EDITORIAL

FIRESIDE CHAT

A Four-Power Agreement Is Necessary To Develop the World

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this editorial]

The following is the edited transcript of a presentation by Barbara Boyd on the LaRouche PAC’s weekly Fireside Chat Internet program on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018. An audio recording of the full discussion is available.

I’m going to start by taking you back to a moment in December of 1982. That moment was a conference held by this movement in Washington, D.C. I remember my state of mind in listening to what Lyndon LaRouche had to say there. This conference occurred after five years in which this political movement saturated the U.S. population, together with policy circles in Washington, D.C., with LaRouche’s idea of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—the idea that it were possible to create a defense against thermonuclear weapons and thermonuclear war.

On that particular occasion, LaRouche told all of us—most emphatically—Look, the SDI, my SDI, this concept has to become a reality literally within days, or humanity is going to face the probability of nuclear war. Now, this was not just some kind of Cassandra claim being made by Lyndon LaRouche. At the time, he’d already been working with the Reagan Administration on his proposal for a while; he was actively discussing it through back channels with the Russians. He knew that what was about to happen was potentially a very dangerous drift into an actual world war; he knew that to be a physical fact.

As a result of that speech at that conference, the people in that room, which was not thousands and thousands of people, but a small force of probably the equivalent of many of the people who could be on this phone call tonight, and their immediate peripheries, if you will. We went to work, and on March 23, 1983, President Reagan said, in a national speech, to the great shock and surprise of most of his advisors, that he was going to support the Strategic Defense Initiative, the idea Lyndon LaRouche first began circulating in 1977.

The fact that this happened, that it even happened, was the result of two factors: the first was a saturation by this organization and our allies of a huge swath of the United States population, a targetted bunch of people—scientists, engineers, intellectuals, farmers, machinists, the working classes of the United States with this idea. And it created the intellectual base within the population which was ready to assimilate the idea that Lyndon LaRouche had proposed, and enthusiastically embraced it at the point that the President opened up and accepted it. And the second condition for the prospect of that idea coming into existence, was that you had a President who was ready and willing to accept this idea and promote it, whatever the other limitations were, of which there were many on the economic front within the Reagan Presidency.

The British System Is Dying

The result of that was essentially the collapse of the then British system, which was divided into two regimes, both of which the British had a substantial amount of control over. One was in the Soviet Union, and the other was in the so-called West; the British idea was that they could keep both of these systems under persistent warfare or Cold War. The unfortunate side-product of that arrangement was that it could blow up at any time into a nuclear war because of the insane doctrine of Mutually-Assured Destruction.

LaRouche proposed the idea of the SDI in the context of a battle against the British Empire, and the globalist financial regime which was born anew on August 15, 1971 with the death of the Bretton Woods system. He proposed to break the entire British system and to put back on the world’s agenda Franklin Roosevelt’s idea of nation-state to nation-state cooperation and collaboration in ending colonialism once and for all, and putting the world on a renewed but entirely new scientific and cultural platform.

This is a powerful demonstration of what Lyndon LaRouche always says: bold, impassioned, and scientifically correct ideas are the actual forces which make history; not mortal human beings or the temporal changes we see in elections or electorates.

As many of you know, the British system soon reasserted itself after Reagan’s breakthrough speech, through the offices of George H.W. Bush and the Bush/Margaret Thatcher developed so-called “New World Economic Order,” courtesy of the City of London. This was a reconfigured imperial arrangement of free trade, international banking, and financialization and looting of the most basic of human needs, such as healthcare. It was a modernized form of colonialism which completely subjugated the United States itself through the Carter administration, the Volcker strangulation of the economy, the Bush administrations, the Obama administrations, the evolution of our now-incompetent and stupid elites who have no idea how to actually run an economy. This is what this political movement has been fighting and resisting through the auspices of LaRouche’s idea ever since August 15, 1971.

Right now, we can see in the outcome of the mid-term elections something that actually came to fruition in 2016, when Trump was elected: The system of the British is dying. You see it in the election of Trump; you see it in Brexit; you see it in similar movements in Europe; and you see it in China’s great Belt and Road Initiative. The force of change which swept the world in 2016 is still out there, as we discovered through our intervention in this election, and it has really survived every attempt at regime-change that the British have thrown at Trump. It has exposed in the process whole aspects of the machinations of Empire which the public can now view. The emperor really doesn’t have any clothes.

The ‘Spirit of 2016’

That “Spirit of 2016,” as I’ll call it, has survived the billions of dollars which the British steered into buying the House and the Senate in this election. Just think about i: Almost a quarter of a billion dollars was spent by just two people—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg—to buy the Congress and essentially get them to impeach Trump. The defeat of this force—and make no bones about it, they were defeated in the election—creates the conditions for a much bigger fight that we have to now undertake.

It’s a different fight than the fight for simple survival, the one which we’ve actually been in. Right now, we have an enormous opportunity for making a giant change for the sustained advance of the entire human race; and of course, along with it, our very beleaguered, impoverished population here in the United States, which has been devastated by the globalism which Trump so rightfully opposes.

Applying Lyndon LaRouche’s oft-used method of what he calls analysis situs to what happened in the last months of 1982, with the breakthrough on the SDI, and what is happening now, you can see that many things are very different, but some things are the same and really deserve some emphasis. What we accomplished with the Campaign to Secure the Future and the campaigns of Kesha Rogers and Ron Wieczorek, our field operations in the Midwest and New York City and on the West Coast—was a really big dissemination of our central ideas; LaRouche’s Four Laws and the vision for where humanity must be one hundred years from now.

We have a President who has been receptive to these ideas and knows them in his own way. We have a President who has been attacked directly by the British because of ideas he holds, and he is smart enough to know that that attack will not end until the British stand totally defeated and exposed. He does not articulate ideas the way LaRouche would. But as my friend Bruce Director notes, Trump uses the word “nationalist” like LaRouche uses the term “nation-state,” and that, rather than whatever proclivities arise from a childhood and adolescence in Queens, New York, the proper use by Trump of the term “nationalist” is what has reaped the murderous rage of the Empire.

It is because of President Trump’s defense of a world order based on national sovereignty, rather than the globalist order controlled from the City of London, that the British have been and still are out to eliminate him at whatever cost, and he knows this. As against LaRouche, British rage takes the form of accusing Trump of racism, anti-Semitism, and all sorts of other names du jour for those who oppose the Empire’s imprisonment of the human mind in the trap of identity politics. Unlike LaRouche, he does not have the studied and worked out ideas that can extricate all of us from this mess quickly. That’s where this political movement comes in.

The Power of Ideas

If you are tempted to think that our impassioned circulation of these ideas in the Campaign to Secure the Future was by a small movement and to no effect, just listen to the middle part of Tucker Carlson’s analysis of the midterms last night, ending in his final wrap-up. He passionately told his audience that the reason for the losses that did occur in the House, the reasons why the elections only opened a door to triumph without representing triumph itself, was the lack of a coherent economic message coming from the President’s congressional and other allies.

Carlson pointed out that tax cuts mean nothing to the millions of Americans who do not pay taxes because they do not make enough money to pay taxes. He castigated those who would support the President, but would not recognize that 401Ks, the stock market, and all the “measures of success” touted in the elections, mean absolutely nothing to most of the suffering people of the United States and many of the President’s own supporters. He said that young people, in the “gig economy,” could not marry and could not have children; resulting in the backbone of society, the family, being completely undermined to the point of non-existence and creating the society of violence and instability we see all around us.

He said that he would never again support candidates who did not themselves passionately make creating the basis of a human existence, for having families, for this impoverished American population, their own sacred cause. This is really not the appeal you would ever think would be coming from Tucker Carlson or anyone with his history. It is very much the result of open discussion of the profound ideas which we have just circulated throughout the United States.

So, now, as the result of these elections, we have a situation in which the Democratic Party can either continue its British-directed road to destruction and resistance, or it can work with the President to legislate, as the President said yesterday. Our ideas about economics, just like LaRouche’s idea of the SDI, can become reality very quickly in this environment; that is, if all of us collaborate and, like a laser, really focus on making this a reality. In my mind, the door is now wide open, but we have to focus with the same energy and passion with which we moved within that short period of time in 1982-83.

It is not sufficient to just work with our own population to create a mandate for the President to pursue these policies, while we free him from the coup so that he can accept our creation. Remember, this attack on the President of the United States is coming from the British and coming through the international field in which they play. Their perverse and evil ideas not only have free reign through our stupid elites, they reach into China, Russia, India, and other nations who would be our partners in bringing about the necessary change. We can’t just flank the British system, we have to totally eliminate it; dismantle it.

FDR’s Bretton Woods, LaRouche’s
Four Powers

This process can only occur through the proposal LaRouche made about a Four-Power agreement, implementing Franklin Roosevelt’s idea as a New Bretton Woods monetary system. That’s the big idea we have to now bring into existence within the shortest possible time. A credit system for developing the world is the absolutely necessary companion to the credit system and capital budgets we can now move to create in the United States.

As Lyndon LaRouche has demonstrated again and again, the growth of our own economy is completely dependent upon just such a new system of trade, on a worldwide division of labor functioning at the highest level of possible advanced technologies. If you think this idea is somehow beyond the population at this point, you just aren’t thinking clearly or creatively enough. After all, in my lifetime, I have seen this poor bedraggled U.S. population actually understand and passionately embrace LaRouche’s concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which is about as complex a concept as you can possibly put across.

When we directly asked LaRouche, “How do you get these ideas across to a population which seems so uneducated or mis-educated?” he has always been unflinching. “Go ahead and find their access points,” he said. “Many of them will be individual. Find whatever you can and use it to the hilt to educate with the greatest passion. Never, ever, reduce profound ideas and talk down to people: Reach to find a language by which to simply and elegantly communicate the most profound ideas. That’s your challenge as an organizer; that’s your challenge as a teacher.”

What Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke about today in her Schiller Institute New Paradigm webcast is a development of what Lyndon LaRouche said in 1984, about certain fundamental principles of a New Paradigm. This is what we now have to begin a major fight for. In a 1983 statement that he called “A Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the United States of America and the USSR,” he said:

The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states; and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.

The most crucial feature of the present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between the dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as “developing nations.” Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modern colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet.

So, LaRouche proposed that the four major economic powers in the world (in terms of population), get together and draft an agreement by which we replace the British monetary system with a worldwide credit system. He based this on the common interests of these nations, and the common experience they’ve had with the British Empire. We had, of course, our successful Revolution for Independence from England.

India was forced through wars and depopulation and export of opium and all sorts of depravations under the British Empire. It was the crown jewel of that Empire, and suffered horrendously for it, a suffering which still takes place today in the form of the caste system.

The British waged two opium wars against China, and of course, the British operations against Russia have gone on from time immemorial. So, we have a common experience in knowing the manipulations of empire. These manipulations of empire can commonly be attributed to ideas also, but to very bad ideas: the ideas we can call the Anglo-Dutch liberal system at this point, represented by Adam Smith, Parson Thomas Malthus, Halford Mackinder, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, the whole satanic gang.

The problem in the world that all of these nations have to perceive at this point, and other nations have to perceive, is not the United States; it’s not Russia; it’s not China. The problem is this idea system of the Anglo-Dutch liberal system. The ideas of free trade, globalization, Malthusianism, radical environmentalism, and limited sovereignty and perpetual war.

So, for those who don’t know it, the original Bretton Woods system was created at a conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, July 1-22, 1944. It was originally committed, per President Roosevelt’s idea, to extending low-interest credit to development projects throughout the world, in order to end poverty. The credit to be extended was not to be used to refinance already existing loans, let alone any speculative activity like today’s genuinely bankrupt and unpayable financial derivatives-type of activity. That Bretton Woods system, despite many problems in the post-World War II period, worked very well in fostering development in the world.

But then on August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon jettisoned the Bretton Woods system—the fixed exchange-rate, gold-reserve system which facilitated all trade in the world—and replaced it with a floating exchange-rate system, which not only created the basis for huge currency wars and rapid devaluation of any national currency, but also created the basis for deindustrialization of every advanced sector nation, including right here in the United States. We’ve been living under that anti-Bretton Woods system since then, right up through November 2016.

Trump decided on, and campaigned on the idea of reversing gears on this globalist system, ending what he calls the worldwide supply chain of free trade, and returning major industrial productive activity to the United States. You can say that in some respects, our economy is so dilapidated at this point—particularly with respect to machine tools and other things which we don’t make anymore—that certain protectionist measures up to a point might be called for to actually rebuild and foster the productive capacities of our labor force. But doing this in the context of the existing monetary system—the London financial system about to collapse—means that to avoid a calamity, worldwide production on a reciprocally beneficial basis between nation-states must be increased along with creating a new financial system.

Principles of the New Bretton Woods

That is what has to be discussed, hopefully at these summits, which are about to occur over the next 30 days. We have to begin to create, with the greatest intensity possible, the conditions for this to work. In other words, Trump goes out and he says OK, I’ve made this deal with Xi, and I’ve made this deal with Putin, I’ve made this deal with Modi; but if nobody in the United States actually understands what he’s done, and he’s got a horde of British jerks who are still trying to overthrow him, his deal dies on the vine. We’re the people who have to prevent that from happening by creating the understanding in the population that will allow this idea to come to fruition and to create a mandate for the President to do it.

So, what are the principles for this New Bretton Woods? I think the principles that LaRouche has articulated and would continue to articulate at this point go something like this:

First of all, this new system has to permit open access for all nations to fundamental scientific discoveries. That allows us to hasten development, because technological progress is the means not only to increase the potential relative population-density of societies, and even to maintain present levels of population potential.

Second, the advanced nations should concentrate on exports of capital goods to developing nations. When we’ve got the highest level of capital goods production, and we’re moving those goods through our economy at a rapid rate and we’re exporting at the highest technological level, we’re bringing our labor force back up to snuff. We’re bringing our labor force back up from the horrible, dilapidated state we’re in now, into something resembling a productive economy. This has been done with very furtive steps in the defense sector at this point by the Trump administration, but it’s got to be massively advanced through the entirety of the U.S. economy.

Were all of the advanced sector nations to export high technology goods to developing nations within a fixed exchange-rate system, the productivity of both the advanced sector nations, but also the developing sector nations, would be simultaneously increased.

You can almost say that it doesn’t matter—because of the increases in the productive powers of labor—whether you get paid in dollars for that or not. The whole emphasis here in on reindustrialization of the advanced sector nations, but on a higher economic and infrastructure platform, and taking that development as soon as it occurs and exporting it to the developing nations to allow them to develop.

Finally, since the fastest rates of technological progress are to be found in the results of space exploration, and since the effect of joint missions to the Moon, Mars, and in near-Earth orbit naturally unites mankind as a whole, fostering cooperation here is an excellent way to jumpstart the entire world’s economy. Cooperation in such a great adventure can quickly bring cultural optimism and spread it throughout the world.

Our Immediate Task

So, this is our immediate task. We have to move now to create a Four-Power Agreement that quickly creates, in turn, a new monetary system dedicated to fostering development of all of the nations of the Earth. This has to be, for political reasons, initiated by the United States, but in collaboration with Russia, China, and India. This, and only this, will bring about the final victory over this British system with a new birth of a creative future for all of humanity. That’s the potential which has been created out of the fight we have just made, whether you realize it or not. Just like those pioneers who listened to LaRouche in 1982, if we focus our passion now, we can actually bring this into being.

Unlike that historical moment of 1982, however, the conditions for a sustained victory over the British Empire right now are much, much better. The British have been totally exposed through their efforts in the coup; the Belt and Road has been undertaken so that people can actually see what large-scale development looks like, and how countries can rapidly advance. We’ve seen, in the course of our Campaign to Secure the Future, how much our own population aches for precisely this type of bold idea and the economy of the future. This opportunity is really sitting right before us now if you look carefully; and we’d be fools if we don’t jump on it.