The LaRouche Connection

Program Summaries: 2008
707-Current

Updated December 24, 2009


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Program No. 707

“Schiller Conference, Kiedrich, Germany. Panel IV:
Rebuilding Civilization”

 

TRANSCRIPTS AND VIDEOS

 

The outcome of the presently accelerating world-wide crisis is not yet decided; but the alternatives can and must be politically clear. It is certain that the kind of global monetary-economic system which has evolved in the aftermath of the crisis-events of 1968, will not survive the presently onrushing calamities.

 

On Sept. 15-16, 2007, the Schiller Institute held an amazing two-day conference in Kiedrich, Germany. The subject: “The Eurasian Land-Bridge is Becoming a Reality.” Three hundred fifty guests from forty nations gathered amid the most momentous period of change in globally extended modern civilization since the great 1648 Peace of Westphalia. As the proceedings of this two-day conference show, we have great and hopeful options for change.

 

The agenda featured prominent speakers from around the world, including Russian scholars and political leaders; an American consulting engineer; an Italian economist; and an American civil rights pioneer. The conference concluded with a report on the work of the LaRouche Youth Movement, with presentations by leading LYM members from around the world.

 

The LaRouche Connection began its coverage of this historic conference (Program 704) with the Schiller Institute’s founder and chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s welcoming remarks and introduction of the keynote speaker, her husband, Lyndon LaRouche, who spoke on “This Present World Financial Crisis: Credit vs. Monetarist Usury.”

 

This week’s edition features the following presentations, from Panel IV, which convened on Sept. 16:

 

·   Amelia Boynton Robinson, 96 year old Vice Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, and heroine of the U.S. civil rights movement: “Civil Rights for All People of the Planet”

 

·   Jacque Cheminade, leader of Solidarité et Progrês, the LaRouche movement in France, and thrice a candidate for the French Presidency: “Beyond the Eurasian Land-Bridge: the Cultural Paradigm of the Millennium to Come”

 

·   Daniel Buchman, a leader of the LaRouche Youth Movement in Germany: “Restore a Real Scientific Method”

 

·   Lyndon LaRouche: “Liberate Man from the Shackles on the Mind: On the Difference Between Man and the Animals.”

 

 [All presentations have been somewhat abridged in order to comply with Public Access time limitations. For a full transcript of the entire conference, see EIR magazine, Vol. 34, No. 38, Sept. 28, 2007. pp. 4-51; No. 39, Oct. 5, pp. 4-31; No. 40, Oct. 12, pp. 48-71; No. 41, Oct. 19, pp. 58-71. Or, visit www.schillerinstitute.com, and click on “Eurasian Land-Bridge Conference: Transcripts & Audio Files.”]

 

Release Date:  Jan. 7, 2008

 

Program No. 708

“Six Months Into the Greatest Financial Crash Ever,” Pt. 1

 

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

January 17 saw three events which clearly define the battle lines in a showdown over how to respond to the accelerating disintegration of the U.S. and world economy:

 

On that afternoon, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke appeared before the House of Representatives Budget Committee, and joined the chorus calling for a “fiscal and monetary stimulus,” to try to inject some life into an already moribund system.

 

On that same afternoon, Lyndon LaRouche addressed an international webcast from Washington, DC, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC). When the question of the myriad of “stimulus packages” was raised, Mr. LaRouche ridiculed the idea: “Everybody is talking about stimulation, like this is a sex clinic or something. This is not the problem!” The present crisis is not a mere financial crisis, nor a depression, but a global breakdown crisis, which, if not stopped, will radiate out from the Trans-Atlantic English-speaking community, “to bring every part of the world into a general breakdown of their respective social systems.” But, by following the example set by President Franklin Roosevelt, and basing ourselves on the U.S. Constitution, which is derived, in principle, from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which placed the “benefit of the other” as the highest good, the crisis is manageable. Mr. LaRouche outlines the measures which must be taken now to prevent civilization from disintegrating into chaos.

 

Two of those measures were the subject of the third Jan. 17 event, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Schiller Institute Chairman Tom Gillesberg presented testimony to a parliamentary committee, urging adoption of Mr. LaRouche’s New Bretton Woods proposal, and informed committee members of the groundswell of support rising in the U.S. for Mr. LaRouche’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Act.

 

The choice before us is clear: Continue the plunge into the worst human catastrophe since the 14th Century New Dark Age, or adopt LaRouche’s policies now!

 

This edition of The LaRouche Connection features Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to the webcast. The event was moderated by LaRouche’s national spokeswoman, Debra Freeman.

 

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, including the discussion session, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4, Jan. 25, 2008. Pp. 4-29. Or, visit www.larouchepub.com, click on “LaRouche’s Writings,” and search for the January 17 Webcast listing.                       ]

 

Release Date:  Feb. 4, 2008

 

Program No. 709

“Six Months Into the Greatest Financial Crash Ever,” Pt.2

 

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

January 17 saw three events which clearly define the battle lines in a showdown over how to respond to the accelerating disintegration of the U.S. and world economy:

 

On that afternoon, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke appeared before the House of Representatives Budget Committee, and joined the chorus calling for a “fiscal and monetary stimulus,” to try to inject some life into an already moribund system.

 

On that same afternoon, Lyndon LaRouche addressed an international webcast from Washington, DC, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC). When the question of the myriad of “stimulus packages” was raised, Mr. LaRouche ridiculed the idea: “Everybody is talking about stimulation, like this is a sex clinic or something. This is not the problem!” The present crisis is not a mere financial crisis, nor a depression, but a global breakdown crisis, which, if not stopped, will radiate out from the Trans-Atlantic English-speaking community, “to bring every part of the world into a general breakdown of their respective social systems.” But, by following the example set by President Franklin Roosevelt, and basing ourselves on the U.S. Constitution, which is derived, in principle, from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which placed the “benefit of the other” as the highest good, the crisis is manageable. Mr. LaRouche outlines the measures which must be taken now to prevent civilization from disintegrating into chaos.

 

Two of those measures were the subject of the third Jan. 17 event, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Schiller Institute Chairman Tom Gillesberg presented testimony to a parliamentary committee, urging adoption of Mr. LaRouche’s New Bretton Woods proposal, and informed committee members of the groundswell of support rising in the U.S. for Mr. LaRouche’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA).

 

This edition of The LaRouche Connection features first the conclusion of Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to the Webcast, in which he discusses his famous “Triple Curve,” first presented in 2000, showing the U.S. economy reaching a critical point of instability; the fact that the human mind is not digital, that creativity does not exist in any digital system; that the time has come when the technological and scientific requirements of maintaining humanity are such that humanity can no longer exist without committing ourselves to the entirety of the human race—a new, global  “Peace of Westphalia.” The remainder of the program is a portion from the discussion session. The entire event was moderated by LaRouche’s national spokeswoman, Debra Freeman.

 

From the Webcast Discussion Session:

 

Homeowners and Bank Protection Act

 

From State Rep. Joe Almeda of Rhode Island (primary sponsor of a resolution calling for immediate Congressional action on the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA) in the Rhode Island House): Statement calling on all state legislatures across the country to support the HPBA.

 

Stimulus Package or Sex Clinic?

 

From someone previously associated with the Hamilton Group, and who is now with the Congressional Budget Office: “Given the nature of this crisis, there are two potential approaches: One is President Lyndon Johnson’s, and I believe Hillary Clinton’s misnamed economic stimulus proposal falls into this one (which I support). The other is the one President John Kennedy took with his Moon Mission. Can one lead to the other? Do you think we still have the capability to launch a JFK-style approach?

 

Infrastructure Plus Stimulation?

 

From someone with responsibility for one of the Congressional committees that deals with economic issues: “While infrastructure spending is among the initiatives under consideration in Congress, there are concerns that legislation providing additional spending through infrastructural development would simply take too long to enter the economy. So, from this standpoint, do you think that ‘stimulus legislation’ is appropriate, and should additional investment in infrastructure be included in any stimulus package, or should it be separate?”

 

A Plausible Pitch?

 

From the Hispanic Caucus on Capitol Hill: “What would you think about dividing your legislation into two pieces? I think we’ve got the votes for a moratorium on foreclosures. What if we were to put that first, and then bring up separately, the bank protection? And, if we were to do it that way, how much time would we have, after a moratorium on foreclosures, to deal with the banks?”

 

After the HBPA: Reactivate Industry

 

From someone involved with a national campaign:  “You’ve built into the HBPA a firewall to protect what I assume you mean to be the chartered banks? Why do you call it a firewall? How would it function? It won’t really stop the collapse. I don’t understand how you could separate banks’ exposure to hedge funds and vice versa. Why does Wall Street have such a violent reaction to your HBPA? From the standpoint of domestic policy, how would you immediately follow up on the HBPA?

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, including the discussion session, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4, Jan. 25, 2008. Pp. 4-29. Or, visit www.larouchepub.com, click on “LaRouche’s Writings,” and search for the January 17 Webcast listing.]

 

Release Date:  Feb. 11, 2008

 

Program No. 710

“Six Months Into the Greatest Financial Crash Ever,” Pt. 3

 

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

January 17 saw three events which clearly define the battle lines in a showdown over how to respond to the accelerating disintegration of the U.S. and world economy:

 

On that afternoon, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke appeared before the House of Representatives Budget Committee, and joined the chorus calling for a “fiscal and monetary stimulus,” to try to inject some life into an already moribund system.

 

On that same afternoon, Lyndon LaRouche addressed an international webcast from Washington, DC, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC). When the question of the myriad of “stimulus packages” was raised, Mr. LaRouche ridiculed the idea: “Everybody is talking about stimulation, like this is a sex clinic or something. This is not the problem!” The present crisis is not a mere financial crisis, nor a depression, but a global breakdown crisis, which, if not stopped, will radiate out from the Trans-Atlantic English-speaking community, “to bring every part of the world into a general breakdown of their respective social systems.” But, by following the example set by President Franklin Roosevelt, and basing ourselves on the U.S. Constitution, which is derived, in principle, from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which placed the “benefit of the other” as the highest good, the crisis is manageable. Mr. LaRouche outlines the measures which must be taken now to prevent civilization from disintegrating into chaos.

 

Two of those measures were the subject of the third Jan. 17 event, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Schiller Institute Chairman Tom Gillesberg presented testimony to a parliamentary committee, urging adoption of Mr. LaRouche’s New Bretton Woods proposal, and informed committee members of the groundswell of support rising in the U.S. for Mr. LaRouche’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA).

 

The LaRouche Connection covered this event in three parts. Part I featured the bulk of Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to the webcast. Part II featured his conclusion and the first five questions from the Discussion session. Part III features all but the last question, which, unfortunately, had to be omitted for Public Access time limitations. The entire event was moderated by LaRouche’s national spokeswoman, Debra Freeman.

 

From the Webcast Discussion Session:

 

From a Maryland state Legislator: “I serve on the committee which is dealing with the immediate implications of the mortgage crisis, and while I do plan on signing on as a co-sponsor to the HBPA, I wonder if there isn’t something we can do on the state level to mitigate the crisis, while we are pressuring Congress to act.”

 

Ted Weill (Chairman of the Mississippi Reform Party): “If the Venezuelan government can set up oil-cracking plants to make gasoline for their people, we should be able to do the same thing. What do  you think?”

 

From John Jeffries, a machinist in Louisville, KY: “Is the HBPA Constitutional?

 

From Ruby Nelson (Warrensville Heights, OH City Council): If the HBPA passes Congress, and I certainly hope that it does, what can we look forward to? Who will it work? What motivates you to wage this very challenging fight, and how can we spread it?”

 

From José Villar, an economist for more than 29 years (in Spain): “Is it possible for a nation to issue money through a national bank without interest?”

 

From a Presidential campaign: “Does Barak Obama know what he’s doing? Is he a witting player, or just a throw-away?”

 

From the Freshman Congressional Caucus: “Can we still build our way out of this crisis, or is it just too late for that? Waiting for a massive public works program to kick in, just does not seem to be sufficient to address the problem.”

 

From Mr. Temba (in Tanzania): “How were Structural Investment Vehicles formed, and what are their effects on the global economy?  Also, who owns these things, and what are we to do with them?

 

John Bosnitch (consultant, and former Executive Director of the Serbian Unity Congress): “Were you in the situation of Serbia and Russia today, what steps could be taken to stop the effort to destroy the entire world order through the issue of independent Kosovo?”

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, including the discussion session, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4, Jan. 25, 2008. Pp. 4-29. Or, visit www.larouchepub.com, click on “LaRouche’s Writings,” and search for the January 17 Webcast listing.]

 

Release Date:  Feb. 24, 2008

 

Program No. 711

“Averting Doom,” Pt.1

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

On March 12, Lyndon LaRouche conducted an international video webcast from Washington, DC, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. Debra Freeman moderated the event. This edition of The LaRouche Connection features the first hour of Mr. LaRouche’s opening presentation.

 

LaRouche: “First of all, Felix Rohatyn is guilty of something tantamount to high treason against the United States, in the fact that he is supposedly a citizen of the Unites States, but is working, to my knowledge, with sources which are intent on destroying the United States. And therefore, the man is a traitor, and should be regarded as such by any honest citizen who is not absolutely stupid.”

 

Mr. LaRouche immediately takes his audience back to the FDR Legacy—to March 1933, the day Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House as President—the same day he began to dictate the outlines of action which saved the Untied States from the Great Depression, and prepared the country for war to defeat British-installed fascism. And how Harry Truman worked for the ideas of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to reverse Roosevelt’s intentions for the post-war period. Since then, the country has been put through shock after shock (McCarthyism; the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; 9/11) to shape a cowardice in the Baby Boomer generation, which has set us up to accept the early destruction of our country.

 

Between 1969 and 1981 we saw the take-down of the 1944 Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system, wrecking the dollar (Aug. 15, 1971); the destruction of the physical economy, via massive deregulation of the FDR-era structure of the economy; a halting of nuclear power; and a change in our culture.

 

LaRouche: “The time has come, when we’re now at the end of the rope. You have a great conspiracy, by the same people, on both sides of the Atlantic: one destroying the Untied States with the fascist Michael Bloomberg for President campaign; the other in Europe, by the introduction of the fascist “Lisbon Treaty” system.”

 

LaRouche: “This is not necessary. If we go back to our Constitutional foundations. In order to have a representative form of government, you must have nations, which are sovereign, which represent the culture of that people. Not globalization.”

 

The crisis we face today is a collapse of the World System. “We are not in a depression; we’re in a general breakdown crisis, comparable in form to what happened in Europe in the 14th Century, when the general dark age hit. We are in the middle of an onrushing dark age!”

 

Mr. LaRouche urges his listeners to use our nation’s uniquely Constitutional powers to get things moving again: “Protect the household. Keep people in their homes and communities. But you can’t save the homeowners, if you don’t save the banks! You have to save the local banks—the real ones that take deposits and loan money, and are vehicles of the Federal government and state governments to conduit funds through them, for local purposes or state purposes, and thus stimulate the growth of the economy.  In this way you put people back to work, exactly the way Roosevelt did.”

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, including the discussion session, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 12, March 21, 2008. Pp. 4-33. Or, visit www.larouchepub.com, click on “LaRouche’s Writings,” and search for the March 12 Webcast listing.]

 

Release Date:  March 28, 2008

 

Program No. 712

“Averting Doom,” Pt. 2

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

On March 12, Lyndon LaRouche conducted an international video webcast from Washington, DC, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. Debra Freeman moderated the event. This edition of The LaRouche Connection features the conclusion of Mr. LaRouche’s opening presentation, and the first seven questions to Mr. LaRouche from the Discussion Session.

 

At the end of Part One of our coverage of this event, Mr. LaRouche was urging his listeners to use our nation’s uniquely Constitutional powers to get the U.S. economy moving again. “Protect the household. Keep people in their homes and communities. But you can’t save the homeowners, if you don’t save the banks! You have to save the local banks—the real ones that take deposits and loan money, and are vehicles of the Federal government and state governments to conduit funds through them, for local purposes or state purposes, and thus stimulate the growth of the economy.  In this way you put people back to work, exactly the way Roosevelt did.”

 

He then proposes setting up a two-level credit system. Loans for authorized programs could receive Federal created credit, through the local, State, and Federal chartered banks at 1-2%. Loans for all other purposes would carry a floating (higher) rate. In this way, the banks are protected, by putting them through bankruptcy protection, and so are the people, and local communities, by keeping folks in their homes.

 

Also required is an economic driver program, involving large projects, especially nuclear power, which would “break the world free of petroleum slavery.”

 

LaRouche: “What we need is a revolt of the patriots: people who see what patriotism really means. Are you committed to some practical benefit for your nation, and the world?”

 

“We must overcome the stupidity which seems to control most members of the Congress and many citizens who prefer to be ignorant, because they like desperation better than solutions, in order to accept these three simple steps:”

 

1.      Enact the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, protecting legitimate banking functions, and homeowners.

2.      Establish a two-tier credit system: 1-2% for government-authorized credit, letting the interest rate float, to 7-8-9% for other things. No stimulus package.

3.      Bring together an alliance of the United States, Russia, China, and India, and bring other countries, and bring other countries into the same alliance, on economic policy, to create a new international monetary-financial system of fixed exchange rates, ending the presently hopelessly bankrupt floating exchange-rate system.

 

“Under these conditions, we can mobilize most of the world to get the Hell out of this thing and come back to a system where human beings can decently live again.”

 

From the Discussion Session:

 

·   From someone associated with writing policy for one of the Presidential campaigns:  “Sen. Clinton has refined her housing proposal to adopt policies that forcibly reduce the amounts of money owed by homeowners…. Can this be done without the establishment of a separate and new Federal institution?”

 

·   From a Democrat member of the Senate, with close historic ties to the military: “Vice President Dick Cheney has recently called for an anti-missile defense system. You are repeatedly identified as the intellectual author of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Has Cheney finally come around to your point of view? Or, has your advocacy of an SDI changed?”

·   From a group at the Hamilton Group: “We are grappling with the issue of economic vs. fiscal stimulus. Please address the question of a strong dollar. How would you defend the dollar in this framework?”

 

·   From a member of the Black Congressional Caucus: Do you actually believe that Barack Obama is a fascist, or is he just being used? Isn’t it possible that he’s smarter than those who think they’re using him, and that he’s really using them?”

 

·   From someone holding statewide office in New York: “Can you comment on the targeting of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer?”

 

·   From someone associated with a Presidential campaign: “Talk a bit more about what specifically corporativism is, and how it differs from what we know as the American System.”

 

·   Composite question (from several sources): “Felix Rohatyn openly refers to himself as a follower of John Maynard Keynes, but recently tried to reverse his previous public hostility to Franklin Roosevelt, by saying he supported the New Deal. There are many ill-informed or lying authorities, who would insist that FDR and his Bretton Woods system were essentially Keynesian. Please address this.”

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, including the discussion session, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 12, March 21, 2008. Pp. 4-33. Or, visit www.larouchepub.com, click on “LaRouche’s Writings,” and search for the March 12 Webcast listing.]

 

Release Date:  April 9, 2008

 

Program No. 713

“Interview: M.J. Mapuranga, Zimbabwe Ambassador to the U.S.

 

AUDIO (Scroll to April 12)

TRANSCRIPT

 

On April 12, Dr. Machivenyika J. Mapuranga, the Zimbabwean Ambassador the United States, gave an interview to the LaRouche Show, the weekly internet radio program. Host Lawrence Freeman was joined by LaRouche Youth Movement member from Zimbabwe, Portia Tarumbwa Strid by telephone from Berlin.

 

In a world in the throws of a melt-down of the global financial system, where City of London financiers are looking for control, looking to save their system, while instigating destabilizations, potentially leading to wars, certainly including Africa, host Freeman begins the discussion with a question to Dr. Mapuranga on the status of the recent elections for President and Parliament in Zimbabwe.

 

Ambassador Mapuranga discusses the elections as a “culmination of the process started in March 2007, when the heads of state and government of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) met, and issued a communiqué in which they requested the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, to play the part of facilitator—some say even mediator—in talks between the ruling party, ZANU-PF, and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).”

 

The talks resulted in Amendment 18 to the Zimbabwean Constitution, which cut the Presidential term from six to five years, and stipulates a maximum of two terms. It also created Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), with two members each nominated by the opposition party and by the ruling party.

 

Amb. Mapuranga, after outlining the course of the recent elections, held according to ZEC rules, details a lot of interference by British, who “if you listen to some of the debates that go on in the House of Lords, you would in fact get convinced that as far as they’re concerned, Zimbabwe is not yet an independent sovereign state.”

 

There follows a discussion of the history of colonial Africa, going back to 1890, up through 14-year War of Liberation, and the continuing scramble for the “treasure trove” of raw materials in Zimbabwe.

 

Portia Tarumbwa Strid intervenes at this point, on President Robert Mugabe’s land reform policy, and similar policies to redress the disgusting British policies of forced starvation, wars, and disease: “Any government that tries to go against globalization, or against the IMF, or against the British Empire, will get crushed.”

 

This allowed the Ambassador to elaborate. “The economy we inherited was an integral part of the Anglo-American economy, and so, very vulnerable to sanctions, including ‘regime change’”

 

There is a new determination of African countries, however, to take their destiny into their own hands. The problem is, they are not getting any help from the West.

 

Dr. Mapuranga: “As far as the British are concerned—and Kenya was a British colony—it doesn’t really matter if it is Raila Odinga in power, or Mwai Kibaki—both of them are very close allies of the British. In Zimbabwe, it is different. We are talking of two different paradigms of development. On the one hand, you have a puppet party, which takes instructions from London, the MDC, which is funded by London; and on the other, you have the party of nationalists that spearheaded the liberation war, and is saying that the indigenous people should also have a say in the ownership of land, and the mineral resources. They cannot just continue to be laborers in the mines of the British, or on British farms.”

 

In answer to Ms. Tarumbwa Strid’s plea to help Zimbabwe build highways, railways, canal systems, doubling its food production, introducing nuclear irradiation for food preservation, and nuclear power, especially the fourth generation Pebble Bed reactor being built in South Africa for power and desalination, Amb. Mapuranga responded: “I agree entirely. But you have a situation where the Bush Administration arrogates to itself the power to say who should have access to nuclear technology, and who should not. That’s a big problem. We have a Ministry of Water Development, which is concerned with building dams and singing bore-holes for irrigation purposes.”

 

[For a complete transcript of the interview, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 17, April 25, 2008. Pp. 48-56.]

 

Release Date:  April 28, 2008

 

Program No. 714

“Averting Doom,” Pt. 3

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

On March 12, Lyndon LaRouche conducted an international video webcast from Washington, DC, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. Debra Freeman moderated. This edition of The LaRouche Connection features the concluding section of the Discussion Session following Mr. LaRouche’s opening presentation.

 

From a Zimbabwean living abroad: “I would appreciate your view on the current situation in Zimbabwe, and the upcoming elections,  [as well as] Africa as a whole, and how the current perilous state of the world political and economic system will impact my already extremely vulnerable continent.”

 

John Asher: What’s going to have to be the transition here, out away from this Eurodollar/petrodollar system, in terms of bringing in the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act and New Bretton Woods?

 

From a Democratic staffer on a House Committee: If Hillary Clinton were elected, would this mean fascism could not be imposed?”

 

From a director of one of the Presidential campaigns: “You repeatedly refer to your Youth Movement, and the role they’re playing in forwarding your political agenda. Yet, those under age 22 or 23 are voting overwhelmingly for Barak Obama. Please explain.”

 

Alli Perebikovsky: What is the historic and cultural background of those nations [which would constitute your Four Power Agreement, i.e., China, India, Russia, and the United States]? What is it that allows these nations to be the best combination to change the current world system?”

 

Carlos Cano (president of the Conseno world organization): “Why do you persist in restructuring the old-neo-liberal model, when those tendencies keep us from a new world order, to be able to save the Earth from climatic changes through responsible consumption?”

 

From several EIR readers and others: “Vice-President Dick Cheney is going to 5-6 countries in Southwest Asia, and many people fear an Iran war, or other preventive war is being set up. This is especially the case after the resignation of Admiral Fallon. What is your assessment of this region, and how do you think the U.S. can avoid war before the Presidential elections?”

 

Question from a male in the audience:  “What is your idea of our future educational system, based on morality and creativity?”

 

From a well-known Democratic consultant: “The current race for the Democratic nomination is being orchestrated in such a way as to cause bitter divisions among Democrats, and my fear is that those divisions may be too bitter and too deep to be mended. If this continues, I’m afraid we face the possibility of a GOP victory. Do you think there is some efficient way to deal with this problem now?”

 

Composite question from six sources in Italy: “The former finance minister of Italy, Giulio Tremonti, has recently written a book on the end of globalization, and the need for a New Bretton Woods. Unfortunately, Tremonti is part of the Berlusconi political movement, in which many are part of the old P-2 networks. They also support a platform which is racist, xenophobic, and generally deplorable, How to you think this contradiction is going to be resolved?”

 

From someone who was a super-delegate to the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston: “Hoe does evil manifest itself in individuals?”

 

Release Date:  May 5, 2008                

Program No. 715

“Firewall: In Defense of the Nation-State”

Early in 2008, Lyndon LaRouche tasked a small team of young associates to create a documentary which would present the true story of what has become widely, but falsely, referred to as “The Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis,” and what to do about it. On February 22, the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC) released 10,000 copies of an 84-minute DVD called “Firewall: In Defense of the Nation-State,” and began distributing them nationally. In this edition of The LaRouche Connection, we present a 60-minute version of “Firewall,” edited for Public Access.

 

On July 25, 2007, before the crisis burst into the news, Lyndon LaRouche delivered an address in Washington, DC which was webcast internationally on the internet, stating the close of the post-Franklin Roosevelt global financial and monetary system:

 

“Firewall” begins with a clip of Mr. LaRouche from that webcast: “There is no possibility of a non-collapse of the present financial system. None. It’s finished now. The present financial system cannot continue to exist under any circumstances, under any presidency, under any leadership, or any leadership of nations. Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general immediate chain reaction type of collapse. At what speed we don’t know, but it will go on and it will be unstoppable. And the longer it goes on before coming to an end, the worse things will get.”

 

While Mr. LaRouche spoke about the reality of a global collapse, Presidential candidates, elected officials, and respected economists raced to reveal various “stimulus packages,” thus perpetuating the hopeless bailout of an already bankrupt system.

 

“Firewall” reveals the process by which we have come to such a point in history, and how we might rise to regain America’s proper role in the world, rather than shrinking into littleness, watching the great experiment of our Founding Fathers relegated to the dustbin of history, as the world descends into a new Dark Age.

 

In the second half of the 19th Century, a new dynamic began to express itself in the political landscape of the world. Previously dominated by a system of empires, typified by the British Empire’s commitment to thriving off the sheer brute labor power of uneducated, enslaved populations,  the post-colonial U.S. Republic offered a better vision for the future, typified in the writings of American System economist and adviser to President Lincoln, Henry C. Carey.

 

Lincoln triumphed over the concerted efforts of the British Empire to break the Union apart, through support of the Confederacy and other means of subversion. The American System, based upon freeing and fostering the creative capacities of mankind, thrived upon a culture of scientific advancement, and development of basic economic infrastructure. The U.S. became the first continental sovereign nation-state to establish itself on the map, in the entire span of recorded history.

 

The international consequences of America’s achievement precipitated rapidly. Germany, Japan, and Russia underwent rapid development. Not giving up easily, the Britain’s Lord Palmerston drew Russia into an alliance against Germany, and manipulated events which led to World War I, the ultimate aim being the ruin of Germany.

 

“Firewall” goes through the horrendous terms of the Versailles treaty—a death sentence for Germany. By 1923, with a disintegrated monetary system, Germany had nowhere to turn, save a political solution to the Weimar madness. Appointed as currency commissioner, and then president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht catalyzed the further dismantling of Germany as a nation-state. He brought an end to the hyperinflation, alright, but only by means of imposing severe hyper-deflation, securing further reparations payments off the backs of an already starved population. The final remedy to enforced disintegration came when the London and Wall Street merged, in slime-mold fashion, to finance the election of Adolf Hitler. Europe was again pitched into savage austerity and World War.

 

Today we are witnessing, once again, the threefold process of feeding a ballooning financial bubble, using an expanding money supply, looted from a collapsed physical economy—exactly what was imposed on defeated Germany—represented as a single, collapse function. A shock front develops rapidly, until it reaches a critical point of instability, where the rate of           

increase in the monetary aggregates surpasses that of the financial aggregates. This singularity marks the transition between

two entirely distinct spaces, where the governing processes on the one side no longer apply on the other.

 

After World War II, Britain launched a project in the U.S. of the same type of fascism as they had established throughout Europe in the prior decade. McCarthyism (better termed “Trumanism,”) turned the U.S. into a virtual police state, creating the conditions later for the rock-drugs-sex existentialist counter-culture, which has dominated the Baby Boomer generation ever since. This time, unlike Germany after WWI, there has been no need for a military to enforce the destruction of American industry. The 68ers had been imbued with a passionate hatred for the human creative capacity, a passion which had only to be steered by the manipulation of popular culture. Science-fiction replaced Science. The cultural willingness to accept the first phase of the triple curve collapse function had been established.

 

Throughout the course of the 1970s, a series of operations were run with the intention of replacing the U.S. physical economy with a massive parasitical debt bubble. In 1971, a group of financier interests, led by George Schultz and Felix Rohatyn, made the decision to officially decouple the dollar from gold, thus ending the Bretton Woods system of international development, established by President Franklin Roosevelt, ushering in by 1979 what the Council on Foreign Relations termed “controlled disintegration of the U.S. economy.”

 

Among the major firewalls established by Roosevelt to defend the American people, the Savings and Loan banks – barred from speculative activities in order to ensure the availability of low interest, long terms loans for housing and other needs—were opened to predatory speculation. Remember Mike Milken and “junk bonds?” By the end of the 1980s, the entire U.S. economy was in a state of collapse, culminating in “Black Monday,” in October of 1987.

 

But an increasing flow of money, looted from the collapsing physical economy, was required to feed the ballooning bubble. Under “globalization,” U.S. trade policy was restructured after the model of the British East India Company. The cost of goods, which would otherwise be skyrocketing, was lowered, in essence, to looting the caloric intake of the populations of the un-developing world. Derivatives markets spread across the globe.

 

After the blowout of the Y2K bubble, a critical discontinuity was reached. Banks began appraising housing prices at higher and higher levels, and new housing development took off. By this time, the electricity grid was wrecked, the steel industry shut down, and the auto industry packaged up and shipped out of the country. The average cost of housing began to exceed the average income. With families unable to afford new homes, sales slowed.

 

“Sub-prime” lending came to the rescue! By offering more and more risky loans to more and more people who could ill afford them, the system managed to keep itself afloat. But not for long. In June 2007, the largest sub–prime lender, Bear Stearns, found its paper no longer being accepted at face value. This triggered a chain reaction, and over 80 mortgage lenders disappeared. The U.S. Treasury and European Central Bank were buffaloed by the City of London into pumping hundreds of billions of dollar into the system by the end of the year, in order to prevent the major banks from going under. Meanwhile, we were being primed for a fascist intervention.

 

Today, as the world faces a crisis comparable to that of 1923, the political solution proffered by some, including would-be President, billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, is massive cuts in social services, such as health care and pensions. Like feudal barons, financial agencies are assuming control over the nation’s infrastructure, restricting its usage to those rich enough to pay the rising tolls. This time, the apparatus which would be used is termed, misleadingly, a “Public-Private Partnership”—otherwise known as Mussolini-style corporatism.

 

Once again, as in Weimar Germany, we have reached a point where the solution must be a political one. But this time, the American people and the world now face an opportunity which was never given to Weimar Germany.

 

Lyndon LaRouche: “Under our Constitution with a President and with the backing of a Congress which supports him in this, the U.S. can act to create a firewall in which we protect mortgages and legitimate, chartered banks. No foreclosures. Keep essential banking functions open. Maintain the communities and the nation as physically functioning entities. The government controls the credit. The government is a sovereign. The government is the only one that is allowed to utter currency. The government must now assert control over its own money that it creates. No other money is allowed to be generated, except by treaty agreements with other nations.”

 

By treaty arrangements with the three other major powers—China, India, and Russia—it is possible to once again create a fixed-exchange rate system in the world, putting a lid on inflation, and once again issue long term credit, in two tiers, the first for productive activities, such as developing higher and higher technologies, going to a nuclear economy, maglev trains, and all sorts of new raw materials, at 1-2%; and the other for everything else, at a floating rate. We can have a really bright future if we just let this go!

 

[For a complete script of the program, go to www.larouchepub.com/tv. Click on Program Summaries for 2008, and scroll down to Program No. 714.]

 

Release Date:  May 15, 2008 

 

“FIREWALL: IN DEFENSE OF THE NATION-STATE”

 

RELEASED FEBRUARY 22, 2008 AS A DVD

BY THE

LYNDON LAROUCHE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE

 

Following is a complete transcript of the 84-minute version of the documentary.

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Narrator: In mid-2007, the global financial system exploded.

 

Newspaper headlines and television sets across the country resounded with reports of what was soon widely referred to as “The Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis.”  The abysmal losses of Countywide Financial and American Home Mortgage became ‘the talk of the town’ almost overnight.

 

The failure was not of pieces of the system, however, but of the system itself.

 

This was not an unforeseen “event.”

 

Several days before the reports of crisis burst into the news, Economist Lyndon LaRouche delivered an international address, signifying the close of the post-FDR global financial and monetary system.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (Time:1:01-1:43)

“There is no possibility of a non-collapse  of the present financial system.  None.  It’s finished now.  The present financial system can not continue to exist under any circumstances, under any presidency, under any leadership or any leadership of nations.   Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general immediate chain reaction type of collapse. At what speed we don’t know but they will go on and it will be unstoppable, and the longer it goes on before coming to an end, the worse things will get.”]

 

In the ensuing period, though the media frenzy had appeared to dissipate, the terror in the financial world did not.  Rather than following LaRouche’s initiative to break from the failing system and support his Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, federal leaders, under pressure from Wall Street, clung to measures which would only prolong the death-throes of the financial system until the end of the year, at the expense of the population.

 

Upon the arrival of the New Year, in the aftermath of further unprecedented money-pumping measures taken by central banks around the globe at the behest of City of London financiers, political solutions began to surface left and right.  Presidential candidates, elected officials, and economists raced to reveal their “stimulus packages,” further perpetuating the bail out of the already bankrupt system.

 

On January 17th, six months after his assessment of the end of the world financial system, LaRouche again spoke out above the clamor, identifying the full scope and implications of the crisis.  

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (Time: 3:00-3:38)

“Each day now since Jan. 3rd the crisis has been expanding in magnitude at an accelerating rate.  What you think is the extent of the crisis today if the measures I propose are not taken, will become much worse by an order of magnitude. On the next week and the week after that and the week after that until the whole system grinds into a collapse probably sometime during this year, and I’m talking about a global collapse not a collapse of just the trans-Atlantic English speaking community.”]

 

 

The following week ended in the last hurrah of the Federal Reserve: a drastic cut in the interest rates—a clear move of utter desperation.  LaRouche identified this as the culminating event of a commitment made by the trans-Atlantic English-speaking world toward a new phase of crisis: a chain reaction of global hyperinflationary collapse, comparable to that which struck Germany in 1923, terminating in the fascist regimes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. 

 

In this presentation, we shall unfold to the viewer the process by which we have come to such a point in history, and how we may rise to the occasion of regaining America’s proper role in the world, rather than shrinking into littleness and watching as the great experiment of our Founding Fathers is relegated to the dustbin of history, as the world enters a new Dark Age.

 

 We urge the viewer to watch as if his future depended on it, because in a very real sense, it does. 

 

PRE-WORLD WAR I

 

Narrator: In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new dynamic was beginning to express itself in the political landscape of the world.  Previous to this, the world had been dominated by a system of empires, typified by the British Empire’s commitment to thriving off the sheer brute labor power of uneducated, enslaved populations.

 

In the name of free trade, the British East India Company enforced an economic policy devised to maintain the dependence of its colonies upon its control of maritime shipping throughout the world.  By flooding foreign markets with cheap goods they would force other countries to devalue their labor to the point where their only recourse was either the employment of slave labor or the elimination of manufacturing altogether.  By these means Britain’s colonies were to forever remain |vassals| with the sole purpose of supplying raw materials to the Empire.

 

[John Hoefle (Time: 6:08-7:06)

“The British Empire ruled by controlling trade and raw materials. So they would have colonies around the world, in which they would loot these colonies. These colonies were never allowed to develop beyond the level at which they needed to develop to make the looting of them, the looting of their raw materials, efficient. So you would build railroads from the mine to the coast, but you would never build railroads across the continent, to tie the continent together as a whole.  You would build up certain local aristocracies, but that’s for the purposes of providing the political protection for your looting operation.  But it’s all about looting and extraction, you don’t want these things to become nations.  Because if they become nations, then they start looking at these resources as theirs, instead of yours, and that’s a problem if you are trying to steal them.”]

 

In the post-colonial United States Republic, however, there existed a better vision for the future.  American System economist and adviser to President Abraham Lincoln, Henry C. Carey, drew a stark contrast when he wrote in 1851:

           

[Carey Reader: Two systems are before the world; ….  One looks to underworking the Hindoo, and sinking the rest of the world to his level; the other to raising the standard of man throughout the world to our level.  One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence,…and civilization.  One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace.  One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American System, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.

Such is the true mission of the people of these United States…. To raise the value of labor throughout the world, we need only raise the value of our own.]

 

In 1865, the young nation--the United States of America--under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln, triumphed over the concerted efforts of the British Empire to break her apart through support of the confederacy and other means of subversion.  The American System, based upon freeing and fostering the creative capacities of mankind, thrived upon a culture of scientific advancement and development of basic economic infrastructure.  A vast railway grid, stretching from ocean to ocean, reinforced the internal sovereignty of the nation, and secured independence from any external sea-power.  In this way, the United States became the first continental sovereign nation-state to establish itself on the map, in the entire span of recorded history.

 

[John Hoefle (Time: 9:50-10:20)

“Now a nation is an entirely different thing.  A nation, if you look at our constitution and declaration of independence, where it says clearly that the purpose of what we’re doing is to protect the general welfare of your population.  That we’re all in this together. That everybody gets protected.  That we want to build a nation according to a concept which promotes culture, which promotes the development of the individuals and the creative potential of the human mind, because that’s your real asset.” ]

 

The international consequences of America’s achievement precipitated rapidly.  Just as Carey had foreseen, the popularity of the American System spread throughout the globe, as other nations perceived its successful thwarting of the British Empire.   Nations such as Germany, Russia, and Japan underwent rapid development.

 

Germany, in particular, began to develop a vast network of rail and canals.  With such an immense system of infrastructure, it quickly became a leader in industry throughout not only Europe, but the entire world. The productive output of Germany’s Ruhr region was second only to the powerhouse of America, the Pittsburg region.  With Germany’s exports growing, so did its maritime power; and as it laid plans to fund the construction of a continuous rail grid from Berlin to Baghdad, it emerged as a significant threat to the long-standing British world dominance.

 

[John Hoefle (Time: 11:38-12:15)

“But if you promote the creative potential of the human mind, then you also destroy the world in which the Empire is operating, because anybody who’s got a brain, and can see a better way, is not going to tolerate these things.  And when the United States, as you saw after the civil war, when we got the American System up and running and started exporting it to other countries around the world, we were transforming the world.  And we were the greatest threat to this system on the planet, and they’ve been after us to take it down ever since.”]

 

[Text on screen only (12:24)

“If ‘Berlin-Baghdad’ were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea-power would be united under German authority…”    British Major Laffan  (excerpt taken from “The Serbs: Guardians at the Gate”).]

 

Though America could no longer be subverted by military means, such tactics were still fully deployable by the British against other nations.  With the 1888 accession of Queen Victoria’s imprudent grandson, Wilhelm II, to the German throne, the British Empire needed only to set the trap.  Under the maintenance of his uncle, England’s King Edward VII, “Willy” had no difficulty in falling for it.

 

Earlier in the nineteenth century, Britain’s Lord Palmerston, notorious for his foreign manipulations, had already prearranged the ploy.  Were any conflict to break out between Germany and France, Palmerston well knew that the Belgian territory would be a crucial strategic position for German success.  Thus, under his instigation, Belgium was set up as a neutral country, meaning that should any nation violate Belgium’s border, that nation would immediately become the target of British aggressions.  Britain had but to lure them in. Germany, however, had grown to such a power that Britain and France alone would not be capable of defeating her. 

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (Time: 13:43-13:55)

“The British method is to get other people to fight a war and kill each other, and they then come in and pick up the pieces, after the people have exhausted themselves in killing each other.” ]

 

Once the British drew Russia into an alliance against Germany after Kaiser Wilhelm II disintegrated the alliance with Russia, the supplemental power the British sought--to wage a two-front war against Germany--was secured.  All that remained to be introduced was the spark.  The convenient assassination of Austrian heir apparent Archduke Franz Ferdinand, carried out by means of Serbian nationalists, ignited the situation, pitting the Germans and Austrians against the Russians and French.  The British up to the last minute maintained a public appearance of having no interest in the ‘continental conflicts’ brewing in the summer of 1914, yet their intent, was unrelentingly to crush Germany at all costs.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (Time: 14:50-15:24)

“So this is the way it happened, but the purpose was to destroy, geopolitically as they call it, to destroy continental Europe, continental Eurasia, to maintain it under the control of the British Empire, and using whatever lies, whatever excuses and so forth they could use, whatever motives they could cook up, to get this thing going.  The essential thing is what is called geopolitics.  To maintain the maritime power of the British system as the world Empire.”]

 

As World War I broke out in August 1914, and all the intentions were unveiled, Kaiser Wilhelm II bewailed:

 

[Stefan Ossenkopp: (Time 15:37) “The world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate aim of which is the ruin of Germany.  England, France, and Russia have conspired for our annihilation…that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but surely created by Edward VII….  The encirclement of Germany is at last an accomplished fact.  We have run our heads into the noose….”]

 

POST-WORLD WAR I


In the aftermath of Germany's military defeat, the British intention to stop the spread of the American System’s potential was now revealed.

           

On condition of the 1918 Armistice, the army and navy were completely dismantled, and all of Germany’s locomotives and train cars were extracted from the country. 

 

The 1919 Peace conference in Paris excluded Germany from the negotiations.   The full burden for all damages incurred through the war was heaped upon Germany.  

 

As an initial installment, twenty billion gold marks were to be paid to the Allied victors in the form of German bonds--redeemable either in gold marks or physical goods.

 

Germany was to be stripped of its entire merchant marine fleet. It was to produce 200,000 tons of ships each year, along with reconstruction equipment for the Allied nations.  One hundred thousand head of cattle were to be relinquished to France and Belgium alone, along with hundreds of thousands of other farm animals.  This would occur in tandem with a continued naval blockade, which had already reduced the food intake level of the German people to half that of before the war. 

 

Not only were Germany’s materials to be extracted, but key border territories were to be ceded to surrounding countries.  The Alsace Lorraine region, possessing the most developed canal system for transport of materials and products from the Rhine River, as well as large deposits of iron ore and coal, was to be turned over to France. Upper Silesia, another choke-point of industry and transport, was to be ceded to Poland. The sudden loss of manpower, resources, rich farmland, and factories would slash the ability to meet the reparations requirements.

 

These were the terms of the Versailles treaty. Were Germany to refuse them, the defenseless nation was threatened with invasion and occupation. In the words of the German Government, they had no choice but to sign their “own death sentence.”

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (Time: 16:49-17:04)

“You want to destroy a nation, you blame it for something.  It’s that simple.  “This guy must be killed” Why?  “Well, I’ll tell you this later, why, the reason, we gotta kill him now.”]

In the period between 1919 and 1921, Germany proceeded in forced march to fulfill the payments. The German government printed paper Reichsmarks to buy up the greater part of produced goods, in order to hand them over for reparations. Thus, since most of the production went toward payment rather than the development of the nation, nothing remained as a foundation to give value to the currency.

In May of 1921, the London-steered reparations committee unveiled their second set of terms, declaring that Germany must pay 132 billion gold marks, an impossible sum.

In October, after the failed attempt of German Foreign minister Walter Rathenau to rework debt agreements with France, the Allies increased the pressure to pay the debt. In order to offset the loss of physical capital, the government was forced to incur more debt than the original reparations. By the end of the year, the built up pressure of the debt and the consequent money printing became apparent, as 262 Marks were needed to buy a single U.S. Dollar.

In response to mounting economic pressures applied at the League of Nations gathering in Genoa, Italy, Foreign Minister Rathenau met with Russian representatives in nearby Rapallo, where a treaty  was signed which would relieve Germany of the portion of its reparation payments due to Russia, and improve relations between the two countries. This positive turn offered an escape from the ever-tightening British noose; however, such a promising agreement was not tolerated. Two weeks after the signing of the Rapallo treaty, Rathenau was assassinated. Within four weeks of the Rathenau murder, the Mark dropped from 345 to the dollar to 1,254.

 

By the autumn of 1922, the ability to pay the financial debt was dwindling.  In the face of collapsing wages and the continued need to service the debt, the Government was forced to rely on unrestrained money printing, and the Mark continued its fall. This dramatic increase in monetary aggregate required bills with higher face values than ever before.

           

In January 1923, despite breakthroughs by Germany in diplomatic initiatives towards reworking the debt agreements, the Ruhr region, which produced three-quarters of Germany’s coal, iron and steel, was invaded by Allied troops.  Refusing to yield to military occupation, the German government encouraged the entire working population of the Ruhr to go on strike. Production was completely shut down. The loss of this strategic area was beyond devastating, and had three related consequences.

 

First, the severing of the Ruhr from the remainder of the German economy was a conclusive stripping of the income stream that had been used to feed the financial debt.  Second, the rest of Germany suffered huge increases in unemployment.  Third, in order to financially support the entire working population on strike, the government was forced to further accelerate the printing presses.

 

Under these conditions, the concept of saving money became an impossibility for the German people.  On the contrary, the more quickly it could be spent the better, so as not to be left with a handful of worthless Reichsmarks.  Wheelbarrows became the common mode of transporting money to buy essential foodstuffs, which were becoming more expensive by the minute.  In the face of such circumstances, many sought refuge in the wild frenzy of a culturally degenerate fantasy-world.  Others, equally deluded, engaged in obsessive gambling and speculation, some attempting to make a profit by betting against the Reichsmark in the currency markets.

 

In the spring of 1923 inflation was in full bloom. By June, nothing could stop the mark.   Waves of strikes broke out due to collapsing wages. Unemployment skyrocketed.  All aspects of daily life became focused solely upon survival, all savings disappeared, and nearly all income was consumed in simply preventing starvation.  Printing presses were run day and night to keep up with the demands of inflation.  The hyperbolic expansion of circulating Marks was mirrored in their devaluation. By the end of the year, the Mark had lost all of its value.  The German population was drowned in a sea of money.

The magnitude and rapidity of this blowout of the German economy necessitated the invention of a new term: hyper-inflation.

 

HJALMAR SCHACHT

 

With a disintegrated monetary system, Germany had nowhere to turn, save a political solution.  Yet the question of whether this solution would preserve Germany as a nation-state, or whether it would become a mere geopolitical tool, was left entirely up to the British Empire to answer.

 

The so called `solution' to the Weimar madness was to bring in Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht; German by birth, but not by breed.  His closest collaborators consisted wholly of Wall Street and London international financial circles, such as John Foster Dulles, J.P. Morgan, Averil Harriman and Bank of England head, Montagu Norman.   Loyal to his kind, he catalyzed the further dismantling of Germany as a nation-state.

 

As newly appointed currency commissioner, and soon-to-be president of the Reichsbank, Schacht introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, which was fixed in value.  At an exchange rate of one trillion marks for one Rentenmark, citizens handed in their entire money supply for a handful of Rentenmarks.  Schacht's policies brought an end to the hyperinflation, but only by means of imposing a severe hyper-deflation, designed to further secure the payment of the Versailles reparations.  Thus, instead of feeding the monstrous debt with worthless ink on paper, the reparations would now be directly stripped off of the backs of the already starved population.  In the name of 'balancing the budget,' any type of so called 'useless' spending was to be cut.  Cuts in credit to industries, and a dismissal of 397,000 civil servants were accompanied by the enforcement of high taxes and increased union busts. Almost all social programs were cut.  As a result, employment and production plummeted.  In addition, Schacht's entrance into power was accompanied with the full realization of his long-planned privatization of all German industry.  New York and London financial vultures and their international syndicates quickly swept in to pick the bones of what remained of the coal, steel, iron, and chemical industries.  Those same industries, under their new foreign controllers, would soon become infamous for their inhuman labor policies. 

 

As any moderately sane people would actively resist such inhumane policies,  Schacht searched for an entity that would have the stomach to adequately enforce their execution.  The remedy for the inadequacy of the current police force to carry out Schacht’s purpose finally came in 1933, when the London and Wall Street cabal merged in slime-mold fashion to finance the election of Adolf Hitler.

 

Europe was again launched into savage austerity and World War.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (Time: 28:27-29:35)

Germany was intentionally destroyed, by the French and the British, essentially the British.  It was intentionally destroyed.  They said “Die!”, that was their intention.  It was a geopolitical move but the intention was to destroy the independent power of nations in Eurasia, and the United States, in part the United States.  The United States was taken as a partner under Wilson in this operation together with Teddy Roosevelt, so we were taken in under this thing.  So we went out to destroy continental Europe, we picked on Germany, destroyed Germany.  So what was imposed on Germany at Versailles and later, was the intent to destroy the country.  And then in general, they used that as a basis for creating a fascist system, they intended to establish a fascist system, a world fascist system.  And it was the British who put the Nazis in power.  It was not a spontaneous thing of Germany; the British stuck them in power, deliberately.”]

 

THE TRIPLE CURVE

 

The process set into motion in Germany was one that economist Lyndon LaRouche described as the "Triple Curve."

 

The threefold process of feeding a ballooning financial bubble, using an expanding money supply looted from a collapsed physical economy, represents a single, typical collapse function.   Like the separation of the boundary layer during transonic flight, the act of divorcing the money supply from the physical economy generates a self-feeding shock front.  This shock front develops rapidly until it reaches a critical point of instability, where the rate of increase in the monetary aggregates surpasses that of the financial aggregates.  This singularity marks the transition between two entirely distinct spaces, where the governing processes on one side no longer apply on the other.  As physicist and mathematician Bernhard Riemann recognized, this type of discontinuity is characteristic of all physical processes.  Significantly, it is the most characteristic feature of the anti-entropic development of human physical economies.

 

All human modes of operation constitute what is called a phase space: a constructive-geometric space of variable curvature and dimensionality, representing the domain of all potential activity -- in short, a set of physical laws.

 

In a human economy, the boundary conditions governing these "laws" are represented by the degree of technological development, typified here by available energy resources.  A wood burning civilization has a necessary upper limit, not only on their total energy output, but on the possibility for that resource to sustain a growing population.  If Man were merely an animal, the depletion of that resource base would result in periodic fluctuations in the human population: a cycle of growth and collapse, maintaining the human population at constant median value, like that of every other living creature on Earth.  On the contrary, however, the characteristic of human economic development is to surpass each encountered boundary by the introduction of newly discovered principles, transitioning from resource base to resource base, forming, in effect, a continuous curve of discontinuities.

 

This is the reflection in the large of the human creative capability which empire seeks to eliminate.             

 

THE BOOMERS

 

[John Hoefle (Time: 32:36-34:01)

“They had an operation to destroy us going into World War II where they wanted this global fascist movement, and there was an attempt, they had the planned coup in the United States against Franklin Roosevelt for example, but you had Mussolini, you had Hitler, you had these fascist movements in all sorts of places around the world. But they blew it because Hitler was out of control and he moved the wrong way, he came after Europe instead of going after and destroying Russia.  So that caused a problem, then they had to defend themselves against Hitler, when they had been planning on using Hitler as a weapon against Russia.  And the other problem was that the American System rose up to bite them of FDR, who took the constitution seriously and intervened to protect the nation-state so that after the war, we wound up as the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.  Industrially we were very strong, nobody could touch us, militarily, nobody could touch us.  So they came out of the war in exactly the opposite shape they had planned.  Instead of running the world, they were on the run.  So their response was to try to bring us down from within, because that is all they had.”]

 

Particularly during the period immediately following the second World War, it would not have been possible to destroy the American system militarily within the United States itself.  The British Hitler project had failed, and the empire had been forced to come crawling to the United States for assistance in stopping their Frankenstein monster.  But this was no longer the United States of Ku Klux Klan booster Woodrow Wilson.  American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic measures had curbed the banking establishment on Wall St., and his recovery programs had created an explosion of technological and economic optimism that far exceeded what the British had sought to destroy in Germany.

 

To stop this, it was necessary for the British to reestablish the influence of their agents within the United States.  On March 5, 1946, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, which later became known as his "Iron Curtain Speech."

 

[Winston Churchill  “Iron Curtain Speech” (Time:35:12)

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.  Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and Eastern Europe.  Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control…”  

 

With this, a project was launched to unleash in the United States the same type of fascism as the British had established throughout Europe in the prior decade.  McCarthyism, better termed "Trumanism," turned the U. S. into a police state.  It was generally recognized by intelligent thinkers that this was a repeat of the fascist terror that had just been defeated in Europe:

 

These police state conditions prepared the generation just returning from the war to raise what has been, without question, the most gullible generation the United States has ever produced.

 

[“Boys with Dad” clip/Kennedy Assassination announcement:
"These boys greet their dad as though they are genuinely glad to see him; as though had really missed being away from him during the day and are anxious to talk to him. This is the time for pleasant discussion, in a thoroughly relaxed mood. They don't pick this time of the day to spring unpleasant surprises on Dad; if they have disagreeable news, they'll postpone the discussion until another time. And this is no time to DUN your Father for a raise in your allowance, new clothes, or argue about other financial matters."

TV-Reporter:
„Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen, you'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath, but, about 10 or 15 minutes ago, a tragic thing from all indications at this point has happened  in the City of Dallas. Let me quote to you this: President Kennedy and Governor John Connelly have been cut down by assassin's bullets in downtown Dallas. "]

 

The Baby Boomers were less a generation than they were a product of an extensive social manipulation.  As had been done in Europe, earlier, the shock trauma of a series of traumatic events were used to create a broken and malleable generation, ripe for the kinds of social engineering required to uproot the type of American optimism which the global financial elites, centered in the City of London, so despised.

 

This created the conditions for the launching of the rock-drugs-sex existentialist counterculture which dominated the Baby Boomer generation.  This time, unlike Germany after WWI, there was no need for a military to enforce the destruction of American industry.  The 68ers had been imbued with a passionate hatred for the human creative capacity, a passion which had only to be steered by the manipulation of popular culture.

 

 [John Hoefle (Time: 38:37-40:36)

“So 1968 there is another event, a speech at the Bilderberger Meeting in 1968 by a man named George Ball.  And George Ball was a member of the steering committee of the Bilderbergers, which was a primarily European oligarchic fascist organization, Prince Bernhard, the Nazi from the Netherlands and others, we’ve said a lot about the Bilderbergers.  He was a banker, a senior banker at Lehman Brothers.  Eastern establishment, former state department, diplomat, a very important man in our government.  So what George Ball was laying out was not some theory about what we ought to do, what George Ball was doing was telling people ‘Here’s the new plan.’  And the new plan was something he called the world company.  Now the idea of the world company is that nation-states cannot be trusted to manage the world because they are selfish.  They look out for their own self-interest.  Nations think that just because they happen to sit on top of raw materials, that those raw materials belong to them.  And we all know that in a period of Malthusian shortages, of overpopulation, of scarce resources, that this can’t be tolerated.  You can’t allow these selfish nations to hold the world hostage, so we have to fix that.  Now we are going to fix that with a corporate structure because the corporation isn’t bound by these kinds of old-fashioned silly ideas.  The corporation is more interested in efficiency.  Where getting the raw materials and distributing them in the most efficient way, which means at the most profit.”]

 

Even as some of the polymorphically perverse hippies of the 60s transformed, throughout the seventies, into the "greed is good" capitalists of the 80s, they never lost their utter aversion to all things technological.  The real technological optimism of Roosevelt's recovery was supplanted by the fraud of "information technology."  Science was replaced by science-fiction; and the Boomers sought to make their programmed fantasies a reality. 

 

The cultural willingness to accept the first phase of the triple curve collapse function had been established.

 

Upon accomplishing this, the financial establishment launched a full scale takedown of the social and economic reforms created by Franklin Roosevelt.  Throughout the course of the 1970s, a series of operations were run with the intention of replacing the U.S. physical economy with a massive, parasitical debt bubble.

 

 

In 1971, a grouping of financier interests, led by George Schultz and Felix Rohatyn, made the decision to officially decouple the dollar from gold.  This marked the end of the Bretton Woods system of international development, as it had been established by Roosevelt. 

 

[Excerpt from Nixon Speech (Time: 42:03)   

“We will press for the necessary reforms to set up an urgently needed new international monetary system.”]

 

The dollar was now officially detached from the physical economy, and free to be transformed entirely into an instrument of speculation.  Currency exchange rates were permitted to fluctuate wildly, and long term investment into national development projects became an impossibility for the underdeveloped areas of the globe.

 

This was consolidated in the period between 1973 and 1974, when a staged oil crisis was used to create the so-called "Euro dollar market."  Royal Dutch Shell and its bankers, Rothschild and Felix Rohatyn’s Lazard, set up the oil spot market and made the dollar the currency of the international oil trade.   This raised the value of the dollar, while at the same time placing a huge pool of dollars into the hands of speculators outside of the United States, to be used as the major instrument in the attacks which were to follow.

 

Throughout the 1970s the very notion of a physically productive enterprise was eaten up in a series of so-called "mergers and acquisitions."  In reality, this represented a steady rebuilding of the kind of cartelization which Roosevelt had worked so hard to destroy.  The legitimate American entrepreneurial enterprise was slowly overrun by profit-obsessed mega-corporations.  Leveraged buyouts of businesses became the norm.  Formerly productive industries were looted, and turned into short term money making machines.  As in Weimar Germany under the conditions of Versailles, the value of financial aggregates, again in the form of debt and stock market valuation, began to spiral upwards out of control. 

 

In 1975, Felix Rohatyn, playing the role of a modern day Hjalmar Schacht, was appointed head of the Municipal Assistance Corporation -- Big MAC -- in charge of handling the financial crisis which New York City was then experiencing.  Aside from the brutal austerity policies implemented by Rohatyn during that process, this set the standard for the ultimate aims of Rohatyn and his financial controllers: private money would now be allowed to run public policy.

 

Finally, in 1979, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker instituted a policy which the Council on Foreign Relations had dubbed the "controlled disintegration of the U.S. economy.  This took the form of an enormous hike in the interest rate, a move which devastated the U.S. productive sector.  With the rate of interest on loans in the range of twenty-one percent per year, long term investments became an impossibility.  Any business venture with the intent of promoting physical development was doomed to failure, and short term money making schemes thrived.  This marked the beginning a period of absolute lunacy economically, and culturally.

 

[John Hoefle (Time: 45:33-45:58)

“Basically in the 1980s you had all of these rules that were designed to protect the economy and protect citizens from these rapacious banking practices were dismantled and the policies were set just the other way to favor this sort of thing and encourage it.  So this continued, by the end of the 1980s the whole system was bankrupt.”]

 

During this period, one of the major firewalls established by Franklin Roosevelt to defend the American people was deliberately targeted and destroyed.  The Savings and Loan banks -- barred from speculative activities by Roosevelt in order to ensure the availability of low interest, long term loans for housing and other needs -- were opened to predatory speculation. 

 

The model for the modern stock market was established, nominally, by Michael Milken, who used mafia money to build up Las Vegas, inventing the so-called "junk bond."

 

[John Hoefle (Time:46:40-48:12)

“The case of Michael Milken illustrates how the system actually works because what Milken did in, I think it was about 1978, was to set up in Beverly Hills, California an office of Drexel Burnham Lambert the investment bank which was based in New York and the Beverly Hills office was a place where he started to sell junk bonds, he created the junk bond business.  And a junk bond is by definition a corporate security which has a credit rating of less than investment grade, so it is commonly called a junk bond or a high yield bond.  Now to understand it you have to take it out of the realm of a business story or a financial story, it’s not really about bond ratings or things like that.  What they would do is that Milken would go to a company, let’s say a casino Stevewin’s casino because he helped build Las Vegas and he would say ‘ok, we can raise money for you.  You want to build a fancy new casino we’ll raise money by selling bonds.’  And up to that point the bond market had been only investment grade blue chip companies, people who thought of bonds as being very safe.  So this idea that you would have these companies that might not really make it, that were somewhat shaky, issued bonds this was a new thing.” ]

 

Milken's monsters, as they were known, became the model for stock market speculation, finally obliterating the already thin line between organized crime and Wall Street.

 

By the end of the 1980s the entire U.S. Economy was in a state of collapse.  This collapse culminated with "Black Monday," in October of 1987, when the markets plunged twenty percent, setting the stage for the creation of the largest financial bubble in history by the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who had been installed shortly before the collapse.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (48:58-49:24)

“At that point Greenspan said ‘I’m coming in, I’m coming in, I’m going to fix everything! And he started this particular hyperinflationary system. He said we can invent money, and it was based on Michael Milken.  And Michael Milken’s kind of experiment in California.  Michael Milken went to prison for that.  Greenspan legalized it and expanded it.”]

 

Again, an increasing flow of money, looted from the collapsing physical economy, was required to feed this ballooning bubble.  This time, however, the money was not paper, but digital.  And this time, the effects of hyperinflation were partially masked for the American population by the introduction of a policy of what was called, euphemistically, globalization. 

 

Under globalization, the United States trade policy was restructured after the model of the British East India Company.  The cost of goods, which would otherwise be skyrocketing, was lowered, in essence, by looting the caloric intake of the populations of the developing world.  This did not reduce the effects of inflation, so much as spread it globally.  Meanwhile, U.S. production was gutted even further; literally packed up and shipped overseas, where an underfed, undereducated, overworked labor force cheapened the immediate costs of production.  At the same time, a move was made to addict the American population to lines of credit.

 

[John Hoefle (50:40-51:32)

“The first thing you do is you make sure that they don’t earn enough money to buy what they need without taking on debt and that comes from killing the productive side of the economy.  So then instead of having high paying manufacturing jobs and a lot of high paying jobs, you have these low paying service jobs retail jobs, things like that.  With globalization we’ve seen a continuing downward push on wages under the theory that we have to be competitive in wages with some country on the other side of the world.  This method of using debt to control is very important and it also gives you some insight considering how in debt the United States is.  What some of the levers are that are used to control us.”]

 

Over the course of the 90’s, the mechanisms created by Greenspan for rolling over the debt continued to snowball.  The derivatives market spread across the globe.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (51:54-53:18)

“Every time they turn around they will create a debt.  They will calculate the anticipated income on the debt that they just created, they will then capitalize the income they just fictionalized, they will take a multiplier effect let’s say 3% ratio to the corresponding figure so now you capitalize a debt, an asset of that magnitude, there’s nothing behind it, it’s only the imagination.  So it’s like what happened in Weimar 1923.  Only in the imagination is this system viable.  This system is measured in these kinds of estimations, in quadrillions of dollars of estimated value but nobody ever produced those quadrillions of dollars.  They are not being produced now, they never were produced which means the system depends upon the assumed income like an interest income on a debt which is not real.  So it’s not the fact that you have a boundary condition of a finite amount of value, the nominal value is just expanding with no reason whatsoever in absolute madness.  Now you are calculating the profit based on the yield the average yield on this mass of fictitious value.”]

 

This carnival reached its limit in the autumn of 1998.

 

[John Hoefle (53:25-54:06)

“In 1998 you had the Russian government announce that it was postponing payments on some of its government bonds the GKO bonds.  This sent shockwaves through the financial world not because the amount of money was significant because it really wasn’t that much money, but because here was a sovereign government telling the financial markets ‘no’.  If a government says ‘no’ and can back that up, then the game is over.”]

 

In a desperate effort to re-inflate a collapsing system, the Y 2K scam was launched.  Consumers were convinced that come January 1st, 2000, all functions run on the two digit date system would come to a screeching halt. Calendars would roll over from December 1999, straight to January 1900, unless new software was purchased to further inflate the tech bubble.  Hotshots with no skills other than website design became millionaires overnight.  The NASDAQ stock-market index soared, nearly tripling over the next 18 months.

 

[John Hoefle (54:48-56:01)

“The way they dealt with this was a thing that George Soros referred to as the wall of money.  The central banks started lowering their interest rates and flooding the markets with liquidity trying to get people to buy.  And then you had this scheme to create a tech bubble to pump up the high tech stocks, the internet stocks, computer stocks and that sort of thing as a way of getting things going again, so they started pumping a bunch of money into these things and actually created, going into the last half of 1999, a mania.  So we went from ‘omigod the system just died!’ to a mania in a year.  And in the mania, the tech bubble mania, everybody was buying stock, you know your cabby would give you stock tips that kind of stuff and everybody wanted in on it.  People were using their credit cards to buy stock because the things were all going straight up and they just kept going up and up and up until it blew up and then it was all over.  But the effect of it was to bring the system back.  It restarted it.”]

After the blowout of the Y 2K bubble, the critical point of discontinuity was reached. The final phases of looting the U. S. physical economy had to commence, and new avenues of money pumping had to be found. The looming specter of terrorism following the September Eleventh attacks distracted the population from the hemorrhaging economy, while serving as yet another pretense to pump in more cash. Simultaneously, enormous amounts of money were offered to the now deregulated banks for home loans. Banks began appraising housing prices at higher and higher levels, and new housing development skyrocketed.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche ((56:49-57:17)

“This is especially the Baby Boomers.  ‘I want this, I want this.  I need this.  I need two houses.  I’m going to go into debt through mortgage to have a house, a house that I like and I’m going to get a good deal.  I’m going to swindle my neighbors’ whatever.  ‘Then I’m going to buy a second house on the same terms, using the credit for my first house to get a second house then I’m going to rent this out to people. I’m going to get rich!”]

The income streams from these new forms of money printing were used to inflate market values even further, while at the same time vulture funds swept in to buy up the last remnants of the U. S. productive sector.

By this time, the electricity grid was wrecked, the steel industry was shut down, and the United States automotive industry was packaged up and shipped out of the country.  In many parts of the country, though reports of inflation were kept artificially low, the average cost of housing began to far exceed the average income of the population.

 

[John Hoefle (57:56-58:22)

“The system is geared towards producing more and more higher mortgages at higher prices.  That what’s called a housing market is actually not about housing it’s about mortgages.  It’s the selling of mortgages.  It’s debt forming, it’s all about debt.  You need a house in order to create the debt, so you build a house.  But the purpose of all of this, what drives it is not houses, it’s mortgages.”]

With families unable to afford new homes, sales began to slow. A new means was needed to keep the bubble going. This came to be known by the name of sub-prime lending.

 

[John Hoefle (58:38-59:51)

“In 2005 the rate of increase of new money coming in as mortgages began to decline.  And for a system like this, that’s deadly.  So the rate of the rate of the money coming in began to slow, in part because they were pricing the houses out of reach of much of the population and as we have subsequently seen as this process stops, everything starts to blow up.  So they didn’t want it to blow up so they started easing the terms of the loans to try to sell houses that people couldn’t afford to people anyway.  The whole idea was to sell houses that people couldn’t afford because that was necessary to keep the system going.  And that’s what the sub-prime loans were, that’s what these alt A loans, the           low-documentation, no documentation, adjustable rate mortgages and all these things, this is all a response to the fact that they had priced themselves out of the market, the housing market was beginning to collapse and they were doing everything they could to keep it going.”]

By offering more and more risky loans to more and more people who could not afford them, the system managed to keep itself afloat, though it was clear to those in the know that, at this point, the party was already over.

 

[John Hoefle (01:00-01:01)

“And this was done from the top down, this was not the mortgage lenders, so called sub-prime lenders doing this, because they were merely creatures of the system.  A sub-prime lender makes loans and then turns around and sells them to some bigger institution, if the bigger institutions don’t want them, then the sub-prime lender goes out of business.  But they were just creatures intended as middle-men because they couldn’t survive this process, sooner or later it would blow up.  So the big banks didn’t really want to do this thing on their own, so they had these middle men to do it. And that’s what blew up, that’s what became known as the sub-prime crisis.” ]

 

Finally, the banking establishment began to realize that the situation was untenable.     Unable to stop the blowout, the bankers resorted to shaping how it would be perceived.  In June of 2007, the largest sub-prime lender, Bear Stearns, found that its paper was no longer being accepted at face value. 

 

[Jim Cramer on Bear Sterns Clip (01:01-01:02)

“When I go to Bear Sterns, I don’t want to create fear,  I like Bear Sterns very much but I think at this stage this is not a good call, they shouldn’t have done it, and they should have just said ‘you know what we’re doing well’ and don’t say another thing, just don’t say it! Because it does not inspire confidence to have 10 headlines coming over about what to do, I don’t like it !! This is about Bernanke, he has to be on that call, forget the investors, the investors are going to do—if Bernanke, Bernanke needs to open the discount window, that’s how bad things are out there!  Bernanke needs to focus on this! Alan Greenspan told everyone to take a teaser rate and then raised the rates 17 times, and Bernanke is being an academic, it is no time to be an academic, it is time to get on the Bear Sterns call! Listen! Open the door-fed window, he has no idea how bad it is out there!!  He has no idea!! He has no idea!! I have talked to the heads of almost every single one of these firms in the last 72 hours, and he has NO IDEA what it’s like out there!!  NONE!!”]

 

This triggered a chain reaction, and over eighty mortgage lenders disappeared.  The US Treasury and European Central Bank were buffaloed by the City of London into pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the system by the end of the year, in order to prevent the major banks from going under.  Meanwhile, the U. S. population was being primed for a fascist intervention.

 

[John Hoefle (01:02-

“Now there is no financial solution to this because the financial system has in fact died.  So the solution is in the political realm.”]

 

Today, as the world faces a crisis comparable to that of 1923, the political solution proffered by some is massive cuts in social services, such as health care and pensions.  Like feudal barons, financial agencies are moving to assume control over the nation's infrastructure, restricting its usage to those rich enough to pay the rising tolls.   This time, the apparatus which would be used is what is termed, misleadingly, a Public-Private Partnership.

 

[John Hoefle (01:03-01:04)

“A public-private partnership is a way in which a private corporation can take over infrastructure which was built by tax payer money and then charge tax payers to use it, is basically the simple answer in the context of the way these things are being used today.  That the idea is since government is that since governments can’t afford to build all the infrastructure they need to build, that the private sector will help them out and that in return for helping build infrastructure the private sector gets to own it, or own some of the income stream from it.”]

 

In what is a sick irony: the very same people who have made it impossible to maintain infrastructure, now intend to enslave the nation by possessing what little of it remains.  In true Mussolini fashion, the actual need for infrastructure development is being used as the sugar-coating for hoodwinking the population into swallowing the poisonous pill of corporativism. 

 

[Schwarzenegger/Bloomberg Press Conference (01:04-01:06)

Bloomberg: “Make no mistake about it, we have an infrastructure crisis.  Non-stop television showed us in New Orleans when the levees broke and in Minneapolis when the bridge collapsed, but the governors and the mayors of this country everyday see it at an operational level:  Bridges that are rusting away, and tracks that can’t carry high speed trains and power transmission lines that can’t keep up with demand, and airports that need new runways, water lines that need back up systems, and sewerage plants that leak into the……

 

Q:  This one is for Governor Schwarzenegger and Mayor Bloomberg, how do you answer those that given both of your records in killer fiscal austerity policies, would just say that this infrastructure initiative is another form of Mussolini corporativism?

 

Schwarzenegger: “First of all let me just say, whatever you call it, the bottom line is that we need to build the infrastructure because we have heard other arguments…”

 

Bloomberg: “Infrastructure is the most populist thing you can do.”

 

Schwarzenegger: “We see now that there is more money in the private sector than in the public sector, so I think it is common sense that we say here’s a way to do it.  I think more and more private investors are interested in getting involved in those kinds of projects.  I’ve used an example for instance up in British Columbia where we have seen tremendous amounts of buildings going on where there is a public private partnerships and the labor is happy, the political leaders are happy, the people are happy, the workers are happy because everyone is working.  So I think it’s great benefit and that’s what we want to do here in California and that’s what we ought to do all over the United States.”

Bloomberg: “I think another thing, with private capital you can do things that you can’t do with the public sector’s money.” ]

 

[John Hoefle (01:06)

“It’s always more expensive for private corporations to do these things than the government.  The government is much more efficient at it and the government doesn’t have to make a profit out of it, whereas the private companies won’t do if they can’t make a profit, so it’s inherently more expensive, and it’s not really necessary if you have a proper government credit system.”]

 

In aerodynamics, the singularity of the shock front is generated as a result of the otherwise continuous functions of fluid flow.  On the other side of this front, the usual laws of aerodynamics are altered.  Actions which once caused an aircraft to gain altitude now lock it permanently into a fatal nosedive.  The same is true of an economic shock-front.  The "usual" economic measures of lowering interest rates, raising interest rates, or issuing stimulus packages, are all mere monetary measures which simply serve to contribute to the hyperinflationary collapse. 

 

[John Hoefle (01:07)

“What they’re doing with all of these schemes, the Fed loans, the money pumping, the stimulus plan, all of these things, is basically hyperinflationary.  They want to roll this whole thing over.”]  

 

Once again, as in Weimar Germany, we have reached a point where the solution must be a political one.  

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (01:07-01:08)

“We either go to this reform or we go to fascism, in that direction, and we have been drifting towards a fascist movement in policy, which was implicitly going toward hyperinflation.” ]

 

The American population and the world now face an opportunity which was never given to Weimar Germany. 

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (01:08)

“Under our constitution with a President and with the backing of a Congress which supports him in this, the United States can turn on a dime.  Precisely such is the key to my proposed legislation which is now before the Congress.  That is, you cannot reform this system, you cannot improve it, it cannot work, there is no way of escaping catastrophe globally under this system.  None.  What you can do, and you can do under our constitution, the Federal Government can act to create a firewall in which we protect for example mortgages and banks, that is legitimate banks, chartered banks.  We move to protect them absolutely under the same under the same thing as a bankruptcy procedure.  In other words you are putting the system into bankruptcy under the authority of the Federal Government, that means that no household will have an eviction.  We’ll sort it out later.  No bank will be shut down, no regular bank, no chartered bank, they are protected under bankruptcy.”] 

 

Since August of 2007, the LaRouche Youth Movement has been in a full scale mobilization to prevent the rise of fascism in the United States.  LaRouche has issued a piece of legislation--designed to halt the wave of foreclosures hitting the United States population, while at the same time re-instituting the types of banking and financial controls which are necessary for the development of human economy.

 

 [HBPA city council testimonials (01:10-

“I want to speak on an issue that has national and international implications…”

 “I’d like to call attention to a piece of emergency firewall legislation that is currently circulating the United States

“I am a full time political organizer for the LaRouche Political Action Committee”

“I also work for the LaRouche Political Action Committee”

“I am also with the LaRouche Political Action Committee organizing for the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act”

“We’re right now in the middle of a national mobilization”

“Right now the financial ash is falling on our heads...”

“Huge losses, billions of dollars…”

“We’re looking at nationwide, millions of homeowners being foreclosed on”

“People are typically unaware that 60% of all the assets of the Banks of the United States are tied up in this housing bubble, so it does mean a financial collapse.”

“The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and other central banks have thus far had a policy of providing whatever liquidity was necessary to plug the holes in bank’s balance sheets…”

“You know the exact same process that was done in Germany in 1923 when you had a hyperinflationary blowout there…”

“This is something which is systemic, it’s a global problem.”

“There is something that can be done about it.”

“The proposal that Lyndon LaRouche has made…”

“The Homeowner and Bank Protection Act”

“The Homeowners and Bank Protection Act”

“Take action by passing a resolution in support of the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007”

“So these are the three provisions in the act”

“the three main points of the legislation in terms of freezing foreclosures, setting up a system of rental payments, and a transition period where the banks can be recapitalized to actually begin to fund infrastructure projects and other productive investments.”

“for the Federal government to freeze foreclosures as we had done in 1933 under President Franklin Roosevelt.”

“re-write the mortgages, and this is the big one, re-write the mortgages to the fair value of the home not just changing the interest rate, change the principle in it.”

“One thing you have to do that is inevitable is to re-regulate the banking system.”

“Congress must establish a federal agency to place the federal and state chartered banks under protection…”

“State governments shall assume the administrative responsibilities for implementing the program, including the rental assessments to designated banks with the Federal Government providing the necessary credits and guarantees to assure the successful transition.”

“What we have proposed is not only a re-proposal of something that Mr. President Franklin Roosevelt did.”

“That’s the kind of policy and orientation that Lyndon LaRouche represents, that’s what the Homeowner and Bank Protection Act represents, it would be the first step declaring we’re in a crisis and declaring that the number one constitutional obligation the U.S. population, keep society stable in the face of an economic crisis, and then from there we need to move with a shift in policy nationally away from a system of globalization and cheap labor and back towards investment in making the United States a productive part of the world economy once again.”

“Send a message to Congress”

“Use the power of government to protect populations during a chaotic economic crisis.”

“I’ve recently returned from Washington, DC where I am lobbying Congress on behalf of this policy, but if you look on the back of the sheet that we passed out you will see support from across the nation.”

“to create a groundswell in the country”

“banding together to fight for the general welfare of the nation. That’s the principle of our constitution.”

“The reason why we are here is because we have created a lynch mob for the good and you guys are a key part of that”

“The good news is that we do have a capability. We do have a power which through cities and state legislatures we have a voice for the lower 80%”

“We’re organizers. We organize in the street 6 days a week, so we are very, we know a lot about what the population is thinking...”

“We find now, we’re in the midst of a presidential campaign, the issue of politics is on people’s minds…being able to speak truth in a time of crisis when most people aren’t willing to do it, that and nothing else qualifies one for leadership which is not a question of position, it’s not a question of influence or money but at the point that we’ve reached right now it is a question of who’s willing to tell the truth and act on it, and I think that’s something that’s going to give people inspiration and will give us a pathway out of the crisis.”]

 

 [John Hoefle (01:14)

“You’re not going to lose your home just because the system is blowing up; we’re going to protect you.  That’s step one.  The other side of it, the bank protection act part is that we’re going to protect the banking system.  Not that we’re going to protect institutions necessarily, but we are going to protect the essential banking functions upon which the economy depends.  That you can’t have a functioning economy without some form of an effective banking system, but that this banking system should be a banking system and not a casino.”]

 

 [Lyndon LaRouche (01:15)

“We must keep, what these idiots with their stimulation packages have no comprehension of, what we must do is we must keep the private chartered banks functioning as well as not evicting homeowners.  So therefore you have to maintain the communities and the nation as physically functioning entities.  You do that by taking federal credit which is provided largely into the chartered banking system so therefore there’s always enough money in the credit of the system to maintain the system and its physical functions, essential physical functions, people don’t die, the pensions are paid and so forth, that sort of thing.  But the other thing, the other music we don’t dance to. That simple.”]

 

To buttress this, Lyndon LaRouche has stressed the necessity of returning to a two-tiered interest rate, designed to promote the growth of American manufacturing, and end the control of predatory speculation over U. S. fiscal policy.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (01:16)


“The government controls the credit. The government is a sovereign. The government is the only one that is allowed to utter money, utter currency. The government now puts control over its own money, that it creates. No other money is allowed to be generated, except by treaty agreements with other nations. SO, you control all the money, as government money, going into the system. So, that money is loaned. Now all the money already in the system which goes into the form of loans for banks, will also get the same kind of implicit benefit. Because now you have a 1 to 2 percent rate throughout the entire banking system, private and public. But the speculators are just sort of stuck out there and they're just going to sort of dwindle on the vine; shaking, drying in the wind. And so that's the way we maintain the system, by regulation and by adjustments in these arrangements. And that will work instantly. The Federal Government has to guarantee the private banks, that is, the chartered private banks, it has to guarantee the householders living in their communities and living in their homes. Those two things must be guaranteed, and some other things at the same time. So you let the rest of this stuff work itself out. 'Folks, interest rate's going up? Fine!' But you have to maintain an international fixed exchange rate system among major nations, and you must maintain the stability of your own internal physical economy.”

“So you're essentially going to dry out whole sections of the market, which are going to have to bankrupt themselves with being useless– we're going to get rid of them. But the concern is, you've got a population of a certain size, communities, so forth, you want to make sure that community, that population is stable. And you let the other things which are essentially parasitical die of their own logic. So you have a two credit system.”

 

--“By freeing government, the government operation and government credit from this high priced credit private credit, what you do is you have set essentially, creating a fixed-exchange rate system in the world.  Now you create a system where nations, their currency values are fixed with respect to each other.  So you put a lid on inflation.  Now you can make long term credit and because if the rate of interest is fluctuating because of inflation you cannot engage in long term investments.  We need a lot of long term investments, physical investments to save the world.  So you need a two credit system.”]

 

  [John Hoefle (01:17)

“The first tier is for productive activities.  If we are, that the root of our problem is a physical economic collapse, that’s more important than the financial side of it.  The fact that our industry has collapsed, that we don’t produce things anymore, that we’ve been living off of our infrastructure, we’ve been cannibalizing our economy.  You know if you look at the triple curve the upper curves, the money curve can go up hundreds of percents, thousands of percents, the bottom curve can only fall a hundred percent, but that hundred percent is what kills you.  And so you need to start rebuilding the productive end of your economy, you need to provide money to do this at low interest rates so that what you’re spending your money for is not the cost of borrowing money, but you’re spending your money to actually get the most productive boost you can, the most bang for the buck, out of your actual production, that’s what you want to spend your money on improving things.  So you have directed government credit for specific projects, these are certain activities that we find necessary, and if you’re going to engage in these activities we’re going to provide you with loans to do them at low interest rates, one or two percent.”]

 

With the sovereignty of the United States thus re-established, in opposition to the policy of empire, it would finally become possible to realize the vision which Henry Carey presented for the development of the continental United States and the world.

 

[Lyndon LaRouche (01:19)

“If you can say you yourself, this is bullshit, and then you can say it out loud to the people who believe in it, you’re making it, you’re doing fine, but if you can’t you’re going to cave in ‘well, I don’t want to say that you know I agree with you but I don’t want to say that publicly.  I gotta go along with it though’, and that’s where the crap comes in.”]

 

[John Hoefle (01:19)

“It reminds me of the Malaysian monkey trap, where they catch monkeys by putting a nut in a jar with a narrow neck, and the neck of the jar is wide enough so that the monkey can reach in and grab the nut, but once he grabs the nut he can’t pull his hand out, and all the monkey has to do to get away is let the nut go and pull his hand out and then he’s free.  But the monkey won’t do it.  The monkey keeps holding on ‘this is mine, it’s mine, I won’t let it go’.  Then whoever put the trap there comes along later and then they kill the monkey and eat it.  And that’s essentially the dilemma we’re faced with.  This paper has no value, this system is bankrupt.  If we keep holding on to it we’re only going to destroy ourselves.  So the solution is simple, we just have to let it go.  And if you let it go, admit that it’s bankrupt, tell the truth, then we can turn our attention to what we should have been doing all along, which is building a productive side of our economy using the creative power of the human mind to develop higher and higher technologies, to go to a nuclear economy, maglev trains, all sorts of new raw materials, to free the world from a lot of the problems we have, existing shortages of raw materials (although a lot of that is not actually true), but still you move on and progress, and that’s what we can do.  We can have a really bright future if we just let this go.”]

 


Program No. 716

“Tragedy and Hope,” Pt. 1

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

What we are facing in our nation today, is not simply the drama of a long primary election campaign, but a war for the survival of American forces, against those of the British Empire. Where things go in the U.S. and in the world at large, will not be decided at some political convention in August, nor at the general election in November. The strategic answers which determine the future of this nation and the planet, will be determined by how the leadership of this nation responds to the strategic questions before us, right now.

 

Both as a former Presidential candidate, a statesman, an economist, and as the chairman and founder of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, Lyndon LaRouche has put those questions before us, repeatedly. It has been the organizing of his movement that has largely shaped the issues in the ongoing national election. But not enough of the American people yet understand what is at stake. Not enough of our leaders, or would-be leaders, understand.

 

On May 7, Lyndon LaRouche delivered an address in Washington, DC at a town meeting sponsored by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC), to once again, outline how the nation and world has gotten into the mess it is in, and, more importantly, how we can save civilization from doom. The event was broadcast live over the internet.

 

This edition of The LaRouche Connection features the first hour of Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks. The entire event, including two hours of discussion, was moderated by Debra Freeman.

 

LaRouche: “The issue is not the election. The election is a battle in a war. It is not something unto itself. The result of this election, in itself, is a matter of indifference. It’s a question of how the battle is won and lost which is important.”

 

LaRouche: “The issue is World War III—between the British Empire, better known as the Anglo-Dutch Liberal banking financial system, and the principal nations of Eurasia—Russia, China, India. [These] and other nations, are the targets of intended warfare by the British Empire, which is already turning Continental Europe into a mere colony, through the program of the Lisbon Treaty. If the Lisbon Treaty were adopted, there would not be a single nation on the continent of Europe, west of Belarus and Russia, which had any sovereignty whatsoever. The British Empire would control the entirety of that region of Europe, as a puppet of the Angle-Dutch Liberal financial interests. It is those interests, represented in the U.S. for a long time, especially since 1971-2, which have taken control of the dollar. Now they’re moving in for the kill. And that’s the issue.”

 

LaRouche: “If they control the U.S. and parts of Europe, under the Lisbon Treaty, then you will have an actual fighting war emerging on this planet, against the continent of Africa and much of the continent of Asia, and other places. You will have dictatorship; you will have mass starvation. That’s part of the British program! It’s the food war!”

 

LaRouche: “We’re not dealing with an election. We’re dealing with whether there is in the Untied States, in the top layers of society, the moral fitness to survive! … If we allow this to happen, we will get the same kind of treatment that the victims of Mussolini, Hitler, and so forth, suffered. We have to win this war against that evil empire!”

 

LaRouche: “[President] Franklin Roosevelt’s intention, at the close of World War II, was to eliminate colonialism and all forms of imperialism from this planet. Once peace had been secured, the power of the U.S., developed through its agro-industrial and scientific power, was going to be used, by transforming its war machine into a machine of production. And as Roosevelt had spelled out specifically, to take the colonial nations of the world and continents like Africa, and free them, not only by giving them political freedom, but by giving them economic assistance and technology, to solve their problems, where they could emerge from being colonies and prey, to being essentially self-determining. And Roosevelt’s intention was to form a receptacle, called the United Nations, as an assembly of nations, including many which would be newly created as freed from former colonies, to sovereign national status. And the minute that pig Harry Truman walked in, to replace Roosevelt, within hours of Roosevelt’s death, Truman went to the side of Churchill. And Churchill’s policy was to prevent Roosevelt’s policy from succeeding, because the British were determined to maintain their empire.”

 

LaRouche: “The white-collar children of Truman, the ‘68ers, gave us Nixon. And with the aid of the Trilateral Commission, destroyed the U.S. economy on the inside. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, another change occurred called “globalization.” Manufacturing industries in particular, agriculture, and countries which were good agricultural producers or good manufacturing producers, have been stripped of those industries, [gone] to populations where the lower 80% of the population is illiterate.”

 

LaRouche: “So you have ‘colonies of manufacturing’ in countries in Asia, Africa, South America, where 80% of the population does not participate in the economy. You have areas which used to be food-producing areas, which no longer produce food. Because, what you’re having is a world dictatorship, under the name of globalization, in which the cultures are being destroyed….”

 

LaRouche: “We are now in a period, where the world as a whole, is in the process of collapsing into a new dark age, similar to, but worse than, potentially—unless we stop it—that which happened to Europe in the middle of the 14th Century.”

In this circumstance, Mr. LaRouche has made a number of proposals, in the tradition of the American System of political economy, to protect the population and get production going again: the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act; a two-tier credit system to channel funding for especially infrastructure; a four-power international conference to fix currency exchange rates again; and immediately doubling of world food production.

 

LaRouche: “Were now at a point, where a revolutionary movement, or the makings of it, is building up around the food issue. And therefore, those who triumphed yesterday, are not going to continue to triumph for long: The result is, either we win, and restore the kind of government we require, in various nations, and among nations, or this world is going into Hell, because the crisis won’t quite. The people will die of hunger; they will die in increasing numbers; they will kill for food. The structure of society will be destroyed in the fight over food which is not there. And therefore, either we win this fight against this evil, or there won’t be anything to fight for.”

 

[For a complete transcript, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 20 (May 16, 2008), pp 4-31.]

 

Release Date: June 2, 2008      

           

Program No. 717

China’s Role in Solving the Global Crisis”

AUDIO (Scroll to June 7)

TRANSCRIPT

 

On the June 7 LaRouche Show, the weekly internet radio program, EIR’s Asia Desk Editor Michael Billington interviewed Da Wei, Deputy Director of the Department of American Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). Joining the discussion was LaRouche Youth Movement member Liona Fan Chiang. The program was videotaped for public access cable TV.

 

Host Billington began by setting the stage for the discussion, by providing an overview of the current global political and financial breakdown crisis, the worst in modern history. All attempts to bail out the world’s bankrupt banking system, he said, are only increasing hyperinflation of the sort seen back in 1923 Weimar Germany. Hyperinflation in food and fuel has already resulted in the onset of famine on a global scale; and social dislocation, riots, food and fuel demonstrations in country after country. In the U.S., the same hedge funds responsible for the subversion of the American banking system are also now shown to be responsible for the subversion of the process by which we are choosing our next President.

 

Billington: “Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal for a Four-Power Agreement between Russia, China, India, and the U.S.—the kind of arrangement organized by President Franklin Roosevelt which made it possible for us to defeat fascism in the 1930s and 40s—is today absolutely essential, if we’re going to have the capacity to put together a new world financial system, and to unleash the kind of economic renaissance required to deal with the current breakdown crisis.”

 

Mr. Billington then touched on the May 14-16 meeting in Yekatarinburg, Russia, where the foreign ministers of Russia, China, and India, made a very dramatic commitment to stick together, and to commit their countries to working together against what they perceive to be a very serious threat, not always named as a British threat, but recognized. This group of nations declared their unity around a great development prospectus—the idea of great infrastructure crossing the region—as the necessary counter-measure against the threat of war coming from the British and their allies in the U.S.

 

After going through the history of CICIR, “the biggest thinktank in China,” Da Wei described its main task as writing policy papers and recommendations for China’s leadership, as well as doing some contract research for private companies and organizations, both in China and abroad.

 

Cross-Strait relations was the first topical issue to be discussed.

 

Da Wei: “Though mainland China and Taiwan are under different governments rule, different administrations, they think that they culturally, ethnically, and (maybe in the future) politically and economically, they belong to one nation. So I think that is the very good basis for the future negotiations, and after that, after the elections in Taiwan, we already had some progress.”

 

Liona Fan Chiang then discussed the recently-released documentary, “Firewall: In Defense of the Nation-State,” [see The LaRouche Connection Program No. 715], which reveals the origin of Weimar German monetary hyperinflation, in the destruction of Germany’s economic productive capability—the same trend we are again witnessing, now on a world scale. The video focuses especially on the British role in destroying Germany, and how they connived to bring in Hjalmar Schacht and eventually Adolf Hitler to “solve” the “problem.”

 

Da Wei answered Ms. Fan Chaing’s question of how today’s hyperinflation is affecting and being treated by the Chinese government, by stating that indeed “the inflation problem is maybe the most important task that the Chinese government is facing…. On the one hand is the so-called new liberalism; on the other hand is, let the county, let the government, the state play a more important role in the development. For example, in the financial market, the government should play a more important role as a stabilizer. In the food supply, the Chinese government has, since the mid-1990s, already noticed that it could be a very severe problem for China…. The government has already taken some measures to slow down the growth of the Consumer Price Index, to make people’s life easier.”

 

Da Wei: “We are quite dependent on the import of fuel—oil and gas—but [we are] basically self-sufficient in food…. We have done some things, like we built the Three Gorges Dam, and we also are trying to build more nuclear plants. We depend heavily on coal. We don’t have a silver bullet [to solve the food supply and environmental problems] very easily. [They] are long-time problems, I think.”

 

As to the urgency of a Four-Power alliance to avoid another round of British-instigated warfare and deal with the breakdown crisis, Da Wei stated that “the biggest problem is mutual trust, and that in recent years the high level of relations between China and Russia, and China and India, is getting better and better.”

 

On the Tibet issue, Da Wei stated that “It’s first not an ethnic conflict. It’s a problem, or issue, in the process of social development, pretending to be an ethnic conflict, or its shows up as ethnic conflicts in China…. The [1904 British] invasion created the Tibetan issue…. It’s a problem in the [realm of] economic development…. I do think we can do more in Tibet to solve this problem, by pushing new affirmative actions which are suited to the market economy, the new economic situation there.

 

Da Wei then referenced a poem, which expresses the feeling of frustration among many young Chinese abroad (called the “April Youth” in China), who believe China is being treated unfairly in especially European and U.S. media: “When we’re poor, you say we are Yellow Peril. When we are rich, you say we are threat of the world. When we have a large population, you say we will use all the resources. When we try to control the population, you say we are violating, abusing, human rights.”

 

The May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province, in which almost 100,000 Chinese died, has also, according to Da Wei “provided us a challenge and opportunity at the same time…. All those countries which sent their rescue teams and provided many relief materials—we can feel this kind of help and friendship from the outside world. This is a positive development…. We are in a huge transformation, not only in the political and economic, but also social [arena], from a more traditional society to amore modern one…. I think social equity is the top priority of the current Chinese administration. After they came into power in 2002, they began to talk about politics based on people’s – we can translate it as “of the people, by the people, for the people,” something like “you should build your politics, your ruling legitimacy, on the people’s needs, the people’s demand…. The mutual trust between the government and the society is very important in the efforts to build a better society.”

 

Liona Fan Chiang next introduced the question of “globalization,” the push for so-called liberalization of trade, which is “pretty much freedom to loot from anywhere you’d like.”

 

Agreeing with Fan Chiang’s characterization, Da Wei emphasized what is needed is a “fair process: fair economic globalization, and that needs the cooperation, and collaboration between the major countries.”

 

 [For an edited transcript of the interview, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 25, June 20, 2008, pp 48-53.]

 

Release Date: June 9, 2008

 

 

Program No. 718

“Tragedy and Hope,” Pt. 2

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

At the beginning of May, our nation was witnessing not simply the drama of a long primary election campaign, but a war for the survival of American forces, against those of the British Empire. As of the end of June, where things go in the U.S. and in the world at large, will still not be decided at some political convention in August, nor at the general election in November. The strategic answers which determine the future of this nation and the planet, will be determined by how the leadership of this nation responds to the strategic questions before us, right now.

 

Both as a former Presidential candidate, a statesman, an economist, and as the chairman and founder of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, Lyndon LaRouche has put those questions before us, repeatedly. It has been the organizing of his movement that has largely shaped the issues in the ongoing national election. But not enough of the American people yet understand what is at stake. Not enough of our leaders, or would-be leaders, understand.

 

On May 7, Lyndon LaRouche delivered an address in Washington, DC at a town meeting sponsored by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC), to once again, outline how the nation and world has gotten into the mess it is in, and, more importantly, how we can save civilization from doom. The event was broadcast live over the internet.

 

Edition No. 716 of The LaRouche Connection featured Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks. This edition presents seven questions from the Discussion Session. The entire event was moderated by Debra Freeman.

 

·   From a woman working in one of the Presidential campaigns: “[Polls are showing] that 90% of Democrats who voted for Obama in each of the past primaries, have said they would vote for Clinton in a McCain vs. Clinton race. However, the opposite is simply not true: the majority of those who voted for Clinton now, may indeed vote for McCain, in a McCain vs. Obama race. What’s up with the Democratic Party – the DNC, the House Dem Caucus, the Sen. Dem Caucus? Even from the most limited pragmatic, pedestrian view, the simple fact is, that Clinton can beat McCain and Obama can not. What are they doing? Do they know what they’re doing, or are they being played for fools?”

 

·   From a state-wide office holder in New York: “The New York press is full of stories that Karl Rove has insinuated that the Republicans are in possession of an October Surprise, to be used if Obama becomes the Democratic nominee. But that would indicate that it would be their intention to make McCain President, and that doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Personally, I do think McCain is crazy, but I really don’t believe he is a fascist. What’s your view of this?”

 

·   From a former female Secretary of Labor: “One of the most pressing issues we face is the price of fuel. On the food issue, clearly one way to address this problem is to increase food production. However, the massive increases in the price of fuel are not a result of oil shortages per se. Clinton’s proposal at least recognizes the problem, but we’re all aware of the fact that it hardly solves. It. What action would you recommend? Is the proper path one of going after OPEC and the big oil companies? Is there some legislative initiative that should be pursued?”

 

·   From some unidentified person: “If you were running Clinton’s campaign, what would you tell her? How can she intensify her appeal to the lower 80% [of income brackets]? Do you think that any of this ultimately is sufficient to overcome the hierarchy that’s determined to keep her out of the Presidency, and if not, then what do you think she has to add to her appeal?”

 

·   From a Democrat on the Senate Agricultural Committee: “Will you be drafting something similar to the HBPA [Homeowners and Bank Protection Act], on the food question? Regardless of whether you plan on submitting actual legislation, what specifically would you recommend in the way of legislative action, to immediately address the crisis?”

 

·   From a Clinton supporter: “If Obama is a fall-guy set up by the British Empire, [then] why are you not backing Clinton 100%? I understand that she is not perfect, but is without doubt, the only one that has a chance of doing right by humanity.”

 

·   Composite question on Africa: “What is your solution to the problem that you refer to in Africa, where the growth of the African population is seen as a threat to the international financiers’ control of raw materials? Do you believe that there is a difference between the Anglo-Dutch financier oligarchy and the government of Great Britain? Many people in Africa really don’t see any difference between the two. Considering the food and financial problems that Africa faces, if right now you were standing anywhere on the African continent, what would you say to the African people?”

 

[For a complete transcript, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 20 (May 16, 2008), pp 4-31.]

 

Release Date: June 23, 2008

 

Program No. 719

“Tragedy and Hope,” Pt. 3

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

At the beginning of May, our nation was witnessing not simply the drama of a long primary election campaign, but a war for the survival of American forces, against those of the British Empire. As of the end of June, where things go in the U.S. and in the world at large, will still not be decided at some political convention in August, nor at the general election in November. The strategic answers which determine the future of this nation and the planet, will be determined by how the leadership of this nation responds to the strategic questions before us, right now.

 

Both as a former Presidential candidate, a statesman, an economist, and as the chairman and founder of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, Lyndon LaRouche has put those questions before us, repeatedly. It has been the organizing of his movement that has largely shaped the issues in the ongoing national election. But not enough of the American people yet understand what is at stake. Not enough of our leaders, or would-be leaders, understand.

 

On May 7, Lyndon LaRouche delivered an address in Washington, DC at a town meeting sponsored by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC), to once again, outline how the nation and world has gotten into the mess it is in, and, more importantly, how we can save civilization from doom. The event was broadcast live over the internet.

 

Edition No. 716 of The LaRouche Connection featured Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks. Edition No. 718 presented seven questions from the Discussion Session. This edition completes the Discussion Session. The entire event was moderated by Debra Freeman.

 

·   From a Clinton supporter: “If Obama is a fall-guy set up by the British Empire, [then] why are you not backing Clinton 100%? I understand that she is not perfect, but is without doubt, the only one that has a chance of doing right by humanity.”

 

·   Rep. Priscilla Taylor (Florida House of Representatives, Democrat-District 84): Two questions: “Hillary wants a tax holiday [on the gas tax]; Obama opposes it. What do you think? What can we do now, immediately, that will have some benefit for the population?” “I know your Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA) has passed in many cities and states. [Ms. Taylor introduced it into the Florida Legislature.] Congress has refused to act on that measure, having their own bill, [and President Bush has said he will veto the relief bill the Democrats have put forward]. Does this give us a new opportunity for the HBPA, or are there other more pressing questions?”

 

·   Composite question on Africa: “What is your solution to the problem that you refer to in Africa, where the growth of the African population is seen as a threat to the international financiers’ control of raw materials? Do you believe that there is a difference between the Anglo-Dutch financier oligarchy and the government of Great Britain? Many people in Africa really don’t see any difference between the two. Considering the food and financial problems that Africa faces, if right now you were standing anywhere on the African continent, what would you say to the African people?”

 

·   John Jeffries (Official with Local 400, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers): “We’re making every effort to get the HBPA passed here in Louisville, KY. What are the similarities of the times in 1933, to today, particularly with regard to the housing market, and to banking in general. Debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities I don’t think were an issue in 1933. Is our current situation worse than 1933? If so, how?”

 

·   Dr. Luise Light (former Director of Dietary Guidance, USDA): “According to the UN Global Policy Forum, the world produces enough food to feed every person alive. So why are we seeing the greatest worldwide hunger and starvation epidemic ever recorded, with one out of every six people in the world at immediate risk for severe malnutrition and death by starvation. This is not only immoral, but is breeding war and revolution in every known country where this massive hunger exists. We know two things: when people have the capacity to grow most of their own food and live in stable communities, they are not malnourished, they don’t starve to death ,and barring any unexpected catastrophe like war or weather-related disaster, they’re okay. The second thing we know, is that this global hunger catastrophe is man-made. It was created by the WTO [World Trade Organization] and others who have globalized monoculture and restricted farming by rules that favor the needs of the affluent, and ignore those of the poor. Who has decided who will live and who will die, by dictating such stupid, arrogant, and murderous world trade policies?”

 

·   Sen. Joey Pendleton (Minority Whip, Kentucky State Senate, and co-sponsor of SR-90, the Kentucky HBPA): “In addition to my service in the legislature, I’m an active farmer, and I also serve on the faculty of the Murray State University Agricultural Program…. How can we feed the world, with the rising cost of production, and yet at the same time, keep food cheap for the domestic market? What’s your idea on how to keep farmers in American farming?”

 

·   Composite question from members of the LaRouche Youth Movement: [Considering the fact that even if Hillary Clinton became President, in order to do that, she would have to make so many rotten deals and compromises with really bad people, that she wouldn’t be a very good President anyway] “is there maybe some other way for us to affect the general future of civilization, other than politics? … I want to maintain a sense of optimism about the future, but looking at the political framework, I’m having trouble doing it.”

 

[For a complete transcript, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 20 (May 16, 2008), pp 4-31.]

 

Release Date: July 7, 2008

 

Program No. 720

“One Year Later—But Still Not Too Late!”

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

In a webcast one year ago (July 25, 2007. See The LaRouche Connection Program Nos. 699, 700, 701: “The End of the F.D.R. Era,” Parts 1-3) Lyndon LaRouche declared that the collapse of the global financial system was not “about to occur,” but was, in fact, ongoing.

 

Now, a year later, he told a Washington, DC audience on July 22, that we are not facing a depression, but a general breakdown crisis. The question, as always, is how to get people to act, and do it now. The event, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee, was webcast live over the internet in English, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian. The entire event was moderated by Debra Freeman. This edition of The LaRouche Connection features Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks.

 

Mr. LaRouche emphasized: “The first thing to settle, is that the present international monetary-financial system will die, and will never recover. This system is finished. The only possibility that exists now, is to create a replacement system, based on the principles of the founding of the U.S. economic system, with the founding of the actual Constitutional government, as defined under, particularly, Alexander Hamilton. And if you don’t understand, and agree, with Alexander Hamilton, it’s like saying, there is no future for you.”

 

Now, as last July, Mr. LaRouche called for “three specific remedies, which are not cures to the problem,” but without which “there’s no future for the United States and no future for the world:”

 

1.      Congress must pass the “Homeowners and Bank Protection Act.” Under this Act, all State and Federally chartered banks are to be put into bankruptcy protection, by the Federal government, with restrictions on which of their accounts will be paid; the rest to be frozen. And, there will be no evictions of householders because of mortgage default. They will remain in their homes under conditions which are acceptable conditions, and will continue to function under bankruptcy protection.

2.      Under the Constitution, the United States must again treat its money as a sovereign instrument of government. Money, or credit, which is convertible into money, must be allowed only through action of government. No bank is permitted to create money, only a government, by credit, by authorizing the utterance of debt of the government, in the form of credit, which defines that debt explicitly as applicable to certain missions, like investments, or developments of people. Under this system, two tiers of credit must be set up, in which the standard interest rate for regular banking—the basic interest rate—is 4% throughout the Federal Reserve System; and 2% (with Federal government protection), for special projects, especially infrastructure projects.

3.      The United States must propose to the governments of Russia, China, and India, that these four major countries agree to sponsor a committee—an alliance of powers, including other powers—to establish a fixed-exchange rate financial-credit system internationally, of the type President Franklin Roosevelt intended in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. No other country can initiate such action.

 

We must have a Presidential candidate, in the United States, who will be credible, in saying to the China, Russia, India, and so forth, “This is what the Unties States is committed to do, as soon as I get to be President. And we can start it right now.” That’s what we need right now!

 

 [For a complete transcript, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 30 (Aug. 1, 2008), pp 4-31.]

 

Release Date: Aug. 11, 2008   

 

Program No. 721

“1932,” Pt. 1

Commissioned by Lyndon LaRouche to bring the importance of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency to today’s world, a small team of his young associates went to work. On July 30, the LaRouche Political Action Committee (L-PAC) released 1932, and began distributing 10,000 copies of the 101-min. documentary on DVD all across the nation. With L-PAC’s permission, The LaRouche Connection presents Part 1 of “1932,” edited for Public Access.

 

Beginning with Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in Washington, DC for his first inaugural address, with the Union in mortal danger, narrator Robert Beltran reminds us of America’s long and continuing-to-this-day struggle of the American System of Economics, “which values the creative powers of the human individual far above any other form of material wealth, recognizing these creative powers as the source of that material wealth, against the British Empire’s lust for control of the so-called “fixed” resources of the environment…which treats the power of human insight as a threat to its power.”

 

Three years after the American Centennial celebration, Germany, under Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck emerged as a national power on the world stage, operating under an American-inspired tariff policy. The British determined “not to lose our former leadership…passing to the Americans,” and put into play a geo-political strategy to eliminate Bismarck and crush Germany. Price Edward Albert, later King Edward II, protégé of Lord Palmerston and son of Queen Victoria, made himself dictator of British foreign policy, and for the next 20 years, personally oversaw the elimination of all obstacles to the creation of a “nightmare coalition” of Russia, France, and Britain, to accomplish this goal, leading straight to The Great War. British foreign policy for Germany in the post-war period reflected exactly the aims of H.G. Wells: the dissolution of Germany as a sovereign country. Crushed under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, by 1923, the British had finally re-conquered Germany, and in Southwest Asia, the same policy was pursued, under the British Arab Bureau and French foreign ministry, creating the Skyes-Picot accord, which mandated British control of the Palestine/Trans Jordan and Iraq region, with French control of Lebanon and Syria.

 

In the United States, the same banks and cartels dismantling the German nation, positioned themselves for similar actions against an already weakened American System. Wall Street became headquarters of these operations, through the likes of criminals such as John Pierpont Morgan. By 1928, John Raskob, a Morgan asset, who had built his fortune through insider speculation, rose to prominence in the Democratic Party. Controlling things on the Republican side of the aisle was another Morgan agent, Thomas Lamont, who provided daily consultation to then President Herbert Hoover. Rampant speculation led to the inevitable collapse of 1929.

 

Through these and other Wall St. networks, and directed on the ground by Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, millions of dollars were injected into the Nazi Party. Finally, Germany’s President Hindenburg was pressured in February 1933 to bring in Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.

 

Back in the summer of 1932, the Democratic Party nominating convention was confronted with selecting a candidate for the U.S. Presidency who could deal with the economic crash which had snowballed into widespread hunger, bankruptcy, foreclosures, and massive unemployment. Despite a clear mandate of the American people for a Franklin Roosevelt nomination, the Democratic National Committee, under John Raskob, went to extraordinary lengths to stop him. Indeed, it was only on the fourth ballot that Roosevelt finally secured the nomination.

 

The fight at the Convention was not a simple internal Democratic Party struggle, but rather a conflict over whether the Lincoln tradition of American politics, or the British system of Empire, would prevail in the world. Franklin Roosevelt knew this to be the issue of the Convention. He knew this, not as a recent discovery, but something which was fundamental to his thinking throughout his life.

 

[Here ends Part I. (Acts 1 & 2). Part II (Act 3), a summary of which appears immediately below,  has yet to be produced as a LaRouche Connection program.]

 

1932 continues with details of Franklin Roosevelt’s biography, going back to 1901, when as a young man of 19 at Harvard, wrote his thesis on Alexander Hamilton, President Washington’s choice for our first Secretary of the Treasury—“the greatest of the cabinet offices,” as against British agent Aaron Burr, “who saw in [the nation’s] grater financial security the banishment of his dream of establishing a Northern Confederacy.” Between 1921 and 1924, Roosevelt and his family turned the period his polio illness and convalescence into a constructive period of education into all fields, becoming serious about politics. By 1928, the signs of total economic collapse and control of all politics by a few on Wall Street became visible to many Americans. He ran for and was elected Governor of New York and addressed the 1928 Democratic Party Convention. As New York Governor, he began to reverse the ongoing economic disintegration by implementing politics of Social Security, unemployment insurance, major state infrastructure, job creation projects, regulation over utilities, and initial regulation of Wall Street. This prescription set a precedent of policy standards later and drew many protests against him from the Hoover Administration.

 

By 1930, the Republican Party had become the party of financial speculation and free trade. Franklin was seen by many as the likely Democratic Party nominee for the 1932 election. To combat Franklin, John Raskob moved the repeal of Prohibition into the forefront of party politics, intending to drive a wedge between the Northern and Southern Democrats. To combat the control by the elites, Franklin invented his famous “fireside chats,” to educate the people about the problems America faced, and to muster support for his intended policy solutions.

 

Amidst the chaos of the convention, the Roosevelt apparatus persisted, Roosevelt finally winning the nomination, on the 4th ballot. Upon his subsequent victory over the Republican incumbent Hoover, he began to implement a New Deal for the nation. Within hours of his first day in office, he began a comprehensive reorganization of the nation’s economy. Chief Aid Harry Hopkins, armed with only a card table, a pot of coffee and a telephone, hired 11 million Americans and spent $20 million in the first three hours of the administration! With the Civilian Conservation Corps, Rural Electrification Administration, Four Corners projects, etc, Roosevelt launched the largest peacetime mobilization of manpower and materials the world had ever seen. He used the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a quasi national bank to re-establish the credit of the nation. He built schools, libraries, airports, post offices—all with Government issued credit. He re-established the U.S. Currency, stabilized the price of gold, and opened a penetrating investigation of Wall Street’s rampant speculation.—all within the first 100 days.

 

The narrative then covers the infamous American Liberty League, organized by Raskob, to propagandize against Roosevelt’s policies, with the ultimate objective to organize a 500,000-man force to storm the White House and overthrow Roosevelt. Fortunately, this plan by what Roosevelt called “these economic royalists” was stopped.

 

The battles of World War II are known. What is not, is the story of the war between the American and British System, to determine the future of civilization, which took place in discussions between the two individuals who represented these outlooks: President Roosevelt and Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill.  The narrative presents this conflict in the form of a mini-drama, through the eyes of Roosevelt’s son Elliott, who attended many of the meetings between his father and Churchill. [See the book As He Saw It, by Elliott Roosevelt]

 

Roosevelt’s vision of the post-war agreements was the banishment of colonialism worldwide, and the bringing of the power of technological development to all nations. Under Roosevelt’s leadership, the U.S. created a potential for global cooperation, threatening the end of imperialism on the planet. For the first time since Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War, the world was moving in the direction of defeating the oligarchical principle, and establishing a global community of sovereign nation-states. Under the presidency of Roosevelt’s chosen successor, Vice President Henry Wallace, that future would have been secured. Tragically, British operatives in the Democratic Party pressured Roosevelt to replace Wallace with Harry S Truman in the 1944 election. Truman was not committed to fighting for Roosevelt’s principles and proved himself willing to submit to Churchill’s post-war outlook.

 

It has now become our job to finish the work Franklin Roosevelt so courageously advanced in his life!

 

Release Date: Aug. 11, 2008

 

Program No. 722

“One Year Later—But Still Not Too Late!” Pt.2

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

In a webcast one year ago (July 25, 2007. See The LaRouche Connection Program Nos. 699, 700, 701: “The End of the FDR Era,” Parts 1-3) Lyndon LaRouche declared that the collapse of the global financial system was not “about to occur,” but was, in fact, ongoing.

 

A year later, he told a Washington, DC audience on July 22, that we are not facing a depression, but a general breakdown crisis. The question, as always, is how to get people to act, and do it now. Sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee, and moderated by Debra Freeman, the event was webcast live over the internet. Part 1 of our coverage of this event (Program No. 720) featured Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks. Part 2 features the first six questions from the Discussion Session.

 

From the Discussion Session:

 

From a former cabinet member: “It would seem that we do have to prepare for the possibility of an Obama candidacy. Our efforts to reach out to the Obama campaign in shaping policy have been rebuffed. We are at a loss as to how to proceed.”

 

From a current member of Congress: “We who backed Obama knew, that if he became the Democratic nominee, he would have to make certain compromises, but he’s doing things now that he is not under any pressure to do, which are serving to completely alienate the base that has supported him from the start, leaving them with a very deep sense of betrayal. Any insight? What do we do?”

 

From a former member of Congress: “Despite Obama’s arrogant confidence that black Americans will turn out in record numbers to vote for him, a deep split is forming in the black community, with those of us whose roots are in the Civil Rights movement on the one side, and those younger black professionals, who’ve enjoyed the benefits of that movement, on the other…. What do you recommend…to stop this from happening? Should we just concentrate on getting the right people elected to the House and Senate?”

 

Unidentified: “Scores of grassroots organizations have sprung up all over the U.S., whose intention it is to guarantee an open Democratic Convention. [But] we’re not getting much in the way of guidance from the Clinton campaign, and without it, it’s very hard to maintain a sense of optimism that we can prevail. Is there any chance at all of Hillary [Clinton] recapturing the Democratic nomination? If so, how? And if not, what to do?”

 

From Sam (a student in Yemen): “Here in Third World countries, people are not fighting to defend a standard of living; we are fighting to provide ourselves with the most basic necessities for surviving, and we’re starving, and we are suffering to death from this economic collapse…. What should we do? Is there any hope for us at all? Any hope for use from the U.S.?”

 

Rep. Yusef Abdul-Salaam (member of the Alabama House of Representatives, Selma): “The nation is in the midst of a major economic crisis, and yet our leaders – Mr. Paulson, Mr. Bernanke, and others—deny this and insist “the fundamentals are sound, everything’s fine; we can handle the current crisis, because the economy is fundamentally strong.” Why are these men in denial? Are they really? Why won’t they grasp the solution that is at hand?”

 

 [For a complete transcript, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 30 (Aug. 1, 2008), pp 4-31.]

 

Release Date: Sept. 1, 2008    

 

Program No. 723

“LaRouche: The Planet Needs a New Financial Architecture”

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

On September 17, twelve days before his scheduled international webcast, Lyndon LaRouche videotaped some urgent remarks on the global financial/economic crisis. This edition of The LaRouche Connection features his opening statement, followed by a dialogue with members of the LaRouche Youth Movement.

 

LaRouche: [Between now and Oct. 1] the U.S. economy may have entirely disintegrated. That’s actually a possibility, the way the government has been behaving recently, in dealing with these bailout situations.

 

We’re now in a hyperinflationary process, caused largely by the measures taken under this government. Back on the 25th of July of last year, I warned that this was about to break out, and I expected it to break out by the first of August. It broke out by the 28th of July, instead. So I’m wrong sometimes, hmm?

 

We’re now in an aggravated mess. The recent series of bailouts should never have occurred. These entities should have been put into bankruptcy reorganization in a normal way. Many of the assets that are listed, as the loss assets, were dubious. Some of this may have been criminal, and should have been investigated for potential criminal action against those involved.

 

The essential thing is to save the United States. As I said last year, this involves first of all the Homeowners and Bank Protection act. We must not shut down any bank, which is an essential institution of credit within the chartered banking system, whether Federal or state. Even if they are bankrupt, their doors must be kept open, their assets and communities served must continue to function.

 

I also proposed a minimum 4% basic interest rate—that was not done. We’re now operating at 2%. Some idiots are trying to reduce it to 1.5%, which is hyperinflationary nonsense.

 

I also proposed that we approach Russia, China, and India, as prospective partners of the United States, in initiating a new international monetary-financial system, based on the precedent of Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods system. We would again create a credit system, which is only possible under the U.S. Constitution, because we are not a monetary economy; we are a credit system. This country cannot print money, except by authorization of the Congress, and by the Executive Branch, with the authorization of the Congress. We have an approximation of that under the Federal Reserve System. No other country in the world has this kind of system.

 

Therefore, we represent, for Russia, China, and India—which are directly, or indirectly,  major trading partners of the United States—something unique for the world, in reorganizing a new monetary-financial architecture for the whole planet. We together, if these four powers agree, with other countries joining in, can create a new international credit system, and begin to rebuild the world which is shattered now.

 

 [For a partial transcript, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 38 (Sept. 26, 2008), pp 12-18.]

 

Release Date: Sept. 22, 2008

           

 

Program No. 724

“The Program for World Economic Recovery,” Pt. 1

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

For years, Lyndon LaRouche has warned us that the U.S. economy was heading into a breakdown crisis. He has repeatedly indicated measures, which, if taken, would have worked to avoid it. And now, with Congress’s betrayal to Wall Street, Mr. LaRouche has, once again, repeated his warnings of a New Dark Age. This edition of The LaRouche Connection features Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to an event sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee in Washington, DC on Oct. 1. Debra Freeman moderated the event.

 

LaRouche: “There’s been nothing like the crisis that faces us today, since a comparable crisis in Europe during the medieval period, the New Dark Ages: we are on the verge of global hyperinflation and complete collapse of the entire planet into a New Dark Age.”  “We would not be in the crisis we’re in today, if people like Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, had not prevented the actions which I had specified.” “The bailout method, itself, is [now] the driving force of global hyperinflation.”

 

The problem with our economy, is that “from 1967-68 until today, measured in physical productive output—not money—the United States has been declining in economic power, physically per capita, per square kilometer, over every year, under every Presidency. There has been prosperity for some, in terms of money, but there was no improvement in our infrastructure; we’ve lost industries.”

 

What are the remedies?

 

1.      Keep homeowners in their houses. No evictions. Make arrangements to manage the downsizing of the mortgage debt, most of which is fraudulent to begin with.

2.      Keep essential banking functions going. Restore Glass-Steagall. Set 4% as the basic lending rate, except for government projects which are in the national interest, certified by the Congress, which would have a lower rate.

3.      Approach Russia, China, and India, to put the entire world into bankruptcy reorganization and establish a new, Rooseveltian, Bretton Woods system. This will be a credit, not a monetary, system.

 

“We need a mobilization of the productive power of the United States, which is largely machine-too-design and related things, to build our infrastructure, to re-build our manufacturing,” so we can build our way out of this collapse: transportation systems, especially magnetically-levitated rail; water management systems, to replenish our dwindling fossil reserves, and protect our cities; electrical power generation and distribution systems, primarily nuclear. And we will use this new productivity to re-build the world.

 

Mr. LaRouche closed on “the danger that somebody in the White House is going to think about calling the troops out to suppress the population, if they don’t like the vote they think they’re going to get from the second vote in the House of Representatives. People have to understand that. You’ve got fascism in this country, right now. And the center of fascism is right in the White House.” Only if the American people make it clear, that they will not tolerate this, will Congress be made to do what is right.

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 40 (Oct. 10, 2008), pp. 4-39.]

 

Release Date: Oct. 13, 2008    

 

Program No. 725

“The Program for World Economic Recovery,” Pt. 2

 

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

For years, Lyndon LaRouche has warned us that the U.S. economy was heading into a breakdown crisis. He has repeatedly indicated measures, which, if taken, would have worked to avoid it. And now, with Congress’s betrayal to Wall Street, Mr. LaRouche has, once again, repeated his warnings of a New Dark Age. Program No. 724 featured all but 10 minutes of Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to an event sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee in Washington, DC on Oct. 1. This edition features the last 10 minutes, plus six questions from the discussion session. Debra Freeman moderated the event.

 

From the Discussion Session:

 

Questioner #1: “People like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and others among us, have been engaged in international discussions for a new financial architecture, precisely along the lines of what you have proposed, [but] they all insist that this bailout must come first, in order to give leaders time to act. Your comments?”

 

Questioner #2: “I know first hand you’re right, that the Russians favor talks that would include the U.S., among others, to begin to craft a new financial architecture. But this current administration is no way inclined to do so, and has rejected the proposal when it was put to them, both by the Russians, and also by people inside the U.S. Even with some institutional support here in America, I’m not sure I understand how this could work without the agreement of the U.S. Presidency. Go through that for us.”

 

From a Democrat member of the U.S. Senate: “In trying to decide how I would vote tonight [on the stimulus package], I asked my friend [former World Bank economist] Joe Stiglitz what he recommended. He said there were a variety of reasons why the [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson plan would not and could not work, but recommended I vote yes, as essentially a very expensive way to buy the time needed for us to reorganize and re-regulate. Clearly you disagree. If the measure passes, is it true that we pass a point of no return?”

 

From another Democrat member of the U.S. Senate: “When FDR addressed the banking crisis in the 1930s, he made no bones about the fact, that building our way out of the Great Depression would carry with it hardship for the population. I’m inclined to vote against the bailout, but I don’t want to lie to my constituents and tell them I have a painless solution, especially when we do not. What is the pain threshold of your proposal?”

 

From 17 freshmen members of the U.S. House of Representatives: “Taking direction from you, we’ve studied the period from 1932 on, and it does seem that FDR’s approach would work [today]. Why is there so much opposition to an FDR solution?”

 

From a staffer to a Democrat member of the House of Representatives: Three questions: How would a two-tiered credit system prevent runs on banks? What is the difference between bank liabilities and bank credits, or assets? How would fixing exchange rates prevent speculative attacks against national currencies?

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 40 (Oct. 10, 2008), pp. 4-39.]

 

Release Date: Oct. 20, 2008    

 

Program No. 726

“The Program for World Economic Recovery,” Pt. 3

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

With Congress’s betrayal to Wall Street, Mr. LaRouche has, once again, repeated his warnings of a descent into the abyss of New Dark Age. Program 724 featured all but 10 minutes of Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to an event sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee in Washington, DC Oct. 1. Program 725 featured the last 10 minutes, plus six questions from the discussion session. We now complete the Discussion Session. Debra Freeman moderates.

 

·      From the editor-in-chief of a major policy journal in Washington, formerly a columnist for Business Week: How does the Federal Reserve manage to pump trillions of dollars into Wall Street to prop up the faltering investment banks, to the detriment of the taxpayer? How is what the Federal Reserve Bank doing, by lending money to banks through repurchase agreements, credit auctions, or other methods, different from what Treasury Secretary Paulson is telling the public what he is doing?

 

·      From a political consultant and pollster: “A good number of House members voted ‘no’ on Monday because they feared what their constituents would do to them if they didn’t. Couldn’t this lynch mob environment also be dangerous?”

 

·      From someone in the audience: “When do we take to the streets?”

 

·      From a black State Senator: “Watching the way that the government is responding to the current crisis, I’m beginning to wonder if black people shouldn’t begin to worry about attempted genocide.”

 

·      From a PRD Congressman in Mexico: “How did you manage to foresee this crisis back in the 1970s?”

 

·      From another PRD Congressman in Mexico:  “In Mexico, people are saying what’s happening now in the U.S. is an American equivalent of the massive government bailout of Mexico’s bankrupt banks in the 1990s. Why do you say that that’s not the case, and what are the implications?”

 

·      From an Argentina official: “In addition to your proposals for reforming the international financial system, what measures should governments adopt regarding their own central bank reserves?”

 

·      Composite question from former Hillary Clinton campaign activists: “Where are the real leaders of our Party? Why are they not speaking out? Surely, somebody besides you has some idea of what to do.”

 

·      From a Democratic strategist: Please comment again on your statement after the Democratic and Republican Conventions that the candidates of the moment were not necessarily the candidate’s we’d have when we went to the polls in November.

 

·      Composite question from members of the LaRouche Youth Movement: “Given the disaster that the two leading candidates represent, how do we make policy through the broader institution of the Presidency.”

 

[For a complete transcript of the webcast, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 40 (Oct. 10, 2008), pp. 4-39.]

 

Release Date: Nov. 10, 2008

Program No. 727

“The Last Chance for Civilization?” Pt. 1

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

On Nov. 1, 2008 Lyndon LaRouche issued what he called the “November 11 Resolution,” in which he presented the indispensable measures to be taken in the face of the now hopelessly bankrupt world monetary system. He issued this Resolution as a discussion document for a private meeting to be held on that date, in Washington, with a satellite meeting in New York City, and identified the period between Nov. 11-19, as decisive for forcing a change in policy, at least among a leading group representing the institution of the U.S. Presidency. During that 9-day period, in addition to the Nov. 11 meeting, Mr. LaRouche gave an international webcast on Nov. 18, and a second private meeting on Nov. 19. During this brief, but crucial time, Lyndon LaRouche shook the world, as can be seen, in part, by the participation of members of President-elect Obama’s transition team in the discussion following the webcast, and by the questions and comments which poured in from across the globe.

 

Featured in this edition of The LaRouche Connection, are Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to the international webcast event in Washington, DC, Nov. 18, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. The entire event, including a 2-hour discussion, was moderated by Harley Schlanger.

 

LaRouche: “What we’re involved in today, is a general breakdown crisis of the world financial-monetary system. There is no possible rescue of this system, as such. If you try to rescue it, you will lose the planet. You have to choose: Replace the system, or get a new planet. I think any sane person would say, ‘Keep the planet.’”

 

With the current system bogged down in more than a quadrillion dollars of speculative currency—more wealth than the world contains—there is not enough money to cover the demands of this currency. We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve got to sacrifice the currency claims or sacrifice the real, physical economy.

 

The United States must now, rapidly, re-assert sovereignty over its money. Under our Constitution, legal tender, can only be uttered with a vote by the U.S. Congress on behalf of action by the U.S. Presidency. Returning to this unique American Constitutional System, we can create what’s called a “credit-based dollar,” as opposed to a “monetary dollar.”  In Europe, on the other hand, the monetary systems are not controlled by the governments, but by central banking systems, which negotiate with governments. Governments have no essential control, as issuing authorities, over debt and credit outstanding. And this is how artificial money was created: by people making a capital promise to go into debt, to get a greater amount of money uttered in their behalf, through such means as derivatives, now in the order of quadrillions of dollars, far above anything that could ever be paid. That is why we are never going to pay those debts!

 

Mr. LaRouche then takes his world-wide audience (listening in via the world-wide web), through what is required to be done at this point: put the whole shebang through bankruptcy reorganization. The U.S. needs to bring Russia, China, and India (to start with) to the table, to enter into an agreement on a new credit-based monetary system, and cancel most of the financial obligations of the current bankrupt system. Use trillions of newly issued credit for especially giant infrastructure projects worldwide, finally finishing the job President Franklin Roosevelt started: ending British colonialism. “Do we care what happens to our people, what happens to the country in the coming period, what happens to the world? Are we willing to kick against the pricks?”

 

 [For a complete transcript of the webcast, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 47 (Nov. 28, 2008), pp. 4-39.]

 

Release Date: Dec. 8, 2008

 

Program No. 728

“The Last Chance for Civilization?” Pt. 2

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

On Nov. 1, 2008 Lyndon LaRouche issued what he called the “November 11 Resolution,” in which he presented the indispensable measures to be taken in the face of the now hopelessly bankrupt world monetary system. He issued this Resolution as a discussion document for a private meeting to be held on that date, in Washington, with a satellite meeting in New York City, and identified the period between Nov. 11-19, as decisive for forcing a change in policy, at least among a leading group representing the institution of the U.S. Presidency. During that 9-day period, in addition to the Nov. 11 meeting, Mr. LaRouche gave an international webcast on Nov. 18, and a second private meeting on Nov. 19.

 

During this brief, but crucial time, Lyndon LaRouche shook the world, as can be seen, in part, by the participation of members of President-elect Obama’s transition team in the discussion following the webcast, and by the questions and comments which poured in from across the globe.

 

Featured in this edition of The LaRouche Connection, is the conclusion of Mr. LaRouche’s opening remarks to the international webcast event in Washington, DC, Nov. 18, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee, plus six questions from the discussion session. The entire event was moderated by Harley Schlanger.

 

From the Discussion Session:

 

·      From someone at a well-known Washington, DC policy journal: Given that nothing positive was going to come out of the G20 meeting, and the follow-up meeting is now scheduled for way out in April, 2009, could the initiative for a four-power agreement come from somewhere other than the U.S., such as Russia?

 

·      From someone with the Obama transition team: Please address both the bankruptcy vs. bailout issue; and also indicate what you see is the viability of the American auto industry.

 

·      From another person with the Obama transition team: “The first 100 days of Obama’s Presidency: What would your order of battle be?”

 

·      From an old friend from Beijing, China: Under a New Bretton Woods system, what do you think about a global currency arrangement? Should it still be the U.S. dollar, or a basket of currencies? Or should we create a new currency?

 

·      From Manuel Frias, a prominent engineer in Mexico: On whether or not to have a new currency. If yes, should the new currency arrangement be linked to gold, or to a basket of currencies?

 

·      From a group of state legislators, who had introduced the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA) in their state legislatures: State Sen. Constance Johnson (Oklahoma City, OK); State Sen. Joey Pendelton (Hopkinsville, KY); State Rep. Jameela Nashid (St. Louis, MO): What should we do in terms of the HBPA, considering it has been blocked by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; what remedies are there for state governments, where you have growing unemployment, and huge deficits?

 

 

 [For a complete transcript of the webcast, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 47 (Nov. 28, 2008), pp. 4-39.]

 

Release Date: Dec. 15, 2008

 

Program No. 729

“The Last Chance for Civilization?” Pt. 3

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 

On Nov. 1, 2008 Lyndon LaRouche issued what he called the “November 11 Resolution” for a private meeting to take place on that date, in which he presented the indispensable measures to be taken in the face of the now hopelessly bankrupt world monetary system. He identified the period between Nov. 11-19, as decisive for forcing a change in policy, at least among a leading group representing the institution of the U.S. Presidency. During that 9-day period, in addition to the Nov. 11 meeting, Mr. LaRouche gave an international webcast on Nov. 18, and a second private meeting on Nov. 19.

 

Featured in this edition of The LaRouche Connection, is the conclusion of the discussion session of the international webcast event in Washington, DC, Nov. 18, sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. The entire event was moderated by Harley Schlanger.

 

From the Discussion Session:

 

·      From a group of state legislators, who had introduced the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA) in their state legislatures: State Sen. Constance Johnson (Oklahoma City, OK); State Sen. Joey Pendelton (Hopkinsville, KY); State Rep. Jameela Nashid (St. Louis, MO): What should we do in terms of the HBPA, considering it has been blocked by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; what remedies are there for state governments, where you have growing unemployment, and huge deficits?

 

·      From someone in New York City: Please assess the risks to prominent figures other than President-elect Obama.

 

·      From the Italian Senate: Considering the fact of Mr. Obama’s election not being a solution in itself, isn’t the best approach to try to influence him, so that it will be possible to adopt the New Bretton Woods system?

 

·      From a Chinese scholar: “You say Chinese workers are underpaid, and that the Chinese government has underpaid them to compete in the global labor market for cheaper production costs. But, raising labor costs has already made many companies bankrupt, so how do you take care of the unemployment issues of the Chinese population?”

 

·      From an economist and a banker from the U.S. Southwest: “Is it still your view that this bailout package, the pumping of money into the financial system, that we’re still on the verge of a hyperinflationary explosion?”

 

·      Feride Gillesberg (Denmark): “How much power does Europe have in [your proposal for a Four Power Agreement], and what should the Europeans do? What is the relationship between the American system and the European parliamentary system?”

 

·      From a young Classical artist in the heart of Europe: “Apart from the study of nature and her principles, what advice could you give to young Classical artists in a time of post-modernism? Once we have perfected our skills, where are we to turn? Are there people in the world today willing to support us, and willing to listen? How do we recognize those who are truly noble from those who are crooks?”

 

 [For a complete transcript of the webcast, see EIR magazine, Vol. 35, No. 47 (Nov. 28, 2008), pp. 4-39.]

 

Release Date: Dec. 22, 2008   

 


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