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Subject: EIR Talks to Lyndon LaRouche 01/19/93
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- ``EIR TALKS WITH LAROUCHE'' -
Any radio station on the planet can air the weekly
interviews with Lyndon LaRouche. Want stations in your area
to air a weekly briefing from LaRouche? Call them. The EIR
Press Staff will provide them with a weekly tape for
broadcast. Or they can pull it down from satellite using the
coordinates below. Including breaks for ads and news, each
broadcast is one hour long.
The following interview will be broadcast on satellite
from 7:00 to 8:00 Eastern this coming Saturday night.
Galaxy 2, 74 Degrees W | Satcom C-1, 137 Degrees W
Trans 3 74.9 mHz NB, SCPC or Trans 2 7.5 mHz
3:1 Companding, Flat | Wide Band Video Subcarrier
January 19, 1993
EIR Talks with Lyndon LaRouche
Interviewed by Mel Klenetsky
- ``The Clinton Honeymoon Ended Before the Wedding Occurred'' -
MEL KLENETSKY: Welcome to {Executive Intelligence Review}'s
``Talks with Lyndon LaRouche.'' We're on the line with Mr.
LaRouche from Rochester, Minnesota.
Mr. LaRouche, the world is now facing a situation where we
are coming to the end of the Bush administration and into a new
administration, a Clinton administration, with a war situation in
Iraq, with American cruise missiles shooting at Iraqi factories.
What does this situation mean for the incoming Clinton
administration?
LAROUCHE: The point of reference, the thing to look at, I
think, is to explain to people around this country what is meant
by an increasingly popular newspaper and news media phrase: ``The
Clinton honeymoon ended before the wedding occurred.''
There are two aspects to Clinton's problem: domestic and
foreign policy. They're interrelated, but from the standpoint of
the typical voter, for example, and from the standpoint of the
members of the Congress, they will seem somewhat different.
Now, one recalls, that the Clinton campaign, Clinton's
campaign for the Presidency, as opposed to the nomination; that
Clinton picked up on something we put into circulation on the
ten-part infrastructure building project as a stimulus to a
bankrupt, depressed economy. And he'd come forth with, in fact, a
very modest package, much less than is needed, but might be
considered favorably as a foot in the door, of about $20-50
billion annually of infrastructure building projects as a
stimulus to employment, or a stimulus to relieve unemployment.
As he began his transition period after the election, he was
warned by the {Wall Street Journal} and other elements of, you
might say, of Satan's emissaries, that Clinton better forget
about the constituency that elected him and concentrate more on
another constituency, the voice of the bond market; that if
Clinton did not scrap his economic stimulus--i.e., infrastructure
program, modest as it was, and pay attention to the demands of
the bond market, the bond market might sink the presidential
budget or finances.
We've reached the point where, at least on the surface,
Clinton has formally capitulated to the New York bankers and has
virtually scrapped every idea of a significant, even tokenly
significant, economic stimulus.
Now that means that as long as Clinton stays with that
policy, his domestic policy will be a disaster. Now you go into
the foreign policy market, in which a slightly different
situation exists, but a related one.
The Establishment people have used the lame-duck Bush
administration to create a mess for the Clinton administration
which will hit the governor with full force on the day of his
inauguration and the days immediately following. The worst
complex of foreign policy messes in the past oh, say, 50-odd
years, is now hitting the U.S. government, at the time that
Clinton moves into government.
Clinton's got a couple of people, like Warren Christopher,
who are old hands there, from an {administrative} standpoint, and
who can handle foreign policy from an administrative standpoint.
But what he needs, is not just administration; he needs a foreign
policy. And at present, he has no foreign policy, and on domestic
and foreign policy his appointees, which are largely payments, in
a sense, to each of the constituencies that support him, to whom
he has an obligation, {have no philosophical agreement in any
single area of policy making.}
So Clinton is in a mess on foreign policy, and in a mess on
domestic policy from the outset. The Bush actions in Iraq only
make the thing terribly worse. Bush is being privately, and to
some degree publicly denounced by governments, including
governments in the United Nations Security Council, as conducting
an irresponsible adventure in his unprovoked and actually
lunatic, renewed attack on Iraq.
This is going to undermine confidence in the U.S.
government, and is going to put immense pressure on the Clinton
administration, to see if the new Clinton administration will
reverse and junk large chunks of what people abroad look on with
fear and anguish as the insanity of the outgoing Bush
administration.
Q: Why would the Establishment want to hand a sequence of
policy messes to an incoming Clinton administration?
LAROUCHE: To control him. If you look at Al Gore, for
example, and the wild ecology radicals, or the people who are
supporting this sort of political correctness, you see that the
Clinton administration has a potential for going in a very bad
direction. And they want to keep the incoming administration
under some degree of control by the Establishment, both
internationally and domestically.
- Moves Toward Austerity in Germany and the U.S. -
Q: Mr. LaRouche, in terms of domestic policy: currently,
there's a conference of mayors going on in Washington, D.C., and
the mayors are very disappointed. They see in Bill Clinton
already the embryo of defeat. Earlier you mentioned that he was
blackmailed by the bond market. Can you go into that a little
bit, and indicate what Mr. Clinton really has to do to get the
domestic economy moving?
LAROUCHE: Well, for example, in Germany, there's a
discussion within the Social Democratic Party in Germany, which
is hoping that it somehow might miraculously come back to power,
about what they can do; and they say, well, debt-financed
expansion of the economy is no longer possible. They're looking
at Germany but also more broadly at the world, and saying, ``That
period is past; it can't be done.''
And therefore, they're going actually to the kind of
austerity which caused the same German Social Democracy in effect
to pave the way for Hitler, by pushing for the non-recognition or
the non-support of the Schleicher government. That is, it was the
SPD's veto of the Schleicher government which paved the way for
Hitler coming to power, in point of fact, where they supported an
austerity program against a recovery program of the Schleicher
government. So that mess is there.
But look at the United States from that standpoint. Now, as
I've said a number of times before, but I think it cannot be
repeated too often, because it will take some time for people to
get this idea clearly in their head. Since the formation of the
Federal Reserve System generally, the way we get money for our
economy, is to go into debt to private international financial
circles.
The way it occurs, is the following way. The banking
community, the financial community, i.e., in New York, discounts
paper with the Federal Reserve System. When it discounts, it
discounts at a discount rate. The Federal Reserve System writes
the discounter, or the person who places the paper for discount,
a Federal Reserve check. The Federal Reserve check is processed
for collection in the normal way. It goes to the Federal Reserve
bank. The issuer at the Federal Reserve bank, puts new money into
circulation--money which it {creates out of thin air,} using the
paper discounted as security for this purpose.
So the banks get money created out of thin air at, today,
perhaps around 3 percent. They turn around and today, they're
loaning that chiefly to the Federal government, at between four
and a half percent to eight percent for medium-term to long-term
bonds, or, in some cases, shorter-term paper.
So, every penny that goes into circulation as new money
today, goes in as the paying of debt, the creation of new debt of
the Federal government, to these private interests. What the
world is saying, is that the process of creating money by going
into debt to private interests, to allow the private interests to
create money out of thin air and charge the U.S. population, (the
government), for that, this is not going to work any more; it's
going to be hyperinflationary, because of the circumstances in
which we find ourselves.
Therefore, because of that situation, which even the New
York bankers and the SPD in Germany and so forth, the Socialists
in Germany, and so forth, all agree upon: It is a fact that you
can no longer consider the Federal Reserve System as the
mechanism of monetary policy; but rather we must go back to the
Constitution and print money by authorization of Congress, as
the Constitution requires. And issue that, not as a debt of the
Federal government, but as loan capital to governmental
institutions and to private sector at low interest rates on
medium- to long-term to stimulate the economy.
The debt will then be created in those forms of security
provided by those kinds of investments, for which the debt is
loaned. Which means that the government must restrict its lending
policy generally, except in emergencies, to public utility and
related kinds of things, and to the private sector, in areas in
which physical wealth is being created, which offers security for
the loan.
And if you don't do that, there's no way that you can
{safely expand this economy} and recover it from what is in fact
a continuing depression--not a recession, there has been no
recovery in progress, that's a complete hoax.
If you can't get the economy moving, you're going to have a
social disaster in the coming period. The massive cutting of
health care, just throwing them out to die, which is what
efficiency means in health care at this point--at least in the
way it's being proposed--cutting jobs in industries massively,
which is going on. IBM has some embarrassing figures to report on
its unprofitability recently. These kinds of things are going to
sink the economy deeper and deeper. State governments and local
governments are going to go into a worse crisis generally, than
even the Federal government.
If we're going to get out of this mess, and get a recovery
going, we're going to have to scrap the Federal Reserve System,
and go back to the techniques used by Lincoln or by President
George Washington or so forth, before.
So, as long as Clinton is committed to submitting to the
bond market and the Federal Reserve System, and as long as he's
not prepared to take the measures to bring these boys into line
and get the economy moving in the way I've indicated, there's no
chance of anything but a failure from Clinton. And that's the
crux of the matter. That's the breaking point. That's the point
on which he stands or falls. If he doesn't do as I've
recommended, he's finished--he's finished before he begins.
- The American System vs. The British System -
Q: First of all, you mentioned a difference between loan
capital of perhaps a Lincolnian system, and Federal Reserve debt.
What is the difference between these two types of approaches,
with a little bit more clarity, and secondly, aside from the
Lincoln period, when were there other periods in our history when
we approached this thing, for example in the twentieth century,
if there are; and when did we start going wrong in the United
States and in the world economy?
LAROUCHE: Oh, we really started going wrong a number of
times. For example, we had that fellow Gallatin, who was a
British agent, who was Treasury Secretary and had some other
posts under Jefferson and Madison. He made a mess in the economy.
Remember that George Washington's two administrations had turned
us from a bankrupt economy into the most stable, secure economy
in the world, from the standpoint of monetary stability, fiscal
stability.
Jefferson and Madison ruined that under the influence of the
Adam Smith proponent, Gallatin. Monroe and John Quincy Adams
straightened it out. Jackson ruined our economy, particularly
beginning 1832, leading into the Panic of 1837, which bankrupted
the United States to all intents and purposes. Under the
direction of his controller, the British/London agent, Martin van
Buren, later president. Then Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan were
absolute disasters as Presidents; Lincoln saved the nation in
more ways than one. Then Johnson, his successor, began to ruin
it. And the Specie Resumption Act of the 1870s, over the period
1875 to 1879, ruined the United States and put us into a
permanent depression despite the rapid expansion of our western
United States and so forth. We were paying so much tribute to
foreigners, to London in particular, that we never had enough
left over, despite the fact that we were already one of the most
profitable operations in the world physically. Then the Federal
Reserve came in, and we were looted by that.
Now what happened is, World War I and World War II, even
under the Federal Reserve--
The Federal Reserve on the one side, did adopt a lending
policy for the wartime period, not only to military production
but to production in general, as logistics of the sinews of war,
so to speak, which did a good job in expanding the economy.
However, it did it in the Federal Reserve way, which meant,
that in both cases, under Federal Reserve financing of war, that
we accumulated a tremendous war debt. Less so after World War I,
but massively so during World War II and afterward.
So we did the right things in terms of lending policy,
largely, during these two wars, but we did the wrong thing by
doing it the Federal Reserve way, which left us with a crippling
debt, particularly after World War II, because we did it in the
wrong way. And that's the problem today. We have never really
done it the right way. Kennedy was moving in the direction to do
something about this, but he was shot before he actually had time
to get his program into operation.
Q: The national banking system creates loans. Isn't it also
going into debt?
LAROUCHE: No. We're going into implicit debt because we
take full faith and responsibility for the value of our currency,
which we defend in several ways.
We defend it by trade policy, that is, by protectionism,
which is the American Way, contrary to some unfortunate people,
miseducated people, who think otherwise and contrary to the
Confederate traitors who also thought otherwise.
We also managed our money by good monetary policy, good
fiscal policy; but essentially, we managed our policy by
{limiting the lending} and the issue of this currency to projects
which {create,} either directly or indirectly, an {increase} in
physical wealth {significantly larger} than the amount of credit
issued to cause the creation of wealth.
What we use, is we use the factor of productivity and
technology to invest in technology and productivity, in order to
get, in effect, a very large gross profit on the money lent to
bring labor and capacity together to produce wealth. Whenever you
find an investment that has this technological productivity
leverage which you can make, where the productivity payoff is
either in the industry, as, say, a goods-producing industry, or
in the industry through the benefits of infrastructure, as in the
other case, then you make the investment, if it's a national
need.
If it is something which is frivolous, or something which is
up in the air, like financing real estate acquisitions and
secondary real estate markets, you don't loan for it. You say,
``Sorry, buddy, go scratch for your money where you want to.
We're not loaning money for that junk. We're not allowing junk
bonds. We won't tolerate that in our economy.'' And so therefore
the difference is that the debt is incurred by the utilities and
by the private industries which borrow the money--not by the
Federal government. But we restrict the lending to those
utilities and to those private sector undertakings which, in
general produce more wealth for the economy, than the value of
the loans issued. And that way, we ensure that we have no
inflation, in fact, we have sort of a deflation, a decline of
prices as a result of the benefits of productivity increases.
- The LaRouche Infrastructure Program -
- and the Bill Clinton Infrastructure Program -
Q: What are the fundamental differences between your job
creation program, infrastructure development program, and Bill
Clinton's?
LAROUCHE: Well, Bill Clinton's is rather helter-skelter. I
imagine that, if he were to implement, the $20-50 billion a year,
that he'd come up with things, grease for the squeaking wheels,
he'd have mayors and states and so forth around saying we need
this money because we have unemployment. And they'd probably find
things which are pretty well designed, blueprinted, ready to go,
from an engineering standpoint. And they probably would be
useful. And they would be a stimulant.
The problem essentially is, there's not enough. In order to
get this U.S. economy moving, you have to realize there is a $1
trillion minimal hole, per year, in the U.S. economy. This
economy has to have a real GNP approaching around $7 trillion a
year. And until we get to that, we're not going to get be in
balance on both private and public account, in terms that we have
to keep going to keep the economy stable and meet the needs of
our people.
So, if you don't spend at least $500 billion a year in terms
of lending power to the public sector for public utilities, and
the private sector for these kinds of investments, you're just
not going to do the job. You're going to be a complete failure.
It's like the man who tried to patch his pants, only he didn't
have any pants. The patch is a good idea; but you've got to have
the pants, too. And Clinton came up with the idea of a patch,
which is not bad, because the pants are tattered, but he also has
to have the pants. And the pants are $500 billion a year, and
$10-50 billion a year is only a patch on those pants.
Q: Mr. LaRouche, you have been fond of talking of
Apollo-style projects for infrastructure development. Do you see
any immediate Apollo-style projects that should be followed?
LAROUCHE: Well, you have a lot of them.
I look at an economy and the science-driver project as a
unified process, in which the science-driver project is an
integral part of the overall growth of the economy. But I guess
we're coming to a break at this point.
- Anti-Science Policies Lead to Genocide -
Q: Mr. LaRouche, if we are discussing a science-driver
policy for the United States, one which allows for infrastructure
development, I think we should also have in mind a discussion
which leads us to a science policy for other nations around
the world. It seems that we're currently dropping bombs on
Iraq, because we don't want them to have science, technology,
and so on and so forth, because of its dual-use nature.
LAROUCHE: First of all, look at it from a domestic
standpoint. You may recall, back in the '60s, when President
Kennedy announced the Moon landing program. That was highly
inspirational, because you had a population which {then} believed
in science and technological progress--as we had from the
beginning of our nation.
What happened after that, in the middle '60s onward,
especially after the 1964 or 1970-71 transition, beginning
with Sun Day, say, in 1970, that we went into a post-industrial,
deconstructionist, New Age, kind of lunacy, in which the popular
myth was created, that technology is somehow bad for the
environment and it's bad for us. And therefore, you have people
today, when you talk about an Apollo-style project, they will
groan and say, ``Science is bad for the environment.''
Well, they really don't know what they're talking about,
because of a massive brainwashing. For example, the DDT fakery.
There was no reason to ban DDT. All the stories about the
damage it did, were outright lies. We have this ozone hole
hoax--a complete hoax. Not one piece of scientific evidence
has ever been presented to sustain what most people, I suppose,
in the United States today believe. It's absolute nonsense.
Unscientific balderdash. And the same is true for most of
these things people believe about technology.
We notice, just parenthetically, if you want to see
pollution: Go into any slum. Go into any water system of most
cities of the United States. We have pollution. It's
old-fashioned pollution. Because we don't have the money to
spend on cleaning up the environment. Because we don't have
an economy any more.
Anyway, how does an economy work? An economy works on
the basis of scientific and technological progress. There
is no other way which a successful economy can work. And the
way it works, is that scientific and technological progress
cause what is called by economists {economy of labor.} That
is, with the same amount of labor, you can produce more; or,
to put it the other way, it takes less labor to satisfy the
same requirements as it did earlier. And that way, you increase
productivity, and you permit the growth and improvement of
the economy.
Now, to do that, we have to keep science going. We have
to keep this flow of technology. And it works as follows.
You start with scientific projects. And in general, you
must have 5-10% of the nation's labor force employed as
scientists, technicians and skilled operatives, in research
and development. That research and development drives a
machine-tool industry which turns scientific discovery into
machine-tool applications--electronic or otherwise, eh? Or
chemical. Those machine-tool applications then become part
of the productive process, which increase the productive power
of labor, and improve the quality of goods.
So therefore, if I build a space project as a science-driver
project as NASA worked, for example, for the computer industry,
which gave us pre-eminence in the computer industry, and this
produces new materials, new kinds of gadgetry, new principles
of design, which we then spill into the entire economy, to
improve the economy in all kinds of places. And that's the
way a science driver works.
Now, when we go to a Third World country and we say,
you can't have any dual-use technology, and they say, ``What's
that?'' We say, any technology which you might use to make
a weapon of war or assist you in conducting a war. ``Well,
what's that?'' ``Well, that includes growing food--because
food is a weapon of war. Without food, you can't conduct a
war.''
So if you have the ability to improve your food production,
that is danger of dual use. Food for your troops. If you have
machine tools that might make machines, well, you might use
these to make shell casings--therefore, it's dual use. So
we turned around and de-technologize the developing nations
and other nations--which means we're sending them back to
the Stone Age. And when you send a nation back to the Stone
Age, as any insurance actuary can show you, what you're doing
is committing genocide against that nation. And some of the
people who are pushing this stuff--not necessarily the people
who support it, but the people who are pushing it--{know}
that what they're doing, is creating genocide against billions
of people on this planet, with these kinds of policies. And
what they're doing, through the entertainment
media and the news media, and so forth, is they've brainwashed
the American people or a large portion of them, into believing
this hogwash, and so you have people sitting back, saying:
``Yeah, technology is bad. It's bad for the environment. It's
bad for spotted owls,'' or whatever. And that kind of talk,
is the kind of talk that leads to genocide.
As a matter of fact, the same thing happened with Hitler.
Hitler's Nazi movement, as most people unfortunately in this
country do {not} know, was in the majority a zero-technological,
anti-science movement, which believed that, in order for a
German nation, or the white race or something, to have enough
living room based on backward technology, that they had to
eliminate a lot of competing populations, because there wouldn't
be enough land area for all of them, in backward technologies;
so they said, let's go into Eastern Europe and eliminate other
people, and that will give us more land for our people, using
these backward, back to the Middle Ages kind of agriculture
and other technology.
And that, in effect, is what the poor people of the United
States are advocating. They say, ``we must not have technology.
It's bad for us. Other people must not have bad technology.
That's bad for the climate. Therefore, we must keep these
people from having this.'' And when they do that, they have
now come up with a policy which is worse than even Adolf
Hitler's, in terms of the score of genocide which they're
perpetrating upon this planet.
Q: Do we need a Nuclear Proliferation Treaty? If
we don't, what is the proper foreign policy toward a nation
like Saddam Hussein's nation?
LAROUCHE: I think you can almost forget that. That's
not important. This whole business about Iraq is a complete
fake, it's a complete sideshow. One should not dignify what
George Bush and his minions have said about Iraq.
We know that George, together with the British, lured Iraq
into Kuwait--that's a fact--in order to attack Iraq. So he went
out to destroy an Arab nation. There are many reasons for it. But
it's unimportant. It's all balderdash, it's all nonsense.
Unfortunately, many Americans believe that nonsense, they
supported it, because they didn't know any better. But it's
nonsense, and by now, with the most recent atrocities by George,
where he bombs Iraq, accusing them of doing things, violating UN
structures they did not, accuse them of having a nuclear
facility, which they did not have, as the UN said, it's just
outright lies for the purpose of arbitrarily bombing a nation as
the last act, the last drunken fling of his outgoing presidency.
And I don't think we should dignify that, by treating George's
argument seriously.
The danger we have today, is of a different nature. The
foreign policy mess, is of a different nature.
As you recall, back in '89, for reasons which I had the
privilege of forecasting in 1983 and 1985, the Soviet Union
collapsed internally, not because of anything George Bush
did. As a matter of fact, he was opposed to the things that
caused the Iron Curtain to come down. George was opposed to
my SDI policy and the Reagan SDI policy. His people were.
And it was that SDI policy and related things, which caused
the Soviet system to collapse. Because they could not drive
their economy, and they were driving it up to 1989. They were
prepared for launching a general first strike war against
the United States and Europe, in 1989.
Now at that point, the effort to drive their economy
to that capability, broke the economy down. They weren't spending
enough on infrastructure, etc., etc., these kinds of things.
Broke the economy down. And this breakdown had been in progress
since about the early 1970s, under Brezhnev. They were just
driving too hard without the right policy, and things weren't
working, and it overtook them. So they sought a breathing
space in letting the Wall coming down, is what the Gorbachov
crowd did. Waiting for the United States and Britain to collapse,
when they could come back.
But at that point, in 1989, that the Wall collapsed, and a
great German banker by the name of Herrhausen, who was promptly
thereafter murdered by British intelligence, proposed a policy
for Western Europe in particular, with U.S. cooperation, moving
into the newly opened areas of former Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union, which was opening up, with large-scale
investments, beginning with East Germany, which would develop
infrastructure and cause a worldwide boom based on the opening up
of the productive potential of Eastern Europe for more advanced
technologies.
At that point, people in the United States and Great
Britain and elsewhere, began screaming about a so-called Fourth
Reich, that a reunified Germany, following this kind of policy,
would become much too powerful.
The problem with this, is that if you go back to the
last part of the last century and the beginning of this, you'll
find that all the wars of this century have been based on
a concept called geopolitics, of which Halford Mackinder,
the British philosopher of geopolitics is exemplary. And the
argument was, that if Germany and Russia and other states,
form a region of economic cooperation, using rail development
and other development to cause the development of Eurasia
in general, then Eurasia will become such a great economic
power, that the British Empire will become impossible.
Later, in the course of World War II, when we had an
Anglo-American arrangement as opposed to a British Empire,
the Anglo-Americans had the same view. That's why we had two
wars in this century, because the British, and then the
Anglo-Americans, or part of them, were determined to prevent
continental European-Eurasian integration of that sort.
Now, the prospect of Germany, as Herrhausen proposed,
or as I proposed with my Triangle project, Germany and France
moving eastward and southward to bring the larger part of
Eurasia increasingly into cooperation and economic development
with Western Europe, this thing sent shivers of horror in
circles in New York and London. They began talking about the
the threat of a Fourth Reich. You head this from Israel.
When the Serbian fascists started their genocide against
their former Yugoslav neighbors, they began talking about
the Fourth Reich too. Germany was so intimidated by the
Herrhausen assassination, the Rohwedder assassination, and
this kind of imprecation from their friends in the West, that
they pulled in their horns and ruined eastern Germany, in
order to placate Washington and London.
As a result of that, the whole world is sinking into a mess.
Today, the Anglo-Americans and others have set Milosevic loose,
beginning late 1989, 1990. His fascists are committing genocide
in former Yugoslavia beyond anything that was done by the Nazis,
in terms of ``quality'' of these kinds of things, we have
condoned it or our policy-makers have condoned it, because they
wanted to contain Germany and prevent Europe from developing.
Now we are moving in the potential of World War III.
Something has to be done about the Balkan mess before it becomes
a full-scale Balkan war. It is becoming increasingly risky;
and of course George Bush goes off in a silly, murderous
adventure in Iraq, to distract attention from that, and to
make a mess for Clinton coming in.
So the geopolitical thinking, which characterized the
British during this century, and characterized so much, including
Henry Kissinger and Co. of our foreign policy establishment here,
is the root of our present foreign policy problems, and governs,
to a large degree, our economic thinking about nations abroad.
Q: U.S. and Western economic policy toward Eastern Europe
has been the Jeffrey Sachs plan, which has resulted in the
dismantling of industry. Is this any different than the
Morgenthau Plan that was introduced after World War II?
LAROUCHE: Not really. The point is, that there were two
aspects to it.
First of all, we have a particular form of insanity,
called a belief in free trade and deregulation which has,
over the past quarter century, ruined the British and U.S.
economies in particular, and has affected, to the degree that
we've imposed it on other parts of the world, has caused a
general collapse of economy per capita and per-square kilometer
aroudn this planet as a whole.
That is, this planet is in a physical-economic devolution
as a result of these free trade, deregulation, and
anti-technology policies.
Now, not just Jeffrey Sachs. Take the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) Establishment. Jeffrey Sachs is almost a sideshow,
a clown from Harvard, compared to the reality, which is the
IMF and associated institutions, which went into Poland and
went into Russia, to make sure that these parts of the world
were absolutely ruined and plunged into chaos as soon as
possible. And they did this in the name of bringing the world
into conformity with free trade and deregulation.
That was done partly--for two reasons. On the one side,
it was done because the generation of people who entered college
in the 1970s, as distinct from those who entered college in
the 1960s, are now coming into dominant positions in the United
States and in Europe. This generation has been largely destroyed
intellectually, by the transformations in education which
occurred in the colleges. This is the politically correct
generation. These are people who, from my knowledge, in large
part, cannot think. They're like Jeffrey Sachs, who belongs
to that generation: 38-39 years old, the man absolutely cannot
think. The man is incredibly stupid. He's a Harvard professor
of economics, who has no comprehension of anything. You compare
him, say, with some of the old people, the old economists
up there, and you say, ``What a difference! What a difference.''
Go back to the economists of the Kennedy period, then look
at Jeffrey Sachs. You say, ``This man is an absolute fool.
He's not qualified for kindergarten, let alone university,
or professorship.'' But that is the quality we're getting, around
the Modern Language Association generation of this type.
So, they did what they did in Eastern Europe and elsewhere
because they are brainwashed into believing this stuff. They
also did it with malice, realizing that in Poland and in the
former Soviet Union, this would cause the maximum catastrophe,
which it has done--they don't care.
Q: Warren Christopher: does he represent a different
strain of geopolitics or foreign policy, or is he of the same
ilk?
LAROUCHE: No, no. Warren Christopher is an Establishment
bureaucrat, who has a known track record as a lawyer and
government figure in think tanks and in government. He was
in the Johnson administration, in the Carter administration;
he's back.
The man is an {experienced administrator.} He's an
attorney-politician-administrator. He is not necessarily a
policy man--that is, a policy shaper, a policy thinker. He
may think; but he is not a policy-initiator. But he is an
administrator, who probably represents some of the strongest
parts of the Clinton administration potentially, in the sense
that these are old hands who can be brought together in an
emergency and are capable of acting {as administrators.} But
what I don't see, is any clear policy initiative, now coming
from anywhere in the Clinton administration. Reich has pushed
to an aside, in the Labor Department, which means that initiative
is sort of put on hold for the time being.
Q: When was the last time that American policy was on
the right track?
LAROUCHE: Well, I think it's been a long time.
The clearest case, was under Lincoln. We had a clear
correct track then, of rebuilding a ruined nation. Lincoln's
assassination was probably the greatest single tragedy and
cause of suffering in our nation, since the founding of our
Federal republic.
We've had elements of good policy at various times under
various presidents. I refer often to the Kennedy presidency
which had many good elements in it. And that was probably
the last time we were anywhere near on the right track--the
Kennedy presidency.
Q: Mr. LaRouche, what is the kind of foreign policy
discussion that we need in our universities to enable people to
determine the difference between geopolitics, that has led to
World War I and World War II, and a proper foreign policy, as you
started to mention, occurred in the Lincoln administration?
LAROUCHE: In dealing with foreign policy, you don't start
with foreign policy as the subject.
You're talking essentially about philosophy. And you
have to have a philosophical grounding. Now, there's no
philosophy, to my knowledge, being taught anywhere in the
university. There may be people who are teaching something
under the title of philosophy. I see some textbooks which
are rather silly, which are passed out to undergraduates and
so forth today. But the title ``philosopher'' is nonsense.
Essentially, we have to go back to a Classical education
in the secondary schools--that is, the high schools--as well
as the universities. Especially the high schools, if we're
going to have a population which is capable of thinking, has
a training, an ability to think clearly about any matter,
including foreign policy matters, especially, which are very
difficult for the average American today even to understand.
I talk with Americans. They just don't understand the
ABCs from which you have to start a foreign-policy discussion.
By Classical education, what I mean is this. Take Stanford
University or some other university which had ``gone politically
correct''--deconstructionist. Take that as a horrible example,
and say, ``This is going to come to a screeching halt. Why
should people pay $15-20,000 a year tuition for that garbage?''
What I object to in Stanford, is highlighted by a recent
resolution supported by students who ought to know better
but don't, under the name of sensitivity, of banning the
requirement that students study the works of dead, white European
males.
Now, it happens that most of what we know on this planet--at
least, most of what we know on which we {depend} to maintain
a population of more than a half-billion people on this planet,
certainly, depends upon the contributions (admittedly, there
are other contributions from other sources), but depends upon
the contributions inclusively, of dead, white European males.
This is most obvious in physical science. Plato is part of
this perspective.
If people don't know these things, they don't know much
about civilization, and therefore can't make much of a decision
about matters either domestic or in terms of foreign policy.
They don't know what a state is, they don't know what the
meaning of national sovereignty is--they don't know any of
the things which are elements, which you have to take into
account, for a foreign policy.,
But the thing to emphasize is this: The nature of man,
thenature of the human mind. Man, as the Book of Genesis insists,
in the first chapter; as Philo Judaeus insisted; as Christianity
is based on this principle, as well as Philo's Mosaic Judaism;
that man is created in the image of God, by virtue of the
fact that man has a creative potential, typified by the capacity
for fundamental scientific discovery, which is absent in every
species of animal. And man is thus manifestly a species apart
from and above all animal life. And is given dominion over
this planet. That is reflected, when we study the creative
discoveries and re-experience in our children's mind the creative
discoveries of great discoverers before us, we are giving
children the capacity to use their creative powers to understand
matters. And without that grounding of our students, not in
the 3 R's, but in these principles of creative discovery,
you don't have a citizenry that is capable of understanding
what a foreign policy ought to be.
Q: Thank you very much, Mr. LaRouche. This has been
{Executive Intelligence Review}'s ``Talks with Lyndon LaRouche.''
Return next week for another discussion with Lyndon LaRouche
from Rochester, Minnesota.
--
John Covici
[email protected]
