The paradigm shift of the last four decades, a period in which the world economy increasingly abandoned manufacturing and gave itself over to untrammelled speculation, is now drawing to an end. The world financial system is about to implode. Gross production worldwide stands at a mere $40 trillion, over which looms a gigantic debt bubble 50 times that size, viz., $2,000 trillion worth of financial liabilities. The impending bankruptcy of General Motors and, potentially, of the entire U.S. automobile industry, is but one of many factors that could well lead to the collapse of the U.S. dollar, and thereby, that of the entire financial system.

To prevent the world's people from suffering the untold harm that the breakdown of the system would unleash, we the undersigned demand that an emergency conference be convened, to agree upon a new financial architecture along the lines of the Bretton Woods System launched at Franklin D. Roosevelt's initiative in 1944...

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Latest From LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche Addresses Midwest, Seattle LYM:

'FOR WANT OF THE MESSAGE, THE KINGDOM WAS LOST': — WE'RE THE PEOPLE WITH THE MESSAGE

Here are Lyndon LaRouche's remarks to LaRouche Youth Movement cadre schools in Toledo and Seattle, on May 8, 2005.

We're in an interesting situation. You're almost in the middle of it, or approximately in the middle of it, geographically in Toledo.

We have the following problem: We have a number of people in UAW locals, UAW presidents, who are in a sense "on the ball" conceptually on the nature of the problem before us. We also have reported from the Democratic Party and from the Congress, the fact that some alleged UAW officials say there is no problem. I don't know what the problem is, that they would say that! Particularly after what happened this past week. We're now in a situation, where, as I've read it—.

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(Provided and Funded by
Lyndon LaRouche's Political Action Committee.)

This Week in History

May 9-15, 1942

Henry J. Kaiser Organizes an Incredible Leap in American Ship-Building

In the late winter and spring of 1942, Hitler had ordered his U-boats to attack American shipping, from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean. Because of the lack of U.S. Navy ships to act as armed escorts for America's merchant ships, the U-boat captains found easy pickings. Due to the fact that the large East Coast cities did not go to wartime blackout rules until mid-April, the German submarines could just wait offshore and fire at American ships as they were silhouetted by the lights of the cities.

Sometimes the survivors would be rescued, at other times they were machine-gunned. By March 1942, 788,000 tons of dry cargo shipping and 375,000 tons in tankers had been sunk. The loss in tankers was so great that they had to be withdrawn from the Atlantic coastal routes. President Franklin Roosevelt was frustrated by the Navy's slow mobilization against these attacks, and began to rely on planes from the Army Air Force. But this was only a stopgap measure, and meanwhile, embattled Britain desperately needed ships as well. Roosevelt decided that the only way to overcome the shipping losses was to outbuild them. He set a goal of 8 million tons of new shipping by the end of 1942, which most people thought was absolutely impossible.

One man who did not, was Henry J. Kaiser. Kaiser was born on May 9, 1882, the same year as Franklin Roosevelt, and shared with him the belief that great problems could be overcome with creativity, careful planning, and, often, bold actions. Kaiser had originally made his career as a construction contractor, and even in the early 1900s, had become known for his unusual methods of enhancing labor power, which enabled him to finish his construction jobs in record time. In an era when much road-building was done with picks, shovels, and mules, Kaiser put rubber tires on wheelbarrows and had them pulled by tractors. Later, he replaced gasoline engines with more efficient diesel engines.

During the 1930s, Kaiser not only built the piers for the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, but he also headed the companies which built the Parker, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams. In 1931, he put together the combine of companies which would build the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, a project so large and complicated that it took seven different firms to bring it to completion. Kaiser's firm also built levees on the Mississippi River, pipelines in the American West and in Mexico, naval defense installations on Wake, Guam, and Hawaii, and a 30-mile aqueduct to bring water to New York City.

But Kaiser had never built ships. As the Nazis took over more and more of Europe, the danger to the Americas became critical. If the Fascists were to conquer Britain and acquire her fleet, North and South America would be facing the fleets and air forces of the rest of the industrialized world. Therefore, Roosevelt ordered the construction of a fleet of Liberty Ships, which would carry supplies to Britain to aid her in her battle against the Nazis. Although the ships were slow, "ugly ducklings," they could carry 2,840 jeeps, 440 light tanks and 3 million C-rations. Henry Kaiser was convinced by Adm. Emory Land, Chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, to enter the shipbuilding business, but he initially knew so little about it that he had to go to the public library to look up shipbuilding terms.

Kaiser went into partnership with an experienced shipbuilder from the East Coast, and chose the site for his enterprise on the mud flats of Richmond, Calif., bordering San Francisco Bay. He had contracted to build 30 cargo ships for the British, and when a British delegation came to inspect the site in 1940, they asked where the shipyards were. Kaiser pointed to the mudflats and answered that within months there would be a shipyard with thousands of men and women building ships for Britain. The delegation was dubious, but in their desperate straits they had to count on a miracle, and they got one.

Kaiser put Clay Bedford, a young engineer, in charge of the project and gave him an outline of what should be done. This included a generous use of space so that the production would never be crowded, a program of prefabricating huge sections of the ships using the kind of massive cranes that had been used in building dams, and using welding instead of the old technique of riveting the ship together.

According to Bedford, "We designed the yard. Actually, there was a race between the Kaiser draftsmen and the field people as to whether we could build it first or the engineers and architects could draw it first. We finished the office in thirty-four days, during which it rained heavily every day. Actually, it rained steadily for fifty-three days. We had water six inches deep along Cutting Boulevard resulting from a high tide and a hard southwest wind, yet we kept twenty trucks busy night and day for three months bring in fill, and dredging the area. It was a miserable time, but we took it in stride because I had a lot of fellows from Bonneville Dam where it rained eighty-four inches a year."

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