PRESS RELEASE
EIR Issues Special Report:
The 'New Economy' Is Doomed
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 16, 2000 (EIRNS)--Executive Intelligence Review magazine today announced the publication of an new Special Report, The 'New Economy' Is Doomed: The Fraud of the Information Society.
The release of the new EIR report coincides with the pronouncement June 13 by Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan that "information technologies" are irreversibly increasing the productivity of the "old economy"--even though no significant productivity increase is shown by any statistics. The paradigm shift, Greenspan insists, is here to stay, and the only direction is up, up, up--exactly the hallucination embraced by President Clinton at the White House "new economy" summit April 5, and thereafter.
This deluded vision is refuted in detail by the EIR report, whose conclusion was echoed in part by the June 5 warning from the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements, the central banks' central bank, that the hyperinflating U.S. markets constitute a hot-air bubble that is "unsustainable"--in other words, about to burst. And that "a soft landing is by no means assured"--in other words, there is going to be a crash.
What The Report Says
The EIR report examines the profound, society-destroying shift to a post-industrial economy which took hold particularly with the 1971 destruction of the Bretton Woods system. The so-called "new economy" is precisely that: the post-industrial world in which less and less real wealth is produced, and the Never-Never-Land of cyberspace, the domain of the "information technologies" which are the Information Society, is hailed as the new source of wealth and the new locus of reality.
"If we have moved on to producing information instead of goods and services," the report asks, "what are we supposed to do about the billions of people who are starving, the increased rate of death by infectious disease around the world, the collapse of our transport, power, and water infrastructure, and other clear signs that the physical production of our society is inadequate to sustain the current generation, much less that of the future?"
The report divides into two parts, one analyzing that Information Economy and showing its hallmark to be the collapse of production; and the second dissecting the cult of "Artificial Intelligence," the cyber-pathology which holds up computers as superior to people; the pathology which underlies the Information Society.
In the first article featured in the report, "The Information Society: A Doomed Empire of Evil," economist and Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche writes that the Information Society is anti-human, a product of oligarchism, and belief in it is nothing but a cult-manipulation, from which mankind must free itself very soon.
The report offers the alternative to this cult that is wrecking humanity's ability to produce for itself, and reproduce itself. As indicated by LaRouche, that alternative lies in American System economics, deriving from the school of physical economy established by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and realized in its most successful form to date by the American Founding Fathers and their successors, like Abraham Lincoln. The American System is based on a conception of the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge (not "information") which sees the human mind as created in the image of God, and as the source of creative ideas upon which the development of human society depends.
In addition, an Appendix offers a reprint of "Systems Analysis as White-collar Genocide," an important 1982 piece by LaRouche which first appeared in Fusion magazine.
The 179-page report, selling for $100, represents ground-breaking work from researchers and theoreticians on two continents. Its Table of Contents gives a sense of the report's depth and scope.
Part 1, on the Information Economy, features:
- The Information Society: A Doomed Empire of Evil
- The Emperor's New Clothes, American-Style: Nine Years of the U.S. Economic Boom
- What Is the Measure of Productivity?
- The Collapse of the Machine-Tool Design Principle
- The Rise and Fall of the Post-Industrial Society
Part 2, on Artificial Intelligence, features:
- John von Neumann's 'Artificial Intelligence'--'Pattern Card' of the 20th Century?
- Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics and Social Control in Cyberspace
- The Cult of Artificial Intelligence vs. the Creativity of the Human Mind
The report can be ordered by calling 1-571-293-0935; or writing to EIR, P.O. Box 17390, Washington, D.C. 20041-0390; or send e-mail message to fulfillment@larouchepub.com.
