SCHILLER INSTITUTE EVENTS
The BRICS and Hamilton:
What Americans Need To Know
by Dennis Speed
Dec. 15—The Schiller Institute convened a conference on Dec. 13 in New York City, titled “Alexander Hamilton’s New BRICS Paradigm Can Save the United States.” How so, you ask? The Institute, which is mobilizing Americans to join the drive of the BRICS nations for technological progress and development, in opposition to the bankrupt trans-Atlantic system, showed that it is precisely Hamilton’s standard of physical economic growth which the BRICS are putting into effect. Bringing the United States into the BRICS effort will mean restoring Hamilton’s American System of political economy—and thus reviving the shattered economic landscape of this country.
Mike Billington, a co-author of EIR’s new report The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, gave the keynote speech, beginning with a moral challenge to the audience:
“We have heard from Schiller Institute founder Helga LaRouche of the stark choice we have to make today. It’s very much like the choice that Martin Luther King made, where each individual is faced with the question of whether or not they will take up the mission to deal with the crisis that threatens, literally, all of civilization.”
The conference, one of more than 25 such events planned to take place in North America in December, sought to answer Chinese President Xi Jinping’s offer to the United States to join the efforts of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), by inspiring American citizens to take responsibility for making the right choice.
Over the last week, Schiller Institute events on the BRICS perspective were held in Houston, Detroit, and San Francisco, in addition to Alexander Hamilton’s New York City. All began with a video presentation by Helga Zepp-LaRouche (see below). The Houston event also featured a contribution from BRICS collaborator Egypt, which is appended.
The Hamiltonian Principle
Moderator Dennis Speed reminded the audience that “on Dec. 13, 1790, 224 years ago today, Hamilton submitted to the Congress of the United States his Report on the National Bank. This is the second of four Hamilton writings, which are, as a body, the most important documents in the science of physical economy. They are the most important documents after Gottfried Leibniz’s 1672 essay “Society and Economy,” which established the science, and Benjamin Franklin’s 1729 essay “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of Paper Currency.”
Speed continued:
“Hamilton establishes in these reports that it is the power of the people of the United States, through one, sovereign, central government, to create the means for the promotion of the General Welfare of all its citizens, through unifying the nation by internal improvements—canals and water management, and rail systems, including continental rail systems slightly later. This would be done through a system of credit solely issued and controlled by that national government, and disbursed through the authority of Congress. To that end there must be a national bank. It is this system of national credit, and the internal improvements resultant from it, that was the basis for the United States becoming, at one time, the greatest economy in the world.”
Hamilton’s Report on the National Bank systematically tears down the premises of monetarism, in which money is seen as a value in itself, and defines a form of national banking where “the banks become nurseries of national wealth,” as measured in the increase of commerce, industry, and living standards. That is exactly what the BRICS are doing today.
The Silk Road Solution
Billington described the contents of the “New Silk Road” report, saying that “this report poses the solution that we have to convey to the American people and to the people of the world—that there is an alternative to the disaster now spreading throughout Europe and the United States, and the onrush to war, which within days or weeks could become thermonuclear.”
Billington referred to the immediate moral and strategic crisis that had erupted only days earlier in Washington, notably Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) courageous and controversial release of the CIA “Torture Report.” He emphasized that international law does not merely suggest that the perpetrators and originators of these acts be brought to justice—it demands it, and has so demanded it from the time of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Billington told the audience that LaRouche had once before “done the impossible,” and altered American and global military defense policy in his organizing of President Ronald Reagan to adopt the Strategic Defense Initiative policy in 1983, in the interest of the common aims of mankind. That policy was rejected by British agents in power in Russia, so the SDI did not happen. LaRouche warned the Soviet Union that if it did not adopt this, the USSR would collapse. They did not listen. When the Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union collapsed,
“LaRouche invented the European Productive Triangle proposal, which became the New Silk Road, and the New Silk Road has now become the World Land-Bridge.”
Challenging Geopolitics
The interwoven themes of war, physical economy, and diplomacy were echoed by two other speakers. Clyde Magarelli, author and former Director of War Studies and current professor of sociology at William Paterson University, in Wayne, N.J., spoke on “Positive Approaches to a Russia/China/India Alliance: The True West Point Intelligence Tradition.” He began:
“One of the often neglected positions in relationship to economics and war, is how the military feels, particularly the professional soldier. And in particular, the higher professional soldiers in America, which come from West Point. It’s a tradition that goes back to 1812, where the moral element is stressed—where weapons change, tactics may change, but the position of moral development becomes key. It’s the will to win and also the will to win dependent upon the righteousness of the effort itself....
“Those who have been to West Point ... know that the tradition or the stress for the cadet is a traditional conception of honor, duty, country. From that, they develop the capacity to make the decisions as to what is right and wrong, and within the legal framework, they have the duty to disobey illegal wars—not a right, but a duty to disobey these....
“There are three basic concepts of war. The one we now face today is the British concept. It’s not a new concept; it dates back to the Athenians, the Spartans, the Carthaginians, the Venetians, into World War I into World War II. It’s a concept that is based upon war as strictly an application of power, without any moral aspect to it.”
Magarelli made it clear that this imperial theory of warfare was the most expensive, in the loss of property and human life, and ultimately fails “in almost every case.”
The next speaker was Ann Lee, adjunct professor of finance and economics at New York University, and author of What the United States Can Learn from China, who said: “I think really right now the greatest challenge facing us, is how to get the U.S. and China to work as allies together as opposed to adversaries. I say this because I know, today, at the Pentagon, ... the war games being played are against, not countries in the Middle East, not against Russia, but against China.
“And I’ve spoken to a number of other people in the military who have studied at the War College in D.C., and they do tell me ... that they are currently talking about pre-emptive war. And for those of you who don’t know what that is about, it means to strike an enemy before they are powerful enough to strike back. And that is the case today with the U.S. The U.S. has the world’s strongest military by over ten times that of all the other countries collectively combined. We have over a thousand military bases all around the world. China doesn’t have a single military base outside its borders.
“And so why does the U.S. want to target China as an enemy? Well, there’s this concept in the military called ‘peer competitor,’ and what that really means is, in order for them to justify spending the trillions of dollars that they do on military equipment, they have to have a reason to justify that kind of spending. And thus China would be the closest ‘peer competitor.’ And even though China has never threatened the U.S. in any way, from any national security standpoint, they have never tried to aggressively attack us, it’s only been cooperative or reactive to the U.S., still the U.S. military is forced to think of China as an enemy, by virtue of these concepts and various perversions that exist today.”
Revive Classical Culture
It is precisely to end that perversity in present-day American policy, exemplified by both the Obama Administration and the Bush family-dominated Republican Party, that the conference attendants were urged to see the World Land-Bridge, not as something for “other countries” to do, but as the most immediate means to uplift the desperately pessimistic American population.
The final presentation was by Lynn Yen, founder of the Foundation for the Revival of Classical Culture. Her presentation, “Remembering Isaac Stern in China: The BRICS and Classical Culture,” while recounting how once-banned Western Classical music came to permeate modern China, rekindled an earlier Schiller Institute campaign to return Classical musical performance to the Classical tuning of Middle C = 256 cps (cycles per second).
Musical performances bracketed the conference speeches, including vocal selections from Bach, Schubert, Glinka, patriotic songs, and African-American Spirituals.
