From Volume 1, Issue Number 38 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published November 25, 2002

THIS WEEK YOU NEED TO KNOW

U.S. Congress Tells 1 Million Americans: Go to Hell! - - LaRouche Calls for Emergency Town Meetings on Super-TVA

On Friday, Nov. 22, the United States Congress fled Washington, leaving behind a "Go to Hell" Christmas message to more than 1 million Americans, who will be cut off unemployment benefits on Dec. 28—simply because the Bush Administration and both the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, failed to reach an agreement on legislative language to renew the unemployment benefits extension that they passed earlier in the year. Representative Dick Armey (R-Texas), the outgoing House Majority Leader, who will not be returning to Congress in January, summarized the "screw you" attitude, telling the Washington Post on Saturday, Nov. 23, that the cutoff of a million Americans from any source of income in the midst of the Christmas holiday season was no big deal: The new Congress would restore the extension sometime after convening in January.

First of all, Armey was lying through his teeth. Just days before Congress abandoned their posts in the midst of the gravest economic crisis in more than a generation—without even passing a single non-defense-related departmental budget—the Federal government announced that the monthly budget deficit for October 2002 had reached $54 billion! October was the first month of the new fiscal year! Factor out the $4 billion in October deposits in the Social Security Trust Fund, which was counted in the Federal government revenues in the "unified federal budget," and the real one-month deficit for October was over $58 billion! Even the most conservative estimates are that the FY2003 Federal deficit will soar past the $500-billion mark. Projections are also that the deficit in trade in physical goods for FY2003 will surpass $400 billion. Even Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has recently fretted that this situation is totally untenable.

The Federal government is broke. At least 46 of 50 states are bankrupt. State legislatures all over the country are being called back into special session, to come up with ways to cut social services, hike taxes, and take other suicidal measures. California Governor Gray Davis, for example, is convening a special session of the legislature on Dec. 9—to devise even more draconian austerity cuts to cope with a state budget deficit that has surpassed $21 billion.

Typical of the suicidal clinging to wrong axiomatic assumptions is the announcement by Davis aides that the Governor will postpone, indefinitely, any implementation of the statewide high-speed rail project that he had advocated during his re-election campaign.

Under these conditions, it should be obvious that there is no alternative to the recent call by Lyndon LaRouche for the creation of a "Super-TVA" to dispense long-term, low-interest Federal government-backed credits to kickstart a massive infrastructure recovery program—starting with the rail and air transportation systems, which are on the verge of bankruptcy collapse. This is a crisis that no sane citizen can turn his or her back on. The solutions exist, but only if there is a full realization that all of the fundamental policy assumptions of the past 30 years—starting with deregulation—have got to be trashed.

Some senior figures in Washington are speculating that the present, bankrupt Democratic Party leadership could "pull a Goldwater," and virtually throw the 2004 elections, with the idea of saddling Bush and the Republicans with a bottomless depression so the Dems can stage a 2008 comeback! This kind of institutional cowardice just won't cut it. We are rapidly approaching the moment of decision, when the American people wake up to the fact that they have been robbed by their elected representatives in Washington. Perhaps the Dec. 28 unemployment insurance cutoffs will provide the trigger. Perhaps the morphed consumer credit and home mortgage bubbles will explode, triggering mass household bankruptcies.

It is in this context—of widespread flight from reality on the part of many elected officials—that Lyndon LaRouche has called on his LaRouche in 2004 campaign organization to convene emergency town meetings all over the country, to take up the issue of infrastructure and re-regulation, wherever the opportunity presents itself.

On the LaRouche Show on Saturday afternoon, Nov. 23, broadcast live over the Internet, Dr. Debra Freeman, LaRouche campaign national spokeswoman, spoke bluntly about LaRouche's "Super-TVA" call. "Although it has precedent in U.S. history, in some of the policies of FDR," she declared, "in order for us to enact Mr. LaRouche's proposal, we are going to have to reverse deregulation, the crazy budget caps, and the entire balanced budget mentality. It requires a dramatic shift ... the most dramatic shift that we have seen, perhaps, since the American Revolution. This shift is 30 years overdue." She concluded, "We have to move now.... I don't want to even see what winter is going to be like in the United States, with these 46 out of 50 states in fiscal crisis, and I am not even sure about the other four states."