LAROUCHE ON WOR TALK RADIO
Preparing the Young Generation
To Take Over the Country
WOR radio's Joey Reynolds Show in New York City interviewed Lyndon LaRouche on Oct. 25. With him on the program were Jeffrey Steinberg and Dennis Speed of EIR. Gen. Joseph Hoar (USMC, ret.) and Chuck de Caro were interviewed earlier in the program. Here are excerpts from the discussion with LaRouche:
Reynolds: Lyndon, how are you? Nice to meet you.
LaRouche: Pretty good. I'm in fair shape for an old geezer.
Reynolds: Oh yeah? You call yourself that, huh? You're my kind of guy!
LaRouche: I enjoy it.
Reynolds: Where are you, now?
LaRouche: I'm right now in Germany, outside of Wiesbaden in Germany. I'm here to do, among other things, to do a webcast, from Berlin [Oct. 31, 10 a.m. Eastern Time], which will go into a number of countries, as well as back into the United States. It's on the question of international policy, specifically economic policy, primarily, as to what we do, to deal, as a cooperative effort among nations with this big financial crisis, which is coming down on us, fast and hard.
Reynolds: Can I ask you a real simple question? Why was—gasoline was expensive a month ago, then it got not-expensive, and now it's going to get expensive again? What is that all about?
LaRouche: That's manipulation. Remember that the price of petroleum as listed on the exchanges, and the price that is paid for it by companies, varies greatly. For example, the Saudis have contracts which are far below these prices at which the United States is officially buying things. And the oil companies, who are producing this stuff, or processing it, are paying that lower price, not the higher price.
So there are two things: There is a lot of fraud in this thing, in the sense of speculative price rises, all kinds of games are played. And the election coming on, the Bush Administration—or shall we call it the Cheney Administration?—whichever—decided to push the price down for the purposes of trying to influence the November election, the Nov. 7 election.
Reynolds: Did you ever meet those guys?
LaRouche: Oh, I met a number of people. I never met the young George Bush. I never met Cheney personally, I never wanted to, not wanting shotgun pellets in my rear end or something.
Reynolds: [laughs] Was Bush, was the old man a friend of yours somewhere along the line?
LaRouche: No! No. Bush and I crossed—. Bush and I didn't disagree at first, back in the '70s, and then we came rather rapidly to disagreement. We came to a very sharp disagreement in the 1980 Presidential primary campaign period, where he, being a Republican, and I, being a Democrat, crossed swords and he made a mistake in the way he went after me, and he lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan.
Reynolds: How many times have you run for office?
LaRouche: I've run every four years. I started out on one issue, and then I ran as a Democrat in 1980, and I've run as a Democrat ever since. I'm not running this year, this round, but previously I have.
Reynolds: ... Do these parties mean anything any more?
LaRouche: They do in a sense, because you need a vehicle which can command the majority of the vote, which can deliver decision-making power through a party. The parties are therefore, somewhat, not homogeneous; they're a collection of highly different things—like, Lieberman is really a right-wing Republican, he's not a Democrat!
Reynolds: Sure, sure.
LaRouche: So, but the idea is to have a coalition which can bargain. And it becomes pretty much like Orchard Street [on New York's Lower East Side], that sort of thing. So, it's necessary.
Personally, I look back to Franklin Roosevelt, as the person in my lifetime, who best represents what a Democrat should be. I have a certain respect, a special respect, for Eisenhower, for example, for other reasons. I wanted him to run as a Democrat in 1947, and he wrote me a letter, reply, saying, no, he couldn't do it at this time. I was very disappointed.
Where Did We Go Wrong?
Reynolds: Let me ask you this: You certainly are experienced, God bless you for that. But, after all of these years, of watching us and being part of all of these plays that we've presented before the general public, why have we come to the place where we're in crisis now? What did we really do that got us in trouble? Where we don't feel good about ourselves!? That's what I wonder.
LaRouche: Well, go back to the 1920s: At that time, under the Coolidge/Hoover Administration, we were very sympathetic to Mussolini and very sympathetic to Hitler's prospects, early on, in terms of leading political parties—Democratic Party, as well as Republican Party.
Roosevelt came in and created a miracle, turned the country around under conditions of depression, and he got on the job very quickly in March of that year, 1933. Remember, Hitler had been given dictatorial powers, barely a week before then. So, when Roosevelt came in, he knew we were headed for a war. He didn't know exactly what kind of a war it was going to be. But he knew that the positioning of Hitler as a dictator, which he already was, meant war was inevitable, in some form.
So therefore, he had two problems: We had a 50% collapse generally, 30% at least, physical collapse of the economy since '29. He had to fix up the collapse of the economy. He had to deal with the fact that a war was coming on. So he pulled in the Hopkins group, which had been operating already in the 1920s, together with our military, so we were preparing for both a recovery of the economy and for the role the United States would have to play in dealing with this war. We didn't know what kind of role we'd play, but we knew we had to be equipped for it.
So, at the end of the war—I came back in April of 1946, after the war was over, from abroad—and it was a different United States than I had left. It was a United States under Truman. And the Truman Administration was really—while it couldn't dump some of the Roosevelt policies—dumped a good deal of it. Our direction had changed: McCarthyism was on the way. Eisenhower in a sense, saved us, from the worst of that, as President. Kennedy was killed.
We have been, in a sense, in a long-term process, we've gone down as an economy, from 1971-72 on. We have been collapsing: our standard of living, our condition of the lower 80% of the family-income brackets, all of these things that used to be precious to us, which we associated with the recovery under Roosevelt, have now pretty much gone. And so, that's where I've been, and that's where I see us now.
We're still at the point—I tried in 2005, when I still had some influence among Democratic Senators and others, to try to turn this around, in defending Social Security and a few other things. I tried to get them to intervene to save the auto industry, but they wouldn't do it! And this year, so far, they haven't done too well, as far as I'm concerned.
Reynolds: Well, we've got a couple of young people in the studio here tonight, and they're college age: Kelly's here and Lucas is here, and they're listening to you. And that does me good, because, I think we've got to, somewhere along the line, put the seniors together with the juniors. And we have to really have respect for each other in time, and I don't mean on these distracting isolation instruments like the cell phone, which is a wonderful tool, but it's also a pain in the ass.
So, you know, these things that, really we need to hear—you know, I said it earlier, we need to learn history! Like I'm learning from you, I didn't learn this before! I'm learning from you, and I shouldn't be having to learn from a guy running for President about history, I should know about history, and then decide whether I like your ideology or not, based on my thinking. And you know, I don't get to that part. I have to learn about history, and then believe you. I have to believe you: That's the hard part about America right now, is believing somebody.
LaRouche: Well, we are in a society which is, particularly increasingly in the post-war period, ever since 1946, we have become increasingly a sophist culture. Like the kind of sophistry which caused Athens which had been the leading society of that period, to destroy itself, through the influence of sophistry.
We have become a sophist culture. And we don't believe, in general, in the truth any more. We believe in what we should be overheard saying. Or even overheard thinking in this day and age.
Reynolds: Image, more than content.
LaRouche: Yeah. The question of the consequences of—for example, we have, around the country, we've done studies county by county, take the number of counties in the United States that used to be agriculture and industry, that is, they were production. You find now it's services. The counties have shifted in their character. We no longer produce the same way we used to. The standard of living is collapsing for the lower 80% of our family-income brackets.
So, we're in collapse, and then we say, and then the stock market goes up to 12,000 and people say, "It's wonderful!" It's lousy! This is hyperinflation! Look at the price of food in the supermarket to the average person. Look at the price of rent, while the mortgage market is beginning to collapse now.
Reynolds: Why, that's why Starbucks, at $5 a cup, is selling coffee, but they also sell albums, and now books. They're going to be a supermarket if you let 'em....
All right, Lucas, what do you think about what you're hearing with Lyndon LaRouche? Just give a thought here, being a young, college student, a 23-year-old. What do you think?
Lucas: I think these guys are absolutely right. You know, I honestly am not into politics that much, but I think we need a new government, basically.
Reynolds: How about you, Kelly? You're 20 years old.
Kelly: I just think students need to get more involved. I mean, in the lobby of my dorm the other day, there were kids—they were signing up kids to register to vote, and so many people just walked past, didn't care, didn't answer the questions, didn't pay attention, and I think that's horrible. I think a lot more kids need to get involved and interested in what they're hearing and have an opinion.
Reynolds: ... Jeff Steinberg is Executive Editor of Executive Intelligence Review, and according to the Executive Intelligence Review, the late former U.S. Senator and Democratic Presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy called LaRouche a man who has brought Plato and Schiller back into politics and was sent to jail for it. So you get punished.
Steinberg: That's right.
Reynolds: For being a "Classic act."
Steinberg: That's right....
Reynolds: How do we start building trust again? What do we do?
LaRouche: Well, I've been concentrating, since about 1999, in the final phase of the Presidential campaign of that period, and I ran into college students at that point, and I saw that there was a certain difference in college-age students, in terms of the future. I could see that these young guys have 50 years of adult life, approximately, active adult life, ahead of them, in business, career, so forth, and that we need them. Because the older generation, the Baby-Boomer generation which is in power now, people between largely 50 and 65 years of age, are too saturated with sophistry, particularly in the upper white-collar strata. That the blue-collar strata that used to be the backbone of our economy, has been wiped out, the auto industry crackup is just part of this; farmers, the same thing. The Tweeners in between are not sure of how they find themselves. They're sort of feel like sandwich meat in between the Baby-Boomers and the younger people.
And I've found that working with and educating young people between 18 and 30, especially the 18 to 25 group, which is the intake group, that we have a great potential in this part of the population, but we have to help it develop. They have problems, they have problems because of the environment, the economic situation they face is horrible, increasingly so. They have no clear future, and we have to give them a future.
Reynolds: How about the war?
LaRouche: This war is insane. The entry of nuclear weapons and the development of thermonuclear weapons as well, produced a state of affairs in which we can no longer fight wars. What happens is, you get a war like the Iraq War. And Bush 41 was correct in not going in to occupy Iraq, because he would have gotten into asymmetric warfare, which is what we're stuck in now. So the U.S. war then, under Bush 41, was cut off at a certain point. And it was right to do it that way—maybe the war itself was not necessary, but the action of not going in was correct.
This Bush, under the advice of bad people, contrary to the advice of all of our best military, went in! And we knew what was going to happen. The leading generals in this country said, in general, what was going to happen. It happened! It's now happening.
We're now in a spreading situation of global asymmetric warfare, with a global economic breakdown. We're headed for the most serious crisis in civilization.
So therefore, what we have, we need to take this younger generation, the same generation that is generally involved in military service in case of wartime—18 to 30, hard core of military service, of junior officers and others—so therefore, this generation has to be employed, and given the opportunities to become the generation that takes over the country, during that coming 50 years. This is our chance to maintain our nation: Stop the idiocy, get these guys into action.
Reynolds: Who're you going to back for President?
LaRouche: Oh, probably at this time, I lean toward Kerry. I don't know if he can make it or not, but he's what's on the platter right now....
