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From Volume 3, Issue Number 51 of EIR Online, Published Dec. 21, 2004

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This Week You Need To Know

WE'VE GOT THEM DEAD TO RIGHTS STEALING THE VOTE, STEALING SOCIAL SECURITY, AND NOW WE'VE GOT TO GET OUT AND MOBILIZE

Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed on Dec. 16, by "Front Street" hosts Charles Traylor, Wendy Huntley, and Bob Fitrakis on Columbus, Ohio station WVKO 1580AM/103.1FM.

CHARLES TRAYLOR: And, we're back with "Front Street on the News" 1580 WVKO. This is Charles Traylor.

WENDY HUNTLEY: And this Wendy Huntley.

TRAYLOR: And Dr. Bob Fitrakis has stayed over with us.

We have on our live line, former Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. And he is the CEO and President of LaRouchePAC.com. Good morning, Mr. LaRouche.

LYNDON LAROUCHE: Good morning.

TRAYLOR: How're you doing today?

LAROUCHE: Well pretty good; glad to be back with you guys.

TRAYLOR: Well, we're glad to have you back with us. And we wanted to talk a little bit about Bush adopting the Pinochet plan to steal your Social Security, and we're going to let Dr. Bob Fitrakis, in the interest of his time, start off.

BOB FITRAKIS: Mr. LaRouche, is there a tie-in between what now they're acknowledging in Franklin County here—that is, massive voter suppression of poor people, African-Americans; you know, the shorting of machines—a deliberate attack upon the voting rights of poor and minority people in Franklin County, and what now appears to be an economic attack on people's Social Security?

LAROUCHE: Well, the point is, if you were going to do this—or try to do it, that is, to bring the Pinochet Plan, which is, of course now failing in Chile after the 20-odd years it's been in effect, it would fail here. But, the point was, if you wanted to do this and some other things, you had to have a Bush re-election. Without a Bush re-election, there wouldn't be a chance, at all, of pushing this thing through.

Now, the entire financial system is collapsing. We're on the verge of a collapse, any time now, for a major financial blow-out of the U.S. and the international markets. At this point, they're counting on looting Social Security, or having a proof that they can loot Social Security, as a way of putting more capital into a depressed U.S. financial market, to try to bail out the gambling side of the financial-market system.

Now, George Shultz and company, of course, who was one of the original authors of the Pinochet operation down there, is also behind the Bush campaign. And he typifies these big interests, which are behind both.

They had to commit a fraud to get elected.

FITRAKIS: So, you're not buying the—. We've just submitted expert testimony from a University of Illinois Chicago statistician, saying, the odds that these exit polls in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were wrong, are in the order of 155 million to 1.

LAROUCHE: Yeah, sure!

FITRAKIS: That doesn't surprise you.

LAROUCHE: No. Not at all. Because we knew from the New Hampshire campaign, when I was campaigning up in New Hampshire, we talked to a lot of people there: We looked at the various options, looking back to Florida and to see what could be done four years later. We looked at voting machine options. We saw that you have people running voting machines—as in Ohio—are part of the Republican power apparatus. And they were involved—and identified—as monkeying with the machine after the election, to change the polling results.

So, this kind of thing we expected. That's why I said to the Democratic Party: We have to go for a massive turnout, a landslide victory, because we're going to have to overwhelm a great fraud. And the only way to deal with a fraud like this effectively, front-on, is to overwhelm it with a landslide vote.

Unfortunately, we got on too late. I still believe that Kerry probably won the vote.

But, the point is, we're going to have to fight. So, my point is: Okay, we've got them dead to rights on violations of federal law, on Voting Rights Act violations, which are a five-year sentence minimum for getting caught at that. And this opens the door to looking at the entirety of the election, because if they were using these tactics, then the question is, how far do these tactics go?

But, the issue here, the typical issue, right now, up front—and George Bush has made it very clear it's up front—the Chilean model of privatization of Social Security is the Bush model. I don't know what he understands, but I do know what George Shultz understands.

TRAYLOR: And Mr. LaRouche, Manuel Riesco, director of the Center for Alternative National Development [CENDA], in a January 2004 study documented that Chile's private pension funds are the most protected industry in Chile's history. And after a quarter-century trial of the privatized pension system, there's now a consensus in Chile among the government, the private pension funds, and think tanks like the CENDA, and the World Bank, that at least one-half of the population in Chile can never accumulate sufficient capital to earn even the minimum pension of $100 a month under this system.

Now, compare that to the United States, 25 years later up under this plan, if Bush is allowed to implement it?

LAROUCHE: It won't be 25 years later. It'll be much quicker. This was now done in 1981. That is, Pinochet came in '73-'75; he was part of Operation Condor, this mass-murder operation through the Southern Cone of South America. This was done by the "Chicago Boys," that is, the banking side was the Chicago Boys, of which George Shultz was a key man. And George Shultz is the man who was the architect of the George W. Bush Administration. He's the guy who brought Condoleezza Rice into the picture. He's the one that was behind Cheney, and Cheney organized the composition of the initial current Bush Administration. This is the combination. It's the same bunch of guys.

There's also another story behind this, you know: Back in the 1970s—and it's now been exposed since 1990, but it's coming out big now. There'll be books on this published in February and so forth. But, leftovers of the old Nazi system were brought into the European and U.S. security system. Elements of this, of the old Nazi apparatus were run down into South America, into Mexico, into Argentina, into Chile, elsewhere. They were run down there on what was called the "ratline" operation. They have been used, like this Della Chiaie case and so forth, they have been used as mass murderers—that is, as special hit-men—used throughout the region: They're the ones that killed the thousands of people to consolidate, in Chile in particular, to consolidate the regime down there.

We now have an explosion, on the issue of this hit-man problem, of the Nazi hit-men, and their successors today.

This swindle on stealing Social Security funds, which is worldwide: It's not only in Chile; it's in Peru, under attack; Mexico; the United States; in Germany, the welfare system is under attack under Hartz IV; under the current Finance Minister of France, Sarkozy, it's also under attack. So, we have a worldwide onslaught by bankrupt banking-system people, to try to grab the very large social welfare funds of governments, now. And the United States is one of the parts. And the Bush candidacy and the election, very much involved—as Bush has made clear—that his immediate, number-one target, after winning an election, was to steal Social Security.

FITRAKIS: I'm wondering if you'd be willing to comment at all upon the tragic death of Gary Webb, who, again, exposed that operation, the large amount of cocaine coming to the United States, and the role of the U.S. government.

LAROUCHE: I have to be careful, because what I say, if I say it's so, I say it because I know it. What I do know, is that environmentally, that is the kind of thing that goes on. I do know a lot about drugs. I do know a lot about the drug network on South America and Central America. I do know about the interrelationship between people like—remember you had Nestor Sanchez, who was detailed from the CIA, to run hit squads, death squads as a part of the same operation that was done in South America, the same crowd: These guys were funded, largely, through drug operations. And in the United States and elsewhere, people who were opposed to these drug operations, and the murder operations that went with them, were killed.

Like the former chief of staff of Chile, was killed abroad, by a bomb, to clear the way for eliminating a rival influence to Pinochet. These kinds of things have gone on, in the United States, here in Washington, D.C., the same thing.

FITRAKIS: It looked like Mr. Webb—anyone who raises the issue, say of BCCI, the ties of al-Qaeda to the Bush family, to drug running, or Gary Webb who points these things out, these people are viciously, viciously attacked, despite the fact that they have massive documentation from government records.

LAROUCHE: I know. Well, I've been a victim, a target of that, you know. I went after drugs and a few other things. And the thing they hated me the most for, was the SDI. They really came to kill me on that one! But, I had some friends in the government at the time, so they didn't succeed in killing me. They stuck me in prison, instead. And they told my friends in government, "If he gets off on these charges, phony as they may be, we're going to kill him!" So, my friends in government didn't help me too much at that point.

But, no, I've been in there. That is the reality. People do not realize; there's a book coming out in February, from Switzerland, which documents from the Swiss standpoint, from their intelligence work on the extent of this thing: We don't realize, in the United States, the degree of high-level assassination run by former Nazi organizations and similar people, which are run all the time, all over the world, and have been through most of the post-war period up to the present time.

So, murder is not something by exception, political murder. The political murder machine is out there. It's out there—anyone who does what I do, is a target of that, any time these guys tend to decide to go that way. And they tried on me several times. They missed, for various reasons each time. But, they came—and we fended them off.

Some people were not as alert as I was, and didn't have as many friends, perhaps, as I did. But you have the case—all over the world, the same thing: It's the same murder apparatus. And, in each case, you don't know, until you investigate it. But, in the whole pattern of cases, you know who the people are who do it—I know the organization that does this sort of thing, I know how it's put together. I know they do it. I know that the criminal is them. Which part of their criminal did it, I don't always know. But, I know they were targetted by this bunch of guys.

And George Shultz is a finger-man for this.

TRAYLOR: Yes sir.

Mr. LaRouche, in your article, you cite the Pinochet Plan, and you outline it, as taking your Social Security payment, giving it financial managers and banks, and then letting those bankers manage the funds, taking 25% off the top and then making profits of 50% and up. And they lose "your money in the market, leaving you dependent upon a pittance or welfare."

And you say, how long would it take, if this implemented, for the Americans to feel this?

LAROUCHE: Well, it would go two ways. The first step, they get the foot in the door. What you described is the very minimal part, of the tip of the shoe in the door.

Now, what happens is: As I said, you've got not only the attack on Peru on the same thing; you've got a similar attack going on against Mexico; you've got an attack on France, with the reform which is coming through the Finance Minister Sarkozy, there. You have an attack on Germany, Hartz IV, to strip away the general welfare, the equivalent of Social Security in Germany. This is going around the world.

Now, what happens is this: If the Bush Administration succeeds in ramming this and related measures through, we no longer have a government that the people of the United States control. We will then be under a fascist-style of dictatorship.

Once they have their foot in the door, by getting the first leg on this Social Security control, they will go all the way. Because, why? We're now faced with a collapse of the U.S. dollar, U.S. currency, in the order of trillions, right now.

TRAYLOR: Well, George Bush says he supports the dollar.

LAROUCHE: Well, he can't support the dollar—he can not support the dollar. Not under the present circumstances. Why? Because it takes $2 billion, coming in every day, from outside the United States, to keep the U.S. dollar from collapsing—and it is collapsing!

Now, that money is beginning to dry up.

What they need the Social Security funds for now, is to try to put a stimulus into the financial market, through multiple—just to build up the market, the financial market: Because they know that very soon, there is going to be a real avalanche, that's going to hit the U.S. financial market. That's inevitable. They want to steal Social Security—they're going to steal all of it; not some of it. What they're talking about is the shoe in the front door, but they intend to put the whole foot in.

TRAYLOR: Wow.

LAROUCHE: Once they get the first step, then you will see, as they did with the Iraq War, get the first step, get in there, and the whole thing comes.

We are now not just over an issue of welfare. We are fighting over a welfare issue. Just as the welfare issue was the issue, which was key in Europe when Mussolini and Hitler came to power: We're faced with a threat of dictatorship. And if we can not mobilize political resources, especially in the United States, to stop this thing now, we will have given up our Constitution and our rights. And when these guys come after us, they're going to come all the way: Because, they are faced with a broken-down system, and they're going to go for a dictatorship.

FITRAKIS: Yeah, those are chilling, chilling words. And, again, this looks like a run-up. I'm worried, that there's been talk—is that, essentially when you go after Social Security, you're going after working class people's public pension—but, there's also been talk about rolling, say, the state teachers' retirement systems into Social Security. And that would be an out and out attack on middle-class, upper-middle-class professional. Would they be that bold?

LAROUCHE: Absolutely. These guys are hungry.

Look at this guy, Schwarzenegger. Whose father was a Nazi official, in Austria.

FITRAKIS: SA member!

LAROUCHE: Well, he actually joined the Nazi Party right after the Anschluss, the father did.

FITRAKIS: Yeah, and he was a brownshirt, as I recall. He actually joined the SA.

LAROUCHE: Well, he actually came out of the police section of the Nazi Party, and he functioned in Eastern Europe as one of these clean-up squads for cleaning up political opposition, eliminating political opposition—by best methods. Now, Schwarzenegger is that. Now, Schwarzenegger has been picked up, by George Shultz and company.

Look at what Schwarzenegger is doing in California—just pull the record on him, what he's done since he's gotten in there, and what he's now trying do to: Schwarzenegger is trying to carry out Hitler's program in the United States. And he's trying to do it in California. And a lot of people are backing him for President. George Shultz is behind him: The George Shultz who was involved in the operations in Chile, back in the 1970s, and in many other things, including the architecture of the Bush Administration.

So, you have the picture. These guys, what they're doing to union organizations, to public institutions—in California now, under Schwarzenegger—is typical of what they intend to do all over the country. If they get the power to do so—and this is the test case, the Social Security question—if they get the power to do so, they're going to go for everything.

FITRAKIS: Let me ask you one contrast question. They're talking about a Constitutional amendment—and I got to leave after this question—a Constitutional amendment, to allow Mr. Schwarzenegger to run for President. On the other hand, we still don't have a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing every American citizen the right to vote. We essentially have a Jim Crow, 21st-Century, high-tech state system, which allows a J. Kenneth Blackwell to suppress, blatantly suppress the vote in Ohio.

How can we, politically, allow this to happen? I mean, isn't there a huge contrast between what is really needed—a guaranteed Constitutional right for all Americans to vote—versus this bogus amendment to allow Schwarzenegger to take over the country?

LAROUCHE: It's a matter of political power. What we need is two things: You need the Democratic Party to stop playing the fool. And I think during the recent elections, the last phase, we did that. The Kerry campaign, in the last two months, was a real serious operation. But, it carried the baggage of all the mistakes the Democratic Party had been making for decades before then. Clinton is sort of deceptive, because he is actually—"he's a natural" shall we say. Once he got in, with the help with a third party ticket, he proved himself to be one of the best vote-getters the United States ever had. And he's a very sharp guy. He does go for tactics, quicker than policy, and that was a weakness when he was President.

But, that deceived us, because, underneath that, the Democratic Party was going rotten—particularly, when they went to this idea of the middle, of concentrating on the suburban vote. Now, when you go on the suburban vote, what you're talking about is, as you see, this population—we used to have an upper 20% of family-income brackets, that was a minority of the total national income of families. Since 1977, the lower 80%, today, gets less income than the upper 20% of the total national share.

So, what you've got, is a process under way, where the Democratic Party, with the idea of the suburban vote, the limited approach, has gone away from the constituencies in the lower 80% of family-income brackets. We don't have a party organization which is structured to have an organized representation of the lower 80%, in the party. This includes people of African descent, people of Hispanic descent, and a lot of other people—just, plain poor people, farmers, and so forth. They do not have any organizational position inside the Democratic Party, where they are participating in controlling the deliberations of policy, within the party mechanism. We no longer have a Franklin Roosevelt Democratic Party.

And when you don't have a political party system—we have good Republicans, too. But, if you don't have a good party system, under which the people are actually represented, then, who is going to interpret the law, if you pass it? Who is going to interpret the Constitution, even if you get the right terms in?

HUNTLEY: Right.

LAROUCHE: It's going to be those who are in power, who control the political process.

Therefore, our problem has been, we have not been mobilized. We have not been mobilized to demand our rights to have representation in our political parties; to be a functioning part of the deliberation process, not simply people who are invited to vote, and turn out for rallies. But, who are actually part, who could put the issues on the table, have them deliberated, not single-issue kind of distractions.

And therefore, without a political system, which enforces the intent of the Constitution, the Constitution doesn't really mean too much, nor does any law you pass.

HUNTLEY: Mr. LaRouche, in light of this, the picture that's been painted, what can we do? I mean, what can the average American do, who is listening to this, and who is concerned about the direction in which this administration is moving?

LAROUCHE: Well, you see what John Conyers has been doing. John Conyers has been playing a key role, and naturally, I'm fully supporting what he's up to. He's in a key position. Bill Clinton is also working, in his own way, on this one. The Kerry people are doing their part—seriously—despite what people suspect and argue, and so forth. I know what they're doing on these issues. They're on the issues seriously.

What we're doing is, we're taking the best part of the people who were brought together around the fight against Bush in recent years, especially those who organized in the last 60 days of the campaign for the Presidential election. These forces must move. What I've done, is laid out this program. Other people have adopted it—the same thing.

I said: Take the Voting Rights Act violations. That is a crime. That's a five-year federal sentence, to be caught doing that crime! Whereas simple vote fraud is more difficult to deal with. But: If you go at the criminal violations, which are federal criminal violations, in terms of election tampering and in terms of Voting Rights Act frauds, then you open up the whole area, you have to investigate the whole territory, in which these crimes have been committed—which means the entire question of the vote fraud is now looked at, from that standpoint, not on a state-by-state "would you have won the election, or not?" which is tough fight.

Then you go with the hottest issue we have: This nutty President is out to steal the Social Security of the American people. Not just a few poor people. We're talking about the majority of the American people will be looted by this thing—and many will be killed by it. When you combine this with the effect on the health care situation, people will be murdered, by this kind of policy.

If we combine these issues, which involve the intent of the American people to vote for a government—do they want a government that kills them?

"Well, I voted Republican!"

"Did you vote for them to kill you?"

"No, I didn't do that!"

"Well! Let's take a look at this thing, then. Maybe we can do something about it."

You have to get at this way. You have to get it with brass knuckles, on issues. You have to get out and fight—not namby-pamby, not maybe-so, not this, not this doubletalk. And get out there and mobilize the people.

The problem is, we have not been giving the people leadership. Now, as you know, small people who don't have much power, are not going get out there and fight, generally. They're going to look for leadership. And they do not trust the people who are their leaders.

We have to, who are willing to lead, we have to prove to them, that they have leaders that they can trust.

HUNTLEY: Well, I know we're wrapping up, we only have a minute or two left, but let me ask this question: We know that the Social Security system, as it currently exists, can not continue and provide any success. We're looking at the proposed recommendation of the Bush Administration, and we're saying, "That's not going to work." What do you think could work?

LAROUCHE: Oh, the Social Security system is not in the danger that that's being alleged.

TRAYLOR: Okay—

LAROUCHE: All right, we've had, in the recent period, we've had a big, big inflation, as I think all of us know. If you just look at grocery bills for the same items over the past ten years, you get a pretty good idea, there's a lot of inflation going on.

Now, in the Social Security tax withholding, there's a cap on that, which is 80-odd thousand dollars. Beyond that point, you're not taxed on your Social Security revenue. If we lift that cap, to the degree that we compensate for the inflation which has occurred since the last time that cap was defined, we would find that the flow of funds is quite adequate to ensure the integrity of Social Security for the period ahead. If you want to talk about 10 years ahead, or 15 years ahead, similar adjustments can be made over time, to deal with that.

Social Security is not in danger. Social Security is in danger of negligence or rape, one of the two.

TRAYLOR: With that, Mr. LaRouche, we're all out of time. We want to really thank you for bringing this stark reality to our listeners about the state of Social Security. And I echo your comments that we can't be namby-pamby, that we have to really get up, stand up, and act up, and act out, if we really want to take this government back from the dictator coup d'etat, that we are up under.

LAROUCHE: Absolutely.

TRAYLOR: Thank you.

LAROUCHE: Thank you. Thank you, all.

TRAYLOR: We're going to take a break folks, we're going to right back with more Front Street. And we're take your calls or comments, if you have anything you have to say about the interview you just heard with Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, former Democratic Presidential candidate.

Latest From LaRouche

'EMPOWERMENT RADIO' QUESTIONS LAROUCHE - - ON 'CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN'

Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed on Dec. 3, 2004, by Dallas/Ft. Worth station KNON's "Empowerment Radio" program, hosted by Tunde Obazee. The program is nationally syndicated, and the taped interview was scheduled to air on KNON 89.3 FM on Dec. 13, as well as by webcast at www.knon.org.

Q: KNON, this is Tunde.

LYNDON LAROUCHE: This is Lyndon LaRouche speaking.

Q: Good morning, sir. How are you doing?

LAROUCHE: Pretty good, for an old geezer.

Q: I want to thank you for joining us on Empowerment Radio on KNON, 89.3 FM, Dallas/Ft. Worth.

LAROUCHE: Great.

Q: Yes. And, you've been a hot subject for the longest time now. You ran for the Presidency of the United States about eight times now; and you're still just the hottest topic in town.

Our topic today—we're going to start with the globalization, WTO, and IMF. And I was also reading about the young man, who actually wrote a book about the Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

What is your position on globalization, to start with?

LAROUCHE: Well, globalization is really a new name for imperialism. It's an attempt, specifically, to return to the kind of imperialism which existed in Europe between about 1000 A.D. and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 15th Century. It was the system that fell apart, what was called the New Dark Age, of the 14th Century.

And this is what it is today: It's an attempt to eliminate the sovereign nation-state. We're destroying the economies of our own country; we're destroying the economies of the world. We're turning people back into slavery by means of the so-called "cheapest price" formula. And we're looting people, by getting them into debt, and then sucking their blood to get them to pay for the debt.

So, this thing is actually a crime against humanity. It is not a policy. It's criminal policy—a crime against humanity, under moral law.

Q: Interesting. But, we have the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, and all: What is the part that the World Trade Organization had to play in this?

LAROUCHE: The World Trade Organization has actually become an instrument, for the promotion of globalization.

See, the essential thing here, is that people who believe in the policies which are associated with the World Trade Organization, don't understand the ABCs of economics. For example, let's take one case I use often: Today, in the United States, if we wanted to set a standard for the development of our people, through education, we would say that we have to provide the equivalent of a professional level of education, for which the target would be the age of 25 graduating from university as a professionally qualified person, at the age of 25. That's the kind of role that the citizen of the United States, for example, must play in the world to do our job, and to do things we must do for other nations.

So therefore, that means we have to invest—for 25 years, we have to invest in the child and the growing young adult. That's an investment of 25 years: That's a capital investment. It's a physical capital investment, but it has a financial complement.

Similarly, if we have a machine tool, a factory, this involves an investment. The investment will have a life of 7 to 25 years. If we invest in a river system, a lock system on a river system, that has a physical life of about 40 years. If we invest in a power system, that has a physical life of about 35 to 40 years, depending upon the kind of system.

So therefore, the key thing is to ensure that we can afford to invest capital in people—25 years of developing a child; capital in public infrastructure that we need; and capital in means of production. Now, if we drive the price to the lowest level, then the price that would be paid would not be sufficient to cover the capital costs of doing that; and therefore, we would drive the person we want to have graduating as a professional, at the age of 25—which should be our objective today, as a social objective—

Q: But, well, we're not doing this.

LAROUCHE: No! We're not! But, we should be. But we have to be able to do that, if we're going to solve the problem.

We have people in Argentina, who are living as children by picking garbage! And this used to be the fourth-highest standard of living in the world, back in 1945. We've destroyed it, by these world trade policies.

We don't have industries in the United States. We're collapsing our industry. For example, we were campaigning in Cleveland—I wasn't there physically, but I was there with my people—and we went through the figures on Ohio: Ohio has been transformed from what was the leading state in the United States, as an agro-industrial state, into a poor state! And this has been done, in the past 14-15 years. And we did this, with globalization.

Q: This sounds like a very common sense issue! So, what do you think is the motive for this?

LAROUCHE: The motive is, that there are some very bad people in the world, who like the system that existed under so-called feudalism—that is, the medieval system. They want to go back to it! They don't like the nation-state. They don't like protectionism. They don't like people to have health care; they don't like people to have pensions. They want slaves! They want cheap labor. And they don't want any governments interfering with their power. They want to be above government.

Q: But, they aren't able, but at least the slave-master who hopes that his slave is healthy to do the work?

LAROUCHE: No. They don't care. You see that—look at that! Look at that. They don't care! You should see these people, as they ran society during the so-called medieval period in Europe. These people are actually—they're the same thing that we had in the 1920s, and 1930s, and early 1940s, in Europe: It's Nazism, fascism. These people are ideologues. And, don't judge them by whether the system will work, or not. They aren't concerned with whether it works or not. They're like lunatics. They want their way. And they're going to have their way, and they'd rather die than not have their way.

That's what Cheney represents. That's what George Shultz, who was the guy who sort of created Cheney, represents. The people who are behind this sort of thing, are actually the same kind of people that we fought against, when we fought Hitler during World War II.

Q: The World Trade Organization, you said, is just an instrument. But one would see, that probably the initial reasons for having the World Trade Organization, it sounds good. Why do you think it's an instrument of exploitation or of imperialism?

LAROUCHE: Well, that's because it's the usual thing with the con man. The con man comes in with a story, and sells it to people. He tells them things, that they think they will believe, that they think are beneficial. It's like the loan shark who comes in and helps you out, right? He's coming in like a real friendly guy. He's going to help you out. And what's he going to do? He's going to suck your blood! And that's the same thing the World Trade Organization is. The suckers bought the story. And the reality, and what they thought they were buying, are two different things.

Q: Hmm. International Monetary Fund: How are they different?

LAROUCHE: International Monetary Fund was originally created as an institution, by the United States government, with the concert of the United Nations. It was originally a good institution. It was based on providing a fixed exchange rate system for currencies, and promoting low-cost international loans among nations, for the development of the post-war world. Beginning about the middle of the 1960s, with the launching of the war in Indo-China, but especially under Nixon in 1971-72, we destroyed the so-called Bretton Woods System, and took the IMF system—which had been a product of the Bretton Woods system—and now we've made it something quite different. We made it a predatory organization: a floating-exchange-rate system.

And the transformation, for example, if you look below the borders, if you look at the condition, from Mexico on down to the tip of Cape Horn—you look at the condition of these countries, which admittedly were not in the best condition—but look at the condition they had then, the industries they had then, the standard of living they had then, and compare it with what they got today: We have sucked the blood of the countries of Central and South America, while at the same time, putting our own people into unemployment, by turning people in those parts of the world into virtual slaves to produce for Wal-Mart what we no longer produce for ourselves.

Q: Well, the average American who says, "How? We, Americans gets blamed for everything. How did that happen? How could America remote-control other nations, and actually virtually put those people to slavery?" Can you give me a typical example? You mentioned Argentina.

LAROUCHE: Well, you want to see something in our country. For example, take the case of the Confederacy. We had, from the 1820s until the end of the Civil War, we had a group in this country who were pro-slavery, and they controlled a certain number of states. Now, you look at the breakdown of the Republican vote as against the Democratic Party vote today, in the most recent election and in earlier elections: There's been a transformation since Nixon, of an anti-civil rights movement—since Nixon; and remember, the Nixon election was based on an anti-civil rights movement. Nixon met with the Klan in Biloxi, Mississippi, to cut the deal. And then, a lot of Southern Democrats began migrating out of the Democratic Party into the Republican Party, and became the hard-core of the Bush Republican Party today.

Now, in this process, you're dealing with people who have a pro-slavery mentality. Now, they don't call it "slavery." They would call it "shareholder value." Shareholder value is actually a new word, for the same thing in the Preamble of the constitution of the Confederate States of America: under which people could be property. And therefore, people could be kept in slavery, because they were "property." Or, if they weren't kept as slaves, formally, you could enslave them indirectly, without calling them slaves, by other means, which is what's happened to us, today.

There are people who destroyed the ability of the United States, which 40 years ago, was the most productive power on this planet. We destroyed that power. We're now living by sucking the blood, of the labor of other countries, and putting our own people into unemployment, destroying our health care systems, destroying our hospitals, destroying our pension system; they're about to destroy the Social Security system. Bush intends to privatize the whole system, right now—and he's working on it.

Q: You were quoted as saying a Bush Presidency is illegitimate. Why is that?

LAROUCHE: Well, first, it's illegitimate morally. What it represents, it was conceived in fraud. For example, in this particular election, recently, the key issue is not the vote count. The vote count is important, and I know there was significant fraud in the vote count.

But, the key thing we have them on, and we have them dead to rights, is voter suppression. We had campaigns, which the NAACP started complaining about. Others complained. I was involved in the investigation of this: In various states, the Republican Party went out, selectively, against African-Americans and others to eliminate their vote. In the recent election, we have instance after instance of voter suppression, involving efforts by the Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft and others, to bring about voter suppression.

Q: What's the difference between voter fraud, and voter suppression—before you go on, so the listeners can understand?

LAROUCHE: Voter suppression is a crime. It's a crime under the Voting Rights Act. It's an act. That act is defined in terms of the Constitution. So, it's a crime against the Constitution.

In other words, if you catch one person in two acts, engaged in voter suppression, that person can go to prison. So, anyone who engaged in voter suppression—and large sections of the Republican Party did engage in voter suppression, caught dead to rights, as the NAACP presented a documentation on some of this. We saw some of it personally, in some of our investigations. So, the Republican Party engaged, in large degree, in a crime.

For example, in New Hampshire, today, there is a case, dating from events in 2002, of voter suppression in the state of New Hampshire, in the election campaign of Sununu, in 2002. That case is now coming to a conclusion, to trial.

That case is a model for what should be happening in the state of Ohio, and elsewhere—in Florida, in Louisiana, and elsewhere, where voter suppression is a matter of fact.

Q: That was my next question, then. How come somebody is not bringing charges against the Republican Party?

LAROUCHE: We're doing it. I'm part of the Democratic Party. We're talking with people in the Democratic Party. I started a campaign to this effect on Nov. 9, officially, publicly. And we're pushing a campaign, on the issue of legal action, against relevant Republicans in particular, who are caught dead to rights in the attempt at voter suppression. And we have the goods on them. We just have to reduce this to a legal form. We are working with other Democrats, leading Democrats, on exactly how we're going to handle this.

Q: You touched on moral issues, but most people would say that President Bush was voted for this time, supposedly overwhelmingly because of his moral standing. Is that just an illusion?

LAROUCHE: Yeah. It's a fast—it's a swindle. I mean, for example, morality involves, especially, the way we treat people. And when you think that the President of the United States, in a campaign debate, publicly, on national television, lied when he was charged by Senator Kerry with intending to privatize the Social Security. The President lied, and said repeatedly, on that broadcast, he did not intend—he had no scheme—for privatizing Social Security.

Now, under the team he's pulled together, the new economics team out of the White House, he's pushing for the privatization of Social Security.

Now, that is a good test of morality. And my view is, that Bush is like the preacher, at a revival meeting who preaches against sin, and then goes out behind the tent and impregnates some of the sisters of the congregation. That's called "morality."

I have a different standard.

Q: There was a newspaper article in London, England, which said, how could 59 million people be so dumb? What do you think is going on with Americans? I would expect something like what is going on in Ukraine—people taking to street, but everybody just seems to have curled up and accepted it the way it is.

LAROUCHE: Looks like the Ukrainian election was pretty much like the U.S. election of Nov. 2, doesn't it?

Q: That goes without any question. But, it seems like the Americans who seem to be championing the so-called "democracy," now aren't taking it too seriously, while the Ukrainians seem to be gung-ho about it.

LAROUCHE: Well, actually, the Ukrainian business—the problem with the election there, it was run by Americans: Americans such as, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright's friends, Holbrooke—good Democrats! And also, the International Republican Institute. So, the problem in Ukraine was chiefly created by American organizations, deployed as a front organization for the U.S. government, or part of it!

So. This is the way things are! The problem is, that we Americans have, by and large, become dumber and dumber.

Now, the problem—one of the reasons for this, is, that if you look at the economics of the situation, since 1977, the lower 80% of the income-brackets of families in the United States has been dropping in terms of income, real income, physical income. Whereas the upper 20% has been increasing its share of national income, to the point that the upper 20% of family-income brackets are getting the same income, as the lower 80%. The result has been, is that the people in the lower 80% have been effectively disenfranchised. They're allowed to vote, often, but they're not allowed to actually shape the policies of the political parties which come up for the vote.

So therefore, you have people who feel, justly, in the lower 80%, that they are being disregarded. Most voters in the lower 80%, if they bother to vote at all, do not vote with the idea that they are shaping national policy. They're begging for favors. Or, they're trying to blackmail a politician into doing a favor for them. It's not really a vote, on how to run the country. It's a vote on, "How do I get something? Despite, the fact that I'm being cheated on all fronts, can I get at least something?"

Q: Later on in the interview, we'll still talk more on exporting democracy, which this administration seems to want to do, also. But, let's go back to the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, because we're still talking about globalization, World Trade Organization, and IMF. What's that book all about? I haven't had the opportunity to read it; but, what's the gist about this hit man? Who's John Perkins?

LAROUCHE: Well, John Perkins is a guy from Boston, or New England—he was born, I think, in New Hampshire. And, he went to work—he was born I think in 1949, or something like that. And he went to work for, actually, the Peace Corps, and the National Security Agency—he was cleared with the National Security Agency. He was given a job in a private company, based in Boston, Massachusetts, Chas. T. Main, for which he worked when he became the chief economist.

Now, what he did, was—this was a private organization, which actually works for the financier interests of the United States, and it works like an imperialist organization. It goes into foreign countries, and induces countries to go deeply into debt. Then, uses the debt, the money for which comes largely from the World Bank or IMF, and uses that as a way of taking over the country, politically. Now, if they get resistance from that, as he says—and I know it happens; I've quite a bit of experience in this area myself, practically, going back before John Perkins was in the business: But, people are killed. Heads of state are killed, are murdered, by what John refers to as "jackals." I know them also as "jackals." They're assassins. There're quasi-military agencies that conduct assassinations, when governments abroad offend the financier interests, behind the kind of job that John refers to.

So, it's what he describes as, describing the method of operations and how it has worked, in the book, is absolutely accurate. This is murder.

And you have, for example, one of the key figures in this operation, is George Shultz. George Shultz is, I believe, about 84 years old, now. He's the guy who crafted the George W. Bush Administration. But, he was the guy who was in charge of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, and he sponsored them; and they put together a team which became the present Bush Administration.

Shultz, who is part of Bechtel, and is allied also with Halliburton, these two corporations, are the swindlers and they key to the power behind the Bush Administration. They represent international financier interests, who are involved in this: who are looting the world; who are overthrowing governments; who are threatening heads of state, getting people killed, or thrown in prison, framed up, so forth. And so, you've got, really, a Nazi-like organization, in which the IMF, the World Bank, and George Shultz, the architect behind the Bush Administration—all these people are nice, sweetly involved.

I know these guys. They happen to be my personal enemies, so I keep good track of them!

Q: But, then, some people may say, like what you said, they're being your personal enemies is the reason why you're saying what you're saying. And not—

LAROUCHE: It's because of what I'm saying that they're my personal enemies! [laughing]

I happen to have to have a loud mouth, and tell what I know. And they don't like that very much.

Q: You have campaigned for the resignation of Dick Cheney. Why's that?

LAROUCHE: 'Cause Dick Cheney's a fascist. And I don't think we should have a fascist as Vice President of the United States.

Q: Give me an example. It's easy to call names, but when you say "fascist," give the average African-American an example.

LAROUCHE: Well, I mean fascist like Hitler. Hmm? We published a number of papers, including a book, on this subject. We have documented the evidence against Cheney: That he is a fascist. It's published. It's a long story, but we presented all the evidence.

And when I say—remember, I was in World War II. I came back. And I found out, when I got back, that something was wrong. I got back in '46 from overseas. And what I found out was, that the right wing, which we had associated with Hitler, had survived under other covers, and they were taking more and more power in the United States. This right wing is what we've been fighting all along. It's what Eisenhower fought against, for example, when he was President. This right wing is, essentially, a continuation of exactly the same financial interests which were behind Hitler back then.

So, the problem has been, that our country has been subverted—and other countries, too—by a resurgence by the same international financial cartel, which was behind Hitler and similar things earlier. And that's where the problem is.

What we're faced with, is not a question of trying to find some guy to go in jail—though many of these guys should go to prison!—but, what we're dealing with, is trying to save the country. And, if we don't get rid of these guys, we're not going to have a country.

Q: Free trade agreement: What is wrong with the current free trade agreement? And, you actually again campaigning against the restructuring or reforming of free trade agreement. Give us a state as is, right now, and what you would like to see.

LAROUCHE: I would cancel the free trade agreement. I would go back to what we had beforehand, under the old Bretton Woods system, of the first 20 years after World War II. The Bretton Woods system which was established under the leadership of President Roosevelt. That is, we had a protectionist system.

My concern, for example, as a patriot of the United States, in the tradition of the founders of our nation, such as Alexander Hamilton, in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, and others: My policy is, that we are a protectionist economy. We put up tariff barriers to ensure, to protect our jobs in our country, and protect the investment in essential industries, in infrastructure, in agriculture, and productive industries—goods producing industries—which are needed.

And we give to other countries, the right to do the same thing.

We seek to negotiate agreements on trade, general agreements on trade and tariffs, among other countries as we used to under the GATT arrangement, before the changes occurred. And this ensures that everyone has a fair shake. We used to call this a "fair trade" policy—as opposed to a "free trade" policy. Now, as a result of the change in policy, the United States, which was once the greatest producer nation on this planet, up until about 40 years ago. It was unquestionable: We were the great producer. We had the technology; we had the industry; we had the infrastructure. We weren't perfect—there were a lot of injustices. But, we were the best at what we did, relative to any standard worldwide.

Now, we've destroyed that. We've become a pleasure-seeking society. We don't care about long-term investment any more. We let our infrastructure collapse. We destroy our medical system, our health care system. We destroy our educational system; the educational system we've got is not worth almost anything, any more! It's worse than it ever was 40 years ago—on all accounts! Now, you get a fake education, instead of poor real education.

So, this is the kind of situation. And what we have to do, is go back to a system of the sovereign nation-state, where nations are sovereign; where citizens in nations share the sovereignty of their nation; where they have the right to employment; where they can have, again, health care, which is being taken away from them now—the things that Roosevelt gave them. That's what we have to do.

This so-called free trade, this WTO, should be cancelled. The IMF should be put into bankruptcy—it's bankrupt anyway—and reformed, to make it back into a Bretton Woods-type system. The World Bank should be reformed, similarly, for the same purpose. This used to be the back-door bank, for helping poorer countries get cheap loans for long-term capital investment. It became something else again.

So, these changes that were made 40 years ago and since then, changes under, say, Kissinger and Brzezinski as National Security Advisors, these changes should be reversed.

Q: Well, looking actually, it was just on the news yesterday, that the dollar is at an all-time low against the euro. Is the dollar near a collapse?

LAROUCHE: Yes, it is. The dollar is probably headed for, right now, $1.40 to a euro—that's where it's headed. It could go to $2, that is two dollars for a euro.

Q: What is the cause of that?

LAROUCHE: Well, we're bankrupt. [pauses]

We're not worth anything any more.

Q: We're supposed to be the richest nation in the world. We're going around saving everybody else!

LAROUCHE: [laughing] We're not doing that! You see, that's a lie! They say we're doing that—but we're not. That's the propaganda.

You know, it's like the man—. I remember, back in the 1930s, there was a restaurant in the city I lived in at that time, in Lynne, Massachusetts. And, it was a restaurant, called Hunt's Restaurant, right in the center of the city. And this restaurant, people were standing there, who hadn't eaten all day, but they were picking their teeth with a toothpick outside the restaurant, in order to try to impress somebody that they had eaten ... and they hadn't eaten that day.

And, we're doing the same thing. We have a country, in which a lot of people have not eaten today, or not eaten decently, or they don't have health care. That sort of thing. And we're running around the world saying, "We're the great, rich success model around the world!" We're not.

What is happening, that China, we're going to China, beginning for a bailout. We're going to Europe, demanding a bailout. We're going to other countries, demanding a bailout. We're not paying; we have a current account deficit that's going to drive us bankrupt. The U.S. Treasuries are about to collapse. The real estate market in the United States is about to collapse.

We're going to lose jobs more rapidly than we ever did, before. We're headed toward a depression, that would make the Hoover Depression seem like prosperity.

And we call ourselves the richest country in the world? We once were! That was 40 years ago ... but not any more.

Q: What are the few things that can happen for a total collapse, if we don't change the course?

LAROUCHE: Well, it's happening right now. We are now in the onset of a process of a general collapse of the world monetary-financial system. This system will collapse. It will never come back, in its present form.

What we can do, the alternative, is to save the nations, and let the system go. Now, the way we save the nations, is we assert this sovereignty of the nation-state. We say that financial systems, banking systems, and so forth, are all subject to control by sovereign nation-states. We put these systems into reorganization.

We create jobs, by creating the credit, by government, for infrastructure jobs, other jobs. We've got to put about 10 million people in the United States back to work, to get this economy back in shape. We can do it. We can do it by the methods that Franklin Roosevelt used. That should be done immediately.

The same thing has to be done, similarly, in Europe. For example, there are 8 million lost jobs in Germany. Now, Germany's a country of about 80-odd million people, as opposed to our approximately 250 now. And they have 8 million unemployed there. And the country is collapsing. Italy is collapsing. France is on the edge of collapsing. There still is some high-tech, in some orientation there. They could recover.

But, we're in a situation, in which Europe and the Americas, are presently headed for the ash-can, unless we put this system into reorganization. And only sovereign governments, or agreements among sovereign governments can do it.

So, we're already finished. It's not "will the crash come?" It is now! It is coming! The question is, "How fast is it coming? And who is it going to hit next?" But, this thing is going down, and there is no bottom. And it's already going down.

Q: I first read about you, or knew about you, actually, from negative propaganda about you. And thank God, I was curious enough. And it was even written that, for your effort over the years, you were targetted by friends of Henry Kissinger and President Bush, and eventually incarcerated in the '80s. What was that all about?

LAROUCHE: Well, the key reason—the 1980s thing was specific. There have been various attacks on me, all by the same crowd. You can imagine who they are, the people I attack. They attacked me, first.

But, anyway, what I happened is: I, in 1982, undertook a project, which was my project, which I had proposed to the Reagan Administration. The project became known later, as SDI. It was a project for an agreement between the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries, on a way of disengaging from the threat of a general thermonuclear exchange by ballistic missiles. President Reagan adopted this policy. I worked on it. I conducted a back-channel discussion with the Soviet government, on behalf of the Reagan Administration.

This created a furor, in the United States, and abroad. In 1986, the Soviet government was demanding that I either be killed, or imprisoned. And that view was shared by people on the Bush side of the Republican Party; and was shared also by the British monarchy, and others. So, there was a concerted effort to have me eliminated. Just the way that John Perkins describes the elimination of some heads of state, who were a "problem" for financial interests.

So, they went after me, in '84. It started in '83, but they went after me in '84. The whole thing was based—these forces, including the Soviet government, which was out to have me assassinated. Then, in 1986, they came up to my door! With over 400 armed forces—and they were about to assassinate me by a shooting expedition in the morning. And, only an intervention from the White House, or White House circles, told them to "get off it." Otherwise, I'd have been dead.

So, what they did, is they said, "Well," to the people in the Reagan Administration and others, they said, "Well, if you don't put him in prison, we're going to kill him!" And so, some of the people in the government got discouraged about protecting me, and said, "Okay, let him be imprisoned."

And so, on that basis, George Bush stuck me in prison—that is, his father—and Clinton got me out!

Q: Tell me, how can—let's go back to, how can 59 million people be so stupid? Because everything you're saying, if all of this is a fact, that can absolutely be verified: How is it that we still have the Bushites governing?

LAROUCHE: In this case, in the case of the Bush business: Bush would not even have a chance of even coming near a re-election, except for 9/11. What is controlling the—. And what happened in 9/11 has never been, officially, revealed. The stories you hear, are not the true stories. There are some elements of truth in some of the things that are said by the 9/11 Commission. But, the whole story is not there. It's a fallacy of composition.

But, in any case, what's happened is, at that point—you know, I warned about this danger, in January on a webcast I made in January of 2001, before Bush was actually installed as President. And, I said, that because the Bush Administration is stupid, that Bush himself is stupid, that the financial crisis already oncoming will get worse. And under these conditions, we have to expect that somebody, in the background, will pull a stunt, like Goering did in 1933, in February 1993, in setting fire to the Reichstag and establishing Hitler as a dictator, on the basis of the Reichstag Fire as a terrorist act. And I said, the same thing can happen to us.

It happened to us on Sept. 11 of 2001. And, at that point, John Ashcroft and others, and Cheney and others, were already prepared to install measures, aimed at dictatorship, as the Nazis and Goering had done, back in 1933 in Germany.

And it happened.

Now, what has happened is, even though we didn't go to a full dictatorship, though we're headed in that direction, with this guy Gonzales from Texas, who's a terrible animal on this kind of thing—as Ashcroft has been; we're headed in that direction.

But, what's playing in the United States, what's affecting much of the population, is called "the politics of fear": People are voting for Bush, because they're afraid of him. It's that simple.

Q: Afraid of him. But, they think he's trying to protect us, supposedly, from those we should be afraid of, and that's the terrorists.

LAROUCHE: Well, no. It's the other way around. Yes—that's how the politics of fear works. The guy who's threatening you, your actual enemy, becomes now your friend, because you want him to like you—so he won't kill you.

Q: Interesting.

Let's go to the topic of "exporting democracy." First of all, what is the definition of democracy? And is America a democracy?

LAROUCHE: Ha-ha! "Democracy" is a bad name! [laughing] The name for "democracy" comes from Athens, in the time of Socrates—and it means dictatorship! It's called "Sophistry" at that point. The dialogues of Plato deal with this business of Sophistry. The Sophist faction, which committed a judicial murder of Socrates, was called the Democratic Party of Athens. And this was the same party, political party, which was responsible for the Peloponnesian War, which resulted in the actual destruction of the power of Athens, and the destruction of Greek political power in that period.

So, democracy is a dirty word, in that sense. What we generally mean, when we talk about our system of government, we should not use the term "democracy." It has a bad reputation. We should use the question of individual rights—the rights of the individual. Now, what they turned it around to mean, is, that you should go by so-called "popular opinion." But, what is popular opinion? Mostly, popular opinion is usually wrong. Most people are usually wrong in what they think is true.

Our system of government, with its checks and balances, as we defined it, was to force the population to engage, as independent citizens with individual rights, in a dialogue, by means of which the truth would be forced to the surface. What we have now, is, people are going by opinions they picked up off the street, yesterday, from some garbage pail, perhaps. Not what they've thought out, as their interest.

For example: You have people—say, people in Ohio. Ohio has had a tremendous loss of employment, in farms and industry. It's really catastrophic. Can you imagine, a significant number of people of farm background and professional background, and industrial background, in the state of Ohio, voting for an administration, which has destroyed more jobs, and destroyed more of the economy as it affects the people of Ohio, than any other Presidency? They voted for that, because he's protecting them? Because he's helping their economic situation? No!

There's no basis for them, rationally, to vote for Bush! Their interests all say, "vote against him." And they would have voted against him—except for: 9/11 and the politics of fear. They're afraid. They're afraid not to vote for him.

This is what this religious fervor is about. I mean, you know, you have people—I don't think they know who God is. And they're religious. But, it's nuts. It's the politics of fear.

Q: You talk about individual rights and popular opinion. If we had taken the popular opinion of the Arab world, if we're truly democratic, then we shouldn't have gone to war. And, again, in this particular case here, looking at Iraq, I don't think there's any individual right that we're seeing.

LAROUCHE: Oh-ho! No! You're right! No, of course not!

The war was un-Constitutional, illegal. And it's also immoral. The policy of regime change, which is the real policy behind the Bush war against Iraq, was not anything, except regime change. And to destroy the country! And that's not the only country they intended to destroy.

Of course! It's illegal! Of course, it's immoral! What they did to Arab citizens of our own country is immoral. What they did to Arabs around the world, is immoral.

Osama bin Laden was created by the British and Americans! He was created by George Bush's family—senior George Bush. The Osama bin Laden family, is a family very close to the Bush interests, to the Carlyle Group.

Q: If the war, and our action right now is un-Constitutional, and regime change is illegal, isn't there a process for a trial, for charges being brought against the administration, or somebody?

LAROUCHE: Yeah, sure, if you've got the court. [laughs] But, you have to have the court. If the government now—we got a bunch of weaklings, among Democrats as well as Republicans, in the Congress, who won't fight! They will not defend the country!

I would defend the country! If something is wrong, I want my government to fix it. If we did it. And I would hope that our institutions would use the principle of law, the principle of our Constitution and the pertinent laws, to do that. We're not doing it! We are the criminal!

Because our people are afraid—or, many of them, are afraid. They're afraid of this government. This government already has the characteristics of a dictatorship. It's not a full dictatorship; we still have some formal rights kicking around. But, it's moving in the direction of a tyranny.

Q: What do you think the people are afraid of? Incarceration? Murder?

LAROUCHE: Being killed, murdered, incarcerated, destroyed.

Let's take the case—let's take African-Americans, so-called; let's take Arab-Americans, and other Americans of Islamic credentials; let's take the largest single minority of the country, the Spanish-speaking minorities, which come in largely from Mexico, but also from other places. These groups of people are frightened. They're frightened because they're either persecuted—.

Look what's happened since Gingrich; since Gingrich became the Speaker of the House: What happened to the African-American rights? The Black Congressional Caucus was put out of business. And the Democrats didn't do a damned thing to stop it. Look at what's happened to the Hispanic population—it's a state of terror. Look at the Arab-American population—absolutely terrified!

And other people are terrified, too. Politicians are terrified. They're terrified of frame-ups. They're terrified of thuggery. Look at the thug you have, Tom DeLay, in the Congress. The Speaker of the House—a tyrant. Some of the Republicans in the Senate, are similar. But, the House is the worst.

The courts can't be trusted. Look, you have Scalia, on the Supreme Court, close to becoming the head of the Supreme Court. Or, Clarence Thomas, the same thing.

This is tyranny! Our court system, our institutions are all corrupted by this kind of stuff. And it's going to take a shock. And I think the shock of a financial collapse will help that. But, it's going to take a shock, to get Americans to come back, and stand up on their hind legs, and fight to restore our rights, and our institutions which used to protect our rights.

Q: But, if you can't trust the court, the judicial system; you can't trust the political system, then who are we to export democracy, and can democracy—? Let's assume democracy is individual rights, popular opinion, but can it be transmitted or exported by force at the end of a gun?

LAROUCHE: No! It does not work!

For example: If you have a legitimate case for war, under the law of war. There was no legitimate case in Iraq. But, if you have to go into a country, as a military force, because of a war, what you do, is your objective is to put that country back into the hands of its own people. And to assist them in doing that. Because, if you take over a country by military force, you are responsible for those people. You are responsible for that country. And you are morally responsible for what you do with it.

Now, if you're sensible, you want to get out of there. You don't want to stay there. So therefore, you want to empower the people to get their own institutions functioning again. And when you leave, they're going to say, "We're happy to see you go. But, we don't hate you."

Now, regime change: No one has the right to make regime change. No one has the right, in the name of democracy, to go in and commit tyranny against another country. No one has this kind of right. There is no such thing as a "right for democracy." But, this whole idea of democracy, as proposed by—what you got, this fascist! You know, Brzezinski's buddy. And, he pushed this Crisis of Democracy policy: Samuel P. Huntington. Brzezinski's buddy—they pushed it. And it's wrong; it's a form of tyranny. It's a crime against humanity.

Q: If you were President, how would have encouraged other nations to respect individual rights and respect popular opinions?

LAROUCHE: Well, what you do, is very simply: You've got to clean up the system. I would restore many of the institutions that we built under Franklin Roosevelt, because they tended to protect us.

But, the key thing actually comes back to economics. If you're providing economic growth; if you're providing economic justice; if you're ensuring that people have access to the education they require; if you're ensuring that health care provisions are made, that public health is taken care of; if libraries and so forth exist; if improvements are being made in the landscape; if cities are better places to live in: you find that people, people in the country, feeling that they are individuals, they have rights, will tend to take these institutions and be proud of them, as we used to be. I mean, we used to be proud of a good library; proud of a good high school, good school system; proud of a good hospital; proud of a clean city; proud of the improvements we made, proud of our parks. Hmm? Proud of this and that sort of thing—proud of our highways, proud of our improvements. Proud of the things we produced in our localities.

And when you have a people who have a sense of their right to this kind of society, it's not hard to get them to mobilize to defend their own rights. And it's not hard to get them to respect the dignity of the other person, as having the same rights. Because, the other person is the person they cooperate with—it's their neighbor. They depend upon their neighbor's cooperation. You know, it's like, in the old days, if somebody got sick in the neighborhood, it was the neighbors that helped out. So, this is idea of a good, healthy society, with a good neighborhood, and a sense of good neighborhood among people, this is all you require, and that's your basic source of strength.

The source of strength is not the whip. It's not the fist. The source of strength is a sense of love: a sense that you're in a society, the society's improving, you are working together, because you believe, it's in your interest to work together. And because you like to get along with people.

Q: The United Nations has been a body, that's supposed to be put together to oversee world affairs in many ways. I think the Bush Administration has made the United Nations, or supposedly called the United Nations, irrelevant, about four years ago. [LaRouche chuckles] What do you think their position is, right now? Is the UN still effective?

LAROUCHE: No. The UN should remain what it is. The UN should be considered, not as a government, but as a treaty organization. That's the way it was created, to be an international treaty organization, to deal, primarily, first of all, with the question of war and peace; but also, to deal with the question of promotion of the development of people.

For example, on the day Roosevelt died, the United States was still committed to liberating the world from colonialism. And from similar kinds of imperialism. What Truman did, after Roosevelt died, was to go back to enforce colonialism. So that we nullified that.

For example, I had a lot of dealings over time, in the 1970s and so forth, with the Non-Aligned Movement, which was an organization created to try to get the United Nations and others to do the things it was supposed to do: which is to promote the development of nations, the nations of the world, the family of nations, and it hasn't done that. It hasn't done that, because the powerful interests, the right-wing interests, which came in with Truman with the neo-colonial policy—you know, where they went back, and they invaded Vietnam—or Indo-China, and forced colonialism back on Indo-China. They invaded Indonesia, and fought a war, to put the Indonesians back under Dutch colonialism. They conducted wars in Africa, to suppress and maintain colonies.

The same kind of policy, as a quasi-colonial policy, was stuck in against our neighbors in South and Central America.

So, the United Nations has not functioned, because the great powers of the world, particularly, have not been willing to allow it to function, but have been fighting with each other, or playing to suppress the people of the world.

The United Nations should be a treaty organization, which is more efficient as a vehicle of cooperation, to assist in bringing about this long-sought desire for justice, among the poorer and weaker nations, and also to promote the cause of justice internationally, by the influence of governments.

Q: How would you address listeners who want to take action? First of all, where can listeners find resources, or materials that you've talked about?

LAROUCHE: Oh, the each one for me, is "larouchepac.com." That's the easiest one to get out. They also can get me otherwise, through the "larouchepub.com" which are the internet sources. We also have, LaRouchePAC has an address, which is in Leesburg, Virginia: It's at Post Office Box 6157 in Leesburg, 20178. And they can get me there.

Q: And I understood there's an 800 number, 1-800-929-7566.

LAROUCHE: Yep.

Q: And if, you have to say, in closing, first address those 59 million dumb people, then you address the others who voted the other way, what would say to the 59 million people who continue to, on their fear, support an administration you call illegitimate?

LAROUCHE: Well, what I do is, I go right at what the issues are. I go at the real things—the economy. And the main thing I have to do, and I encourage other people to do, who are in a position somewhat like my own: If we show courage, in fighting these evils, we will give moral strength to citizens to free themselves from mental enslavement by fear. When people have a friend, or friends, who are not afraid to lead, not afraid to fight, then other people who are hiding in the bushes, will come out and fight, too.

Q: We heard lately, that even some people were so disenfranchised, with there's so much evil now, they're checking on Canada for citizenship, or even migrating over there. What would you say to those, who are saying what you're saying, but are now very discouraged?

LAROUCHE: They shouldn't be discouraged. We're going to fight. I'm going to fight. I promised to fight. My friends'll fight; we have lots of good people with me, who are going to fight. I think John Kerry, who despite the fact that he seems to be officially out of race—I think he'll fight. He has certain capabilities; I think under those capabilities, he'll fight. There are other leaders, who'll fight. What we have to do, is make a show of leadership. So, that people know that they're out there.

You know, the worst thing, if people hear politicians say, promise this, promise that. Then, the politician turns around and don't do anything. So, the people get discouraged, and say, "You can't trust anybody." They say, "I'm a little guy. Who am I to fight? I can't trust this guy, he's supposed to be a leader—he won't fight. How'm I going to fight?"

And so, the important thing is, from my standpoint, I've got to do my job: And other people who are in a situation comparable to mine, must do theirs. We must fight. We must not run away from the fight. We must show the people they have leaders who will fight for them. And then the people will become less frightened, and more willing to fight.

Q: If you were one on one, with Mr. Bush—with nobody around—what would you say to him?

LAROUCHE: I'd say: "George. You're making a mess of it. Now, what I'm going to do for you, is this: You give me Condoleezza Rice's job, and you take it easy. And we'll take care of you, and you'll come out of this election, you'll come out of this period just right. But, just let us handle the job for you."

Q: Mr. LaRouche, I thank you. It's a great honor to have you with us. If you could do a plug for KNON—just say, "You're listening to Empowerment Radio, on KNON, Dallas."

LAROUCHE: You're listening to KNON, Dallas, and we've had fun here: I encourage you to do the same.

Q: I thank you very much, Mr. LaRouche

LAROUCHE: Thank you.

Q: Stay fighting.

LAROUCHE: I shall.

InDepth Coverage

Links to articles from Executive Intelligence Review*.
*Requires Adobe Reader®.

Feature:

Drive To Stop Bush's 'Pinochet Plan' To Loot Social Security
by Paul Gallagher
A monstrous delusion, in the service of saving a falling U.S. dollar and a bankrupt international monetary system, was presented by George W. Bush's so-called Economic Summit on Dec. 15-16. A lock-step parade of globalization ideologues, beginning with Vice President Dick Cheney, claimed a 'great recovery' for the crisis-ridden U.S. economy—and then demanded to save the dollar by grabbing trillions of dollars from the Social Security benefit funds of tens of millions of Americans.

Pinochet's Indictment: The Real Significance
by Cynthia R. Rush
On Dec. 13, Chilean Judge Juan Guzma´n Tapia announced the indictment and house arrest of former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet on charges of kidnapping nine dissidents, and murdering one of them, under the military regime that began on Sept. 11, 1973 and ended in 1990. Reversing a 2002 court ruling that had concluded that Pinochet's mild dementia made him unfit to stand trial on any charges, Judge Guzma´n stated that the 89-year-old Pinochet was 'mentally competent to face a criminal trial in Chile.'

Chile: Private Pensions A Quarter Century On
by Manuel Riesco
The author is a member of the board of CENDA (Center of National Studies of Alternative Development), of Santiago, Chile, www.cep.cl. Riesco is also External Research Coordinator (on social policy matters) for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). He can be reached at mriesco@cep.cl.

Interview: Arturo Martínez
Chile Labor Leader: No To Fascist Pension Plan
If you had the opportunity to speak before a committee of the U.S. Congress about Chile's privatized pension system, what would you tell them? This was the question posed by EIR to Arturo Martínez, president of Chile's largest labor federation, the Unified Labor Federation (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, or CUT) on Dec. 14. His answer was blunt...

An Obituary for London's 'Chilean Economic Miracle'
by Dennis Small and Cynthia Rush
For over two decades, EIR has been exposing the fascist reality behind the so-called 'Chilean economic miracle' touted by Wall Street and the City of London. For example, in our Sept. 1, 1981 issue, Mark Sonnenblick wrote an article entitled: ' 'Free Enterprise' Doesn't Work: The Chilean Model,' which reported: 'The Friedmanite reforms have markedly reduced the productive efficiency of the econmy; resource allocation is increasingly irrational.' In the April 3, 1992, issue we published a feature called 'The Fraud Behind Chile's Economic 'Success Story.' ' And on July 21, 1995, EIR published an in-depth analysis of Chile's economy, with the above title. Although written almost a decade ago, the central points remain fully valid today; and so we publish the following excerpts...

Ryan-Sununu Bill: Case Study of Looting Plans
by Richard Freeman
'If you asked the Chilean people, they would say that Social Security privatization is the best thing that the Pinochet dictatorship ever did.' Asked if this was his own view, the individual said, 'Yes, there are real criticisms of the Pinochet dictatorship. That [privatization] is the best thing it ever did; it was a huge boon for the Chilean economy.' The speaker is Tom Giovanetti, president of the Dallas, Texas-based Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), in a discussion on Dec. 13.

Social Security As FDR Defined It
by L. Wolfe
This is adapted from New Federalist newspaper, Dec. 20, 2004.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law on Aug. 14, 1935, only a relative handful of citizens were covered by private pension funds. If you weren't wealthy, or didn't have an extended family with means, there was no place that you or your family could turn to if you were in economic distress, except charity.

The Economic Hit Men

Shultz and the 'Hit Men' Destroyed the Philippines
by Mike Billington
The U.S.-orchestrated coup which overthrew the government of Philippines' President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 was a classic case study of what John Perkins describes in his recent book, Confessions of an Economic HitMan, as the post-World War II preferred method of imposing colonial control under another name. In the Philippines case, George Shultz performed the roles of both the economic hit man, destroying and taking full control of the Philippine economy, and the coup-master, deposing the Philippine President in favor of an IMF puppet—while calling the operation 'people's power.'

How Mexico Fought the Hit Men
by Gretchen Small
'The discovery, starting in the mid-1970s, that Mexico possesses much larger petroleum reserves . . . than had been previously realized, affords it a unique opportunity among larger Third World sector countries to substantially reduce the time . . . necessary to become a modern industrial nation. . . . By no later than the year 2000, the great majority of 115 to 120 million Mexicans should be able to enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of the average inhabitant of the West European nations in the year 1980.'

Economics:

China Warns Foreign Exchange And Hedge Fund Speculators
by Mary Burdman
The disastrous financial losses suffered by China Aviation Oil (CAO) in Singapore from speculation on oil price derivatives, have set alarms ringing in China. Just at the time that the Chinese leadership is making unprecedented public statements demanding that the United States take measures to deal with the dollar crash, and warning that they will not give in to pressure from either international financial speculators, or the U.S. and Japanese governments, to up-value China's international currency, the renminbi, against the dollar, came the bad news from Singapore.

French Senate Study: For A 'Neo-Colbertist Europe'
A working group of the French Senate's Economic Affairs Commission has published a report, 'For a Neo-Colbertist Europe,' which calls for an immediate reversal of the recent moves toward further deregulation in France. The study's title refers to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Finance Minister for King Louis XIV, who is a symbol of the policy of state promotion of industry and infrastructure.

Report From Germany
Without New Concepts, Labor Will Lose
by Rainer Apel
A pragmatic struggle for jobs can't succeed in a collapsing economy. Labor leaders must think big! In-depth reform must occur very fast in Germany's labor union bureaucracy. A review of the year 2004 shows numerous occasions in which workers with a combative mind could have won in the fight against large- scale job losses and income cuts.

International:

Iraqi Elections Planned Amid Danger of Civil War
by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach
Will elections be held in Iraq, as scheduled, on Jan. 30, 2005? Doubts have been cast on this schedule, which the U.S. Administration and the puppet interim Iraqi government have been frantically pushing, and for good reason: The ongoing, escalating guerrilla warfare against the occupation forces, has created what is euphemistically referred to as a 'security situation,' under which nationwide polls cannot be held.

Genocide: Millions Dead in Congo
by Lawrence K. Freeman
Genocide: The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national or racial group
A just-released report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) documents that the worst case of ongoing genocide anywhere on the planet is occurring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R. Congo). Only the Nazi-implemented holocaust against the Jewish people was more horrific, although the number of deaths in the D.R. Congo may turn out to be greater.

National:

LaRouche Spurs Broad Fight Against Bush's Election Theft
by Edward Spannaus
' 'We've got them dead to rights on violations of Federal law, on Voting Rights Act violations,' said Lyndon LaRouche in an interview on a Columbus, Ohio radio station on Dec. 16, in discussing how the Republicans stole the Nov. 2 Presidential election. 'That is a crime,' LaRouche continued. 'That's a five-year federal sentence, to be caught doing that crime! Whereas simple vote fraud is more difficult to deal with. But, if you go at the criminal violations, which are Federal criminal violations, in terms of election tampering and in terms of Voting Rights Act frauds, then you open up the whole area, you have to investigate the whole territory, in which these crimes have been committed—which means the entire question of the vote fraud is now looked at, from that standpoint.'

GOP Rams Through Police-State Bill
by Carl Osgood
The Intelligence Reform bill that passed the Congress on Dec. 7 and 8 is yet another textbook example ofhowthe Republican leadership rams through legislation without giving members a chance to study it before the vote. Little notice was given to the police-state provisions in the bill until after it was passed. Instead, most of the attention was focussed on bickering over what authority the new Director of National Intelligence will have with respect to the intelligence agencies in the Pentagon. Once House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) was satisfied on that question, the bill passed easily with too little debate.

Conference Report
A Dangerous Game With Ukrainian Sovereignty
by William Jones
Speaking at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee on Dec. 7, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) called for a General Accountability Office investigation to determine whether U.S. funds had been used to benefit the election of former Prime Minister Victor Yushchenko in recent Presidential elections in Ukraine. Paul was specifically targetting the funding dispersed through the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for Democracy and its constituent bodies, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute.

U.S. Economic/Financial News

Hunger, Homelessness Rise Steeply in Major U.S. Cities

Overall requests for emergency food assistance jumped by an average of 14% over the past year, with 96% of the cities showing an increase, according to a new U.S. Conference of Mayors-Sodexho USA Hunger and Homelessness Survey of 27 major cities, released Dec. 14. In particular, emergency food requests by families increased substantially, by an average of 13% in 2004. Also, requests for emergency shelter rose by an average of 6%, with 70% of the cities surveyed reporting an increase.

Insisted Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell, who co-chairs the Conference's Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, "These are not simply statistics. These are real people; many are families with children, who are hungry and homeless in our cities." More than half of those requesting emergency food aid were families.

Twenty percent of the requests for emergency food have gone unmet, as 48% of the cities surveyed reported that food banks and soup kitchens may have to turn away people in need, due to lack of resources.

Further, employed adults accounted for 34% of those requesting food assistance, demonstrating that low-paying jobs and rising poverty, not just mounting unemployment, are reasons for the increase. In all of the cities surveyed, families depended on emergency food assistance centers as a steady source of food over long periods of time.

Of the homeless population, families with children comprised 40%, the survey found. Emergency shelter requests by homeless families increased by 7% during the past year. Additionally, 32% of such requests were not met.

Net Foreign Money Inflows Can't Cover Trade Deficit

Americans are increasing purchases of foreign stocks and bonds, while foreigners have slowed their buying of U.S. securities, moves that are accelerating the fall of the dollar. Americans bought a whopping $51.9 billion of foreign stocks and bonds through October, up sharply from $36.2 billion in all of 2003, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury Department. In October alone, U.S. investors spent $15.2 billion on foreign stocks and bonds, the biggest monthly amount since July 2000. Meanwhile, the overall net flow of foreign money into American stocks and bonds plunged 28.8% in October, to $48.1 billion.

The 2004 trade deficit surged to a record $500.5 billion, just through October, despite the falling dollar. The U.S. trade gap in goods and services jumped 8.9% in October to a record $55.5 billion, compared to September, as imports swelled to an all-time high of $153.5 billion, due to rising oil prices and an increase in the volume of imported oil.

At the same time, housing starts tumbled 13.1% in November, the biggest drop since January 1994, to an annualized rate of 1.77 million.

Retirees Pay Higher Premiums for Health Benefits

Retirees paid 25% more this year on premiums for private health benefits, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Hewlitt Associates, the New York Times reported Dec. 15. Drew E. Altmann, Kaiser's President, told the Times that "prospects for retiree health coverage are slowly disappearing for America's workers, and retirees who have it will be paying more." In the past year, about 8% of large private employers forced retirees to cover a larger portion of premiums, and 11% say they will do so this coming year. For anyone starting a new job today, this implies that the likelihood of their receiving any retiree health benefits is practically nil. The same is true for anyone older who might want to change jobs, as this would almost certainly mean losing health benefits.

Auto Slowdown Drives Up Michigan Jobless Rate

The auto industry slowdown has driven Michigan's official unemployment rate to 7%, the highest level since December 2003, the Detroit News reported Dec. 16. An official report released by the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth, shows that the state's jobs picture—already dismal—is not improving. In November, the state's jobless rate jumped, as layoffs hit 7,000 permanent factory workers, as well as 8,000 employees in the service sector. Total employment fell by 26,000 during the month, while unemployment grew by 16,000. Over the past five years, manufacturing has lost a staggering 210,000 jobs—23% of its workforce.

Meanwhile, Dec. 17 effectively is the last production day for about two-thirds of the 900 workers at Ford's assembly plant in St. Louis. The automaker is eliminating one of its two production shifts as of Jan. 3, together with the Hazelwood plant's seasonal shutdown from Dec. 17-Jan. 1.

At the same time, bankrupt auto supplier Intermet Corp. said it will close its die-casting and machining plants in Sturtevant, Wisc. during the second quarter of 2005, eliminating about 600 jobs.

Fannie Mae Told To Restate Earnings

The Securities and Exchange Commission has told home mortgage behemoth Fannie Mae to restate its earnings, which could total up to $9 billion in previously unreported losses. The Commission found that Fannie had used hedge accounting which involved the use of derivatives. It found also that Fannie Mae had internally developed its "own unique methodology" to assess whether hedge accounting was appropriate. So, the SEC ordered Fannie Mae to restate its earnings and stop the use of hedge accounting.

World Economic News

Bank of England Cautions on Risky Investment Positions

Risky investment positions could trigger a financial crisis, the Bank of England warned in its latest semi-annual review of "financial stability." The report emphasizes that investors have massively increased their exposure to high-yield/high-risk markets in recent months. As an example, investment in emerging-market debt is at an all-time high. Furthermore, speculative positions in commodity futures are close to a record. And global flows into hedge funds have again increased to 110 billion pounds in the first nine months of the year, compared to 70 billion pounds in the entire year of 2003. Some lenders, borrowers, and investors might have underestimated their "long-run vulnerabilities" and may have taken on "too much risk." "Unexpected economic developments could trigger the attempted simultaneous unwinding of common positions possibly leading to strains on market liquidity." On top of the housing bubble, the report points to very strong activity in the British commercial property market. Actually, half of all new corporate loans by British banks are right now going into commercial property. Finally, there is the ongoing consumer debt frenzy. The report notes that unsecured lending—such as credit card debt, store card debt, and bank overdrafts—is now growing much faster than mortgage loans. And debt write-offs have risen sharply this year in spite of unusually low interest rates.

United States News Digest

Retired Flag Officers To Oppose Gonzales Nomination

A group of retired generals and admirals, who were top military legal officers, and who are opposed to the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be U.S. Attorney General, are discussing how to most effectively stop his confirmation by the Senate, according to the Dec. 16 New York Times, and confirmed by a legal source contacted by EIR.

The retired officers are particularly focussed on the legal memoranda written and commissioned by Gonzales which sanctioned harsh treatment, including torture, of prisoners captured in the war on terrorism. Retired Admiral John Hutson, who was the judge advocate general for the U.S. Navy, said that when Gonzales wrote these memos, he "was not thinking about the impact of his behavior on U.S. troops in this war and others to come.

"He was not thinking about the United States' history in abiding by international law, especially in the wartime context. For that reason, some of us think he is a poor choice to be Attorney General."

Brigadier Gen. James Cullen (ret.) said that Gonzales had ignored the advice of military lawyers who were adamantly opposed to the Administration's legal strategies. "When you create these kinds of policy that can eventually be used against your own soldiers, when we say 'only follow the Geneva Conventions as much as it suits us,' when we take steps that the common man would understand is torture, this undermines who we are supposed to be, and many of us find it appalling."

Retired Military Officers Leading Drive To Oust Rumsfeld

Retired military officers are the driving force behind the campaign to oust Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, according to a source who has been deeply involved in the torture investigations. These retired officers, who are speaking on behalf of active-duty officers who cannot speak up, are particularly targetting Southern Republican Senators, and they are telling these Senators to "get rid of this man before there's a mutiny."

Although the news media are playing up Rumsfeld's arrogance and callousness toward the soldier in Kuwait who asked the Defense Secretary why U.S. soldiers deployed in Iraq had to dig through scrap heaps to find armor, the source said that the real issue is not Rumsfeld's callous disregard of the "grunts"—the troops on the ground—but his callous disregard of the officer corps, his not listening to them.

The source said he is hearing that there will be a shake-up at the top levels of the Pentagon in February, in which Rumsfeld will be dumped, but he believes that Dick Cheney is still firmly defending the Secretary of Defense.

Rumsfeld Under Fire From Republicans, Military Leaders

Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld is increasingly under fire from senior U.S. lawmakers and within senior U.S. military layers.

Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss) told the Biloxi, Miss. Chamber of Commerce Dec. 15: "I'm not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld. I don't think he listens enough to his uniformed officers." Lott added: "I would like to see a change in that slot in the next year. I'm not calling for his resignation, but I think we do need a change at some point."

Rummy's callous response to lack of battle armor for troops and their vehicles hit a raw nerve with senior U.S. legislators and senior military command.

Senator Susan Collins (R-Me), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a journalist: "I think there are increasing concerns about the Secretary's leadership of the war, the repeated failures to predict the strengths of the insurgency, the lack of essential safety equipment for our troops, the reluctance to expand the number of troops—all of those are factors that are causing people to raise more questions about Secretary [Rumsfeld]." Her comments are echoed in comments by Senators John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and Chris Dodd, and retired General Norman Schwarzkopf.

Schwarzkopf told MSNBC Dec. 13 that he was angered "by the words of the Secretary of Defense when he laid it all on the Army, as if he, the Secretary of State, didn't have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing it themselves, screwing up."

Pentagon Tells Detainees They Can Go to Court

The Pentagon this week started giving the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba letters saying that they have the right to go to trial; but this is happening six months after the landmark Supreme Court ruling.

Attorneys for some of the detainees are calling the military's notice extremely late, unclear, and practically useless to detainees who do not have lawyers, the Washington Post reported Dec. 16. Some lawyers predicted that no detainee would be able to properly challenge his imprisonment using the military's guidelines.

Israeli Industrial Espionage Under Investigation

The reported rift between the U.S. and Israel over Israel's illegal supplying of forbidden high-technology military hardware to China, is only one aspect of the growing tension between the U.S. and Israel. Reporter Joshua Mitnick of the Moonie Washington Times wrote Dec. 16, that Israeli Army Radio reported this week that "Israeli defense officials in the United States have been accused by the FBI of industrial espionage, the second spying complaint levelled against Israel in four months...."

The Israeli Defense Ministry denies that its envoys have been accused by the U.S. of spying, but did not deny that the FBI had questioned some of its military officials working in the U.S., for aggressively asking questions about classified systems. The Ministry says they were only engaged in "aggressive collection" of unclassified information. "For us, it is legitimate," said a Defense Ministry spokeswoman. This revelation comes on the heels of the Dec. 1 FBI raid on the headquarters of Ariel Sharon's #1 lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where the FBI agents reportedly came in with guns drawn, to seize computer and other files. The AIPAC raid is part of an ongoing investigation of defense officials working for the Israeli embassy in Washington. Also suspected in the AIPAC case, is Pentagon employee Larry Franklin, who works in the close circle of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, and his Deputy, Bill Luti.

Reporter Mitnick also says that the Israeli government is not denying that it called in all its military envoys for a special meeting in New York earlier this month (just after the AIPAC raid) to give them "new guidelines." It was not specified exactly what special office the Government of Israel maintains in New York, where the military envoys were briefed; but it is known that Ariel Sharon uses New York as his main base of operations when he is in the U.S.

Senate Dems Move Against Effort To Cut Medicaid

On Dec. 15, the office of Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) issued a press release announcing that he is spearheading an effort by Senate Democrats to "stand in the way of any effort to block grant Medicaid." The Senate Democrats signed a letter to President Bush expressing their opposition to any such proposal because it "would ultimately mean low-income families and persons with disabilities would be dropped from the program."

"This letter sends a strong signal to the White House that Senate Democrats will not support any effort to block grant Medicaid," Bingaman said.

The only Senate Democrat who did not sign the letter was Republican-in-Democratic-clothing Zell Miller, who is retiring. Excerpts from the letter follow:

"We are writing to express our opposition to any Medicaid reform proposal that seeks to impose a cap on Federal Medicaid spending in any form or eliminates the fundamental guarantee to Medicaid coverage for our nation's most vulnerable citizens, including low-income children, parents, pregnant women, people with disabilities, and senior citizens.

"...We are unwilling to allow the Federal government to walk away from Medicaid's over 50 million beneficiaries, the providers that serve them, and the urban and rural communities in which they live.

"Arbitrary limits on Federal Medicaid spending fail to automatically adjust for economic recessions, demographic changes, health care inflation, or disasters, including terrorism.... Moreover, capped Federal payments profoundly limit a State's ability to be innovative in responding to the growing number of uninsured in this country. We stand ready to work with you on policies impacting the health and well-being of [eligible recipients], and identifying those structural changes that enhance state flexibility without compromising the health and well-being of beneficiaries.

"With the number of uninsured growing in the nation and an aging population, we should take steps to stabilize and improve health coverage rather than undermine it...."

Pentagon Wants Another $80-$90 Billion for Iraq

The supplemental budget request is likely to arrive on Capitol Hill early next year, and will come on top of $25 billion in bridge funding that Congress added to the defense appropriations bill last summer, according to the Wall Street Journal Dec. 14. Whatever the actual amount turns out to be, the next supplemental looks to be the largest one yet, following on $160 billion that Congress has already appropriated since Bush's invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. The much-higher-than-expected troop levels, currently building up to 150,000 troops by January, and the excessive wear and tear on equipment, is driving the costs of the U.S. military presence in Iraq ever higher. Some of the money is also supposed to help the Army reorganize itself from 33 combat brigades to 43.

Marc Rich Sandal Could Blow Up in Cheney's Face

In discussions with EIR on Dec. 13, a prominent Republican Party figure pointed to the New York Post's front-page banner headline exposing Marc Rich's role in the Saddam Hussein-era oil-for-food scandal. A two-page spread, by the tabloid's investigative reporter Niles Lathem, revealed that both the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau are conducting grand jury probes into the role of fugitive—later pardoned (by President Clinton)—financier Marc Rich, in a string of lucrative, but illegal, oil contracts with the Saddam Hussein regime, under the UN-administered oil-for-food program. The Post story named Ben Pollner, a New York City-based oil trader, as a second target of the two probes, reporting that Pollner was recently interrogated by Morgenthau's investigators about his dealings with Rich and Saddam.

Of course, the New York Post's spin on the story is to revive the Bill Clinton pardon of Marc Rich, to embarrass and scandalize the ex-President. But some anti-Bush/Cheney Republicans are licking their chops over the fact that the Marc Rich scandals also hit hard at the Veep's office, because Rich's long-time attorney, and the "quarterback" for the campaign to get President Clinton to pardon Rich, was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, chief national security aide, and alter ego. For 16 years, whenever he was out of government service, Libby, a protégé of Nixon's personal attorney Leonard Garment, handled Marc Rich's legal affairs. Beginning in 1999, Libby worked with "ex"-Mossad officer Zvi Rafiah and Al Gore's White House attorney Jack Quinn, to steer the Rich pardon effort.

The GOP stalwart who pointed to the flank against Libby and Cheney said that there are a lot of GOP "interested parties" who could jump at the story. He forecast that the Bush/Cheney team would be hit with a barrage of damaging leaks, coming from disgruntled Republican Party and even Administration sources. "Look for a leak parade," the source said, adding that the Bush Administration, once said to be "leak-proof," is now facing disasters. He cited the Bernard Kerik fiasco, as a typical case of what he expects to see with greater and greater frequency. He also cited the White House bungling of the situation with Treasury Secretary John Snow, who was initially touted as one of the first Cabinet members to be out the door, and later was told he'd be kept on. "Previously, Snow was an empty suit. Now he's an empty suit with a grudge." He added that he expects the Administration to come to an unhappy premature end soon. "The problem is, what comes next? Republicans hate and fear the unknown, and right now," he concluded, "nobody knows what's coming next from this Administration."

Ibero-American News Digest

South American Community of Nations Is Born

Presidents and/or high-level representatives of 12 South American nations, representing the nations of the Andean Community; Mercosur; and Chile, Surinam, and Guyana, met in Cuzco, Peru Nov. 7-9 to found a new entity designed to bring about the "economic, political, and infrastructural unity" of South America, as well as to serve as a "balancing factor" in hemispheric relations, according to spokesmen for the event. Mexico and Panama sent representatives with observer status. The newly dubbed South American Community of Nations is intended to facilitate broad integration among the nations of the subcontinent over the course of the next 10-15 years, in areas including economics and finance, trade and infrastructure, energy and technology, culture, and more.

The first project announced under the community's auspices is an ocean-to-ocean highway, joining the Pacific to the Atlantic, at a cost of $700 million. The project is a Brazilian-Peruvian one, with Brazil providing the bulk of the financing.

The community is the brainchild of Brazilian President Lula da Silva, and has been embraced with varying degrees of enthusiasm by other South American heads of state. How it ultimately evolves will depend on whether the heads of state within the community are prepared to break with the current IMF monetary and financial system or not.

Fox Threatens To Take Congress to Court Over 2005 Budget

With an overwhelming 332-146 vote on Dec. 14, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies refused to make the nearly 70 changes in the 2005 budget which President Vicente Fox insisted be done. The only changes made by the Congress were to correct minor spelling, grammar, and mathematical errors. Immediately following the vote, Interior Minister Santiago Creel announced that Fox would challenge the Constitutional right of Congress to set budget policy, in an unprecedented suit before the Supreme Court.

The fight erupted on Nov. 18, when the Congress first passed a budget substantially different from the budget proposal submitted to Congress by the Finance Ministry. The Congressional version of the budget raises spending by 10% more than the government wished, and reallocates billions away from bank bail-out funds. Fox first threatened to veto the Congressional version of the budget, because it is the Chamber of Deputies' clearly designated responsibility, his legal team opted to bring a Supreme Court challenge, which he has no guarantee of winning.

Congress has now adjourned, and is not scheduled to resume full sessions until Feb. 1. Nor is the Court expected to hear the case immediately. The government reportedly intends to assure continued funding for the government, by contesting only a small part of the budget, so the rest can become operative.

Mont Pelerin Pushes Silver Standard To Destroy Mexico

An unusual advertisement calling for "A Silver Coin for Mexico," signed by 176 members of the Journalists' Club, was run in two major Mexico dailies this past month (in El Universal Nov. 25, and Reforma Nov. 29). The ad urged adoption of a bill being prepared for the Mexican Congress which would permit the circulation of the one-ounce silver "Liberty" commemorative coin as legal tender in Mexico, in the name of supporting "popular savings and our sovereignty."

The bill is no mere proposal for a new silver coin, but the front end of an eight-year campaign by the fanatic "Austrian School" ideologues of Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society to put Mexico on the silver standard, for the explicit purpose of eliminating any capacity whatsoever of the Mexican government to issue credit, including through an autonomous Central Bank.

The leading figure behind this fascist campaign is Hugo Salinas Price, brother of top Mont Pelerinite Roberto Salinas Price. Hugo—who wrote a book, Silver, The Way for Mexico, in 1997, and founded the "Pro-Silver Association," to push the campaign—argues that "silverizing" Mexico would more effectively strip Mexico of any monetary sovereignty, than either dollarization or a currency board. Under this scheme, the supply of currency in circulation would be tied to the amount of silver produced in Mexico; i.e., the monetary emission of Mexico would be placed in the hands of the silver mine owners. (EIR in Mexico is investigating who owns Mexico's silver mines today.) Were such insanity ever to be adopted, it would have a stunning deflationary effect upon the country, and impose more violent austerity than Mexico has yet suffered.

Hugo Salinas Price also proposes silver become the basis for Ibero-American integration, with siren songs about how silver could "free" the continent from the dollar and "the general Americanization of culture." Using the U.S. economic crisis as grist for this mill, he met in October with eight state governors to discuss his proposal, winning support, at least, from Amalia Garcia, the new Governor of Zacatecas, the leading silver-producing state in Mexico.

On Oct. 27, a group of Congressmen announced they would be drafting a bill to implement the silver standard plan, and in November, the "journalists" added to the drumbeat. Among the signers were Arturo Damm Arnal of the Von Mises Society (another "Austrian School" outpost), Sergio Aguayo, the top Project Democracy agent in Mexico (a drug legalizer), and such lesser lights as former LaRouche associate-turned-fascist "Hispanidad" convert, Marivilia Carrasco.

Halliburton Hires Ibero-Americans as Mercenaries for Iraq

According to research done by the Colombian daily El Tiempo, a representative of Halliburton Latin America is recruiting recently retired Colombian military officers into a mercenary army, which is being deployed to Iraq to protect oil and gas pipelines and private companies, and to serve as bodyguards to executives there. The experience of the Colombians in fighting guerrillas and paramilitaries for decades is considered a big plus in their favor. The Colombians, 16 of whom have already left for Iraq, and others of whom will be heading out in January, are reportedly being offered salaries of $7,000 a month, paid vacations in Western Europe every three months, and life insurance coverage of $60,000. The catch is that their contracts are for one year, and if they abandon their jobs before that time, they must pay back every cent. Perhaps Halliburton doesn't expect many to survive that long.

An ad was taken out in El Tiempo calling on retired Colombian military personnel to hire out for the job, but El Tiempo interviewed the Halliburton rep in Colombia, who denied his company's involvement in this recruiting, and claimed Halliburton's name is being abused in this operation. El Tiempo nonetheless concludes, "This is the first evidence we have of these activities in Colombia. It is estimated that currently, this private Army—including Chileans, Spaniards, South Africans, Irish, and now, Colombians—is 10,000 strong, nearly one for every ten Marines" over there.

Argentine Government Decrees Pay Raise

Argentine President Nestor Kirchner decreed that wages of both the private and public sectors be raised, a move that most certainly will irritate the IMF bankers. Effective Jan. 1, private-sector workers will receive an 11% raise (100 pesos) and state-sector workers who make less than 1,250 pesos a month will receive a 13% raise. These increases will not be subject to tax deductions for pensions or health care. This follows the recently announced increases in year-end bonuses for retirees, and subsidies for poor families.

Pension Pirateers Across Ibero-America Rake It In

According to a 2003 study by Global Action on Aging, investment managers in Argentina's privatized pension system take half the money. "Almost half of workers' pension contributions pay for insurance and charges by the fund managers" in Argentina's pension system, privatized in 1990.

Other Ibero-American privatized pension systems turn over between 18% and 32% of the workers' contributions to investment banks and managers as fees, etc.; but Argentina's system is even worse. Mid-1990s assessments of Argentina's privatization, during the Carlos Menem regime which started it, were glowing; but since then, the system has collapsed, and two-thirds of workers are no longer contributing to it.

Cuba Runs Exercises for Possible U.S. Military Invasion

For the first time in two decades, Cuban President Fidel Castro has ordered up tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers and civilians to carry out maneuvers against a simulated U.S. invasion. The exercise, dubbed "Bastion 2004," was launched on Dec. 13, and headed up by Fidel's brother, Armed Forces Minister Raul Castro. The maneuvers are expected to last a full week, and are intended to demonstrate to Washington, in the aftermath of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions by U.S. forces, that Cuba will be ready for whatever comes. The Cuban concept of warfare is based on "war of all the people," borrowed from Vietnam, and meaning that all citizens of every age will be incorporated into armed "militias," prepared to repel invaders at whatever cost.

On the weekend, millions of Cubans will undergo basic military training as part of the operation.

Western European News Digest

Blair Suffers Double Defeat on Anti-Terror Law

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has suffered a severe defeat at the hands of Britain's Law Lords, who ruled on Dec. 16 that detaining foreigners without trial under emergency anti-terror laws violates European Human Rights Convention.

Lord Hoffmann, who supported the 8-to-1 majority opposing detention, stressed the importance of the case. He wrote: "It calls into question the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.... The real threat to the life of the nation ... comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory."

While the latter decision is not binding on the government, it is a political bombshell, it will have to be reviewed, and it will likely even lead to repeal of the section of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act 2001, sponsored by Home Secretary David Blunkett, which allows indefinite detention of foreigners.

Topping off Blair's predicament, within 24 hours of the Law Lords ruling, Blunkett was forced to resign over an alleged "nanny scandal."

Both setbacks come as Blair is trying to put together his national campaign before elections scheduled for spring 2005, where "security" will be a prime issue.

New Home Secretary Warns Detainees May Remain Behind Bars

The 8-1 decision of the British Law Lords on anti-terror measures (see above) does not necessarily mean release of detainees. Usually only five Law Lords form such a panel, but this case is so important, that nine were included. One key issue is that only foreigners, not Britons, can be detained if there are "reasonable grounds to suspect" terrorist links.

Despite the Law Lords' finding, brand-new Home Secretary Charles Clark has said that the detainees would remain in prison, and the policy will "remain in force" until the law is reviewed by Parliament in 2005. Clark added that the government would study the judgment, "to see whether it is possible to modify our legislation to address the concerns raised by the House of Lords."

Nine of the 11 foreign detainees held in British prisons have initiated an appeal. Most have been held for up to three years, and are in Belmarsh prison in London, called by some "Britain's Guantanamo Bay."

Lord Gingham of Cornhill, the most senior lord of appeals court, has called the powers under which the men were held, incompatible with European human rights laws, because they "discriminate on the ground of nationality or immigration status." He has ordered the Blair government to pay their legal costs.

Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead ruled: "Indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is anathema in any country which observes the rule of law. It deprives the detained person of the protection a criminal trial is intended to afford."

Zapatero: Why Were All March 11-14 Files Erased?

Why were all Spanish government files on the crucial period of March 11-14, 2004—the days immediately following the murderous train bombing in Madrid—erased by then-outgoing Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar? This question was raised by his successor, Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, before the special parliamentary investigation committee in Madrid, on Dec. 13. Zapatero said he found it strange and shocking that his predecessor, the Popular Party's Aznar, had ordered all files erased, for the crucial period from the day of the Madrid train bombings on March 11 to March 14.

Zapatero added that, in addition, all sensitive government files from 1996 to 2004, for eight years of Aznar's government had been erased.

Zapatero also reiterated the need for political parties to cooperate in the fight against terrorism. He told members of Parliament he would triple the number of security forces available to combat terrorism.

The Spanish daily El Pais reported that the Zapatero government is proposing a new anti-terrorism pact for cooperation between Western and Islamic countries. Among the points of cooperation are efforts to dismantle al-Qaeda.

Madrid makes clear that it distinguishes between al-Qaeda terrorism and Islam.

Spanish Neo-Nazis Arrested in Arson Attacks

Police arrested a gang of seven neo-nazis in northeast Spain, operating in the region around the city of Gerona. They are held responsible for a series of arson and other attacks on mosques, Islamic schools, and stores owned by Muslim citizens: an orchestrated "clash of religions."

They are also charged with preparing a major arson attack on the regional headquarters of Basque organizations like the Herri Batasuna party, with the idea of provoking a new round of ETA-authored violence. Rumors have it that more of these neo-nazi groups are operating underground.

German Ambassador to U.S. Urges Bush To Engage Iran

In a rather unusual step that reflects deep concern in Berlin over the next U.S. steps on ties to Iran, German ambassador to the United States Wolfgang Ischinger, in an exclusive article for the Atlantic Times monthly, urged the U.S. to change policy toward that nation. Twenty-five years after the hostage affair in Tehran, he wrote, it is high time for the U.S. to end sanctions against Iran and enter a constructive dialogue with Iranian leaders. The nuclear issue can be settled in the way the European Union chose, namely, by constructive diplomacy that also contains a substantial economic cooperation component.

A similar argument, which took note of the enormous difficulties the U.S. is running into in Iraq, was made by Gernot Erler, chief foreign policy spokesman of the German Social Democrats, at a public panel event in Berlin. Erler strongly urged that the U.S. should not think of opening any new military front against Iran.

Danish Meat-Packers Strike Over Wage Cuts

Over 3,000 workers in the meat-packing industry went on strike at 13 Danish Crown factories Dec. 14, to protest the fact that 300 workers at the Tulip factory in Ringsted, Denmark agreed to a 15% wage reduction, after they were given the choice between that, or the plant closing, and moving the production to Germany. This expanded the strike from the 1,700 workers who walked out the previous day.

Russia and the CIS News Digest

Russian Analyst Sees LaRouche as Pivotal Figure

One of the most striking post-election analyses, published in Russia, was a commentary by Boris Mezhuyev, carried Nov. 12 on APN.ru (Political News Agency, a project of the National Strategy Institute). Mezhuyev is a political analyst, associated with Kosmopolis magazine. Under the headline, "Paranoia, or the Voice of the Moral Majority?", he went looking for the missing "normal left-conservative" factor in American politics, and found it—in Lyndon LaRouche.

Mezhuyev noted exit poll reports, which indicated that the "hypothetical average voter" in the USA was against abortion/homosexual marriage/de-Christianization of society, but in favor of changes in economic policy, making him "more likely to support the moderately protectionist and socially oriented line of Kerry, than the free-market orthodoxy of the Republicans, with their abiding belief in the 'invisible hand' of globalization." In Mezhuyev's view, these data indicate that American society is "healthier than its political establishment." He derived "a portrait of a normal 'left-conservative' voter, who does not want to abandon his country's religious precepts, nor its power as a nation, but who sees no sense in imperial projects like the occupation of Iraq, which never threatened the USA, and who believes that the government ought to implement an economic policy in the interest of the country's inhabitants, and not only the business elite...."

The U.S. two-party system, Mezhuyev noted, seems unable to offer the voter anything corresponding to these values, in a single package. He commented that Russia suffers from the same problem, as evidenced by the virtual expulsion of Sergei Glazyev (who would represent such a combination) from the political system.

If "left-conservatism" has been marginalized in Russia, wrote Mezhuyev, "in America it is virtually absent from the respectable political spectrum." In the USA, he said, the "left-conservatives" are not marginal figures, but "marginals squared"—"representatives of a movement that orthodox conservative circles call 'one of the strangest in American history.' And no less strange, is the fact that the leader of this movement, the millionaire [sic] Lyndon LaRouche, has become enormously popular among left-patriotic circles in our own country." Mezhuyev cited the monthly Russky Predprinimatel, for having described LaRouche as a "Titan thinker," whereas Americans surveyed by Mezhuyev about LaRouche, said that he was crazy.

Mezhuyev then gave a fairly accurate synopsis of some highlights of LaRouche's intervention into American politics, from the 1969 Columbia University strike, through to LaRouche's emergence as a defender of "the American System." That means, explained Mezhuyev, "a statist, dirigist model in the spirit of President Roosevelt's New Deal." Mezhuyev continued, "In the economist's opinion, the philosophical underpinnings of this system are provided by Christian neo-platonism and, in particular, the philosophy of G. Leibniz, while the cultural basis is to be found in Classical music and Renaissance art. Opposed to this 'state-oriented' model is a different one, the 'liberal-oligarchical,' which is rooted in British economic liberalism and the philosophy of T[homas] Hobbes, which is to blame for all the sins of the modern era, colonial slavery first and foremost."

LaRouche is categorically against an American empire, which differentiates him from the neo-cons, wrote Mezhuyev. He noted (as "conspirological") LaRouche's accusations against neo-con leader Dick Cheney, as a follower of the Synarchist International, inspired by Karl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and provided a link to the "Sounding the Certain Trumpet" Nov. 6 message, on the larouchepac.com website.

Should all of this be regarded as brilliant analysis, or raving?—asked Mezhuyev. "The figure of LaRouche is enigmatic," he concluded. But the most interesting question for Mezhuyev is why LaRouche is the person who most expresses what he calls "left-conservatism," which seems to be most consonant with the desires of the population.

China, Russia To Hold Joint Military Exercises

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov made a mid-December four-day visit to Beijing, for discussions with his Chinese counterpart Cao Gangchuan, as well as with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission Guo Boxiong. They agreed to told the first-ever joint Chinese-Russian military exercises, on Chinese territory, during 2005.

Hu Jintao said that China and Russia have the same task, to maintain peace, stability, and development, and their military cooperation is in the fundamental interests of the people of every nation in the region. The two nations will expand bilateral strategic coordination, and expand military cooperation within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Hu said.

Ivanov said that Russia is "fully confident" of the future development of Chinese-Russian relations. Relations between the two armies are an important part of the partnership, he acknowledged, adding that Russia is willing to work with China to promote this relationship and to maintain peace and stability in the region and the world at large.

At the two defense ministers' press conference, Cao Gangchuan said that: "Friendly relations between our Armed Forces are not aimed against third countries. We maintain these relations with a sole purpose of mutual development of our military potentials and to preserve stability in the region.... Both countries believe that military cooperation is an important aspect of our relations and we will continue developing this cooperation in the future according to instructions provided by the leaders of our nations.... Our armies are strong. They are great world-class armies. We can learn from our mutual experience through joint military exercises."

Russian Youth Decimated, Population Plummets

Two new demographic reports from Russia have come out, both of which provide chilling confirmation of the disastrous health and mortality processes going on among its citizens.

In a report on an early-November conference on "The Past and Present of the Population in Russia," held in Moscow, RFE/RL Newsline notes that the population of Russia fell by another 504,000 in the first eight months of 2004, a rate equivalent to "two villages disappearing per day." Unlike in the 1990s, the so-called natural decline of the population (excess of deaths over births) is no longer offset by immigration from other former Soviet republics. Izvestia's coverage of the event, published Nov. 9, noted that one-third of the net decline during 2004 is accounted for by net decline of the working-age population, "a pattern unprecedented in industrialized countries during peace time."

The other report is a UNICEF study, written up in the Moscow Times of Dec. 8, on the astounding death rate among Russian male teenagers (ages 15-19). Of all the young men in that age bracket, one out of every 30 dies in a given year, which UNICEF attributes to "accidents, poisoning, suicide and violence." (The spread of narcotics is evidently not mentioned.) For female teenagers, the rate is one out of 120, for a combined rate of one out of 99—the highest death rate in this age-bracket, among 27 Eastern European and CIS countries in the survey. Russia also led in teen suicides, at 45 per 100,000 each year, and teen homicides, where the Russian rate is 20 times greater than in Western Europe.

Eagerness in Russia, for LaRouche's Views on Ukraine

The International lead article in the Dec. 10 EIR, "Flattened by IMF, Ukraine in Geopolitical Crosshairs," was translated into Russian and posted Dec. 8 on InoSMI.ru, a widely read site providing up-to-the-minute translations from major international media. (InoSMI is an acronym for "Foreign Mass Media.") The accompanying box "Stop Brzezinski's Meddling in Ukraine," which showcased Lyndon LaRouche's direct statement, was not included by InoSMI.ru, but it has been translated into Russian and sent out as a press release by EIR. InoSMI.ru's translation was reprinted and cited in the Russian and Ukrainian media, including in commentaries on Golos Rossii (Voice of Russia) radio, and the Ukrainian news and analysis web site, www.from-ua.com.

Yanukovych Issues Threats, as Ukrainian Run-off Nears

With little time remaining before the Dec. 26 re-vote in Ukraine's Presidential election, Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych who says he was betrayed by President Leonid Kuchma after the first vote, has issued a series of vaguely threatening statements. In an interview with Western press, reported in the Washington Post Dec. 17, and circulated in Russia and Ukraine by InoSMI.ru, Yanukovych said that even if the new vote were to be certified as a victory for Yushchenko, neither he nor his supporters would recognize that victory. "Even if Mr. Yushchenko wins," said Yanukovych, "he will never be President of Ukraine. The people who voted for me will never recognize him. If this nihilism continues, I will not be able to stop people. It is impossible to agree with this great injustice."

Other wire reports note that, during the Dec. 16 discussion, Yanukovych warned that "a real danger exists that after Dec. 26, Ukraine may be on the brink of a full-scale crisis." The day before, in Kherson, and while campaigning in Mykolaiv and Sevastopol, he talked about his supporters challenging Yushchenko's for control of the streets, adding, "As far as I understand, this process cannot be stopped. I hope that it's peaceful."

On Dec. 16, opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko attacked such statements about Yanukovych's people coming to Kiev, as "unconstructive," according to Interfax. Yushchenko accused him of trying to "destabilize civil peace and the political situation in Ukraine," and said that the Premier should "calm down" and "accept his fate." But on Dec. 17, Yanukovych followed up with a statement addressed to the international community, in which Strana.ru reports that he said that "the current situation ... is not a confrontation between the opposition and the authorities, but a crisis that will determine the future of Ukraine." He said that Yushchenko and the foreign press were wrongly portraying Ukraine's choice as between Europe and Russia, a view that "absolutely distorts reality," according to Yanukovych, who said that as Premier and Presidential candidate, "I never cast doubt upon Ukraine's choice of Europe." Unless a pathway of compromise is chosen, he said, Ukraine is threatened not with fragmentation into two parts, "but, in reality, there could be many more parts than that, and, by the domino theory, this will cause a complete redrawing of the maps of both Europe and Russia."

In the Post's summary of his remarks, Yanukovych attacked Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that he wished Putin had not mentioned him favorably, when the Russian leader visited Ukraine before the election. "It rather worked against me," he said.

Abkhazian Election Unsnarled, Relations With Tbilisi Not

Businessman Sergei Bagapsh and former Prime Minister Raul Khajimba, rival candidates in last fall's inconclusive Presidential election in Abkhazia (autonomous region within Georgia, with close ties to Russia), agreed Dec. 6 to hold a new vote in January. The two candidates may run on the same ticket, as President and Vice President. The agreement followed soon after Georgian President Michael Saakashvili had come out on Dec. 3, endorsing Bagapsh's claim to victory and offering a process of dialogue between the central government in Tbilisi, and Abkhazia. Bagapsh promptly rejected Saakashvili's overture as "a provocation," and intensified his discussions with Khajimba. Russian emissaries have been visiting Abkhazia regularly, throughout the crisis, despite being denounced by Saakashvili for interference.

Southwest Asia News Digest

U.S., Russian Military Sources: U.S. Losing War in Iraq

A former Russian military intelligence officer, who maintains close contacts on the ground inside Iraq, told EIR last week that the U.S. military situation is becoming more and more untenable. He reported that the insurgents once again control 70% of Fallujah, operating out of the rubble that is all that is left of major portions of the city. U.S. troops are targets of constant ambushes there, and the insurgents have an elaborate tunnel and bunker structure under the city, that allows them to operate. The source said that recent reports that the U.S. Marines may soon pull out of Fallujah are due to the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult to conceal the true situation on the ground there.

The same Russian source reported on an eyewitness account of a major car bomb or rocket attack on a U.S. military camp near the Iraq-Jordan border. His source, an Iraqi businessman, arrived at the scene of the attack shortly after it took place, and was forced to wait for many hours, as the entire Iraq-Jordan border was sealed, while U.S. forces hunted, unsuccessfully, for the insurgents, and while emergency medical rescue operations were conducted. The eyewitness reported that U.S. military medivac helicopters took six hours to fly out all of the wounded and dead, indicating a high number of casualties. The Russian source reported that the "official" casualty figures are a cover-up and conceal the actual number of killed and wounded.

A similar reading came from retired U.S. Army Col. Patrick Lang, who has decades of experience in counterinsurgency. Commenting on a Washington Post story about an increase in U.S. Air Force airlifts, to deliver supplies in Iraq, to avoid the constant attacks on truck convoys, Lang wrote: "It has to be said that General Jumper's decision to relax USAF restrictions on the use of intra-theater airlift is the right decision in this situation. The level of violence on the roads in Iraq is so high in the critical areas that airlift makes sense as the way to move people and materiel around. At the same time, the necessity of such a decision to adopt distributions of this service which are inherently inefficient should be understood to be evidence of the success of the insurgents in creating enough 'friction' in the system to cause us to move in the direction of reducing our presence on the roads. The objectives of any well-run insurgency are always the same.

"1. Restrict the movements of the counterinsurgents. Make the enemy unable to freely move about the country. This reduces the ability to interact with the population and causes the counterinsurgents to cede 'de facto' control of more and more of the population to the insurgents.

"2. Since the insurgency is inherently a political process, the insurgents must seek to control more and more of the population. A counterinsurgent's progressive withdrawal from the roads directly contributes to the strategic insurgent goal of controlling the population."

Powell's Call for 'More Democracy' Rebuffed at Summit

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell pushed the Bush Administration's Arab democracy schemes at a summit meeting of 20 Arab states in Rabat, Morocco, and received a very cold reception from the official attendees. The Dec. 10-11 event launched the U.S.'s Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) initiative, a program for regime change and looting through deregulation and liberalization of the Arab economies.

The Arabs who attended the "Forum for the Future," argued simply that no democracy could come unless there were a settlement of the Palestine crisis, an end to the occupation, and a real peace.

In the final statement, meeting participants said "their support for reform in the region will go hand in hand with their support for a just, comprehensive, and lasting settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict."

Although the United States signed onto the statement, Powell disagreed with the conditions attached. "We can't hold up reform or slow the pace of reform or keep reform from accelerating because of these other issues," he said at a news conference with Moroccan Foreign Minister Mohamed Benaissa, who co-chaired the meeting.

Arab League chief Amr Moussa insisted that peace in the region was necessary for the reforms envisioned by the BMENA initiative that has been endorsed by the Group of Eight industrialized country. He said an independent Palestine "is a must" if the U.S. plan is to have any chance of working.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal put it even more bluntly, telling the conference that the U.S. bias toward Israel was the main obstacle to promoting reform in the region. "The real bone of contention is the longest conflict in modern history," he said. "For too long the Arabs have witnessed the Western bias toward Israel." The prince said the Arab world understood U.S. security guarantees to Israel, but "what the Arab peoples cannot fathom is why these guarantees are translated into unrestricted backing of unrestrained Israeli policies [that are] contrary to international legality."

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit echoed his Saudi counterpart and said reform moves would remain stalled without action on the internationally backed "Road Map" peace plan.

Barghouti Quits Race, Issues Demands

West Bank Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, who is in prison serving a life sentence in Israel, issued some strong demands last week, in announcing his withdrawal from the January 2005 race for the Presidency of the Palestinian Authority. Speaking at a press conference along with Barghouti's wife Fadwa, Fatah steering committee member Ahmed Ghanem said that Barghouti's original decision to run was in part to "underscore that the charade of a democratic Palestinian election under international sponsorship cannot hide the fact that the election is taking place under occupation and violations of international law." He said that "Barghouti's decision is not based on personal reasons having to do with his situation as a prisoner of cell No. 5 in solitary confinement in the Be'er Sheva prison, but derives rather from his understanding and vision of the general Palestinian interest."

Ghanem then spelled out 18 demands that Barghouti had made in exchange for his withdrawal. These include adherence to the Intifada; resistance to occupation as a fundamental principle alongside negotiations; refusal of any partial or temporary agreements in future negotiations; insistence on reaching agreements with all other Palestinian factions as a condition of any future negotiations; continued struggle against the separation fence and the Judaization of Jerusalem; removal of checkpoints; an end to assassinations and persecution of wanted Fatah militants; withdrawal from all P.A. territories as a precondition for any future negotiations; and preserving the principle of armed resistance. He also demanded that no agreement be signed unless there is a timetable for the release of prisoners. He also called on Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), who is favored to win the election, to support and compensate the families of all victims of the Intifada, set a date for parliamentary elections, and establish a legal committee to bring to trial those involved in corruption.

Asia News Digest

Bush 'Manipulated North Korea Intel,' Just Like in Iraq

U.S. President George W. Bush "manipulated North Korea intelligence as a weapon of mass distraction," wrote Selig Harrison in the just-published January-February 2005 issue of the Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs. Harrison reports (more than a year after EIR's Aug. 8, 2003 exposé), from angry U.S. military sources, that Washington manufactured the North Korea crisis and "claimed Pyongyang was on its way to producing weapons-grade uranium, to scare allies Japan and South Korea."

"Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did in Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons," he notes.

The intelligence was "manipulated for political purposes," Harrison writes, as a "weapon of mass distraction." The North Korea hand's charge has been front-page news worldwide.

Harrison's article reports charges made in the summer 2003, by Jonathan Pollack at the U.S. Naval War College and reported in EIR, to the effect that the crisis was manufactured to stop an East Asian regional alliance and, Harrison adds, "to keep open the option of 'regime change' as in Iraq."

Harrison, Asia chief at the Center for International Policy, also chairs the Task Force on Korean Policy, a grouping of former senior U.S. military officials, diplomats, and Korean specialists. The Task Force, which includes a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former ambassadors, also on Dec. 10 issued a report calling on the U.S. immediately to back down on its insistence that North Korea come clean on its alleged uranium program. Instead, it should first negotiate the dismantling of Pyongyang's plutonium facilities, it said.

Harrison quotes Pollack's charge that the rapid North-South Korean and Japanese rapprochement alarmed the Bush Administration, which "saw a real possibility that its options on the [Korean] peninsula would increasingly be driven by the policy agendas of others," so that the U.S. showdown in Pyongyang in October 2002 was arranged less than three weeks after Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi's historic September 2002 summit with Kim Jong Il.

"Koizumi did not ask for U.S. permission to go to North Korea, and he refused to call off the trip even after [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage revealed Washington's suspicions about a secret North Korean uranium program," Harrison wrote.

"No concrete evidence of a uranium program has been presented," says Harrison, reporting that the U.S. claim of a uranium capability was based on several failed attempts by Pyongyang to buy enrichment technology, including electrical-frequency converters and tubing for centrifuges.

But "According to Pollack, the CIA report indicated that North Korea had no operational enrichment facility to declare.... Most officials recognized that the path to a meaningful enrichment capability remained a distant and very uncertain possibility." However, "despite its limited knowledge about the uranium program, the U.S. government "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes." The uranium issue "furnished powerful ammunition to render the Agreed Framework a dead letter"—something enormously appealing to hawks in the administration," Harrison writes, quoting Pollack.

Harrison also writes that his claims are based on South Korean and Japanese intelligence sources who collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency on the issue.

State Department Denies Harrison Charges on North Korea

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli dismissed Selig Harrison's claims Dec. 11, that North Korea's uranium program is a manufactured crisis issue. "We think there is a wealth of clear and compelling evidence about North Korea's uranium enrichment program," he said. "We have known since the late 1990s that North Korea was interested in enrichment technology." He said the United States obtained evidence more than two and a half years ago that North Korea was pursuing a covert program to enrich uranium, and assessed it was aimed at making nuclear weapons—that is, he simply repeated the assertions which have been made by the U.S. side, and never substantiated.

Japanese PM's Support Plunges Over Iraq Troops

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's support plunged to 37% as the public opposed his Dec. 9 decision to extend Japan's troop deployment in Iraq 9. "It appears that the Premier's polls reflect his decision to extend the troop deployment without receiving the understanding of the people," Mainichi News said.

Taiwan's People Seek 'One China'

"Ties with Beijing won the parliamentary elections Dec. 11 on Taiwan," political analyst Wu Chih-chung of Dongwu University told the Dec. 11 New York Times. "It will be much more difficult" for President Chen Shui-bian's program to split China, he said. Chen's increasingly forceful calls in the past two weeks for Taiwanese independence from mainland China have angered the population, who voted against the idea, and now, "tensions between Taiwan and China will be reduced," he said. As reported Dec. 10, Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its coalition partners dropped to 101 seats, while the "one China" Kuomintang Nationalists and their allied parties won 114 seats, increasing their small parliamentary majority.

The Nationalists have vowed to block Chen's independence constitution for the island and other actions that Beijing has labelled as leading to war, especially when trade with the mainland has kept the economy going, and the one-China policy is very popular in the business sector. The Kuomintang-dominated Assembly may now refuse to purchase $18 billion in weapons from the U.S., as Chen had requested. They questioned the size of the program and suggest that such large anti-missile systems won't be needed because relations with Beijing should simply be improved.

President Chen took personal responsibility for the defeat, and Lien Chan, the Nationalists' party chairman, said the vote would make it difficult to proceed with the purchase of the American weapons.

Japan's New Military Focus Turns to China, North Korea

Japan adopted plans Dec. 10 to shift its military focus away from the Cold War Soviet target, toward guarding against missiles from North Korean and Chinese incursions into Japanese naval zones. The new policy cuts tanks and other ground operations by one-third, but increases investment in missiles and forms a squadron of midair refueling planes to allow an attack on North Korean missile sites, if needed.

The guidelines, updated for the first time in nine years, said Japan needed to change to "multi-function, flexible defense capabilities" to deal with new threats such as terrorist and missile attacks. A joint missile-defense system with the United States is envisaged under the new guidelines, which will "advance the military unification of Japan and the United Sates," the Mainichi Shimbun said. If Japan actually does give up the capability for an independent missile system, it will become more heavily controlled by the neo-cons, so this provision has been a topic of hot debate.

The plan also will raise hackles in Asia with its call for selectively ending a longstanding ban on arms exports. To develop a missile-defense system with Washington, Japan would have to export components to the United States.

"The so-called 'China threat,' is completely baseless and irresponsible," said Zhang Qiyue, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, in a statement Dec. 10. "China expresses strong dissatisfaction with this, and hopes Japan will do more to improve mutual trust and the healthy and stable development of bilateral ties."

Africa News Digest

Morocco Rejects Bush Administration 'Democratization' Summit

Morocco, host to the Dec. 10 Arab summit launching the United States' Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) Initiative, was nevertheless among the Arab states unfriendly to its program for regime change, deregulation, and liberalization (see Southwest Asia Digest). "The U.S. administration can never bring us a democratic project," said Abdelhamid Amine, the head of Morocco's main independent human rights group. "Look at what happened at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, at Fallujah." An independent Moroccan news magazine, Le Journal Hebdomadaire, called the meeting's organizers "delusional" and called the forum a "flop" before it had even started. "It is legitimate to wonder if the promoters of this charade really believe in it themselves," the magazine editorialized. About 500 people protested outside the Moroccan Parliament building, saying that the mere fact that it was held, legitimized "American military aggression on the Arab and Muslim world." There was also a large anti-G-8 demonstration in Rabat Nov. 30.

The independence shown by Morocco helps to explain the preference of NATO and the U.S. European Command for using Algeria as a base for African operations (and probably explains some of the anti-Moroccan assertions in the Algerian press), as reported in the last issue of Africa Digest (EIW #50).

Moroccan Business Journal in Preemptive Attack on Powell

A Moroccan business journal anticipated Colin Powell's speech at the summit on 'democratizing' the Middle East with a suitably pointed cartoon. On Dec. 10—the day before the conference in Rabat on deregulation and liberalization—as the Washington Post reported Dec. 12, "L'Economiste, a conservative business publication here [in Rabat], published a front-page editorial cartoon on the conference depicting a U.S. soldier pointing a machine gun at an Arab man on the ground. In a quote the cartoon attributes to Powell, the soldier sneers, 'I hope we can come to an understanding of the need for reform and modernization of the broader Middle East and North Africa region.'"

The accompanying editorial—not reported by the Post—fails to identify the economic threats posed by globalization, saying, in fact, "The integration of the Arab world into the Western sphere need not occur in spite of us, since it can only be the bearer of progress. Moreover, along the way, Arab and Islamic civilization can only bring its values and riches to the common space that emerges." But then comes the report of unpleasant truths:

"Two major dangers threaten this ideal schema. The first comes from today's Arab leaders. Arab leadership elites are in the position of colonizers with respect to their own populations: it is not certain that they will cooperate in the change....

"The second danger is that Western clumsiness causes the change to be experienced as cultural rape by the targetted populations, because of the methods and the violence used to bring about the change...."

Sudan Begins Darfur Troop Withdrawal After AU Ultimatum

The government of Sudan began to withdraw troops from Darfur Dec. 18, after an ultimatum from the African Union (AU), to all armed parties. AU spokesman Assane Ba told Reuters, "General [Festus] Okonkwo [commander of AU observers in Darfur] has confirmed that troop withdrawal by the government was already under way, and we will meet later today to review the situation on the ground."

Okonkwo had said Dec. 17 that "his efforts to mediate between the government and rebels had yielded minimal results and Darfur was now a 'timed bomb that could explode at any moment,'" according to Reuters Dec. 18. He also reported government preparations for a major military offensive. The ultimatum, from AU officials at the Sudan negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria, was issued the same day. It said that after 24 hours, all attacks would be reported to the UN Security Council.

Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Isma'il said in Khartoum that the government's withdrawal was conditional on compliance by the rebels. The rebels deny that Sudan is pulling its troops back, Reuters reported.

U.S. Divestment Campaign Against Sudan Is Underway

Eric Reeves, an English professor at Smith College, is "at the center" of a national effort to pressure pension funds and universities to divest their holdings of stocks and bonds of companies that do business with Sudan, according to the Boston Globe Dec. 10. Reeves authored a Washington Post op-ed Aug. 23 in which he called for the overthrow of the Sudanese government "by whatever means necessary."

Also involved are Joe Madison, a Washington, D.C., radio talk-show host, who is president of the Sudan Campaign, an umbrella group; Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a Washington, D.C., minister and former delegate to Congress; and Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ).

Madison's Sudan Campaign has received support from the Center for Security Policy, a Washington neo-con think-tank (Frank Gaffney, Jr., President and CEO), in the form of research to identify investments held by U.S. public retirement systems that should be targetted.

Recent news stories report progress of the campaign in Massachusetts, where Harvard University and the pension funds of Boston and the state are targetted; as are those of New Jersey and Alabama.

U.S. companies were banned from operating in Sudan by Executive Order in 1997. The current campaign opposes U.S. investments in foreign companies, such as Siemens and Alcatel, that are involved in Sudan.

ICG Warns of Catastrophe in Congo After Rwanda Invades

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has warned of a "third catastrophe" from Rwanda's latest invasion of Congo, and suggests Rwanda's donors should threaten to cut aid. The ICG briefing, issued Dec. 17, states that "History may be repeating itself in recent weeks as a Rwandan incursion stirs fears of a third catastrophe, but the situation can still be saved. There is uncertainty about what is actually happening on the ground in the isolated and rugged border terrain—including whether the Rwandans are holding territory.... At the least, however, the crisis threatens the Congo's fragile political transition [to elected government]. At the worst, it could cause the Great Lakes region to go up in flames again."

The briefing reports that "Rwanda's reckless decision to play with fire followed almost immediately the summit pledge of 11 regional leaders, including [Rwandan] President Paul Kagame, to 'fully support the national peace processes in the region and refrain from any acts, statements or attitudes likely to negatively impact them.'" The pledge was signed in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Nov. 19-20.

The ICG briefing suggests that the donor governments propping up Rwanda (the U.S. being the most important) should threaten to cut certain forms of aid and apply other economic sanctions to obtain compliance with international agreements.

But it warns Kinshasa against attempting to reconquer militarily the city of Goma and the rest of North Kivu from Rwanda's Congolese allies, as was done successfully in South Kivu earlier this year, saying that such an undertaking would profoundly disrupt "the delicate balance of power and interests between Kinshasa and [Rwandan-allied] RCD-Goma that is a cornerstone of the political transition process" in Congo. "Rwanda's threatened invasion and the anticipation of Kinshasa counter-measures ... bolstered an important Kigali ally that had been losing ground both politically and militarily." This advice may be correct; the RCD-Goma party is not expected to do well at all in the planned 2005 elections. But, in light of its source, it is suspect.

The current conflict is of a different nature than the previous two wars, according to "regional analysts" cited by AFP Dec. 15. They indicate a low intensity war. The severe logistical difficulties of the Congo army contribute to the same result.

Zimbabwe Workers Flee, South African NGO Claims

The Solidarity Peace Trust, an NGO registered in South Africa, claimed in a November report that 60-70% of Zimbabwe's working population has left the country to escape the political and economic crisis at home, according to South Africa's Saturday Argus Nov. 20. It quotes the report: "An estimated 25 to 30% percent of Zimbabwe's population has left the nation. Out of five million potentially productive adults, 3.4 million are outside Zimbabwe. This is a staggering 60 to 70% of productive adults." Many have gone to South Africa.

The "political and economic crisis" is a reference to what is better called a civil war induced by massive Anglo-American intervention: U.S. President George Bush formally declared the government of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe "a threat to U.S. policy."

After allowing for possible exaggeration, the cited figures would still indicate a significant success for the Anglo-American policy of crushing Africa's feeble productive powers.

Morocco Begins Justice and Reconciliation Hearings

The statements of victims of repression in Morocco—from independence in 1956 to the accession of King Mohammed VI in 1999—will be heard before a Tribunal for Justice and Reconciliation, and will be broadcast nationally by television and radio. The initiative came from the royal palace in January, with the intention of launching a national debate on the "years of lead" (lead as in bullets) to prevent the return of repression.

Witnesses will not be permitted to name those who tortured them, on the grounds that legally sufficient proof is usually not available to them, and defamation is thus avoided. However, an official of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, Abdelkhalek Benzekri, told Le Monde Dec. 16, "We know that a number of them are still in high government posts.... Why should they enjoy impunity?"

The Tribunal, under the Presidency of Driss Benzekri, has already received 22,000 dossiers. The hearing may begin Dec. 20 or possibly at the turn of the new year.

Algeria, Morocco Nix Detention Camps for African Illegals

The Algerian and Moroccan governments do not want detention camps in the Maghreb for Africans attempting to emigrate illegally to Europe, according to statements made by Algerian Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem and Moroccan Interior Minister Mostapha Sahel, AFP reported Dec. 14. The idea for the camps came from some European governments. Sahel said that Morocco wished to cooperate with Europe, but "the approach must be economic within the framework of a partnership with the sub-Saharan countries" from which many of the illegals come.

Sahel said that Morocco has added 7,000 policemen as well as some auxiliaries, to the forces policing the frontiers and beaches of the kingdom.

This Week in History

December 20-26, 1783

Washington Resigns His Commission; — Returns to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve

On Dec. 23, 1783, George Washington entered the Maryland Statehouse at Annapolis and returned his commission as Major General of the Continental Army to the President of the Continental Congress. This was a source of wonder to many in Europe, who had assumed that the victorious general could now claim a throne or even a total dictatorship. But Washington was aiming toward the establishment of a true republic, and his words and actions during the fall and winter of 1783-84 made his ultimate goal crystal clear.

During the summer and fall, while the final negotiations for independence were taking place, Washington was planning for the settlement of Ohio and the new lines of transportation infrastructure which would be built to the west. When he penned his farewell orders to the Continental Army, he reminded his soldiers of the extraordinary nature of what they had accomplished: "The singular interpositions of Providence in our feeble condition were such, as could scarcely escape the attention of the most unobserving; while the unparalleled perseverance of the armies of the United States, through almost every possible suffering and discouragement for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle."

On Nov. 25, the Continental Army escorted the Governor of New York as he reestablished civilian rule over New York City. Then, Washington bade an emotional farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern and boarded a barge which took him across the harbor to New Jersey. In Philadelphia, he was greeted with parades and illuminations, and he managed to take the time to buy Christmas gifts for his wife Martha and their two adopted children, Eleanor and George Washington Parke Custis. The Washingtons had adopted their two youngest grandchildren after Martha's son, Jack Custis, had died of camp fever shortly after serving at the Battle of Yorktown.

General Washington then left Philadelphia for the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis, where the Continental Congress was meeting. He took his written commission out of his coat and addressed the President of Congress:

"Mr. President: The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country.

"Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence. A diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our Cause, the support of the Supreme Power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven.

"The Successful termination of the War has verified the most sanguine expectations, and my gratitude for the interposition of Providence, and the assistance I have received from my Countrymen, increases with every review of the momentous Contest.

"While I repeat my obligations to the Army in general, I should do injustice to my own feelings not to acknowledge in this place the peculiar Services and distinguished merits of the Gentlemen who have been attached to my person during the War. It was impossible the choice of confidential Officers to compose my family should have been more fortunate. Permit me Sir, to recommend in particular those, who have continued in Service to the present moment, as worthy of the favorable notice and patronage of Congress.

"I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life, by commending the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping.

"Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life."

Although George Washington was able to reach Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, as he had promised Martha, his resignation from the military did not mean that he would not be active as a private citizen. As soon as the new year began, he again took up his campaign to ensure that the weak and bankrupt American Government under the Articles of Confederation would be replaced by a superior form of republic. As he had written to the Marquis de Lafayette in 1783, "We stand, now, an Independent People, and have yet to learn political Tactics. We are placed among the nations of the Earth, and have a character to establish; but how we shall acquit ourselves, time must discover.

"The probability (at least I fear it), is that local or State politics will interfere too much with the more liberal and extensive plan of government, which wisdom and foresight, freed from the mist of prejudice, would dictate; and that we shall be guilty of many blunders in treading this boundless theatre, before we shall have arrived at any perfection in this art; in a word, that the experience, which is purchased at the price of difficulties and distress, will alone convince us that the honor, power, and true Interest of this Country must be measured by a Continental scale, and that every departure therefrom weakens the Union, and may ultimately break the band which holds us together."

All rights reserved © 2004 EIRNS

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