LAROUCHE PAC WEBCAST
The Beginning of the End
of the Post-9/11 Era
The Dec. 12, 2014 LaRouche PAC weekly webcast marked the beginning of the end of the post-9/11 era. The publication, by Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), of the previously classified material on the Bush/Cheney Torture Program, opens the door to finally ridding the United States of the Bush family dynasty.
The program was moderated by Matthew Ogden. We begin with Dennis Small’s remarks.
Dennis Small: We’re at the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one, if, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, we can achieve it and keep it. Lyndon LaRouche said that the enemy is taking a real beating, and this is a true moment of opportunity. What the Feinstein revelations on CIA torture portend, is the end of the entire post-9/11 dynamic, which the United States—for the entire 14 years of this 21st Century, under two Bush administrations and two Obama administrations—has been marshaled by the British Empire as an aggressive imperial force, up to and including threatening thermonuclear war against Russia and China today. At the same time, the U.S. was being converted into a garrison national security state under the Nazi ideology of the likes of Dick Cheney and other followers of Leo Strauss,[1] condoning everything from torture, to drone murders, and worse. That was the situation until this week.
LaRouche said that the Republicans are now gearing up to try to push Jeb Bush as the next President of the United States; and that would doom the United States to bankruptcy or worse. What Sen. Dianne Feinstein did, LaRouche stressed, along with the backing of important institutional forces who helped her to stand up to the kind of pressure she was getting both from the Bush league and also the Obama Administration—what she did, LaRouche said, is very, very good. “It may misfire, but I think it will go someplace,” he said. It won’t be so easy to ram through more of the Bush league as the consequence of what was revealed here; and that Bush league includes not just Jeb Bush, but also grandfather Prescott Bush’s financing of Hitler’s rise to power, the first Bush President, George H.W., and then “W” himself.
This is going to be especially the case, now that the average American is aware of what is going on around the torture question, with the Feinstein revelations. The average American has no stomach for anything like this; and the average American, starting with those watching this webcast today, is going to respond even more strongly, as they learn the full story of what’s behind the CIA torture story, as we will present it today.
What 9/11 Really Was
It’s important to remember what 9/11 actually was, when we refer to the end of the post-9/11 period. What 9/11 was, was an attack by the British monarchy using Saudi cut-outs, which was intended to subject the United States to a Dick Cheney-led dictatorship under the nominal Presidency of coke-head George W. Bush, while using the incident to also justify wars of aggression and regime change around the world.
The Saudi role, in particular, is documented in the infamous 28 pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which Bush classified so that they would hopefully never see the light of day, he thought, in order to protect his role, and his allies, and which the Obama Administration has continued to maintain classified as well, until this week.
The post-9/11 dictatorship and imperial wars, LaRouche stressed, were designed to enforce a collapsing trans-Atlantic financial system, including Wall Street, which the Bush league has always represented. “The entire Wall Street policy is now in the process of disintegration,” LaRouche said.
So what this means, is that we’re now also facing what could be called a “Glass-Steagall moment.” As with Senator Feinstein’s courageous stand, significant chunks of the Democratic Party have also revolted against the Bush league’s and Obama’s alliance with Wall Street; as was seen in full technicolor in yesterday’s House vote on the Omnibus Budget Bill. A gathering army is coming to realize that the only way to stop war, and stop the annihilation of the American economy, is with a radical change in course.
So, as LaRouche has repeatedly stressed, we must urgently remove Obama from office; and we must reorganize the Democratic Party on traditional American System lines. We must create a future; and we can do that after Hillary Clinton’s likely removal of herself from the candidacy. That’s a required step so that Bill Clinton, who, after having been President two times, may not run again, but he should, LaRouche said, and probably will, help orchestrate the new candidacy he should be in—a leader on the case, and a spokesman for the new Presidency that the country requires at this time.
The issue underlying all of this, LaRouche said, is that of Wall Street, and how close we are to a blowout. You can’t evade the issue of Alexander Hamilton and his system. People think they’re going to save something in terms of money—by not bringing that up, by pretending it’s just not there—but that’s precisely what will kill them. It’s understandable—they’re terrified. But if they stick to that, it’s going to kill them. So, we have to dump Wall Street and return to Hamilton; which is exactly the prospect offered to the United States by joining the BRICS nations in the creation of a new international order. This week, now, we have the possibility of ending the post-9/11 period, and taking advantage of this Glass-Steagall moment which is now before us.
What Feinstein Said
Here is a transcript of an excerpt from Feinstein’s speech on the Senate floor Dec. 9, which was shown during the webcast.
Dianne Feinstein:
Mr. President, I want to thank the Leader for his words and for his support. They are extraordinarily welcome and appreciated. Today, a 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-and-a-half-year review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which was conducted between 2002 and 2009, is being released publicly. The executive summary, which is going out today, is backed by a 6,700-page classified and unredacted report with 38,000 footnotes, which can be released if necessary at a later time.
The report released today examines the CIA’s secret overseas detention of at least 119 individuals, and the use of coercive interrogation techniques, in some cases, amounting to torture. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through a great deal of introspection about whether to delay the release of this report to a later time. This clearly is a period of turmoil and instability in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future, whether this report is released or not.
There are those who will seize upon the report, and say, “See what the Americans did?” And they will try to use it to justify evil actions, or incite more violence. We can’t prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society, governed by law, and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say, “Never again.”
Matthew Ogden: I encourage you to watch this speech in full, but what you just heard Senator Feinstein end with here, when she said “history will judge us by our commitment to a just society, governed by law, and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say, ‘Never again,’ ” I think gets directly at the core of the issue here. After the Nuremberg trials, when the Nazi war criminals were being tried and hung, what did we say? “Never again.” The full extent of the evil that the Nazis represented had to be exposed and put on full display for the entire world to see, in order to ensure that this type of evil never happened again. So today, this torture program, which is now being exposed by the Feinstein report, in its full and horrifying detail, was itself nothing but a purely Nazi program put in practice by a purely Nazi administration. And Feinstein is saying the same thing; we must show the world the evil that was committed, in order to ensure that this type of evil occurs “Never again.”
And I think that’s a phrase that also applies perfectly to Jeb Bush, or any other Bush league candidate for President of the United States. President Bush? Never again. What the Bush-Cheney Administration represented was the attempt to transform the United States from a Constitutional republic into a fascist dictatorship in the aftermath of 9/11. And this is largely what has occurred in the intervening 13 years; both in terms of the internal police-state policies, including the domestic surveillance of the NSA, and in terms of the permanent warfare policies abroad. We’ve been in a constant state of war for the entirety of this century to date.
However, what occurred following Sept. 11, 2001, did not originate in the events of Sept. 11. This is something that Lyndon LaRouche warned about explicitly nine months prior to the attacks that occurred on Sept. 11; warning that the incoming Bush Administration would use a Reichstag Fire-type event to impose dictatorial emergency rule on the United States.
Let me show you a clip from a webcast that Mr. LaRouche delivered on Jan. 3, 2001—nine months before 9/11.
LaRouche’s January 2001 Warning
Lyndon LaRouche:
You’re going to have something like a Nazi regime....
What you’re going to get with a frustrated Bush Administration, if it’s determined to prevent itself from being opposed—you’re going to get crisis management, where members of the special warfare types, of the secret government, the secret police teams, and so forth, will set off provocations, which will be used to bring about dictatorial powers and emotion, in the name of crisis management. You will have small wars set off in various parts of the world, which the Bush Administration will respond to, with crisis-management methods of provocation. That’s what you’ll get. And that’s what the problem is, and you have to face that.
The ‘Neo-Con Manifesto’
Ogden: Nine months later, the 9/11 attacks occurred, and everything that LaRouche warned about happened. How did LaRouche know? It wasn’t because he had some sort of secret information, or some sort of inside knowledge or something like that. The Nazi character of the Bush Administration was plain for anyone to see, if they cared to look. It was preprogrammed into the Administration long before Bush was even selected to become President of the United States.
The most immediate antecedent for this, is what should be called the “Neo-Con Manifesto,” or the “Roadmap to a New British-American Empire,” or the statement of the founding principles which set up the Project for a New American Century—or PNAC. One of the founding members of PNAC was none other than Jeb Bush—George W. Bush’s brother—along with a whole retinue of neo-cons who would later come to comprise practically the entirety of the Bush-Cheney Administration. And who was the original co-founder of PNAC? Mr. Robert Kagan, also known as Mr. Victoria Nuland.[2]
What did this manifesto say? It asserted that in the aftermath of the Cold War—this was released in 1997—American foreign policy must be to do everything possible to maintain the hegemony of the United States and its leading ally, the United Kingdom. And to prevent the rise of Russia, of China, or of any other nation that might challenge this hegemony. It asserted, “The history of the 20th Century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.”
Now, what do they mean by “shape circumstances before crises emerge”? Well, long before Sept. 11 ever happened, what were the founders of PNAC arguing for? Already in 1998, PNAC representatives were openly campaigning for regime change against Saddam Hussein, on the premise that he possessed weapons of mass destruction that he was about to unleash against the United States. Sound familiar? This was the big lie that Bush, Cheney, and Tony Blair used to bomb Iraq five years later, in 2003, while also claiming that Saddam was somehow connected to the attacks on 9/11—also a lie.
Here’s another chilling example: In 2000, PNAC authored another report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which called for preserving Anglo-American preeminence through a massive military build-up, in order to “deter the rise of a new great power competitor,” calling specifically for the military encirclement of China. The report also called for regime change in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and pretty much any other state in the region that was deemed hostile to Anglo-American interests.
And finally, it called for “consolidating the victory of the Cold War in Europe by the creation of a Europe whole and free from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” i.e., running color revolutions on Russia’s border, including in Ukraine. Remember, this is Robert Kagan writing this, husband of Victoria Nuland.
I should also note that Robert Kagan has explicitly attacked John Quincy Adams, who famously said, “America goes not in search of monsters to destroy. She is a well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is a champion and vindicator only of her own.” Kagan stated, “But why not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy? Because America has the power to contain or destroy many of the world’s monsters, a policy of sitting on a hill and leading by example becomes in practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor.” Hence, an imperial policy of regime change and perpetual war.
The most chilling thing about this 2000 report, which was written a full year before Sept. 11, is that it admits that such a military buildup to encircle Russia and China would take a very long time to accomplish under ordinary peacetime circumstances, absent “some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” So, should it be a surprise that this apparatus was in place and ready to go the minute that Sept. 11 occurred? Ready to launch wars, domestic surveillance, police-state tactics, and torture.
The 28 Pages
So as you read this Feinstein report, it’s necessary to keep all of this in the back of your head, and remember that the premise for this entire torture program has this as its background. If Bush and Cheney were serious about getting to the root of who did 9/11, and preventing another attack from occurring, why did they classify the 28 pages of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry report, which documented the Saudi sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks under the then-Ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar—also known as “Bandar Bush”? Why did Tony Blair shut down the investigation into the BAE/Al Yamamah deal, which would have exposed the British role in facilitating the Saudi 9/11 operation? Why is Obama continuing to cover up the 28 pages? Not to mention working directly with the Saudis in the Middle East, to arm and train a whole new batch of jihadi terrorists.
Is this not aiding and abetting the sworn enemies of the United States, who attacked us on 9/11, and who intend to do it again?
Now, also when you read this Feinstein report, ask yourself this: What sort of character did these people have to have, to condone such bestial and inhuman torture policies? This comes out very clearly in an interview that none other than Dick Cheney did yesterday [Dec. 11] on Fox News, in which he declared that the Feinstein report was “full of crap,” and said absolutely remorselessly, with a sneer on his face, “I was strongly supportive of this program. We were perfectly justified in doing it, and I’d do it again in a minute.”
I think what else Cheney said, is also very telling; he said, he “strongly believes that the ends justified the means.” Now this happens to be an explicit statement of the fascist ideology of Leo Strauss, who was the intellectual mentor of the entire neo-con apparatus. LaRouchePAC documented this very thoroughly in our now-famous—or infamous, depending on who you are—Children of Satan book in 2004. And PNAC really was an open conspiracy of this grouping of so-called Straussians, who had planted themselves deeply within the institutions of the U.S. government, and were waiting for the moment to put their fascist ideas into action. And that moment occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.
Strauss’s Noble Lie
So, who was Leo Strauss? Leo Strauss was a protégé of the “Crown Jurist” of the Nazi Third Reich, Carl Schmitt. What both Strauss and Schmitt believed, was, quite literally, that the end justifies the means. That an elite must rule society, using what they called “the noble lie” to pacify and control what they believed were a stupid population, who were unable to govern themselves. Schmitt and Strauss both based their philosophy on the belief that man is inherently evil, and that [Thomas] Hobbes was right when he described the world as a war of each against all.
For example, Leo Strauss wrote a letter to his mentor, Carl Schmitt, in September of 1932—right before Hitler’s ascent to power—in which he said the following: “The ultimate foundation of right, is the principle of the natural evil of man. Because man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified, only in unity against other men.” So clearly, the Hobbesian bestial idea of man.
Schmitt believed that the Treaty of Westphalia had been nullified by World War I, and therefore, the only international law that applied, was that of the struggle for the preservation of power of one state against another. Sound familiar? Let me read that quote from the 2000 PNAC report again: The goal of American post-Cold War foreign policy must be “to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor”—China, Russia, and so forth. And this end justifies all the means, including regime change, coups d’état, color revolution, etc.—even pre-emptive nuclear war. This was the argument that was used to justify the war in Iraq, which was premised on Saddam Hussein’s so-called weapons of mass destruction—which Cheney all along knew to be one big lie, as did Tony Blair.
The Bush Dynasty’s Fascist Roots
To understand why George W. Bush was the perfect vehicle for this attempted Nazi coup in 2001, and why we can’t let Jeb get anywhere close to the Presidency now, one only needs to look at a brief history of the Bush family. The Bush family—or better said, the Bush dynasty—represents the legacy of fascism in the United States, going all the way back to before Hitler’s rise to power.
Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush and Jeb Bush, was the son-in-law of George Herbert Walker, who, immediately after World War I, was set up in a Wall Street-based bank called Harriman & Co. He hired his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, to set up a subsidiary, called UBC, Union Banking Corp. What was this bank for? The only reason for UBC to exist, was to manage Fritz Thyssen’s business accounts inside the United States. Quite literally—Thyssen was the sole client and depositor of Union Banking Corp. Who was Fritz Thyssen? I think the title of his autobiography says it all: I Paid Hitler.
In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt launched an investigation of UBC, and seized the accounts of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act, as well as a number of other subsidiary companies that were owned by Prescott Bush. Now, you could ask the question: Weren’t the Bush family merely shrewd businessmen, making money off of wartime profiteering? Or, was there some sort of ideological affinity for what Hitler represented? Well, it’s very well-known that George Herbert Walker and his partner, Harriman, were early proponents of eugenics inside the United States—what would later become Hitler’s genocidal so-called “race science.” And did this end after the defeat of Hitler? Absolutely not. It merely transformed into the more benign-sounding, but equally evil, population control/population reduction movement. Prescott Bush was a pioneer in this in the United States. His son, George H.W. Bush, went on as a Congressman, to chair the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population.
George H.W. Bush [who came to be known as “Rubbers”—ed.], during his time as the chair of this task force, issued a statement, in which he said: “It is almost self-evident that the greater the human population, the greater the demands for natural resources. How many is too many people? Many believe that our current environmental problems indicate that the optimum level has been surpassed.” And this was in the 1970s. Sound like Prince Philip to you? It should be no surprise, I think, that George H.W. Bush was awarded an honorary knighthood by the British Queen. And it should also be no surprise that this linkage between population growth and raw materials ultimately became the premise of the now-infamous National Security Study Memorandum 200, which called for regime change in countries around the world.
So, after George Bush was the Director of the CIA, and after he was the Vice President under Reagan, he became the President for one term, from ’88-’92, and who did he appoint as his Secretary of Defense? None other than Dick Cheney. And when Bush lost his second term to Bill Clinton, this Cheney crowd went underground and formed itself into what became PNAC, whose manifesto, again, was written by Robert Kagan, and signed by Jeb Bush, who would now have you believe that he is the kinder, gentler, more moderate member of the Bush family. Right.
So I think we need to embrace this moment, as Dennis laid it out in the beginning of our broadcast, with this release of the Feinstein report, as LaRouche said, where we’ve reached the end of one era, the 9/11 era, and the potential beginning of a new one, and specifically, as Dianne Feinstein said: We have looked evil in the face, and we have declared, “Never again.” And that absolutely applies to the Bushes!
However, it’s our responsibility now, to define what the new era must be. How will we create a new Presidency? How will we create a new paradigm, a new dynamic of optimism, to give the American people real leadership and a real mission-orientation, and to sweep the United States into this new international order that’s now being created by the BRICS?
So, I’d like Dennis Small to come back to the podium to discuss this.
A ‘Glass-Steagall Moment’
Small: That’s exactly the sense in which this is, indeed, a Glass-Steagall moment, because the entire paradigm has been called into question. We’ve reached the limit, both in terms of the extreme danger of an immediate nuclear war being launched by this crowd against Russia and China; and we’ve also reached the absolute limit of the disintegration of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, including the collapse of the U.S. economy. And this double reality has clearly begun to dawn on some people.
There was, last night, a very important vote taken in the House of Representatives. There was a 219-206 vote which did finally approve the Omnibus Budget Bill, and this approved bill included the repeal of section 716 of the Dodd-Frank Act. This is the so-called “Swaps Pushout Rule.” Now, this section 716 is the one, tiny part of Dodd-Frank, all of a thousand-plus pages, which somehow survived and said that the government should not back up a certain category of derivatives trading that the banks were engaged in. That has now been revoked: It’s now totally clear sailing. It’s very interesting, that the existence of that one tiny clause, in these thousands of pages, was used by many Congressmen and others to justify the fact that they would not support Glass-Steagall. They said: No, we don’t need to do that, because after all Dodd-Frank does have 716 in it.
Well, Dodd-Frank doesn’t even have 716 in it any more. And what happened, both by the way it was done, and the content of the maneuvering of the action policy, is that a revolt occurred among Democrats, in particular, in the House of Representatives, that threatened passage of this bill up to the very last minute. Sen. Elizabeth Warren played an extremely important role in organizing members, not just across the aisle, but in the House of Representatives as well—which is not commonly done by any means—to not allow the revocation of this to pass. Because the issue, she said, and many agreed with her, was “Wall Street.” Who runs the show? Are we going to allow this Wall Street crowd—which, remember, is who actually runs Bush—are we going to allow them to continue with their destructive derivatives trading until the entire country is destroyed?
‘Whipped’ into Line
What ultimately led to the vote of approval of this removal of Section 716, was the fact that the House members were “whipped”—and that’s the phrase that’s used to pressure members to vote a certain way—but in this case, I think it could possibly be taken literally as well, especially given Dick Cheney’s influence over policies—after all, whipping and waterboarding, not a big difference.
But they were whipped into line by phone calls from the following people, which I’m going to cite in order of influence: first, Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan; secondly, Barack Obama, placed into the Presidency by the same Wall Street interests; then, Denis McDonough, White House Chief of Staff; and also Vice President Biden. It should be noted that McDonough was also one of the people who was deployed out to talk to Senator Feinstein, to try to convince her, in the weeks prior to the release of the CIA report, that it should not be released, and that is one of the pressures she stood up to.
What happened around this whole thing, is that you had Obama and Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan jointly pressuring the House of Representatives, to make sure that the banks were given absolutely free rein in the derivatives. And this led to a big ruckus, summarized adequately, by Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, who said the following: “It is just very strange that the two of them [Obama and Dimon] would be working for the support of this bill.” And she was asked: Was this an Obama sell-out to Wall Street? And she said, “That’s not for me to determine. I know that the President was whipping. I know that Jamie Dimon was whipping and calling directly into members’ offices. And that’s odd. That’s an odd combination.”
Marcy Kaptur, Democrat from Ohio, one of the sponsors of the Glass-Steagall resolution before the House of Representatives, said: “I’d like to know who is really behind this, who has enough power to try and bring this before this committee. I have some imagination of who that might be.” And I’m sure she does, and so do we.
A $2 Quadrillion Bomb
The point here, what’s actually on the table, as increasing numbers of influentials, including in the Democratic Party, are coming to realize, is that the financial system of the entire Western world is completely, totally blown out. The latest drop in oil prices has lit a new fuse on a gigantic $2 quadrillion bomb, because the lowering of the price of oil has created with it, a $500 billion or so speculative bubble built up around fracking and so on; because if the price drops to a certain point, it’s not just that fracking becomes unprofitable, but the whole bubble built on it, like in the case of the subprime mortgages, goes bust as well.
But that’s just one aspect of the whole thing. The real problem, as can be seen in the graphic (Figure 1), the problem is that there are currently approximately $2 quadrillion in total derivatives! What happened was, that with the end of Glass-Steagall in 1999—and take note of the date—the end of Glass-Steagall in 1999 was just about two years before the 2001 9/11 case, which was the other part of the paradigm shift which we’ve been discussing here.
So what happened with the end of Glass-Steagall, the bubble grew rapidly, as you can see on the graph, from about $260 trillion total to $1.4 quadrillion, at the time of the 2008 blowout. That’s a fivefold increase over that period of time, about 10 years.
What happened after that, was about $9 trillion in quantitative easing and funny money printed in the trans-Atlantic system, the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, to try to bail out the bubble. And especially in the last two years, 2013 and ’14, there has been a dramatic increase again in this whole cancerous speculative bubble. And over the last two years, it grew from about $1.5 quadrillion to $2 quadrillion today! That is a 33% rise in just two years.
Now: What was Dodd-Frank? Dodd-Frank was effectively Wall Street’s survival kit for the financial cancer, that’s what it was. It established the premises of bailing in—in other words, whose money would be stolen, to try to keep this incredible bubble afloat? And who would be bailed out? And what Dodd-Frank established, is that the $2 quadrillion, the cancer, would be bailed out. Who gets bailed in, who has to pay for it? You! along with 6 billion other people, human beings, who are considered excess population by the Bush league, the Obama policies, and exactly this Nazi ideology which Matt was referring to previously.
Now, if you care to do the calculation, that comes to approximately $300,000 per corpse, that these people would eliminate for their purposes. But, bottom line, is that none of this will work.
A SWIFT Kick from the Russians
Russia and China know it. They know, for one, that military nuclear war is being actively threatened against them. Most recently, this week the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerisamov, once again reiterated the Russian view. He said, “Steps are being taken, to implement specific measures to weaken Russia’s strategic nuclear force.” And he went on to denounce the ballistic missile defense system, and the various provocations coming from the Obama Administration and NATO.
That has been said before by the Russians. What was most interesting about what he did in this case, is where he said it and how he said it: He summoned to his meeting, and spoke before 70 foreign military attachés posted to Moscow, representing 50 countries. He called in the military representatives of 50 countries and told them: Gentlemen, this is not going to be accepted.
So they’re really very clear on the military aspect of nuclear war. But the Russians are also very clear that what is going on, on the financial front, is financial nuclear war, threatened against them in the world. And it was stated explicitly, by Wolfgang Münchau, writing in July of this year, in the Financial Times; he said, we can bring Russia to its knees in a week! How? We expel them from the international interbank transaction system known as the SWIFT system. And he said we should do this because “payments systems are the nuclear bombs of the financial war.”
Two months later, the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia [Dmitri Rogozin] was in China discussing how to build their own system of interbank clearances to do without SWIFT; and he emerged from those meetings to say, yes, we have discussed this and we approved this idea. Over the course of this week, Russian authorities announced that they were carrying out financial tests of the various banks involved, and they will have their own system up and running by May 2015.
Why? Because as was stated by the head of VTB Bank, the number two bank in Russia, and this gentleman is also a personal friend of Vladimir Putin’s—his name is Andrei Kostin—what he said is, if they throw us out of SWIFT, it is “a bright red line.” “In my personal opinion it would mean war, if this type of sanction were introduced.” So they’re building a new financial architecture, with the Chinese and with the other countries of the BRICS.
A New Financial Architecture
All of this should also be a very “bright red line” for the United States as well, and I think that there are some people in Congress who have realized that that is in fact the case. We need a new financial architecture, of the sort that Bill Clinton was starting to discuss, precisely at the point where he was Watergated with the Lewinsky affair: We need a complete, total, Hamiltonian reform of this system, and we have to do this, because the physical economy of the United States and of the entire trans-Atlantic sector is being annihilated.
It’s not just that monetary values are at stake here. The physical economy is being destroyed: Unemployment throughout Europe, youth unemployment is hitting 60%; in the United States, youth unemployment, real youth unemployment is over 30% in 40 states in the United States! So you’ve got a situation which is completely out of control.
Pensions are being wiped out. There’s a water crisis which is making the entire West of the United States unlivable, because the necessary investments in science and technology and infrastructure are not occurring, will not occur, cannot occur, under this system.
We must return to the policies of Hamilton. As LaRouche said in the mention that I made at the outset of this program, the issue is Hamilton’s policies against the breakdown of the system. We must reorganize the debt; we have to take this $2 quadrillion, and the vast majority of it has to be simply written off. The Hamiltonian principle has to function centrally, as it did in the United States; you don’t have a bunch of states operating independently, you have a single national purpose, a single direction, and credit is created from the single central standpoint, for the purpose of the economic policies which will actually increase the technological platform from which we’re functioning.
We have to create the credit for development as the BRICS nations are now doing. Here we have a situation in the world, where Wall Street, and bankers in the United States and Europe, are talking about billions of dollars in derivatives, trillions of dollars, quadrillions of dollars: It’s all meaningless, it’s all worthless.
Tons, Not Dollars
And China is talking about millions of tons, or billions of tons of iron ore, of steel, and thousands of kilometers of high-speed railroad. Just this week, China announced a 1,000-km high-speed-rail line from Shanghai to Guangzhou, which will reduce the time of travel from 16 hours to less than 7 hours.
China just announced this week, they launched the maiden voyage of the largest container ship on the planet, 19,100 TEU—the unit to measure container ships; bigger than anything that exists on the planet. It is so big, that it does not fit through the Panama Canal, it will not fit through the revised and improved Panama Canal; it does not fit through the Suez Canal. But, it will fit through the Nicaraguan canal that the Chinese are investing in, and will be ready in five years.
Brazil, another BRICS country, has announced that it is going to increase its iron ore exports, measured in tons, not dollars, by 50% over the next five years. And they have purchased 35 of the largest cargo ships imaginable, 400,000 DWT (deadweight tons) to carry this out.
So you have massive physical economic flows going on in one part of the planet, and massive speculative, cancerous flows going on in the other! That’s the reality that we’re facing: These two worlds cannot long coexist. And what we have to do in the United States at this point, is to take advantage of this “Glass-Steagall moment”; we have to join with the BRICS, to get the physical economy going, but most importantly, to get our entire nation back on the track of the kind of thinking that can produce the technological changes to completely revolutionize the way the entire economy is run.
Why should we have container ships floating around the planet, based on oil and other kinds of fuel? Why should they carry their own weight around with them, and have to carry that, too? That’s as idiotic as having a non-electrified train, just for the same reason that we should have fusion-powered rocket ships, if we’re serious about exploring the Solar System. We need to do this. Why should we ship petroleum from one part of the planet to another? LaRouche has long emphasized this. You know, a small amount, yes, but you have to go nuclear! To use petroleum as a fuel for the economy is simply unnecessary from a physical-economic standpoint, if we go forward in a big way with fission and then with a fusion power economy.
So these are all the kinds of things that need to be done; these are the opportunities that are before us. The opening has been created: The end of the post-9/11 era is with us now, we have the opportunity to do that, if we can do it and keep it.
[1] See Jeffrey Steinberg, “Profile: Leo Strauss: Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons,” EIR, March 21, 2003.
[2] See this week’s Counterintelligence report, “Who Is Behind the Drive To Dismember Russia?”
