PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche Calls for Ousting Larry Summers, Endorses Galbraith Critique
March 23, 2009 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).
During his March 21 webcast from Washington, Lyndon LaRouche called for the ousting of the director of the White House National Economic Council Larry Summers, as the key person responsible for the systematic incompetence of the economic recipes put out by the Obama Administration. With Summers out, U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner might adopt a different policy. "Either of these failed White House economic advisors", LaRouche said, "is systemically and implicitly making a fatal error in judgment. You have Summers, who I think probably should be dumped. And Geithner should be allowed to function, at the intellectual level he has, and taken out from under the kind of pressure he's being subjected to now. I think he's probably a viable figure in the Administration for these purposes... Then we have to build something with a minimum amount of shakeup for the maximum amount of benefit."
LaRouche issued his call in the context of commenting on a recent article by economist James Galbraith, the son of President Roosevelt's and President Kennedy's famous economic advisor, who has exposed the incompetence of Obama's economic advisors, and proposes that the only solution is to put banks through a bankruptcy procedure. LaRouche praised Galbraith, saying that "while other people may have the same kind of formulation of questions that he presents in a recently published piece, nobody else has opened their mouths to say it publicly."
LaRouche listed ten elements of Galbraith's critique of Obama's advisors, with which he says he agrees. "The people in there, who are running this operation and making the decisions, are collectively incompetent, because the assumption they're making, based on their past experience and education, is not appropriate to deal with the situation, which has never existed to their knowledge beforehand! No one on this planet has experience, within their lifetime, and within their education, of a problem of the type which we have today. And therefore, they have no competence to present a proposed remedy."
"What we're dealing with is a world financial breakdown crisis, which is now approaching the point of inflection, at which the flood of money for bailout is engendering a hyperinflation of the type that Germany experienced in 1923.... There is no provision in the present system, the present international monetary system, as organized, to prevent a general disintegration of the entire world economy. Which would mean a genocidal collapse throughout the world, which would end up within a generation or so, that where you have 6.5 billion people living on this planet today, you would now go down to less than 2! That's the magnitude of the crisis."
LaRouche focussed especially on Galbraith's call to abandon current economic models and "reach back, past the postwar years, to the experience of the Great Depression." This, LaRouche said, is significant because it is a response to a fascist revival in the United States, typified by Amity Shlaes, who is associated with the American Enterprise Institute. LaRouche then went through the history of the American Liberty League, a fascist organization supporting Mussolini, that bitterly fought FDR's recovery policies, and sabotaged effective implementation of some of them.
In his concluding section, LaRouche picked up again on the question of the deeper reasons for the incompetence of most economists, which Galbraith had addressed. To put it succinctly, those economists are trained to think in terms of a mechanical equilibrium model, which pertains only to animals, not to human beings!
