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LaRouche Addresses Rio Conference
on Release of Alexander Hamilton's
Report on Manufactures


Presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. sent a videotaped greeting to an Aug. 29 press conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, announcing the publication of the first translation into Portugese of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's 1791 Report to the Congress on the Subject of Manufactures, one of the founding documents of the American System of economics to which LaRouche proposes to return our nation. LaRouche contributed the Prologue to the translation.


On Tuesday evening, Aug. 29, 1995, history was made in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with the release of the first edition in Portugese of Alexander Hamilton's 1791 Report to the Congress on the Subject of Manufactures. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who wrote the Prologue to this first Portugese translation of Hamilton, sent videotaped greetings to the conference.

There were 80 persons in attendance at the publishers' event, which was held in the library and the gardens of the Museum of the Republic, which served as Brazil's presidential palace until 1960.

The audience was made up of the ``cream of Brazil's republican elite,'' according to one report. Attending were former parliamentarians, active and retired military (including the editors of two military publications), engineers and other high-level technicians, businessmen, and others, including the two grand daughters of Luiz Rafael Vieira Souto, an engineer who was one of the pioneers of the American System in Brazil, and who is referred to in an appendix to the Hamilton book.

Viera Souto was also the teacher of Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, 98, the dean of Brazilian journalism and the author of the preface of the Hamilton book. Lima was the featured speaker at the presentation.

Nilder Costa, director of the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA) in Brazil, opened the event. To the surprise of many in the audience, he introduced a musical program by a guitar and flute duo, which played works by C.P.E. Bach, J. S. Bach, Fernando Sor, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Pergolesi.

Following the musical perfomance, Lima Sobrinho made some brief remarks about the importance of Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary of the United States, and his contributions. Lima Sobrinho concluded his remarks with the following: ``Nothing else needs to be said; buy the book!''

Silvia Palacios, correspondent of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) magazine in Brazil who was the editorial coordinator of the project to publish the book, spoke next. She said the Hamilton book was part of the efforts of the MSIA and EIR to revive the positive contributions of the American System. ``We hope that the book contributes to revive the anti-oligarchy tradition in Brazil.''

The other big surprise of the evening was the showing of a videotape from a recent ``The LaRouche Connection,'' during which Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed by Webster Tarpley, and he spoke about the new book and the importance for Brazil of Hamilton and the ideas of the American System. A transcript of LaRouche's greetings follows.

The following is an excerpt from the Aug. 22, 1995 edition of ``The LaRouche Connection,'' a weekly nationwide cable television show.

Question: What I have in my hands here, is the first Portuguese language translation of Alexander Hamilton's 1791 Report on Manufactures to the United States Congress of that time. Portuguese, of course, being one of the great world languages from Portugal to Brazil, to many parts of Africa and Asia even, this can now be read. It's the first time this has ever been translated. And you're the author of the Prologue to this book.

We also have an introduction to the book, written by a very distinguished Brazilian journalist, indeed the dean of the journalist corps in Brazil, and this is Senor Barbosa Lima Sobrino who, at 98 years old, continues to write a weekly column in one of the main newspapers in Brazil, Jornal do Brasil. And in his column on July 30, some time ago, he actually quotes Hamilton, saying, ``It's correct to say neither Greeks nor Trojans, but only Brazilians,'' and he advises his countrymen on the purely defensive measures which the United States used in the past, to achieve that primacy of industrial development. He also thanks the efforts of the American economist Lyndon LaRouche, for stimulating a new worldwide interest in Alexander Hamilton.

So this book is going to be launched on the market in Brazil for the attention also of scholars and other students very, very soon.

So I would like, in this connection, to ask you two questions. First of all, what would you see as the importance of Hamiltonian economics for Brazil?

Lyndon LaRouche: Well, Hamilton, of course, was a great thinker and a great man. But what he was also, was a conveyer of some of the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz, who was the relevant economist, and also the ideas which came through Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, that is, on the idea of a paper currency, which was strictly an American creation.

So the combination of the original American idea, developed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of the uses of a paper currency, proper uses, combined with the ideas of physical economy which had been developed by Gottfried Leibniz, is the basis of Hamiltonian economics.

Now the United States, in 1789, was bankrupt. As a result of this bankruptcy, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and others had convened a constitutional conference, or what became a constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and had produced a Constitution which was designed, or based on the principles of Leibniz; that is, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as copied directly from Leibniz, particularly in Leibniz's attack on the ideas of John Locke.

So our Constitution is not Lockean; our constitutional law is not based on Locke. It's based on Leibniz's conception of natural law.

As part of this, in addition to creating the division of powers and authorities, interaction of institutions of government, including the people in the states provided the basis for the creation of a new kind of economic system, to which Hamilton later gave, in 1791, in this particular paper, which is republished in Portuguese, gave the name of the American System of political-economy, which combined the principles as he detailed, of Leibniz's principles of economy, together with the idea of a paper currency, as this idea had been developed by Cotton Mather, his predecessors, and by Benjamin Franklin.

And these two arms of national banking, protectionism, and this kind of political economy, based on scientific and technological progress, and infrastructure building, state responsibility for building infrastructure for the local states or the national government, that this was the basis for the greatness of our economic achievement.

Now, we deviated from that many times; but every time we collapsed, whether under Jefferson and Madison: we had a disaster, an economic disaster. Their policy was a complete failure. Under Monroe and John Quincy Adams, we went back to the American System. Under Jackson and Van Buren, we had a disaster. We tried to correct that, there were some difficulties.

Lincoln revived the American System; and it was on the basis of Lincoln's revival of the American System, that the United States emerged, very rapidly, as the great industrial power of this planet, and also the leading naval and military power, for a short period of time in the Nineteenth Century.

So, this is what made us great.

Therefore, today, when all monetary and financial systems around the planet are collapsing, someone says: ``What's the alternative to this collapse, to the failed Adam Smith system? communist system is gone. The Adam Smith is collapsing, the free trade system, a disaster. It's dying of its own cancer.''

``What is the alternative?'' say people. You say, ``well, there is an alternative.'' ``Yes, but where's the proven alternative?'' ``Oh,'' we say, ``we have a proven alternative. It's called the American System of political economy.''

Question: And perhaps you could just spell that out a little bit. For a large, developing country like Brazil, tremendously rich in natural resources and population. What could a country like Brazil do today, in order to preserve its national sovereignty, economic development, and somehow insulate itself from the things we've been talking about?

Lyndon LaRouche: The same thing that President Clinton had better do, before the middle or end of 1996.

That is, put the existing financial system under government-supervised bankruptcy reorganization, number one. Number two: at the same instant, create a new currency, not to eliminate the old currency, but stop issuing the old currency, but issue a new currency. Only by the authority of the government. Do not borrow money to issue currency. Do not go into debt, to issue currency. The government prints it and loans it for worthy projects, at low interest rates, with the idea of investing in what the government should be investing in. The government's section of the economy, is infrastructure: public infrastructure, large-scale health systems, not necessarily health care, but health systems; that sort of thing.

To use those things, plus science projects like space projects and things like that, as science drivers, then use these large projects to bring in private investors as contractors, as we did, for example, during World War II, to get the economy moving in World War II.

You create government contracts, you make loans to authorized subcontractors who have won their bids, and are qualified. In that way, you stimulate the economy. You stimulate it for needed things, so that you're not loaning money for somebody to speculate on reselling real estate, but to buy the tools and materials and wage goods they need, to do the job. Thus, you're putting money into the economy at the same rate or even a slower rate, than you're generating new wealth. Therefore, no inflationary effect. You're doing it at low-interest rates, no inflationary effect. You are recreating a banking system by loaning through local banks which otherwise would have no capital to lend.

On that basis, we always succeeded. National banking and the American System: it always works. It worked for us, it will work for us again. It will work for Brazil now....

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