The State of Play Following Super Tuesday: A Briefing from Barbara Boyd to ‘Fireside Chat’
March 5, 2020 (EIRNS)—The following is taken from remarks by Barbara Boyd on the LaRouche PAC “Fireside Chat” online dialogue this evening. The full discussion, “COVID-19 and the World’s Economy: Now Is the Time for LaRouche,” included Boyd, Dennis Small, and moderator Dennis Speed, and is posted to the LaRouche PAC website.
What we just saw on Super Tuesday, the Biden miracle so-called, requires a certain degree of madness to decipher. In other words, you have to put yourself in the shoes of those who have not fled the hair-on-fire insanity of the Democratic Party and explore their thinking. Yes, there was a huge mobilization of the apparatus Bloomberg had built in the Southern states, coupled with a mobilization of the extant Clinton and Obama and Bush machinery there, to suddenly get behind Biden; and yes, the media provided the Biden miracle narrative as cover; but that was only part of the picture.
The overriding dynamic is the hatred and fear against this President, created from the coup, exacerbated at this point by the uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus. Think about how crazy they are—Chuck Schumer going to the steps of the Supreme Court and directly threatening two justices. Some think, in a delusion, that they can somehow hide Joe Biden’s dementia and get him a vice president who will reassure the public, while continuing to inflame broad sectors of the public with the notion that anything, anyone is better than Trump. Should Biden win, it will be a fascist government of national unity, in which dopey Joe plays only a minimalist ceremonial role. More likely, the continued fragmentation of the party—because the delegate counts right now are very close between the Biden establishment and the Sanders forces—will result in a brokered convention in which a new candidate emerges or, prior to that, a new candidate may actually enter the race.
What comes through most clearly, however, in the coverage and the narrative formation in the United States over the past week, is one very clear conception: And that’s that this President has been trapped by the necessity of holding together Republicans in his coalition for purposes of winning re-election, and that is a constraint upon him taking the very bold steps which will be necessary to solve this crisis, as Dennis Small just outlined to you.
This is where we come in to the picture. So far, what we have done against the coup, we have successfully educated large sections of the Trump base, independents, and people on what is nominally called the left, about the nature of the national security state, and how it arose. Again, through our direct experience of that national security state in the LaRouche case; and theTrump case, the actions against the President, are simply a magnification of scale, as to what happened in the LaRouche case.
The difference right now is that there are mass strike occurring worldwide, within populations worldwide, against the system which has existed in its present form, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. What we’re finding is that most of the people we have educated, in all of these constituencies, are absolutely ignorant about the actual Lyndon LaRouche and his economic discoveries and programs, and absolutely ignorant about the economic and scientific solutions which can get us out of this mess, solutions which are readily available, and just sitting there in front of their very eyes, if they would avail themselves. They continue to react and revolt, but lack the ability to articulate the solutions. The fake narrative being sold in the American election, particularly in the last month, is that this election is a contest between something called “socialism” and something called “capitalism.” And that fake narrative is just as bad, or worse, than the claim that the Russians hacked the DNC.
There are unique characteristics, as Dennis referenced in the beginning of this call, to the American System of political economy: It’s the real invention, improving upon the best of European philosophical parts, those provided by Gottfried Leibniz. It is completely different from British neo-liberalism, which is the actual content of Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism, as he keeps saying, or the predatory rentier-finance capitalism of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman, and most Republican Senators. And this population whom we have worked with so hard, need be educated, very, very fast, about the concrete features of the American System and the methods of thinking employed by Lyndon LaRouche. One of our leading organizers in the Midwest region, Susan Kokinda, recently pointed out to me that most people we talk to have no idea that they are living in a perverse economic system deliberately created roughly on Aug. 15, 1971, with the destruction of the Bretton Woods system, a monetary system brought into being by Franklin Roosevelt; and which allowed for what most people refer to as “Make America Great,” that period in America and the world when there was a stable international financial system which allowed for credit to be created and used for long-term development. People don’t know this who are in revolt, who are in this mass strike; they just know that somehow, they got screwed. But LaRouche understood, immediately, when the Bretton Woods system was taken down in August 1971, what the consequences of that destruction would be: He understood that if you deliberately devolve populations, you will get mass pandemics, you will situations in which the ability of the human race itself to survive, is called into question.
Now, what Dennis referenced, is I’m writing right now a series for EIR, to make this much more urgently concrete for people. Michael Bloomberg’s New York City is my laboratory for demonstrating to people what happened post-9/11 to the United States: in education, healthcare, city building and housing, the environment, and culture. Once you look at these areas—not as the single issues, which is the way they are paraded to people, “it’s a healthcare issue, it’s an economic issue, it’s an education issue”—if you look at what’s happened in each of these areas of the economy as a whole, under this oligarch who ran New York City for three terms, you begin to be able to map the actual apparatus that brought this horrible condition into being and to peg the people responsible.
Now, Mike Bloomberg is the protégé of a character named Felix Rohatyn. He, in turn, was afigure in the international grouping called the Synarchy, which actually brought about fascism in Europe, during the period prior to World War II. Rohatyn was a financier at Lazard Frères, and became the sort of proconsul of New York City, during its financial crisis in 1974-75. What happened is that Lyndon LaRouche’s movement, which was then largely centered in New York, went to war against those policies, before the financial crisis, and in its aftermath. We were first-hand observers, and documented who was doing it, and their policies.
To cite but one example in the continuity of this, under Bloomberg’s administration: 20 hospitals were closed in New York City. Dennis Small was talking about the capacity of our hospitals deal with this crisis; but under these policies we’ve been closing hospitals right and left in the United States, over this period, taking down the capacity that had been built up through World War II.
The closing of these hospitals in New York City were partly the result, as the hospital closures in the country recently have been, of Obamacare, and Barack Obama and Ezekiel Emanuel’s huge cuts in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. These reimbursements are the lifeblood of how hospitals continue to function, if they are able to serve the poor. Obamacare cut those reimbursements by billions. The hospital shutdowns was also the result of two commissions chaired by Stephen Berger; he chaired commissions under Governors Pataki and Cuomo, which recommended the dismantling of these 20 hospitals. Who is Stephen Berger? It turns out that he was the former executive of the Emergency Financial Control Board, run by Felix Rohatyn, and a veteran of Nelson Rockefeller’s Commission on Critical Choices, which LaRouche confronted in New York City back then. That was the first commission to figure out how to take down the living standards of an entire city under conditions of financial austerity which they intended to implement as a result of the destruction of the Bretton Woods system. Berger has been the activists in two key periods in taking down New York City: The first, immediately after Aug. 15, 1971, and the second, post-9/11.
The same group of people are involved in takedown of the city’s education, where Bloomberg took over the schools and instituted the drill-and-grill testing regimes of George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s version of the same program, but called, “Race to the Top.” Under that program an entire generation were denied any form of real education. I was shocked when I went back and looked at this: Instead of having any type of full curriculum emphasizing developing character and intellect, and creativity, as Lyndon LaRouche would have it, instead the children were put into a system preoccupied with only math and science and there only to pass tests to prove proficiency in those two areas; an intense program which ended with school administrator cheating their way to proficiency, amidst major scandals, and stripping an entire generation of education.
Like most things involved here, the origins of this program were in Britain, and Bloomberg actually brought in Tony Blair’s education czar, Sir Michael Barber, as an advisor.
Right now, we not only have the constituencies which we know are in motion and fully understand a great deal about the nature of the coup, but there are also revolts already ongoing, which are going to be exacerbated, in the healthcare sector and in the education sector against these policies, which have left the population temporarily unable to take the rational steps, which Dennis referenced, to be able to survive. You’re going to find teachers, doctors and nurses, patients, parents and students, who have been subjected to these genocidal policies. But now, all of these things are coming together as an issue of fundamental survival in terms of the country. By inserting LaRouche’s policies for actual economic growth and science into these revolts, which are just beneath the surface, I think we’re in a good position to meet the criteria for change and to turn the tide in this battle.
