JACQUES CHEMINADE

The Coming World of Lyndon LaRouche

This is the prepared text of Jacques Cheminade’s address to the Schiller Institute conference in Morristown, N.J. on Feb. 16, 2019. He is a long-time LaRouche associate and is President of the Solidarité et Progrès party in France. He has thrice run for President of France. Subheads have been added.

It is for me a great honor to speak here this morning, about the Coming World of Lyndon LaRouche, and much more than a great honor—an immense joy. Joy not only to be back among you in the U.S., but the true joy of life, as Lyndon LaRouche told us in 1988, “such that, if we were to cut short, at any point, our mortal life by spending it in a way which ensured the cause of those hundreds of billions of souls yet to be born, we could walk to death with joy because we had completed our life, fulfilled it.” The true joy of being a real human being among other true human beings. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Lyndon LaRouche’s wife and heir, challenges us today: “It is now up to us to realize his life’s work.”

Looking at all of us here, I see us with the eyes of the present, with all our imperfections in this terrible moment for humanity. But if I see us with the eyes of the future, I am filled with hope, because our lives are shaped by the history of an organization which always thought and fought to be at the forefront. Hope—beyond pain and sorrow, hope across the boundaries of nations and time. It is with confidence in what we will accomplish, mustering the strength to fight and win, that I see the coming world as the world of Lyndon LaRouche.

We have before us the possibility of a paradigm change, freeing the world from the destructive grip of the British Empire and its ideology. But it will happen only if all of us become guiding lights, ahead of what we are, and not followers of easy paths. So, let’s do it—because it is our mandate and our mission. This conference, to make sense, has to be followed by unprecedented political organizing to inspire minds and extend our hands to others, beyond all parochialisms, personal biases and borders.

Our commitments—a New Bretton Woods, a National Bank, the Glass-Steagall Act and fusion energy—are not mere words or recipes to be repeated, but powerful ideas defining a dynamic unity. If they do not become real, the world is doomed. LaRouche’s Four Laws will define the future of humanity, if there is going to be one. It is as simple as that, and it is what should make us decide what we will do with our lives. Not by adopting a set of cultish lifesavers but as an intervention in history which confronts our quality of being human.

The human house is threatened both by a financial tsunami and by the flames of war.

Policy to Support Speculators and
Destroy the Rest

At this point, even the Chairwoman of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, has warned that the world is at risk of an economic and financial tempest. Even the guardians of the financial temple feel themselves compelled to warn about what is about to happen.

The statistics, which are the shadows on the wall of the cave, are clear. For every 1% increase of Gross National Product (GNP) generated by the economy, between 4% and 6% of debt has to be issued over that same GNP. The conditions to reimburse that debt are obviously not being met, and until now a default has been avoided only by pumping more and more liquidities into the system. Fake money is not fake news. The situation is of the same type but much worse than the one we had just before the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008.

Today, even if the home buyers are in a bad situation once again, the center of the crisis is located in the so-called non-financial firms. Money has been lent to them even though they were in bad shape. These are zombie firms, zombies like in the Hollywood movies. They don’t produce enough to pay the interest on their debts. Therefore, they have no other choice but to become predators eating the flesh of others.

The loans are aggregated in the form of securities and resold on the markets under the name of Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs). It is again a form of securitization backed, not by real estate debt like the subprimes, but by debts of middle-sized and large businesses pooled together and passed on in various tranches to different classes of investors. The wormy apples are therefore doomed to rot all the other apples in the barrel, just as with the subprimes. The global risk, in the coming years, is estimated at an amount of at least 10 trillion dollars. Not to mention the student debt, of which 20% is already actually or potentially in default, nor the debt of car purchasers, whose loan repay periods are longer than the average life expectancy of their vehicles. These two debts alone represent more than 3 trillion dollars.

The world’s global debt has now reached more than 250 trillion dollars, while the debt on derivative products, which are bets on future prices of all sorts of commodities and paper securities, is estimated to be at 1.5 quadrillion dollars. It is obvious that such a debt pyramid, mostly amounting to financial gambling debts, cannot and will never be reimbursed. Until now, the financial casino has not been closed down, because all the gamblers have been provided with fake money at zero or almost zero percent interest rates! But this easy money cannot continue to flow forever and will stop indeed very soon. Because if interest rates continue to increase, borrowing will become too costly, and the gamblers will be flushed away. And if interest rates remain at the present low rates, the benefits for lending will remain too low, and the lenders will evaporate. It is the whole money system that is therefore sentenced to death!

The U.S. Federal Reserve, as well as the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England have all put monetary fat into their balance sheets, to the level of imploding them, but they can’t reduce it because if they do, all the gamblers would die of monetary starvation. So, they would rather maintain the gamblers and starve the rest.

Musk and Other Malthusians

It is in this context that the gamblers are betting on NBIC: nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, IT and cognitive science investments. They are betting on their control over Big Data, which means trillions and quadrillions of megabytes of data, to control the economies and the people. They expect that robots, computers and associated artificial intelligence (AI) software will control the behavior of people through the monopolization of their data and the pirating of their brains.

Elon Musk, for example, is investing in computer interfaces which, he hopes, will change the way people think. The Silicon Valley hippies of the old days have become the auxiliaries of the present-day mind controllers. Is this thing serious? Well, obviously not if human beings think and work as human beings—if human beings are creative, which is our responsibility here. But yes, it will work, if human beings allow themselves to be controlled and stripped of their capacity to create. I must warn you that that process has started. Their plan is to replace what they call “useless social classes” by more efficient new technologies. Which means that they consider a majority of human beings as unable to perform creative tasks, or better said, they are confident they can make them unable to perform creative tasks.

In that context, the old Malthusian idea is making a great comeback in their dirty minds. To the question, “What are we going to do with the useless classes?” they answer: “First, prevent them from successfully breeding (population control); second, immerse them in an ocean of virtual experiences (if you don’t believe what I am saying, look at the majority of our kids spending more than five hours per day in front of their screens); and third, well, if the worst would come, viruses or wars might become necessary.”

If you don’t believe me, there are hundreds of serious or bizarre books available on this issue, for example the best seller in France, Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harari, like Aldous Huxley in his 1931 Brave New World, pretends to denounce what he sarcastically describes, but which in fact he takes pleasure in learning from his experimenter friends.

Behind this, we have the military complex, which is financial and not industrial, as President Eisenhower had warned against in 1961. California’s Silicon Valley—and other similar places throughout the world—are financed by the Pentagon or other military establishments to work on military applications. In the U.S., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is at the forefront of this, along with other agencies of data control such as Palantir Technologies, founded by the CIA in 2003. This is where the British project to control the applications of science is at its top. The data is shared among the Five Eyes (United Kingdom, U.S.A., Canada, New Zealand and Australia). France now plays a role of junior associated member through its knowledge of how to control the information going through submarine cables between France and the African countries.

Trump or Thermonuclear War

A cyber war is already ongoing, which can degenerate at any time, mainly between the Five Eyes on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other. There is a connecting point between the financial flows, which circulate at the speed of light through the cyber world, the cyber war, and the open war itself. It is the reason why the present situation is so dangerous: The British Empire in its Anglo-American form (British brains and American muscle) is fully aware of its own weaknesses in the world to come, and is playing its last card in this domain. It is acting like a wounded tiger, a situation in which the tiger becomes a man-hunter. It means control of communications and weapons on Earth and military control of outer space.

Donald Trump, whatever his flaws, does not come from that underworld of educated criminals. As a good business person, he wants to reach peace in the world to make good deals. He is not ideologically flawed like the Wall Street/City of London politicians. He utterly dislikes the war-mongers of the CIA and the FBI. That’s why the Anglo-American oligarchy wants to get rid of him and his close friends. Either by a direct, political or physical elimination, or from inside, by profiling and surrounding him with “expert counselors” from their world.

Until now Trump, in his own way, is doing pretty well. He is getting rid of the Russiagate hoax, he has created a spirit of peace with Kim Jong-un in Singapore and, now, the American negotiating team in China is trying to complete a trade agreement between the two countries. Trump said he might be flexible on the March 1 deadline set for increasing tariffs on Chinese imports, if no deal has been reached. Thanks in part to your efforts, and in particular to Barbara Boyd’s reports on the legal assassin Robert Mueller, the American population smells that the operation to tumble Trump out of the White House comes from no-good people and, beyond that, is targeting the American presidency as a power.

Let’s nonetheless consider all the sources of immediate danger. In the minds of some, the so-called trade war against China is aimed at becoming a technological cold war, preventing China from accomplishing its “Made in China 2025” high technology objectives. Moreover, U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo in Poland raved against Russia’s “grand master plan for dominating Europe and reasserting its influence on the world stage.” Before, at the NATO defense minister’s conference in Brussels and in Warsaw, he raved against Huawei and against the threat posed by Russia and China. Not exactly in conformity with Trump’s call for peace through common development. The Chinese reacted by stating:

The U.S. is lobbying all other NATO countries to boycott Huawei equipment with the obvious intention of making its allies participate in a crackdown on Chinese high-tech companies. . . . If U.S. allies stop using Huawei equipment, no longer purchase energy from Russia, and further alienate China and Russia at the demand of Washington while increasing imports from the U.S. and following the U.S. lead in everything, then NATO will start to resemble the old Warsaw Pact.

This was published in Global Times precisely while Pompeo was in Warsaw. Chinese irony!

Lowering the Barriers to War

Even worse is the dismantling of all the international arrangements made during the Cold War to prevent an open military conflict. The United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and has now deployed anti-missile weapons around the Russian borders in Europe, despite the fact that Russia had been promised at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall that NATO forces would only go into the former East Germany and no farther.

It has been acknowledged in the meantime that such defensive anti-ballistic missiles can eventually, with the recent technological progress, be transformed into offensive ballistic weapons. On October 20, 2018, Trump announced that the U.S. would leave the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty within six months if Russia did not destroy its 9M729 missiles and associated systems. In the meantime, the U.S. itself is producing low-yield nuclear warheads, like the W76-2 for the U.S. Navy’s Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile.

As Boston-based journalist James Carroll wrote, “it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used [in a classical war theater]. This is the weapon that can make the previously ‘unthinkable’ thinkable.”

As for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), negotiated between the U.S. and Russia in 1991, there are no real signs of new negotiations for its third version, or New START. Adding to that is the intended militarization of outer space, in contradiction to the spirit of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, in which conditions are coming into being for an extremely dangerous situation, even more dangerous than under the MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, doctrine operational during the Cold War. The best experts consider that the world military situation is potentially even more dangerous today than during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Now, in the present situation, the Western powers have dropped the international rule of non-intervention into the domestic affairs of other countries. The case of Venezuela is very dangerous, with Mexican president López Obrador having to remind everyone of the “principles of non-intervention, self-determination and peaceful resolution of conflicts.” The U.S. Special Envoy to Venezuela is neo-con and convicted felon Elliot Abrams, one of the historical enemies of Lyndon LaRouche.

In the case of Iran, with the reign of U.S. extra-territoriality, which de facto prevents any country from trading with another if the United States forbids it, the Iranian economy is strangled, in a recession with a minus 4% rate of growth. The skilled young population entering the labor market cannot find jobs. Two points are worth considering here. First, Iran has never violated the nuclear treaty that it signed in 2015 and is only being blamed for producing missiles that no treaty prevents it from building. Second, Iran’s public debt is about 40% of its Gross National product, while France’s debt is approaching 100% and the American is above that! Talk about financial virtue!

And as far as virtue is concerned, French President Emmanuel Macron, who goes around lecturing everybody, has not only promoted military interventions in Syria and Libya, but is now interfering in the internal affairs of Venezuela.

Human Trafficking Is ‘Good for GNP’

The European Union is in shambles, in total disunity, with no political vision, no sense of the future and no respect for national sovereignties. President Macron speaks of “European sovereignty,” which is a total illusion, because there is no such thing as a “European people,” as well as a chimera, since the Europeanist leaders themselves do not hide from the people that, for their good, they have to build Europe against them.

A revealing aspect of the state of things in the EU is that its official statistics office, Eurostat, has ordered all state members to include in their respective Gross National Product calculations, all possible trades, including drug trades, trading in human beings and weapons trades. A demand morally and economically insane, criminal, but “logical” in a monetarist economy, which pumps up the Gross National Product by adding all the money values, independently of their effect on the physical economy!

China, United States and the Financial Occupation

Let’s look now at the Chinese. Their representatives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland were pretty blunt. I have gathered a few quotes to give you the sense of what is really going on. So, let’s listen to those Chinese:

The recipe of Chinese policies is productivity, family values, savings orientation and control of the financial system. . . . The real question is not the level of debts, but how the credit is used and where it goes. . . . China is ready to open up to the world, to open up is good for China, China is ready to play in the global economy, but the real question is: Is the world ready? . . . China will be the main source of added wealth for the world during many years; therefore to launch trade wars against China may not be a very good idea. . . . The real debt problem is the American debt; the problem for the U.S. is to sell its debt to the rest of the world.

The truth is expressed in just a few words. So, does this mean that the Chinese with their One Belt, One Road Initiative will be the solution to all our problems? Should Trump or Italy farà da sé, that is, do it by themselves? They are two major opportunities, but of course, not the solution in itself. We have a great task before us, the most interesting task: With all those best possible allies, and considering that the key to the world’s direction lies presently here, in the United States, our task is to be the Aufklärer, the pathfinders for the coming LaRouche world.

The first thing to remind Americans of, is that the U.S. economic system is a credit system based on the Constitutional authority of the government to issue and control its own money. As George Boris, one of the advisers of both Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France once said, “If the state does not control its money, it is the money that controls the state.” Under the Constitution, the Congress of the United States utters currency as credit against the United States itself, betting not on the markets but on the future of the nation and its people.

The main function of this credit should be to supply capital funds for long-term capital investments, in the public sector and spilling over into the private sector. To free us from the shackles of the British financial casino, we should separate banking activities (Glass-Steagall), protecting commercial banking and banning financial speculation from state protection, as we put the existing system through a controlled bankruptcy reorganization. This is what Lyndon LaRouche repeated so many times, and what reality can become now in the coming financial tempest.

Internationally, this means a cooperative set of treaty agreements of between 25- and 50-years’ duration, as the Chinese government is doing with partner states to build the New Silk Roads. This is the way President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to organize the world after World War II, a project sabotaged by his successor in office, Harry Truman, and the British. In the meantime, Winston Churchill was delivering speeches in Europe and his famous Westminster College speech [in Fulton, Missouri], in which he openly described how British-led policies, and forces, would put Europe under control. Our LaRouche moment is to overcome this process of self-destruction and free ourselves from the financial occupation.

A Profound Change in the People

I have no time to stress how we should also free ourselves from the cultural occupation which is the other leg alongside the financial one. I will always remember the day in my life when I heard Lyn describing this as a “double-pronged process”: the financial looting and the counter-cultural destruction of the creative powers of human beings, through the sex-rock-drug counter-culture, which today has become incommensurably worse and even more addictive than in those times.

Remember that Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Homo Deus which I quoted before, said that the aim is to immerge the useless classes in an ocean of virtual experiences. In Japan, and spreading to other countries, we have the hikikomori, young males who are unable to leave their homes, imprisoned in their computer-based virtual universe. Today, the financial and cultural occupations are based on the cult of entropy, the world doomed to destruction by today’s “catastrophists,” the last straw of the Green New Deal.

Bruce Director showed—I mention him but I could have mentioned all the others who contributed to the presentation of Lyn’s conceptions in a recent six-class series—Bruce Director showed, how creative discoveries, which are the basis for the economy, are anti-entropic by nature and tuned towards the advantage of the other, the passion for creation—the agapic commitment to increase the creative powers of the other, a power behind which, as Max Planck, the German friend of Albert Einstein, once said, “. . .there is a conscious, intelligent Mind or Spirit.”

Our choruses here are the opposite of a world doomed to destruction. They are an immersion in the agapic experience of beauty, the discovery of our voice, the voice of the others, and the polyphony, which composes a thing of beauty which is a joy forever, our diverse contributions generating a beautiful unity above each of them.

Our challenge is to create the same “unity above diversities” in our political action. I am convinced that the United States, beyond what I see and read on Facebook or Twitter accounts, is a land of opportunity for such a breakthrough. I have read from some of you that in Texas and Florida you have met a process of change in the population of a far more fundamental depth that even what occurred during the now remote LaRouche SDI moment.

. . . So They Can Build a World Land-Bridge

Now let me say a word about our French Yellow Vests. What is happening is definitely related to the disappointment with Macron, but it involves much, much deeper issues. First, as in Great Britain or here in the United States, the conscience of the Yellow Vests is one of people who have been abandoned by the elites, people against whom the elites have seceded. Second, is the drop in purchasing power of these people of working-class backgrounds who have been forced to accept service jobs, often very far from their homes. The “ecologist” taxes, added to the price of gasoline and diesel, have produced the shock of the proverbial final straw on the camel’s back.

Third, they are legitimately convinced that they are the castoffs of financial globalization, losing access to public services and good schools for their children, two social benefits which have been the spine of the French state since the adoption, at the end of World War II, of the program of the Council of the Resistance Against Nazism and the financial feudalities who allied with Nazism. This so-called peripheral and forgotten France has suddenly occupied the traffic circles to show that it exists and demands justice. It has generated a surge of Rabelaisian French—crude and dense, even if imperfect—against the frozen words of the court and the administration.

It is a ground-swell wave throughout France and also in Europe. It is what Rosa Luxemburg in her time called a “mass strike ferment,” and I stress the word “ferment,” until now with no real national leaders, but an agglomeration of local and regional organizers. They are now conscious, and they are starting to engage themselves in a process of economic, social, and for some of them, also cultural education. We are involving some of them in the basics of physical economics education. Recently, one Yellow Vest from Southern France, close to us, wrote a petition for a Citizens Initiative Referendum, in French called RIC, calling for a National Bank and for the French state to recover the sovereign power to utter credit.

The interesting point is that they demand to have time for reflection and for making their own decisions, and reject the rotten political parties. All kinds of operations and provocations have been launched against them, but we hope that their commitment to justice and a better future will lead them to change the politics of our country. Our main task is to help to give them a better sense of who the enemy is and how to fight it. They are definitely one part of the coming world of Lyndon LaRouche, provided that we keep up the good work and uplift the ferment.

The Chinese sign that means danger at a point of juncture, is very proper to our times, because it is also a juncture at which things can change, in a world where people fight to build roads and bridges, not just houses, where they can build a world land-bridge to bring a change to civilization, transforming danger into opportunity.

Take Responsibility for the Creation

It is in Lyndon LaRouche’s words that we find the best guidance above and beyond, in these times of trouble. So, let’s be with him. The following remarks are from a webcast address that he gave on Aug. 1, 2009. Let’s listen to his wise and passionate words. I picked up LaRouche’s last answer, to a question from a 21-year-old single mother from Argentina:

My question to you is this: What do we do, to transmit to the majority of the world’s youth, who only live in the present—and do so very badly—the idea that they would have a concrete, real and effective future, based only on cultivating the creative abilities of their minds?

LaRouche responded:

Let’s take the space program. We need to get at the heart of these matters, in an exemplary way, and an exemplary way should also be a highly practicable way. I think the objective—see, it involves a concept, of a change in the image of what man is. When you go to constant acceleration, as a required modality, in flight of a human being from one planet to another, you’re operating in a completely new kind of domain, the domain of the relativistic relations, relativistic transport. And this is a great challenge: Because you have to think about when you’re getting out of a 1-gravity situation on Earth, into this kind of artificial gravity, you are in a relativistic environment. Your definition, your terms of thinking about the same old things you knew before, are now presented in a new way.

The human race, eventually, has to live in the universe; we have to live in the Solar system; we have to live in the galaxy, in the longer term. We have to face the challenge that that represents. See, you think like an immortal person: that is, to think in such terms that you are thinking about mankind in the distant future, and you’re thinking about your place in relationship to mankind, in the distant future, and even distant planets. Because you’re looking for something in yourself, which has permanent value. We’re all mortal. We’re born and we die. But we’re not animals.

We’re creatively thinking creatures. And the meaning of our life does not lie in our biological existence as such. It lies in the meaning for humanity, before us and after us, in what our lives have contributed to the existence of humanity as a whole. And therefore, the best way, the practical way, is always to look ahead, to look as far ahead as you can look, into the future, and see what it is you must do for the future, so that our hand is at the tiller, long after you’re dead, in that way.

And obviously, if you’re going to chart a course, you have to chart a good choice of course. So, pick one! Pick a destiny! Pick a destiny, two generations, three generations, four generations beyond your life today! Try to reach that far. Try to make something that you do, something that contributes to the future of humanity! Find your identity in the future of humanity, after death; commit the kind of acts and kind of development that mean that. And act accordingly: because that is the secret of true happiness. That is the “pursuit of happiness,” as understood by Leibniz, as recorded in his second reply to Locke, which became the cornerstone of our Constitution, through, first, the Declaration of Independence, where it is the meaning of our existence as a nation, and was reflected again, in the Preamble of the Constitution, in its own way.

We have to be immortal. We have to be immortal, by assuming immortal responsibility. Reach beyond our own life, to what we can do now, which will touch in a beneficial way, generations of people after we’re dead. In that way, you know, you’re immortal. If you think like that, you know you are immortal. If you can act like that, you do even better.

There isn’t anything else to add; our mission is to act, taking full responsibility for the Creation.