...... ...................Larouche Online Almanac

Published: Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2005

Today is:

Volume 4, Issue Number 4

This Week You Need to Know:

Helga Zepp-LaRouche:

Society Needs a New Paradigm, More Worthy of the Dignity of Man

Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche gave this speech to an EIR seminar in Berlin on Jan. 12. Lyndon LaRouche's keynote speech to the seminar appeared in last week's "Need To Know," and can also be found in this week's InDepth Feature.

I just want to, in a certain sense self-reflect, or initiate a process of reflection, because actually what we are trying to discuss here with this seminar, is a vision for the 21st Century. We are not talking just about geopolitics, financial crisis—all of this; but, in a very fundamental way, we are struggling with the question: How can we make mankind more human? How can we make the political order on this planet more worthy of the dignity of man? And that has gone completely awry.

Now, for me, even though I'm a full-blooded politician and I'm working on this perspective of what we are doing here in the LaRouche movement for more than 35 years, I still look at the world, and say, "How could we come to this point? What went wrong with this world, that we have come to a point, where two continents are dying...

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The Economy

World and Nation-State

This Week in History

January 24-30, 1934

Dancing for the President's Birthday: — How FDR Conquered Polio—Twice!

On the night of Jan. 30, 1934, there were 6,000 balls held across the nation to celebrate President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's birthday. The motivation for these "Birthday Balls," as they were called, was to raise money for the conquest of polio. President Roosevelt addressed the participants on a nationwide radio hookup, saying that he was speaking not so much as the President, but "more as the representative on this occasion of the hundreds of thousands of crippled children in our country."

Most of the more than $1 million raised by the balls went to create an endowment for the Warm Springs rehabilitation facility which Roosevelt had created in Georgia. In the following year, the proceeds from the Birthday Balls were spent differently—70% of the proceeds went to provide care and treatment for crippled Americans in the communities where the money had been raised. The other 30% was used for medical research to develop prevention and immunization against polio.

The story of how FDR created the conditions for the conquest of polio begins in 1921, when he was stricken with infantile paralysis. After the critical phase had passed, Roosevelt began an extensive correspondence with polio victims across America, and with the doctors treating them, a practice he continued throughout the rest of his life. At first, he was seeking advice and exchanging ideas, but gradually through his work at Warm Springs he became an innovator in rehabilitative medicine, and was providing advice to others.

Roosevelt first learned of Warm Springs in a letter from his friend George Foster Peabody, who was the co-owner of a run-down hotel there, a resort which had seen its heyday before the Civil War. Peabody told FDR about a young man, Lewis Joseph, who had been confined to a wheelchair by a serious childhood case of polio. But after Lewis swam in the mineral-rich, 88-degree waters of Warm Springs, he was able to abandon the wheelchair and walk with the aid of two canes.

Roosevelt, who had tried every possible available remedy for polio, to no avail, travelled to Georgia, and met with Lewis. FDR found that the buoyant water would hold him up so that he could actually walk in the pool and exercise for up to two hours. He set up residence in a cottage at Warm Springs, and when the Atlanta Journal learned of the former Vice Presidential candidate's presence at Warm Springs, it sent a reporter there to do a story. The article he wrote for the paper's Sunday magazine of Oct. 26, 1924, was entitled "Franklin D. Roosevelt Will Swim to Health," and was syndicated nationwide. Soon letters from polio sufferers poured into Warm Springs, and ten patients arrived at the train station unannounced.

The aging inn and cottages at Warm Springs were designed as a resort, not a medical facility, but Roosevelt threw himself, crippled as he was, into the task of organizing a transformation. Patients were boarded with the townspeople until repairs were made to the cottages and inn. FDR planned exercise sessions in the pool, and led them himself. By the summer of 1925, there were more than 25 patients at Warm Springs.

Roosevelt had ramps built into the old inn, supervised the repair of cottages, and designed a treatment table 12 inches below the surface of the pool, which became the model for the standard equipment of all water therapy. He also worked closely with the patients to create exercises and treatment procedures. In that process, he drew up a muscle chart which he used to test the patients' muscle strength on a regular basis, in order to record any gain or loss of strength from a particular therapy. The patients jokingly called him "Doctor Roosevelt." The appellation stuck, and reporters during the 1930s called FDR "Doctor New Deal," while during World War II, he was described as "Doctor Win-the-War."

In the spring of 1926, Roosevelt paid $200,000, more than two-thirds of his personal fortune, for the purchase of the Warm Springs Resort. He had planned to finance the rehabilitation side of Warm Springs by attracting wealthy vacationers to its resort. But the inn's healthy patrons complained constantly about having to share the pool or dine with the polio victims. So, in February of 1927, FDR, and his friend and law partner Basil O'Connor, established the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation as a nonprofit permanent institution which could accept charitable contributions. The Foundation bought Warm Springs from Franklin Roosevelt for a one-dollar demand note, and the vacationers at the inn were sent packing.

Roosevelt then brought in an orthopedic specialist from the New York Department of Health to be the resident physician, along with a trained physical therapist. When the doctor's report showed that all 23 polio cases had shown marked improvement, the American Orthopedic Association, which at first had rebuffed Roosevelt, endorsed "the establishment of a permanent hydrotherapeutic center at Warm Springs."

Money now had to be raised for the center, especially to support patients who could not afford the treatment, even though it was given at cost. Roosevelt stated that he "wouldn't want anyone to be sent away for lack of money." A fundraising brochure was produced, which contained a description of what made Warm Springs so different: "To the special methods of treatment must be added the psychological effect of the group treatment, the stimulus caused by a number of people pursuing the same end, and each spurring the other on to more and better effort."

Because of the prejudice against polio sufferers and crippled people in general during the 1920s, most victims had been isolated, shut up in back bedrooms, or left languishing in grim "hospitals for the crippled." When they came to Warm Springs, fun, laughter. and companionship often worked magic on them, and increased their ability to function. The classes on using muscles for everyday practical activities were usually the occasion for much laughter, since severe paralysis can cause absurd predicaments and everyone could recognize themselves in their fellow-patients' difficulties.

As the Foundation's reputation grew, physical therapists from across the nation applied for admission to its training programs. The brace shop also acquired a national reputation for excellence and innovation in prosthetic devices. Many of the staff members published articles in professional medical journals. The physical plant grew as FDR called in architect Henry Toombs, and together they drew up a master plan for the next 20 years.

When Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York in 1928, he was able to spend much less time at Warm Springs, but he consulted frequently with O'Connor and maintained his fight to gain competent treatment for the paralyzed. His 1929 message to the New York Legislature contained a startling proposal: "I conceive it to be the duty of the State to give the same care to removing the physical handicaps of its citizens as it now gives to their mental development. Universal education of the mind is, after all, a modern conception. We have reached the time now when we must recognize the same obligation of the State to restore to useful activity those children and adults who have the misfortune to be crippled."

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Feature:

Berlin Seminar Promotes a New Westphalia Treaty
by EIR Staff
An international EIR seminar of political figures, economists, military, strategic analysts, regional experts, and intellectuals, was convened in Berlin on Jan. 12-13, to discuss the current strategic, economic-financial, and cultural world crisis and the perspectives for solving it through concerted international action for a 'New Treaty of Westphalia.'

In Commemoration of The Tsunami Victims
This statement was proposed to the seminar by Dr. M.K. Saini from New Delhi.


Strategic Studies:

Hersh Expose´ Hits Cheney Cabal Like Political Tsunami
by Jeffrey Steinberg
The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal that runs the Bush Administration's military and national security agenda, was hit with the political equivalent of a tsunami on Jan. 17, with the publication of a story by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the Jan. 24-31 issue of The New Yorker. Hersh revealed that the Administration is working on plans to launch missile and commando attacks against as many as three dozen of Iran's suspected nuclear and chemical weapons facilities, perhaps as early asSummer 2005.


Economics:

Battle Over Social Security Could Make Bush a Retiree
by Paul Gallagher
Well before the President was inaugurated on Jan. 20, the Bush White House was geared up for a new, all-out election-style campaign with a new opponent—the Social Security system and the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since a Dec. 6 'roll-out' of Bush's intention to change Social Security old-age and disability insurance, into a system of private retirement accounts invested in Wall Street stock and bond funds, the President's chief priority and focus has been on this campaign. His Cabinet members and chief aides have been publicly deployed to push it. The impulsion is coming from Wall Street, faced with a dollar crash and urgently looking for a new source of cash to meet the $2 billion/day flow now needed into the U.S. debt-and-deficit bubble.

Cato Institute: Predatory Clique Leads the Attack on Social Security
by Richard Freeman
No organization is more responsible for the forced-march drive to privatize Social Security—stealing trillions of dollars of its funds for Wall Street accounts—than the Cato Institute, a multi-million dollar Washington, D.C. think tank. During the past 20 years, Cato has had more than a quarter of a billion dollars lavished on it in contributions by the most powerful Wall Street banks, and largest right-wing think tanks—led by the ultra-right-wing Koch group of foundations. Cato has spent this money on a host of projects intended to destroy the sovereign nation-state and implement fascist economic austerity. But the lion's share has gone into the privatization of Social Security.

Don't Reform Maastricht: Dump It!
Report From Germany
by Rainer Apel
European leaders have to finally abandon the nation-killing straitjacket of the Maastricht Treaty.
On Jan. 17, the finance ministers of
the Eurozone Group, which includes 12 European Union members, held their routine session the day before the meeting of all 25EUfinance ministers, in Brussels. It was expected that the sub-group around France and Germany would have the upper hand, with its call for a 'reform' of the Maastricht Treaty's budgetary straitjacket, and that this would have its impact on the all-ministers meeting on Jan. 18. What was not generally expected, was a defense of Germany's national interests by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, published in an op-ed on Jan. 17 in the German-language edition of the Financial Times.


International:

Resistance Flares Worldwide To Bush's New Round of Wars
by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach
Days before George W. Bush's second inaugural speech, a political shot was fired against the neo-con agenda, which ricocheted around the world from the pages of the New Yorker magazine. Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who was the first to reveal the Abu Ghraib prison torture, published a devastating expose´ Jan. 17 of what the second Bush Administration plans to do—or is already doing—to continue its 'permanent-war' strategy.

Taras Vasilyevich Muranivsky and America
by Rachel Douglas
On Feb. 2, 2005, Prof. Taras V. Muranivsky would have turned 70. Our friend and colleague Profesor Muranivsky died on July 17, 2000. The work he did, as leader of the LaRouche movement in Russia during the 1990s, still reverberates, in the urgent discussions of a new monetary system and Eurasian development, conducted by Lyndon LaRouche with leading intellectuals and political fighters from Russia, Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. To honor the 70th anniversary of Taras's birth, we present here the message from Rachel Douglas of EIR and the LaRouche movement in the United States, delivered at a memorial meeting held in Moscow in the Autumn of 2000.

Pakistani Cauldron Bubbles Over
by Ramtanu Maitra
Despite accommodating all of Washington's demands to help the United States to fight its war on terrorism, Pakistan's President-cum-Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is not sleeping well. With two assassination attempts, and the suspected assassin, a junior Air Force officer, having 'escaped' from his Pakistani prison, President Musharraf is now virtually living in a bunker. Meanwhile, tribesmen along the Pakistan-Afghanistan borders are at war with the Pakistani Army, the gas fields are under attack by the Baloch tribes, and in the Northern Territories, where Pakistan meets Afghanistan, China, and the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, Wahabi and Sunni militants are baying for Shi'ite Ismaili blood.

Australia Dossier:
Australian Released from Guanta´namo
by Andrew Reed
Mamdouh Habib was tortured by the United States with complicity of the Australian government.
Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib will soon be released from the notorious Camp Delta in Guanta´namo Bay, Cuba, after languishing there without charges for over two and a half years. He was being held as an 'unlawful enemy combatant,' accused of training with al-Qaeda, and assisting with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.


National:

Interview: Scott Horton
Bush Team Revives Nazi Legal Ruses, Rejected at Nuremberg
by Edward Spannaus
Scott Horton is chair of the Committee on International Law of the Bar Association of the City of New York and lecturer in international humanitarian law at Columbia University. During 2002 and early 2003, when civilian lawyers in the Pentagon, working with White House laywers such as Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, and Justice Department lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, were developing policy positions declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the Afghanistan conflict, and were loosening restrictions on methods of interrogation so as to violate U.S. military law, Horton was contacted by top lawyers in the military services who opposed these new policies, but whose voices were not being heeded.

Helmuth James von Moltke
Resistance Against Hitler's War Crimes
by Gabriele Liebig
The systematic disregard for international law reflected in the treatment meted out to Iraqi and Afghani prisoners of war by American personnel, both civil and military, has been compared with Hitler's 1941 'Commissar Order' and 'Barbarossa Edict' [see interview with Scott Horton, above]. But just as American military and retired military figures, as well as State Department officials, opposed the abuses and war crimes from the outset of the Iraq War, and are becoming increasingly outspoken today, so during World War II, Helmuth James, Count von Moltke, a key figure in the German resistance, did everything in his power, from his post in the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), to prevent war crimes. Von Moltke also led the Kreisauer Circle in the resistance to Hitler.

Dems Put Hold on Nomination As Gonzales Stonewalls
by Edward Spannaus
In the face of continued, flagrant stonewalling by Attorney General-nominee Alberto Gonzales, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee put a 'hold' on his nomination on Jan. 19, forcing at least a one-week delay in the committee vote. The White House had hoped to have both Gonzales and Secretary of State-nominee Condoleezza Rice confirmed by the full Senate on the afternoon of Jan. 20, immediately following the swearing-in of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The White House was reported to be furious that its two most important Cabinet nominations were stalled.

  • From the Congress
    Dems to Ashcroft: Probe Ohio Vote Suppression
    The House Judiciary Committee, of which John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) is the ranking member, sent this letter on Jan. 14 to Attorney General John Ashcroft. It requests the naming of a special counsel to investigate the numerous documented cases of misconduct as the election was carried out in Ohio. Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell was reponsible for administering the election, and was at the same time the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney Campaign in Ohio.

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