PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche Endorses Spannaus, Hits
Democrats' `Self-Inflicted Wounds'
May 20, 2002 (EIRNS)—This statement by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., endorsing independent Democrat Nancy Spannaus' campaign for the Senate in Virginia against Republican incumbent John Warner, was released today by LaRouche's political committee, LaRouche in 2004.Do you remember November 1994, when a force rallied by Virginia Democratic voters associated with me and Nancy Spannaus, mobilized the margin of vote which defeated the right-wing insurgency of Republican Senate candidate Oliver North, and also sent thuggish former Attorney-Generalissimo Mary Sue Terry into hard-won retirement? Those happier days remembered, look at the wreckage of what remains of the Commonwealth's Democratic Party today.
The wreckage you are seeing in Virginia's Democratic Party today, is a case of self-inflicted wounds.
To seek the causes for this ruin, start with a trip to corporate Herndon, formerly a virtual capital of the presently dying "new economy." Herndon, and much of the rest of the corporate area around Dulles Airport, is on the way to becoming a ghost-town. In Herndon itself, doomed ghosts, behind row upon row of empty windows, stare mournfully at the highway-traffic flow from Dulles to Washington. That, Virginia, is a monument to your folly of the recent six years.
It will soon be much worse. To the degree there is growth in consumer spending in areas of the nation such as the Washington Beltway and its surroundings, much of this has depended upon the ability of financially-imperilled owners of mortgaged property to "cash out" fictitious financial capital gains in the estimated market value of their mortgaged property. Soon, that ground-rent bubble will pop, one way or the other, and the last pretense of former palmy days will be brought to an end. Already, we have reports from official sources, that, similarly, forty-eight of our fifty Federal states are in financial jeopardy, while the rope of Newt Gingrich's national debt-ceiling tightens around the neck of the White House and Congress alike.
So, the past eight years' wrecking of Virginia's Democratic Party is part of a nation-wide—in fact, a more or less world-wide—economic, social, and moral catastrophe; a catastrophe which has hit the hardest inside the United States, throughout the Americas, and in Europe and Japan, not to speak of what presently continuing U.S.A. and British policies have done to Africa. The Herndon horror, is just one clear symptom of a global folly which has brought Virginia, like much of the rest of the world, into the grip of a catastrophe more ominous than that which struck the world during the period following the last great Depression, during 1929-1933.
Then, all that taken into account, what did the Democratic Party do, especially during the recent six years, to destroy itself in the way it has done? Granted, much of the impetus for this came from the cabal featuring names such as Charles Manatt, Don Fowler, Mary Sue Terry, and former Vice-President Al Gore. Names are names; what policies associated with those figures, are responsible for the state of ruin of the Virginia party today? It is all summed up in a single slogan: "Get rid of LaRouche."
Ask yourself, what is the connection between the Herndon horror of today, and the "Get rid of LaRouche" campaign which has wrecked the Virginia party during the recent six years? In effect, the Virginia party is limping, not because it shot itself in the foot; the economic crisis in the state today, points to the fact that the party shot itself in the head.
The connection is elementary. LaRouche forecast, that unless certain changes in U.S. economic and social policies were made, the U.S. economy was headed into a global breakdown of the world's present monetary-financial system. That was the pivotal issue of the raging 1996-2000 political fight between me and Gore, inside the Democratic Party. On the issues of that fight, Gore was wrong, as usual, and I was right, as usual. My forecast is now the ongoing reality of the lives of the Virginia party, and also Virginia's citizens. Most among you supported the choice of Gore; and, now, Gore's folly is staring at you with dead men's eyes, from such places as the vacancies in Herndon.
The National Pattern
It is a poor consolation for the poor Virginia party, that both of the two major national parties are in a worse crisis. In both of these national parties, as in the Virginia party itself, the internal crises of the parties have two leading causes, failed economic dogmas and the overreaching influence of an assortment of rabidly gnostic, far-right-wing religious cults. Were those two influences to continue to dominate national policy deliberations, as they presently do, this nation will not long survive in any form we would recognize today.
The two major parties are gripped by an hysteria-wracked effort to maintain some semblance of internal unanimity with these wild-eyed gnostic elements; to maintain a balance with the unbalanced. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, the notoriously gnostic fanaticism of the Rev. Pat Robertson, exemplifies this problem. Robertson, like Texas Senator Phil Gramm and his wife Wendy "Enron" Gramm, typifies the bottom of the bottomless barrel in thinking about the economy, and reaches to much lower depths in matters of theology.
The recent flaps over steel-import tariffs and farm policy show one aspect of the problem in the Congress, the Executive, and political parties. The present bumping against the legislated debt-ceiling, reflects a related crisis in economic policy. On the one hand, the leadership of both parties vows its fealty to a radically monetarist version of the religion of "free trade," but the constituencies demand at least a semblance of the stability which only protectionist measures can provide. Similarly, the legislated debt-ceiling and the mounting military demands cannot coexist in the same universe. Compromises are occurring, but, because of the ideological fanaticism within both national parties, and the current Executive, no clear principle is presently possible in either party.
An important part of the political crisis of both the Virginia party and the national parties, is the recent trend toward uncontrolled breaches of our republic's traditional separation of church from state. The problem lies not in the traditional ecumenical fraternity among monotheistic religious communities. The source of the infection comes from the swamps of religious fervor, in the convergence of wild-eyed gnostic forms of so-called Protestant cults, upon alliances with Carlist and Zionist cults. This shifts national policy-shaping from the domain of reason, into the same forms of homicidal mass-lunacy recalled from European feudalism and the period of religious wars from 1511-1648 in Europe. The overreaching influence of these lunatic, integralist cults into the affairs of our government, is pushing civilization back, toward the nightmare preceding the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and, ever deeper, into a pre-civilized dark age.
In European history, the continued existence of a constitutional republic depends upon two principal assumptions consistent with the Mosaic doctrine of Genesis 1: First, that man and woman are made equally in the creative quality of the Creator of the universe; second, that this likeness to the Creator is expressed in the form of that creative power of reason through which experimentally valid universal physical principles may be discovered by individuals and shared among the members of society. It follows from that, that it is only in a society in which creative reason, so defined, is the highest authority of government, that the members of society are elevated from the status of virtual human cattle—as under slavery or feudalism—into persons endowed with the qualities of citizens of a republic.
Thus, the existence of our republic, and of any true republic, combines a practice of toleration toward individuals, with an insistence that the adoption of all laws and their implementation must be made on no other basis than knowable, provable universal principles, without the intervention of any doctrine from non-existent or hidden sources. Without that law of government according to reason, no republic could endure.
Thus, the usurpatious, extortionist grip which sundry wild-eyed religious cults have secured on the processes of government, represents a threat per se to every facet of our constitutional system of republican self-government. Under that continuing condition, our republic and its major political parties can neither continue to function, nor survive.
This danger is presently an acute one. Not only is the overreach by intrinsically irrationalist gnostic cults a grave threat to the security of our republic, in and of itself. Under conditions of present crisis caused by the prevalence of intrinsically failed and related policies over the course of more than thirty years to date, our Executive and Congress could not respond effectively to the present challenges, except by making sweeping changes in law and custom, changes which must be based on deep-going re-considerations of principle. That is where the pivotal feature of the present crisis of the national and Virginia parties lies.
That means that the crucial function of political leadership, is to force that quality of deliberation on fact and principle among the citizens generally. This means that the party machines must adapt themselves to improved forms of conduct, with a radical increase in openness to deliberation on both existing and currently non-approved party policies.
Over the recent years, notably since 1996, the Virginia party, like the national parties, has distanced itself more and more from any semblance of meaningful dialogue with the constituents. That must now be changed; and, therefore, the policies associated with Manatt, Fowler, Mary Sue Terry, Goldman, and Gore, must be overridden, for the purpose of rebuilding the party into a form which can earn the mandate to govern under the conditions of escalating crisis gripping the Commonwealth and the nation at this time.
