LYM to Congress:
Erect Firewall, Or Be Fired!
by Matthew Ogden, LaRouche Youth Movement
Becoming the first legislative body in the nation to do so, the Pontiac, Michigan City Council passed a resolution on Oct. 4, calling on Congress to swiftly implement Lyndon LaRouche's proposed Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA). Of immediate significance, this Pontiac resolution represents a voice from a city located in the heart of what was the strategic center of America's once-vibrant industrial and machine-tool sector, whose population had been the working-middle-class; but, as a result of the philosophy of hatred for the blue-collar worker, embraced over the past 40 years by the white-collar Baby-Boomer generation, this region has undergone a continuing dynamic of decay, turning the Detroit metropolitan area, today, into the second highest city in the country on the list of those currently being devastated by foreclosures.
This action by the Pontiac Council comes on top of the introduction by State Rep. LaMar Lemmons, Jr. (D) of a similar resolution into the Michigan House of Representatives, which, upon circulation, immediately received 21 co-signers. It echoes the resolution introduced by Rep. Harold James (D-Pa.) in the Pennsylvania State House, which has received 40 signatures. And, most recently, the draft resolution has been introduced into the Illinois State Legislature.
Outside these official bodies, nearly 60 individual state- and local-level elected officials from all across the country have now signed onto the nationwide petition being circulated by the LaRouche PAC, demanding Federal action to initiate the proposed HBPA. These 60 have been joined by over 100 labor leaders and constituency activists. Among these individual endorsements are, significantly, voices from leaders of three principal minority groups: Black, Latino, and American-Indian. This mass action, which has been organized by the LaRouche PAC from among so-called third- or fourth-ranking elected officials, has actually turned the politics of this country upside-down. As opposed to the "Olympian-Zeus"-like, top-down control that the Pelosi Democrats believe they possess, these elected officials are now emerging as the real, natural leaders of the nation, responding to the spreading social crisis and the looming financial implosion, to which the current wave of foreclosures is merely a dark prelude. Why wait for permission to act, from a Capitol Hill gaggle of bio-fools with an 18% approval rate? The Congress is busy distracting itself with talk of ethanol, again, as it did last year when LaRouche was mobilizing to save the machine-tool sector with the Emergency Recovery Act of 2006. The significance of the general mobilization which these endorsements represent, is the broader rejection by large constituency groups of the conditioned behavior to wait for permission to move, from more "important authorities." What had been a pervasive go-along-to-get-along attitude, is being turned into a mission-oriented mass movement, to demand that Congress defend the general welfare. A real revolution!
If it seems that the Congress is divorced from the realities that their constituents are living in, the local leaders now demanding that Washington move, certainly are not. Look at the op-ed published in the Sept. 30 Washington Post, by Jim Rokakis, Cuyahoga County Treasurer. It is a story of the social rot in Cleveland's Slavic Village, with drug-related deaths and gang-violence resulting from the process of home foreclosure: 800 at last count, with entire streets and blocks being abandoned. And, as Rokakis points out, "Cleveland isn't alone." This dynamic of decay is now claiming much of the territory of the country, spreading social chaos in a "blob-like" effect, very similar to the dynamic of an epidemic disease, as documented by the Jan. 6, 2006 EIR on Baltimore's "death-zones."
This was the message that State Rep. Harold James and State Rep. Juanita Walton (D-Mo.) brought to the Annual Convention of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Joined by a team of organizers from the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), James and Walton organized the Congressmen attending this huge event to respond to the call for action on the HBPA from the dozens of state representatives around the nation who had endorsed the act. Most significant was the response to the endorsement by current California Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, who was well known to those in attendance as a former Congressman, and former chair of the CBC. Several radio stations, broadcasting live from the floor of the convention, requested interviews from Walton, James, and LPAC representatives, including the Bev Smith show, a nationally syndicated black radio program. They were also interviewed on WURD 900 AM, a Philadelphia show based in Representative James' home district, and on CBC convention closed-circuit TV.
The interviews did not stop when the convention ended: On Oct. 4, Walton was interviewed on St. Louis's KLPW. The same day, former Michigan State Rep. LaMar Lemmons, III (D), whose father is the primary sponsor of the HBPA resolution in the Michigan State Legislature, was interviewed on drive-time radio in Detroit's KLPW.
After the Congressional Black Caucus convention, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus also met in Washington. The intervention made by LPAC organizers into leaders of this hard-hit population, around the initiative to freeze foreclosures, was significant, and some very prominent Latino leaders decided to add their names to the rapidly growing list of endorsements on the petition for the HBPA.
Crossfire
In this sort of nation-wide mass mobilization, each breakthrough in one region, is amplified by the broad-reaching deployment of the LaRouche movement, to spark more breakthroughs elsewhere. This multiplier effect was apparent at a Lansing, Mich. City Council committee meeting on Oct. 4. The LYM had presented the proposed legislation at a public meeting of the body two weeks before, as we have at dozens of such events around the country. One of the council members had responded by organizing a meeting of the committee to hear a formal presentation of the resolution by the LYM. After emphasizing the fact that Lansing and all other cities are facing the effects of a problem which is outside their domain to solve, and that the housing bubble had been created originally as an illusion to forestall the collapse of the entire financial system, the most significant response came from a council member who realized, "You're talking about changing the entire system. That's really big! I agree with everything you're saying ... but this is big!"
These council members were highly impressed with Michigan HR 190, the draft resolution to support the HBPA being circulated in the statehouse, and the list of cosponsors, indicating that this would be a positive factor influencing their decision. This is real politics; this is how to move the base.
Deployed to cities like Lansing and Pontiac and legislatures such as Michigan and Ohio, throughout the Midwest, meeting with representatives, and bringing the HBPA to community colleges, pulling students into these meetings, the LYM is carrying out a strategy to create a mass effect in these concentrated centers of population. The youth are deployed similarly throughout the Northeast corridor, from New England through New York and into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and "Ground Zero" Northern Virginia, and covering the West Coast, into Texas, and with networks in South Dakota, Missouri, Kentucky, and a number of other states. The method of building up the natural leadership from among these populations, is what works. And these citizens are responding to this emerging leadership, especially in the regions where the "horror stories" of the social chaos and economic collapse are already igniting action among the people.
The example above, of Cleveland, is one; another, prominently, is Lancaster, Pa., where LaRouche PAC organizers have been on the scene for several mass meetings. These vivid local manifestations of a nation-wide collapse are provoking revolutionary responses from the political base. Our job is to redirect dangerous riot-potential, and turn it into FDR-style action to save the nation.
In Olympia, Washington, despite the fact that the Governor is in denial about the danger that the state faces—insisting in response to a question in a public forum from a LYM organizer, that she needn't worry, since Washington State is 49th in the nation in foreclosures—several bankers are telling the LYM that they support the HBPA because of the danger that banks are facing as their nominal mortgage assets dry up.
This fight to save the homes and save the banks makes transparent the real nature of the current war. In the Texas Legislature, organizers from the LPAC emphasized in meetings that, just as had former Congressman Jim Wright in the famous S&L crisis, the fight today is to protect the common man against the treasonous speculators—today the British Cayman-Island based hedge funds, which have attached themselves, as parasites, onto the chartered banks, upon which the everyday life of Americans depends. This is the real scope of the foreclosure crisis which LaRouche's HBPA is intended to reverse, specifically, the hedge fund lobby centered around the Ogilvy Group. The LYM briefing to these legislative offices on the real extent of this war, inspired one legislator to decide that he would write an appeal to the Texas Governor, to hold a special session on the housing crisis, to consider the HBPA. A real breakthrough, because the Texas legislature would otherwise not reconvene until January of 2009!
Build the Firewall, Now
Though this report of LaRouche PAC interventions is nowhere near comprehensive, a final word on one more indication of the mass effect being generated: Apart from elected officials, labor leaders, and others of official capacity, citizens from all around the country are spontaneously e-mailing their endorsements to the LaRouche PAC, responding directly as members of a growing audience of larouchepac.com. Among these are engineers, teachers, students, and pastors.
One, a high school janitor, attached the following message: "YES! I certainly support this petition to Congress: TO IMPLEMENT THE HOMEOWNER AND BANK PROTECTION ACT OF 2007. This is the wisest method to stabilize the already tumbling economy. I lived through the last 1929 depression, and with this type of logic we can save millions of families from needing to suffer again. PLEASE IMPLEMENT THE HOMEOWNER AND BANK PROTECTION ACT OF 2007!"
The flood of endorsements will continue, both from individuals, and now from legislative bodies, of which the City Council of Pontiac is the first. LaRouche's proposed economic firewall, however, cannot be built out of endorsements alone. With LaRouche scheduled to present an international webcast on Oct. 10, titled "Time To Stop the Greatest Crash in Modern History," a broad-reaching network of elected officials is being tied together into the sort of team of experts and natural leaders that Franklin Roosevelt formed into his apparatus of recovery. The LaRouche PAC will be sponsoring satellite viewings of this live webcast in statehouses around the country, to put this team into direct dialogue with LaRouche. These people will serve as the jury for the Congress today; but, Washington should heed their judgment only as a prelude to the judgment of future history: Did Congress act when the survival of the nation was at stake, or, did they, through moral weakness, fail?
