This article appears in the November 29, 2019 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
WHERE IS AMERICA HEADED?
The LaRouche Solution
As the Way Out of Chaos
[Print version of this article]
Mr. Schlanger, a former spokesman for Lyndon LaRouche, is currently a Schiller Institute Board Member. We present here his edited remarks as prepared for presentation on Nov. 17, 2019 at the Schiller Institute Conference, “The Future of Humanity as a Creative Species in the Universe,” in Bad Soden, Germany. Subheads and links have been added.
To address the question, “Where is America Headed?” a good place to begin is to look at what Roger Stone said in commenting on the death of Lyndon LaRouche. Stone was a long-time friend of President Donald Trump, and was just convicted as the last of the defendants in the fraudulent Russiagate prosecutions of legal hitman Robert Mueller. He was targeted largely due to his role as the key strategist for the Trump campaign.
Stone first encountered LaRouche in New Hampshire in 1980, when he was the coordinator in New England for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. Asked about his relationship to LaRouche, Stone said he was “very familiar with the extraordinary and prophetic thinking” of LaRouche, adding that LaRouche’s ideas had an “important backstage role” in electing Donald Trump.
Many who have followed LaRouche over the years have expressed surprise that he and his movement have defended Trump since his election, against the regime-change coup run by British intelligence in league with Obama’s intel team, to remove him. Trump’s public persona, as portrayed by hostile media, as a crude, ignorant, ego-driven bully, seems light years away from that of the thought-provoking, philosophical approach of LaRouche. Yet, it should be noted that the ongoing attempted coup is being run by the same network, and some of the same people, such as Robert Mueller, who ran the railroad which put Lyndon LaRouche in prison in 1989.
In talking about Trump’s victory in a February 2017 interview by Joseph Ford Cotto for the San Francisco Review of Books, LaRouche identified the reason for his support. Speaking of Trump’s campaign promise to return to the American System of economics, LaRouche said:
What Trump has done by his success here, is to build up the possibility of a revival of the U.S. economy. . . . The vote for Trump in the U.S. is one of the many expressions of populations being fed up with being victims of the system of globalization, which has made the poor poorer, and destroyed the middle class. Trump gave expression to that sentiment.
For the U.S. to survive the turbulent period ahead, in which populations around the world are rising up, and traditional political parties are disintegrating—as here in Germany—in the face of the implosion of the neo-liberal economic and financial system, it is urgent that Trump return to that promise to revive the American System and implement it as the policy of his administration. Which means that the real history of the uniqueness that has defined America in its best moments—which is most clearly reflected in the life’s work of one of its greatest thinkers, Lyndon LaRouche—must become known to a growing number of its citizens.
And that is the long history of the battle between a classical, republican, humanist conception of man, against an imperial, oligarchic view.
LaRouche’s Success as an Economic Forecaster
LaRouche often remarked that his unrivalled record as a forecaster stemmed from his rejection of the axioms of neoliberalism, and his refusal to accept the tyranny of “popular opinion.”
Let me interject here a brief note about his unparalleled ability to forecast. On the eve of the 2000 election, between the Green lunatic Al Gore and the future war criminal George W. Bush, Lyn was asked at a youth cadre school what he thought would be the result of the following Tuesday’s election. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said, “We won’t know right away; in fact, we might not have the result for weeks, or months.” That was it. The room reacted with stunned silence. Later, after he was done, I was asked, as his spokesman, what he meant. After stumbling around for an answer, I was forced to admit, “I have no idea.” Remarkably, it turned out he was right!
In his economic forecasting, he always worked from the top down. He always said that you must forget statistics, systems analysis, and the algorithms of the Quants. You must begin by recognizing neoliberalism as a disease, not an economic theory, which has its modern origins in imperial Venice.
The Bedrock of National Economic Sovereignty
While continuing the overall outlook of the bestial Roman Empire, the Venetians were confronted by a new enemy with the emergence of the modern nation state, a product of the Golden Renaissance, a movement which united the scientific-philosophical conception of man developed by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, with the scientific-artistic brilliance of Leonardo da Vinci. The political form of the nation state which emerged from this unity, LaRouche said, is the idea that government—
must be morally accountable to be the instrument of promoting the General Welfare of all the people and their posterity, their cultural development, their welfare, the improvement of the land.
This concept, which became the bedrock of the idea of national economic sovereignty, provided the basis for the advances in statecraft associated with King Louis XI of France in the middle of the 15th century, and Henry VII of England, at the end of that century. It was this tradition, three centuries later, which informed the Founding Fathers of the U.S., and is embedded in its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The Venetians immediately recognized the threat these developing sovereign nations posed to their imperial system, which was based on slave labor and free trade. As it became impossible to run a global empire from Venice, the Venetian system moved north, and was revived as Anglo-Dutch liberalism, consolidated by its takeover of England in 1688. The British East India Company, after 1763, became the economic base of this empire, which was soon consolidated as a global empire.
John Locke No Mentor of U.S.
Founding Fathers
One of the chief spokesmen for this empire was John Locke, who is often falsely identified as the leading philosophical influence on America’s Founding Fathers. Shamefully, this is now taught as gospel in American universities, and accepted by most economists and political scientists.
In fact, Locke was a leading apologist for the Empire. He was an investor in the Royal Africa Company, which was at the center of the slave trade. His 1669 tract, Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, written while serving as secretary to the arch-imperialist Earl of Shaftesbury, is a defense of government by feudal aristocracy. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 which, in its official history, states it was “founded as a private bank to act as banker to the Government.” In 1696 Locke was appointed by the King to the Board of Trade, the original enforcer of British free trade dogma, epitomized today by the enforcement arms of private financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and the World Trade Organization.
In reviewing this history in a webcast on October 12, 2005, titled “Truth in Forecasting: Create an Economic Recovery in America,” LaRouche exposed the difference between the Lockean system—which is the British system still today—and the American system. The control of money by private interests, and the subordination of physical economy to Monetary Interests, is the key distinction.
The British System, Left and Right
Under the British System, value is measured arbitrarily in monetary terms, which are subject to manipulation, as we see in the post-1971 end of the Bretton Woods System, to the run-up to the 2008 Crash. And we see manipulation again today, when unsustainable debt is protected at face value on the books of banks and other financial institutions, protected by unlimited monetary creation through such fraudulent bailout practices as “quantitative easing,” negative interest rates, and overnight funds injected into so-called repo markets. In that 2005 webcast, LaRouche said that in contrast:
[In a republic,] the performance of money will be measured by physical economy. . . . How do we run the money system . . . to promote trade and investment, to increase productivity, so as to increase the opportunity for development?
He came back to this theme in a speech in Berlin on March 2, 2006, “The Urgency of the American System Today.” There he said that governments based on monetary systems, as in the U.S. at present, and Europe under the European Union, whether supposedly leftist “Keynesian” or neoliberal “Friedmanite,” are those in which—
the government is a subordinate of a central bank. The central bank is largely a creature controlled by private financial interests . . . unless the government is very powerful and has a lot of support, they control the government.
He added that the British Empire system today combines this private control over monetary policy with so-called “globalization,” which dominates the policies of governments in the trans-Atlantic region.
That means, that we’re going to have to go to a Eurasian orientation for Europe, in terms of economy. We must not have globalization. Globalization is death. It’s a form of imperialism, under which no one has any sovereignty over anything; and groups of bankers, like the Lazard Group in France, run the world—and eat the world, and eat the people in it. So therefore, it has to be sovereign nation-states.
Let those words sink in for a moment—“It has to be sovereign nation-states.” Only in a nation whose real history has been deliberately distorted and lied about, to the point that its leading politicians would embrace John Locke as the mentor to our Founding Fathers, could the idea of national economic sovereignty be denounced as a “racist” doctrine. Yet that is precisely what those attacking President Trump charge, on the rare occasions when they actually try to engage in debate.
In their imbecilic rants against Trump, what they are really attacking, is the concept of America which has been championed by LaRouche, who said in his October 2005 webcast:
The United States is the only nation, the only national system, which, with the American System of political economy, has ever successfully challenged the British System.
The future of the United States depends on understanding, on the most profound level, what those words mean, so we may choose the LaRouchian solution today, to win the battle against the British Empire, run by its private financial controllers in the City of London and Wall Street. That President Trump has recently described these forces in the terms used by President Eisenhower, as the “Military-Industrial Complex,” in speaking of why he made the decision to break with the last two decades’ policy of U.S. involvement in “unending wars,” is a step in that direction, but does not go far enough.
LaRouche’s Four-Power Solution
The President should ponder, along with you, the implications of the following statement by LaRouche, from a webcast on November 11, 2009, given after it had become clear that the incoming Obama administration would continue with the same failed, and disastrous policies, of the Bush administration, which led to the Crash of 2008. I believe this clear conception for the future is what Roger Stone had in mind, when he said LaRouche provided an “important backstage role” in Trump’s election victory. Listen to Lyn from that webcast:
What I’ve been involved in, recently, has been the development of a solution. The solution, and it’s the only shot you’ve got, is a Four-Power agreement, prospectively, among the United States (with a change in the current Administration’s policy), Russia, China, India, and some smaller countries which would be willing to participate in this. This would represent governments of the world which account for about half or more of the population of the world. So that, if an initiative is made—this includes the United States, Russia, China, India, and other countries—if an alliance of these four and other countries occurs, that is sufficient power to bring down the present world system, and at the same time, institute a new one. . . .
However, if we have the guts to put the system through bankruptcy reorganization, this nation can survive. It will survive on the condition that we make an alliance to break the power of the British Empire, and the British interests internationally. That means, making a partnership with Russia, China, India, and other countries, to eliminate the present world monetary system; eliminate the present monetary system, and go to a credit system, which is the system adopted by the United States, before our Constitution was actually formed, under Alexander Hamilton, in dealing with the war debt of the United States in the early 1780s; it then became an integral part of the foundation of our Federal Constitution, at a later point. So, if we go back to our Constitutional standard of a credit system, and join with Russia, China, India, and other countries, and also get a bloc of a credit system, we have the power then, with the support of other nations who are looking for a solution, to eliminate the imperial system, the monetarist system, which runs the planet today. That’s our only chance.
If we don’t have the guts to do that, we have nobody else but ourselves to blame for not doing it. And that’s where we stand.
Today, the future of America depends on participating in that Four Power Agreement conceived by LaRouche, in cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative. It is time the United States, as a nation, returns fully to its anti-imperial roots, and goes with LaRouche’s solution.
