NOVEMBER 6 LAROUCHE PAC WEBCAST:
How Obama Has Destroyed
This Country
The following is the transcript of the Nov. 6, 2015 LaRouche PAC webcast.
Matthew Ogden: Good evening. It’s Nov. 6, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and you’re watching our weekly broadcast here from larouchepac.com of our international Friday night webcast. I’m joined in the studio tonight by Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review, as well as Megan Beets of the LaRouche PAC Science and Research Team.
Now, the three of us did have a chance to meet with Helga and Lyndon LaRouche just a few hours ago; so that has definitely informed the content of the broadcast that you’ll hear tonight. What you will hear tonight is a thorough exposition of the continually building case for immediate legal action to be taken against the murderous policies of the Barack Obama Presidency. The case against him continues to snowball.
You’ll hear about the media censorship that was ordered directly from the Obama White House to eliminate any coverage in the leading newspapers of record of the United States, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, of the damning story that was broken by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill in The Intercept, of the so-called “Drone Papers,”—which expose the lurid details of Obama’s weekly kill sessions, which have routinely resulted in innumerable innocent civilian deaths.
You’ll hear about the most recent revelations in the case of the bombardment of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, by which it is now revealed that doctors and other medical personnel who were fleeing the hospital, fleeing the bombardment of this medical facility, were systematically gunned down by U.S. military gunships. This is further building the case that this is indeed an intentional targeting of a medical facility, and amounts to nothing less than a war crime.
You’ll hear about the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been fleeing the illegal wars that have been perpetrated by the Obama Administration in the Middle East and northern Africa, resulting in the massive social displacement of entire portions of these populations as well as widespread death and destruction, as Obama continues to lend his support to the overthrow by radical jihadists of sitting sovereign governments in this region.
You’ll hear about the shocking statistics of the rise in the death rates, rising dramatically throughout the United States, particularly among the former skilled, industrial and manufacturing labor force, who were sacrificed at the altar of the bail-out of the bankrupt Wall Street banks by first, the Bush, and now the Obama Administrations. One of the leading causes of this increase in death rates across the United States, and especially in this formerly productive sector of the American labor force, is an unbelievable surge in deaths from heroin and related drug overdoses. This is occurring not only among the inner city minority populations, but also now among suburban middle and upper class white populations, surpassing automobile and firearms rates of mortality and now reaching an epidemic level as characterized by the Centers of Disease Control.
Capitol Hill Forum Hears Warnings of Nuclear War
And finally, you’ll hear about the continuing mounting danger of global extinction warfare as the Obama Administration continues to attempt to provoke World War III confrontations with both Russia and China.
Now, this final item was the explicit discussion at a landmark event that occurred this past Wednesday (Nov. 4) on Capitol Hill, which I personally had the opportunity to attend and to be an eyewitness to. This extraordinary event was set up as an informal hearing by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and the dean of the House of Representatives—the longest-serving member of Congress on the House side.
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Creative Commons/Shelley Moskowitz
Hearing convenor Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), dean of the U.S. House of Representatives, speaking at a reception by the Haiti Advocacy Working Group at the Capitol in January 2012.
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Also in attendance were a number of other Congressmen, including Reps. Barbara Lee, Alan Grayson, Charlie Rangel, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Congressman Walter Jones, among others. The distinguished members of the panel at this informal hearing were all founders of the recently re-established American Committee for East-West Accord, including: former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock, who was ambassador to the Soviet Union under President Ronald Reagan; NYU Professor Stephen Cohen; and John Pepper, a leading businessman and former CEO of Proctor & Gamble.
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Reagan’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock, speaking in Sept. 2014 to the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law.
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The subject of this hearing was none other than the fact that the Obama policies are on the verge of provoking a thermonuclear confrontation with Russia—a subject which was explicitly presented in those terms—and the fact that without a drastic change in U.S.-Russian relations which must be induced, there is no way that this World War III confrontation can be avoided.
The invitation to this event, which was published by the Committee on East-West Accord and was circulated by the office of Congressman John Conyers, read in part as follows:
The Ukrainian crisis represents a low in U.S.-Russia relations not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. And the recent Russian involvement in the Syrian situation is now making the danger even worse. American and Russian jets flying bombing missions in close proximity to one another, raises the possibility of a military accident between two nuclear-armed powers.
As the New York Times warned, the complicated and shifting landscape of alliances leaves us “edging closer to an all-out proxy war between the United States and Russia.”
The majority of Americans never lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 or the darkest days of the Cold War. They have led lives without the looming specter of nuclear war, but the areas of conflict between our nations are growing. The conflict in Ukraine, the expansion of NATO, Russia’s involvement in Syria, and other lesser issues are driving a new wedge between the US and Russia.
While most would agree that conflict between the United States and Russia benefits no one, the likelihood of such a conflict, as well as the serious consequences that it would bring, is not being discussed on Capitol Hill.
Worse Than the Cuban Missile Crisis
Now each member of this panel, and a number of the Congressmen each in their own way, referred to the darkest days of the Cold War, which they all remembered, being senior statesmen of this country. John Conyers and Jack Matlock, who was an ambassador and a close collaborator of President Ronald Reagan, both referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis. They recalled the experience of “duck and cover,” hiding under one’s desk, nuclear air raid drills, underground bomb shelters, nuclear bunkers, and stated that although the situation at that time seemed bad, the situation today is as bad, or worse. They added that unless the direct provocations against Russia are halted, there is very real possibility which exists of open nuclear warfare breaking out, and exterminating the human race.
Ambassador Matlock echoed much of what he had stated during previous appearances in Washington, D.C., but also especially during his recent appearance on the same dais as President Vladimir Putin at the Valdai discussion club in Sochi, Russia two weeks ago. Matlock elaborated the 20-year process of broken promises and outright lies and deceptions that resulted in the eastward expansion of NATO all the way up to Russia’s borders, which has an immediate and calculated threat to Russia’s domestic security, worse, in fact, as Matlock pointed out, than the Berlin crisis of 1961. The fact is that Berlin was not directly on Russia’s borders, but now you have the immediate proximity of Ukraine, and other countries right on the borders of Russian territory.
One More Base. . .
Stephen Cohen underscored Matlock’s remarks and warned point-blank, in no uncertain terms, that the placement of one more base on Russia’s borders, or the incorporation of one more country in Eastern Europe into the NATO security alliance, military alliance, would mean war between the U.S. and Russia, and everything that entails.
 www.RussianCenterNY.org/youtube
Professor of Russian Studies Stephen Cohen, at the Russian Center in New York City in Oct. 2012.
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He pointed out that former Obama Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul’s blog has shifted from what he called “Mickey Mouse democracy promotion” to now, all-out strident calls for outright warfare and regime change provocations. Cohen emphasized that the danger of war today is far worse than at any time during the Cold War, mostly because of this cross-partisan 100% close-to-consensus when it comes to the demonization of Putin and Russia, and the lack of any substantial pushback from among the corridors of power in Washington, against this narrative, especially from within Congress.
This failure was something which, he noted, was changing with this historic event, changing in front of the eyes of all those who attended this event. It had a packed audience, standing-room only, and was the first open discussion of this kind in a forum such as this by anyone on Capitol Hill.
The Real Enemy
And finally, John Pepper made a very impassioned call for a completely new paradigm in U.S.-Russia relations, one which is founded on a concept of common security, and a creation of a mutual common security architecture, against what he identified as the real enemies, as opposed to the made-up enemies: the real enemies of both the United States and of Russia. Number one: international terrorism, and ISIS, in specific. And number two: what he identified as the greatest enemy of all mankind, which is thermonuclear warfare itself. He stated, the true enemy that we must guard ourselves against is the enemy of nuclear annihilation, and I think we can all find common cause in that.
So, as I said, this was really an extraordinary event, especially when you juxtapose it to another event which was happening literally simultaneously on Capitol Hill, just a few doors down from this hearing room. And this was a hearing featuring none other than [Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs] Victoria Nuland herself, and that counterposition was pointed out very clearly by numerous participants in this event, both members of the panel, and members of the audience, as representative of the two stark choices that are facing the American people right now: Obama’s World War III and thermonuclear annihilation, or a new international policy of cooperation and partnership with Russia, as well as with China. Which means the immediate end of the murderous and deadly policies of the Obama Administration.
So, with that said, I’d like to ask Jeff Steinberg to come to the podium for the next segment of tonight’s broadcast, to elaborate a little bit more on what I’ve just covered.
What the Capitol Hill Forum Fatally Left Out
Jeff Steinberg: Thanks, Matt. There were obviously some important things that were said during that John Conyers event on Wednesday afternoon up on Capitol Hill, but I think it’s critical to recognize that there was one thing that was not said, and that was that the only viable solution is the removal of President Obama through either impeachment, or invoking of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, or some combination of actions, as happened with Richard Nixon, to force his immediate resignation.
The fact of the matter is that you had prominent American diplomats, prominent American scholars, leading members of Congress, standing there, and saying to the American people that the President of the United States is pushing the world towards thermonuclear annihilation, and yet nobody took it to the logical conclusion, which is that we’ve got to get this guy out of office.
Now, in our discussion earlier today with Lyn and Helga LaRouche, Mr. LaRouche was reflecting on where we stand, in terms of the dangers represented to, really, the survival of the entire trans-Atlantic region. Because that’s really what’s on the table right now. Assuming we even avoid the immediate threat of thermonuclear war and annihilation, the simple fact is that if the current trendlines continue, without a reversal, in a very short period of time the entire trans-Atlantic region will be doomed, will be finished, will not resemble anything like what Europe and the United States historically represented, particularly the United States.
Parts of South America may very well survive, because they’re already aligning themselves with the Asia-Pacific region, and with Eurasia more broadly, where countries like China, India, Russia are doing relatively well compared to the complete breakdown process that’s inflicted the entire trans-Atlantic region.
Now the problem of not directly addressing the clear and obvious solution to this crisis, namely the constitutional removal of President Obama from office, is in fact indicative of a much deeper problem, a problem that very few people other than people such as Mr. LaRouche think about constantly.
The bottom line is that since the very beginning of the Twentieth Century, since the intervention by Lord Bertrand Russell and others around him to destroy Classical science, and to replace it with mathematics and with the disease of pragmatism—since that process began at the beginning of the Twentieth Century—we’ve been on a steady downward trajectory—culturally, economically, philosophically, morally. We’ve been, throughout the trans-Atlantic region, in a slow but now intensifying complete collapse of society, and when you broach the issue of a President who has committed atrocities, such as his drone kill policy, all you need to do, is go back on the LaRouche PAC website, and review the last three Friday evening webcasts. You’ll have all of the details you need to know about that.
The fact that there has not been a move to remove this President from office, is because the disease of pragmatism has infected our political institutions to such a great degree, and has infected our general population to an even greater degree, that the only measure that can prevent the possible annihilation of mankind, is considered to be “unpractical, it’s not pragmatic, there’s no guarantee that this process will succeed.”
So, we’ve been on this long trajectory downward. It’s very much like the principle of how you boil a frog. If you put a pot of water on the stove, and get that water boiling to a full boil, and try to throw the frog in the boiling water, the frog’s going to jump right out. He’ll run away and you’ll never find him. If you put the frog in a pot of warm water, comfortably warm water, and have a low flame, then, gradually, that water will reach a boiling point, and the frog won’t notice it, because the incremental changes are gradual. That’s why you’ve got to look back and consider where we are as a trans-Atlantic civilization today, and ask yourself, from that standpoint: can we survive by continuing to cling to pragmatism and avoid taking the necessary urgent measures that can save us from otherwise certain doom?
Don’t Call Obama a Murderer, or You’ll Be Next
The drone policy, as Mr. LaRouche emphasized in our discussion today, is emblematic of Obama. He’s a mass killer. He boasted to White House staff, back in 2011, that he was really good at killing. Coming into the office of the Presidency, he had no idea how good he was at targeting people to be killed by others. But that’s the character of it; that’s what the “Drone Papers,” like the “Pentagon Papers” which earlier brought down Richard Nixon, show.
The “Drone Papers” alone are more than sufficient to bring down President Obama. But it has not yet happened, because a few phone calls from the White House to the New York Times, to the Washington Post, got the word out: this story is taboo; it’s not practical to tell the truth about this mass murderer, because we might get cut off from access to the White House. So, you’ve got this phenomenon.
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Doctors Without Borders General-Director Christopher Stokes, at the news conference Nov. 5 where he exposed the U.S. Airforce’s deliberate targetting of medical personnel at the hospital in Kunduz.
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You have the new reports that Matt just mentioned concerning the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders [MSF] hospital in Kunduz, providing more and more evidence that it was a pre-meditated assault on an international medical facility under the lamest of excuses, and that as doctors and nurses and patients were fleeing, they were being shot, on the grounds that anybody who was there was automatically, de facto Taliban, and fair game for another mass kill.
Destruction of Life
But there’s many, many more things to consider. You have the conditions of life of the American people, which have been destroyed, systematically, boiling-frog style, over a period of, really, the last 40 years, or you could say even the period going back to the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April of 1945.
It’s been a largely downward trajectory ever since then, and that is merely a slice of the process that began right at the turn of the Twentieth Century, with Bertrand Russell’s invasion and assault against science. If you look back at the sweep of the Nineteenth Century, you had some of the greatest accomplishments in culture and in science—in real, physical science. You had Bernhard Riemann, you had the great classical composers—Beethoven, Brahms. You had the work of Friedrich Schiller, branching over from the 1700s into the 1800s. You had a renaissance underway, particularly in Europe, particularly in Germany, during the end of the Nineteenth Century, covering the whole sweep of that Century. And suddenly, it came it came to a screeching halt, with the British top-down intervention, personified by Bertrand Russell. And we’ve been on a cultural downslide ever since. If you destroy the culture, you destroy the moral fabric of a society.
So, where are we now? Earlier today, as I’m sure many of you are aware, a series of propagandistic lies were put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, saying that 271,000 jobs were created last month in the United States, and that the unemployment rate is now officially down to 5%. Five percent unemployment is considered to be tantamount to full employment.
Well, those figures are an absolute lie, and I think if any of you think about it, any of you watching this broadcast now, think about whether your conditions of life are better or worse than they were at the start of the Obama Presidency, or, even more so, at the end of the Clinton Presidency, when Bush and Cheney came in. If you say, “My conditions are better, my prospects for my children and grandchildren are better,” then you are in an extremely small minority. The simple reality is that half of the 271,000 jobs claimed to have been created, are purely fictitious. They’re the result of a mathematical sleight-of-hand trick, projecting, on average, death and life rates and starts of new businesses and bankruptcies. But there’s nothing normal about the current economy. So, forget that number!
If you take the fact that 94 million working-age Americans, qualified to be in the labor force, are not counted as part of the labor force, because they are either chronically unemployed or have never been able to find a job, then if you add those 94 million people, working-age people, in, you find that the actual unemployment rate in the United States, is 23%! That number is on a par with the worst, darkest, days of the Great Depression in the 1930s, before Roosevelt put people back to work.
U.S. Mortality Rates Rise
A study came out just this past week from Princeton University, indicating that for the first time in a long time, there are more and more Americans dying during their middle-age—their 40s and 50s. And this is due to a combination of job loss, of lack of access to adequate medical care, addiction to drugs and alcohol—again, a reflection of a process of chronic unemployment or under-employment. In rural United States, according to a report in the New York Times earlier this week, the rate of suicides is rising astronomically.
In a few moments, Megan will give you a detailed readout on the fact that we’re in the midst of a heroin epidemic in the United States, and it’s mostly afflicting middle-class and upper middle-class households all over the country. You have all of the signs there, as if anyone out there needed to be reminded or told, about the actual collapse of the conditions of life.
 View full size Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The shocking rise of mortality rates among U.S. White non-Hispanics (USW), ages 45-54, shown in the study “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 2st century,” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These rates are compared with U.S. Hispanics (USH), and six comparison countries: France (FRA), Germany (GER), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada (CAN), Australia (AUG), and Sweden (SWE). The full report can be found here.
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So, this has occurred during the period of the Bush-Cheney Administration and during the period of Obama. There’s nothing that we can do right now in particular about Bush and Cheney, from the standpoint that they’re out of office. They should have been impeached for a whole range of reasons, and they were not impeached. Yet President Obama is the current President. And he stands guilty of crimes that even go beyond the scope of what Bush and Cheney did. The drone killing policy is a policy of mass murder.
In effect, you should be thinking about President Obama from the standpoint of somebody who is a bigger mass murderer than Charles Manson. How would you feel about having Charles Manson in the White House? Well, guess what? Maybe you do. So, the question is, and this is addressed to the outstanding individuals who did appear at that Congressional forum, and it’s also addressed to you, the American people. When are you going to shed the disease of pragmatism and face the reality of the situation that you are now living through? This is not something you watch on television, or read about in the newspapers or on your personal computer. This is the life that you are being subjected to; and there’s no reason for it.
The trans-Atlantic region is dead; the U.S. economy is dead. The European economy is even more dead in many areas than the U.S. economy is. Asia is not thriving because of the impact of the trans-Atlantic crisis, but Asia is doing vastly better. There’s growth going on—China, India, even Russia; there’s growth going on in the entire region. There’s a perspective of optimism, about space exploration, about extending the high-speed links from the Asia-Pacific coast on to the Atlantic coast of Europe.
 View full size Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The astronomical rise in mortality among the white non-Hispanics ages 45-54, by cause. From the Case/Deaton study.
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The document reports that drug-related deaths, as Matthew mentioned in the opening, drug-related deaths have risen to become the leading cause of injury death in the United States. More than firearms; more than car accidents. And in 2013 alone, the United States lost 46,470 people to drug overdoses—46,000 people. That’s more than 120 per day. Now among drugs, controlled prescription drugs—mainly opioids—and heroin, account for the largest type of drug by far; and the slight decline of the use of prescription drugs is being steadily replaced by the use of heroin, as people shift over to what’s a much more deadly drug. But it’s also much cheaper and much, much more widely available.
Now, to illustrate that a little bit, in 2013 there were 169,000 new users of heroin; many of them very young. Between 2013 and 2014, the rate of current heroin use—in other words, people who have used heroin in the past 30 days—rose by 51%. Between 2007 and 2013—or in other words, during the course of Obama’s Presidency—the addiction to heroin rose 150%; and the deaths by overdose of heroin more than tripled.
 View full size CDC/NCHA, National Vital Statistics System, Mortality.
The complementary increase in heroin deaths, as compared to the decrease in deaths from opioid analgesics is shown in this chart, part of a study by the Centers for Disease Control. The data can be found here.
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Now the primary area where this increase of death has occurred, is in the Midwest; the formerly industrial centers that LaRouche took the spearpoint to save over the course of 2005 and the following years, when under the Bush-Cheney Administration, the auto industry and related machine tool sectors were gutted and crushed. Now it’s the Midwest, followed closely by New England and the New York/New Jersey area—all of these formerly productive industrial centers of the country which have suffered in every way under Bush and Obama.
Now the increase, as you might guess, for the most part is not concentrated in the inner cities; although I will mention that in the city of Baltimore, one in ten people is a heroin user. The epidemic is not centered among the poorest people in the country; it’s centered in the middle class, the working class. For example, families with an income of $50,000 or more, for families of that income rate, heroin addiction has risen by 60% in the last four years. These are working class, upper class families and their children.
But this picture of the epidemic use of drugs is just part of a broader picture. Death is on the rise under President Obama. A study was released just a few weeks ago in September, which is receiving wide coverage this week, which states that since 1999, over the course of the four terms of Bush and Obama, the death rate among middle-aged white Americans in the age range of 45-54 has risen dramatically; in an unprecedented way, 10% overall, and 20% among the poorer, less educated strata.
This increase of the death rate of middle-aged people is not a natural shift in demographics; it’s not due to some overall change in disease mortality rates. In fact, for comparison, in comparable industrialized countries around the world, the mortality rate for exactly this class of people has fallen by 25% to 30%. So, this is purely the result of a conscious policy in the United States by Bush and Obama.
The leading cause is not disease. The leading causes are signs of the complete degeneration and despair among the American population: drug abuse; alcohol abuse. And in fact, the authors of the report note particularly, heroin and opioid overdoses, and suicide. And as Jeff referenced, in rural areas of the United States, the suicide rates since 2004 have risen by 20%.
So here you have an overview of the stark reality of the Obama death policy, so clearly seen in the attack on the hospital in Afghanistan, turned against the American people. When presented with some of these figures the other day, LaRouche responded with this: He said, “Why didn’t we, as a nation, respond years back, and take action to stop this from happening? How did people get set up to accept the economic policies of destruction of science, of industry, along with endless bail outs of Wall Street? How were we induced to submit to do this to ourselves?”
 Creative Commons/Andrew Jameson
Typical of the shutdown of productive industry in the U.S. Midwest is this Fisher Body Plant in Detroit, photographed in 2008.
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So, I’d like to ask Jeff to come to the podium to respond and elaborate.
The Courage to Act
Steinberg: I think it goes back to what I said earlier. Slowly, the level of culture, the level of real science that had permeated our culture even here in the United States in the Nineteenth Century has been under steady and constant assault; largely coming from the British, particularly reflected in people like Lord Bertrand Russell, who wrote books professing to be about science.
Russell wrote a book in 1951, The Impact of Science on Society, but he didn’t talk about science. He talked about methods of destruction of young minds by turning the education system into a system that basically drives people into accepting their subservience to be trained, to be submissive, to be non-inquisitive. And again, the disease that Russell imposed from the beginning of the Twentieth Century was the disease of replacing physical science with mathematics. Everything comes down to a formula; everything comes down to a probability. If it’s not highly probable, then it’s not practical, and therefore, don’t go there.
So, you’ve had an assault on education, from the kindergarten level on up, all the way to the major universities professing to be the great halls of advanced education. You’ve had a culture that has been destructive in the most unbelievable and egregious ways. And the net effect is that even compared to the early 1970s, people have lost a certain sense of fight. They’d rather watch reality television. Our leaders have accepted the idea that there are boundary conditions on what they can even dare think about.
Last week on this broadcast, we talked about former Sen. Mike Gravel, who, as a lowly first-term Senator from Alaska, had the audacity to put the Pentagon Papers in the Congressional record. That act in 1971 led to the demise of President Nixon, and contributed mightily to the end of the Vietnam War. So, there are glimmers of recognition among some of our elder statesmen that things used to be different.
And so, we’ve got an enormous challenge on our hands right now. Do we continue to tolerate, even knowing that the President of the United States is sitting down every Tuesday afternoon with a small group of White House advisors and basically ordering the murder of individual citizens from nations all over the world, some of them American citizens, without any kind of oversight, and without any accountability for his actions?
As Megan just said, he’s presided over an invasion of drugs, whether it’s over-the-counter prescription or black-market illegal drugs; we have 94 million citizens of working age who are not working in the real economy. Clearly not every one of those people is sleeping under a bridge somewhere. How many of them are directly involved in the black market economy that’s shoving heroin at a record rate into the arms of American citizens? It’s all of a package.
And again, as I said earlier, and as Mr. LaRouche emphasized in our discussion this afternoon, Obama’s got to go, and the book of evidence is absolutely there. It’s comprehensive, it’s irrefutable. Some of the crimes that he is documented to be guilty of are crimes that go beyond simply the question of impeachment. They may wind up being the basis for criminal prosecution, because the immunity afforded to elected officials does not extend to outright criminal action.
So, we’ve got Wall Street, that’s a parasite sitting on top of and destroying the United States economy. There are straightforward measures that could be taken to eliminate Wall Street, starting with the idea of simply re-instating Glass-Steagall. There are many things that could be done. We could issuing credit to rebuild our infrastructure. We could be adopting the model of Franklin Roosevelt from when he first came into office, setting up training programs for young people to give them the necessary skills and to also give them the sense of optimism that they’ve got a constructive role to play in society, and that they’ve got a bright future ahead of them.
All of these things could be done. They’re all right there. If you go to the LaRouche PAC website, you will see there’s a massive amount of material spelling out chapter and verse exactly what kinds of measures can and must be taken to turn this situation around. But ultimately it starts with a very subjective question: Are you prepared to fight for your own vital interests? Are you prepared to hold elected officials to a Constitutional standard, and to hold them accountable if they fail to live up to it? These are the issues. These are the questions that are really right now staring us in the face, because we don’t have much time left. We don’t have a great deal of time to solve these problems, to tackle these issues, and the question is, are you prepared to give up your pragmatism, to turn off your television, and to do something constructive for your country, for your family, and for your future generations?
That’s really the issue and that’s the question that should be the burning issue on everybody’s mind at this moment.
The Downing of Russian Airbus A321M
Ogden: Now, our final segment for this evening is our institutional question, which reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche, the Russian-operated Airbus A321M crashed last Saturday shortly after taking off from the Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, on its way to St. Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board. There are strong but unconfirmed reports that the plane had been downed by a bomb, a claim contested by both Egypt and Russia. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, however, said that Britain had weighed the whole information picture, including the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility after the crash, and had concluded that there is a significant possibility. If these reports are substantiated through examination of the plane wreckage, what actions do you suggest the Russian government should take against the perpetrators of this tragic crime?
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The crash site of Russia’s Flight 9268 in the Sinai Desert, as published on Nov. 2, 2015.
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Steinberg: First of all, I think the actions taken by the British Foreign Secretary were obnoxious and egregious. The British have no role whatsoever in this investigation. If they had communications intercepts suggesting that terrorists were planning such an attack, then the obvious question is why didn’t they inform the Egyptian and Russian authorities, if they knew this was happening? The fact of the matter is that the British basically staged an ambush for Egyptian President el-Sisi, because it was upon his arrival in London for a long-scheduled state visit that Hammond made these comments, and basically announced at the same time that British Airways was suspending flights into Egypt.
So, you’ve got a British game being played here, and an Obama game, because an unnamed Obama Administration official immediately came out and told Reuters that the United States is in agreement with the British in terms of jumping the gun, and drawing these hasty and perhaps completely false conclusions.
Now, what Mr. LaRouche said is, first of all, you’ve got to let the Russians conduct the investigation. The Russians are perfectly capable of conducting a thorough and honest and comprehensive forensic investigation to determine what happened. And because of the nature of the area where the crash occurred, namely, in the Sinai desert, all of the remains of the plane have been recovered. The black boxes have been recovered, with a little bit of damage to one of them. All of the bodies by and large have been recovered. And therefore, because you’re dealing with people who have competence, and who have a vested interest in finding out what really happened, Mr. LaRouche emphasized, let the Russians do their job. Don’t jam them. Don’t try to speed it up. Patiently wait for the investigation to be concluded.
And I should say that the head of the Russian FSB, their intelligence service, Alexander Bortnikov, issued a statement today. I’ll just read it—it’s brief—but it goes very much to the point that Mr. LaRouche just made. Bortnikov said, and it was publicized on Channel 1 TV in Russia today:
We need to obtain absolutely objective and verified data on the reasons for the crash of the plane. This is necessary for purposes of investigating the cause of this disaster, and for informing the public. This work must be done in the most meticulous fashion, taking as much time as may be required, and I want to state that until we determine the actual causes of what happened, I think it is appropriate to halt Russian civil aviation flights to Egypt. This chiefly involves tourism. At the same time, we find it necessary to cooperate actively with the Egyptian authorities in joint work on the investigation of the causes of this disaster.
Russia 1 then quoted the official spokesman for President Putin, Mr. Peskov, who said the President concurred with Bortnikov’s recommendations; and he added “Halting the flights does not yet mean that the version that it was an act of terrorism is being viewed as the main one in the investigation of this air disaster. Experts continue to exclude nothing, including the possibility of a bomb explosion onboard the plane.” So, this is the beginnings of an investigation into a serious tragedy; 224 people were killed in it. And it’s not known yet; we don’t have the results of that forensic investigation.
Now as the question of what the Russians should do, I think the answer is, pretty obviously, that they’re already doing it. The Russians, as of September 30, are carrying out a systematic, targetted campaign against the terrorist networks that are operating inside Syria. They are, at the same time, aggressively pursuing a diplomatic track to try to bring an end to this five-year horror inside Syria; and that will obviously have major implications for the situation next door in Iraq, in Lebanon, in other parts of the entire Middle East region. So, in effect, Putin already made a command decision and launched the flanking operation against the Islamic State and allied jihadist groups and their sponsors in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey.
So, it would be a mistake to veer off what is already an extremely effective and ongoing flanking operation. If it turns out—and again, it’s premature to make any judgement on this—but if does turn out that the Islamic State or some affiliate or spin-off was involved in planting a bomb on that plane, then that’s another story; and you’ve got to carry it several steps further. What was the infrastructure through which that operation was conducted, if it proves to have been a bomb rather than a mechanical failure? Now, if you’re talking about the Islamic State, if you’re talking about Nusra, if you’re talking about al-Qaeda, then ultimately, face it; you’re talking about operations that were allowed to grow and allowed to fester as a result of the policies of the Bush and now Obama Presidencies, and the Blair and Cameron governments in Britain.
So, ultimately, all roads lead back to what we’ve been discussing throughout the entire evening broadcast tonight; namely, as the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], Gen. Mike Flynn, told al-Jazeera, and has subsequently repeated in interviews with American and Russian media: the President, the administration were warned that the actions that the United States was taking in places such as Benghazi, was fueling the growth of jihadist organizations. And it was not an oversight, or that the warnings were ignored, as General Flynn said, it was in pursuit of the ongoing current policy that they made a willful decision to keep doing what they were doing, having been fully informed that this was fueling the growth of not just al-Qaeda. But back in 2012, DIA was already looking at the prospects of the creation of a jihadist caliphate in the area on the territory of parts of Iraq and Syria.
 White House/Pete Souza
President Obama with one of his key advisors on choosing drone victims, CIA Director John Brennan. This photo from Dec. 2012 shows Brennan, then Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, briefing Obama on the Sandy Hook shootings.
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So, in other words, the [former] head of the DIA has said openly and publicly President Obama willfully pursued a policy that created ISIS. So, let me ask you, if—and we’re not there yet by any means—but if it turns out that this was a bomb; if it turns out that the Islamic State was involved in it, then let’s go higher up the political and logistical chain of command. Are we not talking about the consequences of Bush and Obama administration policies and certainly the policies of the parallel British government?
So, that’s another dimension of what I want you to think about this evening. And I hope that you’ve been disturbed enough by what we’ve discussed tonight that you’ll lose a bit of sleep and think about what’s required to end the tyranny of pragmatism. To end the tyranny of basically “go along to get along;” and what it will take to actually solve these crises before they bring the entire trans-Atlantic region down, or may ultimately lead to thermonuclear annihilation.
Ogden: So, as I said at the outset of this broadcast, the evidence has continued to accumulate. The case against Obama has now begun to snowball; the avalanche is ready to begin. It is now incumbent on those who are in responsible positions of leadership to take the legal and Constitutional actions which must be taken to protect the American people and to protect the people of the entire world from the deadly consequences of the continuation of the policies of the Obama Presidency.
