Subscribe to EIR Online
This article appears in the November 7, 2008 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
A TRUE CLASSICAL TRAGEDY:

Our Economy Is Bushed!

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

October 29, 2008

[PDF version of this article]


It is time to be realistic about the situation which will menace the very continued existence of our U.S. Republic, whatever the outcome of the November 4th general election.

What must be addressed in the accompanying report, is the wretchedly corrupted state of the present leadership of the political parties, especially since about February 2006, at a time that the Democratic Party leadership, in particular, had refused to respond to the votes cast by the electorate in the preceding mid-term election—on any leading issue, then, or to the present date.

Similar problems, even critical ones, have existed for our republic during some past times, but the state of our national political affairs during the recent two years has been perhaps the most deadly threat of that type in the entire experience of our nation as a Federal republic. As we go into the 2008 general election, that is the problem which should be uppermost in our mind.

Notably, excepting certain U.S. Presidents, or Vice-Presidents, such as Aaron Burr, whose intentions were those of outright traitors, the outgoing George W. Bush, Jr., after nearly eight years in that office, has created a record for himself, as being, beyond reasonable doubt, the worst excuse for a U.S. President in our republic's history. He was already the worst possible choice actually available when he entered that office, and accomplished little since, except to rise from a complete absence of qualifications for that office, to achieve the more notable status of having been, traitors aside, the most despicable ever.

The disaster of this election has not been accidental. Whatever the developments of the increasingly tumultuous, remaining weeks ahead, George W. Bush, Jr. will go down in the Creator's ledger as the President who did the most in his efforts over eight years, not merely to bankrupt the U.S.A., but to adopt those policies which have amounted to the attempt to plunge the entire planet into what is presently looming as the onrushing threat of becoming the worst dark age in the presently recorded history of mankind.

What prominent political figure of our republic, or any reasonably well-informed foreign nation, could be so stupid, or so craven as to suggest that an incarnate virtual political disease such as President George W. Bush, Jr. could be the author of a remedy for the world's current disasters?

Why were so many citizens, especially the most influential ones, unable to muster the combined wisdom and just plain guts needed to prevent the scheme of the attempted impeaching of former President Bill Clinton, a hoax against our Federal Constitution, which set into motion the chain-reaction of economic and related events which ended with the alleged defeat of Presidential candidate Al Gore, Jr. by an even worse choice, George W. Bush, Jr.?

It is time for the apparent majority of our political influentials to ask themselves, whether their failure to defeat Bush's re-election in 2004, forecast a still worse expression of a continuing national tragedy already clearly in progress, during the still coming days and weeks now immediately ahead. Or, must we fear that what are considered our currently leading political figures, each and all, are simply lacking in the combination of insight and nerve which we require to lead our republic to survival now.

The only remedy for us now, lies in the potential embodied in the uniquely crucial distinctions of our republic's Constitution from that of the form of government found, for example, in western and central Europe, still to the present day. In this moment of the gravest threatened crisis in all modern history, the fate of the nation hangs not so much on the particular personality of an elected President whose very life may be in jeopardy, but on those institutions of the Presidency which persist as Presidents come and go.

I explain:


What we are experiencing is no mere recession, but a presently accelerating general financial and physical breakdown of the entirety of this planet, which, unless turned around, now, will accelerate steeply into a planet-wide "new dark age of mankind."

It is already clear to those who actually understand the present U.S.A. and world situation, that the present pattern of general breakdown of the U.S. economy, an economic-financial breakdown-crisis which erupted at the close of July 2007, is a breakdown crisis with characteristics similar to, but worse than that brought about in mid-Fourteenth-Century Europe. Now, as then, this menace is represented by a pack of financier bandits fully as rapacious as that pack of Anglo-American financier parasites controlling the circles associated with Wall Street champions rallied around President George W. Bush's U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson.

Those citizens who understand what is needed now to save our nation from the already onrushing horror, will reject any opinions on our present situation which are contrary to the warning which I have just stated here. This is no mere depression, no mere echo of 1929; it is a general breakdown-crisis of the financial systems of the entire planet.

There are ways in which to bring the world to safety, even from a crisis as terrible as what has been happening, continuously, as I had warned at the end of July 2007.

Therefore, since there will never be a spontaneous recovery of the planet from the presently accelerated general breakdown-crisis of the entire economies of the world, the only hope lies in a return to the kinds of measures undertaken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from March 1933, onward. Today's pervasive problem lies, chiefly, in the confused, general state of mind of our electorate itself, most of whom think of issues of policy in terms of competing political parties, rather than thinking in terms of the common interest of the past, present, and future citizens of our republic. This non-partisan leadership must not be considered as representing mere factions, but as a whole leading constituency of our Presidential system for times of our nation's existential crises, as now. Our nation—and the world—could not be rescued from the greatest economic crisis in modern world history, unless our government adopts, immediately, the only kind of action which could rescue the world as a whole from the presently onrushing plunge toward a prolonged new dark age.

We of the United States could not save ourselves by options of the U.S. government itself. We require immediate agreement on actions to be taken in concert by such leading nations of the world today as our U.S.A., Russia, China, and India. Without a sweeping change, which eliminates most of the leading trends in economic policy-shaping of those, and other nations, since about 1968, the entire planet, including our own U.S.A., is slipping at a presently accelerating rate, virtually daily, into a total breakdown of the present financial-economic systems of the entire world.

Ours Is Not a Parliamentary System

Even at all times, especially whenever our republic is threatened in an existential way, as now, our citizens should think of the Presidency, rather than as the incumbent President, as the essential element of self-government under the unique, Federal, constitutional system brought into being through the interplay between the coincidental meeting of Society of the Cincinnati and the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia at that time.

Our peculiar advantage lies, to a very large degree, in that we are not a European parliamentary system! Nor, is our nation's economy based on the doctrine of the Adam Smith, who was, and remains, to the present day, our enemy of the time of our struggle for national freedom, from that time. We are, by our Constitution's specific principle of a national monopoly on the uttering of public credit, unique among nations in that respect; it is to the essential principle of that uniqueness of our constitutional system that we must turn, when we are being driven, as now, as under the mortal threat from Lord Palmerston's British Empire, to last resorts, again, today.

It is through constitutional authority to launch the sweeping replacement of failed monetary-financial systems, such as those of Britain and most other nations, that we, our nation, and our constitutional republic, alone, are presently capable of initiating the reform needed to launch an immediate recovery of the nations of the world from the presently onrushing avalanche of general breakdown-crisis of the planet as a whole.

Therefore, the crucial question which we must ask ourselves, is: are we capable of using the President to be elected, presumably, on November 4th of this year, to effect immediately the needed reforms needed both to save our nation and its people? Neither of the prospective President-elects actually has the qualifications for initiating that urgently needed, timely reform on which the continued existence of our republic depends.

Therefore, let us ask a somewhat different question: could the Presidency of our republic use the elected President as the constitutional instrument which could launch that urgently needed general economic reform?

The answer is "Yes." Will that Presidency, which is a mass of institutions and persons gathered around the policy-shaping and other relevant institutions be willing, and capable of mobilizing the needed remedies, where a mere individual President would probably fail? That is the question, a question of far, far greater importance than any individual likely to become the President of our republic by the time of the January next inauguration.

What we must avoid, as if our republic's life depended on it—as it does—is to reject all of the kinds of compromises being cooked up around the President Bush Administration, or similar mish-mash concoctions proposed by sundry interests and institutions abroad. The survival of civilization requires the immediate adoption of nothing different than the reform, based on replacing the inherently failed design of European-style monetary systems, by the U.S. Constitutional principle of a U.S. constitutional credit-system.

The needed reform will fail unless that specific condition, the junking of international monetary systems, in favor of a Hamiltonian credit-system, is treated efficiently as axiomatic. This requires the included, leading role of the U.S.A., in a small group of leading world powers, such as Russia, China, and India, in agreeing to a principled design of that specific, Hamiltonian, Franklin Roosevelt type. If that is done, and conducted in service of the equitable interests of the nations of the world, we can come successfully out of what would otherwise be, very soon, a general breakdown of every economy in the world over a period of perhaps generations to come.

For such a long-ranging challenge, no mere President, as a personality, could efficiently represent the people of the United States. For this form of problem, we must rely on the Presidency of our United States, rather than any mere President temporarily occupying that office.

My job, as my forecasts of events have now shown my competence to be presently uniquely competent, is to act to mobilize what represents the too-little understood, implicitly immortal institution of the U.S. Presidency as such, to craft that commitment by our republic, which is presently so urgently needed to rescue the world as a whole from the follies which have ruled the world, most emphatically, since the dumping of the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the course of the 1968-1981 interval. It is not a merely passing President, but the immortal institution of our implicitly immortal Presidency which is required to commit us to our part in crafting the indispensable new commitment to the hopeful future destiny of humanity as a while.

Back to top

clear
clear
clear