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This article appears in the August 14, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

From the Streets of America:
The Mass Strike Revolt Is On

by Jeffrey Steinberg

[PDF version of this article]

Aug. 8—Yesterday morning, President Barack Obama abruptly cancelled a scheduled appearance at Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va., where he was to hold a town hall meeting on his health-care "reform" policy. Instead, he held a three-minute press conference in the Rose Garden, read prepared remarks from a teleprompter, and took no questions.

Today, the President's office announced that he had cancelled a schedule of public appearances around the country, en route to his vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Now, instead of touring the country, promoting his health-care swindle, as previously scheduled, the President is ducking for cover, taking his family to the Grand Canyon, and then to the safety of Cape Cod. Mr. Obama, in short, is hiding out.

The same is true of the vast majority of members of the House of Representatives and Senate. They have all gone into hiding, in the face of a mass revolt of the American people, against what they see as a total betrayal by their Federal elected officials, starting with the President.

In the minds of the vast majority of Americans:

  • The President has fully embraced and extended the Bush Administration's policy of bailing out Wall Street and the banks—to the tune of more than $23 trillion, while average Americans continue to lose their jobs, their homes, and their health care at worse than Depression-era rates. A death-spiral is already hitting some of the most vulnerable, and this will only get worse in the immediate days ahead.

  • The President has been caught, repeatedly, in his own words, advocating a policy of euthanasia and other radical cuts in health-care services, all in the name of so-called "reform," and "saving the system." More and more Americans are coming to realize that the President's policies are worse than those of Adolf Hitler. As Lyndon LaRouche noted today, Hitler was smart enough to wait until the war had begun to implement his genocidal euthanasia schemes. Obama is going, flight-forward, for the same policy of identifying whole categories of the population whose lives are deemed "not worthy of living," and he does not intend to wait for anybody or anything.

The fact is, that the American people have awakened to reality. And this is one slumbering giant that will have its way—one way or the other. The United States of America has entered a period of momentous revolt, the likes of which has not been seen, since the French Revolution erupted on the streets of Paris in 1789.

The People Have Spoken

Coinciding with LaRouche's Aug. 1 webcast, the American people have taken to the streets, to voice their fury at what has been dealt to them by their elected representatives in Washington. The news of the week has been the mass turnout at town hall meetings all over the country, called by once-popular Congressmen, who, now, increasingly, won't dare show their faces in public. Constituents have turned out in record numbers, to shout down their elected representatives, and demand a total change in policy—starting with health care.

In Romulus, Mich., where the official unemployment rate is 17%, but, in reality, is closer to double that figure, 1,000 citizens turned out to confront the formerly popular Rep. John Dingell (D), who has served in the House since 1955. When LaRouche PAC organizers held up a large poster, depicting President Obama with a Hitler moustache, and the words "I've changed," the crowd went wild with approval, taking pictures and videos, and backing down police, who attempted to escort the organizers outside the room where the event was being held, which was only large enough to seat 150-200 people.

When a man in a wheelchair disrupted Dingell's talk, accusing him of backing a policy that would kill his son, who suffered from cerebral palsy, the police pulled him out of the room. That incident was videotaped, and has been posted on the Internet, where millions have seen it. Major news outlets, like CNN, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal, have featured the Obama-with-Hitler-moustache in their headline news coverage of the revolt.

In a suburb of Tampa, Fla. Aug. 6, some 1,500 people showed up for a town hall meeting with Rep. Kathy Castor (D). The event, promoting Obama's health-care "reform," was organized by the White House-run Organizing for America and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The majority of people in attendance showed up to express their anger at the murderous policies of the President and Congress, and, at one point, captured on video, SEIU goons attacked some of the participants, causing a near-riot.

In St. Louis, Mo. the same day, 1,000 citizens were locked out of a widely advertised town hall meeting with Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.), while SEIU members were ushered into the room through a separate door. At that event, SEIU and Obama toughs also attacked protesters, leading to six arrests.

Elsewhere around the country, the same thing is happening. Even Congressional Republicans, who oppose the Obama euthanasia scheme, are finding that they, too, are not exempt from the public wrath. Rep. Tom Petri (Wisc.) was confronted on Aug. 7 by an angry crowd at a public appearance, and Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) had to fend off 350 furious constituents this week. The angry voters were not at all satisfied at with a pledge to vote against Obama's health-care fiasco. They want far, far more out of their elected representatives.

The mass, spontaneous eruptions are not confined to pre-scheduled public events either. While on the campaign trail for a local candidate in the Denver area, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made an appearance at a community center, and was soon confronted by a crowd of angry citizens. Word got out to nearby shops and buildings, and Pelosi had to flee.

The Sergeant-at-Arms of the United States Senate issued a warning to all Senators late last week, that they should take precautions when they return to their home states, because they could expect to face "a true political uprising."

Making Matters Worse

The response from the Obama White House to this popular revolt has only served to make matters worse. For weeks, the President has been urged by responsible Democratic legislators to drop his health-care "reforms," and accept the fact that the American people have resoundingly rejected his claims that he can "improve" health care for all, through trillions of dollars in cuts in services. The President has, so far, rejected all pleas for sanity.

Instead, he and his top aides have accused the tens of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets, of being "right-wing professional agitators," "Brooks Brothers-suited rioters," and "Brown Shirts." While the President's men are putting out these patent lies, accusing "Big Pharma" of putting up the cash to send professional agitators from town to town, the reality is that the pharmaceutical industry is in love with Obama's scheme, because it allows them to keep up their price gouging. Indeed, the industry lobby, PhRMA, is pledged to spend $150-200 million in an advertising campaign this Autumn, supporting the President's so-called health care reforms. And another front group for the industry, Healthy Economy Now, is spending an additional $12 million in advertising—to boost the Obama scheme.

In one extreme case of flight-from-reality, White House officials have gone so far as to blame the mass protests on Israeli agitators (!), who, they say, were smuggled into the United States on behalf of the Netanyahu government. The ostensible reason? To deliver the President a major defeat on his signature legislative issue, and thereby weaken his opposition to continued expanded Israeli settlements, and Israel's rejection of the two-state solution.

The President, safely sealed off from an ever-growing majority of furious citizens, is clearly sticking to his mad denial of reality. In his Saturday, Aug. 8, weekly radio address, the President lied shamelessly, stating, "As we draw close to finalizing and passing real health insurance reform, the defenders of the status quo and political point-scorers in Washington are growing fiercer in their opposition. In recent days and weeks, some have been using misleading information to defeat what they know is the best chance of reform we have ever had. That is why it is important, especially now, as Senators and Representatives head home and meet with their constituents, for you, the American people, to have all the facts."

The President ranted on, "So let me explain what reform will mean for you. And let me start by dispelling the outlandish rumors that reform will promote euthanasia, cut Medicaid, or bring about a government takeover of health care. That's simply not true."

This is the same Barack Obama who, just a week earlier, had announced five times, in the course of one press conference, that the central feature of his program was the creation of an independent board to police medical services and cut costs—the precise equivalent of the Hitler T-4 board that oversaw the removal of medical care, the euthanizing of hundreds of thousands of elderly, chronically ill, and mentally impaired Germans from 1939-41—a prelude to and first phase of the Holocaust.

This insane sophistry on the part of the President and his backers has forced some Democrats to repudiate the White House lies, to save their political skins. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), an early enthusiastic campaign backer of Obama, posted a statement, declaring, "I disagree that the people showing concern over some health-care proposals are 'manufactured....' Real folks, strong opinions." Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who was confronted by 500 enraged constituents at a town hall meeting in Baltimore, defended his detractors, telling reporters that the "majority of Americans" want to know how the bills before Congress and peddled by Obama, are going to affect them, and these are "legitimate questions" asked by real constituents.

While the revolt now underway is the cumulative reaction to the failure of elected officials to honestly deal with the worst economic and financial collapse since the 14th-Century New Dark Age in Europe, it can be fairly said that Lyndon LaRouche's series of widely viewed webcasts, beginning with his April 11, 2009 address, exposing President Obama as suffering from a severe "Nero Complex," have informed the public and helped fuel the process. Indeed, while the White House tries to scramble to pin the reactions on a bunch of "right-wing extremists" and "racists," growing numbers of Republicans have, indeed, been picking up on LaRouche's exposé of the Obama health-care "reform" scheme as a replay of the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program.

Just-retired Alaska governor and recent GOP Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin displayed a bit of political acumen on Aug. 7, when she posted a statement on her website, asking: "Who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

Palin went on to cite Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who delivered a frontal attack—by name—on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and a key White House health-care "reform" advisor, for his repudiation of the Hypocratic Oath, and his advocacy of euthanasia.

The Dynamics of the Mass Strike

Against this backdrop, LaRouche delivered a history lesson on the dynamics of the mass strike process, in a symposium with colleagues today.

"This is a mass strike, comparable in many features, to the French mass developments of June-July 1789, something which we have not seen, which is even comparable, in either Europe or North America, since the 1930s. Faced with the systemic revolt of the U.S. citizenry against the combined general breakdown-crisis of the U.S. economy, and the hatred throughout the population against the role of both the President and the majority of the U.S. Congress, the vast majority of the U.S. citizenry are in a revolt against the elected officials of the government.

"So, both the President and the Congress have gone into hiding this weekend, hiding from the U.S. population as a whole body—not against some limited numbers of disgruntled citizens. This is a condition fairly compared to France, in the months of June and July 1789, a time when the King and Queen of France had gone into hiding from a French population which was enraged against them, by such developments as the King's bringing in foreign troops from the Queen's brother, the Emperor Joseph II, in rage against France over the matter of the earlier orchestrated scandal of the 'Queen's Necklace.'

"When the institutions of national government such as the head of state, his government, and the national legislature have fled into hiding against the fully justified rage of the general population as a whole, you have a situation of crisis which is comparable to that of the French Revolution.

"There are two issues behind this general rejection of the President and members of Congress by the great majority of the U.S. population. First, is the Obama health-care policy imported from the President's masters of the British monarchy; the second is the 20-plus trillions bail-out swindle initated by the complicity of the U.S. Congress and both the Bush and Obama presidencies. The President and Congress have fled not only because they have lost the confidence of the people; they have fled because they have also lost confidence in themselves.

"We are, thus, in a condition, when the President and Congress have abandoned their posts in government in this way. Unless both the entire bail-out policy and the Obama health-care policy are repealed now, the situation is already virtually ungovernable.

"The existence of the continuity of the constitutional government of the U.S.A. now lies, at this instant, in the hands of those within the institutions of the President and Congress who are ready to cancel the bailout, restore the U.S. economy under reorganization of finances in bankruptcy, and sweep the entire Obama health-care plan into the rubbish-bin, for now, and forever. It is time for the right representatives of constitutional government to take President Obama out to the woodshed, as was done with President Nixon. Nothing less will do."

In the case of the French Revolution, leading republicans, like the Marquis de Lafayette, failed to act at critical moments, and lost control over the entire process, leading to the British intelligence-led destruction of France, and a new decade of wars on the European continent.

Today, LaRouche emphasized, there is nothing that will turn off the public rage, and its demand for a genuine change in leadership and policy direction. What will give positive direction to the mass revolt that is already underway and unstoppable, is a clear plan for a revolutionary change in policy. This is, LaRouche asserted, what the American people want. - London Answers -

It is no coincidence that, while the Obama White House privately seethes at LaRouche's every word, and makes no bones, in discussions with perceived Democratic Party allies, that LaRouche is the greatest obstacle to their Nazi euthanasia agenda, they avoid, at all costs, an open and public confrontation with LaRouche. So, the White House spin-doctors have been focusing their barbs at an amorphous "right wing" and "big business" apparatus behind the crash in support for the President's agenda.

Not so for the City of London. On Aug. 7, the flagship Financial Times ran a smear story on the "black helicopter" conspiracy mob, which, they lied, stands behind the crash in Obama's popular support. They led off with an explicit attack on LaRouche, citing an earlier attack on him in the same newspaper which produced a flurry of protests, at the time. After a rant against LaRouche as a "conspiracy theorist" who places "international bankers," "world government," and "the Queen of England" at the center of his conspiracies, author Jurek Martin conceded that the American media can no longer curb his influence, because the Internet now makes it impossible for the Establishment media "gatekeepers" to control the spread of LaRouche's ideas.

The Financial Times diatribe came less than a week after LaRouche's Aug. 1 webcast, which, not coincidentally, was titled "The Fall of the House of Windsor."

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