!
Fansler: If people don't have the self-dignity yet, to say that Obama has to go, look at this NAWAPA thing, and you realize that you deserve better than a British agent who has done everything to sabotage everything for the national interest since he has been in there.
Schlanger: And I think that's all we have to say on that topic: That people with that kind of self-dignity have to have enough confidence in their ability to think and their ability to communicate ideas, that you are not afraid to go out and to organize people to see this is an alternative.
We just have about two minutes to go. Merv, do you want to say something to summarize the importance of what we have done, and what people should do?
Fansler: I would just encourage people: We have got to move. You know, LaRouche has been really kicking our butts to get this thing moving—and we are operating on a 24 hours a day/7 days a week basis, pretty much right now. And we have got to get everybody that we can, everybody who is listening, to deploy with this immediately, and just fire away. This is a blitz period. We've got to get it done.
Kirsch: And we are declaring World War III with this.
Schlanger: I think it's obvious to anybody who is paying attention, that the decisions made in the last couple of weeks, by the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank—that they are pushing, exactly as LaRouche warned, into a Weimar-style hyperinflation. And it's sort of like, you are sitting in a room filled with gasoline, and you are hoping that no one is going to light a match. And the fact that no one has lit a match yet, you say, "Well, see, there's no hyperinflation. Everything's okay." And I think this is the image people have to have of their future: When you have a situation like that, you have to move aggressively, to get the hell out of that room, and to start creating an alternative.
[1] See http://larouchepac.com/basement
[2] See Jeffrey Steinberg et al., "Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter, and Fascism: Why Obama Wears the Moustache," EIR, Aug. 27, 2010.
