EDITORIAL

History and the
Midterm Elections

Aug. 20—On the one side, there are those rarer moments of history when brains and guts can win the battle to uplift man and his condition far into the future. On the other side, in the decades and centuries between those rare moments, you fight anyway; you never stop. But what you win at these times, rather than immediate victories, is the preparation of the forces which will win the war of the future.

The period since the Presidential election, particularly this Autumn, constitutes one of those rarer moments.

EIR’s founder, the great economist Lyndon LaRouche, responded to the first reports of Donald Trump’s election victory in November 2016, by indicating that the rejection of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and their forty thieves, was much more than a U.S. event. It was the world as a whole which had repudiated them—not just Americans who were so fed up with this bunch that they couldn’t bear to look at them again.

The larger historical context of that 2016 election result, which inspires our knowledge of real meaning of the November 2018 midterm elections, is the subject of articles by William Wertz and Lyndon LaRouche in this issue.

To try to encapsulate it here, it resembles the closure of the long cycle of history which began April 12, 1945, the day of Franklin Roosevelt’s untimely death. Through his policies, he had taken us out of the Great Depression. At the same time, he had launched the same New Deal policies throughout the Western Hemisphere in the form of his Good Neighbor policy. The financial side of the Good Neighbor policy was an international credit system, not a monetary system, aimed at economic development, industrialization, and raising the standard of living. It was to be run multilaterally by perfectly sovereign nation-states through a proposed Inter-American Bank.

On April 12, 1945, World War II was drawing to a close. Europe and much of Asia had been destroyed, while the United States, with its wartime economic mobilization, had become the greatest productive power the world had ever seen. Around the world, regardless of nation or party, the survivors of that terrible war, almost without exception, looked to the United States and Franklin Roosevelt to lead them to a permanent peace, to reconstruction of the destroyed nations, and to freedom and economic development for the British Empire’s colonies and semi-colonies of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

For them, only that kind of future could possibly redeem the horrors of that war.

Franklin Roosevelt’s design for the postwar world credit system, which became the Bretton Woods system, modelled itself on the credit system of his Good Neighbor Policy—and the architects of the latter, especially Harry Dexter White, were then the architects of the original Bretton Woods institutions. Thus, Roosevelt proposed an international credit system—not a monetary system—which would enable yesterday’s colonized peoples, now independent sovereign nations, to industrialize and develop advanced full-set economies. Fixed exchange rates, unlike the floating-exchange casino of today, would make large-scale long-term, very-low interest development loans possible, facilitating massive capital exports from the United States, and then other nations, to develop former colonies and semi-colonies.

The alliance of Roosevelt’s “Big Four,” the United States, Russia, China, and the difficult ally Great Britain, was to be the keystone of the new world credit system, as of the new United Nations Organization.

Roosevelt pushed this program through in the teeth of bitter opposition from the British Empire represented by Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes, and from the American anglophiles, our Tories, especially on Wall Street. Churchill needed Roosevelt to win the war, but as soon that was ensured, he wanted him and his policies overthrown and destroyed the day after.

These enemies began to move rapidly to undercut Roosevelt after Normandy, and then, when Churchill’s dupe Truman replaced the deceased Roosevelt in April 1945, Roosevelt’s policies and personnel were shown the door. Churchill launched the Cold War to destroy Roosevelt’s Big Four alliance. Instead of keeping the war-industries running, while changing them over for massive capital exports to industrialize “underdeveloped” countries, as Roosevelt had wished, Truman shut them down.

Since April 12, 1945, with the partial exception of the 1000 days of Jack Kennedy, we have been speeding ever more rapidly downwards. On Aug. 15, 1971, Richard Nixon exploded what remained of the fixed-rate Bretton Woods system, opening the door to today’s floating currencies, which feed speculation and hamper development. Since the Oil Hoax of 1973, the dollar—the so-called Eurodollar—has been created and run from London, with no regulation from the United States. In 1989, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher dictated that the breakdown of the Soviet and East European system would not be used for a higher East-West integration for joint development, as Lyndon LaRouche proposed, but that Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would instead be given over to an orgy of looting.

In 1999, after being tamed by impeachment, Bill Clinton acceded to the revocation of Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act.

Over the turn of the current century, we have gone from Bill Clinton to much worse—to Cheney’s puppet “Dubya” Bush, and then the Satanic Obama.

Our factories have closed; homelessness and drug addiction are everywhere. There is no question but that Americans had suffered under a “long train of abuses” before daring to reject Wall Street and the corrupt establishment of both parties to elect Donald Trump. But this would not have happened without Lyndon LaRouche’s long fight to re-establish Hamiltonian principles of economy, and continue the Roosevelt revolution from a higher and more advanced standpoint.

Meanwhile, the Russians have gone through their own kind of Hell. Russians say their country suffered more under Thatcher’s looting than even in World War II, as life-expectancy and population plummeted. But then, since 1999 (preceded by the brief premiership of Yevgeny Primakov), Vladimir Putin has done the unbelievable to drag Russia out of the dungheap which Margaret Thatcher had made of it. A new, viable, leadership has arisen there.

During a longer period in China, the destructive legacy of the Maoist Cultural Revolution and earlier Great Leap Forward policies had been overturned under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his successors since 1978. They have based themselves ever more clearly on the Chinese classics of Confucius, Mencius and the later Zhu Xi. As EIR’s Michael Billington has shown, in his taking up Gottfried Leibniz’s work of the 17th and 18th centuries, these Chinese classics are in coherence with the Christian humanism of the Renaissance which underlay American policies from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt. Now, Deng Xiaoping’s successor Xi Jinping, President of China since 2013, has taken up a mission of world development whose vision was launched by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche in the 1990s—the Eurasian Land-Bridge, also called the New Silk Road and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Neither the Russian nor the Chinese development would have occurred without the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, spread by his many trips to Russia, his wife’s trips to China, by LaRouche students in both countries who translated his works, and in other ways. All these years, as the world and U.S. situations deteriorated, LaRouche was fighting fiercely—but apparently losing every fight, or almost every fight. The same Robert Mueller who is now trying to overthrow the U.S. President and Constitution, had LaRouche railroaded, falsely convicted, and imprisoned for five years, on behalf of London. LaRouche was losing every fight—or so it seemed until now.

Now, what Churchill destroyed in the late 1940s is back on the agenda again today. In the leadership of today’s Russia and China, there is the willingness to reconstitute Roosevelt’s Big Four, not only for peace, but for a world credit system along Roosevelt’s intentions: LaRouche’s “New Bretton Woods System.” Britain as the fourth member was forced on Roosevelt by the difficult wartime alliance. For the fourth member today, LaRouche has long specified India—which Roosevelt would have included, but could not, because it was still a colony in 1945.

Of course, none of this works without a central role by the United States. But this is precisely what President Trump is prepared to do—and what his two predecessors fiercely opposed. No wonder that former President Obama is the “field marshal” for the British in trying to bring down this U.S. Presidency. Or do you think it’s a coincidence that the leading Americans in this evil effort are all Obama’s former subordinates?

All this indicates what we must fight for in this election period. What we must fight against is the threatened impeachment of this President, which would destroy all these prospects, and doom us to chaos and near-term war, facing nuclear war down the road.

On impeachment—don’t be a fool! Face the reality that a majority-Democratic House of Representatives will quickly vote to impeach this President on a strict party-line vote, regardless of whatever better judgment any of those Democratic Representatives may hold in private. Unfortunately, any Democratic Representative today considers himself or herself completely powerless in the face of the blackmail and other power wielded by Obama, Hillary Clinton and the other mad dogs. By all means, Democrats should be elected to Congress if they’re good—but they are not good unless they sign—and adhere to—the pledge offered by the LaRouche PAC campaign, which says, “I will not support impeachment of President Donald Trump. In general, I will act to end the on-going insurrection against the President and to investigate those responsible, referring them for prosecution where warranted.” Otherwise, no citizen should cast his or her vote for a Democratic congressional candidate in this election.

Impeachment will be the first punch in a campaign to obstruct, tie down and destroy this President. But don’t delude yourself that if somehow he is removed, we’ll return to the days of Obama. Not at all! Haven’t you noticed how much worse Obama, and his stooges Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Clapper and company are now, than they ever were in office? How much more contemptuous of the law? How they are a thousand times more eager for war than ever before?

It’s the British Empire. The British Empire is in conniptions because their prisoners have escaped, or are in process of escaping. If they get their way, they’ll make sure it never happens again. Not just through a police state, but through war. War was always the means they used to control the United States and make it impotent. Elect a Democratic majority which has not signed the pledge above, and you’re on a very short path to impeachment and war.

But, more important—This, then, is the great opportunity we face. For the first time since Jack Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt before him, we have a President who is fully committed both to peace and to economic development. Among the election promises which he is working to fulfill are creating productive, well-paying jobs for Americans, and rebuilding American infrastructure. We must convince and support President Trump to introduce the current version of the Roosevelt recovery program, found in Lyndon LaRouche’s Four New Laws of June 2014, which also include the restoration of Glass-Steagall, which the President supports. We must convince and support President Trump to join with Russia, China and India, to launch a new world credit system to replace the bankrupt speculative system which exploded in 2008. All or virtually all other nations will willingly sign on.