PRESS RELEASE
Guts and Government
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.May 10, 2005 (EIRNS)—The following is the text of a leaflet issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee..
General George Washington's actions against the Hessians, like Frederick the Great's decision at Leuthen, Czar Alexander I's courageous acceptance of the Prussian leaders' advice on trapping Napoleon's invading forces, General Douglas MacArthur's Inchon Landing decision, are only typical of famous cases in modern history in which a situation required a combination of competence and courage from an exceptional individual who acted against the lack of a quality of command-decision capability by a majority among other leaders. The General Motors crisis is such a kind of national crisis, when a decision by some exceptional leadership must override the impulse of the majority to equivocate and vacillate.
Right now, our Congress and other leaders are vacillating while the GM crisis is at point where the future of our nation hangs on having a leadership with competence and guts to make a crucial strategic decision. So far, such competence and leadership is not being shown by the leadership of our government or our political parties. Use your political shoes to kick them into the needed upward experience.
You must now demand the needed quality of leadership which will act now, before it is too late to save the imperilled vital machine-tool capability represented by our national auto industry.
Certain powerful international financial interests, acting in collusion with elements of the Federal Reserve System and the Bush Administration are acting to cut a deal around General Motors which will virtually shut the most vital part of the productive potential of the U.S. national economy, while swindling GM employees and retirees of present, vital pension and other entitlements. If that deal is pushed through, it would virtually ensure the end of the U.S. as a leading economy of the world.
One of the leading reasons for the lack of competence being shown by much of our nation's political leadership now, is that the present generation in the Congress and our industrial enterprises are victims of about forty years of brainwashing in the cult of a post-industrial society. For that reason, leading figures in government, and other relevant institutions are seeing the GM crisis as just another financial crisis; they have not faced the reality that the life-or-death issue is not the financial crisis itself, but the danger of losing our most vital physical production capabilities.
The fact is, that the financial system is already hopelessly bankrupt. The biggest financial collapse in world history is now coming on. That governments can deal with, to organize a recovery, as President Franklin Roosevelt did. However, if we break up the structure of our most vital national industry, in the machine-tool sector of the auto industry, not even a Roosevelt could organize a recovery in your lifetime.
To save the nation, we must keep the labor-force organized around our automobile industry's vital machine-tool capability intact, in place, employed, and functioning. That decision must be made now, or very soon, the time will come, when it can not be made at all.
The U.S. Senate must act to cause our government to put our presently bankrupt major automobile enterprises into a special kind of Federal receivership for the purpose of keeping the machine-tool-centered labor-force and production facilities of the U.S. automobile industry intact and functioning on our national territory. At some future time, the financially reorganized industry will be returned to a new, healthy form of independent private ownership. In the meantime we must save an industry which is a most vital strategic asset of our nation.
The required recovery program will diversify the produced output of that industry to include what are presently urgent needs for products other than automobiles, products which require the kind of productive capability which the automotive industry's machine-tool element enables that industry to provide. Much of this market for the industry's work involves areas of urgently needed basic economic infrastructure. That diversification will play a key part in expanding the base of our physical economy in ways which reverse the presently accelerating collapse of our increasingly bankrupt national economy.
On this issue, we must act now, as if our lives depended upon that action. Our nation's economic future, and much more besides, does depend upon that action.
