The following is an edited transcript of remarks by Jason Ross to the May 12, 2026 Diane Sare for President webcast, “An Economic Recovery Plan for the People of the United States.” Mr. Ross is the science advisor to The LaRouche Organization. Subheads have been added. The video is available here.

Thank you Diane for the invitation to be here; I’m very happy to be here. Before I get into my talk, I do want to say that what you’re doing with your campaign matters—the fact that you’ve got your Congressman, Pat Ryan, leading a bill to cut funding to the Iran war, is the kind of thing that, through pressure, can come to a vote and be passed, can shape policy, shape the country.

Diane asked me to speak tonight as a member of a scientific and economic research group that worked with Lyndon LaRouche for some number of years. And my job tonight is to tell you, as best as I am able, what is actually happening to the physical basis of economic life in the United States, and what we need to do about it. I want to start with an image. Let’s say an apple orchard is on fire, lit by an arsonist.

When you put out the flames, you don’t get your apples back. That concept is the key diagnosis of the U.S. economy today. The orchard will not magically rebuild itself on its own. And until we understand the difference, the difference between putting out a fire, and the long work of cultivation that brings forth new fruit, we will be told that a recovery is a matter of months, when in fact it is a matter of years, of generations.

What we’re living through is not a recession, not a simple depression. It’s the shock of a collision, a collision between our economy as it’s functioning, and the ongoing withdrawal of the creative work that actually keeps a civilization in existence. So let’s give a diagnosis first, and then we’ll get to the recovery plan.

A New Dark Age

So, what makes a “dark age”? It’s not simply that people are poor. I mean, if you look back in history, you could say, compared to today, basically everybody was poor. A dark age is something more frightening. It’s when there is a loss of the capacity to build the future; the loss of engineers who knew how to build the aqueducts; the loss of the trained hands who knew how to build. The loss of the assumption—the deep, shared, civilizational assumption—that next year, and next decade, and the next century ought to be better than today, and that it is our common job to make it so. That’s the kind of crisis that we’re in. Not a bad year. Not even a bad few years. It’s a slow, draining out of the conviction that we ought to build anything at all. You can see it everywhere you look. The highway you drive to work, the high school physics classroom that hasn’t bought new lab equipment in a decade or two, the abandoned factory, the closed cannery, the shuttered maternity ward.

Consider some recent news. In Central California, farmers are preparing to pull 420,000 peach trees out of the ground. Not because they’re diseased, not because there’s some pest spreading, not because the soil is bad. It’s because the cannery that bought their fruit—Del Monte, a 140-year-old American company—has declared bankruptcy and walked out on half a billion dollars in long-term contracts, shutting its processing plants. So, 420,000 peach trees gone, because the American economy is not organized around feeding ourselves. That’s an image of a dark age, a peach tree pulled up by its roots.

Two Ledgers

Now, how did we get here? In the broadest terms, over the last 50 years—more than 50 years—since 1971, this country has come to keep two completely different sets of books [Figure 1]

On one set of books, we were very rich. The stock market sets records, crypto sets records, asset prices set records. The financial sector—finance, insurance, and real estate—now accounts for roughly one out of every five dollars in our economy. We see it on the bottom there, the lawyers, the traders, the software engineers working in these fields seem to be doing very well.

On the other set of books, the books of the physical economy, the books that track whether we’re making things, growing things, building things, fixing things, we’re getting poorer every year. Manufacturing’s share of the economy has shrunk for decades. Look how small it is now. Our trains are slower than they were 60 years ago. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, and we discover that we cannot, ourselves, produce enough of the basic chemicals that we need for our farms and our industries.

So, one ledger measures what we own on paper; the other measures what we can actually do. And the gap between these two ledgers, the gap between the price of an asset and the productive capacity that ought to underwrite it, that’s the gap into which the American family is falling.

And we know exactly when that gap began to accelerate. Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 by people who told us that financial innovation would lift all boats. Well, we’ve seen what it lifted, and we’ve seen what sank.

What Young People Can No Longer Afford

Here’s what that fall looks like in human life [Figure 2].

The median age of a first-time U.S. home buyer in the United States is now 40 years old, according to the National Association of Realtors, an all time record. A generation ago, just a generation ago, that median age was 28. We’ve added more than a decade, in many cases, a whole generation, for how long it takes an American to become a homeowner.

The U.S. fertility rate is now 1.57 children per woman, another record low. In a recent national survey, 71% of American adults said that having children is not affordable for most people; 43% named money as the major reason that they themselves were holding back from starting a family or for having additional children, versus 22% who just said that they had decided not to have kids.

Let the weight of those numbers sink in. A generation of young Americans is being asked, “Do you believe in the future of this country, of its economy, to build a life in it, build a home in it, start a family in it, bring children into it?” Increasingly, the answer coming back is, “We can’t.”

This isn’t a problem of income disparity per se. It’s a matter of something much worse—income insufficiency. The income for tens of millions of people is no longer sufficient to purchase the basic material conditions of a home, a family, health, education, stability. We have an economy that delivers astonishing wealth at the very top, and at the bottom, fails to provide the package of goods on which the continuation of civilization depends.

Drawing Down the Past

Now there’s a name for this process. The technical term is “primitive accumulation.” It is, as LaRouche defined it, “the uncompensated conversion of previously existing resources into current consumption.” That is, it means living off of an inheritance instead of adding to it.

Twenty-five years ago in Moscow, a Russian academician named Dmitry Lvov, the head of the economics department in the Russian Academy of Sciences, went before the parliament in Moscow, and he spoke about what the Anglo-American experts who had advised Russia in the immediate post-Soviet era, that is, in the ’90s, what they had told them to do.

The academician said: they didn’t “reform” us. They didn’t modernize us. They taught us to live off of our grandparents. They taught us to sell that inheritance—the oil, the gas, the factories, the trained minds, the laboratories—and to call the proceeds “growth.” Lyndon LaRouche spoke at that same meeting of the Economic Committee of the Russian Duma in Moscow, and LaRouche agreed with what Academician Lvov said. And he warned that the same physics of primitive accumulation was taking place, although in a slower form, in the United States as well. He was right. What the two of them meant was, that every advanced economy is built on top of investments made by people who are no longer here. The interstate highway you drove on is paid for by your grandparents. The water coming out of your tap is thanks to aqueducts and reservoirs built before you were born. The basic science behind the medicine in your medicine cabinet was funded by labs that no longer exist. The engineer who designed the bridge your kid’s school bus goes over was trained by teachers long gone, in a school that may have closed. The topsoil that grew the wheat in your breakfast cereal this morning took thousands of years of biology and human effort to form, and is now being lost at the rate of inches per generation. Social trust, trust that was earned over generations of public life, disintegrates.

None of this is free. None of it renews itself. All of it has to be actively replenished. In a paper on primitive accumulation, Lyndon LaRouche put it in a single sentence. He wrote—and I want you to hear this, because every word counts: “For an economy to prosper, it must, sooner or later, replenish the physical economy, to compensate for what has been ‘borrowed’ from it, as primitive accumulation.” That’s the principle. And by that principle, the United States is running an enormous overdraft on all of civilization’s accounts.

Now, LaRouche drew a picture of what that overdraft looks like [Figure 3]. The triple curve, which Diane discussed, where the lines going up are money and financial paper, stocks, bonds, derivatives, crypto, every speculative claim a Wall Street computer can invent. What’s going down, the physical economy, that is supposed to be backing that paper—the factories, the farms, the workers, the power plants. LaRouche warned about this decoupling for 40 years. Who among us chose to listen? A society that fails to add new infrastructure, new science, new education, new industry, new soil, new water, new social trust. It doesn’t freeze in place. It doesn’t remain static. It begins to consume itself. It draws down the topsoil instead of renewing it, it draws down the aquifers and doesn’t refill them or develop new sources of water, like NAWAPA [North American Water and Power Alliance], which Diane mentioned.

It deferred maintenance on bridges and power plants and rail beds. It draws down the universities, the trained machinists, the chemists, the engineers. It draws down on social trust itself. Every closed factory is a withdrawal. Every collapsed bridge is a withdrawal. Every science department starved of funding is a withdrawal. Every young person who can’t start a family is a withdrawal from the demographic balance sheet of the United States. The generation now retiring, converted physical investments that they didn’t make, into paper claims that have been stuffed into 401(k)s. And they called that growth. And now this society, already living off of its inheritance, already drawing itself down, joins with Israel to launch the Iran war.

The Iran War: The Dark Age Policy
at Its Sharpest

The Pentagon will tell you this war has cost about 25 billion dollars. That, supposedly, is the cost of munitions and operations through day 60. It is, of course, only a portion of American military costs, which are at least hundreds of billions of dollars. But that’s still not the real number to talk about the cost of this stupidity. The real cost is at least four trillion dollars. That’s a common estimate of what this war is costing the world economy, when you include the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the collapse of Gulf exports, the strikes on power facilities, the spike in food and fuel prices, the recession now rolling through the world. Four trillion dollars. That is half the cumulative bill of the post-9/11 wars, compressed into a matter of months.

But again, that four trillion is just paper. What it represents in the physical economy is what we really should be looking at.

Now through the Strait of Hormuz pass—well, did pass—roughly 35% of the world’s urea nitrogen exports, 23% of its ammonia, 20% of its phosphates, 45% of its sulfur [Figure 4]. When that strait closed, fertilizer that would have been applied to fields in Argentina and Brazil and Ethiopia and Iowa this Spring, never made it. Now, stop and think about what that means.

Roughly half the people on this planet, now alive on this planet, are here, are fed or sustained, because a little over a century ago, two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, figured out an efficient way to pull nitrogen out of the air, out of the atmosphere, and turn it into plant food. That’s what nitrogen fertilizer is. Without it, the so-called green revolution in agriculture could never have happened. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to use the same amount of farmland that once supported two billion people, to support the eight billion people we now have today. That reaction that creates the fertilizer runs on natural gas, and the natural gas is what’s being cut.

So is the phosphate which plants need for their roots; so is the sulfur, which goes into the chemistry of producing almost every industrial process you can think of, from smelting copper in Chile to producing steel in Italy, to factories producing the wires in your wall. This is a chain of production, from energy, to fertilizer, to grain, to bread, to the family table. We have just taken a sledgehammer to that chain of production. Starvation will, and is, following.

The International Grains Council says that it expects a two-percent decline in world grain output over the next crop year. The UN Development Programme says that 32 million people have already been pushed into poverty as a result of this war, with other estimates going to 45-50 million or more. Food [cost] inflation in Iran is over 100%. In Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the governments are limiting work weeks to four days, to ration fuel by reducing the commutes. So, picture a Bangladeshi rice farmer paying 50% more for urea, for nitrogen fertilizer. Picture another farmer in the Congo who perhaps can’t get it at all. The Sri Lankan family missing a day of work; the Iowa farmer watching his bills rise and his income decline. And you, paying $5 [per gallon of gasoline] at the pump and maybe $7 for diesel. And who knows what, next month, for bread. We’re all paying for the same war. And the cruelest part is that even if the war stopped tomorrow, the damage would keep unfolding.

Some of that is for physical reasons, simple military ones, like clearing mines out of the strait. But the fertilizer that wasn’t applied this Spring—you can’t retroactively apply it. It will result in decreased crop yields in the harvest this Fall. Iran has lost 18 months of human development over the couple of months of the war. They don’t get that back, the moment the missiles stop flying. The orchard, once burned, is not restored by putting out the flame. Or to put it more simply, you can’t move back into your house as soon as the fire department leaves, as some people in California have discovered. So that’s the Dark Age policy. That’s Dark Age policy in its sharpest form—not just the cessation of creative work, but the act of destruction of it. And so, what’s the alternative?

I want to be very careful about what I mean by growth. I don’t mean a higher GDP number; I don’t mean a bigger pile of stuff. I don’t mean more consumption, although we should have more consumption. I don’t mean anything that can be measured in dollars, that can be measured as a scalar. Real growth means raising the productive powers of labor. It means enabling a society to do next year what it couldn’t this year. It means a chemist who synthesizes a new molecule; a nuclear fusion reactor, bringing online clean and cheap energy; a water system that turns deserts into farmland; a rail network that knits together a continent; a vaccine that defeats a cancer; a mission to the Moon and Mars that pulls a generation of children into the sciences.

That’s real growth. It’s not a financial number. It’s the expansion of what human society is able to accomplish through the application of that creative process unique to our beautiful species among all known life. The technical term LaRouche coined for what we are really measuring then, is “potential relative population-density.” It means the ability of a square kilometer, or acre, of land to support a growing population at a rising standard of living, through scientific discovery, through the cultivation of progress. And that’s the number that we’re not even trying to raise right now. The Iran war and its aftermath are reducing the world’s potential population by half a billion, a billion people, or more, certainly far more if it expands to nuclear war.

But not everywhere is stagnant. Not everywhere is cannibalizing itself. India, for example, has brought online a 500-megawatt fast breeder nuclear reactor. China announced that it is committed to launching in 2028 a mission to Mars to bring back samples to earth in 2031. Algeria and Chad have signed agreements on the trans-Saharan highway and the trans-Saharan gas pipeline. Personalized mRNA vaccines are in trials for pancreatic cancer and showing very good results. Actually, that is an example of something happening in the United States.

The act of recreating civilization is still happening, just not so much by us. We need to choose to do that again. So here’s what I want to put on the table tonight. Six commitments, each of which is a piece of what it takes to keep a civilization in existence [Figure 5].

Number one, end the war now. Every dollar going into the Golden Dome and the Golden Fleet and the next round of strikes on Iran is a dollar withdrawn from investment into the future with interest. Congress must shut off the funding and end the war. Pass Congressman Ryan’s bill, and then we’ll see Hormuz reopened to freight.

Two, restore productive credit. As Diane pointed out, we don’t have a monetary problem, a money problem in this country, we have a direction problem. The Federal Reserve will happily create trillions of dollars if a hedge fund is in trouble. It will not create trillions of dollars to build a high-speed rail network through the country. So, we need a national credit system like Alexander Hamilton built, that Lincoln used, that Roosevelt restored with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; the kind that Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws spells out, that creates credit for production, not speculation.

Third, we need to rebuild the productive platform. Take that credit, and invest it into power, water, transportation, housing. Not as a stimulus check, not as just a tax credit, but as investment directed into physical projects.

Nuclear power, including the next generation of small modular and high-temperature reactors, as well as nuclear fusion. Inland waterways, the North American Water and Power Alliance, modern rail, the construction of millions of homes.

Four, restart science as a national mission. We haven’t had a mission of the scope of the Apollo mission to go to the Moon for 50 years. We need one—and not just AI. We need fusion. We need space, biology, materials. The deliberate public generational commitment to discover principles we don’t yet know, the principles that are the basis of all growth in economic wealth; the basis for improving the productive powers of labor.

Fifth, raise the floor under young people. Through increases in productivity we can make a home affordable to a 28-year-old again, make a family possible again. This is not redistribution alone, although that could sure be a helpful tool. But it’s about raising the overall productive platform of the whole economy, so that what young people earn is worth what their parents’ or grandparents’ earnings used to be worth, in terms of what it could provide in housing, and so forth. Without this, there’s no future.

And six, replace financialization with physical economic development. We need a new Glass-Steagall. No more bailouts. Reorganize the banks, put them through bankruptcy, where necessary, so that credit flows back into roads, rails, power, schools, homes and businesses. The casino has to close.

So, these aren’t six separate programs. They are six aspects of one decision, one decision to apply creativity to the human process again. To start adding to the inheritance, expanding our shared patrimony instead of consuming it.

Closing

Let me close where I began. When you put out the flames in the apple orchard, you don’t get the apples back. It’s necessary, but it’s not the last step. It takes a generation or more of work, planting, cultivating, pruning, watering, waiting, to restore production. That’s the real work of an economy, of adding to it every day, at every scale, with every hand that knows how. The Anglo-American elite have decided to burn rather than to plant. You didn’t choose that. At least, you didn’t mean to. The American people show through poll after poll that they increasingly know that this war is wrong.

So I’ll leave you with this.

Three hundred and fifty years ago, the German scientific genius Gottfried Leibniz brought a new idea for understanding the paradox of motion, the nature of change. The world in motion, he said, is not coasting on its own momentum, but it is being remade at every instant by a cause that is itself never at rest. Trans-creation, he called it. Three hundred years later, Lyndon LaRouche translated that idea into the economic principle that a civilization is a continuous act of creation. What we have stops being ours the moment we stop building it. It’s our choice. We can keep burning, or we can start again to build.