This editorial appears in the July 17, 2020 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this editorial]
EDITORIAL
Smash the Coup Against Trump!
Save the Presidency and the Nation!
The following was originally published as an editorial for LaRouche PAC.
July 4—Over the next four months, there will be a turning-point in our history as profound as the Revolutionary War and adoption of the Constitution, or the Civil War. Now the knowledge and the character of this generation of Americans will once more be tested in the fire, as we were then. Will we pass that test? At stake is the future of the American experiment in freedom, one of the greatest achievements of 3,000 years of European civilization. Will it continue,— or come to an end? Today once more, we are face to face with the question posed by President Lincoln at Gettysburg 157 years ago.
Will we permit the takeover of our Presidency by an “elite” that spits on our Constitution, our laws, and all of our proudest traditions? One that giggles with hatred and ridicule at our middle and working classes (regardless of race), and especially at our industrial workers and farmers? Or rather, which hates those who once were farmers and industrial workers, before they were deprived of their livelihoods by that same, so-called “elite,” using the code-words of “globalization” and “free trade”?
Indeed, that “elite” must truly love the poor—as they claim to—for they have created so many more of them! By deliberately shipping our manufacturing jobs to “runaway shops” overseas, by holding agricultural prices far below the cost of production—and by much other evil-doing—they have deindustrialized our country, destroyed our economy, and caused 150,000 “deaths of despair” per year by 2017.
If these privileged criminals succeed in toppling President Donald Trump by whatever means, don’t delude yourself that we will be ruled by a cabal akin to the Hillary Clinton of 2016—as bad as she was. No. The evil billionaires of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, themselves mere puppets of the international-financier class centered in London, have further hardened their hearts over the last four years. They are far worse now than they were then.
Look behind the irrational hatred for President Trump, which pours from their controlled media. For no other reason than to get rid of this President, they have knowingly taken actions that risk a downward spiral into war—even possibly nuclear war. And now, since Memorial Day, they have sent their own children, with other young dupes, into the streets to riot, to assault innocent strangers, and to loot businesses—at the risk of their own injury or even death. Over the same period, there has been much ill-informed discussion of American slavery. But ask yourself this: how is the morality of this depraved “elite” and their masters, in any way superior to that of the slaveholders of the old Confederacy?
Can a stupid and corrupt minority continue to lord it over the majority of our citizens who have been in revolt against them, a revolt which will be lost if a significant group in that majority does not now arm itself with actual knowledge of our history and the necessary principles of science and economy by which the nation can once again prosper? That that minority boasts so many academic degrees, largely in so-called social “sciences,” only attests to the over-ripe rottenness of our educational system and their actual vulnerability, if those who love this country now arm themselves with the ideas necessary to lead.
The Promise of Donald Trump
President Trump was elected because he was not one of them. That is his original sin. He placed the interests of the “forgotten man and woman” above their system and the interests they represent—for the first time since John F. Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt before him. Every attempt he has made to make good on his pledge to the disenfranchised has met with sabotage from the Washington civilian and military bureaucracy, and the leadership of both political parties.
But yet he has fought on, to keep his promises to remove U.S. troops from “forever wars,” to bring manufacturing back to the United States, and to foster good relations with Russia, China, and all nations. He has resumed U.S. manned spaceflight for the first time since 2011, from American soil, on American rockets. From there, he aims to return us to the Moon within four years, as a way-station to Mars.
Now at this moment, the COVID-19 pandemic, a dire tragedy for the human race, has paradoxically created the unique circumstance which could permit President Trump to fulfill his economic promises—but only if an aroused and intelligent population rallies behind the necessary economic leap which must now take place. This election can be won and the coup defeated, but if and only if, we achieve the needed breakthrough in economic policy during the next four months. The circumstances of the pandemic have awakened a certain moral consciousness across much of the world, which tells us that when we rebuild our economies afterwards, we cannot simply recreate the economies we had before, with their inequities and cruelty, but rather that we must create something far better.
That is what Russia’s President Vladimir Putin meant when he said in his June 23 Address to the Nation, “During this time, we reconsidered many things.” More explicitly, reflecting a common sentiment, American economist James Galbraith recently wrote: “Life will not be what it was before. A vast reorganization of economy and society will be needed when it’s over.” Hundreds of others have said as much, but the sensitive reader was probably already aware of the phenomenon.
President Putin has called for a summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France—to discuss coordinated measures to defeat the epidemic and to discuss propelling the world’s economies out of their present collapsed positions.
What is wanted and needed now is a Twenty-First Century version of Franklin Roosevelt’s recovery program, begun in 1933, from the last Great Depression. (Although this one will be shaped in part by the yet-unknown future course of the pandemic.) This is exactly what the late Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019) spent a long lifetime developing. LaRouche was simultaneously a scientist who revolutionized economics, and a relentless and resourceful fighter who refused ever to accept defeat in any just cause. For this he was framed up and imprisoned for five years,1989-94, by President George H.W. Bush, at British instigation, using the same Robert Mueller who later played Grand Inquisitor against Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019.
LaRouche wrote many articles and books defining the principles and guidelines for such a recovery and reindustrialization program, many of which are freely available. Videos of his speeches are featured weekly on the larouchepac.com website. Because they reason from principle rather than providing recipes, all of them are still acutely relevant today. But he summarized them on June 8, 2014 in his “Four New Laws To Save the U.S.A. Now! Not an Option: An Immediate Necessity.”
While you should read that short document in its entirety now, the Four Laws, the principles upon which this nation can emerge and thrive, can be summarized as:
1. A return to Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall law to separate investment (speculative) banking from commercial banking, so that commercial banks are again able to provide adequate credit for useful activities, while the taxpayers are no longer compelled to bail banks out of their speculative losses, as in 2008 and still today.
2. Hamiltonian national banking, in which low-interest Federal credit is made available for productive and other useful purposes such as infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture and science—as under the Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt administrations.
3. The use of a Federal Credit-system is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the intention to increase the physical-economic productivity and standard of living of the persons and households of the United States.
4. Science-driver crash programs to develop controlled fusion power, and for deep-space exploration and colonization. (The space program is not explicitly mentioned in the document, but LaRouche said later that it is implicit there—as a reading of the whole document will confirm.)
In today’s circumstances, we must also act immediately to return manufacturing to the United States from runaway shops overseas, whether through treaties, tariffs, local-content provisions, incentives, or other means. Otherwise, LaRouche had long called for restoration of family farming through an end to “free trade” follies, combined with a return to parity pricing and enforcement of the anti-trust laws against the grain and meat monopolies.
Our Rendezvous with Destiny
In the midst of this great crisis and this great opportunity, on Tuesday, June 30, Britain’s Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced, in a speech titled “Build, Build, Build,” announced what he called a “New Deal” of infrastructure-building, science, education, healthcare and reindustrialization for Britain. His second-in-command, Michael Gove, made it clear that the Johnson government would model its policies on those of Franklin Roosevelt, along with current U.S. science-driver programs such as ARPA and DARPA.
All this may seem to be a great surprise coming from the party of Margaret Thatcher in the metropolis of the still-surviving British Empire, but Lyndon LaRouche had understood that the unexpected British “Brexit” vote in 2016 to quit the European Union, which produced the Johnson government, was of a piece with the unexpected election victory of Donald Trump later that year. While we can’t predict what will happen in Britain, we can say with certainty that the Johnson government’s express commitment to FDR’s American system, can immediately be used to inspire the American people and President Trump to do what must be done immediately here, provided we fight for exactly that.
Neither the Johnson proposal nor our proposal will gain the necessary speed or durability now, following the shutdown of the world’s economies, unless there is an agreement on fixed exchange rates, ensuring long-term investment in high-intensity capital goods and productive jobs at decent wages throughout the world’s economies. LaRouche called for a New Bretton Woods, initiated by Russia, China, India, and the United States, the four nations with the combined economic strength to strip the City of London and Wall Street of their most potent weapon, manipulation of currencies and terms of trade for short-term financial advantage. Johnson’s proposal means that the P5 summit proposed by President Putin could start us down the road to LaRouche’s Bretton Woods. That summit should occur immediately, and certainly by no later than September.
All of the above expresses the lifelong commitment of Lyndon LaRouche, and the commitment of this publication since its founding. Join with us now to ensure that it happens. We must fight to win this now—not in four months!
Whatever the outcome of this struggle to save the Trump Presidency and the nation, it will have titanic consequences. What Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936 could truly be said to today’s Americans: “To some generations, much is given. Of other generations, much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”