PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche: Put the Auto Industry
Under Federal Protection
Oct. 17, 2005 (EIRNS)—This release, originating in Lyndon LaRouche's Oct. 12 Washington, D.C. webcast, was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.
In response to a question at his Oct. 12 webcast, economist Lyndon LaRouche outlined once again the policy required to save the vital machine tool capacity which is embodied in the automobile industry of the United States. Back in April and May of 2005, LaRouche wrote memoranda to the Senate, prescribing a policy of "strategic bankruptcy reorganization" to be carried out by the U.S. Senate, but nothing was done. Now that Delphi has declared bankruptcy, and there are renewed expectations that GM may do the same, a Senate staffer asked LaRouche to discuss his policy further, and answer the criticism that it was a form of "nationalization." LaRouche responded:
"In the past we have, in situations like this, we have put an entity or a group of entities under Federal protection, not with the intent of [nationalizing] them, but of reconstituting them. I don't think you'd get many people enthusiastic about bailing out some of the management of General Motors or Delphi. As I said, what's happened, what the management of those two entities has done, means that the U.S. government owes Martha Stewart an apology....
"...from our standpoint, we have to look at this as a government, from a standpoint of national interest, national strategic interest.
"Now, the problem in the Congress is, that there is a lack of understanding of the ABCs of economics. And, that's because they are Baby Boomers. They are part of this generation of the 68ers. They are people who have been conditioned to believe in the mysteries of service economy. Free maids, for example. Or, changing your sex, and wives, and husbands, and so forth. Marry a turtle, whatever. So, these fellas have a little confusion, about things about the General Welfare question. And, therefore it's going to take a lot of effort to get them to understand this problem.
"But, we need machine-tool capability. We need the means to implement machine-tool capability. We have tremendous needs in this country for a railway system, for a magnetic levitation system, for improved, many kinds of systems. We do not need to save the capabilities of GM, Delphi, and so forth for the specific business of automobiles. We need to save the capacity, for producing the kind of product this combination can produce! And, producing it in the areas in which people are presently employed: Because, the other side of the thing, is, you don't really have people working in some place. You have people who have families, are embedded in communities—which several generations, in communities. These are family-related communities. There are all kinds of complexes, stores, other industries, all kinds of things tied together. ...
"Now, what we need is, we need a mass-transit system. Preferably we need a maglev system: Because, with a maglev system we can get people from a railroad station on the West Coast to a railroad station on the East Coast, about as fast as you can get there by plane—when you think of all this stuff about going through the ticketing, and all the moving back to airports and so forth. You can certainly do that with that kind of system, your intercity connections become highly efficient. You would never use short-haul air flights as a way of transportation between urban centers, because you can do it more cheaply and quickly by maglev. You even have high-speed rail, which is a compromise in many cases. We have improved qualities of high-speed rail, of the type they are using in some parts of Europe, for example—it'll work.
"We can do that.
"We can produce plants—by breaking the job down, we can produce power plants, new ways of making power plants. Now it takes a number of years, three, five years to build a power plant. We can speed that up by redesigning the job. We know how to make the thing work. We just have to design the way that we put it together, like this whole curing of concrete, and so forth, in some cases.
"So therefore, we need the increased production. We have to change from a services economy to a producer economy, now. If we don't maintain the integrity of our machine-tool sector, our machine tool-industrial sector, we can't do it! We become a Third World country.
"And I think some people want to destroy us. So, we are talking about saving the nation. And, if we have to put the industry under Federal protection, to keep it running, in order to maintain the capacity, and keep these communities functioning—the tax-paying communities? maybe that will get through to some of the Congressmen! [applause]—then, we should do it. This is not a question of nationalizing! This is stupid propaganda by some idiot advisor on this stuff."
