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LaRouche - Admin - 12-01-2008 FROM FEAR TO PANIC AS DERIVATIVES CRASH HITS http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/11/21/larouche-fear-panic-derivatives-crash-hits.html Lyndon LaRouche today declared that leading bankers and government officials have gone "from fear to panic,'' as the next phase of the total disintegration of the global financial system hits. "We are now seeing the blowout of the multi-trillion dollar derivatives bubble,'' and this is what is driving the panic, LaRouche explained. As of the end of June 2008, official figures, compiled by the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, showed a total derivatives exposure of the three largest U.S. bank holding companies--JP Morgan Chase, Citicorp and Bank of America--stood at more than $179 trillion. And the Bank for International Settlements put the amount of documented outstanding derivatives contracts worldwide at the end of 2007 at $675 trillion--still a fraction of the actual exposure. During November, investors in hedge funds had the opportunity to withdraw their cash, without penalty, and this factor, on top of the already onrushing unraveling of the derivatives bubble, is playing out. LaRouche noted that every major financial institution of the United States, Europe and Asia is tied up in the derivatives collapse, but no one has a clear picture of the exposure of the other financial institutions. "This is the big explosion, detonating right now,'' LaRouche warned. "And so far, I am offering the only coherent solution--bankruptcy reorganization of the entire global financial system--starting with the cancellation of all derivatives obligations. My solution poses an existential threat to the entire Anglo-Dutch financial system of globalization. I know it, many leading bankers and government officials around the world know it, and, of course, the British know it. This is why the fear has turned to outright panic. We are nearing the showdown moment." "YOU DAMN FOOLS : YOU SHOULD PUT THIS THING INTO BANKRUPTCY Wall Street insiders know that last Sunday's $269 billion second bailout of Citigroup was intended to be only the first of a series, which will embrace most or all of the major banks. And that Sunday Citigroup fiasco was followed by Paulson's announcement Tuesday of an $800 billion Federal Reserve program to buy junk paper, making a total of over $1 trillion in new "bailout" commitments over a mere three days, and bringing the total up to about $8.5 trillion so far (over half of GDP), in the U.S. alone! In this setting, Lyndon LaRouche said today: "Why don't they try bankruptcy? We should put this out clearly: You damn fools; you should put this thing in bankruptcy! You don't have enough money in the universe to pay this bill! So why don't you admit it! We should say that; exactly that. We shouldn't do any reporting of this stuff, because reporting it is being impotent in the face of it. Just say that there's not enough money in the universe to pay this damn bill. They can't do it; they should declare bankruptcy, and just cancel all these damn derivatives. We'll protect the firms that are driven into bankruptcy, in bankruptcy reorganization. We have no other course except to put this thing into bankruptcy. "We're about to launch the greatest hyperinflationary burst in modern history," he continued, "unless we stop this. We're on the verge of a hyperinflationary explosion; they've been trying to conceal this hyperinflationary thing by various tricks so far. Now it can't work any more! So they've got to put the thing into receivership! Put it into bankruptcy now! That should be your headline on everything. There is nothing to do with this thing except put it into bankruptcy. Paulson, stop being a Christian Scientist! Take your medication! Don't be a Christian Scientist all your life; take your medicine! "This is not just U.S.," LaRouche went on. "This is international. As I had warned, this is now going into a hyperinflationary phase. And if you don't want to blow out the world system, you're going to put the damn thing into bankruptcy now! You're going to put the legitimate banks under bankruptcy protection, now! No protection for derivatives, none! But the banks which may be put normally into bankruptcy as a result of that, are put under bankruptcy protection, and the derivatives payments are suspended. "What that does, that's life and death time," he emphasized. "If you don't do it, you're going to lose the country! Are you going to do it?-- That's the whole point! Look, you damn fools,-- you don't know anything! This is the guy that knows what he's talking about; you damn fools haven't known what you were talking about all along! Now, this is what you're going to do if you've got any brains left! "And Paulson," LaRouche said, "I don't care if he's a Christian Scientist or not; he's going to take his medicine! Bankruptcy! "Bush may not like it," he continued, "but that's what you have to do! And, if you don't like the result, mail the bill to Bush! The Bush Administration itself, is going totally with the British line. And don't let this lame duck shit on your economy! "The main thing is, my statement should just dominate everything," LaRouche told his associates. "Don't pollute it by coming up with other discussions and explanatory notes, which is what the usual mistake is. In this case, just say, as I've been warning, the hyperinflation is being unleashed. It's being unleashed over this Citibank thing, and this is the time to stop the bullshit. The policy must be to put Citibank and other banks under bankruptcy protection of their normal banking functions, which means freezing all claims based on the speculative investments called derivatives. No bailout for derivatives! Freeze them! Put the whole thing into bankruptcy and supply the protection to the regular functions of the banks. Then you don't have to pay out all that money, you damn fools! You don't have to put a nickel more into bailouts! Just put the thing under bankruptcy protection as I've told you all along, you damn fools! "Now, you damn fools, do as I told you!" LaRouche concluded. "You did it your way, and that was wrong, and now it's a hopeless case! You've got to do it now my way!" THEY'RE GOING INTO A HYPERINFLATIONARY PHASE NOW http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/11/26/larouche-theyre-going-hyperinflationary-phase-now.html Commenting on yesterday's announcement of a new injection of $800 billion into the banking system, Lyndon LaRouche said today: "This is going to turn their debts into assets. They're going to take Fed money, deposit it in the system in their name, and they're not going to do any lending. How the hell is that going to stimulate the economy? They don't know how to spell `stimulation.' They really mean to say `suffocation.' What we have here is a lack of understanding of the English language. They should check their dictionaries. What they're really talking about is not `stimulation' but `suffocation' -- $800 billion worth of more suffocation." "They're going into a hyperinflationary phase now. All of this is preparing for launching into the hyperinflationary phase. They've been holding back on the hyperinflation for a while, by various tricks; now they're coming to the point that they can't get by with that anymore. Now they're going to unleash hyperinflation." U.S. banks have already put at least $600 billion of the $1.3 trillion in extraordinary Fed lending back on deposit to earn interest, rather than lending it, according to financial commentators. The same process is occurring in Europe where the European Union today announced a $258 billion stimulus package. PAULSON WILLNG TO SINK ALL US BANKS http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/11/26/larouche-paulson-willing-sink-all-u-s-banks.html Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is willing to follow the British scenario and sink all U.S. banks, Lyndon LaRouche said today. Instead of following British orders, Paulson should take his medicine, and declare the whole system in bankruptcy-- reorganization in bankruptcy, not more bailouts. He may be a Christian Scientist, but this time he has got to take his medicine, LaRouche said. LaRouche characterized Paulson's latest $800-billion Federal Reserve program to buy junk paper, as an end-run around the debt ceiling. It is illegal and unconstitutional, LaRouche said. Part of the reason for the British-orchestrated assassination threats against Obama is the fear that he could overturn some aspects of this illegal sham, LaRouche said. LAROUCHE PRESENTS PROGRAM FOR WORLD ECONOMIC RECOVERY http://larouchepub.com/lar/2008/webcasts/3540oct1_opener.html Lyndon LaRouche delivered this address to an audience in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 1, 2008; it was simultaneously carried on the Internet at www.larouchepac.com, the website of the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC), where video and audio archives are on file. LaRouche's opening remarks were followed by more than two hours of discussion, moderated by his national spokeswoman, Debra Freeman. [PDF version of this webcast, and discussion which followed] Debra Freeman: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Debra Freeman, and on behalf of LaRouche PAC, I'd like to welcome all of you to today's event. Certainly there no moment more dramatic for our nation, and in fact for the world, than this one. And it is indeed fitting, that after the stunning defeat of the bailout package, if you will, by the House of Representatives, just a couple of days ago, that we would be hosting this event today. It is my understanding that we have the largest audience gathered around the world that we have ever had. That doesn't surprise me. But I don't want to keep them waiting. So, without further ado, please join me in welcoming the statesman and economist, Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon LaRouche: Thank you. We have come into times like those you have never, in your lifetimes, experienced before. As a matter of fact, there's nothing in all modern European history, globally extended, to compare with what is happening, globally, and in the United States as well, right now. There's been nothing like the crisis that faces us today, since a comparable crisis in Europe during the medieval period, called the New Dark Ages: We are on the verge of a complete collapse of the entire planet into a New Dark Age. On the 25th of July last year, I announced that we were on the edge of the beginning of a breakdown crisis in the U.S. economy. At that point, I indicated the measures that would have to be taken, to deal with this crisis which is going to hit us, measures which if they had been taken, between the 25th of August and recently, we would not be in the crisis we're in today. We're in a crisis today, because people like Senator Dodd and "Bailout Barney," in the House of Representatives, prevented the actions which I had specified, which would have prevented the kind of crisis which the nation and its people are suffering today! So, if you don't like what's happening, blame "Bailout Barney" and Chris Dodd. Chris Dodd's a stooge for Felix Rohatyn, one of the worst right-wingers in our country today. Now, I also indicated a proposal for certain other actions, in addition to the warning, which should be taken by the United States, to avert and begin the correction of this problem. The first was known as the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007, which I specified at that time. It was actually set into motion as a formal proposition in early September of that same year. This had much support at the state level, and counties, throughout the United States. It was voted up by county organizations and state organizations. But it was never formally adopted, because of the blocking from interests controlling people like Dodd and "Bailout Barney." So we're in a crisis, because Bailout Barney and Dodd, and people like them, acted to prevent this action from occurring, which would have saved our banks which are now in trouble, and which would have saved the homeowners, who are threatened with continuing and accelerating evictions today. This is one of the reasons, why the House of Representatives displayed such hatred against the Congress as a whole, in the recent vote on Monday, against the bailout. Now, the bailout bill might be voted up. The danger is, that a desperate Bush Administration, and what it's tied to internationally, might try to make a military suppression of resistance to their policy now. They might try to use military force, to force through the kind of legislation, the bailout, which is being attempted now. On the Verge of Global Hyperinflation The other side of this proposition, apart from other measures which I've indicated earlier, but will repeat again here today, the essential irony of this situation, is that this is no longer the kind of crisis which the lying government which we have, and the stupid President we have, have been talking about. This is not a mortgage crisis! This is a collapse, a disintegration of the entire international monetary-financial system! Something that has never happened in European experience before! And for which there's no one competent in the White House, right now. We are on the verge of a global hyperinflation like that which hit in October 1923 in Weimar Germany [Figure 1]. When you start talking about $700 billion, then a trillion, then $2 trillion, then $3 trillion, then $7 trillion for this bailout, which is the direction we're going in, you're talking about a Weimar-style blowout of the entire international financial-monetary system! And the problem now, is that the bailout method itself, is the driving force of hyperinflation, global hyperinflation. And what you have, is, you have a sense like the French Revolution, in which the Marquis de Lafayette had the correct position, politically, with the Tennis Court Oath and similar kinds of things. But he lacked one thing: He lacked the guts to take on his own king. The king had been totally corrupted by a number of measures—and he was not too bright; you've got to let him off a little bit—he was kind of stupid. He was good at fixing clocks and making clocks, but he was not very good at politics. And his wife, Marie Antoinette, who was the sister of the Emperor of Austria, was framed up by a British operation called the Queen's Necklace Affair. She was humiliated publicly, and the Emperor of Austria, who had been a friendly fellow, a progressive fellow, relative to the rest of his relatives prior to that point, went berserk. So, what happened, is, that the French king, who was a bit of a jerk, brought in foreign—not French—troops, to occupy the area around Paris, to suppress the French people. And this led to what became, inevitably, the French Revolution, the bloody French Revolution. Because of this kind of mistake. We are on the verge of things like that, today. You have a situation, in which—as you saw with the House of Representatives' vote against this bill, despite all the pressure on the Representatives—and the pressure was not just from the Representatives, it was from people who are represented! It's the people out there, who hate this. And there's an instinct in this Administration, to use military force against the people of the United States, to suppress the opposition to this bill. That is reality, right now! Not something "coming down": That is already the reality. If this bill were to be pushed through, with or without the aid of military force against the American people by American troops—which are now being stationed for this kind of operation—the United States will disappear, in very short order. And civilization would crash, globally. The world would go into a Dark Age, like that of a similar situation in Europe's 14th Century, during which, within a period of a generation, the number of parishes in Europe collapsed by one-half. The level of population of all Europe collapsed by one-third. And mass insanity dominated the population of Europe at that time. That was the end of the authority of the feudal imperial system which had ruled Europe from about 1000 A.D., up until that point. We are on the verge of a situation, in which, if the bill is pushed through, the chain-reaction effects of the bill, will ensure that the population of this planet drops from about 6.5 billion people to less than 2—and that in a fairly short period of time. Entire languages will disappear, entire countries will disappear as entities, and we will go through a Dark Age worse than Europe experienced in the 14th Century. Now, there are some people in the Congress and elsewhere who say, "Ohhh, ohh! We're frightened! We're frightened! You can't do this! Don't you know what you're doing? You can't do this, we can't vote against this bill!" Why? "They'll kill us!" If American troops, ordered by the President, turn on the American people to suppress the opposition to this bill, the United States will cease to exist! This is worse than treason! Any such action, from any part of government, is worse than treason! And anyone who accepts such an order, is a traitor to the United States. So that's the situation we face. There Are Remedies Now, what're the remedies? What're the alternatives? There are some excellent alternatives, but there are no alternatives for Wall Street. Wall Street has earned its death. It is a dead, stinking fish, lying in the streets of Lower Manhattan. The investment banking system is dead! And it should have been killed, before it rotted into death! [laughter] So this is our particular problem. Now, if we want to save the country, and save civilization, and avoid a Dark Age, there are some very elementary remedies, some of which I've already stated earlier, a year ago. One, as I said, we must keep the homeowners in their houses. No evictions. We can make other arrangements to manage the downsizing of the debt. Because most of the mortgage debt is fraudulent. That is, the agencies which generated this level of indebtedness, this level of a housing crisis, committed fraud—fraud against the nation. Therefore, they are not entitled to the full price of the mortgage in any case. But what the full price should be, we don't know. But, we'll find out. We will put this housing situation under bankruptcy protection, by the Federal government, with the cooperation of state government and local government. People will stay in their homes, if they wish to, if they are actually the mortgage holder. Because we must also keep the banks functioning. Now, we have a problem here: In 1999, Clinton was in deep trouble, because of the frame-up against him, by Republicans and others who were trying to stop his attempt to make a change in the financial architecture. Remember, at the time, back in 1998, there was a great collapse of a speculative bubble, which was created about the Yeltsin candidacy for reelection in Russia: the GKO cases. So, at that point, the system was collapsing. I warned the government at that time, that the collapse was on; it was inevitable. And the President at that time—this was in August—agreed with me, that this was the problem. He moved, with the Secretary of the Treasury of that time, to initiate what became the intent to launch a change in the architecture of our financial-monetary system, to eliminate this factor of corruption, and to create remedies for it. However, at that time, there was a frame-up, organized by forces which were opposed to this reform, which moved toward the impeachment of President Clinton. So, President Clinton, during the following year, was living most of his time, under the dictatorship of Al Gore! Who was acting as a man in occupation of the White House. And the ability of the President, Clinton, to deal with these kinds of problems, which were building up in the year 1999, was limited. Under these conditions, and a confused and corrupted Congress—and it was confused and corrupted—the repeal of Glass-Steagall occurred. If Glass-Steagall had not been repealed, we would not be in the kind of crisis we're in today. We should restore Glass-Steagall immediately. That's one of the things the Congress should do. But that's not enough. There are new problems, in addition to those addressed by Glass-Steagall, which have been created by this process; so therefore, we have to have a larger piece of legislation, and I'll get to that. I also proposed a protection for our banking system, in terms of currency: I proposed that we have a basic, minimum 4% interest rate, as the lending rate for our banking system. Except in cases of government projects which are in the national interest, government projects certified by the Congress, which would have a lower rate of borrowing. That would have protected us against some of the worst things that went on in this period. The Big Four Powers Now, the third thing, which is the big one, which is of crucial importance right now, is, I proposed that the United States approach Russia, China, and India, as the big four powers on this planet; not to establish a dictatorship by these four powers, but to take a group of four nations, which aggregately are so powerful, the world has to listen to them, and obey some of the suggestions they make. They would immediately be supported in these kinds of measures, by Japan, by Korea, by some nations in Europe—some forces in Italy, some forces in France, like President Sarkozy in France, right now. There's a movement in Italy, also, organized by the Finance Minister of Italy, which is moving in the same direction. The Italian motion is directly done in my name: That is, the idea of a New Bretton Woods, my policy, is specified by a motion, a bill presented in the Italian Senate, now, for a New Bretton Woods system. Now, that is the solution, the key to the solution to this situation, internationally. We have a world system: The entire system is bankrupt! The entire world monetary-financial system is already in a Weimar-style hyperinflationary takeoff! We are weeks or so away from a crisis beyond belief! And all the troops that Bush might wish to deploy to the streets to try to get that bill through, will not save the United States from destruction by the effects of his doing that! Therefore, we need the cooperation of Russia, China, and India, as a "Big Four," around which other nations can gather, and simply get rid of the opposition to doing this! It's in the interest of the people of the world, so why not mobilize the major part of the world's population, in these and other nations combined, and let's say, the people of the world, through their respective national governments agree: This is going to be stopped! What would we do? We would take a leaf out of the book of President Franklin Roosevelt, who's much smarter than these jerks that we now have in government, today. He had some better supporters then, too. We would then say, we're going to set up—as what the language is, in Russia, in Italy, from the President of France, and from others—a new Bretton Woods system! And they mean, a new Franklin Roosevelt Bretton Woods system. Nothing different. The difference between that, and what Truman did, is notable. What Roosevelt did, is, Roosevelt followed the Constitution. FDR's Post-War Intention Now let me explain what the problem was then, because it's relevant to understand the problem today. Roosevelt's intention, during the war, was to engage in a reluctant alliance with the British, in order to crush the Nazis, and some other pestilences running loose. But Roosevelt's intention was also, at the end of the war, to eliminate colonialism and everything like it from the planet. Now we had had, as some of you are old enough to remember (or very few of you I guess; you'd have to be my generation to remember that), we had launched, as a recovery measure, from the Depression created by Coolidge and Hoover and people like that, which we used as our mobilization, with the role of Harry Hopkins and others, to mobilize the United States economically, to prepare for our obligation to deal with this menace of Hitler and so forth in Europe, and in the world in general. We created, from the poor people of our streets, through Harry Hopkins and other Roosevelt programs, we created the greatest economic machine, physical-economic productive economic machine, the world had ever known, in our United States. Yes, we had allies that we depended upon. But! It was the margin of the United States' mobilization by Roosevelt, which enabled us to defeat Hitler, and similar problems! Roosevelt's intention was to get at the root of these global problems, by eliminating the power of British imperialism! And that was the big fight between Roosevelt and Churchill all during the war. So Roosevelt's intention, as he said, clearly, was, at the end of the war, as he said to "Wi-i-n-ston!"—"At the end of the war, Winston, no more British crap! People are going to be free. There are going to be no more colonies." We're going to use the mighty military war machine, the productive machine of the United States, to free people, to enable them to develop, to gain their freedom, to eliminate colonies from this planet, and to allow nations to develop to the full dignity of mankind. Now, we didn't do that at the end of the war, because Truman was a Churchill-lover. He was a bum, too. He was only stuck in, because he was a right-winger, and Roosevelt was under pressure in 1944, from the right wing, which was resurgent at point. And they put this character, Truman, in place. And Truman kissed the butt of Winston Churchill—there's no bones about it. He may have kissed some other things, too, but the butt was noted. So what Truman did—under the Truman Administration, we didn't follow Roosevelt's post-war policy. Roosevelt's post-war policy was to convert the military productive machine, which we had generated to win the war, to convert it into a production machine for the benefit of the world, for capital goods and other things for the world. What the Truman Administration did, was say, "No, we like the British." The Truman Administration endorsed the recolonization of Indo-China! The Japanese soldiers were imprisoned in Indo-China; they had been freed by a revolution which was supported by the United States, by OSS people and so forth, from the United States. Under British orders, the Japanese troops were taken out of the camps, given their weapons again, and told to occupy Indo-China. Out of that, came the Indo-China war, which we spent some time on during the 1960s-1970s. We did the same thing with the Dutch in Indonesia. We did a modified version of the same thing in India. We did the same thing in Africa. We worked with the British and Dutch to recolonize the planet, to restore the British Empire, which is what the Anglo-Dutch system is. And what we did in the United States, instead of converting our war machine into production for the world, and its development, we shut large parts of it down! We took the war debt we had inherited from the war, but we shut down the means of getting rid of that debt, by converting military potential into industrial and related potential. And thus, we, the United States, were on the way down: We've gone down in successive stages. We went down, in the first stage, under Truman. We went down after the killing of Kennedy. Johnson was terrified; he thought these three guys were going to shoot him next, in the back of the neck, or something like that, and he said so. Johnson was not a bad President; he was a terrified President. We Will Rebuild the World Economy Then you had the Baby-Boomer factor, in 1968. And that destroyed the United States and let Nixon be elected. And we had that right-wing turn, and we've never recovered from it since. Since 1967-68, as measured in physical productive output, not money, but physical productive output, the United States has been declining in economic power, physically, per capita, per square kilometer, over every year, under every Presidency; from 1968 to the present time, there has never been prosperity in the United States [Figures 2 and 3]: There has been prosperity for some, in terms of money, like the thieves who are backing this thing about the bailout. But there was not improvement in our infrastructure; we have lost industries; we lost our automobile industry—we have a Japanese industry, which is functioning quite nicely inside the United States. We don't have a U.S. auto industry—and we will never have one, never in the normal sense of an auto industry. The Japanese are doing a good job, and similar people are making all the autos we need. But we do need something else: We need a mobilization of the productive power of the United States, which is largely machine-tool design and related things, to build our infrastructure, to build systems, to build a railroad system to replace this crazy highway system; to fix our river systems which are about to collapse; to restore our agriculture; to rebuild manufacturing and similar activities in the United States, instead of make-work. To rebuild our nation, in the American tradition, not the British slavery tradition which we're operating under now. Now, we're faced with a period, in which under the present system, the U.S. dollar is right now essentially worthless. It has not become worthless, but it's becoming worthless, and there's nothing underneath there to stop it from falling. As a matter of fact, the Secretary of the Treasury is causing the dollar to fall at an ever-accelerating rate! We are in hyperinflation—now! Like Weimar in the Autumn of 1923: The world is in a hyperinflationary spiral, and it's going to blow out. Now, what do we do? What do we do with the Four Power agreement? Russia is ready to agree to this—now! Forces in Italy and France have declared themselves for it. What they mean by that is still up for some discussion, but it's there. China will support that, but not unless the United States comes in on it, because China is concerned about the price of the dollar; because China depends largely upon its trade with United States. India would join it. If Russia joins it, these countries would join it. If this Big Four, joined quickly by other nations, comes to an agreement, we will put the entire world into bankruptcy reorganization. We will create an intention to form what we would call a "New Bretton Woods system." We will use the power of international government—that is, not an international agency, but the power of government pulled together as an international force—we will use that force to regulate a fixed-currency system throughout the planet. We will put the lid on hyperinflation. We will keep the banks of countries open—the real banks, not the fake ones. We will build the economy, by measures of economy-building: large-scale, needed infrastructure projects, using high technology, using engineering design. This will be a rebuilding of the world economy. We will create new credit, not the fake credit you've been getting lately, but new credit, at low interest rates, long term, just as we did under Roosevelt: to launch the employment, in each of the countries, under a fixed-exchange-rate system which allows us to rapidly build back the productive power of nations. Yes, we're going to take time to clean this mess up that we have today. It'll probably take two generations, before we fully eliminate the results of the corruption which has been dumped upon us in the past 40 years. A New Mission for Mankind But you have to understand something else: In real terms, in physical economic terms, every policy directive of the United States over the past 40 years has been a miserable failure, a mistake. The U.S. economy, as measured in physical productive powers and output, per capita and per square kilometer, including essential basic infrastructure, has been collapsing consistently over 40 years. Since the budgetary year of 1967-68, there has been no net growth per capita, of real growth in the U.S. economy. What this tells you is, that every government of the United States, every session of Congress, in the main, the opinion of newspapers, the leading newspapers and other publications, the opinion of most mass media, has been stupid! Because we have consistently made the decisions, one after the other, which have made the conditions of life worse with each generation. The per-capita physical output of the United States today, is less than it was in any preceding period going back to 1967-68. The influence of the Baby-Boomers, the influence of especially the environmentalists, so-called, has been a key factor in this. We have been destroying ourselves. A similar process has gone on in Western Europe; a similar process has gone on elsewhere. Now, we have a global situation, in which there has been an implicit shift of power, a shift of power from Europe and the Americas, toward Asia. The future of the planet lies in the development of Russia, China, India, and other Asian countries. These are areas of large populations in which 60-70%, or more, are extremely poor, poorly developed. This represents a social crisis, a planetary social crisis, with all kinds of side-effects possible. But! If we're going to have a successful planet, we have to concentrate on large-scale infrastructure projects and similar things, which will, over two generations, raise the productive powers of labor of populations from all around the world. This means that the major investment, in the planet, in the period now, will come, first, in Asia; second, the second-largest component will be black Africa, especially black Africa; the third component will be development in Central and South America. The United States and Western Europe must be mobilized as a driver, an economic driver, as well as a political driver, to bring about the success of development of the whole planet, by what we do in support of the development in South and Central America, in Africa, and in Asia. We need a new mission for mankind. We don't have any enemies in the world, who are any worse, any more our enemies than President George Bush is. It is the people who are controlling us—and the British, the Anglo-Dutch Liberals, these characters are inducing us to destroy ourselves. We don't have real enemies in Asia, as nations! We don't have real enemies in South America. We don't have real enemies in Africa—not if we think like Franklin Roosevelt! If we think like Roosevelt, we don't have enemies there. These are our friends—and our government is our enemy! So, essentially, if the American people are able to stand up to this, as many of the people of the lower income brackets, as represented in the Congress, in the House of Representatives—are able to push through the changes that are necessary, I can guarantee you, absolutely, if that change is made, Russia will fully cooperate; China will cooperate; India will cooperate. Then Japan will cooperate, Korea will cooperate, other nations will cooperate! The nations of Africa will greet this as—they're being mass-murdered now under British policy!—they will rejoice, at our coming back into the picture in this way. The world will be on the side of the United States. What the United States Is Now, the other thing we have to appreciate, is what our United States is. In modern history, there was an evolution, coming out of a long period of religious warfare, from 1492 to 1648, from the same time as Columbus's first exploration across the Atlantic, until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Now, during this period, the forces that were trying to crush the nation-state institution, were not able to crush the nation-state, because the improvements in productive powers of labor, and the increase in intellect and freedom, among the rising citizenry in the cities which were emerging in this period, were such that, as Machiavelli describes this process, the city could defeat the forces of the opposition. And so, you had an adaptation, by the enemies of humanity, called the movement of Paolo Sarpi. Paolo Sarpi was a slick character, a Venetian, who, among other things, moved the operations of his part of Venice, away from the Mediterranean base, into Northern Europe, centered in parts of Germany, in the Netherlands, and in England. This is a process which began with the Venetian restructuring of the marriage policies of Henry VIII, which was done from Venice: They sent him a marriage counselor, and he got rid of the wives; he sort of cut off their careers, at the head. He said, "You don't need a head any more, if you don't please me." So, in any case, there was a process in which the power of development or the power of civilization shifted from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe. And the two areas were the Netherlands and England. So now, there was a split, and the split occurred in 1763, in February of 1763, with the Treaty of Paris, the Peace of Paris, in which we, in the United States, or what became the United States, broke with England, because England had become an empire, and was trying to loot us. Because of this cultural factor, the dominant characteristic of global civilization has been English-language domination and control of global civilization, from that time to the present day. Especially from 1763 to the present. Thus, the division between two English-speaking peoples, those of us, in the United States, today, and those who represented the British oligarchy or the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy—the bankers, the thieves—became the leading force on the planet—not necessarily the entirely controlling force, but the leading force. And thus, the role of the United States is built into the history of Europe! It's built into the history of civilization, like an organic quality: That we in the United States have adopted, and been given the destiny, of creating the leadership, to assist the rest of the world in becoming free, of the British, Anglo-Dutch Liberal Empire, and its practices. That was Roosevelt's intention, his explicit intention. That was the intention of every great President we had, every great patriot this country had. We were considered a threat to Britain, to the British Empire, for this reason. Thus, it's built into the cultural relationships within the planet, that when the United States takes the moral role, as it did under Roosevelt, and says, "We are concerned with finding ways of cooperation with other nation-states on this planet, to form a society of perfectly sovereign nation-states, which enter into forms of cooperation in their common interest. We'll not try to dictate the internal characteristics of the government of these other nations, we simply cooperate with them as national personalities. And we as a national personality cooperate with these other nations, as their national personalities. And come to common goals and common ends, the common aims of mankind." Now, if we take that policy—not, "Who's the enemy? Who're we gonna beat?" We've got one enemy to beat: the Anglo-Dutch Liberals. The other enemies are simply fools who don't know any better, but we're supposed to know better. We must become again, we must re-create in this country, a new political movement, based on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, based on the legacies which many Republicans bear, a new political movement, which adopts the idea of the United States as a unique, universal personality, which has a role to play, on this planet, for the benefit of humanity as a whole, and therefore, for itself: It's the principle of Westphalia, the Peace of Westphalia, "the benefit of the other"! It's the principle of the modern nation-state, the benefit of the other people, because if you care for the benefit of the other people, you're going to be cared for yourself. You're going to create the kind of society in which you'll be cared for. You create justice for others, you create a climate of justice for yourself; you create a climate of progress, you create a climate of progress for yourself. An Agreement To Come to an Agreement You know, the experience that I had since I was overseas during World War II, in Asia, is to see the evil of the conditions of life and culture under which people live, largely because of the factor of imperialism—of British imperialism in particular, also Dutch imperialism, and so forth. And these people, then, when I was in India, for example, in the Spring of 1945-46, that was the aspiration: The Indians looked to us, and coolies on the street would come up to me, in American uniform, and say, "Is the United States going to send us agricultural machinery? Is it going to send us textile machinery, so we can be no longer be coolies at eight annas a day, but we can have our own life?" That was the image of the United States in the eyes of the world, as long as Roosevelt was President, and that continued for some time. Roosevelt represented the best tradition of the United States: Not trying to find out "who's the enemy to beat?" An enemy is somebody who's coming out to kill you; well, you fight them off. But you're not looking for a system of relations among states, based on adversarial considerations! Your system, while it may deal with adversarial problems, must, in the long run, rely upon non-adversarial issues, like that of the Peace of Westphalia. Under those conditions, given how terrible the situation is, right now, with our monetary-financial system, if we—the United States—if we can force, in this United States, to take this piece of crap, this President, and force this Presidency to move, to make an agreement—that is, to make an agreement to make an agreement: It doesn't require a full-fledged worked-out agreement. It requires a process of getting to an agreement; an agreement to come to an agreement, among Russia, the United States, China, India, and other countries, which now, probably include Italy and France, and some others. Under those conditions, we, as a combination of powers, can dictate what the fixed-exchange rate of the monetary system will be! We can dictate and regulate against inflation. We can create credit, large-scale creation of new technologies, and new kinds of infrastructure. We can do these things! But we have to agree to agree. Then, apply the power, represented by that agreement, among these powers and others who join them, to crush that force which is imposing this hyperinflation upon the entire world, and is now threatening to use even U.S. troops to try to suppress anybody who opposes a bailout—which would, in itself, destroy the United States. These guys behind the Secretary of the Treasury don't care about the United States! They care about their class, their Wall Street class, their investment banking class: They care more about Goldman Sachs than they do about the United States! And they want revenge against the United States for allowing Goldman Sachs to go bankrupt; or, it is bankrupt, aptly. So that's the issue. Real Economics Now, the positive side has another aspect: There is a certain idiocy about economics, not only among our economists. Generally, if you want to become an idiot in economics, you have to study economics and become professional at it! You can not be a successful idiot without becoming professional! And, there are good economists, in the sense that they do things which are useful, they know things which are important. But when it comes to the basic questions of international systems, we don't have economists—who are called "economists"—who know what the hell the score is. They just don't know it. They may be well-meaning people, they're often intelligent people. They know something. They are useful, at something. But they don't understand the basics of economics. Because they believe what they're taught in universities, and that's the first step down to absolute destruction of your intellect, these days. The point is very simple: The idiot says, particularly the free-trader—I don't know who he's trading in, but he's a free-trader—says, "well, everything starts from the point of production." Well, that's nonsense. Economy does not start—not successful economy—from the point of production. For example, let's take a case in about 1910-1912, in the area of New York City, in general, because Thomas Edison was in that area: And there was a development in improvement in electrical motors, the small electrical motors which could be attached to individual machines. And there was a leap in productivity in the greater New York area, through the Edison method of introducing these individual machines, of these new types, to attach them to machines, rather than belt-driven systems, or similar kinds of systems. It was a leap in productivity. There was no significant increase, as such, to account for this increase in productivity, at the point of production otherwise. But it was the effect of changing the environment of production. RE: LaRouche - Admin - 12-17-2008 THE PRESENT MONETARY SYSTEM IS THE DISEASE http://larouchepac.com/news/2008/12/04/larouche-present-monetary-system-disease.html BFM.ru, the new Internet portal of the Russian economics radio station Business FM, today published an interview with U.S. economist Lyndon LaRouche, under the headline "The Present Monetary System Is the Disease." Correspondent Natalya Bokareva, to whose written questions LaRouche replied on Nov. 27, introduced the interview: "The only way to save the world economy is to return to Bretton Woods. The cosmetic changes, proposed by the G-8 and the G-20, will not save the world. The American economist Lyndon LaRouche presents this viewpoint in an interview with BFM.ru." Illustrated by a photo of LaRouche addressing an audience in Washington on Nov. 18, the BFM.ru publication goes on to provide partially correct biographical information on LaRouche, including that he was author of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and that he was jailed, but was released ahead of time after advocacy on his behalf by numerous influentials. The introduction also notes that as an "anti-globalist," LaRouche calls for returning to "the original American System," adding that "this is partially explained by the fact that LaRouche's ancestors landed on American shores from the Mayflower, thus originally belonging to the American establishment." Today, BFM.ru stresses, "LaRouche calls for the world to return to the economic prescriptions of Roosevelt, and to a credit system, rather than a monetarist global financial system." (The day before this publication appeared, Russian aluminum industry magnate Oleg Deripaska issued a nationally publicized call to save Russian industry by following the model of FDR's New Deal.) Then follow the interview questions and answers, as shown below in English. They may be viewed in Russian at www.bfm.ru/news/2008/12/03/larush.html. In the discussion area on BFM.ru, readers have noted the importance of studying LaRouche's other writings, including his economic and strategic forecasts from before 2001. BFM.ru: Many officials keep repeating that the global financial system needs reforming. In your opinion, what will this new order mean-- creating some new regulatory institutions or reorganising the existing ones (the IMF, the World Bank) to change their core profile and activities? What is possible and necessary to implement in the near future? LaRouche: All proposed reforms which were situated within the context of the present monetary system would fail disastrously. It is the present monetary system itself which is the disease. It can not be cured; it can only be replaced. Any attempt to reform the present system would be a quick step toward a great disaster. What is required is the replacement of the existing monetary system by a credit-system modeled upon the intention of the Federal Constitution of the U.S.A., as President Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended such a reform in his presentation of what he defined as a Bretton Woods System. The confusion on this issue arises because the IMF installed by the British and Truman's USA was a monetarist system, not a credit system. The source of the potentially fatal confusion among most governments on this matter is a result of the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt was anti-colonialist, and intended his IMF reform to eradicate colonialism and similar abuses. Truman, a right-winger allied to Churchill, used the opportunity created by President Roosevelt's death to defend previously established British imperialist and other colonial arrangements. The British empire now rules the world, at least temporarily. With the floating of the U.S. dollar, by President Nixon, in 1971, the dollar ceased to be a sovereign currency, and was degraded, step by step, to becoming a plaything of an Anglo-Dutch Liberal monetarist system. It is that now hopelessly bankrupted, monetarist system, itself, which has entered the phase of terminal collapse. All nations which continue to seek reforms within the existing monetary system will simply disintegrate at some early time, perhaps as early as months away. Russia would be a first choice of a possible initiator of such a reform, were the U.S.A. to join Russia in such an action. Then, China, which desperately needs such a solution, and India, whose situation is somewhat less critical at the moment, would form a group of four which would be the nucleus, around which to rally other nations as members. Such an action would be almost certainly successful; no alternative to that is visible. BFM.ru: In your opinion, how relevant is the need for stricter oversight over global corporations and, particularly, for control over speculative capital movements? LaRouche: Ruthless enforcement against freedom for speculative forms of financial-capital movements is necessary for any nation which intends to outlive the now rapidly approaching general breakdown-collapse of all existing monetarist systems. Money has no intrinsic value. That is why all conventional economists have been complete failures in their attempts at long-range statistical-economic forecasting. There is no way that money values could come kinematically into functional correspondence with human values. Forecasting, in which I have the best record of anyone so engaged, must be approached in terms of physical-capital and science-technological factors, not statistical theories. Money-values must be regulated within reasonable ranges of estimates; such systems are called protectionist systems. People who think only in terms of buying and selling today, are ignorant of the decisive role of long-term capital improvements in production and basic economic infrastructure. Not only must protectionist measures defend long-term capital requirements, but they must include increasingly high rates of technological improvements in effective productivity of physical capital, as measured per capita and per square kilometer. These capital formations involve spans of a quarter- to a half-century and longer. The ensuring of needed long-term physical capital formation and of increase of the energy-flux-density of power per capita and per-square kilometer of territory, must be built into the policy-making process. For example, the increase of the energy-flux density of power sources (which means nuclear-fission and nuclear-fusion densities) is indispensable for meeting the conditions of life required for the present level of population of the planet. Without a fixed-exchange-rate system, no long-term success of any modern economy could be possible. BFM.ru: The G7 today is a kind of a representative club which is not a decision-making body. In your opinion, is it necessary to expand the membership in this elite club and change its principles of functioning? Should this include creating a new global regulatory body competent in making decisions which are obligatory for its members? LaRouche: Forget the G-7 and kindred arrangements. They are only coffins within which the memory of disintegrated national systems who join them will soon be buried. It is necessary to create a new system. The only workable first step would be to create a nucleus for a new world credit-system (not a monetary system) of the form which President Franklin Roosevelt had actually intended. It must be a fixed-exchange-rate credit-system, not a monetary system. BFM.ru: Currently, the ideas of reorganising the global financial system are promoted by different officials in different countries. Can you see a political leader authoritative and powerful enough to grasp and unify all the views and drive this revolution? LaRouche: Presently, all governments are behaving very foolishly on these issues. One must hope that sheer terror will improve their intentions. The terror will be a runaway hyperinflation which will comparable, on a world-wide scale, to what Germany experienced during October-November 1923. That development is already under way, globally, at this moment. The banking systems of the world are already accelerating their inflation toward early breakdown prospects. I present the design for the remedy. If my design is adopted, civilization will survive the months ahead. If not, we must hope some nations of the distant future after a prolonged, planet-wide, new dark age will be wiser than the present ones. RE: LaRouche - Admin - 12-17-2008 BUILDING THE FOUR POWERS ALLIANCE Vs. LONDON's NEW DARK AGE http://larouchepac.com/news/2008/12/12/larouche-india-building-four-powers-alliance-vs-londons-new-.html-0 Lyndon and Helga Zepp LaRouche have just completed a visit to India to promote the Four Powers Alliance to defeat the British imperial drive for a new global dark age. In an exhaustive series of seminars and private talks, Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly focused on the already onrushing systemic collapse of the post-Bretton Woods financial system, and the urgent need to establish an alliance of sovereign nation-states, led by the four powers, the United States, Russia, China and India, to replace the current system of British imperial monetary looting and perpetual conflict, with a new system based on the American concept of credit. The LaRouches' visit to India occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Nov. 26 asymmetric warfare attack on India's financial capital and largest city, Mumbai, an attack aimed at destabilizing the entire Indian subcontinent, and provoking a military confrontation between India and Pakistan. Lyndon LaRouche systematically exposed the role of British intelligence and their Saudi allies in orchestrating this attack, and challenged the leadership of both India and Pakistan to join forces in defeating this common enemy. On Dec. 3, Lyndon and Helga Zepp LaRouche, along with EIR counterintelligence director Jeffrey Steinberg, addressed a seminar in New Delhi, sponsored by the Forum for Strategic Security Studies (FSSS), a leading military think tank. A partial transcript of that event, featuring the opening remarks by the three speakers, and closing comments by Lyndon LaRouche, appears immediately below. The next issue of Executive Intelligence Review will feature a more comprehensive report on the LaRouches' visit to India, and its aftermath. The Time Has Come for a New System Lyndon LaRouche made the following remarks at the Forum for Strategic and Security Studies in New Delhi on Dec. 3, 2008. The panel, which included EIREditorial Board member Jeffrey Steinberg and Gen. K.K. Hazari, was chaired by Vice Admiral K.K. Nayyar. The event's host was Brig. (ret.) Dr. Vijai Kumar Nair. The transcript has been edited, and subheads added. Moderator: Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche again to the Forum, after a lapse of a few years. And also, he's been kind enough to agree to discuss with us, the various problems we've been thinking about, and how the new U.S. Administration will--shall I say--tackle them, or attempt to tackle these issues. I've been talking to Mrs. LaRouche, about how the real problem, which is taking place after the financial collapse of the Bretton Woods system, is going to be the principal concern of Mr. Obama and his administration. Secondly, Mr. LaRouche has been kind enough to speak to us on Indo-U.S. relations. And third, if you [Mr. LaRouche] have the time, if you could take it on: What are the principal strategic issues, which are going to dominate the world for the next 30, 40, 50 years? Lyndon LaRouche: There are two aspects to be considered here. First of all, let's assume that the incoming U.S. administration actually adopts the kinds of policies which I foresee as required. Secondly, what happens if that fails? So you have two completely different kinds of strategic perspectives, one for Plan A, and the other for Plan B; and Plan B is very messy, and, as most of you can already anticipate--I don't need to say that any further. But, to talk frankly--and confidentially somewhat--about the new administration. The President-elect is a mess. He was actually created by George Soros, and George Soros is a British intelligence operative, of very nasty proclivities, who is running a lot of the problems that you face in various parts, India and elsewhere, today. He's the world's biggest drug pusher, and he also is a general menace. He actually is part of the Commonwealth Office. Presently, he's been long associated with Lord Malloch-Brown, and is now working, nominally under Malloch-Brown. He's also the world's biggest dope pusher! He runs the drug operations in the Americas: Every state except one, in South America, that is, Colombia, is soft on drugs, under pressure from George Soros's money, and similar kinds of things. He also is the drug runner of record in Europe, and also, as you know, in Asia. He's involved in all of it. A very dirty--he's a mass murderer, there's nothing good that can be said about him: As a young man in Hungary--he was an adolescent--he was employed by the Hitler machine in killing Jews, as an errand boy of the Jew-killing operation. The point about that, is not that he did it, but the point is that he never regretted the kind of role he played in doing that. He may have objected to the idea of killing Jews, but he didn't object to the process by which the killing was done, if applied to others. And he's become that kind service operation for the British monarchy ever since. A very dangerous fellow, and most problems we have in Asia and other parts of the world are part of that. He's key in Africa, for example, the present thing in Congo; he's a key part along with his friend, Malloch-Brown, in trying to create a new wave of genocide in Africa. So: a pleasant fellow. A Response in the Institutions - But the point is, that when you have someone with a great deal of money power, like that, coming out of Britain, running the U.S. elections, the fact is, there is a response in the institutions, which may act against the very success. And that's happened before in U.S. history; that's happened in the history of various countries: You get a government you don't want, and somehow institutions of government or around government may act, to try to correct that error, after the damage has been done of putting the fellow in power. And so, in this case, you have the President-elect, who is a lawyer, which is not necessarily a recommendation these days--especially a U.S. lawyer; and he's not thoughtful, he does not understand much of anything. He's a man who has a strong opinion about himself, but not necessarily a very well-crafted opinion about other matters. Now, what's happened is, despite his rivalry with Hillary Clinton in the recent campaign, the administration he has, in terms of his present appointments, is largely either Hillary people or people who would be friendly to Hillary. For example, you have Gen. James Jones, a very competent officer with a well-known history; we know his history from three successions. We know Gen. Joseph Hoar, who is his predecessor, and the predecessor of the predecessor--very clean fellows; we know pretty much how they think, and they're very reliable people. He's in, in a competent position. We have other key positions: Hillary will be the Secretary of State, and she will have the active powers. Bill Clinton will not be in the government, but he will have some kind of acknowledgment of his existence by the government, and he will continue to play a key role on behalf of the United States. If you look through the list as I see it, there are a few bad apples here and there, like Rahm Emanuel from Chicago, who is very close to the President-elect. But! What I see, is, in terms of operation of a government, under conditions of national and global crisis, it is the leaders of institutions which deal with the crisis which are crucial. Sometimes, the government runs the head of state, or the head of government, and we're in that kind of situation, where that is possible. Now: For this situation, I'm in a very special kind of situation, where my influence, because I'm senior, among other things, and have been through many wars, and am well-known by many people in government--they're afraid of me, but they like me, and they like me when they have a problem they think I can help on. So, I will be playing a significant part, according to indications presently, probably, in this government. - The Financial Mess Is Coming Down - And the key thing, which is of primary concern, is the fact that the international monetary-financial system of the world is presently disintegrating. Many people like to pretend that's not true, but it is true. We have outstanding obligations, in the name of derivatives, which run to about $1.4 quadrillion. And this mess is coming down. The entirety of the crisis is not a bottom up crisis: It's a top-down crisis. From about 1987, we have built up this financial derivatives bubble, which has taken over more and more of the world. This system is now collapsing. This collapse, taking 1.4 estimated quadrillion dollars of obligations, short-term obligations of speculative nature, are coming crashing down, and there's no bottom to this crash. The only thing you can do--in a crash of this magnitude, which we have not seen in modern European civilization at any point, up to this time--the last time we saw something like that in Europe, was during the 14th Century, which was called the New Dark Age; that's the last time we saw something like this. Now we can deal with a New Dark Age type of crash. What it means is going to the principle of bankruptcy: You put the system into bankruptcy, by governments, and you sort out what you know must be paid, because it's needed, it's needed to keep the society functioning and going. And you know what is trash. And you put the trash to one side, and create a new monetary-financial system, or a new financial system, and start from there. And you have to do it quickly, because we're in a world crisis: China is collapsing now, in a chain-reaction collapse of its export economy, which is a disaster for it, and portends a potential political crisis inside the country, a major strategic political crisis. That's the threat. We have similar kinds of situations throughout the world. Europe is about to collapse, western and central Europe are about to collapse. Russia is going through an existential crisis: It thought that it was going to be exempt from a crisis in the United States and elsewhere, and it now has found out that's not the case. When this system goes, everybody goes. India, of course, is in a relatively favorable position, because of the lower ratio of dependency on foreign exports, and dealing with the internal population, the lower 63%--at least there's an element of stability in the process, so you're starting from an advantageous relative position, in terms of internal security and general security for dealing with the crisis. But other countries are in a much more precarious situation. Russia's situation is less precarious than China. China's situation is very precarious. And the entire Southwest Asia is a mess. So, in this situation, we have to solve the problem immediately. Now, what I propose, which is rather unique, in the sense that it's unique to the United States: We have a Constitution unlike any other nation on the planet. Our Constitution says that money can not be created, except by the will of government. We are a credit system, not a monetary system. Most of the world--including the United States--is a partner in a monetary system. We don't own the monetary system. We have agreements with a monetary system as nations, but we don't control it, it's not ours. And because it's not ours, it was possible to do this derivatives speculation: That is, to create fantastic credit, on the basis of 11:1 and things like that, of debt. You issue some phony money, you call it a debt, you capitalize it at a rate of 11 times or so the price; you create a vast market of debt, which is greater than the entire world's debt, otherwise. And this comes crashing down on you. There's only one thing you can do: You have to put the debt into bankruptcy, bankruptcy reorganization. Now, to do that, you have to make one change, which we made a long time ago in principle, constitutionally. The United States is not a monetary system. Our system is, by our Constitution, not a monetary system--it's a credit system. That is, the creation of money, or the creation of government obligations tantamount to money, can not be established, except by the consent of the Congress--by the Presidency, with the consent of the Congress. This credit can be uttered for government support for investments, public works, that sort of thing. Or, it can also be simply monetized. But in the end, it is monetized, because that's when you use this stuff for loans, you put this credit out as loans, and the stuff becomes matured, then it comes back into the system as a monetary aggregate, in repayment of those loans under government conditions. - A Four-Power Nucleus To Change the World - What we can do is this: There are four nations on this planet, which are significantly large and important enough, that they could, if willing, could make a decision which would eventually change the direction of affairs on the planet. These four nations are: The United States, itself, because of our Constitution, which is advantageous; Russia, because of its particular position, which is not merely its financial position, but the northern part of Eurasia, contains raw materials resources, which have not been developed, but could be developed. These are absolutely essential for development, and it can not be done by simply ripping the ground; you have to go in there and develop the resources. As for China: China has a real crisis. The majority of its population is extremely poor, and there is no hope for much improvement without a development program in China. Under the present rate, there is not enough development to stabilize the country. India is more stabilized, but it also has a similar problem, long term, of a lot of very poor people, who are going to be a growing population, and they're going to have demands, and legitimate demands. So therefore, we all have this problem, of how do we expand the capacity for carrying the world's population in a stable, growing way, which can't be done under the present monetary system. So therefore, if these four nations agree, to form a nucleus, in recognition of defense against this crisis, then we can change the world. Now, we require a U.S. government which is willing and has the understanding of what its responsibilities are in a such a system of cooperation. For example: Those four nations in cooperation--well, Japan will come in right away; Korea will come in right away; some nations in South Asia will come in right away; Africa will welcome this development; some countries in South America will welcome it. The United States population will welcome it, very quickly--maybe not immediately, but very quickly. And we simply have to have a government that'll do that. Now, because of the internal crisis in the United States now--that is, we've had a breakdown crisis of the U.S. system, the monetary-financial system, and economic system, since the end of July 2007. I happened to forecast this thing, and therefore, since it's happened, I get a lot of credit for having forecast disaster, which usually is not the way to become popular. But, so, more and more bankers, including Federal bankers and Federal Reserve System bankers, and others, have realized I'm right. And people inside the incoming administration, who will be officials or leading advisors to the administration, agree with me. The question is how. There are two views of this: My initial view was, go directly to these four governments, the United States itself, India, Russia, China, and sponsor the idea of an agreement to deal with this particular crisis in this way, by creating a new credit system to replace the present bankrupt monetary system. Everybody needs it, and it's not a matter of liking the other fellow; it's a matter of, you need his support, to get the job done. If we do that, and if we get this administration to do what it has to do to make that work--and we'll know that by January-February, whether we're in that direction or not--in that case, I'll be playing a key part in this. And if this policy is actually adopted, by the incoming administration, then my role will be defined accordingly, and therefore, I can say certain things about what's going to happen, with that understanding: that if my policy is adopted, my role is rather indicated, and I'll be working through regular channels in the new government, as a private individual in dealing with this problem. - Threat of a Dark Age - Now, if this does not happen, then we're looking at the equivalent of a 14th-Century Dark Age in European history. We're looking the possibility of a collapse of the world population--we're now approaching 7 billion people--to about less than 1, within about two generations. And when that's understood, then the impetus for doing the job, I think, is supplied by the threat. We can do it. We all know projects that are needed, in our countries, respectively--and in other countries, that are needed. We know the essential role of nuclear power, for example in the case of India. This is probably a fairly well-outlined and charted policy by now. But the only way--for example, when you have a country where 63% of the population is extremely poor and unskilled, how do you increase the productive powers of labor rapidly? Well, you can't do it by suddenly educating them as labor. You can do that in that direction, but you can't do it in that way. You have to go to infrastructure. The marker of infrastructure, mass transportation and so forth, actually is determined by power. The relevant power for India, is nuclear power, as signaled by the importance of thorium, in the spectrum of the future developments here in India. So therefore, by using infrastructure development, large-scale infrastructure development, as capital improvements, capital development, you can increase the productive powers of labor, without changing the character of labor itself. Because you've increased the productive power of the individual by an inventory, by a factor of that type. And that's the positive side. The other side of this, strategically, is, you have to control the planet. Now, the planet's out of control, and the planet went out of control when the United States went out of control. And we went out of control in various degrees. We were in control on the day in which United States entered the war against Nazi Germany. At that point, we did not win the war because of our military prowess: Our soldiers were not better than German soldiers, or French soldiers, or others. But our soldiers had more infrastructure. Where they had hundreds of pound, we had tons. When we moved into a country, we oversupplied the country with logistics: And we won the war, because of our logistical capabilities. But at that point, we established a logistical system, which changed with the death of Roosevelt. Roosevelt was committed to a post-war world based on a credit system, not a monetary system. That was his Bretton Woods system, which I'm proposing we essentially look at and return to. What happened under Truman, we went to a monetary system, rather than a credit system. The issue was clear, and you felt it immediately in India. When I was still here, with the death of Roosevelt, and the accession of Truman, the policy toward the independence of India changed fundamentally. The immediate Roosevelt perspective was the independence of India, as such. What happened with the death of Roosevelt, was, the liberation of India was postponed, through London. And in the meantime, the Pakistan split-out was organized. So that you had the same people who, in my experience in Calcutta, in the spring of 1946, who were shouting "Jai Hind! Pakistan Zindabad!'' in the same tune, a little over a year later were killing each other! And this was a key part of this whole process. - Post World War II: Return to Imperialism - But the policy of the Truman Administration, which was practically a stooge for Winston Churchill's policy, the policy was, to save the Empire! So we have freed Indo-China, to become an independent state, and the British and Truman turned it over to reoccupation by the French colonials. We did the same thing in Indonesia, the same kind of thing. We did similar kinds of things in Africa, not always the same thing, but similar kinds of things. So in effect, we recolonized the world. And on this basis, we recreated a British-style monetary system, in place of a credit system: This was the significance of John Maynard Keynes. John Maynard Keynes, who, in 1937, professed himself to be a fascist--and he was a fascist. I fought some of his supporters, back in 1971: He was a fascist! He changed his flag, but he didn't change his trousers. He was the same thing. So, we had an international monetary system, which was essentially imperialist in its character, based on a specific orientation to re-colonialism in many parts of the world, but essentially of a monetary system, which became then the entity--which became known as the Anglo-American-Dutch monetary system--and this entity became, actually, the force of an empire. In 1968, 1971-73, the United States lost its controlling position in this empire, and the British took over. And they took over largely through a fake called an oil hoax, the petroleum hoax of 1973, in which the Saudis and the British formed a special organization. And if you look at this Saudi-British operation of 1973, on the oil hoax, you have the genesis of what you call the "Islamic problem'' in this region, today. I mean, you had these religious conflicts, already, but you didn't have this problem, this Islamic problem that's popping up today. It started in 1973 with the oil hoax. So, that's essentially our situation, that we have the prospect of a solution. And I think my proposal on this thing is clear; it's clear to many people in what will be my own government. And if it doesn't go, then we'll have a disintegration. - We're in a Deadly Situation - Then, you'll have, for example, a collapse of the present government of China; it will be not sustainable in its present form, under this condition. You will have a crisis in Russia. You will have the spread of chaos in all of these areas, and therefore, you're back on emergency rations of trying to set up various kinds of defenses, which are internal defenses against chaos spreading internally, and also protecting borders. You're simply going to have to have a kind of imperialist environment, in which you're fighting and maintaining forces and measures, just to survive! Because, when you're under conditions of a general breakdown crisis, when you look at the world food supply. Look at the vulnerabilities in the world food supply, and look at the basis this represents for threats, for instability in every part of the world, then your concern for India will be: ``How do we defend ourselves?'' And every hand can be the hand of a potential enemy. Which is all the more reason to wish that the other alternative works beforehand. But, we're in a deadly situation. We're in a breakdown crisis. And this is the only thing we have in European experience, that's well-documented to correspond to this, is what happened in the 14th Century, with the so-called New Dark Age: How do you defend yourself under a condition of a threatened New Dark Age? I think the present policies of India, in terms of the endemic policies about maintaining stability, would still hold. But then, you would have the question of much-increased emphasis on internal security--you've seen it already; what we saw just in Mumbai is a typical example of that: Here, the British Empire, with its assets, deploys all over the place. The Indian government makes protests about this character who's London-based, who's being deployed doing this, like Dawood Ibrahim, and nobody pays any attention, because no one wants to cause resentment by the British Empire. And these guys run around, and the world is peopled with this. The world is ready for international terrorism, in a form we have not seen before. And your major security problem is not going to be conventional warfare, though that is possible. The major security problem is instability and chaos in neighboring countries, and among neighboring populations. I don't think it's a pretty picture. I think the solutions are a little complicated, to try to describe them. But I think on the other hand, what we have to be concerned is to try to prevent this process. We have to have a coalition of forces, on the planet, which is strong enough, and understands its mutual self-interest sufficiently, to restore the kind of control which the United States attempted to promote under Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, in dealing with China, and dealing with the Soviet Union, and other countries, toward the end of the war, said, you don't have to like the other country; you don't have to like its government; you don't have to like its policy. What you have to do, is establish an international system of control, under which you don't have things running loose, which are menaces. Simply having treaty organizations or similar things tantamount to treaty organizations, where people have such an interest in maintaining the treaty organization that they will regulate themselves and their own country. And you can get cooperation on this. - Needed: A Good Intelligence Program - I think under Option A, as I would describe it, we have a successful case. Under Option B, I think we have a terrible case. But, one we'll fight if we have to. But your fighting capabilities are going to have to be much more sophisticated, than they have been so far. And the most important fighting capabilities are going to be in the domain of intelligence. A more effective intelligence operation, because the problem you're dealing with in this terrorist operation is largely an intelligence problem! If you have a good intelligence program, you have a better chance of coping with it. And the functioning of your intelligence services will be crucial. And most military operations, will be actually adjuncts: Since you're not looking for wars, you're looking for control of hostile situations, which means you're looking primarily for an intelligence defense, which may have a military augmentation to it. So, I'm essentially--with that said--quite optimistic. I think, knowing the problems, I have to be also realistic, but I'm optimistic. And it doesn't make any difference, because, after all, what am I going to do? I'm 86 years of age, I have some rather lively character, for my age; and I'll be around, I think, for some time, and doing these kinds of things for some time. But I have to think about doing what I have to do now: And that is, to anticipate the future, which I won't live in, but I have to anticipate it, and I have to think about the ideas, and plans, and schemes, and whatnot which we need to have in place in order to deal with whatever the future is going to donate to the coming generation. And I think we have a shot with the United States--I can't guarantee it. But the idea of this Four Power initiative, I can only say on that, right now, I've said we should do it immediately. From the incoming administration, the suggestion to me is: Well, the people don't trust the United States enough after two terms of George W. Bush, Jr., to make such agreement. But maybe if we do it first, make the proposal publicly first, and state it as U.S. policy, maybe then, other countries will join in such an agreement. And I'm sure that the rate of increase of the international financial crisis will encourage people, quickly, to say, "Let's have a new system, because the present one is finished.'' RE: LaRouche - Admin - 12-17-2008 A VIEW FROM DELHI: THE GRAVEST MOMENT OF CRISIS IN MODERN HISTORY http://larouchepac.com/news/2008/12/13/dynamics-terrorism-view-delhi-gravest-moment-crisis-modern-h.html If we could presume that these last two months of the George W. Bush Administration will not produce some monstrous actions, either from the Bush Administration, or steered from London, or both, the long-term fate of every part, and all of this planet will now depend, in fact, on whether or not a specific kind of pro-Westphalian, post-imperialist, global cooperation, is launched through an initiating role of cooperation among the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India. Such cooperation would mean an early end to the existence of that British empire founded, as a private empire, at Paris, in February 1763: the moment which created a break between London and England's English colonies in America, and which has defined the British empire as a world empire in fact, since that time, to the present day. The current outcome of that continuing British arrangement, has been a present world-wide crisis, a crisis for which nothing comparable to this presently oncoming crisis-situation has occurred in globally extended European history since the advent of Europe's Fourteenth Century New Dark Age. This present crisis requires the liquidation of what has been called the British Empire, an empire which, in fact, has dominated the world's economic and related affairs to this present moment, most recently, since the August 1971, U.S. termination of the Bretton Woods concept of a fixed-exchange-rate system. Now, a reversal of that Nixon action is urgently needed, for the sake of humanity as a whole. However, it will not be sufficient to return to the monetary system which still existed during the March 1 1968-August 15, 1971 interval. A change to the kind of anti-imperialist credit-system which President Franklin Roosevelt had specified for the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, were indispensable at this time. Hence, the absolutely indispensable exclusion of the British empire-system from the negotiations establishing the initial basis for the new world system of anti-British imperialist cooperation among key leading sovereign nation-states including the U.S.A. Without the inclusion of the U.S.A., the situation of the world at large would be hopeless, or virtually so, for generations yet to come. Notably, the likely, happier outcomes of the required sort of a change, would include the emergence of England, Scotland, and possibly Wales, as sovereign nations regaining, among other goods, the level of economic well-being and happiness which was lost in those territories with the advent of the first government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson (not to speak of the luridly pro-Satanic antics of the fanatical anti-Westphalian imperialist, Prime Minister Tony Blair). Such changes would be the "land-mine-like" economic explosion which would be the end of that vast empire, still today, which was crafted by the intention of the Liberally irrational Paolo Sarpi, but that according to the image of Julian the Apostate's Liberally augmented Pantheon. This is the British empire which, at the present moment, is emulating that same Julian in the terrorist practice of religious warfare as a principal instrument of London's intended global imperial rule. Preface The Way England Seems to Rule: The widespread, softheaded sympathy for so-called "globalization," and the Duke of Edinburgh's neo-malthusian cults, shows that the world's contemporary societies are, usually, each, including the U.S.A., bound together by their lack of any efficient comprehension of how today's societies, including their own, are controlled.[1] With the emergence of the British empire as today's only true imperial power, an imperium which had been spawned by the influence of Venice's Paolo Sarpi, Sarpi's British heirs took pains to ensure that the very idea of a universal physical principle would be outlawed from the knowledge and practice of ruling institutions and their subject populations. Hence, in modern European Liberal cultures affected by Anglo-Dutch Liberal paradigms, for example, mere mathematical formulas have tended to be treated as substitutes for the expression of what are actual physical principles. Thus, the definition of a leading idiot, such as one from among today's contemporary neo-malthusians, which one might expect to meet in any university's science department, is one who shares that utterly fraudulent and actually silly myth, which claimed that Isaac Newton discovered Johannes Kepler's universal principle of gravitation. That was the British claim made on silly Newton's behalf, although the record of that discovery as made uniquely by Kepler, can be found in a process of discovery laid out in great detail in Kepler's own The Harmonies of the World. There is no competent argument which refutes the crucial evidence, that the principled character and authorship of the actual discovery is readily available to be known still today. For example, Albert Einstein was emphatic, and extremely clear in this matter; the relevant details are in print, or available on the internet, where anyone who is serious can find them. In short, when any scientist says that Newton discovered gravitation, that scientist is either brainwashed in some way, or is either grossly incompetent, or simply singing lies for his supper. Nonetheless, the shameless lie, claiming Newton to have been the author of the discovery of a principle of gravitation, persists into those charnel houses of dead intellects to be recognized in relevant departments of many leading universities and allegedly scientific foundations of the decadent world at large today. Nonetheless, I would not have brought this troublesome subject-matter up here, as I have just done, unless it were one of the best examples of the reason for the typically systemic failures of governments and their leading intellects today, especially on the subject of empires. The significance of the Newton hoax, is that it is, clinically, a typical by-product of that doctrine, launched by Paolo Sarpi, on which all modern varieties of philosophical liberalism, including its intrinsically diseased varieties of statecraft, are premised. Sarpi's Design Sarpi's advantage over his rivals of the Council of Trent, was that Sarpi recognized that the failure of the original promoters of what was to become the A.D. 1492-1648 sweep of religious warfare to succeed in the efforts to crush that modern nation-state institution which had been launched by the forces of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, had been religious warfare rooted in an hostility to science which was, itself, premised on the supposed authority of the same ancient Sophist, the Aristotle who had been a crucial influence in inspiring the fanatical nonsense of Euclidean a-priorism. This was the same assumption which had been the premise for teaching of that doctrine of mathematics as a substitute for physical science, a sick habit which continues to pollute much university and other education today.[2] On this account, Sarpi had adopted a non-Aristotelean variety of Sophist doctrine, a doctrine rooted in the teachings of the lunatic, medieval "deconstructionist" William of Ockham,[3] whom Sarpi selected as his own choice for the anointed spiritual father of modern European theological and secular Liberalism. The point of the matter is, that it was the Renaissance's practical power in creating the institution of the modern sovereign form of nation-state defined by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa,[4] which had fostered science-driven technological progress, and thus afforded the new nation-states, such as those of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII, as model forms of society which had expressed their innate superiority over efforts to revive the medieval, usury-based, pro-feudalist traditions. Some of the relevant factors at play in this are extensively documented in those publications of Niccolo Machiavelli which had once served as the foundation for modern instruction in the principles of warfare. So, to repeat relevant arguments which I have presented as cases in proof in locations published by me earlier, Sarpi permitted controlled innovation of forms called philosophical "Liberalism" today, where the Aristoteleans of that time had essentially banned scientific progress of any kind. This gave a decisive strategic advantage to the Venetian faction of also evil Sarpi, over its pro-Aristotelean rivals, a Sarpi faction which oriented its influence away from the Mediterranean, into the maritime regions of northern (nominally Protestant) Europe. However, at the same time, Sarpi et al., like his followers, such as the hoaxsters Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes, worked to suppress all knowledge of the methods of actual scientific discovery. This was expressed in the campaigns which attempted to exterminate knowledge of the work of Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, Carl F. Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann, campaigns which sprang from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries' Liberals, and, with extraordinary fanaticism, by the followers of Ernst Mach, and, worse, the followers of that most evil and impassioned deconstructionist, Bertrand Russell. Such has been the setting of the essential effect of modern academic Liberalism's efforts to reconcile Aristotle with the Liberalism of Ockham, as the perfervidly deconstructionist Bertrand Russell and the followers of the Russell cult, have attempted, with increasing fervor, during the Twentieth Century. The notion of an Aristotelean reconciliation with a doctrine of "free trade," is an example of this medley of intellectual and moral corruptions. That effect has been, most notably, that, as Gottfried Leibniz emphasized, during the 1690s and later, between the two Sophistries of Aristotle and Sarpi, what had been the competent, preceding practice of science, that of the Pythagoreans and Plato, had been largely suppressed. The crucial concept to be emphasized on this account, is that which Leibniz named "dynamics," as a translation of the ancient Greek science's term dynamis. The significance of this concept of dynamics for political science today, is that it points out, that the principled character of social processes lies not in the notion of kinematic-like interaction among separate elements, but that those processes are subsumed, in each distinct type of case, by an efficiently encompassing single principle. This signifies a principle as conceived as in the likeness of Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of a general principle of gravitation governing the composition of the Solar system. This principle of dynamics as expressed by Leibniz in terms of a universal physical principle of least action, assumed a refined form through the discoveries of Bernhard Riemann. This work, in turn was enriched by the respective work of Albert Einstein and Max Planck, in one aspect, and, also, by the concept of Biosphere and Noösphere by Russia's Academician V.I. Vernadsky. All of these notions of dynamics are to be regarded as combined into a single conception in study of such social expressions of dynamics as those of such subjects of economy as nations, or empires.[5] The notions to be associated with the categorical terms nation or empire, and the distinctions between the two, are to be recognized from the standpoint of this notion of dynamics. Take the category of "British empire" as a case in point. 1. The U.S.A. Under a British System The role of a corrupted, pro-fascist government of France, in opening the gates of France's military institutions to permit a superior French military's stunning defeat by the Wehrmacht, shocked many long-standing fascist or pro-fascist elements, such as the grandfather of the still-incumbent President of the U.S.A., in both the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. to give way to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in organizing the alliance which was to defeat the forces of fascism allied with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. From that point on, until developments of the 1968-1973 interval, the principle of the Bretton Woods system defined by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, had been the dominant force in economy world-wide. With the wrecking of the U.S. commitment to scientific progress in economy, by the upsurges of pro-fascist, so-called "left-wing," dionysian, "68er" forces in the Americas and Europe, the door was opened for the grab of the U.S. Presidency by the candidacy of Richard M. Nixon. It is of crucial importance to recognize, not only that Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush are offshoots of the Wall Street gang which had supported Hitler until the Pearl Harbor casus belli changed their costumes without changing their pro-fascist inclinations, but that that gang has been the same circles behind the leading "right wing" think-tanks and press and dominating much of the U.S. political scene since the inauguration of Winston Churchill's and Bertrand Russell's political-strategic accomplice, President Harry Truman. It is no coincidence that the two referenced Bush Presidential administrations are products of the same right-wing tradition expressed by Prescott Bush's key role, as an accomplice of the head of the Bank of England in financing Hitler's rise to dictatorial power. To understand the problem that part of present history typifies for the condition of world crisis today, it is essential that our political leaders and other citizens examine such matters from the standpoint of the definition of dynamics just indicated. The actual British empire in question, still today, is not a secretion of the British Isles. A more exact term would be "Anglo-Dutch Liberal," a.k.a. Sarpian, type of "neo-Venetian imperialism." This is otherwise to be recognized as a dynamic of a phenomenon of slime-mold likeness, a phenomenon dominated by a (dynamically) integrated aggregation of financial entities whose integral action suggests the life-style of a common slime-mold. In that configuration, the appearance of British elements, including the monarchy itself, is that of a feature of a slime-mold which is, when taken as a whole process, the empire as such. Then, view the organization of this slime-mold as follows. The overall slime-mold, when considered as a whole, is what is to be identified as "the empire." A typical empire of this general type would be composed of such subordinate features as the equivalent of mere "kingdoms," of which one is the United Kingdom. However, do not overlook the fact that this empire is organized, as Lord Shelburne adopted this policy, according to the model of the Byzantine Empire under Julian the Apostate, in which the component elements are treated as parts of an extended Roman Pantheon, of which the United Kingdom as such, or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, are, in fact, each, merely one part. In the case of the Saudi Kingdom, it, in turn, is a leading feature of the British imperial subsidiary which is the colony known as the multi-national, "Sykes-Picot" treaty organization. This latter has been extended to include Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other localities, and their role in international terrorism, each quasi-distinct, but considered each as an element of the extended imperial Pantheon according to the model of Julian the Apostate. Then consider the financial-monetary aspect of this same slime-mold-like concoction. The Financial Slime-Mold Since the British puppet Richard Nixon had been foisted upon the U.S. Presidency by aid of the Dionysian cult known as the rampaging "68ers," and, since the consequent 1971-72 breakup of the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, the British empire has employed the break-up of the Bretton Woods system, as the opportunity to assimilate the United States itself into the grip of a floating exchange-rate form of London-centered, imperial slime-mold. (Hey, Sucker: our U.S.A. has thus been colonized by London!) This development was greatly aggravated by the 1973 launching of the British-Saudi oil-boycott hoax, which made possible the large-scale operations of the petroleum spot-market swindle, which, in turn, has tended to dominate the world economy since that time. This series of developments transformed the U.S. dollar into a plaything of the Saudi-British empire's Netherlands-based, post-1973, BAE-linked, "spot market," a market which is among the leading keys to international terrorism today. The U.S.A. helped the British empire increase its relative power globally, at U.S. political and economic expense, through the U.S. Carter Administration's wrecking of the U.S. economy, as was done through Carter's submission to his sponsor's, David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission "scam." By October 1987, the accumulated effects of the combined follies of the Nixon Administration, and the continuation of willful wrecking of the U.S. economy by the Trilateral Commission, had brought on the greatest U.S. financial crash since 1929. The response to this 1987 development, which was launched by incoming Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, was the post-1987 unleashing of a vast financial-derivative bubble, a bubble designed, to the personal profit of present California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in accord with the model, such as Enron, provided by a Michael Milken who had been convicted for such kinds of practices. The grip of London on a U.S.A. now in the grip of the vast fraud of the financial-derivatives scheme, began to approach the state of desperation reached in late July 2007. The preferred British method of imperial rule, notably since the beginning of the so-called "Seven Years War," is to subordinate its targets to control by the slime-mold effect of its Julian-the-Apostate-modeled orchestration of conflict ("divide and rule"), especially orchestrated religious and similar cultural conflicts, among the targeted elements thus assimilated into the "digestive tract" of the slime-mold itself. This came, to a large degree, to represent the assimilation of the U.S. economy itself into a globalized system of control centered in the Anglo-Dutch-Saudi control of the world financial system through the "spot market" created by an Anglo-Dutch-Saudi, significantly BAE-related, development, a development pivoted on the combination of the "spot market" and the intrinsically hyper-inflationary role of financial derivatives speculation. The role of Alan Greenspan in creating the great financial-derivatives bubble now in the process of "popping," is a case in point. The subjugation of national governments to toleration of financial-derivatives raids conducted against their own nationals, is exemplary of the way in which these national governments were corrupted by the British Empire's slime-mold-like characteristics. The U.S.A. Nonetheless The U.S. Federal Constitution and what might pass for a semblance of a British constitution, are two distinct, and mutually antagonistic orders of living organisms, as distinct as mammals from reptiles, species lacking in any respective, mutual congruence. On this account, while the implications of Leibniz's "The Pursuit of Happiness" are even more profound than the difference in species defined by the language of the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, the two conceptions, that of the Declaration of Independence and Preamble of the Federal Constitution, are broadly equivalent in direction of intention, and are both adversaries of anything which might pass for the relatively reptilian quality of what passes for a British "constitution." The British and American systems are not only as different as ice cream and swamp-bred mud pies, but essentially so antagonistic that the one could not tolerate the other, let alone mate successfully. They are different species of existence. To be specific, compare the U.S. Constitution's Preamble with the model of the enhanced Pantheon of the system of empire under either the Pantheon of Julian the Apostate or, the comparable Island of Dr. Moreau of author H.G. Wells. Wells himself is highly significant as an illustrative case of the depravity to which I refer.[6] The Case of H.G. Wells Wells' career began, essentially as an assistant to the notorious Thomas Huxley, the grandfather of the notable Aldous and Julian Huxley associated with The Open Conspiracy of the H.G. Wells of the 1920s and 1930s, the Satanist witch-doctor Aleister Crowley of LSD pre-history and the Lucifer (Lucis) cult, all together with Bertrand Russell, and with the George Orwell of 1984 notoriety. Here, in this set of British associations, we meet the heritage of the Satanic relics of Babylon, or of the Delphic Gaea and her chopped-up consort Python, or her Apollo-Dionysus cults. (What a pack of "Dick Tracy" or "Batman"-like characters!) Seeds of the form of moral corruption typified by the closely knit circles of British Brigadier John Rawlings Rees, the pro-Satan Aleister Crowley, H.G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell, were already present in a significant degree around the circles of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ku Klux Klan associate Woodrow Wilson, as among the circles of the family of Averell Harriman during the 1920s and the pro-fascist circles in the U.S.A. of the 1930s; but, with the incumbency of what President Franklin Roosevelt would have considered the virtually treasonous President Harry S Truman, the flood of the kind of British kookery associated with Rees, Crowley, Wells, and Bertrand Russell increased to the degree of virtually taking over relevant sections of U.S. academic and intelligence operations linked to the "white shoe" circles left over from war-time intelligence operations during World War II.[7] The entirety of the so-called "environmentalist" and related cultish movements in and out of U.S. government circles presently, is a product of this, chiefly British, subversion of notable governmental, academic, and other relevant institutions of the U.S.A., including a large, largely brainwashed-greenie part of the Democratic Party apparatus, today, especially the foundation-linked, anti-"blue collar" parts tied closely to the circles of Bertrand Russell's ideological kiss-breeches today. Here, we encounter the British imperial slime-mold factor in subversive action against almost everything which the establishment of our republic had represented. Are these accomplices treasonous, or something even worse than treasonous, something virtually Satanic? Whatever might be said on that account, the fact is, that the "green factor" traceable to the modern neo-malthusianism of Princes Philip, Charles, and the late ex-Nazi Bernhard, is the principal means of policy by which our United States is being destroyed by such virtually Satanic invasions today. That is the relevant issue to be addressed by our citizens generally. Such is the crucial slime-mold factor in the British Empire's use of such morally degenerated creatures as those deployed to bring our republic down from within. 2. Leibniz Versus Descartes Among the causes for the prevalent incompetence of the so-called economics profession, more or less world-wide today, is that, despite the great advances in physical science since the revival of ancient dynamics in a modern form by Gottfried Leibniz,[8] the prevalent thinking about economy today is still in the contrary, relatively primitive, essentially Cartesian mode at best, with no account made for the relevant accomplishments of the Gaspard Monge-Lazare Carnot circles of France's Ecole Polytechnique, the circles of Carl F. Gauss, and of Lejeune Dirichlet and Bernhard Riemann, and, still later, the related, actual discoveries of Max Planck and Albert Einstein. That, unfortunately, is not the worst of the failures of the current economics profession. There has been, in fact, a sharp regression to the mechanistic primitivism of Ernst Mach, the extreme, deconstructionist depravity launched by Bertrand Russell's part in the Principia Mathematica, and the consequent moral as much as scientific depravity of the implicitly neo-Malthusian school of Cambridge systems analysis associated with promotion of anti-humanist, holistic mysticism. Not only is the idea of science-driver progress absent from the customary practice of the academically based ranks of the economics profession, the practice has degenerated to a purely monetarist form of statistical dogma, thus causing the practice of economics to degenerate to the brutish level of a statistical sociology. Hence the incompetence of all of my putative rivals among statistical economists, especially prize-winning ones, and also governments, on the matter of long-ranging forecasting. On these and kindred accounts, it might be said, that the idea that something might be better, such as a daughter's choice of a marsupial as her husband, simply because this represents an interesting, current novelty in taste, such choices, such as the popularized neo-malthusian fads of former Vice-President Al Gore and his patrons of the British royal house today, ought to have been banned from the practice of science—and statecraft—long ago. To complete the preliminaries for this chapter, I emphasize that we are presently returning, here, to the same subject of dynamics as in the preceding chapter's summary of the crucial characteristics of the so-called British empire, but this time from a positive standpoint. That is not to propose that there are good dynamics, as distinct from bad ones; all processes in the known universe, whether non-living, living (i.e., the Biosphere), or human (the Noösphere), good or bad, belong to the subsuming domain of dynamics: the universe is organized in a way reflected in the expressed principle of dynamics. Look at this from the standpoint of Bernhard Riemann's work. Look at this principle as expressed by the ancient Pythagoreans, Plato, and, later, Eratosthenes, and also from the modern standpoint of (once more) Brunelleschi, Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, Abraham Kästner, Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, Carl F. Gauss, Lejeune Dirichlet, Bernhard Riemann, Planck, Einstein, et al. Take Einstein's crucially significant remarks on the achievements of Kepler and Riemann as a point of reference for all modern science. Riemann's Revolution There are two points within the entirety of Riemann's 1854, Göttingen habilitation dissertation, which are of the most crucial, elementary sort of significance, bearing on my remarks at this point within this report. The first point is the ridding of science of the crippling effects of a-priori ontological presumptions, in the opening two paragraphs of the dissertation. The crucial complement to the content of these two paragraphs, is the closing sentence of the dissertation as a whole. When the entirety of the dissertation is considered from the reference-points of those bookends of the beginning and end of the dissertation as a whole, there is an effect like Archimedes' legendary cry of "Eureka," as I experienced this in 1953, an experience like turning on the light in a dark room through which we had been groping our way before that moment. The result is not a "non-Euclidean" geometry, but an "anti-Euclidean geometry." There is an ontologically crucial distinction between those two choices. With the first, geometry remains within the ontological domain of a-priorism. With the second, geometry is freed from the dark, gloomy prison where modern, troubled mathematician graduates from confusion to the consolations of insanity are found. In contrast, Riemann's escape from the domain of a-priori mathematics, that significance of Kepler's uniquely original, uniquely competent discovery of gravitation becomes increasingly clear, as it appeared so to Albert Einstein's view of the matter.[9] The question becomes, as for Kepler and for Leibniz's work in developing that notion of the ontologically infinitesimal (e.g., transfinite) of Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation, and as Einstein emphasized this relationship to both Kepler and Riemann.[10] The principle of gravitation bounds the universe, in the sense of containing it. The author of the revolution in perspective, Leonardo da Vinci, would have been greatly amused. Similarly, each true principle of the universe acts, like universal gravitation, to bound that same universe as in the manner of universal gravitation. The existence of the principle lies, thus, as if outside the universe it bounds, thus defining the universe, as Einstein emphasized, as self-bounded in that respect. To this, Einstein, after Riemann, defined the whole universe as anti-entropic (bounded by a principle of universal anti-entropy), and, thus, without limit in this respect. Thus, the universe is finite, and self-bounded, but without bounds. This view by Einstein, et al., is coherent with the superior view advanced by Academician V.I. Vernadsky, who introduced the evidence, chiefly from the standpoint of experimental physical chemistry, the evidence which showed that the universe of our knowledgeable experience to date, is partitioned, by two respectively distinct principles, of life, and of creative human cognition, thus defining domains, the Biosphere and Noösphere, respectively, distinct from, but "overlapping" the adducible abiotic domain dynamically. The anti-entropic characteristics associated with both the Biosphere and Noösphere, define the universe of our experience as anti-entropic—as governed, from the higher level, by a universal principle of anti-entropic action. By anti-entropy, we should signify that the characteristic principle of action which distinguishes healthy human minds from brutish humanoids, is a universal principle of anti-entropy associated with mankind's discovery of governing principles of human action which supersede inferior qualities of belief which had reigned earlier. This idea of fundamental scientific progress in principle, can be compared with the non-linear character of human progress from relying on simple sunlight, to a succession of relatively higher orders of fuels, from burning of trash, to charcoal, coal, coke, petroleum, hydrogen and closely related gases, nuclear fission, and, beyond. This progress is not to be measured in calories, but in terms of the quality of work in which a superior modality yields greater power of action than the same number of countable calories of a lower order of power of action. A Lesson from Chlorophyll Reserving the use of sunlight to promotion of chlorophyll, while relying upon nuclear-fission as a source of power, creates a vastly better environment for human existence than the deserts promoted by diverting Solar radiation from chlorophyll, in order to accomplish nothing so much as to throw the planet into a desert filled with, and defined by the lunacy of intrinsically dead Solar collectors massed, like inorganic effigies of ancient Chinese soldiers in parade formations. The idea of "Solar power" should warn us that believers in today's so-called "environmentalists" are essentially brutish worshipers of the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, or of the bat-loving, Nazi-like Prince Philip of the World Wildlife Fund.[11] Such are the brutish, mankind-hating lackeys of Prince Philip as lying, perverted, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, or the George Soros whose drug-pushing habits of today were formed, according to his own account, when he, as an adolescent, a Jew, was running errands for Nazi mass-murderers of Jews, exactly as the late Ben Hecht described the Perfidy in which adolescent Soros had become a part. Then, as an adolescent, Soros ran errands for the Nazis; an experience he has repeatedly refused to regret, when challenged on this point in public interviews. Today he employs the same putrid instinct on behalf of the British Empire's drug-pushers, who evidently admire the connection between Soros' experience in such skills. Vice-President Al Gore's brutish defense of Soros against Malaysia, shows the essential, despicable kinship of Gore and Soros today. Such are the Sun-worshipers and leading drug-pushers of our present times. It is of crucial importance that we recognize the systemic connection between the feverish incompetence of many among our contemporary university science departments, such as those still prostituting themselves to teaching the Newton myth, and toleration for the kinds of evil which the viciously brutish habits of George Soros and Al Gore typify, on such accounts. We are presently approaching seven billions living human individuals on this planet, unless types such as George Soros and Al Gore succeed in assisting Prince Philip's prominently and repeatedly avowed, Nazi-like intent to reduce the population to two billions, or less, to realization. Measures such as the WTO and granting patents on principles of living organisms to Monsanto, merely typify the steps toward genocide expressed by what "globalization" and "post-Westphalian," variously British and brutish forms of fascism represent today. Perhaps the worst of all offenses against decency, is the tendency, like the legendary indifference to smoke-stacks in Nazi Germany, to tolerate, or even admire those who are, in fact, practicing such services on behalf of global genocide today. The ability of the human species to rise above the potential population densities, and civilization of the higher apes, resides entirely in those creative powers of the individual human mind through which mankind has discovered those universal physical principles on which the distinction between people and cage-fulls of brutish rhesus monkeys, or adult chimpanzees depends. Thus, mankind is both set above all other things in the Biosphere, but, is, at the same time, obliged to employ uniquely human discoveries of ever-higher universal physical principles. The requirement, as I have noted in other locations, is to increase the potential relative population-density of the human race, by means which enhance the Biosphere per square kilometer of surface-area of our Earth. It is this absolute distinction of mankind, and its obligations to the universe, on which the very continued existence of mankind depends. However, the essential thing which sets mankind absolutely above all lower forms of life, is the human mind's qualifications for performing this assigned mission. The more such human minds, so dedicated, the greater the benefit to all mankind, and, doubtless, to our Solar System as well. Dynamics The principal cause of disasters, within each known culture of the world, still today, has been the lack of a consciousness of that quality of creativity which does not exist for any species but mankind. The consequent tendency has been, to situate man as if man were merely another animal species dwelling in a Biosphere, but not what Academician V.I. Vernadsky chose to name the Noösphere. In reality, the planet Earth, including the Biosphere, exists within the Noösphere, rather than the Noösphere within the Biosphere. Nonetheless, the prevalent view is that man is, in effect, just another type of animal, albeit a talking animal. This corrected view of humanity, as containing the Biosphere functionally, rather than living within the Biosphere, is now assuming the form of a precondition for much chance of anything which could be considered as "normal human life" on this planet. That is to say: the view of the planet as one in which man, as made in the likeness of the Creator, determines what the Biosphere must become, rather than man adapting to the Biosphere's requirements. The failure of most of humanity, and most cultures, is to be recognized as rooted in the effects of what the great tragedian Aeschylus described, in his Prometheus Bound, as the reign of the Olympian Zeus over mortal mankind. Another expression of the same mortal failure extant among typical present states of cultures, is the form of Sophistry known as Aristoteleanism; the alternate expression of the equivalent defect in cultures, is to be seen in Sarpian empiricism and its derivatives. In European theology, this case against Aristotle is stated by Philo of Alexandria in the following terms. Aristotle argued, blasphemously, that if the Creator's creation of the universe were perfect, then the Creator himself could not alter that Creation once it had occurred. This argument is equivalent, theologically, to the insistence that the universe is governed by a thermodynamic principle of universal entropy (i.e., a "second law of thermodynamics"). Aristotle thus employed the same Sophist falsehood expressed by the Olympian Zeus of Prometheus Bound, as Johannes Kepler presented the proof against Aristotle (and Claudius Ptolemy) for Astronomy. This principle of creativity is demonstrated by the increase of the potential human population-density, relative to the higher apes. By no means is this effect limited to post facto statistics; the science of physical economy provides us what may be fairly described as exact knowledge of how this gain by the human species occurs. In this way, the portion of the total mass of the Noösphere is increasing, relative to the Biosphere, as the percentile of the total mass of the Biosphere is increasing relative to the abiotic mass of the Earth. The rate of increase of the mass of the Noösphere is conditional upon relevant rates of increase of the Biosphere, both per capita of human life, and also upon the increase of the Biosphere relative to the total mass of the planet. These required increases are, in turn, dependent upon mankind's discovery and employment of new physical principles. These principles are associated, in a general way, with an increase of the power of human action as measurable in such forms as decrease of the cross-sectional area of the pathway through which a standard quantity of action is transmitted. This may be translated for convenience into a measurement called "energy-flux density." This increase is typified by the term of convenience, "energy flux-density." Hence a low-density form of power, such as solar radiation at Earth's surface, is qualitatively inferior to the same number of calories along a channel with a smaller cross-section. So, chlorophyll is qualitatively superior to sunlight, and so on. It is through scientific progress to this effect, that the Earth is transformed in organization to the effect of both maintaining and enhancing the preconditions for human life. This defines the Noösphere as superior to the Biosphere, and defines man, not the so-called "natural environment," as the governing principle of any sane and moral form of society. This is the principle which must govern each and every wise nation and people of this planet over all sane society henceforth, in all times to come. RE: LaRouche - Admin - 12-21-2008 LYNDON LAROUCHE GIVES PRESS CONFERENCE IN EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN STRASBOURG http://larouchepac.com/news/2008/12/17/lyndon-larouche-gives-press-conference-european-parliament.html Lyndon LaRouche made the following opening remarks to a press conference at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France on Dec. 17. Mario Borghezio (head of the Lega Nord delegation at the Euroepan Parliament): I thank everybody who is here today, and will immediately begin the press conference with Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche, who has collaborated with her husband for a long time. LaRouche is a figure of extraordinary importance. I do not want to steal time from the press conference, but I only want to remind you, before giving the microphone to chairman Muscardini, whom I thank for her support for this initiative, that Prof. Lyndon LaRouche has been, among other things --you have a biographical note--we know him well, but in this case it is very improtant to listen to his voice, the voice of one who had forecast, much in advance and with thorough motivations, the financial crisis, exposing clearly who was responsible. And at a moment when many babble, even in this Parliament, about the financial crisis, without their analysis coming to a conclusion or solution, I believe that it is very important today for us MEPs, and for you journalists, to listen to his words and his motivations. Thank you again, Prof. LaRouche, and please, Mrs. Muscardini. Rep. Cristiana Muscardini (co-chairman of the United Europe of the Nations Group): Very briefly, I wish to thank Rep. Borghezio for having taken this initiative. Our group has been for many years, through interrogations and questions to the Commission and the Council on the crisis (that, you know, was preceded by the financial bubble that popped year ago, etc.), often forewarned of a situation that eventually exploded. The meaning of today' press conference, as concerns our group, is that we think that the time has come to give a voice, in the European Parliament, to all persons who, in the last years, have taken clear positions regarding the international situation. We are not here to pronounce judgment on which is the correct or most viable way, but we are here to invite the European parliament to reflect more, to confront itself better on some fundamental issues. I think that President Sarkozy's statement on the floor, both yesterday and in the last session, when he correctly characterized the crisis we are facing a systemic crisis, needs an indepth analysis in all directions. And this is the meaning of this meeting otday, which will e followed by meetings with other personalities in the next months, in order to try to give an answer, or at least a correct analysis, on events. Thank you. Borghezio: Mr. LaRouche, you may speak. LYNDON LAROUCHE: On the 20th of January, presumably the elected President of the United States will be inaugurated. Between now and then, it is extremely difficult to forecast exactly what will happen. The terrorism in India and Mumbai is merely typical of this interim situation and what we must be prepared to deal with. But in the meantime, the issue which is facing the coming President of the United States, who has, incidentally nominated a number of friends and collaborators of mine for his government, starting with of course Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State; but the problems that are going to confront all of them, is something I forecast on the 25th of July of 2007, where I forecast that I expected within a few days or so, we must expect the beginning of the biggest crisis of all modern history, the biggest economic-financial crisis in all history. Three days later, it broke out. The crisis is essentially one of a financial derivatives crisis: That the system of speculation which was launched under Alan Greenspan when he began the head of the Federal Reserve System of financial derivatives has reached the point of explosion. It's over quadrillions of dollars of debt. And there's no possibility that this debt could ever be satisfied or liquidated. This presents the world with a danger, the challenge of a reorganization of the world monetary-financial system, and what I am proposing to my friends and sympathizers in the coming administration, is that we put the entire world through a financial reorganization, in the direction of the policies of Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. Not what Truman began to implement in 1945, but what Franklin Roosevelt presented at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944: That is, to create an international credit system based on a fixed exchange rate of credit systems among nations, and to proceed to start a program of actual recovery, financial-economic recovery. We know what the situation is in Europe; we know largely what the situation is presently in the United States. The insanity of the present government of the United States, in going to a virtual zero interest rate, much like what the yen did some years ago, in the overnight yen market, is a piece of insanity whose results we have yet to see. I would hope that this would be reversed. If it's not reversed, then we have an incalculable situation. But in any case, that's the issue. The issue is, we must end the kind of financial system which was created since 1971-1972. We must go back to a system of a fixed-exchange-rate system. It must be based on a credit system, not a financial system. What I mean, is this: The United States is unique among nations, in the fact that we have a credit system, where European nations have financial systems, monetary systems. The difference is this: Under our Constitution, the creation of money, or credit, must be made by the President of the United States, but with the consent of the House of Representatives. This credit can be then used, and monetized, as specified by the legislation and by upholding the President's power to utter credit. What I'm proposing, essentially, is that we use the United States' Constitution, with its provision for a credit system, through treaty agreements with other nations, to create a fixed-exchange-rate credit system. The purpose is largely to generate credit, which can then be used, internationally, for building up long-term investments in the world economy. This means, taking much of the financial derivatives, which could never be paid anyway--there's no possibility of satisfying the demands of this financial system presently; there's not that amount of money will ever exist in the world, to pay off quadrillions of dollars of debt, which is largely fraudulent debt. And therefore, we have to wipe this aspect of the debt of the world off the books, and go back to a credit system which is based on the idea of the nation-state, as opposed to what we're getting now, in terms of a new, funny international system, a monetary system. Go back to the nation-state, and take long-term commitments, in terms of a quarter-century, half-century, or full century, depending upon the category. We have a problem, for example, in this respect in Asia: What I proposed of course--the initiative on this, for this proposal, be made by an agreement among the United States, Russia, China, and India, because it's in this area of the world, in Asia, including Russia's role in Eurasia, where the greatest amount of poverty and the greatest need for development occurs. We have in India, for example, 63% of the population is extremely poor, and not likely on their own powers to increase their productivity immediately. Without large-scale infrastructure, such as nuclear power and things of that sort, to regenerate that, to build up the infrastructure of nations such as India, to the point that they multiply the productive powers of labor in these countries. We have a problem in China, as we all know now. China is collapsing; as a result of the collapse of the U.S. market, the entire Chinese system is in crisis. This is going to spread throughout the world very rapidly, which is why the situation is unstable. Russia is essential, because Russia is a Eurasian culture, not a European or an Asian culture. It's been that since about the time of Genghiz Khan. So, under these conditions, the raw materials which exist largely in Russia, in northern Russia, are necessary to supply the minerals needed for building up the economies of countries such as China and India. China and India could not do this by themselves, because this involves technologies which are only known in Russia, in institutions such as the Vernadsky Institute for example, which is a specialist in this kind of area, of going into an area such as the tundra area, the Arctic region, or sub-Arctic region, to draw out the raw materials which are necessary. It's not a matter of digging in the ground, it's a matter of developing a system of raw-materials development. Also, the future of humanity is going to go increasingly in the direction of Asia--the large populations of Asia; 40%, approximately, of the human race lives there, and most of it is very poor. So, we're going to have to mobilize the Americas, especially the United States, and Europe, to play, again, a leading role in science and technology, as a part of the process of developing the whole of this planet, including Asia and Africa, developing the whole of the planet up to a condition in which humanity can succeed. It's my belief, that under the Obama Administration, from all signs so far, that something in that direction will occur. There will be complications, as you know what governments are like, and they're always complicated. They don't provide exactly what you want, but if you get 50% or 60% of what you want, that's considered pretty good these days. So, that's where it stands. The key problem is that, in the area of economy, there are very few people in the economics profession or otherwise, who have any actual comprehension of this problem and its nature. They didn't forecast it, they didn't see it coming, and they relied too much on statistical forecasting, rather than real forecasting. Real forecasting is based on physical science; it's based on taking into account the will of people and deciding what they're going to do, and whether these ideas they have are correct or not. Are they able to forecast the results of what they intend or not? So that's my position here. My qualifications, which have been proven many times in the area of forecasting, are actually based on a branch of science known as Riemannian physics, a physical economy conception of Riemannian physics. And I've been successful: I've been forecasting for a long period of time--obscurely, back in the 1950s, when I forecast the 1957 recession, and forecast what became the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, and a number of other forecasts, and I've succeeded in this one. And as a result of my success in forecasting, people in the coming government of the new President have acknowledged the fact that I've been right and decided that I have to play some very significant role in shaping what will be the policy of the new government. Now, I can't make any guarantees or predictions on that, because it's a long time between now and the 20th of January, and with terrorism breaking out in India and elsewhere, and the likelihood of more terrorism in various parts of the world under these conditions, we can not exactly proceed on the basis of knowing exactly what's going to happen. We have to be prepared, on the one side, with knowing what we should do, what the objectives of mankind should be, what the policies should be, what the resources are that we can use to achieve those objectives; and also have a Plan B, as well as a Plan A. Plan A is what could happen and would be good for humanity. Plan B is what if that isn't provided. So you always, in policy, have to have two options: One is the best option that you should follow, and the other is what you have to do in case the first one doesn't work out. I think those of you in politics long enough know and understand that. But that's the situation we're in. We're in the most dangerous situation: In all modern history, there has been nothing comparable to this in European experience, since the 14th-Century New Dark Age, so-called--when the collapse of the House of Bardi occurred. And we're in, with the derivatives crisis, in quadrillions of dollars of debt which could never be paid, we're in a crisis which is worse than that the House of Bardi faced, and other firms, in the 14th Century. It merely means, we have to proceed: Cancel what should not be debt, cancel what should not be paid; continue what must happen, must be done, without missing a step, protecting the people, protecting the individuals; protecting the cultures, as if no interruption had occurred. We can, I believe, do that, under reorganization. But we have to have, as I said, a Plan A and a Plan B. I'm working on Plan A. And I'm warning people about what Plan B looks like: and it's awful--awful. But if it happens, we're going to have to face it, as we have faced terrible things before. Thank you. - QUESTIONS TO LYNDON LAROUCHE - Borghezio opens the floor for questions. Ivo Caizzi (Corriere della Sera): Two questions, if it is allowed. The first one: If I understood correctly, you say that the mass of outstanding debt on the financial markets cannot be repaid. Therefore, practically, there is no possiblity to re-establish a balance on the financial markets, in view of what is the monetary mass available on the markets. My question is, what is your concrete forecast on this financial crisis? The second question: you spoke about zero interest rates in the USA. Can you explain to us why it is insane to cut rates to zero in a moment, when, clearly, we need to restart the economy? LAROUCHE: Well, what we have to do is very simple, actually, from an American standpoint, from the U.S. Constitution. There are complications in the case of Europe, but from the American Constitution, this is not a difficult problem, because our Constitution was devised to deal with precisely this type of problem. What we do, is you put the chartered banks, we call them in the United States, and the equivalent banks--that is the real ones, not the speculative banks, but the ones who deposit savings, who use national money, national contributions, as credit and loan this money out under specified terms--under that case, you take the credit system, linked with the chartered banking system, that is, the regular banking system, and you say, "We're putting these things into bankruptcy reorganization, but they will keep their doors open, and will function under government protection." This also means a protection of treaty agreements among governments, to create a fixed-exchange-rate system planetwide, which will have the same objective, of cooperation among sovereign nation-states to protect their essential banking system; and also, at the same time, to designate certain objectives, which should be the objectives of the separate, sovereign governments and their cooperative relations: these to ensure that we immediately go back to a real, productive economy, in agriculture, industry, and basic economic infrastructure. And this means, we have to designate, first of all--we're talking about quarter-century-, half-century-, and century-long kinds of agreements on development. That's your credit system. We have to also balance, through a fixed-exchange-rate system, we have to balance the payments, the scheduled payments back and forth among these nations. It's my belief that we can actually do much better immediately, than we're doing right now, if we do that. What's needed, is governments to have the courage to take this kind of action, and to take them jointly and quickly. For example, the issue of nuclear power is going to be leading one. Because without that, we certainly can not meet certain requirements, such as water management, and other things which are needed on this planet as a whole. But governments will have to come to agreements on this kind of thing. And we can succeed: We've done it before, we've done similar things before. We just have to use our imagination and take the lessons we've learned and apply them. CLAUDIO CELANI: His second question--why cutting the rates is an insanity? LAROUCHE: Oh, well, this is nonsense! For example, I've been fighting for a 4% rate, a basic banking rate, in the United States for some period of time. Without that kind of protection, you can not maintain a credit system. Japan tried this with this overnight rate, before. Japan kept collapsing as a result of this. A zero interest rate is insanity. The only alternative to zero interest rate, is for the government to make an outright grant! If governments vote for an outright grant, as for a humanitarian purpose, or some related purpose, that's fine. But a 0% interest rate corrupts the banking system, and you must have a stable--you must have security for people putting their savings into banks! You've got to protect--I think a 4% rate for open market activities, and a 2% rate, or 1.5% to 2% rate for special government credit systems is about the range you want to operate in. AP-Biscom: There are some in Italy who say that the banking system is actually in good condition because the banks didn't expose themselves too much to the subprime bubble. Do you think this is true? Do you think there are countries that are sheltered by the fact that their banking system acted in a different way, sheltered from the disaster? LAROUCHE: I don't know exactly what the situation is in the Italian system now. I've known that traditionally, the Italian system was oriented much more to the localities and to those kinds of interests, and I thought, actually back in the 1970s, I thought things were much better than they are today. But take another case, take the case of India: India has a relatively stable credit system, as of now--that is, internally. It's making some progress. Whereas China took a much bigger risk in relying upon the U.S. market; and when the U.S. market and the European market began to collapse, then China is now in desperate situations. So there are obviously relative conditions for better or worse among nations. I think the instinct of Italy, until at least recent developments, which I'm not up to--I thought the Italian orientation for a credit system was essentially much better. I think the bell towers helped to have some of that effect. Muscardini: One remark. From Prof. LaRouche's words, the need becomes evident of a politically stronger Europe, that can be in the market in a propositive and stable way, because, if problems were solved only by a new system organized by the United States, China, India, and Russia, it is obvious that Europe should submit to others' choices, whereas a political and imaginative capability for the future of Europe would enable us to give our contribution and not submit to others' decisions. I also want to specify that, along with macrosystems, we must also deal with the issue of consumer credit, and of a system based only on extreme consumerism, that led millions of citizens to create debt in several ways, so that this creates another crisis that hits single individuals. Therefore, I imagine that out of these first meetings of ours, we can also find an answer to this question. Borghezio: Well, I do not want to take even a second from the gentlemen from the media, but I would take the occasion, if there are no questions at the moment, to ask Prof. LaRouche to explain well to us everything he feels he can tell us about the role of the international speculators. There are figures who act with support from the media system, and hide themselves behind philanthropic roles, and who, instead, are notorious agents of the most terrible and dangerous financial speculation. What can institutions do, in order to defend families and economies from the actions of these gnomes of occult financial powers? LAROUCHE: Well, basically, we're talking about the paradigm for this in the case of George Soros. George Soros is the biggest drug pusher on this planet! He's a drug pusher in Asia; he's a drug pusher in Europe; he's a drug pusher in the Americas. He also was a big power in the election campaigns in the United States, and it looks as though Mr. Obama is not pleased with the result of this sort of thing. So, for example, you take a farmer on the borders of Afghanistan, will grow a crop of opium, a crop of about $600 valuation. By the time that product reaches Europe, it has a price of $6 million. So that, the traffic coming out of Afghanistan, and other locations, through transit in the Carpathian region, into Europe, as in from the Caribbean throughout all South American states, except Colombia, and inside the United States, is one of the biggest ulcers on this planet. And if we don't control and stop this kind of speculation, which is associated with Mr. Soros, as probably the most evil single individual on this planet today, we don't have sovereignty in any part of Europe. This corruption by drug trafficking, is one of the greatest evils on this planet today. And George Soros, who, as a teenager was running errands for the Nazis who were shipping Jews into concentration camps for execution, has not been killing Jews lately, but he's applied the same lessons and methods he learned, and has talked about, when he was a teenager in Hungary--has been applying those same methods of finance and gangsterism throughout the world today. And governments are treating people like that with respect! Which is a mistake. This is a crime! And should be treated by all governments as crimes. The failure to treat this as a crime, has opened the door to most of the evils on this planet today. If we protect our children, our citizens against a drug traffic, then we have a basis for morality. If we do not protect our children, and our markets, our economy, from these drug traffickers, we don't have sovereignty, and that's the problem I think we see in Europe today, is that the influence of these drug traffickers and their political associates, have undermined the sovereignty of the nations of Europe today. And I think our dealing with that, ruthlessly, in all parts of the world, is the thing that will open the doors for establishment of full sovereignty of nations, again, now. MALE: [in English] I've would like to ask you to ask you a question all day. I'm an observer from the Spanish newspaper El Pais. I would like to ask you about the last plan approved here by the European Union. The fight against climate change and the new technologies, adapting the economy to green technologies: Do you think this is a good idea for restarting the economy? LAROUCHE: Well, the key thing here, is a human being is not an animal. A human being is creative, or potentially creative, as no animal is. Human beings are capable of increasing the productive powers of labor of the population, and the standard of living, by will. And therefore, anything that destroys, or impairs the mind of the individual human being, or corrupts their education, or corrupts their opportunities, is a threat to humanity. It's a threat, because it springs from an ignorance, or disregard of the difference between man and a beast. And therefore, that is crucial. Maintaining programs, which are oriented toward technological progress, scientific and technological progress, to increase the productive powers of labor and raise the physical standard of living of mankind, and enable us to sustain a growing population on this planet, these are the measures which are required. Corriere della Sera: [in English] Just a last question. I knew that a couple of years ago, you had this [public] meeting with Minister Tremonti--at the time he wasn't a Minister of Economy, but he was in a position. Can you remind us the main topics of the discussion and the common point that you may share or join with Mr. Tremonti? LAROUCHE: Well, Tremonti is a very brilliant, and I think somewhat courageous individual, who I would tend to agree with most of the time. And sometimes we have a little disagreement on this or that, but we are friends. I wish the best for him, and I think he wishes the best for me. And I think our differences can be resolves in the normal course of events. For example, he tends to still cling to a Keynesian system; I don't want a Keynesian system. I want a system for Italy of the type that most Italians used to want: an American System. By which I mean, Franklin Roosevelt, of course. Borghezio: Given that we are allowed to go over the time limit for some seconds, I would exploit it for one last question. I would like to ask Prof. LaRouche: how do you evaluate the deep indications that, also through reflections on ethics of a large universal knowledge, have been addressed to governments and the leaders of the world economy by His Holiness Pope Ratzinger? LAROUCHE: Well, my views on this thing of course, is, that I believe that a developed language-culture of a people is an integral part of their ability to function. And that therefore, the problem that is posed to us in the attempt to find more cooperation, international cooperation among nations in Europe and elsewhere, is that if we lose sight of the role of a developed language-culture in the functioning of a people, and lose sight of that in the search for unification across borders, that's a mistake. Because there are subtleties in the creative powers of the human mind which are associated with the development of these cultures in language forms. And therefore, it is necessary to have an affirmation of national cultural characteristics, as the basis for the nation-state. And anything that interferes with that, in my experience, is a danger to the productive powers of labor. When we went from a fixed-exchange-rate system, among sovereign nation-states as the policy of the post-war period, that was a mistake! Because a fixed exchange rate was a basis for having nations of different cultures, respective sovereign, enter into long-term conditions of cooperation, and sharing creativity. Take the history of Italy, for example, particularly from Dante: The development of a language culture and its revival was an essential part of the creativity which we saw in the Renaissance in Italy. And if you lose that, if you go to argot, instead of a cultured national language-culture, you lose--for most of your people--you lose their productivity. And the defense of productivity must be the standard by which we judge these kinds of questions. Borghezio: Very well. I thank the distinguished journalists and the colleagues who have stayed until the last available minute and I heartily thank Prof. LaRouche, whose words have demonstrated to us that a great economist can also be a great philosopher. RE: LaRouche - Admin - 12-21-2008 THE LAST CHANCE FOR CIVILISATION? http://larouchepub.com/lar/2008/webcasts/3547nov18_opener.html Here is Lyndon LaRouche's Nov. 18, 2008 international webcast from Washington, sponsored by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee; it was simultaneously carried on the Internet at www.larouchepac.com, the website of the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC), where the webcast and discussion are on file. LaRouche's opening remarks were followed by more than two hours of discussion, moderated by LaRouche's West Coast spokesman, Harley Schlanger. A PDF version of this webcast and discussion can be found here. Schlanger: ... As the present global financial disintegration has been unfolding, and accelerating, we've been hearing, constantly, the refrain: "No one could have known it was coming." That refrain, no matter how often it's repeated, is dead wrong. We're also hearing another refrain, as trillions of dollars are being pumped into dead banks, in a futile effort to save the bankrupt system: "No one knows what to do." Again, those repeating that refrain, are dead wrong. It's my great honor and privilege today to introduce to you the one man who not only forecast this crisis, who knew it was coming, but has offered a solution, and is organizing globally to implement that solution: Ladies and Gentlemen, join me in welcoming economist and statesman, Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche: Thank you. This past week, this past Tuesday, I gave an advance presentation to an audience, here in this city, and also in New York, on a discussion of what I was going to say today. What I said then was recorded—not in full, but the remarks I made in opening, were recorded—and have been reproduced and are in circulation now. What I said, essentially is, 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: that is, the present, international monetary system can not be rescued. If you try to rescue it, you will lose the planet. You have to choose: Replace the system, or get a new planet. Those are your choices, essentially. I think that any sane person would say, "Keep the planet." Mars is not particularly hospitable these years; I understand it's rather cold there, at present. So what that means, essentially, is, the world is now operating under an imperialist system, which is actually part of the British Empire. Now, the British Empire, is not the British Empire: It's an international monetary-financial system, which has a base in England, but which operates globally. And since the breakdown of the U.S. dollar, in 1971, and the subsequent launching of the highly speculative market in petroleum, the short-term speculative market in petroleum, the U.S. no longer controlled its own dollar. The dollar has been controlled increasingly, as the U.S. economy has deteriorated, by a London-centered crowd, centered in those financial interests. The result of that, plus the fact of what was done, beginning in 1987, under a now departed—happily—former head of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, is that a new addition was added to this process of this speculative kind of currency. It was based on a system which had been pioneered by a Michael Milken, who went to prison in the 1980s for what he did; but Alan Greenspan made it international. So that, what happened last July, a year ago July, was not a crash of a short-term market, at all, a real estate market. The real estate market was collapsing, or did collapse, as I said it would collapse, exactly at that time. But there was no real estate market collapse of the type talked about. What was collapsing was the system. Now, the system is in the order of magnitude of more than a quadrillion dollars, many quadrillion dollars, of speculative currency, out there. More wealth nominally, than the world contains. Everything had been done to prop up this crazy dollar, as an international currency, controlled, not by the United States, but by a syndicate of international financier interests: the floating-exchange-rate system. And what happened is, they had gone into the area of U.S. real estate, as in London and elsewhere, in trying to create debt, synthetically, to cover this vast accumulation of unregulated dollar claims in the international market: quadrillions of dollars claims. Maybe more than $1 quadrillion. Maybe $10 quadrillion, or more than that. And so, there is not enough money, real value in the world, to cover the demands against currency. And therefore, the system has gotten to the point, that under the present system, you've got to sacrifice the currency claims, or you've got to sacrifice the real economy. Which means, there's no way, that you can reorganize under the present world monetary-financial system. You have to put the whole system into bankruptcy reorganization. Now, how can you do that? Well, what you can do, is end the existence of monetary systems: You put them into bankruptcy and close them out. Well, what do you do for money? We go back to the U.S. dollar. The American Constitutional System Our Constitution is unique among nations, in many respects: that we're a true nation-state, where European nations are not true nation-states. They may aspire to be nation-states—Charles de Gaulle tried to do that in France—but they're not really nation-states. Because they are under a parliamentary style of system, and a parliamentary style of system is inherently not a fully sovereign system of sovereign nation-states: It's controlled by something else; it's controlled by international monetary interests. So, what we can do, is, very simply, is we can go back to the U.S. Federal Constitution, and create what's called a "credit-based dollar," as opposed to a "monetary dollar." A credit-based dollar is consistent with our Constitution: that no money, as legal currency, as legal tender, can be uttered under the U.S. Constitution, without a vote by the U.S. Congress on behalf of action by the U.S. Presidency. So, in our system, the official currency of the United States, insofar as we follow our own Constitution, is limited to dollars, or dollar-equivalent negotiables, which are uttered only by previous authorization of the U.S. Congress, especially the House of Representatives, and uttered by the U.S. Federal government! There is no such thing as an international monetary source, which gives us our currency—not legally. It is uttered by the U.S. government; it is sovereign. We are a sovereign state, and our currency is uttered by us, under our Constitution: by approval of the House of Representatives, and by the Presidency. No other currency exists. In Europe, that is not the case: In Europe, the monetary systems are not controlled by the government. They are created by central banking systems, which may negotiate with governments, and have agreements with governments, but the governments do not control the monetary system, as such. In point of fact, that is the essence of a free-trade system: that the governments have no essential control, as issuing authorities, over debt and credit outstanding. And it's because of the utilization of that provision, that artificial money was created, by people making a capital promise, in capital amount, to go into debt, to get a lesser amount of money uttered in their behalf, now. That's how the world incurred a presently outstanding debt, through such means as derivatives, in the order of quadrillions of dollars! Far in advance of anything that could ever be paid. So, we are never, never going to pay those debts! We couldn't pay those debts. So, we're never going to pay them. What do you do in a case like that? What does the United States do in a case like that, under our Constitution? You declare those debts in bankruptcy. And what do you do with them in bankruptcy? You sort them out! Those things that should be supported, will be supported, and the rest of it will just wait, or die away. The great majority, the vast majority of the obligations outstanding today, as nominal claims against countries, will be cancelled. Those things which should be paid, will be paid. Those otherwise, will never be paid. And they will never be paid, in any case! A Four-Power Alliance Now, you have two ways to go: Either you collapse the world, with starvation and mass death, and those effects. Or, you put the thing through bankruptcy reorganization. And how do you do that? Well, what I specified is very elementary: I have four nations in mind that can take the lead on this thing. And the four nations, which together, represent the greatest consolidation of power on this planet: These nations are the United States, Russia, China, and India, as joined by other nations, which join in the same deal. We put the world through bankruptcy reorganization. How do we do it? We use the U.S. Constitution to do that. The U.S. Constitution is unique in the fact we have a kind of Federal Constitution we have: that our dollar is not a monetary dollar; it's a credit dollar. In other words, the United States has uttered an obligation, on behalf of the U.S. government, which can be monetized. That is our obligation; that's our only obligation, and any other kind of obligation is not fungible. Other countries have a different kind of system. Now, if the United States says, that we are going to back up our dollar, and enters into an agreement with Russia, China, and India, to join us, with other countries, in doing the same thing, to put the world through bankruptcy reorganization, in which we will cancel most of the outstanding financial obligations: It has to happen. Otherwise, no planet! If you try to collect on quadrillions of dollars of outstanding claims, from whom are you going to collect, by what means, and what's the effect? It is against natural law, to collect on that debt! How many people are you going to kill, to collect that debt? How many countries are you going to destroy, to collect that debt? So, we have this monetary authority outside, which has treaty agreements with governments, but which has no real obligation to governments otherwise, except the treaty agreement. This agreement has resulted in the creation of a vast world debt, a monetary debt, which can never be paid. Well, obviously, the system is bankrupt! You shut down the system, and put it into bankruptcy reorganization—it's the only remedy. A Credit System How does it work for us? Under our Constitution, any credit we utter, in a monetizable form, is an obligation under the authority of the U.S. government, in each process, by the approval of the Congress, the uttering of it, and by the action of the Federal government, with that approval. Now, also, not only do we utter our currency, properly, under those terms, but if we, as a nation, as a sovereign republic, enter into an agreement, a treaty agreement with other countries, for the same system, then under the treaty agreement, other countries enjoy the advantage of the same system we have for reorganization of our debts. And that's the only way we can get out of this mess. So, we create a group of nations, who are operating under treaty relationship with the United States, which gives Constitutional protection to this, so that we now have created a new system—a credit system—to replace the existing monetary system. And everything that is put under the protection of the credit system, is now solid. Everything else is thrown onto the floor, to see what you can pick up: It's in bankruptcy. So therefore, we can create a new credit system, among nations, which I think—if the United States, Russia, China, and India agree, most nations of the world will happily join us, especially considering the alternative. And therefore, we can create a new world system, a new money system, a credit system as opposed to a monetary system. And under those conditions, we can proceed to advance credit on a large scale, for physical reconstruction of the world's physical economy. We can organize a recovery of the same type, which we undertook with President Franklin Roosevelt, back in the 1930s and 1940s. And we won't change from that, I should think, once we've done it. That's the only alternative. Now, what that means is, politically, the end of the British Empire; or what's called the British Empire. The British Empire is the present world empire. There is no other empire on this planet today, except the British Empire. The use of the "empire" to describe any other system, is incompetent. The British are the only empire, and the British Empire is that which controls the dollar, the floating dollar today, the monetary dollar. So, under these conditions, we then proceed to world reconstruction. And what we do, instead of the present free-trade system, is we go back to a protectionist system, a fixed-rate system; in other words, currencies will have a fixed rate of exchange with respect to each other, or adjustable by treaty arrangements, but they do not float. And we then proceed to utter the credit, for large-scale infrastructure investment, which will be the driver of the physical reconstruction of the planet. That's the only remedy. Any suggestion but that, is insane. Any failure to do exactly what I've prescribed, is insane. All sane people will, therefore, immediately agree—or we will have to draw the obvious conclusion. So, that's what I outlined, in essence, as to how this would work—that's the core of it. This is the U.S. Constitution. It's a system which worked, every time we've used it. If we go back to it once again, as we did under Franklin Roosevelt, we'll come out of this nicely. Globalization: A Crime Against Humanity What are we going to do, however? We have, then, a physical economy, which is a mess. We have a situation in which the people are in jeopardy, life is in jeopardy; the conditions of life, the physical conditions of life are deteriorating throughout the United States and elsewhere. We have a problem of starvation in many parts of the world. Much of the human population is now in desperate jeopardy, because of current food prices and current organization of food production. Globalization has become a mass murderer, and globalization is virtually a crime against humanity, in its present implications. We set up a system, as you may have noticed, with the case of Monsanto and other ones, where we grow food in one country to be eaten in another country. And we don't grow food for that country, much in your own country. You grow food for other countries, under the present kinds of agreements, WTO type agreements, to produce food for people in other countries. For the food you eat yourself, you have to go to a completely different country than your own, and get them to produce food for you. In the middle stands someone who's a dealer in food, the international financial community, which determines the prices which are paid for the country which exports the food, and also determines the prices paid for the country that buys the food to consume it. And what we've done recently, is we have destroyed the independent food-producing capabilities of nations, so they no longer have self-sufficiency. They are at the mercy of something like the WTO, which is a form of mass crime against humanity! The WTO should be repealed, immediately; cancelled immediately! It's a crime against humanity, its very existence. People should grow food primarily in their own country, and get supplementary foods of special types they may require from other countries, where they're better produced. But the sovereignty of a nation, in respect to its own production and consumption of food, is primary. So therefore, that part of the system has to end. Most of the other features of globalization have to end. They will end, if we're human, if we're decent. And that means a complete change of course from what the present trend in policies is. Most treaty agreements that now exist will have to be cancelled, relevant to this. And practices of this type will be outlawed. Food prices will be under international supervision, to make sure there's no more of this fraud. You have to realize, that billions of people's lives are presently in danger, as a result of these WTO and related policies, the effect of them. That's our problem. And our remedy is to use great power on this planet, to force through a system, a fixed-exchange-rate system, to establish a credit system in place of a monetary system, and to launch large-scale projects through joint credit structures which finance these projects, which enable nations to build their way out of the present physical mess we have today. It's a tough one. And people say, "Why do you want to do that? Couldn't you take slo-o-w-er steps? Slo-o-wer steps?" "Well, you know that train's coming down the track, and you're walking across it—do you think you should take slo-o-w steps?" No. So therefore, what you need, is you need these four countries. And they are different countries, as you may have noticed, not only different as nations, but they have different characteristics. We have one characteristic, as the United States, when we're functioning properly. Russia has certain characteristics which are unique to Russia. China has characteristics, including social characteristics, which are unique to China. India has characteristics which are different than any of the other countries. But this is a great part of the human race, the population, totally. And you have countries that are associated with them, like Japan. Japan's market is principally Asia. Its best market, for its high-tech production, are neighboring countries of Asia, which include Siberia, include the mainland of China, and so forth—that region of the world. Japan has a high-technology capability, which is extremely valuable. Korea—especially South Korea, but really Korea as a whole—has also a very significant potential. Also Korea is different than Japan and China, and Russia, and therefore Korea is a very valuable country, in the sense that it's not the same as China, Japan, Russia, and so forth. And therefore, the cooperation among these countries of different characteristics is a very important stabilizing factor in the world situation. It also is a key part in production. The Problem of Power-Generation India has completely different characteristics in this respect, but it also has, in effect, similar problems. The most common problem, is power. Now, we have nuclear power, developed today. It's the only decent power, that we have for dealing with these kinds of problems. Because, you can not measure power in calories. Only an idiot, or someone who is ignorant would measure power in calories. That is, a kilowatt of sunlight, and a kilowatt of nuclear power, are not the same thing. You can not replace a kilowatt of nuclear power by a kilowatt of sunlight. In the process of power, the low end of power is generally sunlight, as it impinges upon the Earth. That is a very poor quality of power. Now the best thing you can do with sunlight, is what we tend to do with Earth naturally. That is, sunlight has a very low cross density in terms of intensity, as it hits the Earth. The most useful thing that sunlight does, is it helps to grow plants. Now, how's it grow plants? Well, one case is, of course, the green plants. Take power in terms of being applied to green plants. Now, the green plant has something in it called chlorophyll. Now, chlorophyll has a wonderful quality: Is that the individual chlorophyll molecule, which looks like a pollywog under a microscope—it has a long tail which is sort of an antenna; and it has a head with a magnesium molecule in the head. And the sunlight impinging on this antenna is now captured by some of these molecules. The power which is obtained by this antenna-like section of the molecule, now powers the magnesium head complex of that molecule. These molecules interact together, and what it does, these collections of molecules in chlorophyll, is increase the energy-flux density of the power which it has absorbed by means of these tails, from sunlight. This high-intensity power then converts carbon dioxide and so forth, into oxygen, and carbon products, and living things. So this, in turn—the increase in chlorophyll—cools the atmosphere, gives you a more uniform temperature, it turns a desert into something else, and that sort of thing; and therefore, all life on Earth depends, to a great degree, on this action of chlorophyll: of converting sunlight, through the action of chlorophyll, into a higher order, which then feeds all kinds of living processes, grows trees, cools the atmosphere. It does all sorts of good things. And this process is now essential to the system of life on Earth, and developing the entire planetary climate. If you go to solar energy as a source of something else, and take the sunlight and now put it into trying to heat something, directly, what're you going to do to the climate? You're going to increase the temperature of the climate? Because you're not cooling it; plants cool the climate, green plants. You're going to have a higher temperature. You're going to come to creating an artificial desert! Where you want a green planet, you are creating a desert. And you say, "That's better for nature." This is only from the mind of denatured idiots, who think of these kinds of things. That's why they're called denatured. So, in any case, therefore, the key thing here, is to increase the energy-flux density of power. Now, how do we do that? Or how have we done it so far? Well, you can burn brush—that's not too efficient. Again, you're burning something that was once alive. Another way is to burn wood, as such—a little bit higher order of fuel. Or you have charcoal; now, charcoal is a little higher order in combustion, in terms of energy-flux density, than just wood. Or you can go to coal, which is more efficient than wood. You can go to a more efficiently condensed form of coal, called coke. You can go to petroleum, a still higher order. You can go to various kinds of natural gas, that's a little bit better. You can go to nuclear power: Boy! A factor of a thousand times or more better! You can go to a high-temperature gas-cooled reactors—oh, you're getting up there, buddy! A high-temperature gas-cooled reactor of a pebble-bed variety, you can start to desalinate, in a great way! You can take and provide large masses of water, and create the conditions of life. Don't use petroleum the way you do it now: hauling cheap petroleum all over the planet at high prices, to burn it! You generate, from water, you generate high-temperature gases, which are much more efficient for airplanes and automobiles and so forth; and other kinds of synthetic fuels. Then we will go, at some point, to thermonuclear fusion, which is still tens and thousands of times more efficient than that. So, in this process, we go to higher and higher degrees of man's power to shape nature, per capita and per square kilometer. So, by going to these greater energy-flux densities of power, we're advancing the condition of life on the planet, for mankind as a whole. Now, what we obviously wish to do, is just exactly that. For example, in the case of India: India has a large supply, a natural supply of thorium. Now, thorium is a material which is related to uranium in its function, but it's generally not useful for making nuclear weapons; it's useful for producing power systems. India has the capability, with thorium, and with a large stock of thorium, and with thorium reactors, to increase the energy-flux density of its area. Now what that means is, you have in India, take a case, about 70% of the population is not too well trained, not too technologically qualified. But that's not going to stop you, because if you can increase the power available, locally, per capita and per square kilometer, in a country, you can take the same quality of labor—which is not too efficient, because it's not skilled, it's not trained—but you can increase its productivity without yet changing the way it behaves. By power supply, you can provide water, through desalination; or other kinds of things. So you create an environment, an infrastructure environment, in which the same quality of effort, the same level of skill by an Indian worker in a village, can be increased by several times, several-fold; conditions of life can be improved. So therefore, the general method we've used in humanity, in our successive ventures, is to improve the environment, the environment of production, which as a lever, increases the productivity of production, in human terms, in terms of human effect. Therefore, you upgrade the conditions of life, by concentrating efforts on improving what we call "basic economic infrastructure," that of art, agriculture, and industry, and city life, and things of that sort. And that's the way we have to go. Save the U.S. Auto Industry? For example, the question will come up; it comes up all over the place: Shouldn't we go back to making automobiles again? No! I fought for that back in 2005, and early 2006. The Congress of the United States killed the idea of saving the automobile industry, when I was about to save it. They killed it in February of 2006: Now, the same idiots, who killed the automobile industry and destroyed it in February 2006, are now saying they're going to come back and start producing automobiles again, having destroyed the market for, and the ability to produce automobiles! Simply because people want to manufacture automobiles, there's a form of fantasy life now! There's no sense for the United States to go back into the automobile industry, not at this time. It's insane! But it's attractive to people who don't think. Why are the people who shut down the auto industry, in February 2006 when I was working to save it, or save part of it, and save the industry, as well as the automobile production—why do they want to start it up now? They shut it down! The present Speaker of the House was one of those who shut it down! She says she's now promoting it! Did she change her mind? Did she change some other things? It's all fakery. What we need now, is not U.S.-produced automobiles—the Japanese are doing a fine job of more than filling all our requirements. There is an excess of automobile production, en masse, throughout the world! Why are we going back into the automobile manufacturing business? To produce vehicles we can't sell? Just to look at them? Well, let's try something else: Let's take the highways around here. What's the congestion: How much time do you lose every day in commuting to work in the Washington, D.C. area? What is it, two hours commuting for you? Two and a half hours each way? What are the tolls you pay on these routes? How much of your personal life is lost by this commuting—as opposed to what you would have, if you had a high-speed rapid-transit system network to transport you, without having to drive the car, without having to smell the other guy's gas, ahead of you. You're getting sick. How much would you like to have more time for family life? If you're spending five hours a day commuting, what kind of family, if you have two adults, both working, and some children: What kind of a family life are you creating, for Americans with that kind of arrangement? Shouldn't we have, instead of all these automobiles on the highway, with all these tolls, and all these fumes to smell from the automobile in front you—wouldn't it be better to get a shorter, and faster transportation system? And to have a better family life? Maybe a few hours a day saved, for some kind of normal family life, not wondering what your children are doing all these crazy hours? Don't we have a shortage of clean power sources? Don't we have a shortage of investment in manufacturing things that we need, which we're wasting on this sort of stuff? And, do you have clean water? Do any of you remember the time, you could get safe, fresh water, out of a city water system, from a tap? Do you remember when that was? How many bottles of bottled water do you drink a day? How much does it cost you? How much did it used to cost you, the same amount of water, safely out of a tap? Build Vital Infrastructure, Worldwide So, what you need—the conditions of life and the conditions of production; we have a shortage of infrastructure in this country, of basic economic infrastructure. Not infrastructure like sidewalks, to pay taxes on! You have people in New York, like this crazy Mayor of New York: He wants to take over the infrastructure. He'll buy your sidewalk, and he'll put a tollgate at each block! This is not what I mean by infrastructure! What you need are the basic things, like a generally free transportation system! We don't need the tolls! We don't need the tollbooths! They're not digestible. The story about getting "toll house cookies"—you never get toll house cookies in tollbooths! So, it's consumer fraud. We don't need that: What we need is an environment which is largely a free environment, because that's not the way to have commerce; but an environment which is not just free, but it becomes an essential part of providing the environmental conditions of life, in which the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer, are increased. So, in many parts of the world where you have poor people, as in Africa, with no infrastructure, and other parts of the world like that, you're not going to get a significant increase in productivity by applying the effort to the local point of production. You're going to increase the productive powers of labor, by providing the infrastructure, which enables the existing level of personal skills to be much more efficient in terms of their effect. Kill the bugs, in Africa! Maybe some food will survive. Africa is one of the largest food-producing areas in the world, but most of the food doesn't survive to get to somebody's mouth. The diseases are not controlled; you don't have the transportation systems in order to connect communities, to provide the services which are needed for agriculture. What we need in the United States, and other parts of the world, is the basic development of improved infrastructure, as it affects human life and production, in order to increase the productive powers of labor per capita. That's what we need in the United States. We need to increase the productive powers of labor. At the same time, we have a population, which, over the past period, over the past 40 years!—40 years! Forty years!—the United States has been losing productivity per capita over 40 years. It started back in 1967-1968, we began to lose, shrink, net infrastructure development: Over the course of time, we lost our industry, we lost our productivity, we lost science, we have people doing kinds of work that is not work any more, just make-work to keep them busy; and services, to service services, to service services. We destroyed that! We have a people that no longer have the skills to produce what they used to be able to produce with the same population then, today. We've lost that. We have been insane for 40 years! Since 1967-68, Fiscal Year '67-68. We have been losing infrastructure. Under Carter, we had a disaster! We wrecked the U.S. economy under Carter! That was Carter's great achievement! Under the guidance of David Rockefeller, with the Trilateral Commission. We've been destroying the United States! We've been destroying Europe! Look at Germany, since 1990: The economy of Germany was destroyed, on orders from Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of England; supported by George H.W. Bush, the father of present idiot; and the support of Mitterrand. Germany, which was a powerhouse of productivity, has been virtually destroyed by this order. Similar things have happened in the rest of Europe: Poland is much worse off, today, in terms of productivity, than it was under the Warsaw Pact. Other countries of the former Comecon states, are similarly situated. We destroyed Russia, in terms of economic productivity. We destroyed essential parts of the productivity of the entire planet; we destroyed technology, with these measures. And therefore, we have great needs for breakthroughs in technology, which are within our reach; but we also have to be able to assimilate technology, by what? By improving infrastructure: the infrastructure which is necessary to enable labor of a certain skill to improve its productivity, because we have unskilled people! We don't have the skilled labor population we had 40 years ago! We've lost it! We have a very small fraction of that. We're about to lose much more of that, right now. Look, take the aircraft industry—we were talking about this today. We have, most of the modern planes that we're developing, aren't flying! We're flying old planes, of lower technology. We've lost the technology that we once had, or the relative technology that we once had. So we've got to back to that, and dig up that. So, what we need is the large employment, that's feasible, for the development of the basic economic infrastructure which is needed to increase productivity per capita. And to then use that, to gradually phase in the population, back into the kinds of production levels we used to have, when we had the skills to do that. So, putting money into automobiles that you can't sell, hmm?—which you can not compete in productivity with other countries which are producing automobiles, because our capability—we were doing it already before we shut down the automobile industry; while Japan and Germany, especially Japan, and Korea, were increasing their productivity in the area of auto and related things, we weren't. We were using old technologies, to produce so-called "new, modern" cars. We can no longer compete with Japan or Korea. We lost it—that was a deliberate choice, a policy choice. So what we have to do, essentially, today, is we have to think in these terms, go back to a high-energy-density policy. If you don't believe in nuclear power, you're an idiot. You're not going to succeed. You have to go back to a high energy-density system of infrastructure. Stop all this highway building! Get back to mass transit. We also have an insane policy on development of the economy generally. We used to have the idea of taking every state of the Union and developing production in every state: In other words, you spread production and its skills throughout the United States. That was one of the functions of our developing of a national transportation system. You didn't have super-industries where the whole industry was concentrated in one corner of some state and not in others. We had a balance of agriculture, infrastructure, and industry, which we used to develop the separate states of the United States, at least to a certain degree. So we distributed the productivity over the countryside. We didn't try to get giant industries to gobble up all of these things. So we would balance the cost of production against the economy as a whole, this whole territory. We were doing, essentially, with many wrong things included, but relative to today, what we were doing 40 years ago, was sane, compared to what we're doing today, which is relatively insane. And our first objective is, to do what is immediately feasible, is to recapture the kinds of things we used to do, and do them once again. And measure what we assign people to do, to what the present skills are out there. One of the first areas we have to get into, is the system of education: Our public education system stinks. So you've got to get back to an education for human beings, not for monkeys. And often emotionally disturbed monkeys, is what we're doing today: We're turning children into emotionally disturbed monkeys, which creates a market for teaching children who are emotionally disturbed. And the training program itself, increasing the disturbance. That's what we're doing. So we have to get back to the standards we used to practice, and realize that we've been systematically destroyed by the policy-changes which have been in effect over a period of time. Roots of Our Problem: British Fascism This goes way back, and we have to remember how this happened: In the 1920s and the 1930s, before the election of Franklin Roosevelt, coming out of the First World War, the leading financial powers of the world, were headed toward global fascism. That was the policy. Germany did not create fascism; Britain did. Hitler was put into power in Germany by the British, with help from New York City, people, like the grandfather of the present President of the United States, Prescott Bush. Prescott Bush was the guy who personally issued the order, which refinanced the bank, and refinanced the Nazi Party in the end of 1932, to enable Hitler to become dictator of Germany in January of 1933. And these guys, including that crowd, including Prescott Bush, remained on the Nazi side, up into the time, we ourselves were going to war against Nazi Germany. And he got into trouble at that time. Truman was also involved in that kind of stuff, back then. The whole Wall Street crowd was just as Nazi as the British were, and the British created Hitler. It's absolutely clear. They created Mussolini. Winston Churchill was a backer of Mussolini, up until the time that Mussolini invaded France. And Winston Churchill was still his friend, even after that. Winston Churchill was still supporting Hitler, until Nazi Germany invaded France. So Hitler was not a creation of Germany; Hitler Germany was a creation, largely, of London, with support from a lot of people in the United States—including from the grandfather of the present President of the United States, Prescott Bush. So, what happened in this process, is, Franklin Roosevelt, in becoming President—over the objections and the opposition of the financial crowd of J.P. Morgan and Co., which supported Hitler and had supported Mussolini—Roosevelt produced a miracle of saving the world from going into a fascist dictatorship, then. And the British finally agreed to go along with him, when Hitler invaded France, and broke the agreement that Britain had with Germany in support of Nazism. So, what we did, in my generation, in going to war against Hitler, and in setting up what Roosevelt intended should become a post-war development, changed history for the better. But the moment that Franklin Roosevelt died, we were in trouble! (I was there; there are a few, maybe one or two in this room, who were there at the time, who were adults at the time, as I was.) And they moved as fast as possible, as time would allow and public toleration would allow, to move back in a different direction: Back to exactly the policies that Franklin Roosevelt had opposed, back in 1932-33. And that's the root of our problem. So today, when I am proposing what I'm proposing now, which sounds to anybody looking back on those days, as exactly—I'm proposing to go back to the kind of philosophy of outlook that Franklin Roosevelt represented, back then, in '32-33 and afterward. I'm going against them, kicking against the pricks. Because the trend is what? The trend has been continuously one toward world fascism. That's what's been happening in this election campaign, so far this year. A drive toward a new kind of world fascism, called "globalization." Therefore, if you look at this, look at the process by which we have been destroyed from what we were becoming, and had become, up until the end of the last war, especially since 1968 to approximately '71. If you look at that, you see, this is not some "natural" process: This is the natural consequence of an intentional direction of policy in the wrong direction! We didn't collapse because we were worn out; we didn't collapse because the environment was strained; we didn't collapse for any of those reasons! We collapsed because somebody intended that we should be collapsed! Because they wanted their kind of society, the kind of society they were headed toward, under Wall Street influence back in the 1920s, into the early 1930s. And we had a replay of that, right in the recent election campaign! A replay of 1932. Only in that case, Roosevelt won. So, we're in trouble today, only because we made that change—and we've made it again, back in the same direction. We're Going Straight to Hell! Now, the question is: Do we want to survive? If we want to survive, we have a lesson of how to survive, in what Roosevelt in particular accomplished as President, during the time he was President. We can survive. But, if we don't, we're not going to survive. As a matter of fact, with the present conditions, if those changes are not made, you must expect that there will never be a recovery of the economy: This present crisis will be a permanent one. We now have between 6.5 and more billion people on this planet. Two generations from now, we will have less than 1 billion, something like the dark ages of the 14th Century. And if we continue in this direction, the direction we're going in now, the direction which we're going in as of the 18th of November, the direction we're going in as of the end of the week—if we continue in that direction, that's where we're going: We're going straight to Hell! And the alternative is, to turn this around. Go back! Recognize: We're headed straight toward Hell, right now! This is not somewhere down the line: We're talking about this year—we're talking about January, February. This joke that was passed this week [at the G-20 meeting], this joke with this President of the United States, this silly fool! And the silly fools that were participating. Many people were not silly fools there, but they said, "We're going to go along with this, because this guy's getting out of here. It's temporary." If we go in that direction, we're finished. Civilization as you've known it is finished. It's happened before! Look at the history of mankind in total! Look at what we know about the history of mankind. This has happened before! Not exactly the same thing, but the same type of problem! Mankind had a civilization which was on the way up: The conditions of life of the average person were improving; the culture was improving; technological-scientific progress, in terms of those times, was going on! Mankind was on an upward course! And BOOM! Something like this intervened. The civilization went into a crisis, and collapsed. It's happened repeatedly. Dark ages are a characteristic of mankind, at every part of mankind. In every case, there was the possibility of not letting that happen. In many cases, it was allowed to happen; no one resisted. Are we now going to resist? 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 pricks? Are we willing to say, "No, no, no! You don't do this to us"? Do we have political leaders who have the guts to do what's necessary? Do we have political leaders who have even the guts to recognize that it's necessary, even if they don't have the guts to do it?! We have people, who tell me, "Well, can't you compromise? Can you start this a little bit here? A sample, a teaser here? To see how it works?" When you're on the ship that's sinking? The Titanic is sinking, and you want to argue about stateroom accommodations? That's our situation now. Use the Presidential System So therefore, that's what I laid out on Tuesday, last Tuesday. It's an outline of exactly the policy we can follow. If we can reach agreement, in the United States—I don't care who the current President, I don't care who the President-elect is. We have a Presidential system which is more important than any President: Can the Presidential system of the United States decide to reach an agreement with Russia, China, and India—now!—to take joint action, which will turn the planet around. And that joint action would turn the planet around! Are we willing to do that? With the understanding that we're going back to the kind of policy that Franklin Roosevelt represented in his time, that we know we must represent, relative to our circumstances in our time? If we're willing to do that, and if we can engage Russia, China, and India, which are countries completely different in culture than our own, and different than each other; if we can engage in that, with those four nations, and others, to make a commitment to say, "This is not going to happen to us: We're going to take action to transform this planet. We're going to move upward," we can survive, we can succeed. Are we willing to do that? If we are, we can survive. And if we're not, we're a bunch of fools! And richly deserve what's going to happen to us, if we're not willing to do that. That's the issue. And people say, "Well, explain your scheme, explain your scheme." I say, "Look, it's simple: You guys are a bunch of fascists. Now, stop being fascists!" That simple, just stop being fascists. Don't pull these swindles, you're stealing, you swindled everything out of our people! What do you think the debt is that the typical American has? Look at the quadrillions of dollars of debt out there! Don't talk about subprime mortgages! The so-called subprime mortgage is the fag-end, a little, teeny fag-end result, of the big one—which is quadrillions of dollars! You're going to walk into some poor householder and say, "You owe a quadrillion dollars?" The guy's going to say, "Take the house!" No, that's the point we're at: We've got a bunch of cowards, and they're not stinking cowards, because many of these people who are acting like cowards, by combat standards are cowards; by ordinary standards, no. They're just frightened people, who are afraid of taking on a tough enemy who they know is a killer. George Bush is a killer, you know. Look at how many people he killed. How many people, how many Americans did this guy kill, in wars that should never have been fought? In other effects on people, that should not have occurred; he's a killer. He'll kill you—willingly. Won't even care. And that's the problem: People in power know that! Not just George W. Bush, but other people in power, are just as bad, or worse. George Shultz is worse! He's a more mature killer. Felix Rohatyn, who was one of the supporters of the Pinochet regime in Chile, is worse. One of the big funders of this Democratic campaign—George Soros—is a killer. One of the biggest drug dealers in the world. A mass murderer: Who took his experience in sending—he's a Jew, remember—sending Jews to death camps, as his job, as a teenager: And with the same mentality, unimproved, conducting similar operations, today. So, the guy out there, the politician who looks a little bit frightened—don't necessarily call him a coward by ordinary standards of cowardice: Take into account the fact that he's terrified. He's not combat worthy, or combat ready. And therefore, he's frightened; he's running scared. He's a deserter, in fact. And some deserters had a good excuse, didn't they? They were frightened. So that's our part—and some of us have to stand up, as I'm doing, and take leadership in this situation. Because, if we do it, we have in our hands the ability to introduce the policies that will succeed. If we bring together, cooperation among the United States, Russia, China, and India, and other countries follow and join that, we can turn this world situation around. We can get back to something which is going in a different direction—we can do that. And the question today, is, are we willing to do that? Look to Future Generations The problem today, is a question of morality of a special type: When I was younger—and some of you, who are approximately my age, or verging upon it, were younger—when you thought about life, you generally thought about two generations of preceding generations, grandfather and father's generation; and you thought about two generations to come, you thought about becoming a grandfather, and the two generations that would come afterward. Many people who immigrated into the United States thought that way. They came here as poor people, from poor countries, or poor conditions in other countries, and they looked forward to their children succeeding and their grandchildren succeeding. The idea of coming over to the United States, as labor, in New York City, and ending up with a grandchild as a scientist or a doctor or something. It was a sense of achievement and that was the mentality of people from that time, people coming to this country as a land of opportunity to become something, to develop into something. That's not the standard today. The standard is much more selfish. Self-centered is, "When I stop breathing, I don't care any more." In my generation, or in older generations, that was not the standard. We said, "I'm going to stop breathing, but what I'm doing is going to go on. The process I'm part of, is going to go on." And therefore, you weren't a dog, you were a human being. And like a human being, you thought in terms of coming generations, as well as past generations; you thought of how you had come into being, you thought about your background, you tried to learn from your family's experience, and the experience around you of older generations; you tried to see where the country's going; you tried to see what role you were playing in the country; and thinking about raising a family, and seeing what comes of that family two or three generations from now. And life was organized around this kind of idea, of family and community. Of a meaning of being somebody, and who you were in a community that's growing and evolving with successive generations, about four, five, six generations, was the context of your life. And if you did a little study of history, you would look back further, a few hundred years; or if you studied as I did, you'd look back a few thousand years. And look ahead at least a couple hundred years. And you situated your life, in what your role is now, in the time-phase you occupy in life—relative to a few thousand years before you, and maybe a hundred or more years to come. And that's where you located your interest! Your interest in being, was not what you experienced while you were alive. But what you experienced in knowing what you were part of, in times past and times to come! What you were determined to help cause to be the case, in times to come! It's like the grandfather who would take his grandson out to a large project, like the Tennessee Valley project of the old days, and saying to the grandson, "I helped build this. See what I helped build." And that was the standard of life. The problem today, is that standard doesn't exist. It exists in rare people; it exists to some degree in a feeling and anticipation of desire; it's the desire to be human, the desire to have a sense of immortality. But there's not much substance to it. There's not much confidence in it, because the society doesn't encourage you to think in those terms. And so that's the situation before us. We can solve this problem, and discuss it here. We can solve these problems: But we have to understand the problem. We have to understand that we are now at the end of civilization. That the policies which are being presented to us, by high-level sources in the United States, in Europe generally, lead to an absolute disaster for humanity in the very near term. There is no question whether this system is coming down or not! It is coming down, now! And without the kind of radical changes that I indicate, this system is coming down this year! This year and the coming year. It's coming down: It's gone! There's nowhere else to run to! You want to live in Hell? Stay where you are. No need to change, no need to travel: Just stay where you are, it'll come to you. But, the point is: Are you willing to take the risk of changing? Are you willing to fight the war that has to be fought, rather than some war you would rather fight? That's the situation today. That's my situation. You've got to think in those terms. I've spelled this out in writing, I've spelled it out in the past weeks' time, in several ways, in a number of pieces. The situation is clear to me, we can win, it's possible: But, it's not likely, is it? You have to make it likely. Maybe some of us have the guts to do it. RE: LaRouche - Admin - 12-25-2008 WORLD FACES "TOTAL " FINANCIAL MELTDOWN BANK OF SPAIN CHIEF AFP The governor of the Bank of Spain on Sunday issued a bleak assessment of the economic crisis, warning that the world faced a "total" financial meltdown unseen since the Great Depression. "The lack of confidence is total," Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez said in an interview with Spain's El Pais daily. "The inter-bank (lending) market is not functioning and this is generating vicious cycles: consumers are not consuming, businessmen are not taking on workers, investors are not investing and the banks are not lending. "There is an almost total paralysis from which no-one is escaping," he said, adding that any recovery -- pencilled in by optimists for the end of 2009 and the start of 2010 -- could be delayed if confidence is not restored. Ordonez recognised that falling oil prices and lower taxes could kick-start a faster-than-anticipated recovery, but warned that a deepening cycle of falling consumer demand, rising unemployment and an ongoing lending squeeze could not be ruled out. "This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" of 1929, he added. Ordonez said the European Central Bank, of which he is a governing council member, would cut interest rates in January if inflation expectations went much below two percent. "If, among other variables, we observe that inflation expectations go much below two percent, it's logical that we will lower rates." Regarding the dire situation in the United States, Ordonez said he backed the decision by the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates almost to zero in the face of profound deflation fears. Central banks are seeking to jumpstart movements on crucial interbank money markets that froze after the US market for high-risk, or subprime mortgages collapsed in mid 2007, and locked tighter after the US investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in mid September. Interbank markets are a key link in the chain which provides credit to businesses and households. RE: LaRouche - Admin - 12-26-2008 THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM IS RIPE FOR A TOTAL BLOWOUT http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/12/23/larouche-financial-system-ripe-total-blowout.html Lyndon LaRouche today forcefully warned that the entire global financial system is "now ripe for a total blowout.'' LaRouche declared, "It could come at any moment now--tomorrow morning, Jan. 2, anytime. The world is as good as dead, in terms of the survival of the nation-state system, unless this situation is corrected immediately, through the steps that I have repeatedly outlined.'' LaRouche noted that the State of California has acknowledged that it has a $43 billion deficit, going into the final week of 2008. "I am not sure that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger understands the magnitude of this crisis. But I am certain that his boss, George Shultz, does know how close we are to a total blowout. For people like Shultz and his London friends, this is end game,'' LaRouche continued. "These are malicious characters, who relish the prospect of the entire planet being needlessly plunged into a new dark age." "It is the point of total breakdown of the entire system. If some significant player in the global financial markets loses his nerve, or if someone goes flight-forward, that alone could trigger the total disintegration. I am talking about the kind of situation--within weeks--where you see a total freeze of economic activity, where you start to see mass deaths on the streets.'' LaRouche explained that "We have reached this point, largely due to the insanity of the general populations of the Americas and Europe. How else could we have reached this type of condition? People are still trying to fit their policy options to conform with popular opinion, and, under these conditions of total breakdown, that is really insane. We are at the boundary condition--the end of the system, and one wrong move can trigger a dark age.'' BREAKDOWN OF THE GLOBAL MONETARY SYSTEM BY SUMMER 2009 GEAB http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21364.htm The G20-meeting held in Washington on November 14/15, 2008, is in its essence a historical indicator that the Western - above all Anglo-Saxon -monopoly on global economic and financial governance, is coming to an end. Nevertheless, according to LEAP/E2020, this meeting also clearly demonstrated that this kind of summits is doomed to inefficiency because they concentrate on curing the symptoms (banks’ and hedge funds’ financial difficulties, derivative markets’ explosion, financial and currency markets’ dramatic volatility, ...) rather than the fundamental root of the current crisis, i.e. the collapse of the Bretton Woods system based on the US Dollar as sole pillar of the global monetary system. Without a complete overhaul of the system inherited from 1944 by summer 2009, the failing of the current system and that of the United States at the center, will lead the whole planet to an unprecedented economic, social, political and strategic instability, and more specifically to a breakdown of the global monetary system by summer 2009. In light of the technocratic jargon and calendar of the declaration released after this first G20-meeting (totally disconnected from the speed and scope of the unfolding crisis (1)), it is more than likely that the disaster will have to happen for the fundamental problems to be seriously addressed and for the beginning of a reply to be initiated. Four key-factors are now pushing the Bretton Woods II (2) system to collapse in the course of the year 2009: • Fast weakening of the central players: USA, UK • Three visions of the future of global governance will be dividing world’s largest players (United-States, Eurozone, China, Japan, Russia, Brazil) by spring 2009 • Unbridled speeding-up of the last decade’s (de-)stabilizing processes • Increasing number of more and more violent backlashes. LEAP/E2020 already extensively described factors 1 and 4 in previous editions of the GEAB. Therefore we will concentrate on factors 2 and 3 in the present edition (GEAB N°29). The agitation that has seized global leaders since the end of September 2008 indicates that panic has struck at the highest level. Worldwide political leaders have now understood that the house is on fire. But they have not yet perceived something obvious: that the very structure of the building is involved. Improving fire-regulations or reorganizing emergency services will not be sufficient. To use a strong symbolic image, the World Trade Center’s twin towers did not collapse because firemen were late or because water was missing in the automatic fire-system, they collapsed because their structure was not meant to support the shock of two airliners hitting them in just a few minutes. Today’s global monetary system is in a similar situation: the twin-towers are the Bretton Woods system, and the airliners are called « subprime crisis », « banking failures », « economic recession », « Very Great US Depression », « US deficits », … a whole squadron. First year of major correction (Dow, as percentage, since 1900) - Source ChartoftheDay Today’s leaders, who all belong to the collapsing world (including Barak Obama (3)), cannot possibly imagine how to solve the problem, just like central bankers in 2006/2007 could not possibly imagine the scope the unfolding crisis could reach (4). It is their world which is disappearing under their eyes, their beliefs and their illusions (sometimes similar) (5). According to our team, a 20 percent renewal of worldwide leaders is required to begin to see sustainable solutions (6) appear. This is indeed, according to LEAP/E2020, the « critical mass » needed to permit any fundamental change of perspective in a complex not very hierarchical human group. Today we are still far from reaching this critical mass: in order to contribute to finding solutions to the crisis, those new leaders must accede power in full awareness of the crisis’ specific nature. According to LEAP/E2020, if global leaders fail to realize that in the next three months and to take actions in the next six months, as explained in GEAB N°28, the US debt will « implode » by summer 2009 under the shape of the country’s defaulting or the Dollar’s dramatic devaluation. This implosion will follow closely a number of similar episodes affecting less central countries (see GEAB N°28), including the United Kingdom whose already huge debt is ballooning at the same pace as Washington’s (7). In the same way as the US Federal Reserve saw, month after month, its « Primary Dealers » (8) being swept away by the crisis before it was itself confronted to a real problem of capitalization and therefore survival, the United States in the coming year will witness the implosion of all countries too-closely integrated to their economy and finance, and of their allies financially too-dependent on them (9). Monetary authorities with the largest foreign reserves in 2008 - Sources FMI/BRI/Wikipedia , 10/2008 The role the Europeans can play in the matter is essential (10). The Eurozone in particular must send out a strong message towards Washington: « The United States will fall into an economic and financial pitfall in 2009 if they cling to their past « privileges ». Once the world has given up on the Dollar, it will be too late to negotiate ». With more than 550-billion USD, the Eurozone owns the third largest reserve (ex-aequo with Russia who is not very accurate on that aspect) after China and Japan, and before the Gulf oil-monarchies (see table above). It therefore has the diplomatic weight, the financial weight, the economic weight, the commercial weight and the monetary weight required to compel Washington to face realities (11). The EU altogether will follow because non-Euro EU countries are all on the verge of a severe crisis of their currency or economy or both (12). Without the Euroland, their outlook is very gloomy in the short and medium term. As a matter of fact, the Euro is the only currency a growing number of initially reluctant (Iceland, Denmark…) or skeptical (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary…) countries now wish to join (13). Sign of the times, the Financial Times has started to list the US federal state’s tangible assets: military bases, national parks, public buildings, museums, etc… everything has been evaluated for a total amount of approximately 1,500-billion USD, i.e. more or less the probable amount of the budget deficit in 2009 (see the detail of these assets in the chart below). No wonder why Taiwan, despite its dependence on the security provided by Washington, decided to stop buying one of the three great components of the US public deficit, the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac securities (despite the fact that they were « rescued » by the government (14)); or why Japan is now a net-seller of US T-Bonds. All those who, despite our advice in the past two years, invested in Fannie and Freddy securities or in stock markets or in large US private equity banks or in the banking sector in general, have no reason to worry: it will not happen because « they » will prevent it! A problem remains however: “they” are now panic stricken and “they” understand nothing to this situation “they” were never prepared to face. Like we explained in the GEAB N°28, 2008 was only the detonator of the global systemic crisis. Now comes Phase IV, phase of the aftermath! RE: LaRouche - Admin - 01-11-2009 THE END OF DEMOCRACY Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content/articles/Art088_07012009.html To the great uneducated masses, democracy means universal franchise free to pick its governing institution divided into two or more opposing parties. The media instructed technical class also adhere to the creed that government should not interfere with the market – the market being corporation-controlled distribution and free markets meaning it is forbidden to inhibit global spread of corporation over private entity. Wealth is not governed. Wealth does not spend itself on people. The people pay for everything and are taxed for everything they buy or drive or fly. Now the wealth system has collapsed, irretrievably and rationally. It is the people who are ordered to pay the billions required to restore wealth to the wealthy. This operation can only be accomplished by persuading the masses that in fact the operation is a rescue from poverty not a recipe of endebtment. In Visconti’s film masterpiece of Lampedusa’s novel, ‘The Leopard’, the politics of power are laid bare. The underlying law of governance is defined: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” If the financial system has collapsed then it means the democratic system has collapsed, democracy’s function having been to separate government (controlling the masses) from ‘market’, that is, commodity wealth – money itself, while worthless intrinsically, having become a traded commodity. By 2005 the monks of the banking/investment orders knew that the inescapable end-game of futures and hedge-fund systems was reaching mathematical meltdown. This meant that democracy needed a mandate for the masses which could offer hope, salvation, rescue and business as usual – in short, the dream would not die. With superb expertise the stage was prepared for the dream-regime, the dream leader and the brilliant delusion of turning the end into the semblance of the beginning. The ‘policy' of this renewal was only one word. Why not? Millions had died and been displaced in Iraq with only three letters – W.M.D. The political mantra was announced: “Change.” However, it may be that in the great nature of this upheaval it will not be ‘their’ business that is renewed – but rather, that the whole system, money and its personnel – will all be swept away. ‘Their’ change will not grant them a sameness. The Second Hundred Years War that started with the politicisation of wealth in South Africa in 1910, (the ‘solution’ of Dominion), finally has come to an end. It has been the era of the political class. The era of the rule by the servants of the banking elite who, not the universal franchise, empowered them. No concocted mathematical (“economic”) rescue package can succeed – because the epoch of democratic governance cannot be rescued. Banking cannot work without democracy. However, the crisis in the political class is greater than that of finance. Now we know that paper money does not function – we also know that democratic personnel do not function either. It is over. It is over. It is over. Let us look out on the terrain. In Kenya – two party politicians claim the Presidency. In order to win it they both let their own people slaughter each other by tens of thousands. It is still unresolved. In Zimbabwe – a half-crazed President (“Zimbabwe is mine”) embodying socialist politics in pure form, battles the opponent, he in turn, the appointee of American investment. Their refusal to collaborate has produced million dollar inflation and a cholera epidemic with over 1000 dead. In Bangladesh – two militant Begums battle for power, their policies identical – they have paralysed the country for a decade. In Greece – two parties locked in conflict for two decades, the socialist Papandreou team cursing the monetarist Karamanlis team. Now Greece approaches civil war. It should be noted that the party-system tends to produce an abortive monarchism sustaining a low DNA-structured leadership – Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes in the key Republican state. Blatant non-functioning of the party system democracy is said to be because the country is immature, but that cannot be sustained when you regard the European Union. Britain’s Prime Minister forced not only the country but the government itself into a war neither wanted. The present holder of the office has never been chosen by the electorate, that itself is a disgrace given the dictatorial powers achieved by his predecessor. Blair was seriously in need of psycho-analysis. Brown is even more insecure as a Premier. He is almost totally blind. Visiting heads of state are asked not to offer their hands first in greeting as he may miss it. His corsets do not inspire confidence. His upper dentures do not meet his lower dentures. He has some mysterious disability which results in an uncontrollable dropping of his jaw. The pursed lips of his smile suggest job losses more than pleasure. From the fear dilated eyes of Blair to the blindness of Brown, however, the defining word is not ugliness. It is inadequacy. Democratic leaders are not fit for high office. This is now axiomatic. Inadequate. Brown – inadequate. Bush – inadequate. Merkel – inadequate. Zapatero – inadequate. How does this inadequacy manifest? Well! When the complete financial system and its institutions collapsed at the end of 2007 – the political leadership not only were surprised, they actually denied it at first. They openly stated they did not know HOW it had happened. They offered no solution. They adopted the bankers’ (the bankrupted bankers!) recommendation. But there is a much graver inadequacy. The worst aspect of the political class is its cowardice, coupled with its supreme indifference to the slaughter of its own young men in useless wars. The refusal of a government to go to the front-line in the event of a war, led by its President and first ministers, should result in their overthrow or national and military mutiny. They endlessly belittle the personal rule of the Monarch – but the Monarch led the war and so did not squander generations as Asquith, Lloyd George, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Blair and Bush have done. Killers and cowards. What more sickening sight in the world than Blair and Bush visiting Iraqi soldiers, or Brown visiting Afghanistan. No wonder the French soldier turned away from President Sarkozy as he laid medals on the coffins flown into Paris AMERICA'S POLITICAL CANNIBALISM Chris Hedges http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081013_americas_political_cannibalism/ It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities. Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity. We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown. This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia’s northern coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe what they saw along the coastline recently as “methane chimneys” reaching from the sea floor to the ocean’s surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming. Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species. The corporate con artists and criminals who have hijacked our state and rigged our financial system still speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists at elite business schools. They use terms like securitization, deleveraging, structured investment vehicles and credit default swaps. The reality, once you throw out their obnoxious jargon, is not hard to grasp. Banks lent too much money to people and financial institutions that could not pay it back. These banks are now going broke. The government is frantically giving taxpayer dollars to banks so they can be solvent and again lend money. It is not working. Bank lending remains frozen. There are ominous signs that the government may not be able to hand over enough of our money because the losses incurred by these speculators are too massive. If credit markets remain in a deep freeze, corporations such as AT&T, Ford and General Motors might go bankrupt. The downward spiral could spread like a tidal wave across the country, especially since our corporate elite, including Barack Obama, seem to have no real intention of bailing out families who can no longer pay their mortgages or credit card debts. Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society. If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing $485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I fear I am watching it happen here in the United States. WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE CAPITALIST CASINO? Tony Benn The Tribune http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21062.htm "THE great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic state, They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation." These words are from the 1945 Labour manifesto Let Us Face The Future which brilliantly identified the very same crisis which is now described as a "credit crunch" as if it were a mere hiccup in an otherwise wonderful neo-liberal globalised world which could be corrected with a vast subsidy from the taxpayers to put the Wall Street casino and its partners worldwide back into profit. It reminded me of the fact that when slavery was abolished it was the slave owners, and not the slaves, who received compensation from the government of the day. Perhaps more important - and never mentioned in the media - is that all the news we get every day and every hour is all about the bankers while presidents, prime ministers and other elected leaders of the world have been reduced to the role of mere commentators who are expected to supply taxpayers' money whenever it is needed to bail out the wealthy. Indeed, what we are watching is nothing less than the steady transfer of real political power from the polling station to the market and from the ballot to the wallet - reversing the democratic gains we have made over the last century when we were able, increasingly, to use our votes to shape our economic future. Our 1945 manifesto made that clear in the very next passage following the quote above. This is what it said: "The nation wants food, work and homes. It wants more than that. It wants good food in plenty, useful work for all and comfortable labour-saving homes that take full advantage of the resources of modern science and productive industry." That was the policy that swept Labour MPs into power in 1945 and gave this country the National Health Service, the welfare state and a massive house building programme, made possible by elected local authorities who had the resources made available to them by the Treasury. Now, 63 years later, we are back facing a similar situation and we need to understand why it has happened if we are to see our way forward. We have been told every day by the media that we should put our faith in the market and that elected governments are the problem and not the answer and, for that reason, should not interfere. These ideas began to emerge in the political mainstream when Margaret Thatcher came to power and in 1994 "new" Labour adopted them as the basis of its own approach which explains why she once described "new" Labour as her "greatest achievement". Trade union rights are now more restricted than they were in 1906, wages have been held down and people have been advised to borrow and spend as an alternative - which explains why the stock market has fallen and locked more and more people into debt, which is a subtle form of slavery itself. This is why so many people are frightened and frightened people can sometimes be persuaded to seek an answer by identifying an enemy who can be made a scapegoat for failure - as Hitler did when he blamed the Jews, the Communists and the trade unions for the mass unemployment in Germany and set up a fascist dictatorship which led to the Holocaust and war. Hitler dealt with the unemployed by giving them jobs in the arms factories and the armed forces which led to the Second World War and the massive human cost it caused. Whatever the left does it must never respond by splintering into a mass of tiny ideological sects forever fighting each other - for that way leads to failure, frustration and defeat. This is the time for co-operation across the left to tackle the problems that face us on a non-sectarian basis as we have seen in the Stop the War Coalition, the campaigns for trade union rights, civil liberties, pensions, nuclear disarmament, council house building and a fair tax system - all of which require full trade union backing if they are to succeed. If the economic situation gets worse, as it very well may, we have also to be on the look out for the "coalition" solution which could well be presented to us as the only way that these problems can be tackled, an argument that is being put forward now in America when George Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama rallied round to back the $700 billion bail-out that Wall Street demanded. That same argument was used by Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 when he formed a National Government which nearly destroyed the Labour Party in the general election when only 51 Labour MPs survived and, without the courage of Ernie Bevin and the TUC, it might never have recovered, as it did in 1945. I hope that the re-appointment of Peter Mandelson to the Cabinet in the latest reshuffle does not lead to that idea being re-floated as the best way to see us through the crisis for that could be the end of democracy - allowing the European Commission to prevent the re-emergence of public ownership and control of the banks which many will now see as the best way forward. For the first time in my life, the public are to the left of a Labour government and common sense points us in a direction quite different from the one we have been following since 1979 when Thatcher set out to destroy the trade unions, cripple local authorities and privatise our public assets which we need now more than ever. In 1945, the nation realised that the problems of peace required the same intensity of commitment as the problems of war. And with the disastrous experience of Iraq and Afghanistan that argument, too, is beginning to register again and people are asking why we waste so much money on those illegal, brutal and unwinnable wars and on new nuclear weapons when people are losing their jobs and facing repossession of their homes. The case for peace and socialism is intensely practical and, put like that, will command wide public and electoral support as it did then, in 1945, and could again do now. Tony Benn, is one of Britain’s most distinguished politicians and the longest serving MP in the history of the Labour party RE: LaRouche - Admin - 01-11-2009 END THE BAILOUTS! NEW PECORA HEARINGS NOW! GMAC `Bank' Deal Is Blackmail Paul Gallagher http://larouchepub.com/other/2009/3601pecora_hearings_now.html Ever since the September 2008 wave of popular revulsion against a $700 billion bailout of banks, Americans' anger has been building against what is now $8 trillion—and rising—in bailout commitments to financial firms, while the economy plunges faster and faster from underneath the people. Worse than the bailouts themselves, are the pervasive evasions and lying by government agencies about the huge and scandalous losses and frauds which supposedly "leave the nation no choice but" these bailouts. Congress, with the heads of its major financial committees essentially taking orders from the Treasury and Wall Street, has not started a serious investigation yet. That is about to change, and the turnaround needs to be immediate, to enable the incoming Obama team to attack the worst financial collapse in history at its root, and put a "firewall" between that collapse and the big job of trillions in new investments to rebuild the productive economy. The equivalent of the 1932-34 "Pecora hearings," which laid the House of Morgan's 1920s crimes bare before the American people, is necessary this month, to stop the bank bailouts so that real economic investment can begin. On Dec. 30, economist Lyndon LaRouche, outraged that the bankrupt derivatives pile called General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC) LLC has been anointed a "bank" by the Federal Reserve, and instantly bailed out by the Treasury, renewed his demand for "new Pecora hearings" by Congress in January, to investigate the swindles that have triggered the greatest financial breakdown crisis in history. LaRouche called for House Resolution 1452, "Establishing the Select Committee on Financial Bailouts," of Reps. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), to be taken up and passed immediately. LaRouche PAC TV produced a nine-minute video on the crucial role that hearings like those headed by New York District Attorney Ferdinand Pecora played in launching President Franklin Roosevelt's "100 Days." The video was posted at www.larouchepac.com on New Year's Day (see p. 68). "This GMAC scandal shows the need for an immediate creation of a 'Pecora Commission,' right now," LaRouche said. He denounced as blackmail, any idea that the GMAC bailout will "save a single auto sector job," and therefore has to be tolerated by Congress. "What you run up against in this auto thing, is people say, 'We need to save the jobs.' But there is no intent to save any jobs. There is only the intent to bail out financial interests. GMAC shows that luridly. They're talking about a commitment of government bailout funds, that the Congress doesn't know anything about." The famous 1932-34 Senate Banking Committee hearings, in which New York City District Attorney Ferdinand Pecora was the chief investigator, probing the swindles of the J.P. Morgan and Insull holding companies, helped make possible President Franklin Roosevelt's bank reorganization and New Deal. It exposed the criminality of the speculation which caused the financial collapse of 1929-32; Samuel Insull, and J.P. Morgan's Edward "Jock" Whitney, wound up in prison; and the American people knew what FDR was fighting. Stinking Blackmail The scandal of the GMAC bailout stinks to high Heaven. The creation of this phony "bank holding company" was done through the manipulations of the big Cerberus Capital Partners' Wall Street hedge fund—and also by manipulating GM itself, Chrysler Corp. (which Cerberus owns), Delphi Corp., and Lear Corp., major auto suppliers. It evokes Samuel Insull's infamous 1920s, Morgan-financed holding company empire, which was the Pecora hearings' first investigative target. Today's Treasury is run by a moonlighting Goldman Sachs CEO, Hank Paulson. Having used up the $350 billion first tranche of the so-called TARP bank-bailout funds authorized by Congress, the Treasury proceeded to capitalize the GMAC LLC "bank" with funds which Congress has not agreed to, and which most Congressmen oppose. GMAC LLC became a "bank" with $161 billion in debt it can't pay, all of it junk debt, failed mortgage assets, and failing car-loan assets, and losses of $8 billion over the last seven consecutive quarters. The Federal Reserve declared GMAC a "bank" on Dec. 26, despite its repeated failure for two months to meet Fed criteria that were specially tailored and promulgated to enable it to become a bank! And one weekend later, on Dec. 29, the Treasury capitalized "GMAC bank" with $6 billion—"The deal is concluded, and the GMAC bank already has the money," was the Treasury announcement on Dec. 30. An anonymous Treasury source told the Detroit News—also quoted by Bloomberg News—"Congress will simply have to authorize the other $350 billion." "That's blackmail against Congress," LaRouche noted, "and against their constituents who overwhelmingly oppose these bailouts. This happened before. The Pecora hearings investigated it and stopped it. It's the same swindle. Pecora investigated Insull and Morgan. Today the GMAC/Cerberus swindle is just like that of Insull and Morgan. It's the same corruption in government today, by the outgoing Bush Administration." The biggest holders of the mass of GMAC debt have wound up, in this swindle, with repayment priority over the Federal government's preferred stock, if and when "GMAC Bank" goes under. Madoff Bundler Runs GMAC The GMAC "bank" swindle overlaps the scandal of Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme. The head of "GMAC Bank"—installed as CEO of GMAC by Cerberus Capital Partners 30 months ago—is a hedge fund operator, Ezra Merkin, who runs Ascot Partners. Merkin threw virtually all of his Ascot investors' money—$1.8 billion—into Madoff's scheme, collecting 1.5% himself for the "service." Ascot Partners is registered in the British Crown's Cayman Islands, which should be the focus for any serious investigation of Madoff's Ponzi scheme. How much in GMAC-based derivatives bets did Merkin throw into Madoff's black hole? Word on "the Street" is that Merkin, "completely discredited," will have to resign as head of "GMAC Bank." Resign or stay, he should be a witness called by a Select Committee on the Bailouts. But bad as the GMAC scandal is—making a "bank" insolvent at its creation, a bank whose CEO is a big Bernie Madoff enabler, purely to bail out the junk debt of that "bank"—LaRouche stressed that the investigation could start with derivatives bubbles, with Madoff's Ponzi scheme, ratings agencies, Wall Street's lying mortgage securitization wave, with the swindling of states and municipalities on their bonds, or with GMAC. What's crucial is to expose "who bought whom, and when?" to set off the wild speculation and 50-to-1 "leveraging" of the cash flows of "globalization"; to leave it all unregulated, and devastate national economies. In short, how was history's biggest and most destructive financial bubble created? LaRouche spoke directly of local constituencies' strong interest in "Pecora hearings." "The swindling of states and municipalities around the country by these Wall Street banks—as in the case of Birmingham, Alabama, sent into bankruptcy by financial derivatives sold to them by JPMorgan Chase—is another powerful reason for a new 'Pecora Commission' today. So also is the Madoff scandal. "Given the horrible condition that states and cities find themselves in," LaRouche said, "I call on my friends in the state legislatures, the city councils, the mayors' and governors' offices, to contact your Congressional delegations and get them to act, now." LaRouche noted that his LaRouche Political Action Committee had mobilized widespread constituency pressure on Congress in support of his Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA) of 2007, which would have put up a "firewall" protecting the economy from the banks' breakdown crisis. Congress was blocked at the brink of introduction of the HBPA, and panicked into futile bank bailouts instead. "Now the entire system is collapsed, the economy is facing ruin. We must mobilize those constituencies to get a Congressional 'Pecora hearing' going immediately. This is the way to break [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi's grip on the Congress." |