The Change of 1945
[PDF version of this editorial]
It is widely acknowledged today that you can't solve a problem, such as the deepening breakdown crisis of the world economy, without knowing what its causes were. In that light, there is little surprise that so few people know how to approach getting the world out of the current disaster.
For, as Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly said, the current breakdown crisis did not begin in 2007, nor in 2001, nor even in 1971, when the Nixon Administration took the suicidal step of taking the U.S. dollar off gold, and moving us into the casino economy. The economic/financial disaster we face began in 1945—specifically, on the day after Franklin Roosevelt died.
What happened on that day? The United States, and the world, lost the leader who had vowed to bury the British Empire, and who had built up the United States to the point where it was well-capable of doing so. FDR had developed plans for a new world credit system, and for global cooperation for bringing the entire world out of its misery through economic development, and he had shown that the U.S. had the will and the means to resist British opposition.
With FDR gone, the British immediately began to take over. Using their little stooge Harry Truman, they started to roll back, subvert, and reverse course. FDR's Bretton Woods plan, for example, was changed, and turned into a compromise with the Keynesian scheme for monetary dictatorship (including protection for the Nazi-supporting Bank for International Settlements). Plans for conversion of winding-down military industries, into suppliers of machine tools and other desperately needed technology for the developing sector, were scrapped—leading to one of the largest collapses in employment in U.S. history. On the international front, the U.S. reneged on its promises of liberation to the former colonies of the Netherlands, Britain, and France—with devastating consequences.
But, don't confuse the particulars for the fundamental change. By shifting to the British approach to economy and government, what Truman, and nearly all U.S. Presidents who followed him, were doing, was to destroy and dismantle the very productive machine which was required to put the world economy on the road to ever-progressing recovery. While the consequences of FDR's investments showed their effects over a few decades, and the Kennedy Administration, for one, took them a bit further with the Great Project of the space program, the engine behind the American System of progress had been removed. Collapse was inexorable, as long as the U.S. and the world stayed on that path.
But, contrary to the genocidal anti-population doomsayers, we do not have to stay on that path! We can return to the policy perspectives of FDR, immediately, and throw every "innovation" in finance and economy out the window, with nothing but great benefit for the global economy. In fact, we must take that action now, before the rot that has been eating at our economy destroys the basis for survival, for decades or centuries to come.
This is not a matter of technical adjustment, as will be clear to you if you simply listen to FDR's own discussions of banking and economy. We are talking about a change in morality, a change which will shift our own sense of identity as a nation back to that of pioneers in scientific and technological progress, human improvement, and a better future for all mankind. That would be a reversal of the change of 1945—and it's on the agenda now.
