EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2021

LaRouche Legacy Foundation Conference—The World Must Listen to the Wise Words of Lyndon LaRouche

Aug. 14, 2021 (EIRNS)—Can the human race survive the crisis now threatening mankind itself? Will we as a race continue the descent into global nuclear war, an out of control pandemic, a hyperinflationary destruction of the means of survival, a cultural collapse into a new Dark Age? Or can this existential crisis serve as a spark of human creativity in enough citizens of the world, to both end the insanity which brought us to this point, and launch a new paradigm which unites the nations of the world in achieving the common aims of mankind—peace through development? The answer lies not only in what people think, but how they think. Can we spark creativity in a population which has been degraded through scientific frauds, drugs, pornography, perpetual warfare and economic decay?

This was the theme of the conference today—“So, Are You Finally Willing to Learn Economics?” the first to be sponsored by the LaRouche Legacy Foundation. Helga Zepp-LaRouche was joined by leaders from around the world—political leaders, economists, musicians, scientists, and youth, from Russia, China, Slovakia, Germany, France, Austria, Argentina, Philippines, Mexico, Trinidad & Tobago, Peru, Colombia and Ukraine, for a dialogue on “LaRouche’s Discovery” and on “Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” under the theme: “So, Are You Finally Willing To Learn Economics?” The LaRouche Legacy Foundation is in the process of publishing LaRouche’s Complete Works, of which Volume 1 is now available.

It was fifty years ago, on Aug. 15, 1971, that Lyndon LaRouche became quite famous, but also became the target of what former Attorney General Ramsey Clark described as

“a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focussed on destroying an enemy.... The purpose can only be seen as destroying—more than a political movement, more than a political figure—it is those two; but it’s a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.”

On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon scrapped the Bretton Woods system, which had sustained world development in the post-World War II era, by decoupling the U.S. dollar from its peg to gold, allowing all the world’s currencies to float, to become the subject of speculation, and for the British system of “free markets” and deregulation to replace the Hamiltonian American System, which is based on the concept of directed credit to enhance the general welfare and lift the productivity of labor.

EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher explained to the thousands of participants in the conference from around the world (with simultaneous translation in Spanish, French, German and Russian), that the Bretton Woods which was adopted after Franklin Roosevelt’s death was not the system intended by FDR. Rather, Roosevelt had insisted that after the war, the former European colonies must be granted full independence, and that American System production of the capital goods needed to industrialize the entire world would drive U.S. production while also ending the colonial era for good. But Harry Truman, whom LaRouche denounced as a little man serving Wall Street, helped the Europeans to restore their colonies, while the U.S. was turned inward. The subsequent focus on internal consumerism through debt, rather than capital exports, LaRouche forecast—uniquely among all economists—would cause recessions and the collapse of Bretton Woods. This was but the first of LaRouche’s forecasts, all of which were proven to be fully prescient. A video of LaRouche speaking in 2001 described his many forecasts, emphasizing that he “was standing alone” among economists who were trapped in British monetarist ideology, thinking of money, not the physical transformation of nature, or the condition of the human race.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech provided a powerful insight into her husband Lyndon LaRouche’s capacity to inspire people from all different layers of society, from heads of state to Peruvian fishermen and Italian shoemakers, to grasp a different way of thinking,—that one cannot separate politics, science, and culture, and that all aspects of life fall under the centrality of creativity as the difference between man and beast, driving the science of physical economy as the true science of human progress. She later noted that anyone who met LaRouche would experience an awakening of their own powers of reason, through the creativity of LaRouche’s mind engaging them.

Zepp-LaRouche traced her husband’s debt to Plato, Leibniz, Kepler and other giants of history, in making his own discoveries. She reviewed the new means for measuring progress which he had created—“relative potential population density,” and “energy flux-density”—and the interconnection between these crucial concepts. She explored Lyn’s initial decision to combat the statistical method of systems analysis of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, which treated the mind as a computer, promoting artificial intelligence as a replacement for the mind. This false concept of the nature of man has grown today into the insanity of the “models” which drive the climate hoax, financial speculation, and the oligarchical society. She concluded by calling for the “replacement of the quackery of information theory with the ideas of LaRouche in all universities.”

The leading Chinese economist Ding Yifan, who has written about LaRouche’s ideas in several books, noted that LaRouche focused on two crimes from the ending of Bretton Woods: the abuse of currencies through floating exchange rates, allowing speculators to attack national currencies; and the deregulation of the financial system, which allowed the speculators to take over. He noted two events in Chinese history, once during the Han Dynasty 2000 years ago, and then in the Mongol era in the 14th century, when similar disregard for the difference between money and the real economy led to the collapse of the dynasties. Today’s QE and other hyperinflationary money printing, he said, is creating a cancer in the economy—a demonstration of LaRouche’s warning about entropy resulting from the failure to develop the real economy.

Jozef Mikloško, who had been Vice Premier in Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist government, and later Slovakia’s Ambassador to Italy, described his friend LaRouche as the most educated man he’d ever known, and described that 80 pages of his book was on LaRouche and his organization. He portrayed his trip to visit LaRouche in prison, where he found LaRouche’s optimism and agapē undeterred. He also reviewed the injustice of LaRouche’s incarceration, and the worldwide mobilization of world citizens who united to protest that injustice. He said LaRouche was the “Sakharov of America,” calling for a new revolution of Christian agapē. He recommended that a “short book” be produced in all languages on LaRouche’s ideas, which was embraced by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and moderator Dennis Small of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation, while observing that capturing LaRouche’s ideas in a “short” book would be quite difficult indeed.

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko, Chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine and a former Parliamentarian and presidential candidate, gave an impassioned presentation, titled “Saving Mankind: Is It a Mission—Possible?,” on her cooperation with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche. She pointed to the Biden-Putin Summit as correctly indicating the dangerous strategic crisis, but warned that it did not address the fundamental causes of that crisis, in the systemic destruction of the world economic and financial system. She reviewed the dire state of the world economy, and the necessary solutions posed by LaRouche. She called the state of the Western banking system a “speculative giant squid,” sucking the wealth out of the world. She also reviewed the destruction of Ukraine following the 2014 coup, driving the country from being one of the top ten economies in the world to now the poorest in Europe, with 10 million going hungry, and a population decline by over 20% since 1990. She closed: “Will we be a cemetery with windmills in place of crosses?”

Dr. Kirk Meighoo, a former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago, an author and a political activist, described how he become a development economist through his education (in Toronto, Canada, Jamaica, and the U.K.), but only when he discovered LaRouche through the internet did he realize that his profound ideas had been censored in all the universities. He described how the emergence of China, India and Russia as major economies should have led to a new world order, and that the G20 had made an effort in that direction, but failed, while the BRICS has now been torn apart. The pandemic destroyed economies around the world, he said, while money was printed up in outrageous quantities to bail out the banks, “transferring the wealth from the poor to the rich.” Resolving this crisis can only be achieved by ending the neoliberal system altogether, he noted, and commended the LaRouche movement for leading that effort.

Yekaterina Fyodorovna Shamayeva from Russia, a senior lecturer, spoke on “Design and Management of Sustainable Development and an Interdisciplinary Synthesis of the Fundamental Ideas of the Schools of Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov.” The late Pobisk Kuznetsov was one of Russia’s leading scientists and philosophic thinkers, who became a close friend and collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche following the fall of the Soviet Union. He proposed that a new unit of measure of the progress of physical economies be based on LaRouche’s dual conceptions of relative potential population density and energy flux-density, and that the unit be called the “La,” after LaRouche. Shamayeva described the continuing effort in Russia to bring about a synthesis of the ideas of Kuznetsov and LaRouche, emphasizing that economics cannot be separated from the laws of nature. She called for more of LaRouche’s works to be translated into Russian (there is already a large number of LaRouche’s major writings available in Russian).

The first panel closed with video presentations and readings about LaRouche from several people who have since died, among them: former Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the miscarriage of justice in the persecution of LaRouche; Dr. Enéas Carneiro, a former member of the Brazilian parliament and presidential candidate, on why LaRouche was granted honorary citizenship in the city of São Paulo; former President of Mexico José López Portillo, who in 1998 called on the world to “listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche”; and former Foreign Minister of Guyana Fred Wills, who in 1976 called on the UN General Assembly to adopt LaRouche’s idea of a New International Economic Order.

Fascinating dialogue during the Q&A session centered on three questions from the audience: 1) What is the difference between “forecasts” and “predictions?” 2) Do new technologies and robots threaten to cause unemployment? 3) What is the difference between Marxism, neoliberalism, and Christian socialism?

The second panel, “Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” will be covered in a forthcoming issue of the EIR Daily Alert. Both conference panels are posted to the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website.