MICHAEL STEGER
It’s a New World
[Print version of this transcript]
The following is an edited transcript, taken from remarks given by Michael Steger to the LaRouche PAC Manhattan Meeting of Feb. 11, 2017.
Steger: The level of changes that are taking place so quickly is almost breathtaking. We’re three weeks now into a new administration, and as Mr. LaRouche had said after the election in November, this is clearly a global revolution, a global process. It wasn’t something only occurring or developing in the United States.
What I’d like to go through are a couple of key developments. There is so much taking place, and I want to review some of it, put an emphasis on it, and then capture what are the restrictions.
- Why is Glass-Steagall not at the forefront of a policy discussion?
- Why is the National Bank not yet at the forefront of a policy discussion in the United States?
I think, as many of you in this room know, a big portion of this is on the level of an asymmetrical warfare on information—or really an attack on ideas and an attack on the human mind that has been taking place inside the mass media, so we’ll get at that question, because it is a critical component of how we make this breakthrough and consolidate what’s taking place. But before we do that, let’s review the political situation.
 kremlin.ru
Japan Prime Minister Abe (right) had met three times with President Putin (left), prior to his meeting with President Trump: May 6, 2016 in Sochi, Sept. 2, 2016 in Vladivostok, and in Nagato, Japan on Dec. 15, 2016.
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We’ll start with this recent summit that President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Abe had, because this clearly indicated a completely new shift in the way the world is now beginning to interact—the way that major nations of this world are beginning to interact. To put a certain context to that, we recently discovered in our own Executive Intelligence Review magazine, an article from 1982 that situates this summit—that it was Prime Minister Abe’s father who was then Minister of Trade for Japan, working with the same Mitsubishi Corporation that Lyndon LaRouche and this organization were collaborating with on a project in Thailand to build the Kra Canal. [Abe’s father] was then going to go to Florida to discuss with the G-7 nations’ trade ministers, a program for a $50 billion Global Infrastructure Fund.
The projects on that list included: the Lake Chad project, which is now under discussion by China, the Kra Canal project, the Nicaragua Canal project, and the greening of the Sahara Desert. And they identified that the greatest risk to world peace was the economic deterioration and lack of development.
Now, that was Prime Minister Abe’s father. It’s important to make that note, simply because it is Prime Minister Abe who over the last eleven months has had a series of discussions with President Putin, and the first one last year took place in May. This is important to note, because after Abe had announced that he was planning to travel to Russia, then-President Obama had attempted to weigh in on Prime Minister Abe, and told him, “Don’t go; wait for the summit you and I are going to have soon there in Japan. Wait for that first. Let me tell you what I think about this summit with Putin, and then maybe you can go.” Abe said, “That’s okay, I think I’ll go.”
At that point, you saw what was the beginning of a major strategic shift on the planet, where nations which were closely tied to this Anglo-American program—this British imperial policy—were showing clear signs of breaking, of working now instead with this Eurasian-centered process around Russia and China. Since that summit, Abe and Putin have now met three times—first in Sochi, then again in Vladivostok, and then again in Tokyo.
At the summit in Tokyo, or soon thereafter, the Prime Minister made it clear that it was his intention that he would finally sign a peace treaty with Russia, that he would resolve the questions of the Northern Islands or Kuril Islands, as they are known in Russia—which is a territorial dispute between Russia and Japan—that he wanted to be the Prime Minister who signed that treaty, resolved Japan’s sovereignty on this question, and opened up a collaboration with Russia.
So, Abe staked his own personal career on the commitment that he wanted to be the one who solved this, which clearly is in this overall orientation that we see even from his own family.
Now these things are not just governed by those local circumstances. Clearly, they’re governed by a much higher process globally.
At the time, President Putin responded, and said, in effect: It’s important to note that on the question of these disputed islands, the Soviet Union had already been willing to resolve this in the 1950s, but at that time, it was American influence which disrupted any type of negotiations between the Soviet Union and Japan.
They had already agreed to provide Japan with the two southern islands—there are four of them—the two southern ones would go to Japan. But John Foster Dulles, of the Wall Street-British crowd, threatened Japan, saying, if you make a deal with the Soviet Union, we will take Okinawa as U.S. property and U.S. dominion—the far southern island with the U.S. military base in Japan. So it was a direct threat, a direct intervention on the British system’s behalf to prevent any kind agreement between the Soviet Union and Japan at that time.
 White House
President Trump (right) made the new U.S. policy shift clear at the Feb. 10 summit in Washington, D.C. with Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (left). Trump indicated that the United States would not interfere in Japan/Russia efforts to work out their differences, dating from World War II.
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It is very interesting that during this summit between Trump and Abe, that this is the context that is now under discussion. President Trump made it very clear that we will not interfere, that Japan and Russia are close neighbors, they have certain interests at stake between them, and the United States will not be intervening, regarding the negotiations between Russia and Japan—you’re now seeing that with the United States free of Obama, we are now permitting this kind of new system in the Eurasian world to consolidate.
At the same time, in this summit between Trump and Abe, there is a substantial discussion, in many ways, of major infrastructure development of the United States. Trump, on the day prior to the summit, was meeting with airline executives, and he said, “You go to China, you go to Japan. There are all these high-speed rails, there are all these fast trains, and in the United States, we have none.” This is part of the discussion. Abe made the comment that if we built a maglev rail between Washington, D.C. and New York City, it would take one hour to get there.
This discussion of infrastructure was there—and I’ll touch on that in a second—because what is critical to this is our initiative here in the United States on economic policy, for Glass-Steagall and a National Bank.
But in the broader scope of the process—because it is global—a question comes from a Japanese reporter, asking President Trump about the tensions between Japan and China, and China’s growing role in the region. Of course, there’s the South China Sea, and there’s also these rocks out there in the East China Sea, which are disputed between China and Japan.
Trump’s response was very important. He said, “I had a discussion with President Xi last night. It was a very warm discussion, very cordial, and I think that U.S.-China collaboration will be very important for the United States and China, but also for the entire region including Japan.” So he made it very clear that there is this quality of discussions between Japan and Russia, between Japan and the United States, and now between the United States and China.
This was the first discussion between President Trump and President Xi since the November election, and it was clearly something of a commitment by President Trump toward the One China policy, that Taiwan and China are one nation—but it also occurred in the broader context of this new developing system. This is very important because we are talking about the development of a system, and of a world, that has never existed before. There is no parallel.
We can draw comparisons, we can make notes of other moments in human history where similar substantial transformations have occurred, something like the Italian Renaissance—but what is developing has never existed on the planet. So, the fellow Americans that we are organizing, the members of Congress, whoever they might be, in any institutions, throughout Manhattan, throughout New York City—there’s no nostalgia.
You know, there is a big nostalgia culture we have today. But there’s not even nostalgia for a great relationship between the United States and Russia, even though we had one. You have an outreach between President Trump and Xi Jinping, representing the two largest economies in the world, which is now taking new footing. Then, in addition to this, we know there has been ongoing discussion on the question of Russia, and I think we have to highlight the kind of stance that Trump has taken. The interview that Trump did with Fox News on Super Bowl Sunday,— this is the first time since the 9/11 attacks, that a President has outright condemned the Iraq War in these terms, as a “policy of murder”—that this was an injustice, that this was a criminal act.
This was an important break, and it was provoked because of the hysteria being directed against this new administration’s ongoing relationship and discussions with Russia. Coming up next week, the new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, will probably be meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, and they will be discussing a possible summit between Trump and Putin. They will be discussing the questions of Ukraine, of Syria, and opportunities for major collaboration between the United States and Russia.
Over the course of this last week, there were also major discussions between the United States and Turkey. Turkey is now in discussions with Russia and Iran on the question of Syria, so if the United States begins to work with Turkey more closely, it brings the United States into discussions with Russia on Syria, and also Iran.
Okay, so that’s quite a situation.
As many people know, there will be a summit in May in Beijing, a Belt-and-Road summit. Helga Zepp-LaRouche just gave an interview to the Chinese government news agency Xinhua, and this is in the context of that summit in May. Vladimir Putin will be attending. Chinese President Xi Jinping will be hosting it. And there are now reports coming from a leading Chinese expert on the New Silk Road, in discussion with an Indian newspaper, that President Trump will be attending—although that has not yet been confirmed by either the Chinese Foreign Ministry or the U.S. State Department.
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EIRNS/Stefan Tolksdorf
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (left) and EIR’s Washington, D.C. correspondent Bill Jones, in Beijing, China Sept. 29, 2015, for the release of the Chinese-language translation of EIR’s World Land-Bridge report.
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But clearly this is the kind of potential we’re consolidating, and when you bring together this level of nations and heads of nations, in the context of what’s now developing, we clearly have a potential over the coming weeks and months, going into the summit in May, to consolidate what Helga Zepp-LaRouche had said to the audience just last Saturday, here in Manhattan: that we are now looking at a potential for a major transformation of the world, and if President Trump has the courage to follow through on this potential—something that Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche have created over this last forty years—that if President Trump follows through on this potential today, he will clearly become a towering giant in the process of human history.
A Long-Awaited War on Drugs
The media have blacked all of this out entirely. But there’s also another factor, and that is the culture itself in the United States. And the very foundation of this culture that we see today, this rotting culture—you see it in Wall Street, you see it in Washington, D.C., you see it throughout the country, the destruction and devastation of the country. It’s epitomized by the drug culture, by this drug addiction. This is something for which again, Mr. LaRouche and this organization initiated specifically the war on the drugs; we called for it. And at the center of our call for a war on drugs, was our recognition that what was really controlling this international drug trade was the international banking institutions.
Now this is being taken up. With President Trump’s recent announcements, there is now a real war on drugs, a full commitment. Well, I wouldn’t say a full commitment. A full commitment has to be centered against the banks, against the role of Wall Street. We’ve already documented the role of HSBC, the role of Wachovia—now Wells Fargo—and these other various banks directly, in laundering drug money, and terrorist money-laundering, so that’s the question. But you’re now seeing a commitment.
I want to read something from President Trump which he said in a meeting with police chiefs and sheriffs earlier this week. He said:
It’s time to dismantle the gangs terrorizing our citizens, and it’s time to ensure that every young American can be raised in an environment of decency, dignity, love and support. You have asked for the resources, tools and support you need to get the job done. We will do whatever we can to help meet those demands. That includes a zero tolerance policy for acts of violence against law enforcement. As part of our commitment to save communities, we will also work to address the mental health crisis. Prison should not be a substitute for treatment.
We will fight to increase access to life-saving treatment to battle the addiction to drugs, which is afflicting our nation like never, ever before. I’ve been here two weeks; I’ve met a lot of law enforcement officials. Yesterday, I brought them into the Oval Office. I asked a group, what impact do drugs have in terms of a percentage on crime? They said, ‘75-80%.’ That’s pretty sad. We’re going to stop the drugs from pouring in. We’re going to stop those drugs from poisoning our youth, from poisoning our people. We’re going to be ruthless in that fight. We have no choice. And we’re going to take that fight to the drug cartels, and we will work to liberate our communities from the terrible grip of violence.
That’s definitely a commitment on this drug war that we haven’t seen in a very long time. And I think, probably, many people in this room are aware, that as much as Ronald Reagan and his close collaborators were committed to a similar fight—then Vice-President George H.W. Bush and the Bush gang were the ones running crack cocaine into the inner cities of our country. They were running the Iran-Contra cocaine operations into the United States. So you had sabotage at that time, even in Reagan’s administration, against waging a war on drugs—promoting drugs.
And so this is a fundamental shift, that we have not seen since the drug culture began in the 1960s. And now, at the same time, you have a commitment by Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly. He made clear statements in his testimony to Congress that we’ve got to execute this, we’ve got to shut down the drug demand. You can’t eliminate it, but you’ve got to reduce it. We’ve done it before; we know how to do it.
And what we know, is that this means a development program. You have to keep these young men out of prisons, to keep them off drugs. You have to change the educational program. You have to create a sense of science and optimism throughout our education and our culture.
You have to have a program of development, of jobs—real jobs, not these makeshift jobs, not this “gig economy” as they now call it. But a sense of what you’re contributing in your daily work efforts, as something significant and positive for the society as a whole. That’s how we eradicate this drug culture. But you also have to go after the production of it: Ninety-nine percent of the heroin comes through the Mexican border, he said. These things have to be shut down.
Now, at the same time that this administration is committed to shutting down the drug trade, they are also willing to address the fact that the entire environmentalist program is a fraud and a scheme. Ben Deniston just did a video report on the LaRouche PAC website, which highlights what they’re calling “Climategate II.”
Prior to the recent, big climate-hoax summit in Paris, which received international support, a leading figure of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) came out and leaked the proof that the Paris report on ocean water temperatures was an entirely fraudulent document. This administration is going directly after this environmentalist insanity—that it is a program for depopulation, it is a program of drug addiction, and it is a program of no-development of any sort.
And these developments are substantial, because this is the first time we’ve had an attack directly on the drug culture of the United States and an attack on this environmentalist insanity. This is the first time that this has happened. And I can tell you, I’m speaking to you from California today: There is a freakout in California, and though they might want to say it’s about illegal immigration or gay rights, or gay marriage, or rights to abortion—I guarantee you: the core of this freakout is the drugs. And you wouldn’t have anybody believing in so-called global warming if they weren’t on drugs—if they weren’t on drugs or if there wasn’t a drug culture. Much of the fraud of our culture today is largely based on the idea that you’ve got a drug culture: It’s the music, it’s the pessimism, it’s the loss of clarity of mind.
This brings us back to why this organization has been able to prevail in this fight over the course of these forty and fifty years: Because it wasn’t simply that we didn’t like the Vietnam War, or that we didn’t like Obama. This organization has been led by a distinct quality of thinking, that Mr. LaRouche himself has embodied.
Now, the bigger question is this: If the population were not drugged up, no one would tolerate Wall Street bailouts. If people weren’t on these drugs—and this is a broad portion of the population—you wouldn’t tolerate these actions, you wouldn’t tolerate the destruction of your country. You wouldn’t watch the industry break down; you wouldn’t watch the nation go into wars for fifteen-plus years—perpetual war. You wouldn’t watch the bailouts to the very criminals that ran the criminal fraud against your population, and you wouldn’t tolerate Obama’s ongoing drone attacks and murder policy. So, what we’re getting at is a real question here—that this question of liberating the minds of our population is something that Mr. LaRouche, Mrs. LaRouche, and this organization, and everyone who’s been a member has been fighting for—a liberation of the human mind: The slavery today is a slavery of the mind.
 White House/Pete Souza
Slavery of the U.S. populations’ minds by more than 15 years of perpetual wars, and a policy of drone attacks and murders: ex-Presidents Barack Obama (left) and George W. Bush.
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Because what we’re talking about is having access to the future. Very few Americans today have an emotional connection to the kind of future that we can build and create. That might be a little bit more understandable when there’s not much there on the horizon in terms of a new potential. But today, what we’ve seen consolidated over these last few years, and especially with the Brexit and then the Presidential election, is now a new potential that is clearly more than just possible. It’s approximating everything this organization has been fighting for. And there has to be an emotional connection to the reality that we can address the problems that mankind has feared to face for too long.
For example, the kind of poverty and famine and wars that people still imagine Africa to be. As we saw with the Ethiopia-Djibouti rail line, China has a vision of Africa far different from just wars and famine. But many people in Europe and the United States accept “that’s just how Africa is.” We’ve lost our vision, we’ve lost our sense of the future.
And this is really the target of this drug culture—it’s to undermine the ability of the human mind to access the future, including among people who have become addicted to drugs, or dominated by the culture and by the music, by the scientific frauds, or among the people whose families are broken down by it, or whose employees are destroyed by it.
Glass-Steagall and Hamilton
This brings us back now to the single unifying question of what we’ve got to do to address this problem. The mobilization for Glass-Steagall and for Lyndon LaRouche’s “Four Laws” is now the primary focus we have to implement, for two very clear reasons.
It is the inflection point of this entire political process. On the one hand, if you’re going to shut down the criminal drug trade, the scientific fraud of global warming, and operators like George Soros, like the Wall Street banks, and like what we’ve seen from Prince Charles in the push for the global warming fraud—then we’re going to suffocate and shut down the funding for these types of operations, and we’re going to shut down the drug-running.
There was a former UN official, Antonio Mario Costas, who made it very clear—and other people have corroborated this—that the banks are dependent on the hard cash of the international drug trade. With Glass-Steagall, we are going to wipe out the Wall Street gambling process. We’re going to wipe out these worthless debts, and we’re going to ensure the stability of the American population. That’s Glass-Steagall. You have to wipe out the British system.
Now, at the same time, Glass-Steagall is the first step for the United States to take, to make it possible for Trump to join fully in a new relationship among nations, to establish a direct participation—economically and financially—of the United States in collaboration with Russia, China, Japan, and other major nations. Glass-Steagall is the first step.
The second step is a national banking system, and then you have the opportunities for the public credit and the science driver programs that are so key. Now this national banking is the very principle of the United States. Every time it’s been called back into existence in some form, there has been a transformation of the American economy. And there’s a very clear reason why. Today, we have a monetary system, a system where money circulates based on a British liberal conception of mankind, that at best you seek pleasure and attempt to avoid pain. That is the sum of all human decision-making and choices on a social level and on economic practices. That’s how the British economic system views their so-called statistical principle within economics.
But the very opposite is true: Human beings are not governed according to that process. We have unique access to the power of the human mind to identify the longer-ranging and more substantial principles that govern our universe, our development, and our culture. We have access to recognize and identify those principles, to discover them as new, and to act upon them toward the benefit of the society and of mankind as a whole. The National Bank does that. It takes the so-called “money supply” that’s been thrown out there by these bailouts, through these printing presses, and it shuts that process down, and it aggregates that money supply and transforms it into a credit system. It changes the system—it becomes an inflection point, or a change. So that that money is aggregated with a singular focus of development of the country as a whole. That is an aggregate power of the nation as a whole and its future, to develop that future.
This is a Credit System, not a Monetary System. That’s why the National Bank becomes so important,— that we take the money that’s in circulation, we take the Treasury bonds that are in circulation, and you now bring them to bear for development. As you see in New York City, I see it here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Where does a lot of the money go that directly affects us? It goes into hyperinflation of basic commodities, and into things like real estate—that’s a major area.
Under a national banking Hamiltonian economy, under a LaRouche policy, that investment loses money. It’s becoming obsolete. It’s a slumlord-like approach to economics, to put your money into so-called real estate as some kind of long-term financial investment. A true economy is one based on the conception of the principle of mankind, which governs this new system—this new relationship among nations. The true economy is one where you’re having a transformation of technology, creating advanced technologies and making the previous technologies obsolete. That’s where you find your greatest profit! That’s where you find your greatest return on investment! In the areas like fusion technology, space exploration, as in what Kesha raised on the Thursday night organizing call.
The New System of the Future
These questions of major scientific and technological advancement, of high-speed rail, of a development of land area, something like the Bering Strait Tunnel, to develop the areas of the Far East, Siberia, and the northwest parts of Alaska and Canada and the United States,—these sorts of technologies and projects create a new economy and a new society. So instead of having money oriented towards the places where people can make some kind of quick gain, on very obsolete and static entities—or even worse, as we know, the drug trade—instead, the national banking system transforms that and reorients it towards a real advancement of the development of the country. And that’s a sense of principle. That’s a sense of what the human mind can grasp—that capability. And that’s why it’s always been such a powerful aspect of the United States economy.
It’s this drug culture that we’ve now seen for over fifty years in this country—promoted and endorsed as somehow “expanding your mind”—that we are now going to end, this British system, and orient to what is very clearly, on an international level, a major development orientation with major nations—and this includes nations like Mexico. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly made it clear that we’ve got to work with Mexico. China has offered to work with Mexico in questions of high-speed rail and port development.
These are the parallels between the projects under discussion today, and what this organization has promoted and developed over fifty years, from Operation Juárez to the collaboration on the International Development Bank. These projects are now coming to fruition, but not as separate projects, but as a unified, integral system of human development. And it’s that kind of political fight, around Glass-Steagall, that then becomes the inflection point to eliminate and destroy this British system, and to create the kind of new system which can clearly be consolidated over the coming weeks, and potentially at the Belt and Road Initiative summit in May, with the level of representation that might be developing there.
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Representative Marcy Kaptur website
Reps. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio, speaking), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Tim Ryan (D-Ohio, left) and Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii, right) call for re-instatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, Feb. 1, 2017.
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It’s striking. And the way that we saw that Glass-Steagall developed last week—at the press conference led by Rep. Marcy Kaptur—you saw a bipartisan effort; you saw a commitment to work with the new Presidency, to break this so-called partisan political theater you currently see—the political theater of George Soros at the airports and these protests. Instead, you saw people cutting through that, to focus on the needed policy, and to state that they were going to work together, in bipartisan fashion, with this new administration to bring this policy to bear.
And then, over this last week, you see the consolidation of these international developments:
- the war on drugs,
- collaboration with Japan,
- collaboration with Russia,
- collaboration with China.
We’ve got a lot to do.
