Oct. 31 Webcast:
Dialogue with Lyndon LaRouche
The following is a transcript of the discussion which followed Lyndon LaRouche's Oct. 31, 2006 webcast from Berlin, Germany. Subheadings have been added. It is also available as part of the PDF version of the webcast transcript.
Tremblay: ...What's important to say is that the dialogue that Mr. LaRouche has started has been going on, obviously, for quite some time, and Mr. LaRouche answered some of these questions that were submitted already in written form, in the last couple of days. I would just like to mention, very shortly, that this dialogue is at a very high level. Among the people who have submitted questions are members of Parliament, also from Italy, Andrea Ricci, he asked about the question of the New Bretton Woods system. And that's what the first subject of the questions will be. There's a question from also an economic journalist from Italy, [Giorgio] Vitangeli is his name, where he's asking about the collapse of the U.S. real estate bubble. And part of the written dialogue, there's a question from Prof. Dai Lunzhang who is the former chief economist of the central bank of China, and he asks Mr. LaRouche something along the lines of the direction that the International Monetary Fund is going; and whether the International Monetary Fund represents an institution to change.
But I would like to read one question which I think is more of a statement, and I'd ask you to comment on this. And this is from the former Secretary of State of the Argentine Republic, Julio González. And he states the following:
"Mr. LaRouche, a coalition government must be established immediately in the United States, in order to save the world economy. The political program of this new government must be to stop the expansion of wars based on oil, and those economic resources must be applied to building railroads over the entire globe, as your marvelous development project has indicated. Such wonderful plans will put an end to British supremacy and will stop their clash of civilizations, intended to eliminate the world's population.
"How to do it? The philosophical and mathematical genius Blaise Pascal said once, that power rules the world, but opinion based on reason leads power. With Lyndon LaRouche's world economic program to save nations, such world public opinion will be immediately established.
"Lyndon LaRouche, victory, and future."
LaRouche: As you probably know, in Argentina, they have very few illusions of the type common to Europe. They don't believe the British are good. So therefore, they tend to be more objective about the world situation than many other parts of the world. But this is true.
We have a development about the crisis in Mexico now. Throughout South America, which is extremely important, because South America is coming out of the dirt after being put there, from the 1970s on, increasingly over the course of the 1970s. And you have Lula, who—I don't pass judgment on Lula—but his reelection in Brazil is significant in the sense that it creates a solidification of a process of adjustment—I wouldn't say just cooperation, but adjustment—among the nations of South America, which will have some impact moving north. They do want to develop. They do have practical ideas. The role of the current President of Argentina is extremely useful in this respect. He's taken initiatives—in cooperation with other nations of South America, not just as Argentina alone—but in cooperation, which are really quite beneficial and very promising for the future.
But what this gentlemen expresses is, I find, most agreeable. Thank you.
Tremblay: Do we have a question from Washington?
Freeman: Good morning. We do have a number of questions from institutions here in Washington. Before I ask Lyn the first question, I'd like to just mention that there are a number of audiences, in addition to the audience in Berlin and here, gathered and participating in today's event. There are five university campuses in four cities in Bolivia; there are six universities in Colombia that are participating, as well as three separate trade union organizations; and we have an event ongoing in Argentina, as well.
Clinton's Effort for a 'New
Financial Architecture'
Lyn, the first question comes from a senior staff member from the U.S. House of Representatives. It's someone whom you know very well. Her question to you is this: "Lyn, during the 1998 economic crisis, then-President Clinton and Treasury Secretary Rubin discussed proposals which sound very similar to those you are suggesting now, for a 'new financial architecture.' It was a very hopeful time for all of us. What happened to hinder their plans, then? And how can you overcome renewed efforts from those who sabotaged a changed direction in the past, under what was an arguably more auspicious situation?"
LaRouche: There were two problems there. At that point, I was very much involved—this is particularly in August of 1998—because I'd seen this coming, this GKO bond crisis, and we'd dealt with in 1997 a similar kind of crisis, which George Soros was sort of a figure in, at that time. So we were prepared. I was prepared.
And at that point, in August, at a meeting of his own staff, President Clinton then just came to the conclusion that I had been right, and they had been wrong in their estimate of the situation. And with his Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, at the time, moved to craft a sense of planning, which in the month of September, came out in a meeting he had with the New York Council on Foreign Relations—a private organization; but he came out of that thing, and didn't have a follow-up.
The lack of follow-up was—what he had done, is he had actually threatened to bait the bear, and hadn't followed through, and the bear began to strike back at him. And the bear struck back with a scandal and an attempt at impeachment—we call it "bear facts" I guess—an attempt at impeachment of the President. So that made a mess of everything. And the forces which were being mobilized by the President to act for a monetary reform were neutralized by this set of circumstances, which is what often happens.
I think that, today, that President Clinton probably has a clearer retrospective view of what the issues were then, than he had then. I think he's clearer on this now, than he was then. Unfortunately, he's not President. You know, we have a lot of problems that wouldn't have occurred to the planet, if President Bill Clinton had had a third term. We'd have avoided a lot of disasters, this way. The past six years have been really a mess.
So, we're at the point now, that either, as I've indicated today, speaking here today: Either we go through a reform which reverses the decisions of 1971 and '72, to reestablish the modality of a Bretton Woods system—at that point, that does not mean we're simply going back to the Bretton Woods system, because at that time, when the Bretton Woods system was formed, the United States dollar was the only currency in the world, and every other currency in the world depended upon the dollar. Today, we're not the only currency in the world. And therefore, you have to use the dollar as a mechanism of organizing other currencies together, for a fixed-exchange-rate system by agreement among a number of nations. That's essentially the change.
Otherwise, it's the same thing: We have to put the thing through bankruptcy reform; we have to bankrupt whole banking systems to save them—not to shut them down, because they'll shut down themselves, if we don't do it. They're hopelessly bankrupt. But we need the bank as an institution, therefore, we're going to save the bank as an institution, not because it's worthy or because it's solid or something of that sort. It's made a mess! It's mismanaged, it's terrible! But we're going to save it, because we need it. You need private banking institutions, and you need a national banking system to coordinate private banking institutions. That way you can resume economic activity without missing a step.
If you try to start to reinvent banking, you lose. So we're going to have to save the banking system, and we're going to have a general bankruptcy-type reform, of banking systems in various countries, together, simultaneously, by heads of government meeting, and agreeing on these things. We have to reform the system, we have to create a new form of credit—government credit, because there will be no private credit net available—so it must be state credit. It must be long-term state credit by governments for assigned mission objectives: for both public infrastructure, and for private industry, agriculture, and so forth. On that basis, we can do just fine.
So, today, I think, looking from 1998 to the present—we could take that as a benchmark, President Clinton's experience during the months of August and September of that year with the GKO crisis—as a benchmark for what we have to do.
But we have to add to that some very specific, positive, affirmative objectives, in the reorganization of the world system, because we're dealing with a world system. We're not dealing with just a U.S. crisis, or a U.S. agreement with other states in a crisis, we have to create a design: a new world, monetary and financial and banking system, based on experience. We have to design it quickly. We have to get agreement, quickly. We must have agreement, for example, with China, with India, with Russia, with at least some nations in Europe, and the United States and some other nations. If we get that kind of principled agreement, we can save this planet. If we can't get such a principled agreement, I'm sorry fellas, we won't save this planet.
Economics and Human Dignity
Tennenbaum: I'm Jonathan Tennenbaum. It's my pleasure to announce to you a special guest, who came here this morning from Moscow, from Russia: Yuri Krupnov, who is a well-known expert on technology and on education. He's among other things, the rector of a youth nuclear energy academy. He has just recently founded a new political party in Russia, called the Party of Development, and I think some remarks that he could make to us could be very interesting in the light of what we're discussing right here.
Yuri Krupnov: Thank you.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, I'm very glad to be here, and right now to take part in discussion with outstanding economist and thinker of our time, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche. And I think that this discussion and all our speeches are important, first of all, because of our understanding that the situation in the world is very unique. Just now, we have not only the world finance and economic crisis, and I think that all people, all over the world understand that the crisis exists. And there is not any honest man who could deny it.
But more important, that the situation is changing just right now. Ten years ago, when I was introduced to Mr. LaRouche, I thought that we haven't got any near future, and we haven't any opportunity to take part in economic development, to take part in political development, and to take part in world development. But just now, I think that we've got the main orientations and the main goals. We have the understanding of the situation, and I'm very proud to say that we've got quite a different Russia. Ten years ago, in my country, we had a very strange crisis, which was organized by the government itself. And when, today, Mr. LaRouche speaks about the government of the United States, which is in the situation to destroy the United States, the situation is very similar. Yet at the same time, the situation is different, because we know the experience of Russian so-called "reforms," we know the experience of Asian and other crises, we know the experience of the last five very strange years of government in the United States.
And I think the main problem now, and which we understand this problem, is deindustrialization. Deindustrialization is a process which is also organized, and we understand that there are actors who organize deindustrialization, not only in some countries, but all over the world. And I think that the main idea should be, how to stop deindustrialization, and how to organize industrial development.
To my mind, industrial development is not a problem for some country, any country. Industrial development is the main idea, which could unite mankind, and really give the proper aim for our actions, and for our attempts to change the world. Just now, in Russia, we are trying to organize the so-called Coalition for Industrial Development, and this coalition is not for political action, but first of all, it is organizing for uniting the industrial men, and the men with industrial logic and with an industrial mentality. Mr. LaRouche said very clearly that today, it is not obvious for many people, the idea itself that every man should work. And that should be obvious, and we should support every man, every industrial man, every man with an industrial mentality, who tries to put their ideas and their mentality as a norm, a normal thing, and a norm for all people in the country and for all mankind.
I think that we should organize not only one coalition in Russia, but we should organize an all-world or global coalition for industrial development, and first of all, it should be organized, I guess, here in Berlin.
Jonathan Tennenbaum has told me many times about the situation in Berlin, which was the industrial center, 20, or 100 years ago, and was a very prominent industrial center, but now has only 5% of its industrial capacities. And to my mind, this is a great example of what shouldn't be done, in any situation. We should organize our coalition in order to change the situation in Russia, first of all, and in Berlin, and in any industrial center, or in the city or in the country which has industrial capacities, or would like to have them.
And I think that the main idea, and I was very happy to listen to Lyndon LaRouche, today, when he talked about the dignity of man as a main idea of industry. We all know the expression: "It's the economy, stupid." We are talking about economy. And Mr. LaRouche also is an outstanding economist, without any doubt. But to my mind, we are discussing here not economy, first of all: We are discussing the destiny of man, and we are discussing the dignity of man, as the main goal for any political action, in any country.
So we should discuss quite another economy. We should distinguish between different economies. Well, we see a casino economy. This economy is not similar to an economy of development, to an Isotope Economy, which Mr. Tennenbaum suggested. And I guess, just now, we should formulate this mission and this idea, that the dignity of man is the aim of any economy. And only such an economy should be called an economy.
I think that the idea of development, and Mr. LaRouche said today about even world development, or development of the universe, or development of all mankind: The idea of development is now, such a thing which should be implemented in such a community as this. Because, in conclusion, I should say that I'm very proud to be here, and to listen to Lyndon LaRouche, which united people all over the world, but special people, who like only to make things which could develop the world. And this advanced community is a development itself and should develop the world. I guess it's a mission, and in Russia, I make anything that could develop not only Russia, but take part in world development.
Thank you.
Tennenbaum: Perhaps, I would two brief questions from Russia, if you would like to comment: We had a question from Prof. Eduard Afanasyev, who is the dean of the Economics Department of the Russian Orthodox University in Moscow; which he also asked his classroom for this question.
So, first question: What does Lyndon LaRouche think of Nobel Prize-winning economists?
Second question: What does Mr. LaRouche consider should and can be the role of Christianity in solving the present world economic and civilizational crisis?
Perhaps, I'll just throw in another question. This is by Alexander Nagorny who is on the editorial board of a weekly in Moscow, called Zavtra; it's a very well-known weekly in Russia. And he simply asks, "Mr. LaRouche, what is your vision of Russia in general, and Russia's role as a possible geopolitical and geo-economic center, and the future of the Russian currency?"
LaRouche: Well, I don't think much of Nobel Prize-winning economists. I don't know of any of them who are competent. They generally have won their prizes for failure: That is, they have won the prize after their theory has failed catastrophically. So it's sort of a negative accomplishment: It's like getting a pension: "You're worthless. Here's your pension. Go away and don't bother us any more."
An Ecumenical Standard of Statecraft
Christianity has a very specific kind of role. Now, first of all, that in dealing with humanity, we have to recognize we can not shove religion down anybody's throat, as an economic policy and otherwise. But we don't have to.
You have two great documents coming out of modern Europe, which pertain to this question. The first one was by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who was the founder of modern science, as a matter of fact; revived it from its grave, hidden in various empires which had preceded him. And then in the Treaty of Westphalia. One of the things that Cusa did, of course, was his De Pace Fidei, which was the first ecumenical statement—this was in the context of the conflict between Christianity and Islam, in the context of the Ottoman Empire. At that time, he presented this De Pace Fidei as an ecumenical doctrine. Now, the ecumenical doctrine of Cusa, then surfaced in the Westphalia Treaty of Cardinal Mazarin, his successor, as the great policy in which civilization in modern Europe emerged, out of the bowels of over a century, a century and a half, of religious warfare, started by Tomás de Torquemada, and concluding with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.
So, these two things are the lessons, I think, for politics globally.
We're dealing with two areas of culture: We're dealing with European culture, in which Christianity is a crucial part, the dominant part, at least the cultural part. But you're also dealing with Asian cultures, which are by and large not Christian. And therefore, in this case, you have to go back to the ecumenical standard of statecraft, rather than a specific religious standard. And what you do, is you take a religious belief like Christianity, for example the Epistles of Paul and the Gospel of John, which are the most relevant from the standpoint of the Christian view of humanity, as a whole—ecumenical doctrines as well. And you have to find the common ground.
Now, the common ground—this is an important question—I'll keep it as short as possible: The common ground is the difference between man and beast. The difference is not simply a distinction, like a brand label, which it often is treated as. The distinction is, that man can think. Man can think in the sense of discovering universal principles of the universe. Man does not discover mere values. Man discovers universal values, as in a scientific discovery; or say, Johann Sebastian Bach's discovery of well-tempered counterpoint actually is not a novelty introduced to modern experience. It actually is the discovery of a universal principle, a principle of the universe! And that can be demonstrated. I won't go over it here, but that can be demonstrated.
And therefore, man's ability to discover, or rediscover, principles of the universe, and to apply these principles to problems or challenges which confront man, is essential.
In Christianity, and Christianity's characteristic for this purpose, is not only the mission of Christ, but it's also the mission of his followers, particularly John and Paul, from whom the understanding, the assimilation of the highest level of civilization at that time, which had been Classical Greek culture; so from the distillation of the highest level of culture which had previously existed, Christianity adopted, through such instruments as Paul and John, adopted an understanding of the distinction between man and beast, and of the universality of man, as distinct from the beast.
Now, what we must achieve, in dealing with humanity as a whole—we're dealing with different cultures. Not only different languages, not just the dictionary value of the language, but the connotations of the use of the language. The habits of the use of the language by a people, the values of that form of language in the experience of the people. And it's through that medium, that a people is capable of working together in the realm of ideas, as opposed to words and objects.
So therefore, it's essential, if you wish to have a society which is based on the will and participation of the people, you must respect their language, their language-culture. Because their language-culture is the repository of their communication about all kinds of values, including the deepest values.
Therefore, when you're dealing with the factor of Christianity, its values, you can only deal with that, from the standpoint of taking what culture you represent, and transmitting the values in the terms of the other culture which you're addressing. So the approach has to be an ecumenical approach. It means an ecumenical approach in the case of Christianity, of going to the most profound level of Christianity, its conception as typified by the work of John and Paul, as Apostles. And proceed from that, as in the case, actually, Cusa did. And as actually in the case of the Westphalian Treaty. The Westphalian Treaty is based on I Corinthians 13: the concept of agape, the Greek concept of agape.
So, that value is universal: It's a part of Christianity, but it's also universal. And there are ways in which, say, a good missionary, or an astute politician, can carry universal values from his own language through the language-culture of another people. And that's the way we should approach this. And in that sense, as our friend from Russia points out, Christianity does have a significant role in statecraft: this role, for the Christian. We're trying to reach the mind, the values, as they may be experienced in the language-culture of another people and a different religion: Ecumenicism.
Russia's Unique Strategic Mission
Now, on the role of Russia itself: Russia has some very interesting specific qualities, among which one is exemplary. You had a famous Russian, who was once a prince and once a Tsar, known as Peter the Great. And he showed up in Germany on two occasions in particular, at one place: at a famous academy in the mountains abutting Saxony. And from leaving there, once as a prince and once as a Tsar, he established academies of geology in Petersburg and in Moscow. One of them has the tradition of the Vernadsky Museum Institute today in Moscow.
Now, Russia's achievement in physical science, especially in the areas of geology, is outstanding for the world. It not only is outstanding in the world, but Russia represents a territory, both developed and undeveloped, which Russians know how to deal with, because they have this particular kind of development of geology: Is, how do we take this mass of land-area, which contains all kinds of undeveloped mineral resources, as well as developed ones, with a hungry China, a hungry Asia to the south, which needs the development of raw materials. Russia has the ability, the scientific ability, lodged in the Russian Academy of Sciences—which also went through the evolution of being the Soviet Academy of Sciences; and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences—it has the ability to deal with understanding how we have to approach the management of the development of raw materials in these areas, which the rest of the planet needs—especially the population of Asia.
So therefore, Russia has a very specific quality which is built into the Russian character, and expressed particularly in certain aspects of the Academies of Sciences in Russia, as a tradition. They think better about this thing, than anybody else on this planet does, generally. And that's where they are outstanding.
Also, you have, typical of this, is the work of Mendeleyev; typical of this is the work of Vernadsky. And the ideas of Mendeleyev, even though they were not completed by him, and the ideas of Vernadsky, which also were not completed by him, typify the things in Russia which are specifically Russian, culturally, which are of specific value to the rest of the world. Apart from that, Russia is also a Eurasian culture because of the history of its development. It has elements of Asian culture, as well as European. So Russia is a Eurasian culture.
Now, what're we trying to do? We're trying to bring together, all of Eurasia over the next 50 years, into a cooperative scheme of development. And Russia's particular value, is being the Eurasian pivot, which unites the function of Europe in Eurasia, with the functions of Asia. This is typified by Russia's relationship to India and to China. And the time has come, that the world has to recognize, that Berlin—which is one of the reasons I stand here, today—that Berlin, as the epitome of Western and Central Europe, is the link to Moscow and other places in Russia. And Moscow and other places like that in Russia, are the link of Europe, to India, and to China, and to other places in Asia, and to the development of the natural resources in Asia—in Russian Asia and elsewhere—which is necessary for Eurasia as a whole.
So, Russia has a very nicely defined, primary mission, from the standpoint of the interests of nations which abut it. Thank you.
What's Behind the Darfur Crisis?
Tremblay: Debbie, do you have a question from D.C.?
Freeman: Lyn, this question was submitted by a policy foundation. It reflects a whole series of questions on the same topic that we've just been bombarded with over the course of the last few days. The question is as follows:
"Mr. LaRouche, you have a long history as an outspoken defender of human rights, especially in the developing sector. At a recent event in Washington, D.C., former President Clinton addressed the current tragic situation in Darfur, and at that meeting, he voiced his support for an aggressive U.S.-led intervention to remedy it. We were very surprised at that time to learn from your spokeswoman that you emphatically disagreed. Given your record, we assume that you do not condone the current stance of the Bashir government, and since this issue is going to continue to escalate as a major strategic factor in the immediate days ahead, we would really appreciate it if you would explain your view of the situation, both in terms of its cause, and also of its remedy."
LaRouche: First of all, the problem is caused by the United States; the problem of Sudan is caused by the United States. It goes back to the time that, in this case, the current President's father, who may wish to disown the connection, was a Vice President of the United States. And he, with his wife, made a visit to the capital of Sudan, and did some unpleasant things. But he was also involved, as Vice President, in what became known as Iran-Contra. He was a key part in organizing what we call today al-Qaeda, together with the British, because they've got people who are highly religiously motivated in the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia, and went to religious people in places such as Sudan and elsewhere, and recruited from Muslim Brotherhood circles, which were religious, people who were enthusiastic for this prospect, which we call al-Qaeda, which was then what the United States organized at the behest of Brzezinski and company earlier, continued by Vice President Bush and by Jimmy Goldsmith of England, and so forth, as what was called the Afghanistan War of the 1980s.
So, in this period, the United States in the person of Vice President Bush at that time, and others, had this grand war going over there, and they used people from the Arab world, particularly religious Arabs, particularly Saudi connections and so forth, to conduct this war in Afghanistan, which we are still experiencing at the present time—what they did then. It was a war on the underbelly of the Soviet Union, which was in a sense a bad idea. We had a better approach to this than they did, to deal with this—the Soviet Union. So in this process, that happened.
Now, at the time that President Clinton was leaving office—and I think his administration had a very poor comprehension of Africa, in practice. And I think I have a much better comprehension of the problems of Africa, though I'm not perfect on the subject, than he does, still. Though I think his ideas have improved greatly, and I think his administration served him badly, particularly on the Africa question, as in the case of Uganda and so forth; I think he was very badly served by many people in his administration, in the State Department at that time, and this is part of the problem.
But, I was last physically in Sudan at the end of January of 2001, and I ran into a buzz saw. I was there doing work on the question of water. I'd been there a number of times before. I was very familiar with the problems in the country, and the complexity of these problems, which this problem of Darfur is a reflection of, but a reflection of something else specifically. If you want to deal with the question, you have to deal with it honestly.
First of all, the objective of some people, recognizing that the key to the whole area, from the so-called Lake Victoria (which I think is a name that ought to be changed, to some respectable name), all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, that this area is governed now by a water agreement which involves Egypt, on the measurement of the Nile water. Now, the objective was, the imperialist objectives, were to destroy Egypt. How? If you break the Nile water agreement by splitting off parts of these micro-state creations in this area, then you will break the water agreement, and then what will happen is Egypt will blow up, and the entire Arab world will blow up!
So, looking at these things as isolated human interest things, is a mistake, because it is sophistry; it's ignoring the problem. Now, as I said, I was there in January of 2001. What I ran into was a buzz saw. The Arabs coming out of Saudi Arabia, of Prince Bandar and so forth, told the people in Sudan that they had a friend in George Bush, George W. Bush, and the George W. Bush Administration. And I said, "No!" I said George W. Bush is here to destroy your country! He's not your friend. But they said, no, the Clinton Administration made a mess of the place. Bush is going to make it better. And I said, he's going to destroy you. And it happened. It's been destroyed.
Now, this crisis down there is a product of what the Bush Administration has done, and the ignorance on the Africa question on the part of Clinton's own administration. Clinton's own administration made a mess of Sudan policy. It was not the cause of the problem, but it made a mess of the whole thing, failing to understand, because of very bad advisors on the question of this area. And, as I said, I think the former President would recognize today that some of his former advisors served him very badly on this question. And this mess is created by Bush, so why don't you clean up the Bush Administration? And then we can settle the Darfur thing.
Yes, it is a problem, but it's a problem which is orchestrated. You want to treat this thing, you want to solve it? You're not going to solve it, not by those methods. You may think you have excellent intentions, but it's not going to work. You don't understand the area. And you have to understand this area, and not just by intelligence reports, you have to understand the people, you've got to understand the history. You've got to understand Egypt. You've got to look at what some people thought about Museveni. You want to understand the problem in Darfur? Look at Museveni! And look at what the Clinton Administration's attitude was on Museveni. That's where mistakes were made. And the problem is, the former President has to look at this this way. You cannot be so attached to the idea of doing a humanistic act, that in the course of doing what is ostensibly with humanistic intention, becomes a contribution to a disaster, again. And that's what the problem is.
People should listen to me, and talk to me a little more about these things, and then they wouldn't make those mistakes.
Tremblay: My friend and colleague from France, Elodie Viennot, is going to take the microphone.
Viennot: Good evening, I'm speaking here in particular from the Presidential campaign of Jacques Cheminade, who's here with a small delegation of the LaRouche Youth Movement, as we're campaigning there. We're very happy to be here at a moment which is completely critical, obviously also for France. And I have a question coming from, in particular, mayors of villages and smaller towns of the country, who are those who can make it possible that Mr. Cheminade is an official candidate in the Presidential election that is scheduled for April of next year. And, in general, they are extremely disgusted with the course that our civilization has taken, what France has been doing, Europe in general, and are very distraught, in terms of what they can actually do. And in general, the question is the following: As local and regional leaders, what can we expect from Mr. LaRouche and Mr. Cheminade's campaigns; and beyond signing for Mr. Cheminade as a candidate, what can we do from our grassroots position for your movement?
Mobilize the Youth!
LaRouche: Well, there are several things that have to be done. First of all, as in all things, we have a generation of people between the ages of 18 and 30, who are not messed up in the same way that the older two generations are—the Tweener and the Baby-Boomer generations, as they're called in the United States, and also here. That the Baby-Boomer generation, apart from a few excellent individuals who are valuable, have been a disaster for humanity, in their role in policy. You see, for example, you look at the 1980s, the 1970s: We had in the 1980s, things I was doing and things that were associated with me—for example, we organized major forces in countries around the world, such as France, Italy, Germany and so forth, in major projects, strategic projects, that I was involved in. These involved an attempt to try to secure an avoidance of a collision with the Soviet Union at that time. But people were committed to that. When you go into the '90s, the later part of the '90s and the '90s as a whole, we're in a disaster area, because what had happened is, the generation which had been still leading governments in Europe and the United States, the generation that began to die out toward the end of the 1980s, was replaced by the Baby-Boomer generation, and the policies have been an absolute disaster.
Take for example, the case of the United States. The Baby Boomer, the 68er, was typified, especially the upper 20% of family-income brackets, by the most crass immorality ever invented. It was Sodom and Gomorrah revisited, the 68ers. They were not a heroic generation. They may have fought against some things that were bad, but they created worse things than they fought against. They became sexual freaks. They were known for their sexual freakishness and other kinds of things. Their habits, entertainment habits, their recreational habits in general. You had another generation that came along, who were very poorly educated, called the Tweeners. They tended to become religious fanatics, in reaction against the absolute immorality of their older generation, the Baby-Boomer generation. See, when you're dealing with politics in the United States or in Europe, you run right into this problem. That the Baby-Boomer generation, that is, the upper 20% of family income brackets, who are now generally in service between the ages of 50 and 65, are generally hopeless, morally, intellectually hopeless in dealing with any crisis situation.
You have a Tweener generation, which is very poorly educated, which is raised in a post-industrial orientation and environment, has a very poor mooring in reality, from a practical standpoint. You have a younger generation, of young adults, 18-30 years of age approximately—there's some destroyed people, but you find in there a repository of people who, under the right conditions, can develop and provide leadership for future society. They have no money, because there's no money around. They have a very poor living standard. They come mostly from broken families. You know, it's very hard to find out who your daddy and mother were in that generation, because their marriage habits were such-and-such. So, this kind of problem.
Therefore, today, the key thing to focus upon is: Can you mobilize an effective operation? Can you mobilize people from the 18-30 age group of young adults? If you can mobilize that generation, or a significant part of it, you can then build a core of leadership, which, like youth movements in the past of all European history, every important change in culture, in politics, in the history of Europe, has come from a generation of that age group of 18-25, 18-30 age group. They are adult, they think like adults, they have adult orientation, but they are open to change. It is the initiative: Take the American Revolution.
The American Revolution, except for an old geezer like me, Benjamin Franklin, was largely people of this generation, youth generation, young adults. They made a revolution that shook the world: the American Revolution at the time. Same thing was going on elsewhere. And when the leadership of youth was bad, the revolution failed, or the progress failed.
So the key thing here is, the organization, and all serious politicians, all serious political leaders and other leaders, must recognize that the mobilization and development of the 18-30 age group, as a force of leadership to inspire the rest of the population to move to necessary actions and decisions, is the future of humanity. And nothing else will work. Nothing else will work. Everything else will fail, without that factor.
I work with this young generation, and I've seen them do things that the older generation would never dream of accomplishing.
The American System vs. the British
Tremblay: The next block of questions is basically on the situation in the United States, as you can well imagine. Again, this process of dialogue has been ongoing, so you have answered some of them in writing. There's a question from Col. Eberhart Möschel here in Germany, perplexed about the situation in the United States. We've gotten many questions, from different citizens here, who are asking what is happening to the civil rights in the United States, and why is it just being accepted that civil rights are being destroyed inside the U.S. There've been questions on the Iran policy, etc. What I'd just like to do, very shortly, is read just one sentence from the question from Prof. Lokesh Chandra, an eminent historian and former member of the Indian Parliament, he asked, "How do you view the aggressive policies of the present U.S. administration, in alienating vast sections of the world's people? How do you see this?"
LaRouche: You have to look back to the end of World War II. You have to look back to the point of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and the accession of his enemy Harry Truman to the Presidency. Roosevelt's policy had been, from the beginning of his administration—it was a policy of a conflict with Churchill during the time of the attempted cooperation between Churchill and Roosevelt. Churchill, for bad reasons, took the good step of helping to break up the fact that most of the British monarchy was organized behind Hitler, and but for a few people such as Churchill, who Roosevelt managed to pull away from support from Hitler—and remember, the leadership of French banking, typified by Lazard Frères, Worms, and so forth, and Deterding in the Netherlands, were Nazis. That's what they were. They may not have been Nazi Party members, but they were behind Schacht, and Schacht was a Nazi. Schacht was a master Nazi. He organized the Nazi Party, as a force, for the head of the Bank of England. And the British were using again, their intention was to use Hitler, originally, to have Germany go into a war against the Soviet Union. And then, to have Britain and France fall on the ass of Germany, while Germany was deeply involved in the occupation of the territory of the Soviet Union. That was the original plan, in support of Mussolini, support of Franco later, support of Hitler, all came from Anglo-Dutch liberal and French Synarchist circles in the continent of Europe. They are the guilty parties. Of course, at the end of the war, things were cleaned up. But by 1948, the French fascists were all out of prison and back in their old jobs in finance. That's the reality.
So, in the process, the issue between Roosevelt and Churchill, throughout this war period, was, as Franklin Roosevelt said, "Wi-i-inston, when this war is over, there is not going to be a British Empire! We're going to free these people. We're going to help them develop," referring to Africa and other colonized areas. The policy of the United States, during the period of the war, was the liberation of all colonial territories, to become independent sovereign states, and to develop with assistance from an American war machine, which would be converted to producing goods, capital goods in particular, to help them develop.
The day that Roosevelt died, Truman, who was a stooge for Winston Churchill and company, reversed the policy. Vietnam had been liberated, Indochina had been liberated, by support of the United States. And Ho Chi Minh was a United States ally in the liberation of Indochina from French occupation. The Netherlands was kicked out by a revolt, which the United States supported, under Roosevelt. And so forth and so on.
The entire effort at liberating the colonial empire of the British, the French, the Dutch, and so forth, this thing was cancelled. The peace agreement which had been struck with Hirohito was suspended. Why? So that Truman could drop two unnecessary nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in order to signal to the world that U.S. policy was the British policy of using nuclear weapons as a threatened weapon to be dropped on the Soviet Union, to get the Soviet Union to give up, to join in world government, the elimination of the sovereign nation-state. Now, that was the situation. And the problem today, is that the fight is still that, except that we lost in the United States. The British faction in the United States took over. People think that the United States is the problem. It is not the problem. There's a faction in the United States which is tied to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal faction of Europe, the imperial faction, the faction behind globalization. That is the problem.
And what is happening to the United States—in order to have globalization, you have to get rid of the United States. What is happening under George W. Bush and Lynne Cheney's dog, the President of vice, what is happening is that the United States has, in six years, discredited itself as never before in history. The world hates the United States, despises the United States, and says the planet would be better off if the United States were to disappear. If you want to destroy an empire, to destroy it from the outside, you destroy it first from the inside. If you think back to Nov. 7, 2000, think back, what has been the change in the view of the United States from around the world since Clinton left office, to the present day? The United States in the Middle East is being destroyed. By whom? By the United States! The U.S. military is being destroyed in Afghanistan, in Iraq. U.S. credibility in the entire area is being destroyed. They're now going to destroy Turkey—that's one of the next targets—by using Kurdistan, the Kurdish issue, to split up Turkey. What do you think that's going to do? The threatened nuclear bombing of Iran is still on the agenda. The breakup of China is on the agenda. Wars against Russia are on the agenda. All seeming to come from the United States. The Orange Revolution—it's actually the Lemon Revolution, eh? This is how the United States is being destroyed. It's being destroyed, as all empires are destroyed. If you can destroy them from the inside, then you can easily destroy them from the outside. That's what's happening.
Freeman: This is Debbie Freeman in Washington. When I mentioned the audiences that were gathered in Ibero-America, I failed to note—and I want to note, most emphatically—that five important universities in Peru are holding gatherings where these proceedings are being monitored, and among them is the National Agrarian University in Lima, where we would like to send particular greetings to Professor De la Vega and the new LYM chapter there. This, I understand, is the sixth LaRouche webcast that is being shown at that location.
In terms of additional questions from the United States, I thought we were doing a one-to-one ratio. It doesn't seem to be going that way. We have a lot of institutional questions here, so we're going to have to figure out how to deal with it. I will defer to a request from Berlin, and ask the next question, which was submitted by Prof. Jorge Hirsch from the University of California in San Diego, but I will note that we have a number of congressional and other questions as well. Dr. Hirsch says:
"Mr. LaRouche, given that the Bush Administration has radically changed the U.S. nuclear weapons policies, to make nuclear weapons more useable without consulting Congress or the American people, and it has explicitly confirmed that a U.S. nuclear strike against Iran is an option on the table, and this was explicitly stated in George Bush's April 18 press conference, and that the decision to launch a nuclear strike is solely President Bush's, I'd like to ask: What do you think the international community could do to help foreclose the real possibility that America will use nuclear weapons against Iran, which would have catastrophic consequences for Iran, for the United States, and for the world? For example, do you think it would help if our European allies demanded that President Bush take the nuclear option against Iran off the table, as a condition for them to continue supporting our joint diplomatic effort on Iran's nuclear program? Or do you think it would help if Russia and China would ask that the U.S. make a firm unconditional public commitment not to use nuclear weapons against Iran, while Iran is a non-nuclear weapons state, in exchange for them agreeing to support sanctions against Iran if it doesn't suspend enrichment?"
LaRouche: Well, the problem is, that if you're going to fight war, and you're going toward a global policy of fighting war, as the United States and Britain have done so far under the Blair-Bush alliance, then any weapons that can be used, will be used. And trying to get bans on nuclear weapons under those conditions is a waste of time. What you have to do is get at the root of the cause. There are two roots. First of all is the root of war, and the root of war is called, in this case, "regime change." If you don't like what a nation is doing, overthrow its government, or else. And that's not really the purpose, but that's what the idiot says. (I'm speaking of the President, of whom I'm speaking kindly by calling him an idiot. You could call him something else, much more appropriately.)
The problem is, you have to eliminate the factor of war. Now, you can not eliminate the factor of war as long as you have a Bush-Cheney Administration. There's no way you're going to get the agreement, so why propose to seek an agreement with an idiot who will not agree to it under any circumstances? They will go to war. Look, what is Bush? You have to understand this clearly. People don't think sometimes, strategically. They don't think globally. Bush is an imbecile. A mentally ill imbecile, a moral imbecile as well as an intellectual one. Now, why would someone like George Shultz take an idiot, a deranged, morally inferior person like George W. Bush, Jr., and say to him, "You're going to be the President of the United States"? And the entire Bush Administration was orchestrated by the same George Shultz who organized putting Pinochet into power in Chile. Who also gave us Operation Condor in the Southern Cone of South America in the 1970s, which committed some of the worst Nazi-style genocide, using Nazi veterans to guide it. And this was done under George Shultz. Now, why would George Shultz—this ever-loving evil totalitarian—want to stick an idiot, a congenital idiot like George W. Bush into the Presidency of the United States during a period of crisis?
Obviously, the tadpole is a tool. He's not really a political figure. The Bush-Cheney combination was put in to cause the United States to destroy itself, and to clear the way for globalization, by discrediting and destroying the United States. Because as long as you had a patriotic instinct for saving the United States as a sovereign nation, as a sovereign republic, you could not have globalization on this planet. If you destroy the United States, Europe has no guts! Western and central Europe are gutless. Don't talk about what they're going to do. They don't have the guts to do anything really strong. They don't have leaders who will do it. Leaders who might have developed were broken. My generation of Europeans might have done something, but they're dead or almost dead. So they're not here to save civilization. You have weak secondary leaders, who don't have the guts or the understanding to do these kinds of things.
So therefore, there's only one remedy. It has two parts. Number one, get rid of the Bush-Cheney Administration. Don't waste your time trying to improve what can not be improved. Don't try to improve poison by giving it a better flavor. Get rid of it! Get the United States to immediately impeach these two clowns. Get 'em out of there! We have not had a double impeachment of President-Vice President. Let's have one; it's time!
See, the problem here is the wrong kind of thinking about war. What do we have to go to war for? I can not think of any case in which we would want to go to war, on this planet. I can think of instances where we might want to engage in military defensive action, which would be an act of war. I don't like the idea of Desert Storm, but we know that at least George Bush the father was not as insane as George Bush the son. George Bush's father was advised, and he accepted the advice, that after he had defeated Saddam Hussein in that engagement called Desert Storm, he would not try to occupy the country, knowing that occupying the country would lead to an internal revolt, which would lead into asymmetric warfare! And the United States had just gone through asymmetric warfare in Vietnam. They had seen the Russians go through it in Afghanistan, and by that time, everybody had understood, you don't start asymmetric warfare! So therefore, Bush did it! Why? To destroy the United States. Did Bush intend to destroy the United States. Who knows what he intended? What difference does it make? You don't ask a rattlesnake why it's poisonous! The point is, people who are afraid, who don't see the possibility of doing what is necessary.
The Westphalian Approach
What we need to do is get back to the idea of a Westphalian approach to politics. We have to bring nations together, even badly behaving nations, by doing something good for them. Look, like North Korea: North Korea is not a pleasant place to live, but kicking it doesn't do any good. You make it desperate and mean. You starve it, you're not helping it! What you do is offer something, as the Clinton Administration in a sense was doing. You offer the opportunity for integration, for economic development, for feeding its people, for building up industries. You take the "enemy," in a sense, your foe, and you make him your ally! How? By doing something good for them. Because if you do something good for the nation, the government of the nation must sooner or later respond to the fact that the people like what you're doing for them. They don't want to fight you.
What we need to do is have a policy toward Africa. You have to have a policy. Our policy must be to care for the people of other countries, and to do the things that we can do which will benefit them. And once they understand they're working on a beneficial basis with us, we can talk to them! We can conduct diplomacy. We have to be prepared, in some cases, to defend ourselves, if one of these nations goes amok and decides to attack people, but we're going to behave the way the United States behaved in Desert Storm. Once the issue of the fight is settled, the shooting stops! And the reconstruction begins. So you may have to use military force to defend institutions from aggression, but you do not use military force for regime change or to try to impose a regime or to try to make an enemy by provoking it, in order to create a pretext for attack. Don't worry about how to settle these wars; don't have them! Don't seek them!
Have a good defense, which the United States has destroyed. The United States has no good military defense. We're like Israel, which is absolutely impotent. Israel just lost a war in Lebanon, by its own stupidity and foolishness—what it did in the aerial attack. That's all it really had, and made a mess of everything. Israel's about to be destroyed, by itself, by this kind of warfare.
So these are the kinds of problems we face. We've got to go away from this idea of conflict orientation, to the idea of a Westphalian approach, to treaty agreements with other nations. And also have a defense if you need it, but don't use it except to put out the fire. And don't go any further than putting out the fire. Make friends, not enemies.
What Should a Democratic Congress Do?
Freeman: This is a question that was submitted by Jake Schechter, who's a political consultant here in Washington. He's involved in 50 key races for the Democrats around the country, and his specialty is policy development, both for the campaigns but also in the post-election period. He says:
"Mr. LaRouche, as it stands today, one week before this all-important Federal election, we have a better than even chance of taking control of both Houses. Although I do want to say that nobody should be overconfident, my own view is that we have not yet felt the wrath of the Rove dirty tricks apparatus, and you can be sure that it will be unleashed, sooner or later. But for the sake of today's discussion, let's assume that the Democrats break profile and that we actually do win both Houses. What are your instructions to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and to the President of the Senate, in terms of what you think they should set as an agenda for the first 60 days of the new session?"
LaRouche: Well, as he knows very well, you have two particular problems to deal with. Number one, you do have to try to bring Democrats together, but you don't let that hold you back from doing what you have to do. You have to do some serious talking in your own ranks, rather than giving anyone veto power, in the sense of vetoing things that have to be done. You can not have incompetence used as a way of compromise. "We're not going to do anything to offend one of our own groups; therefore, we'll come up with an incompetent decision." You're now in a crisis where civilization's about to disintegrate! You have no margin for making rotten compromises, even in your own ranks. There are some things you can't compromise on. What you do is you give away everything that's not important, and trade it away in order to do what is important. Rotten compromise is no good. Giving away things which are valuable to you, but which are less important than the main things, means you concentrate on the main things. You may sacrifice some things which you think are important, but they're not crucial. Because you do, as a matter of fact, have to get some kind of consolidation.
Lower 80% of Population in Revolt
The problem is, the politics of the Democratic Party has been oriented to the upper 20% of the family income brackets, and to the money from the upper 3%! What's happened is the lower 80% has been essentially ignored, or treated as an also-ran, or tolerated, at best. Now you've gone through a period in which the lower 80% is in a revolt. You see this reflected in—it's not the fact that sodomy was being practiced and covered up, in the House of Representatives, or things like that. That is not what caused the revolt. That was the trigger. The population wanted an excuse to break from the Bush Administration, and the fact that a member of the House of Representatives, Foley, was caught with his pants down made a good excuse for the evangelicals to break from the party. Because they already have.
Who are these lower 80%, including the evangelicals? They're people with children, as boys in service in Iraq, or returned from Iraq and can't get medical care, or families which were destroyed by being sent to war in Iraq, because the government doesn't protect them, doesn't support them. Economic conditions which are intolerable. There's every reason for the personal lower 80% of family income brackets in the United States to hate the Bush Administration. Only ideological factors like conservatism, fundamentalism, and so forth, have held them in. So now what you get, often people react—and you know this—people react not because they react on conscious issues, and political issues. They may know the issues, but their political behavior somehow does not seem to register. But then you see they react! They react on a secondary or tertiary issue, which expresses something to them, which they wouldn't dare express by going directly and denouncing the party politically, that is, the Republican Party.
So you have a revolt, now, of people who are suffering: senior citizens, health care generally of people over 50 years of age, or 40 years of age, all have health-care problems they can't meet, are not covered. Whole towns are disappearing, whole sections of the country are disintegrating, the conditions of life of the lower 80% of the American people are miserable, and desperate. It's coming into the upper 20%, with the housing crisis. You're going to have a housing crisis, a collapse of housing prices, a mortgage-based crisis. Everything is being lost. They're suffering. Doesn't this suffering somehow find a channel to express itself? Yes it does.
Now, the Democratic Party's mistake is, is that it is oriented toward the upper 20% of family income brackets on the blue side for political support, and the upper 3% for financial support. So, how can they get the money to finance their campaigns, and how can they get the turnout from the upper 20% of family income brackets on the blue ticket? That's the issue. That's the problem.
Why don't we look now, where they didn't look last year, at all, at the auto crisis? Now, look at the effect of the auto crisis? Whole sections of the United States are destroyed. The United States no longer has a U.S. auto industry. They have an auto industry in there: Japanese, French, so forth, but not the U.S. You don't have the structure of an automobile industry, controlled by U.S. forces and U.S. interests. And the auto and aerospace industries are the gut of a modern industrial society. You don't control the gut of your own modern industrial society? You don't have control of your machine-tool capability? You rely on the good faith of foreign governments? No. And that's the mistake. What we have to do is correct the mistake. Look, in February of 2005 and March more emphatically, I emphasized, you have to act now to save the U.S. auto industry, as a part of a program of saving the United States economy. "No-o-o, we're not going to do it. We're not gonna do it. We're gonna kiss the butt of Felix Rohatyn and other swindlers. Ye-e-es we'll have infrastructure. We'll let Felix Rohatyn finance it." A fascist! The guy who financed putting Pinochet into power in Chile. Eh? That's where the problem lies.
The problem of the Baby-Boomer generation and the problem in the leadership of the Democratic Party is opportunism, but there's a better name for it. It's sophistry. We have to give up sophistry. We have to realize we're in a crisis, we're at a turning point in world history. We're about to lose the nation as a whole. Fiddle-faddling, trying to horse-trade issues in the usual sense no longer makes sense.
You have to think like Franklin Roosevelt. If you can't think like Franklin Roosevelt, keep your mouth shut!
Questions From Eurasia
Tremblay: We have a series of questions that deal with the problems of the interaction between nations in Eurasia. The first one is from Chandrajit Yadav, the former Union Minister of the Indian government from New Delhi. He says:
"Dear Mr. LaRouche, I agree with your assessment that the world economy is in serious crisis. One third of the youth in the world are unemployed. The time has come for an alternative, the LaRouche Eurasian Land-Bridge idea should be carried out as soon as possible. But, there's a problem with that. Because the governments of the three Eurasian nations which should be the most involved—China, India, and Russia—are not providing the required leadership for the Land-Bridge. I think, with the weaknesses of these three governments, we need a people's movement to support the Eurasian Land-Bridge." And he asks for your comment.
I would mention that Prof. Dai Lunzhang, a former chief economist of the central bank of China, and his colleagues, raised a couple of other points relevant to that. They talked about the problem of rivalries between China and India. They raised also the question of how to deal with the Sino-Japan relationship, and in that relationship with U.S. policy vis-à-vis Japan. I would add to that, particularly one question raised by the former vice-minister president of Czechoslovakia, who is also the former justice minister of Slovakia, Jan Carnogursky, who pinpoints the weakness of the European Union as a partner of this and says that we're threatened with a possible collapse of the euro. Would this mean a collapse of the European Union? What will happen with the European Union?
And perhaps one last element to put into this, is from Jagdish Kapur, who's a leading Indian intellectual and one of the co-chairmen of the Dialogue of Civilizations forum from New Delhi, who refers to the failure of world policy, including U.S. policy, with respect to the use of nuclear energy for development purposes.
Comments?
LaRouche: The problem here is, these countries—China, India, and Russia—do not yet understand the world situation. That's the problem. They don't have a sense of what the real issue is. They're looking at issues they do know, but in a context which does not correspond to the actual reality, the onrushing reality.
For example, China has not yet understood—they've improved their understanding, but they've not yet understood—the implications of a collapse of the dollar for China. They know they're "agin" it, but they don't understand that this policy as such, this U.S. policy, means an impossible situation for China. India does not understand that this means an impossible situation for India. And of course, on the Sino-Japanese thing that our Bank of China friend mentions, this is something I dealt with otherwise.
The problem is that, remember, the reform in Japan occurred under the influence of the United States against the British and Dutch. So Japan would still be an Asian nation, completely backward, with no industry to speak of, except for the United States' intervention during the period of the 1860s and 1870s. But later, the same Japanese Emperor who accepted the United States' advice on the industrialization of Japan, was won over by the British monarchy, which said to him, "You are a monarch, you are the Emperor of Japan. We are the Emperor of England. We emperors got to stick together—against the United States!" Now, the British wanted to get rid of the United States' influence in China. So what they did was, they launched—under Prince Edward Albert—they launched in 1894-95, the first Sino-Japanese War, the aggression against China by Japan. That was followed by the occupation of Korea, again an imperial acquisition, which was then followed by the Russo-Japanese War, which was orchestrated entirely by the British monarchy. The orchestration of this was done by Prince Edward Albert; it was done in order to prepare for World War I in Europe. And then you had Nicholas II, the fool, the Tsar of Russia, who was the nephew of the King of England, who made a treaty with the British and French, the Sykes-Picot Treaty, on the partition of Iran. Now he was fully in the business, and he lost his life. He lost Prussia.
So this is the kind of thing that was going on in this period, and people fail to understand that the imperial policy which the British monarchy stuck into Japan, against its friend the United States—which was what caused the Pearl Harbor incident which was organized by the British in the 1920s first, and then the British changed sides—that this policy has its reverberation today, and the conflict between China and Japan today, is a reflection of the continuing British influence in dividing the nations of East Asia against one another in order to control them.
And the British influence in India is the same kind of problem. I was there. I was actually technically under the command of Mountbatten, when I was in U.S. military service in the China-Burma-India theater. Mountbatten was the commander, I was in his service, and I was about to make a revolution against him. But anyway, that's another story. But this is the same kind of problem today. Therefore, the failure to understand, and to look back at history at least 100 years, preferably two or three hundred years—to understand today, you must do that, not just try to take the over-the-fence backyard issues of today. You won't understand them.
What you need to do in a case like this, you have to rise above the issue, get to a higher level, define what are the actual interests of mankind, and propose an action which may have nothing to do with the way the issues are defined, but changes the subject completely. Say, let's not debate that. Let's not have that family quarrel. Let's talk about what we want to do that's positive. And that's the best way to solve these problems.
The European Union Is a Coffin!
Now, on the problem of the European Union. The European Union, forget it! It's a coffin. Do you want to spend your life there? The European Union was set up to destroy continental Europe, to destroy every nation in continental Europe, and it's done a very efficient job at that. Here's Germany, with tremendous unemployment, with lack of industry, and you have the occupying powers, chiefly Mitterrand and Thatcher, impose a European Union on continental Europe and then don't join it themselves. Because it's a slave ship. The British organize the slave ship, get the Europeans to join it, but don't come aboard themselves. They sit outside and watch the fun. So here's Germany, which technically, could—except for the European Union and the ECB [European Central Bank], and the euro, which is the name for a poison pill. They sit there, vast unemployment, decay of industries, loss of everything which Germany was capable of doing, hamstrung because they can not create state credit to build up employment in the industries which are needed to bring the deutschemark or the equivalent up to a balance. There's not enough productive employment.
Like Berlin itself: The city is not allowed to become able to support itself with its own income. It is in a permanent state of bankruptcy, when a solution would be obvious. The government must build up the industries again. We've got an excellent relationship with China, India, and so forth, on Germany's relationship on behalf of Europe with this part of the world, Eurasia. Well, why don't we just do what we should? Here's the railroad center, Berlin, it's the access to the East. We've got tremendous markets to the East—why don't we have the industries right here where we have the people? Build up the industries, export to the East. We can put people to work, we can balance the budget of Berlin. Germany can make money again. We can stop the one-euro jobs and all this other nonsense. People can have a future. The German government could do that, simply by creating intelligent application of state credit. But they can't! Why? Because of the European Union suit, which is a new form of the Iron Maiden. So, we shouldn't really worry about that at all.
On the nuclear power, look, the problem is really very simple. The people have been sucked into the "green revolution" and globalization. In India as elsewhere. Fine. The problem is that, and the problem is that in other parts of the world, they don't want to fight the nuclear power issue, which anybody in India knows they need. India of all countries absolutely requires the immediate widespread application of nuclear power, in 100-900 MW capacities. They require it because of the nature of the country. It needs it! The water question alone requires nuclear power. You have to dot the whole country with nuclear power plants, just to deal with these problems. It's the only solution for India! Other people are not realistic, they're Baby Boomers. They think about not what you eat, but how you feel about eating, is what's important.
Impeach Bush and Cheney
Freeman: Before I ask a question from Washington, we did get a communication from Peter Ruffino, from the University of Chicago Law School. He said:
"Mr. LaRouche, thank you for your remarks regarding the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. As I'm sure you know, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who hopes to be the Speaker of the House in January, has repeatedly made public pledges that if the Democrats win control of the House, that she wants to make clear that impeachment of this administration is off the table. I drafted a letter to her, asking her to withdraw that pledge, in which I outline a series of already documented impeachable offenses by this administration, even prior to any substantive investigation by Congress. As of today, over 150 leading constitutional law experts have added their signatures to this letter. I just wanted to use the opportunity of this webcast, to invite any American law professors who are listening to this broadcast, to join in this effort."
I don't know if he wants me to give out his email address or not. If there are people listening who would like a copy of the letter and who would like to participate, perhaps the best thing to do is to respond to the email address of LaRouche PAC, and we will forward your name and information to Dr. Ruffino, and he can contact you himself.
'Core Labor Standards' and Infrastructure
The next question that we have was submitted by a senior member of the professional staff of a leading House Democrat. And again, they are charged with trying to draft policy for the immediate period ahead. The question is as follows:
"Mr. LaRouche, you have spoken and written a great deal about salvaging the American manufacturing sector for national infrastructure and defense purposes. In this sense, America would produce things that it would purchase for its own purposes. But what about salvaging a manufacturing sector that still sells to the rest of the world? How can American manufacturing regain a competitive edge in the world's marketplace, and how important are core labor standards to that project? And if you think they are important, how would you suggest that we make core labor standards enforceable around the world? This question could just as well be about German manufacturing or French manufacturing, or really the manufacturing sector of any highly industrialized nation facing competition from other countries that simply do not respect fundamental workers' rights."
LaRouche: We've got to put some teeth in this issue. Now, the problem is, the mistake is to assume that we go to manufacturing jobs as such for export. That would be a mistake. It's not a mistake to export manufactured products, that's not the mistake. The point is, that people have to understand the composition of the process of production and how an economy works as an economy. The problem the United States has, the thing that tends to drive up the cost of production, is the lack of basic economic infrastructure. The United States wastes a tremendous amount of money on building highways. You may have seen our super-highways; they're called parking lots—at every rush hour, parking lots. You see the congestion of moving populations around a few centers which have super-highways used as parking lots at rush-hour time; and rush hours go on six to seven hours a day. There's something wrong here. We've gone in the wrong direction.
What did we do? We destroyed infrastructure. The way you have to look at the United States economy—and people have to rethink—don't listen to what the accountants say. The accountants don't understand economics; that's why they're accountants—they flunked economics. The problem here is, to have a productive industry, you must have an economy which is productive. You measure productivity per square kilometer and per capita. You measure it for your total average territory. You develop private agriculture; farmers, real farmers. You don't destroy the hedgerows in order to have cheaper farming for mass grain production. You don't do all the stupid things to destroy whole states, whole sections of states, by de-industrializing them, by destroying agriculture, by destroying education, and then having a few large areas and taking the average as if you were making some gigantic soup, as opposed to an economy. Where we've lost it, we've lost it. We don't have power production; we've lost whole sections of the country in terms of power production. You can no longer get drinking water out of a faucet; you buy bottled water, or you get a disease; you've got a choice. We don't have schools, health care; we don't have the infrastructure which supports a highly productive population with the means of production which infrastructure provides.
How a Productive Economy Works
Therefore, the way you build an economy, is the way economies were built well in the past, in European systems. You develop an economy by developing the people—education, sanitation, health care—the people. You develop the communities in an organized way. You emphasize private corporations, not large corporations. You don't ban large corporations, but you don't want to consolidate conglomerates. What you want is, you want the entrepreneur; you want the typical German entrepreneurial firm.
For example, let's take the case of MBB in Germany, which I had some acquaintance with some years back. MBB was the aerospace center of German industry. It was very highly developed; 10,000 people worked in engineering design. The industry was destroyed by Reuter of Daimler-Benz. This was a firm which not only had about 10,000 people in that category of work, but which had relations with small shops all over Germany, where you had a physicist with two people, a firm with 25 people, which were subcontractors, who were the repertoire of firms such as MBB. And people at MBB who want to make a product, know that this guy over here, this guy over here—they can call him in to assist them with any particular problem they have to solve. And therefore, the private firm, the small, closely held private firm, the Mittelstand firm, is the essential part of any well-organized economy. And Germany was the pillar of this kind of development in former times. It's gone, or it's going. There's a little bit left of it in Bavaria and a few other places, but generally it's going. It's insane!
What does that mean? It means you have communities which have diversified characteristics, different kinds of industry in the same area, a great dependence on things like the Mittelstand for these industries, a few larger firms which combine the work of a lot of Mittelstand firms together with the process of making the components, which make the final product. And you have a nervous system, where you can go into one firm, say a key firm, "We want to do this." "Well, let's see, we've got this firm, we've got this Mittelstand, this one here. We can put it together." That was what Germany used to be able to do. That was the high quality product. That's what the United States used to be able to do, by depending on these small firms, with 5 to 100, 200 people, which were specialized firms in technology. And large firms that wanted to make an automobile, an airplane, and so forth, could rely upon these firms to do the testing and design work, and you got a product. And that's what you want to do.
Now therefore, we don't have that structure. If we want to build an industry which is competitive on the world market, the United States could do that; but what it would have to do is, it would have to start by building infrastructure, which is what I emphasized last year. I said, take the auto industry: don't let it be shut down; don't close it down. Leave it alone; keep it there. Convert the part of the auto industry you aren't going to use for automobiles, convert it for infrastructure. We can build locks and dams. We can build all kinds of things which are necessary for infrastructure, and build us back an economy. Use this auto industry, with its machine-tool capability; use the same plants in the same places. That's the way it works—like Lockport, New York. They had a plant up there, Delphi. The plant had produced all kinds of things—aircraft; it could produce components for water-management systems, canal systems. It's on the St. Lawrence; it's on the Great Lakes; it's connected to the Ohio River. You can move your product down the very rivers in which it's going to be used for that kind of production. The space industry used to have that same kind of ability.
So, what we have to do is build up the productive potential per capita of the United States per square kilometer. Therefore, don't worry about being competitive in this area or that area. Don't let the accountants talk to you on this one. Get your engineers, get the scientists, not the accountants, and go calculate physically, per capita, per square kilometer, how much productivity and competitive is it in terms of technology? Build it up. If you do that, and you turn the ingenuity of the entrepreneur loose—not the large corporation run by the papier-mâché accountant, but a real man, a real human being, who knows production. Turn him loose with his firm; let him fight for his market, help him. And you will increase the productivity of the United States the way we did under Roosevelt, under comparable conditions. That's the way to do it. It's the way to do it here—Germany's the ideal comparable example to what we can do in the United States. Just do the same thing.
So, that's what we have to do. Go with my program; the way I said it. We still have some of the plant facilities; we still have the personnel who are put out of work, the communities that were shut down by the stupidity of the Congress in allowing this to happen. Put these people back to work; create a government corporation; create the funding of a government corporation. Take these things over that are being idled; put them under government protection. Get them moving again! Move them ahead to the point that they become self-paying operations.
What Should Foreign Governments Do?
Tremblay: We have a question here from the audience. It's from Mr. Jihad Yakan, an entrepreneur here from Berlin. He's originally from Syria. He'll ask the question in German, and then I'll translate it. [Question in German.] "Mr. LaRouche, you mentioned that the policies of George W. Bush are destroying the U.S. What is your advice for the Chancellor of Germany? In this respect, what is your advice for the governments of both Syria and Iran that wish to preserve peace?"
LaRouche: Well, it's something I'm working on—getting rid of the Bush Administration—because if we don't get rid of the Bush Administration, nothing's going to work; the United States will be destroyed. I mean, if you keep taking poison, you may die. If the United States keeps taking the poison of the Bush Administration, it will die; it will die very soon. We're going into a crisis. Remember, I said at the beginning today of this event, I said we're already, as of the middle of September, we've gone through a phased downshift in the U.S. economy, which means that the U.S. economy and the world economy are about to go into a chain-reaction collapse. A collapse which is potentially comparable to what happened to Europe when the House of Bardi went bankrupt in the middle of the Fourteenth Century, and Europe went into a Dark Age. We're in that kind of situation. You have an economy which is based on managements which in large degree are totally incompetent, by governments which are incompetent in the matter of economics. That is, they've lost the kind of competence that existed in governments, say in the 1980s and the 1970s. They've lost that competence; they don't know how to run anything, except to run it down. Every policy they make is generally a mistake.
What we have to do is two things: We have to have a mission orientation ourselves: that we're going to go back and become what we should be. And that we are going to get rid of governments that refuse to make that kind of reform. And we will be able to do so, because everything is falling apart, as it will be very soon, in every leading government of Europe. You're going to find that governments in Europe are going to suddenly disintegrate the minute this tidal wave of collapse hits, and you'll find governments which will disintegrate which you think are strong governments, and have good chances of being re-elected today, you'll find that those governments are going to disintegrate before your eyes.
A Revolutionary Period
So therefore, you have to take a completely fresh view of the situation, knowing as I said at the beginning today, that we're in a time when things are going to change very suddenly, very soon. Anything you think is established habits or traditions in your area, don't trust it, it probably will fail. We're going through a revolutionary period, of a crisis beyond belief; you have not seen in the past century, anything like this. The closest probably is what happened in 1923 in Germany, to what is going to happen now, to what is going to happen on a broad scale.
So therefore, what we have to do in this area, is decide we're going to do that; we're going to change the government of the United States. We're going to have a positive policy towards relations among nations. We're going to be looking for economic development in terms of industry and related things, and infrastructure. We're going to base relations on trying to find ways of utilizing the desire to cooperate in the economic sphere wherever possible. We're going to negotiate the way we used to: to negotiate projects, which are projects through financial agencies, such as new banks organized in a new way—fresh start banks—to fund contracts with the aid of government-to-government agreements, treaty agreements, which cover certain projects among certain nations. And that's the way we're going to do it.
You take the case of Iraq and Iran—it's no problem. Iraq is a problem because the country is being destroyed, disintegrated. It's very hard to rebuild a country that is being disintegrated, but if you rebuild around it—for example if you use Syria, which is next to Iraq, use Iran, which is next to it, if they're both proceeding healthily, if Lebanon is being reconstructed, if you've got the Palestinian crisis under control, and start to give the Palestinians some opportunity, some hope for some kind of relief, then you have an environment in which you can introduce treaty agreements to sponsor economic development. Under those conditions, yes, it will work. The opportunities in Iran are tremendous—maybe not tremendous on some scale, but relative to the area. It's got 70 million people, some of them have a high degree of technology and culture. You can do a great number of things there. It's a good opportunity, but you need to have the agreement among governments to provide the protection to enable this agreement to go forward. The need for the market, the need for the jobs, the need for the economy is there; the incentives are all potentially there. But you need to have governments agree; and to do that, you have to get rid of the Bush government.
Tremblay: Debbie, you have one more question. This will be the last question from D.C. then.
Freeman: Lyn, we still have a number of institutional questions that we will submit to you, and perhaps you can answer in writing. They include questions from here in Washington, but there are also several questions from some key labor leaders in Argentina, and there are a couple of institutional questions from both Africa and from other nations on the Ibero-American continent.
Assessing Bill Clinton
But what I'd like to do is to make the last question here from the Young Democrats, from a community college in Missouri. There are about 25 of them who gathered to listen to the webcast, and Bobby Stiewell submitted this question for you. He says:
"Thank you for calling us to seek justice by doing all we can to preserve the lives of those around us. You call for justice and love, and you refer to Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 13. Now, admittedly, Bill Clinton is a Baby Boomer. And he did enjoy a lot of controversial pleasure while he was in office—and I guess he was impeached for lying under oath. But, you said that it would have been useful if he had served a third term. What of his specific policies would you want to have seen continued and developed if, in fact, he had a third term in office? I think this is important from the standpoint of the immediate political period ahead."
LaRouche: In this case, I think the important thing is the man and not the policies. The valuable part about Bill Clinton is that he's extremely intelligent, which none of his rivals, approximate rivals, really are. And he is capable of changing his policies on the basis of being intelligent. See, most politicians are like wind-up toys. Whatever they're built to do is what they do, whether you want it to do it or not. The valuable politician is a statesman—not as a politician, but a statesman. The statesman is the person who starts from the standpoint of a conception of care for the country, and care for humanity as well; and who responds to not only what he sees, but what he foresees. Who concentrates on getting advisors, specialists who will help him foresee what is coming down the road. Who will help him see what the options are for dealing with each of the problems he's thinking about. He functions not as a politician, but as a leader, a person who is groping into the future, and knows how to do that job of groping into the future. A person who knows how to change; who knows how to develop and respond to the situations as often as possible before they happen.
Now Bill showed, through his Presidency and through what I've seen of him since he was President, that he continues to grow, as very few leading American politicians do. They may improve slightly, but they don't grow. Bill has been growing, and therefore, had he had a third term, I'm sure he would have grown even more than he has being out of office. But he's shown to me growth in being out of office. He does have a streak of outward opportunism (which he would explain otherwise, and I understand that), but underneath the opportunism, there is a man who cares, and there is a man who wants to find the real answers. Who, in the short term, will try to politically maneuver his way through a situation, by gathering support by being an opportunist, a Baby Boomer, in short. But he comes by that honestly—he is, after all, a Baby Boomer. But at the same time, underneath there, is a man who can think, who has a sense of history, who has a sense of an historical perspective in respect to the things he does or chooses, that he's committed to, whether he says so publicly or not, but what's working in his mind behind the scenes. With all the faults I might find in him, he has that quality of the statesman, and there are very few of his generation who actually do. So, I take Bill—with all his faults—and say "Hmmph." But that's plus; you want to criticize Bill, look at what the competition is for his position, and you'll come back to Bill.
'Marching Orders' for the LYM
Tremblay: We have many, many more questions, but unfortunately we just don't have the time today to be able to ask Mr. LaRouche directly. But, of course, all these questions will be forwarded to him in written form. For the last question, Portia, from the LaRouche Youth Movement here in Berlin, had something she wanted to ask Lyn.
Portia Tarumbwa: Hi Lyn. We're having fun here tonight. Actually, parallel to this meeting, intervening on some suckers from the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] who wanted to sabotage tonight's meeting. But in fact, I think we're having a lot of fun in Berlin overall, in the past period, warming it up for a revolution. My question, on behalf of the LaRouche Youth Movement, and also on behalf of young people gathered around the world is: With the great danger, and the great promise of the period of history we're in, I mean, it's hallowed what you're proposing, basically. I've come to realize the necessity of a whole generation, my generation, to more and more to think like you. Mastering your discoveries and the implications of them on the past, but more importantly, on the future. And we have very few role models today, so could you give us some pointers or, rather, marching orders?
LaRouche: Yes; we have a project which I've started in the United States. I started it because I saw that the youth movement's education program, while useful in respect to getting into some of the theses of Sphaerics, for example, and a few other things, was very useful, but it was not getting the kind of thrust and continuity which is needed. So, I said, we're going to scrap this. We're going to do another program.
So, I took three phase questions out of, largely, Kepler. First of all, to re-enact Kepler's discovery of gravitation; not to learn how to repeat it after me, but to re-enact the act. To go through the mental experience of Kepler. Because Kepler writes what is happening to his mind—he doesn't change it. So, by studying Kepler's works, you can see how his mind was working at successive stages in developing an idea. Very unusual—very few writers do that, very few scientists have done that. Secondly, actually Kepler is the founder of modern science. The design for the founding of modern science was by Nicholas of Cusa; contributions were made by Leonardo da Vinci—and very important ones—but it was Kepler who first took the question and divined a universal approach to science and modern science. All modern science that's successful comes out of Kepler. If you relive Kepler, and two of his discoveries in particular, and a third one by Gauss—first, the discovery of the principle of gravity, which no English-speaking person ever knew, until recently. Secondly, the discovery of the organization of the Solar System—now it's even more than that, because the discovery of the Solar System is the discovery of the fact that the universe is not entropic. That is, the astronomical system is not a fixed system, because the Sun was alone in its corner of the universe, all by itself. Nothing there; it was spinning fast, spinning rapidly around, looking for something. It couldn't find anything, so it made something. It spilled off some plasma, when it was fast spinning. This plasma took the form of a plane of plasma, looking pretty much like the image of Saturn, with all its moons and rings. This material spun off, and in it you begin to see that there's fusion occurring; going from the limited number of elements you find in the Sun, outside there are more elements are being created by the Sun, by radiation from the Sun impacting upon this plasma. And then some years ago, I decided this had to be polarized, because you couldn't get the table of 92 elements without polarization—then it would work. So, here's a polarized plasma spinning off this material; this material is spun off by distillation into planetary orbits, one after the other. They have certain characteristics in common. They never lose their connection to the Sun; even stray bodies that come into the planetary system, are locked into that system by the Sun. And this has an ordering. Now, we have thermonuclear fusion, which is what the Sun was already doing. So, thermonuclear fusion is a universal principle; it's not something that happened, and then happened. It was there in the beginning.
The universe is not a fixed creation; it's a developing creation. The world is anti-entropic; the universe is anti-entropic; it's creative! And our minds are creative. We are in the image of creation; we are the personification of creation, and our duty is to develop. Not to do the same, but to do something different; to move forward, to make the next step up. That's our destiny; that's what we existed for, and that's what we have to make it—our morality. We never try to perfect ourselves to sit in the same corner. We never allow ourselves to do exactly what our parents did, and grandparents before us. We must do something new; something better. Not to throw away what they accomplished, but to build upon it. To build a better future. And in Kepler, you've got that, in the way he approaches the discovery of gravitation; that's how it takes you someplace. But then, the way the organization of the planetary system spun out; created by the Sun, around it.
Then you have a third case. Not done by Kepler, but done by the effect of Kepler. Kepler, in looking at the harmony of the system, saw that there's a missing planet in the system. A missing planet in a location of dissonance. And so then, when Gauss saw some phenomenon—41 observations of something, that's all he had. From 41 observations, he discovered the orbit of the first asteroid, Ceres, which had the characteristics which belonged in the Keplerian harmonic system. Once he saw that, he knew that this was an asteroid, not just some stray piece of garbage out there. That shows you the importance, the understanding of the relationship of these characteristics of universal physical principles, and how they're derivatives, and how they apply to reality.
Then you go on to the final stage beyond that; you come to the work of Riemann, Bernhard Riemann. And as Einstein said, but nobody seemed to understand what he was saying. He said modern science begins with Kepler, who is valid, and it continues through Riemann, who completes the cycle of the definition of what modern science is.
So, I have these young guys working on these successions. Start with gravitation of Kepler; get to the organization of the Solar System—Kepler. Realize the implication of Kepler's discovery—the asteroids by Gauss. Then go beyond Gauss, to the realization of the implications of Gauss, and then you get to Riemann; Riemannian hypergeometry, a physical hypergeometry, not a formal one. Now, you know everything essential about the entirety of modern science. You can thinks like modern science. You don't know just a few things, you're not a guy who can babble off and say "I know this thing; I know this thing." Now you have a sense of how the universe works, and how man works in the universe.
We need a generation of youth who think like that. Now, it doesn't mean everybody of that age group is going to think like that right away, but we need in society, a core of young people, who in their search for an education which they can't get, even if they could afford it in the university, need an education. We need an educated population. We can't afford the prices of universities anymore, not for many people. But we can't throw people in a ditch because they can't afford the price of a university education at a university where they can't get an education, no matter how much they pay for it. Therefore, we have to educate them, so we go economically. We take a core program, identify the greatest central achievement of European science. We say, you know this; know from Kepler to Riemann; know that, and then branch out from there to the next stage, yourself.
Tremblay: Unfortunately, we've come to the end of the meeting today, but fortunately for us, Lyn has given us a lot of work, so we'll have a lot to do in the next weeks. And, there is a webcast on Nov. 16, from Washington, D.C. I know everybody will be watching, and there will be probably thousands of more people, because of the result of the American elections in one week, and therefore, what Mr. LaRouche has to say on the future of humanity, based on these election results. So, with that, I'd like to end the event here, and of course, thank Lyn very much, and we hope to see him here in Berlin as soon as possible again.