LAROUCHE PAC TOWN HALL

New Coup Plot Exposures Define Central Issue of U.S. Election As War or Peace

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this transcript]

This is the edited transcription of Harley Schlanger’s presentation to the LaRouche PAC’s Town Hall, September 19, 2020. Subheads and embedded links to sources have been added.

It’s absolutely urgent that people get the context as was presented by Dennis Speed, who spoke before me. Many people are studying the “connectos”: What did Clapper say? What did Brennan do? What did Comey do? What’s Pompeo up to? All these specifics. People get confused because, first of all, there’s a brainwashing effort underway from the mass media, which is part of the corporate control over people. There’s also the destruction of education. A loss of the sense of the dignity of man The people who are committed to reducing the world’s population have no commitment to the idea of creative human beings as representing the solution to the problems.

The Process Behind the ‘Connectos’

What we’ve been doing is to give people an understanding of what’s behind these things. I think the last two weeks, these extraordinary [Schiller Institute] conferences which brought together people from all over the world to discuss it on September 5th and 6th, and then specifically the American patriots, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Col. Richard H. Black (USA ret.) who identified, in the case of Wiebe and Binney, the role of the security-state apparatus, both in the coup, but also in controlling the population. And then, secondly, retired Colonel Black’s exposé of the military forces being organized to carry out a military coup against President Trump, assuming the election is not conclusive on November 3rd, and that if the President insists that all the votes be counted, that this will be seen as an obstruction, and that he must be removed by military forces.

All of this would seem like a plot worthy of a Dalton Trumbo story. But it’s actually occurring!

What we want to do is give you an understanding of what’s behind it; that this is not just about Donald Trump being a “bad person,” or “someone who’s trying to wreck the Constitution,” or “a racist,” or “a white supremacist.” It’s not just about Joe Biden being “possibly senile,” and “representing bad networks.”

A process has been underway, and to understand it, you have to go to the work of Lyndon LaRouche. Because, in order to get a summit, we’re going to have to free the President in a way that the American people will support him meeting with President Vladimir Putin, President Xi Jinping, and others, to work out these problems and avoid war. A summit is an urgent necessity, not after the election, but as soon as it can take place.

At the same time, the summit will be opposed, vigorously, by the coup plotters. We have to make sure people understand the nature of the coup, the intent of the coup plotters. Again, it’s not that they just don’t like Trump, or that he’s doing this wrong or that wrong; their whole post-Cold World system, which can be traced back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but especially after 1989 and the fall of Communism, this whole system has been about using the U.S. military to impose a bankers’ dictatorship against and over and above sovereign nations, on behalf of a handful of global international bankers, cartels, and insurance, big pharma, the grain cartels, and so on.

LaRouche’s Warnings and Forecasts

In order to get this context, we really have to take a look at what Lyndon LaRouche was doing, especially from 2001 forward.

Just to give you a little bit of background: In his forecast of January 3, 2001, LaRouche came from a point of having viewed the previous 30 years, going back to August 15, 1971, as a succession of steps taken by people like George Shultz, like Felix Rohatyn, like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, acting to bring the United States as a military force to impose this globalized system.

From the beginning, before August 15, 1971, LaRouche was onto this, was warning about it, and was taking people like me, who were young people looking to try and do some good in the world but getting confused by what was going on at that time—the Vietnam War, the rock-sex-drug counterculture—wondering how to position ourselves in such a way as to not just be brought into some sort of clownish reaction, but actually pose something serious. And that’s what we found in LaRouche.

I want to now take the two presentations of LaRouche from 2001 to sort of bracket what we’re dealing with, when we are dealing with the crises today—the global financial breakdown, the COVID crisis, the so-called climate change crisis, and, most importantly, the danger of war breaking out, because of the efforts of the same people who are behind the coup, who are targeting Russia and China, and in fact are carrying out the coup because Trump was trying to work with China and Russia, when he first came in as President.

Now, LaRouche’s forecast on January 3, 2001 came out of a very clear picture of what happened leading up to that, and I’ll just give you some of the highlights.

The Strategic Defense Initiative

Lyndon LaRouche was involved in organizing the Reagan Administration to support what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, an idea of developing an anti-missile ballistic defense system that could be shared with Russia [the Soviet Union]. It would have two benefits: One, it could make nuclear missiles “impotent and obsolete,” as President Reagan himself said. But secondly, for LaRouche, of utmost importance, was bringing new physical principles through scientific research and development to the forefront of economic policy. This was a reflection of what John Kennedy did with the NASA program, which triggered the longest period of sustained, real productive growth of the economy up through the Johnson Administration—no thanks to Lyndon Johnson, but because of what Kennedy did with NASA.

This was seen as a threat to the global system that was being brought into place. This was what LaRouche was attacking when he first went onto the campuses in the late ’60s, not just against the Vietnam War, but what was brought in with it, what became the counterculture and how that counterculture became the dominant culture of the country.

Now, in the period of Ronald Reagan first coming in, we were headed toward a confrontation with Russia [the Soviet Union]. There was the Ogarkov doctrine, the Soviet plan based on the idea that they were losing the opportunity, because of U.S. technological advance in the defense sector, to take [over] Europe.

[Chief of the General Staff, Marshal] Nikolai Ogarkov and some of his people came up with a plan for defeating the West in Europe, possibly taking West Germany. Military action was involved in it; the launching of the nuclear freeze movement in Germany was very important. That’s when the Schiller Institute was set up, to try and keep the U.S. and Europe on the same course. But LaRouche’s idea was that we have to go bigger than that: We have to end the era of Mutual and Assured Destruction [MAD] and Reagan liked the idea.

Unfortunately, Reagan’s colleagues in the Republican Party didn’t like it. They wanted something cheaper, something not involving science. And on the Democratic [Party] side you had absolute, total obstruction, where you had people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Senator from New York, arm-in-arm with Henry Kissinger, and what did they demand? That Reagan not be in any way associated with Lyndon LaRouche. They also went to the Russians [Soviets] and organized them to go after LaRouche. And, because of the opposition in the United States, and in the Soviet Union, there was no SDI.

So the Reagan recovery was largely a product of heavy defense spending on existing technologies, which is not a good plan for an economic future. At the same time, the Russians [Soviets] tried to keep up with that spending, and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union which Lyndon LaRouche had forecast.

Now, when the SDI was stopped in the United States, what was introduced was a bubble, a series of bubbles. And Lyndon LaRouche in the beginning of 1987 forecast that this would blow up in October 1987. And there was a stock market crash in October 1987!

What was the response to that? Develop a new bubble!—but what facilitated that was the collapse of the Soviet system and the communist governments of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe, in the period of 1989 and 1990. This was a unique opportunity for the West to establish, not a “superiority,” an arrogance by saying “You have to copy what we did.” Instead, they could have reached out: This was the proposal that was coming from Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche for an industrial Productive Triangle, for extending technology development to the now-unemployed workers in the Warsaw Pact countries and Russia [the Soviet Union].

The ‘End of History’:
Globalism and Free Trade

Instead, there was a theory put forward by a man named Francis Fukuyama—many of you have probably heard of him. He came up with the idea of “the end of history.” It’s not a particularly brilliant philosophical idea; it actually came from people like George Shultz, who argued that the collapse of communism proved, not just that communism was no good and didn’t work—which was obvious; but that the alternative system is the only system that should be allowed on the planet, the neoliberal economic policy, which would be a globalization system, a deregulation system, a speculative system that would be enforced by Western military supremacy, especially that of the United States.

Now, when you talk about the “military-industrial complex” or the “deep state,” that’s what you’re talking about. But, where did this idea come from? It came from the British Empire, because it merged British geopolitics, which is constant warfare, constant division between East-West, between North-South, between smaller states and bigger states; it involved at the same time, neoliberal economic policies which took away the power of elected governments from acting for the good of their people. In other words, this is what the bankers’ dictatorship is! They’re even saying it now, they’re talking about it! Why let elected governments determine economic policy, so-called fiscal policy? That should be in the hands of the bankers, the bankers should control credit policy and spending policy. And that’s what’s been presented, going back to the Jackson Hole, Wyoming meeting in 2019—literally, a bankers’ dictatorship.

Now, this whole idea of Fukuyama and the people who were working with him, including at the time George Herbert Walker Bush, this is what Bush called the “new world economic order.” What was it? It’s the idea that we now have a single world empire, controlled by the City of London and their junior associates on Wall Street. This would be a policy of globalization and free trade—which means outsourcing, which means looking for the cheapest raw materials, cheapest labor policy, and, at the same time, free market neoliberalism: reduce government, reduce the power of governments to interfere with the free market—that is, with the globalists—setting the terms of trade.

This should have been familiar to Americans because this is what we fought against in the American Revolution. It’s an imperial policy. And what they were doing was trying to make this imperial policy, the policy of the United States. Now, at the same time, it was to be backed up by U.S. military force: a unipolar world empire. If any country resisted this, on the basis of defending its population, it had to be crushed. No national sovereignty was to be allowed.

I want to just give you a sense of one aspect of this: There was a book written by Walter Wriston [Chairman and CEO] of Citicorp/Citibank, one of the most important people building up what’s called the “banks too big to fail.” He wrote a book in the mid-’80s called The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World. That was the policy being applied through [Chairman] Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve, later by [Chairman] Alan Greenspan, and by the major banks internationally. That was [UK Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher’s policy. And that was the Bush presidential policy.

Now, it differed a little bit from Bill Clinton. Clinton created new bubbles in order to protect his popularity. He was told by Greenspan, “Build up the stock market,” and so we had stock bubbles, and they crashed. We had an Asia crisis in 1997; the Russian bond crisis in 1998 nearly collapsed the financial system with the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, basically a speculative fund.

All of this, then, was addressed with the so-called “Y2K crisis,” where there was pumping of money by the Plunge Protection Team, money going to the speculators, to build up a new bubble. And, where did it go? Into the dot.com sector.

LaRouche Forecasts a new ‘Reichstag Fire’ Event

It’s in that context that you look at Lyndon LaRouche’s comments on January 3, 2001. They’re very short. Here’s what he said, in answering a question during a webcast on January 3, 2001:

We’re going into a period in which either we do the kinds of things I indicated in summary to you today, or else, what you’re going to have, is not a government. You’re going to have something like a Nazi regime....

What you’re going to get with a frustrated Bush Administration, if it’s determined to prevent itself from being opposed—its will—you’re going to get crisis management. Where members of the Special Warfare types, of the Secret Government, the secret police teams, and so forth, will set off provocations, which will be used to bring about dictatorial powers, and [evoke] emotions, in the name of crisis management.

You will have small wars set off in various parts of the world, which the Bush Administration will respond to, with crisis-management methods of provocation. That’s what you’ll get. And that’s what the problem is, and you have to face that.

Now, this was a warning of a Reichstag Fire type event, which would be used to bring on line a police-state that would enforce the United States moving into a series of wars. This is exactly what happened, nine months later on 9/11.

When LaRouche was on Jack Stockwell’s radio show [on September 11], he made the following comments—without knowing anything, without having read a single thing, or hearing a single thing; just having seen the events of that day, because he was on the radio as the World Trade Center was coming down. And what LaRouche said is that this is not a coincidence, it’s a systemic operation.

If they’re snatching planes … if all three of these planes—the two we have from New York and this thing on the Pentagon—to get that kind of thing, to snatch planes like that … This means that there’s been some kind of either incompetence or fix on the whole security operation, because you can’t get this kind of thing without a real goof-up, on the security side. So, somebody in charge of security was really not very effectively in charge.

Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe pointed out last week that just as LaRouche knew this was coming in his January 3, 2001 webcast, people in the National Security Agency had figured out in July and August of 2001 that something was coming, and they were discussing it, and they were reporting it. Wiebe said this was brought by Tom Drake to the attention of the White House, someone in the White House, and it was dismissed. In other words, this was the intent: to use 9/11 to bring in, not just the security state, but every aspect of the security state including the total reorganization of the U.S. economy to fit in with this globalized system, to fit in with this new, imperial system. And that’s exactly what happened at that point. This was the dream of Walter Wriston and the bankers.

Living Off the Labor of Others

Then, what was this? The triumph of the “new economy” was being proclaimed. What was the new economy? The so-called “information age,” “artificial intelligence,” “the weightless economy”—in other words you don’t have to produce anything! You get some other poor schmo in another country, who can work for almost nothing, who has no benefits, and have him do the production.

Meanwhile, what do people do in the United States? The service economy. And what is the service economy? It’s living off the labor of others for the things you actually need, like food and material goods, and then trading things back and forth, which are increasingly related to the internet, including at a certain point, changing what you think you need, so you can participate in a social networking experiment, which takes away everything that goes into the creativity of a productive population, and turns it instead into a bunch of people looking for thumbs up on Instagram, for their latest little trick.

Now, underlying this idea of a “weightless economy,” is anti-growth, the idea that growth is bad, growth is a problem. This is the “manmade climate change” argument: that because human beings consume so much, we’re heating up the atmosphere. Forget that the atmosphere is shaped by things that are much larger than all the combustion engines on the planet; forget that there are such things as solar radiation and tilts of the Solar System, and things of that sort; forget, also, that there was global warming and global cooling before there was a single automobile on the planet, before there was a single factory, probably before there was a single human being!

No, you inculcate this theory that says, “our consumption is what’s causing the problem.” This is the green agenda, and what underlies it, is an anti-human view, that human beings—or most human beings—are useless eaters, and therefore, there has to be a way to limit the number of useless eaters. We need enough of them to protect the lifestyles of the rich and the [top] 1%, but not too many of them!

At the same time that this theory was being propagated, you had the advances of the so-called “security state.” And this is what Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe and their team were reacting to, around 2001. This is why they left the National Security Agency, because they saw that the collection of metadata, as opposed to targetted cyber-investigations, would be used, not just to keep track of what everyone’s doing—whether they’re talking politically about what they’re going to do—but to start shaping an environment where everything you do is controlled; where people know what you buy, where you shop, what you look at on the internet, what music you listen to, what movies you see, what foods you order, where you go to restaurants—all of this is then used to help shape an environment which is controlled by Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and so on.

And these are not ordinary companies. They’re integrated into the military-industrial complex. A perfect example—I’ll give you two perfect examples, simple ones: Jeff Bezos and his company, Amazon. He owns the Washington Post. His company, Amazon, has a contract to run the cloud computing operations for the Central Intelligence Agency. You think they’re not looking at everything you buy and everything you look at when you go on Amazon?

Here’s another example: The widow of Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, from Apple Computer. She is the person who bought The Atlantic magazine, which has been running these stories attacking Trump to turn the military against him, claiming that he said people who die in wars are “losers.” And at the same time, she owns Defense One, which has been writing stories about the coup, that military people are preparing for a coup against the President.

So here you have two prime companies of the information age, Amazon and Apple, that are integrated into this coup process.

‘The New Left, Local Control, and Fascism’

Now this is what Lyndon LaRouche was warning about in his 2001 statements. This is the world we’re facing. And, in fact, if you go back and look at LaRouche, this is what he was talking about in late ’60s, early ’70s. He wrote an incredible piece, the first piece I read by Lyndon LaRouche, which was called “The New Left, Local Control, and Fascism.” We used to joke that what he was saying is that the people who are proposing local control of police and things of that sort, what they really wanted to do was control their own garbage cans, because that’s all they would be allowed to do! They essentially would live in deteriorating cities, under declining conditions, where they would no longer have anybody to call to protect them.

What do you think we’re seeing now, as the spinoff from the Antifa and Black Lives Matter? What are they saying? “We want to control our ‘turf’.” They don’t control it! The banks control it! The corporations control it! They may control who sets a police car on fire—they may not even control that, because people are acting out of impulses that are being directed from somewhere else. By the way, I don’t know if you saw this the other day, but on Fox News, when Newt Gingrich brought up the role of George Soros, he was shut down! So the censorship is a central part of this.

All of this escalated under President George W. Bush—Bush, Jr.,—and then under President Barack Obama. The deindustrialization escalated! The growing gap between the small number of wealthy and the larger number of poor, including the collapsing middle class—all of it continued: globalization, free trade, and so on. And regime change wars: We had Iraq, we had Libya, there was Ukraine, there’s Syria.

Rejection of the Establishment Parties Internationally

It was in this context that you had the victory of Donald Trump. What Lyndon LaRouche said when Donald Trump was elected was that this was not just an American event. It’s a reflection in the United States of what’s going on internationally, the rejection of the establishment parties. I see this throughout Western Europe. You know, in Germany, the two leading parties, the coalition partners, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, had their worst showings in the last election in years. The Christian Democrats, the lowest percentage vote since the end of World War II; the Social Democrats had the lowest percentage since the time of Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s. Now—they’re still the government!

In Italy, you have a complete mess, as the European Union is doing everything it can to destroy those forces that were fighting for an Italian government that could make determinations of where it would invest. It’s not allowed to do that because that goes against the anti-sovereignty of this globalized system.

The Trump election, in a sense, was the world turned upside down: All of a sudden, the Americans who were supposed to be at the center of this “end of history,” this new, neoliberal, neoconservative, globalist order, said, “No! We don’t want Hillary Clinton! We don’t want Barack Obama II. We want something different.”

And Donald Trump understood this. The most effective part of this campaign was his attack on the regime-change wars, the endless wars, his attack on the anti-growth Green policy—he pulled us out of the Paris Climate Conference; his attack on the unfair trade agreements such as the gold standard that Hillary Clinton was calling for, the “Asia Pivot” of Obama, which was essentially economic warfare against China—Trump opposed that, and he pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership; and the possibility that he could break with Wall Street, that he was calling for the return to Glass-Steagall banking separation, which was a major issue LaRouche had been raising, since its repeal by Republicans and Democrats was signed into law by Bill Clinton, in 1999. Trump had in the Republican Platform of 2016, restoring Glass-Steagall.

So, if you were sitting in the City of London and you saw this fellow come in, you weren’t worried about whether he was a sexual pervert, or whether he was a nasty guy: You were worried about the fact that he had articulated a program against the policies of this British imperial doctrine, the neoliberal policy, the geopolitical war policy—he was opposed to all that. He was trying to bring the United States back to the tradition of the American System.

The Fight We’re in Today

And that’s why Russiagate was launched, the Ukraine coup, the impeachment, the social insurgency today financed by the same people. And what you have to realize, is that the people behind Russiagate, are the same people saying that we should go to war with Russia, we should go to war with China. The idea of the military-industrial complex is that it’s not simply about arms procurement and purchases, it’s not just about money for corrupt corporations. It’s about controlling a whole system, and the elements of it include all of what I’ve presented here, including the so-called dot.com companies, the artificial intelligence, the Yahoos and others, as well as the arms producers, as well as Big Pharma, the insurance companies.

It was Big Pharma and the insurance companies, and the for-profit hospital policies pushed by Bush and Obamacare, which tore apart the public health services in the United States, which made us susceptible to the coronavirus pandemic. President Trump was saying that initially, before he got pulled into this anti-China line. The same people pushing the anti-China line are the ones pushing the war policy and the regime-change policy in the United States.

So this is not just about an “election in November”: It really is about crushing the imperial forces that have been engaged in a fight that does go back to 1945, to control the United States.

The idea of the summit as a weapon against these imperial forces has a historic background to it: When the American Revolution was being fought, it wasn’t just the American colonies against the British Empire. There was support for America for something called the League of Armed Neutrality; and one of the leading players in that was Russia. The French were there, also.

Imagine, if we had a summit which brought together these great powers, today, which are needed to overcome the power of the City of London, that’s why it’s so urgent that in order to defeat the coup and to end the war danger, a summit take place—and a series of summits, which bring the world back to the era before the “twilight of sovereignty” was declared by Walter Wriston, back to a time when nations had governments which acted in the interests of their people, and worked with other nations for their joint, common concerns.

That’s the fight we’re in today.