In the Wake of the BRICS Summit:
A New Era Is Upon Us
[PDF version of this transcript]
LaRouche PAC's Friday evening webcast of July 25, 2014 was hosted by Matthew Ogden, and joined by Dennis Small of EIR, and Diane Sare and Kesha Rogers from the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee.
Matthew Ogden: Tonight I'm joined in the studio by Dennis Small from Executive Intelligence Review, and by two members of the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee, Kesha Rogers and Diane Sare. The four of us had a chance to meet with both Mr. LaRouche and Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, so the questions that will be presented tonight were discussed with both of them, and the answers you hear will reflect their remarks.
Now, before I read our first question for tonight, I'd like to start with a short breaking news update. In a very significant development, the U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed House Concurrent Resolution 105—a resolution sponsored by Representatives Jim McGovern, Barbara Lee, and Walter Jones. The resolution asserts the Constitutional role fully and exclusively reserved for Congress in authorizing and declaring war.... [See National lead.]
So, this is very clearly a strong victory, and represents a significant paradigm shift in Congress with regards to defending the fundamental principles of the United States Constitution....
I'd like to turn to our institutional question for tonight. It reads as follows:
"Mr. LaRouche, rebels in eastern Ukraine have turned over the 'black boxes' and the bodies of the passengers from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to the proper authorities. However, the crisis in eastern Ukraine continues to intensify, with the Pentagon charging that the Russians are moving more heavy equipment across the border; with Europe announcing further sanctions; and the war danger looming large. What are your recommendations to all interested parties on how to solve this crisis?"
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
Dennis Small: Thank you Matthew, and good evening. The developments of today that Matt just referred to in the Congress of the United States are a very good first step to opening up possibilities for addressing the crisis which is actually behind the developments with Flight MH17, and what the British Empire is trying to do with this whole incident, which is to trigger a thermonuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia. Mr. LaRouche's first response on this question of what should be done is that the British Empire and its Wall Street allies—its branch office—have to be put out of existence. They have to be politically and financially shut down, and with them, tools such as Barack Obama should be removed from any relationship to the august office of the Presidency of the United States.
Now on the specific question of MH17 and the responses around that, what Mr. LaRouche spoke of is the need for, of course, having full transparency in the investigation. All of the signals intelligence coming from all sides in this matter should be made available. He remarked that the shipping of the "black boxes" to the United Kingdom is a very bad development, because the British are the ones behind the entire crisis, and they can be expected to use their control over the black boxes to try to control or to eliminate any access to actual information about what's going on. He said that the British Empire is intent on creating wars, including thermonuclear war. And therefore, if you want to stop the drive for war, what you have to do is bankrupt the British Empire and Wall Street.
I would like to inform our viewers that in discussions that we had with a very highly placed military source in Europe, his comment on the transfer of the black boxes to the British is that they are not going to be able to falsify the contents, but they are going to go out of their way to withhold whatever evidence there actually is in there. This source, who is by no means favorable to the Russians in general terms, said that as of this point, the Russians have been forthcoming with regard to the information that they possess, and that the United States has not. His comment was that the Obama strategy in all this is to actually provoke the Russians, and his view is that the thinking in Moscow and in Beijing is that they have approximately a two-year timetable in order to be prepared for war against the United States.
Now, this is not a matter of simply citing a source who might be right or might be wrong, I would refer people to comments made this week by the Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, in response to the accelerating and aggravating situation in Ukraine. At a rather unusual meeting of the Security Council of Russia on July 24—unusual in that his remarks were broadcast live on television; usually these are closed-door meetings—he said the following: "We will act appropriately and proportionately to the approach of NATO's military infrastructure toward our borders, and we will not fail to notice the expansion of global missile defense systems and increases in the reserves of strategic non-nuclear precision weaponry."
Putin went on to specifically reject the idea that the NATO-U.S. ballistic missile defense system is simply defensive. He said the following: "That's not the case. This is an offensive system; it is part of the offensive defense system of the United States on the periphery. Regardless of what our foreign colleagues say, we can clearly see what is actually happening. Groups of NATO troops are clearly being reinforced in Eastern European states, including in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea."
So you can see from the Russian side, that is their perception of the direction of the escalation of the conflict around the Ukraine.
Mr. LaRouche's comment on these developments is: Yes, but don't leave the British Empire out of the equation in the evaluation of this thing. They are the ones behind Obama. They are behind the war drive, and they're also behind the current economic collapse which has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe. And he reiterated: You have to shut down Wall Street to stop the war danger. If you don't do that, you're walking into a trap of either accepting the provocations or responding in a way the British have already pre-discounted. He said the drive for war is coming from a bankrupt and desperate British Empire.
Real Value vs. Fraudsters' Speculation
LaRouche said Wall Street and the British Empire's bankers are fraudsters. Their assets are worthless; and try as they may to collect on them, they've got nothing coming to them. The fraud is that they are trying to put value on things that don't exist; and that the price that they are assigning to these assets is completely phony. He said what has to be done is that all of that fictitious value has to be simply written down; it's not worth anything anyway. Reorganize it through bankruptcy reorganization—measures such as Glass-Steagall—and what that will leave is the small amount remaining of actually valid debt which will be fungible and the basis for creating an entirely new credit system.
And he reiterated the point that he emphasized in last week's webcast, which is that there are now two completely incompatible systems in existence on the planet. In the one case, you have utterly worthless paper accounts, and these need to be examined. He said, look to commodities speculators, look at what's happening in food; look at what's happening on the grain markets. They are killing people to defend the phony value of these assets!
What we actually need—and this is a fundamental proposal of the direction in which the world must now move, so let me emphasize this from the outset—he said, we need a general proposal for an agreement among nations as to what is and what is not real value in the economy. There are two incompatible systems, the one represented by these worthless assets, which is taking the world to the brink of war. The other is represented in the meeting from July 15 in Brazil of the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—along with all the heads of state of South America (see last week's Feature). LaRouche said they have taken a very important step in the direction of what real value actually is. And this issue of real value, this issue of actually defining what real economic value is, is the central issue for the establishment of a just New World Economic Order—having destroyed the British Empire. And that is the intention behind LaRouche's Four Laws, which require immediate implementation in the United States and internationally.
So, LaRouche said, impeach Obama; get him out of the way. And, it wouldn't be a bad idea if the British impeached Blair, who, incidentally, is facing impeachment charges before the British Parliament as well. These are the representatives of the Empire; we have to bankrupt the Empire if we are to stop the war.
Perpetual War Scenario
Now, in terms of these overall war situations, just to round out this point, it's not just Ukraine. What you've got going on is what one might adequately describe as the Tonkin Gulf syndrome. Now some of you viewing this webcast may recall that one of the crucial incidents that got the Vietnam War started was the Tonkin Gulf incident. This was a British-run operation, and this is classic, what they do. They simply lie; they claim things happened that didn't actually happen; they give you the bum's rush—especially the United States—to get the United States involved in war. Before people even have time to ask questions, the war is on, and from the British standpoint, it's too late to pull back. They did it, run by the British, in the Tonkin Gulf situation.
It's exactly what happened with Tony Blair's "dodgy dossier," which got us into the Iraq War—with a little help from Bush. It's what they pulled off in Libya. Remember, in Iraq, it was all about weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had—except he didn't. But it was a little late by the time that was admitted. Same thing in Libya. They tried the exact same thing in Syria, charging the use of chemical weapons supposedly by the Assad government. And there's absolutely no evidence that that's what was occurring. The Russians had a role in blowing the whistle on that, as did some people in the United States Congress and some people in military and intelligence circles in the United States. In both cases, urged forward, encouraged to move forward and directed in terms of the ideas, by the LaRouche movement.
And now they're trying to do the same thing in Ukraine. What is actually behind this MH17 question is exactly that. They're fabricating things; they're making it up. And they're trying to do this to get the United States in the thick of perpetual wars. And I think the fact that the Congress of the United States today demonstrated an anatomical principle of importance, which is that backbones can be made to grow—at least political backbones. You'll hear much more about that from Diane and Kesha shortly ahead—this is very important, in terms of pulling the plug on this British-style operation.
Now, the British goal in terms of these perpetual wars, is not new—it's not just the Vietnam War. This goes way, way back. In fact, this is something that was addressed by Nicholas of Cusa in the middle of the 15th Century, because they were facing wars then, also triggered by the Empire at the time. (Queen Elizabeth, although she looks like she's old enough to have been so, she was not actually the head of British Empire at that time. I want to reassure our viewers of that fact.) But what Cusa talked about was immediately after a terrible massacre which occurred in Constantinople—but you could be reading about it today in eastern Ukraine, or Iraq, or in Syria, this kind of religious-promoted massacres.
What Cusa discussed in a writing called "On the Peace of Faith" (De Pace Fidei) is the basis for putting an end to these perpetual wars. He appealed to God to guide humanity in the right direction on this, and then he wrote: "On account of lengthy, continuous meditation, he concluded it would be possible, through the experience of a few wise men ... to find a unique and propitious concordance, and through this, to constitute a perpetual peace in religion upon the appropriate and the true course."
In the remainder of that document, he discusses what that appropriate and true course is, which is neither agreement on particular religious rites nor particular prophets nor anything of the sort; those can vary, Cusa said. But agreement on the truth. And his point of emphasis is that man is capable of knowing the truth; the truth exists; and man is capable of knowing it. And that man's identity is in the permanent search for this truth. That fundamental point of Cusa's—incidentally, Cusa was the inspirer of the discovery of America as well—but in this idea, in the concepts involved in the founding of the United States, this concept of man is, in fact, the key to what Lyndon LaRouche has identified as the only course politically for getting the world back from the brink of catastrophe, which is taking down the British Empire; and getting rid of Wall Street, Obama, Tony Blair, and their other assets.
BRICS Summit: What Americans Must Do
Ogden: As Dennis mentioned, a new system of nations has emerged in the past few weeks on this planet, in the form of the BRICS countries and especially their alliance with the nations of Central and South America, including prominently Argentina, which is setting the standard for resistance around the world. Earlier this week, LaRouche described the current world situation as follows: "You've come to a period of time where the whole world system is such that China is powerful; India is powerful; South America is powerful. These are the forces which are resisting the British Empire. From South America, resistance. From China, resistance. From India, resistance. So, if we join ourselves in that cause of resistance, we can bring this whole damned thing down. It's very simple, you just have to say, 'This is a swindle. We have no reason to pay for it. We don't owe anybody anything.' And resistance is a very powerful weapon once people have the guts to use it."
Now remember, this is coming from the original author of the idea of the "debt bomb," as we've elaborated on this webcast previously. When LaRouche was engaged with the leaders of South and Central America in the early 1980s, as the author of Operation Juárez, which was the proposal for a bloc of South American nations to unilaterally declare a debt moratorium on the usurious, speculative debt payments that the IMF was demanding from them, and to reassert the sovereignty of their nations. You also had LaRouche's role even before that, in proposing the creation of an International Development Bank, the IDB, by a bloc of nations, to replace the corrupted IMF and World Bank system. This idea was taken up at that time by the entire Non-Aligned Movement in 1976, at a historic summit in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
However, the difference between then and now, is the sheer magnitude of the BRICS nations, and the overwhelming proportion of the world's population which they and their allies represent, along with the state of sheer and utter bankruptcy which the Wall Street/London monetary system has now achieved.
This spirit of resistance was reflected very clearly in a speech delivered by Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner earlier this week. She asserted that the historic summit last week between the BRICS and Unasur [Union of South American Nations] represented what she called a reformulation of a new global order, in which "there are new actors who don't want to smash your head in, but rather want to cooperate with you." And she laughed at the threat, that if Argentina doesn't concede to the vultures, then it won't have access to foreign financial markets, which Argentina has done perfectly well without for the last ten years or so.
She solemnly vowed that she will not concede. She said, "I wish to say to each and every Argentine, that this President will not sign anything that compromises future generations of Argentines, as others did. We will not go backwards to the hell that the foreign debt meant for decades, which limited possibilities of growth, development, knowledge, education, housing, health care, and universities, for millions of Argentines."
So Dennis, my two questions are: 1) What standards do determine what true value is, to distinguish between real and fraudulent debt? And 2) what must Americans do, as LaRouche said, "to join this resistance, to bring down the Empire once and for all"?
Small: Well, let me start with the second question. LaRouche had very simple marching orders which he issued earlier this week on this question: They should join him in telling Wall Street the following: "It's your crap, you eat it!" And that's the whole point.
All this represents no actual value. LaRouche again emphasized that the Argentine case is absolutely clear. You have vulture funds that did not lend a dollar to Argentina, but instead bought up bonds that had already been in renegotiation when Argentina had restructured its debt. They bought those bonds for pennies on the dollar, and they immediately turned around, and went to court to sue for 100% plus fines and interest on those bonds. The net result is that if they are paid, they will get 1,608% profit over a six-year period.
Now, this is insane! It's unjust, it's immoral, it's unscientific economically, and it's exactly what should not be done. And Wall Street simply needs to be told, along with the British Empire, "This is yours, no one is going to pay this." And this is what's now happening. People are simply not paying.
Now, what often comes up, and I've heard these questions frequently, and many of our viewers may have as well, have little gnawing doubts in their mind, "Well, but ... but ... but ... but ... didn't they borrow the money? Don't they really owe it? I mean, where did the debt come from in the first place? And, my mother told me you should always pay your debts."
Bankers' Arithmetic
Let me give you a little bit of history as to where the debt came from. Back in the period of the debt bomb and Operation Juárez that Matt was discussing, during the period of the '80s and the '90s, we did some straightforward calculations of the nature of these financial instruments. And the first graphic that I want to show you, is something that we did many years ago. It's called "Argentina: Bankers' Arithmetic." What this actually shows, is that over the period from 1980 to 2001, which was the point at which Argentina was forced to default on its foreign debt, because they simply couldn't pay it, Argentina's foreign debt began at $27 billion—that's the upper line. Over the course of the 22-year period, from 1980 to 2002, Argentina paid in accumulated interest payments—only interest, this is not repayment of principal, only interest—they paid $120 billion. This is more than four times what they originally owed. And at the end of that period, what they owed was $142 billion!
So they owed $27 billion, they paid $120, and they ended up owing $142. The debt increased six-fold. This is what you call bankers' arithmetic. It's wonderful for them. It simply means killing countries and people. And that's what happened.
Now how did that happen? Well, if you control the casino table, you can impose this on people. If you are the only game in town, no problem. You just raise interest rates, for example, which is what Paul Volcker did, from a couple of percent up to 19, 20, 23%. Then what do you do if you're a debtor? You've probably experienced that on your credit card—you know exactly what happens: You can't pay!
Then the other trick that they pulled with these countries is that they launched financial warfare on them, forcing a devaluation of their currency. So if in the past, when they contracted the debt—for example, a million dollars would have cost 10 million pesos if there was a ten-to-one relationship between the currencies—if you force a devaluation of the peso, then all of a sudden overnight, to pay that $1 million, it doesn't cost you 10 million pesos, it costs you 100 million pesos. "Sorry, you have to pay." And that was another form of the total fraud behind this thing.
So when LaRouche says that this a complete fraud, and there is absolutely no basis for payment, that is the actual fact. This debt has been paid, and paid, and paid over and over again! And it's now time to tell Wall Street, "It's your crap, you eat it!"
Now the vulture funds that are involved in this, as we've said before on this show, these are the same ones that are operating inside the United States as well. Detroit: The main vulture fund involved in the Detroit operation right now, destroying that city, is a fund called Aurelius Management. They're one of the major funds involved in Argentina! They're also involved in Puerto Rico, which is being driven over the edge as well. So it's the same people.
LaRouche said, "These guys are pigs. Who are they? Look at the vulture funds, and look at the corrupt judges who are part of the corrupt game, that are giving backing to these claims. You call these Justices of the Supreme Court? With looting rates of 1,608% over six years?" LaRouche said, this is a system of private racketeering that's going on. So the approach is very simple: Don't give in. Simply say "No," like the BRICS are doing. And as of now, what the BRICS are doing with the South American countries, is they're saying, "Gentlemen, you're bankrupt. We don't owe you anything. You're not going to be paid. You've been paid many times over." And, besides which, nobody on this planet likes you very much anyway. So if people simply don't pay, those assets go poof! Because they don't exist anyway.
How Do You Measure Value?
Now on to the question of real value. How do you actually measure value in an economy, which is the challenge LaRouche has thrown out to the world at the point where we are now in a position increasingly, to get rid of this British Empire.
What kind of a system is actually required? Well, we can look at the issue of the physical economy as measured in what LaRouche has described and discussed at length in his economic texts, as energy-flux density. This is a measure of the density of concentration of power in an economy to produce work. It's not a measure of simply the total energy produced—that's important, too. But the form and the organization of the energy makes it of a different quality if it is extremely dense. Try to cut metal with 7 quadrillion candles. You can't do it. But if you put the same amount of energy as those 7 quadrillion candles—I mean, 7 quadrillion isn't that much, it's just three times the total values of the financial assets in the world; so surely, we can count up 7 quadrillion candles. The amount of energy in that is probably equal to 1 laser that would be used in machine-tool work. So, it gives you an idea: Energy is not a scalar quantity. It's a question of the form of organization. It's a matter of energy-flux density.
For example, one measure of this, if you look at the economy is, are people producing their energy with high energy-flux density methods, nuclear, for example; or, have they been forced to revert to coal, or biomass, or no energy whatsoever?
Now, let's take a look at the following graph. What this shows is nuclear energy as a percentage of total electricity produced. Now, relatively speaking, the more of your total energy which is produced by nuclear, as compared to others, the more advanced your economy. You're more technologically advanced, because you have a relatively dense form of energy in use in the economy. And you can see from this graphic that back in 1990, a couple of typical European countries, Germany and Spain, were at relatively high proportions, up in the 30-40% range.
You can also see that as a result of the policies implemented in those countries under the European Union, the percentage of total energy produced in those cases, has been dropping, drastically, if you look at Spain, and Germany, which is on an anti-nuclear course.
Over this same period—the three lower lines in this graph—I've included three countries of the BRICS: One is Russia, and you can you see what's been happening to their economy, where from 1990-2010, the proportion of nuclear is increasing very significantly from about 10% up to 18%; and although there was a serious problem of very low overall total energy consumption, which actually fell at a certain point, that's not the dominant trend in this period. What this is showing is an actual increase in nuclear in absolute terms and in relative terms as well. And in the case of India and Brazil, although it starts fairly low, it is also trending upwards.
Going Nuclear
That takes us up to the current period, 2010: Now, all of these countries have plans, projections of what they're going to be doing with their energy sectors, including nuclear.
And I want you to look at the next graph, and tell me, which of these two systems the United States should be associated with? In the case of the European Union, which is run by the British, you can see that, in the case of Spain, which is the green line, their plan takes them from 20% down to 10% nuclear! The economy's being torn apart! And it's actually much worse than that indicates, because they're actually trying to produce energy with windmills and solar energy! I mean, give me a break! Even Don Quixote knew that this was ridiculous, and he wasn't too intelligent.
But the case of Germany is my favorite, from the standpoint of irony, because Germany is already on a rapid course down, but that's not good enough for this government. This government, the Merkel government, intends to reduce its proportion of total energy produced by nuclear from about 15% down to zero! by the year 2020. Zero!
I want people to know that we have spoken with highly qualified Eurasian sources, who report, that the governments of Russia, China, and India, think that this evidence, this graph, simply proves that Germany must have an extremely advanced fusion energy program, because nobody could be so stupid as to wipe out fission power if they didn't have fusion coming online.
Now, you can see what the plan is with the BRICS. Russia, increasing; Brazil, increasing; India, increasing. So, what's going on here, is two different systems of value, two different world systems, and we're faced in the United States with the question of which direction are we going to be going in under these circumstances? And the second option, the option that the BRICS are creating and so on, is clearly the one in which the world has a future, a value system which reflects the physical economy, that is to say, using man's mind, for scientific developments to implement technologies which will increase the energy-flux density.
I'll just give you one example of this: Russian President Putin, at the recent meeting of the BRICS in Brazil, proposed the widespread adoption and implementation of the Russian GLONASS system, which is basically a global positioning system, a GPS system of the Russians, for the purpose of increasing food production in their countries by 30-50%. Because with such a system, as it has been implemented in places that are not insane, you can actually use that positioning system to determine very specifically, based on the soil characteristics, the chemical characteristics, and so on, to be able to use your highly automated and computerized tractor, to implement the necessary fertilizer and other additives that are required, down to the square inch. There are tractors, and they exist in the United States, except we don't really use them to produce food here anymore, because we have a government that's bailing out the bubble, instead of investing in these things.
But that's the kind of thing that is under discussion. So this, I think, is a step in the right direction, if not the full answer to the question you're raising, and which LaRouche has put on our table, and the world's table for consideration, is, what is value, really?
'No Recess Until Obama Is Impeached'
Ogden: This week, LaRouche PAC was very active, especially in Washington, D.C. It issued a national leaflet, titled "No Recess Until Obama Is Impeached," which was distributed both in Washington and across the country. We had activists coming to Washington from up and down the East Coast, and as you can see from the picture which I'm going to put on the screen, LaRouche PAC members were on Capitol Hill with a banner which read, "Remember the Guns of August: Cancel the Recess, Impeach Obama, Restore Glass-Steagall."
Now, the mobilization of LaRouche PAC nationally over the past several weeks, has certainly catalyzed a rising tide of resistance against Obama and his policy of world war. As I mentioned in the beginning of this webcast, today we saw a very significant, historic, one-hour debate on the floor of the House of Representatives, and an overwhelming vote in favor of the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 105, a majority vote of 370 to 40. And this resolution declares, "The President shall not deploy or maintain United States Armed Forces in a sustained combat role in Iraq without specific statutory authorization" by Congress....
So let me just underscore what Congressman Jones said there: This is a monumental step toward Congress' reclaiming its constitutional authority. And as Mr. LaRouche said in response to this earlier today, "This opens it up for very important things to come."
Now, this reflects the significant mobilization that LaRouche PAC has engaged in, to force Congress to assert its constitutionally mandated responsibilities as a check against Obama's uncontrolled drive for global war. Though it's not at all clear if Obama will heed this action, since he's already declared that in his mind, he doesn't need to come to Congress for authorization, and he would like to act without the authority of Congress, since, as Jones said, the Authorization for Use of Military Force obtained by Bush in 2002 is still on the books.
However, the growing threat of impeachment is certainly being felt and is being acknowledged in the White House, and it's only continuing to grow. Today, a new poll was published by CNN which states again what previous polls have said: 33% of all Americans currently favor impeachment, which is several percentage points, in fact, above a similar poll that was taken at the point in George Bush's second term; and 57% of Republicans favor impeachment, despite John Boehner's strategy to try to quell this groundswell for impeachment, with his lawsuit. And you also had today, Dan Pfifer, a top advisor to Obama, saying that he would not discount the possibility of Congress actually moving to impeach Obama, at some point in the future.
So, I am joined in the studio tonight by Kesha Rogers and Diane Sare, who have been on Capitol Hill all week, and will continue to be here through next week as well....
'A New Era Is Upon Us'
Diane Sare: I'd like to start with a brief exhibit which should not be displayed too long, because I find it most uncomfortable, which is entitled "All Will Fall," from our friend Francisco Goya, who knew something about Barack Obama, apparently. And you can see the Queen of England, Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama, Samantha Power, and I think that's Victoria Nuland up at the top. And it occurred to me, actually after thinking about what's happening with Tony Blair and what's happening with [Ukrainian Prime Minister] Yatsenyuk, who is Victoria Nuland's little project, it is the case: They are all falling.
But so those of you who are nervous or intimidated about calling your Congressman to demand that they take action and stay in session and impeach this guy before we get thermonuclear war or a total collapse, so don't be fearful. This is what you're dealing with.
Now, what has occurred, and what Kesha and I discovered on the Hill, which was somewhat disturbing to us, is that very, very few people that we met with actually knew what had occurred with the BRICS Summit—that this is a transformation. It's a potential for a whole new system on the planet. And with the agreements that they've made with nations of South America, you have 48% of the world's population. And what they are doing is actually in the tradition of the United States.
I was particularly struck, because I've been thinking a lot about what Gen. Douglas MacArthur said at the end of World War II, upon the surrender of the Japanese, in a radio address he gave Sept. 2, 1945, where he says: "A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential through progressive advances in scientific discovery has, in fact, now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door."
And it struck me and others on the Policy Committee that what we have now before us, is this potential for a "greater and more equitable system," and that this was actually the crux of foreign policy, as intended by our Founding Fathers—not the idea of going in and overthrowing governments, right and left, in total violation of sovereignty. And I will say, there's been such a paradigm shift in meetings with some of the younger staffers, I was astounded that they argued, that it is "legal and normal" for us to interfere in affairs of sovereign states who are not a direct and imminent threat to the United States.
John Quincy Adams: Real Foreign Policy
Kesha Rogers: What I'd like to do is, to take the discussion that has been developed thus far, and to really focus once again on this question on what the United States, what the American citizens must understand about our unique role, and our understanding of what the United States represents as a leader and a partner throughout the world.
We had a discussion with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, and in the course of the discussion, we were developing the point that, since the atrocities of 9/11, you have really had a clear destruction of the understanding of what the United States relationship in foreign policy must be, and what the American people really should be fighting for. And you know, a lot of people think that "foreign policy" means, going after terrorism, going after the "bad guys"; foreign policy means funding ISIS, or funding Ukrainian Nazis in Kiev. We just have the complete wrong policy, about what our unique role in terms of collaboration with nations around the world represents.
So, what I wanted to do, is take a moment for some brief quotes from John Quincy Adams, because he knew very well what the real nature of foreign policy is, and what the United States represented in relationship to other nations. These quotes come from the July 4th, Independence Day, 1821, speech that he gave in the House of Representatives. And the question is posed to the countrymen and elders of the state.
He says,
"What has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaim to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in her assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity....
"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be....
"But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
"She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all....
"[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, and Peace. This has been her declaration, this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."
And I think that John Quincy Adams wasn't thinking about freedom, and peace, and independence from the standpoint of joining hands and singing "Kumbaya." He was thinking about it from the standpoint of exactly what the BRICS Summit represents; that the United States must take its rightful place in leadership, if we do our job and dump this British Empire, and dump its puppet Barack Obama in the White House right now.
What John Quincy Adams actually exemplified in those very profound remarks, is why we fight today. Why people must understand the real significance of foreign policy in this nation, as the advocate of, as John Quincy Adams said, "the march of the mind." Because in all of the discussion we've had thus far, on the question of real economic value, on the question of the development of sovereign nation-states, of resistance, this is what we are resistance for. This is what we're fighting for.
And with that, I'd like to just say, that as we're here in Washington, D.C., throughout the course of this next week, let me just reiterate Mr. LaRouche's clear command that Congress must not recess until Obama is impeached!
As you're calling your Congress members, as Diane just said, you should think about these words of John Quincy Adams, what we should be participating in and leading as a sovereign nation and as a nation with the commitment to development of freedom and peace throughout the world. And I would just say that we cannot have any illusions whatsoever, about what is coming down on mankind if we don't do our job, if people refuse to act.
Now, those of you who are out there, again saying, "Well, this sounds like a beautiful idea, but impeachment just won't happen"—well, I'll tell you this: You need to tell the Republicans and the Democrats, "It's time to stop masturbating! It's time to put down your Boehner and actually do your job!"
So this is the fight that's before us right now. We have a victorious moment. If we think about what has just happened with the spectacular developments of the vote that took place around H. Con. Res. 105, and what Congressman Jones laid out, we can really see that a resistance is under way, the momentum is under way, right now, where this President can be impeached. And it is your mission to command, that Congress not leave! We don't want to see you in the districts, we don't want to see your ugly faces, until you actually do your job!" That's how blunt we have to be! "You think you're going to come to the districts and run an election, when you have let this President run roughshod over the Constitution, to continue to destroy our nation. This has to stop!"
So, as we go into these next few days, I hope that each person, each and every one of you watching this, will take up and muster the courage. As we were discussing last night, we need throughout the Congress and throughout the population, a spread of contagion of courage to come about rapidly and immediately.
A New, Just World Economic Order
Ogden: For our final question, I would like to follow up on what both Diane and Kesha were very beautifully developing, and let me pick up on what Diane said, and repeat this quote that she cited from Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "A new era is upon us.... The destructiveness of the war potential through progressive advances in scientific discovery has, in fact, now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door."
Now, interestingly, General MacArthur continued by explaining, in his words, that the problem basically, is a theological one, and it involves a "spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2,000 years." He said, "It must be of the spirit, if we are to save the flesh."
Now, the occasion for this speech was the signing of the surrender by the Japanese, which officially brought an end to World War II. And MacArthur also said on this occasion: "It's my earnest hope, and, indeed, the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion, a better world shall emerge, out of the blood and carnage of the past. A world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man."
Now, if you look at Lyndon LaRouche's lifetime career, since the end of World War II, where he was stationed as young soldier in Calcutta, India, and as he's explained many times, saw with his own eyes, the bestiality of the British Empire toward the Indian people, his identity since then has really been to pick up, where patriots like Franklin Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur left off, and to lead this fight to create this new, more equitable system among nations, and this "world dedicated to the dignity of man." We're reviewed repeatedly, through the recent weeks' broadcasts here, LaRouche's role over the past four decades, in planting the seeds for what is now being created, with the New Development Bank, with the BRICS Summit and so forth, starting from LaRouche's proposal in 1975 for the IDB, the International Development Bank; the Colombo summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1976; to Operation Juárez in 1982; to the SDI in 1983; to the Strategic Triangle proposal after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and to LaRouche's calls for a New Bretton Woods system in the 1990s, leading directly into the fight for the Eurasian Land-Bridge, going all the way into the 2000s. And now you have LaRouche's four cardinal laws for the United States, beginning with Glass-Steagall.
But what has unified all of these efforts and all of these initiatives, has been the ever-present demand, for a new, more just, economic order for the planet. So, Dennis, in the context of what we've already talked about here, today, and the question of the creation of a true standard of value, based on the identity of the human species, I'd like you to elaborate on what is meant when we say, "a new, more just, economic order for the planet." What is the true definition of justice? And how do we apply that principle to bring into being what MacArthur described as "a world dedicated to the dignity of man"?
Small: Well, John Quincy Adams put his finger right on it, when he talked about the "march of the mind" as being the national mission of the United States. Because the issue of mind and the role of mind in creating real economic value and justice, in the exact same way, is at the heart of the answer to the question that you're posing, in what we've been discussing.
Now, I think that John Quincy Adams today would probably be, as they say proverbially, rolling over in his grave, if he had a look at what is going on around the world on the question of nuclear energy.
Admittedly nuclear energy did not exist back then, but if you take a look at the map which was prepared for this broadcast on the nuclear energy question, which shows where in the world nuclear plants are currently under construction. There are 72 plants under construction in the world today: 47 of them, 65%, in the BRICS countries, plus Argentina! The rest of the world, only 25. And that goes along with those graphs I showed you on energy-flux density.
How is it possible, that the United States of America, which was guided by ideas such as John Quincy Adams, and by people like Douglas MacArthur, and who which has a statesman like Lyndon LaRouche, today, could allow this to come about? How could it possibly be, that at the BRICS Summit, they have taken up the banner of the American System of political economy, and are in the process of building a transcontinental railroad across the Americas, South America, which was originally mapped out in 1898 under the Presidency of McKinley? How is it possible, that a new interoceanic canal across Central America, and Nicaragua specifically, is being done along the lines of a report and a study that was done in 1896 at the Congress of the United States? Isn't it time that we, where the American System was first established, join in, with the American System?
Founding Grandfathers
Now, to do that, we're going to have to return to the ideas of MacArthur and John Quincy Adams, and so on, and to the ideas that I discussed at the beginning, of Nicholas of Cusa, and most particularly to the discussion of this issue of justice presented by one of the Founding Fathers of the United States—actually, I should probably call him a Founding Grandfather of the United States—I'm talking about the great German philosopher and scientist, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Because our Founding Fathers, the ideas of our Founding Fathers, descend directly from the great Renaissance tradition of Cusa, and through Leibniz.
On this issue of justice, and morality in economics, you often run across people who say, "Well, you know, I feel very bad about what you describe as happening in Argentina, and I agree that 1,608% interest is just a tad high—but what could you do about it? You got to pay your debts!"
What does justice actually mean, and what does it have to do with real economic value? I have three quotes from Leibniz that I want to read to you to address this issue, and for you to mull over. In the first one, which is in 1702, a writing of his called "Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice," he poses a paradox. He says the following—he poses it in theological or religious terms—but I think you'll get the broader point. He says:
"It is agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things."
Leibniz then goes on to say, if you are among those believe in the first option, that it is good and just simply because God wills it, he says: "This view would destroy the justice of God.... To say my will takes the place of reason, is properly the motto of a tyrant. Moreover, this opinion would not sufficiently distinguish God from the devil."
And then he goes on, speaking of the devil: "A celebrated English philosopher named Hobbes (who has lain down truly wicked principles and adhered to them with too much fidelity) has wished to uphold almost the same thing as Thrasymachus," who was a character in one of Plato's dialogues, whose view is "might makes right"; there is no such thing as justice, just do it! Sort of Obama's view of the unitary Executive.
Continuing with Leibniz—he says the same thing as Thrasymachus: "for he wants God to have the right to do everything, because he is all-powerful."
Now, Leibniz says, that's wrong. He says, what is real justice? What is really the Good? He says, this is something knowable to man, it is not something arbitrary. It is knowable to man, and that is because man, is capable of creativity and science. Man can know that these things are as they are said to be, just and good, because those are universally perceivable or conceivable concepts, which the mind is capable of understanding. So he says the following:
"It is not enough, indeed, that we be subject to God, just as we would obey a tyrant; nor must he be only feared because of his greatness, but also loved because of his goodness.... Justice is nothing else than the charity of the wise, that is to say goodness towards others, which is conformed to wisdom. And wisdom, in my sense, is nothing else than the science of felicity."
What Leibniz on other occasions calls "the pursuit of happiness," the exact concept which is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, in the famous phrase, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
These ideas are, indeed, the basis on which our nation was founded. That concept of the good and of justice, which Leibniz elaborates here, is at the heart of what real value actually is in an economic system. Because real value derives from that which distinguishes man from beasts. What allows us to distinguish what is just from what is unjust, what is good from what is bad, what is moral from what is immoral. It is man's creativity, our ability to create, to do things right, or wrong, as we choose, that is what distinguishes us as a species. And that creativity is what leads to the possibility for science, and control over the universal principles that guide the universe.
That, expressed in economics, shows itself in rising energy-flux density. You control more and more power, for the benefit of the entire species. That is the meaning of LaRouche's Four Laws and his principles of economics. That is why he shaped that presentation of the Four Laws around the parallel concept of Vernadsky and Vernadsky's noösphere, which we've also discussed on these webcasts.
So this, this idea of Leibniz, this idea of Cusa, these ideas of John Quincy Adams, the ideas of MacArthur, this is the American System of political economy. Half of humanity is moving with the American System. Don't you think we ought to join them?
