Lyndon LaRouche Keynotes
Schiller Institute European Conference, Feb. 21-22, 2009REBUILDING THE
WORLD ECONOMY AFTER THE SYSTEMIC CRISIS
Here
is Lyndon LaRouche's keynote, "On the Next Step," opening the
first panel of the European Schiller Institute conference in Germany,
"Rebuilding the World Economy after the Systemic Crisis." He was
introduced by the panel's moderator, Schiller Institute founder and
president, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
HELGA
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: So, good day. Dear conference participants, I'm
very happy to greet all of you at this truly dramatic moment in
history. I think we are, as an organization, in a very unique position.
As a matter of fact, I can tell you, that the existence of this
organization is because the gentleman, Mr. LaRouche, has actually
devoted his entire life to the systemic, inherent problems of the
present world financial system, and how to remedy it and replace it by
a system which is more coherent with the lawfulness of the universe.
As a matter of fact, Mr. LaRouche
is internationally known, and
feared by some, because he has been on the record of predicting this
crisis to erupt. The first time he did that in 1957, and especially in
1971, he made the prognosis that if the existing trend then would be
continued, it would come to a breakdown and new depression.
But I would also like to welcome
the delegations from many
countries. I'm very happy to greet representatives from 25 different
nations in the audience. And I can not greet all of you separately, but
I'm very happy to say that there is an important delegation from
Austria, from Switzerland, from Nigeria, from Denmark, and 22 more. So,
eventually, I will tell you all the different nations which are
represented.
So, without longer words, we are
meeting here in Ruesselsheim, and
when we picked the site of this conference, we did not know what would
happen with OPEL. We picked the city more for convenience of logistics,
that it's close to the airport, it's close to other connections, but
it's now sort of a symbolic situation, because the breakdown of the
world financial system, and the world economic system, I think is very
acutely felt, especially here in Ruesselsheim, which is symptomatic for
the sorrows of the population at large.
Now, let me give the word to a very
special individual, my husband. [ovation applause]
LYNDON LAROUCHE: Thank you very
much.
We're at a point in history, the
like of which has not been seen in
Europe, since the 14th century New Dark Age. And one of the problems we
face in the world today, is precisely that: That there is no
one
living today, or for several generations in the past, who has any
inkling whatsoever, of the event which grips the entire planet at this
moment. We now have a planet which is estimated to be populated at 6.7
billion people. If we do not take appropriate action internationally,
as I shall indicate, there will not be 6.7
billion people two generations from now, but, if we're lucky, 2
billion people: Whole sections of the human population's cultures will
disappear, except for the few remnants to remember the past for larger
numbers.
The problem is, that while we have,
as in the United States, we have
around the new President, we have a selection of people who are highly
qualified talent. There are a few I'm not too happy with, but the
majority are really some of the best talent the United States has to
offer for this purpose. Unfortunately, they, too, have no experience
and no comprehension of the kind of crisis which the world faces now.
And therefore—I mean, I'm not that old: I mean, I wasn't there in the
14th century—but, I do know a great deal about it, probably more than
anyone living today in terms of what to do about it. And thus, it's a
heavy responsibility for me to make the distinction between what people
who live today, and who are professionals, who are experts, do
know about fixing a situation like this. But my problem is, to show
them, what to do about what they do not
know. Because people will talk about this crisis, as a
"recession"—that's complete childishness among experts. They talk about
it as a depression; that's really a mild understatement, which gets you
no place.
You're talking about the kind of
crisis from which civilizations and cultures do not reemerge!
In which entire cultures vanish, as well as vast parts of the world
population. You have to have a clear view of the vulnerability of the
world's population.
Let's take the case of China. China
has just gone through a shocking
crisis. China can not sustain its existing population of 1.4 billion
people on the basis of a continuation of the present trends in the
world situation! This is not a matter of China's problems. This
is a global problem: The entire planet faces mass extermination!
India is a more stable country,
because it's less dependent upon
exports as a percentile of its operations, but it, too, is extremely
vulnerable. Russia is on the verge of non-existence! The entire
Southwest Asia, an area of crisis—this crisis makes things worse.
Africa is a target of genocide, especially by the British Empire. And
if we don't stop that, there will be almost an obliteration
of the population of Africa. The population of the United States, of
South America and so forth. This is the situation, in which the normal
reaction, by governments, and by nations on their own behalf, will be
totally inadequate and wrong-headed in trying to deal with this kind of
a crisis.
We require two contradictory
things, which are really not
contradictory. We require, on the one hand, a reaffirmation, especially
in Europe which no longer has this affirmation, of national
sovereignty! Without the defense and promotion of national sovereignty,
you can not organize the people of this world to deal with this
problem! That's one of our problems.
And at the same time, there's not
an understanding of how to
organize a global fight, to overcome this great crash, with the saving
of national sovereignty: That is, how can we get nations, which are not
inherently inclined to one another, in this account, to work together,
as sovereign powers; to work together in long-term cooperation—we're
talking about 50 years and so forth into the future—to rebuild
the economy of this planet, to rebuild it in a way that we can say, a
few years from now, we have done the job, we have secured the
possibility of the survival of civilization, as civilization, on this
planet.
Now, these are questions, for which
we have talents suited to deal with this problem. But they don't have a
conception
of how they should organize themselves, in common effort, to achieve
it. And that's the heavy job I have. Because I've spent most of my life
in two ways on this question: One, on the nature of this question
itself. There is no competence whatsoever, among the professional
economists of the world, in dealing with this. That is, not with the
problem as such. There are people who are competent with implementing
and designing the implementation of programs which will make this work.
But we have no economists, who have any understanding of this, because
they haven't studied it; they have not worked through the history. They
think in terms of recent history, like only a few generations, or only
a couple of centuries past. They think nothing about 2,000 years or
3,000 years in the past, and you have to think that way in order to
deal with this.
Now, take the thing from the top
down: On the 25th of July of 2007,
I conducted an international webcast, in which I announced that we were
on the brink of a general breakdown crisis of the world
financial-monetary system. I indicated what the problem was, and some
of the measures that had to be taken.
Three days later, the world
financial system began to disintegrate.
Idiots called it a "subprime mortgage crisis." They were idiots. It was
the whole system in a death rattle. And since
that time,
since the 28th of July of 2007, the world as a whole, has been
disintegrating, economically, at an accelerating rate. People have
tried to call it a "recession"; some have called it a "depression."
They all have assumed that they do not have to make fundamental
changes—they do not have to make changes, which reverse
the
policies of the world, since especially 1968, since the spring of 1968.
That's where the point is. So, you have to take most of the changes in
policy, by nations and among nations, since March 1st of 1968, when
President Johnson took the first step to bring down the
fixed-exchange-rate system. And the collapse of the fixed-exchange-rate
system meant the destruction, or the self-destruction, of the United
States, and set up Europe for vulnerability, to go down.
Europe, since that time, has lost
its sovereignty. Here we have this
great area of Europe, of Western and Central Europe. It no longer has
the bulwark of national sovereignty, and of a system of attempted
cooperation among national sovereigns any more. No part of Western and
Central Europe presently has the legal authority, to manage its own
economy. It's under a euro system, which is a prisoner system. There's
no planning for national credit. There's no system for generation of
national credit for recovery. There's no provision in Europe today, no
allowance in Europe today, under present rules, for an expansion of
capital investment, through public credit, needed to reverse the
present trends.
For example, let's take right here
in Ruesselsheim, just as an
example of that: Here we have a disintegration of the international
automobile production system. It's global. The United States automobile
system is dead. It committed suicide a long time ago, and the death is
occurring just now. It's been deliberate. It's been a process of the
United States' potential. What the United States represented at the end
of World War II, had a much higher potential than it has today. There's
been a disintegration of that, especially since the middle of the
1960s; there was an immediate collapse of the U.S. economy's potential
under President Truman, once peace was declared. It's been going down
ever since, but especially since the middle of the 1960s. By 1968, as
I'd indicated, the system was finished in its present form. You had to
have a reversal of tendency.
But what happened, as a result of
the impact of the 68ers on the
streets, in various countries of the world, was, instead of mobilizing
to deal with the international economic crisis,
financial-monetary crisis, they went in the other direction: They went
toward a post-industrial society,
as it was called! We went against nuclear power! Which is the only
power system which could save civilization today. Because most people,
in terms of economics, are idiots. They believe in the so-called "free
energy" policy. They believe that we could rely
upon the winds, rely upon sunlight, and use that for power. You can't!
People don't know what power is. A
calorie is not calorie: Power is measured in energy-flux
density:
That is the intensity, or the equivalent of temperature, of the heat
source used for power. This also goes with physical chemistry: That, to
transform raw materials, or to reprocess waste materials and turn them
into raw materials, we require high energy-flux density
power sources. Petroleum is not high enough; natural gas is
not high enough.
Without nuclear fission power, and
a prospect of nuclear fusion
power, there is no possibility of developing the power sources, on a
sufficiently large scale, to ensure fresh water supplies
for
the population of densely populated nations. India is drawing down its
fossil water resources! What does that mean for the population of the
future? Europe is drawing down its fossil water resources. The United
States is drawing down its fossil water resources. So, without nuclear
power, this planet is not going to recover. The use of wind power is a
farce; it depends upon a large subsidy by governments, of the use of
windmills. And the windmill policy is going to break; if it continues,
it's going to break Europe, if nothing else did. The objection to
nuclear power, will break Europe, if nothing else does.
And the whole conception of
infrastructure, and the conception of
skilled labor in industry, is gone! As we see here at Ruesselsheim.
Let's take the case of Ruesselsheim which has come up at a convenient
point.
The world auto industry was run in
a manner in the postwar period
which was clinically insane. As you know, just take a simple highway:
When you reverse decentralization of production, what do you do? You
concentrate production in a few larger centers. You go to larger
industries, cut back on the smaller industries—what happens? What's the
density of automobile traffic in commuting? More people transit longer
distances to get to and from work. And we have, in United States,
around Washington, for example, you have people who are commuting to
and from work, two hours a day, each way—some longer. What does that do
to family life? What does that do to cost? What does that do to
pollution, in terms of pollution? So what we've done, is by destroying
an integrated agro-industrial production potential, with emphasis on
more and more high technology, with increases in energy-flux density of
power sources, which enables us to use and have new technology, what
we've done, we have destroyed the potential of human beings to live on
this planet.
Now, we did another thing,
similarly: We began to shift employment,
from Europe and the United States, for example, into poorer countries.
People said, that was good. It is not good. They went there for cheap
labor. But the productivity of the world as a
whole, was
lowered. In other words, the average level of productivity of the world
as a whole, was lowered by this outsourcing program. Now you see,
China's existence depended upon its export industry
as a
result of this! Now, China is in an existential crisis, because there
never will be again, the kind of export market on which China has
depended, by gobbling up industries from the United States and Europe
for cheap labor sources.
So, now we've got to a position
where we've got to reverse that,
we've got to put it back. We have to go to the technology which enables
us to sustain a population of over 6 billion people. We are not
presently using the technology, or maintaining the technology, which
will support a population of 6 billion people in their present
condition of life. If we lower the standard of living, we're going to
kill people. Because, look at the China situation: You have a potential
bit of genocide going on, right now, in China, unless we find a remedy,
for that.
And therefore, how're we going to
get out of this? How're we going
to change the world's orientation from the present policies, of
international associations, the present policies of nations in general
— how're we going to reverse that? Because the
habits, the
mental habits, which have taken over nations, especially since the
spring of 1968, those habits are now killing people:
and will wipe out this population of this planet to a large degree in a
New Dark Age, unless we reverse those decisions and those
habits which have governed governments' international affairs, since
1968. That's our situation.
For this purpose, we have to think
of new kinds of cooperation,
especially cooperation in creating leadership for the planet as a
whole. I have designated, since Europe is not functional now; Europe is
incapable now, under its present organization, under its present laws,
Europe is incapable of a concerted capital formation movement, to
rebuild the economy of Europe, and rebuild the economy of the world.
The opposition to nuclear power is just one of the problems.
Demobilization, all these windmills in Germany, is the sign of doom:
This is not Don Quixote targets. This is doom! These windmills are
losers. Reliance on these kinds of power, are losers: You can not have
modern industry with that!
So, who is willing to do it? Well,
I've picked out, there are four
countries on this planet, which, if they cooperate, can stimulate the
planet as a whole to take the measures needed to go in a better
direction. These are, the United States — the United States, whatever
you think about it, is crucial. Without the United States' cooperation,
there will be no recovery of this planet. Without defending China,
there will be no recovery of this planet. Without defending India,
without defending Russia —and without bringing these four nations and
others together in solidarity, to reverse the direction from the past
40 years' direction, back to sanity! as we
understood it in the beginning of 1968, there is no chance of avoiding
a Dark Age.
Now, what is required is simply
this. First of all, end these
trends. Go back to the concept, the best ideal we had earlier, of a sovereign
nation-state.
With globalization, you don't have any chance of anything: You depend
upon the sovereign nation-state for culture, for cultural reasons alone.
Because, what's the problem here,
the problem with outsourcing, in
particular? Well, how does a human being live? How do societies live?
How do we sustain large populations that have grown, especially from
less than 1 billion back in the middle of the 14th century, to 6.7
billion today; how can we sustain that kind of population? We require
scientific and technological progress, as the driver for the
development of infrastructure and manufacturing, and for
care of people—
like medical care, and things of that sort. Large-scale sanitation.
Sanitation is essential, to maintaining life. It's as essential as
medical care is, for maintaining life.
Now, how do we do that? Well, we
educate populations, we develop
their mental powers through education and in culture and in modern
technology, modern science and technology. We build up a population
which is able to assimilate modern science and
technology,
and to apply it at the point of production and in other ways. That's
how we went from about 700 million people on this planet, to now, 6.7
billion people on this planet. So we went in that direction, through
that development.
We have now gone back to reversing
that development. And we have
reversed it, especially since 1968. With the shutting down of nuclear
programs, nuclear energy programs, in the 1970s, we condemned the
planet to a threat of this present type. By going against high
technology, and insisting on low technology, we condemned the planet.
Now: We're going to have to go back
to high technology. And that
means that we're going to have take populations, which are completely
estranged from science and technology, today, in a real sense, and
we're going to have to mobilize them around the use
of
scientific and technological progress, in doing the productive and
related work which is essential to rebuild the potential for the
existence of life on this planet.
There's the problem.
Now, without national cultures, you
can't do this. See, the point
is, what people don't understand, and most economists, in fact, don't
understand, they don't understand what productivity means. They think
they do, but they don't know. Because, productivity depends upon those
creative powers of the individual human mind, through which great
scientific discoveries are made, and through which related types of
improvement and assimilation of innovation comes within the population
in general. In other words, to the extent that we're exposing a
population to the experience of science and technology, and related
cultural patterns, then that population has a potential for being
creative. It has the potential for making discoveries, or at least
assimilating them, productively. Without that orientation toward
science and Classical culture —not the junk that people have today, the
junk that we got in Europe through the post-war period, when we had
this European policy of going to junk, as opposed to Classical culture.
We inhibited, with these trends in the post-war period, we inhibited
the capability of developing productive, creative potentiality, in
populations. This was shown in the educational systems, especially from
the 1960s on.
So we no longer have, with
globalization and similar effects, we no
longer have, the potential for expressing scientific-driven and
Classical culture-driven productivity in populations.
And that's one of the problems we
have in the Asian development. The
idea of keeping Asian populations or South American populations,
keeping these populations ignorant, and poor, without a development of
Classical culture, means they can not sustain themselves
Because the human race can not maintain itself at 6.7 billion people on
the planet if the population is not capable of real
creativity!
Now, the development of this
creativity in the population depends
upon using national and related cultures, as the vehicle of mobilizing
people to think creatively about themselves, and about people, and
about society in general. If you think about a cheap-labor population,
a cheap-labor population in general: They aren't capable
of innovation. And suddenly, you find yourself confined to methods of
production, which are not capable of generating
technological and scientific progress needed to save the planet.
The idea of organizing this, was
essentially a European idea. It
came in Europe, in particular—the thrust for what became European
civilization came out of the Council of Florence in the middle of the
15th century, about 1439, that period, the great ecumenical Council of
Florence. And this was a flourishing of Nicholas of Cusa, for example,
or Filippo Brunelleschi earlier, as exemplified by the Santa Maria
della Fiore Dome in Florence. The work of the successors of Nicholas of
Cusa, such as Leonardo da Vinci, and the great scientific minds of the
16th and 17th century: This is how we got European culture.
And not separate from this, is the
process leading through Bach into
the great musical culture and related things in great Classical
artistic culture, in drama, and so forth. These are the things which we
developed from roots in preexisting European civilization. We developed
these in Europe, and we exported these from Europe, as in the
colonization of South and North America. We transmitted these to the
world.
The idea was to extend this to the
population of the world, the access to this kind of knowledge. And thus
to promote
in the individual, that quality which distinguishes man from monkeys
and apes: The power of creativity. No form of animal life is capable of
raising, voluntarily, its own potential population density. The only
kind of life that has ever been able, or ever will
be able,
to increase the potential population density of the planet, to raise
the standard of living and longevity of a population, is the human
being: The creative powers which exist in only living form, these
creative powers exist only in the individual human being. And it's that
creative power which drives scientific and technological progress, as
well as cultural progress.
And when we quench that, by
cheap-labor policies, by anti-scientific policies, by the kind of
culture that degrades
people by participating in it, rather than promoting their development,
we are destroying creativity! People express creativity as individuals.
But they express creativity as individuals who are working together in
a certain culture.
For example: How do you express
creativity? In the use of language!
In the use of national language as a social expression, the
communication of ideas. And the question is how deeply in the
population can you get that communication of ideas. If you have a
population which is 50% or 60% ignorant, and kept in ignorance—is that
population going to be capable of developing these kinds of ideas, of
developing creativity? No! Therefore, it is the development of national
cultures,
the water in which the fish of people swim in the nation, the national
culture, its development, is the source of increase of the potential
productivity and creativity of the people in society. And therefore,
it's the idea of national mobilization, to national purpose, in this
sense, in the sense of a cultural movement, which the basis upon which
creativity is fostered and has been fostered in human existence. It's
called, by Leibniz and others, dynamics, as
opposed to Cartesian methods.
And therefore, we have to mobilize
nations as sovereign
nation-states, not to kill each other, but according to the Westphalian
principle: To put the other nations first, be concerned for the other.
So it's a people, as a national sovereign people, considering the
welfare of other sovereign peoples, as being in their
interest, while at the same time defending their own sovereignty, which
has been the source of every great achievement of European civilization
in particular. And is a lesson we have learned from studied other
cultures, in Asia and so forth, from earlier times. And that's our
problem.
Now, this involves practical
problems. I have said, for reasons
related to this, that the only hope, now, for preventing the entire
planet from sinking into a New Dark Age, in which the population level
will drop from the present 6.7 billion people to less than 2, in a
fairly short time, speaking of generations, is by these methods, this
approach: By going back to the nations — end globalization, replace
globalization with a Westphalian approach both to relations among
peoples, but also their relations among people as nations in
cooperating for the development for potential productive powers of the
planet as a whole. That's our only chance.
What was the United
States?
The United States, for various
reasons is a center of that. Now, a
lot of Europeans don't like to say that, they don't like to think about
that. But what was the United States? About 1620, when the first people
from England and Netherlands came to North America, there was a
migration from Europe into North America which became, principally, the
United States, later.
How did this occur?
The great Renaissance in Europe
occurred around the center of the
Council of Florence, and the great impetus in culture, in science, and
so forth, from there. But then, those who represented the "older ways,"
which had led into the Dark Age of the 14th century, intervened, to try
to stop and suppress this development. The development progressed in
that century, in the 15th century, with Louis XI in France, who set
into motion the first actually functioning
nation-state on
this planet. Louis XI was admired very much by a fellow who became
Henry VII of England, who copied the same approach from Louis XI.
But then, you had a reversal of
this tendency, very soon, beginning
about 1492, with the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Because an evil,
reactionary force associated with the Habsburgs at that time, had
unleashed a mode of religious warfare, which was also done in other
ways, largely from Venice, a religious warfare which tore Europe apart,
in religious warfare, from 1492 to 1648, until the Peace of Westphalia.
So this process was already ongoing in the Fall of Constantinople, and
what followed.
Nicholas of Cusa, in that process,
back then, when he was still
alive, after seeing the wars in the Balkan areas, which were continuing
wars, said "Europe is doomed in going this way. Therefore, we must send
people across the oceans, to find other people in other parts of the
world, and to set up relations with them, on which we can predicate a
return to the principles of the Renaissance."
Now, he died. But his testaments,
his writings on this subject, were
sent to other places, to a trustee of his, who happened to be a Vatican
representative in Portugal. Christopher Columbus became acquainted with
this material, from Nicholas of Cusa at that point, before about 1480,
and wrote to the circles of Cusa, who was now dead, in Italy, and had
extensive exchanges on the subject of Cusa's plans for long-range,
oceanic voyages, to develop relations between people in Europe, who
were part of the Renaissance, and people in other parts of the world.
By 1480, Christopher Columbus was
committed to this problem and the
program. He then began campaigning to obtain support— funding and other
support—for a voyage across the Atlantic; and remember, he was an
Atlantic sea captain—he knew about ocean currents, and recognized the
validity of the information he had, that, across the Atlantic, at about
the distance where the United States lies today, there was another
continent; and that we should, from Europe, begin to send voyages to
make contact with the people on this other continent. That was
Christopher Columbus's purpose. What happened back in Spain was a
rather different purpose.
But, out of this development, you
had the influence on people, in
England, for example, who began to spread the idea— since Europe is in
trouble with this rise in religious warfare, is it not time to begin to
colonize other parts of the planet, to establish lines of communication
with people on other parts of the planet, other continents, in order to
try to save Europe?
So therefore, there was from that
point on, from the beginning of
the 17th century, from the beginning of that time, there was a large
influx of that; the influx came from England, in 1620, where especially
the Pilgrims landed in New England—that was the beginning of the
process. With the Peace of Westphalia, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, among his
other projects, had a special emphasis on—well, he took families from
village in France, and he put them on ships, and he sent them to
Quebec. And these families were just transplanted from towns and
villages in France, into now, new towns settled in Quebec. And that was
two things. You had two movements, one from France, typically, typified
by the case of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and then, also from England and
other parts of Europe. A lot of Germans began moving along that
direction, too, along with the Dutch.
So, the idea was, in the
colonization of North America, in particular, the intention was not
to escape from Europe! These were not refugees. These were pioneers,
who were inspired by leaders of these expeditions which intended to save
European civilization from its own self-destruction,
by taking the viable parts of European culture and creating colonies
across the Atlantic, in which to preserve the best of European
civilization against the oligarchical interests of Europe, such as
those which were behind this religious warfare.
So therefore, the United States
had, from the beginning, a dynamic
characteristic, even before it was a nation, of people who were
committed to saving the best of European civilization, even from Europe
itself.
So that, into our institutions,
beginning during that period, during
the middle of the 17th century on, there was a development in the
United States for this direction. There was also a counter-development,
from Europe, trying to crush it. You had the reactionary forces of
Spain, trying to crush similar settlements from Spanish populations
which were trying to find a place for civilization where Spanish could
be spoken, in South America and Central America. So this was the
process.
So the characteristic of the United
States, the importance of the
United States, is not that it's a bunch of people sitting on a certain
territory. The important thing about the United States is the
conveying, dynamically, within the population, of this idea of
preserving the best of European culture at a safe distance from Europe.
And the oligarchical problems which hit Europe, which still exist in
Europe, today.
The effect of this, from Europe
was, on the part of the
Habsburg-centered interests and on the part of the British Empire, as
it emerged in 1763 in particular, was to crush this! The first crushing
came with William of Orange, in that period, the attempt to crush the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. And this kept coming and coming. The British
interest in this became associated with the British East India Company,
which was not a part of Britain, but was a completely separate power
unto itself. So the tendency was to crush the
United States,
from the outside, and from the inside: by corruption from the inside,
and corruption and pressure from the outside.
With the success of the American
Revolution, achieved, mostly
significantly, under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, and with the
development of the transcontinental railway system, under the impetus
of the Lincoln Administration, we had a revolution in the world.
Because prior to about the 1870s, the greatest power on this planet,
commercially and militarily, strategically, was sea power. The ability
to transport forces and economy, by ocean waters or sea waters, was the
center of world economy. Land-based transport could not compete. We had
an attempt in that direction, with Charlemagne, with the development of
the water systems of continental Europe, from France eastward, under
Charlemagne: That was a program that was trying to overcome this
problem, that the ocean-borne traffic was more economical, and more
powerful economically, than land-based transport, and land-based
production.
So therefore, sea power was able to
dominate the world. And the
British system was simply a system, which is based on the idea of sea
power to dominate the world. The crucial thing came with Paolo Sarpi,
where, instead of trying to concentrate on sea power in the
Mediterranean, where it had been up to that period, was to transfer sea
power—the sea power of Venice, because Venice was then, and is still
today, the center of this kind of process—to transport this power of
finance—of piracy, as better called!—from the Mediterranean, to move
the center of naval power, of maritime power, to the northern coasts of
Europe. And this was centered around the Netherlands. And the way it
was put in, was through the Netherlands war. And the people of the
Netherlands went crazy, under the conditions of this religious warfare
led by the Habsburgs. So a power emerged in the Netherlands, which is
corrupt, which is a branch of Venice's finance, and evil.
And that became the center point of
creating what became known as
the British Empire, which is not the "British" Empire: It's a northern
version of the Venetian financier empire. You don't think the people of
England have the brains to know what an economy is, do you? It's an
evil force, which is evil in Europe, which is centered on this process:
going north, to establish sea power.
With the development, and the
defeat of the Lord Palmerston's
Confederacy, by the forces led by Lincoln, there was a transformation
inside the United States, to the development of a project which had
been founded by John Quincy Adams, when he had been Secretary of State:
The unification of the United States as a territory, from its Canadian
to Mexico borders, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as a sovereign
state. And the effecting of that, by not only a system of canals, of
inland water systems, but also by transcontinental railway
systems.
The development of the transcontinental railway system in the United
States, by establishing the United States as an integrated territory, a
national territory, shook the world! And one of the leading responses
to this was by a then-young professional diplomat, Otto von Bismarck,
in Germany. And you had a similar thing after 1870 in France.
So you had the development from
Europe, of transcontinental railway
systems, which now integrated the internal territory, of national
territory, in a degree of efficiency, which could not be
matched by sea power!
And that is why Britain launched what became known as World War I! And
the war was against the implications of the development of
transcontinental railway systems in Eurasia: That
was the major issue! It's the issue today.
So therefore, the United States,
from that point on — this program
from the United States, the idea—. We don't like the oligarchs — we're
not going to shoot them, unless we have to — but we don't like
oligarchs. They're a parasite. We've had them in Europe too long! We've
had them in other parts of the world too long. We don't need
them any more.
What we need, is national
leaderships, which understand this idea of
mission, which Nicholas of Cusa expressed in the Renaissance period: Save
the culture of Europe—from itself!
By transplanting the best of it to other places, where it can be built
up, as an ally of those forces in Europe which are trying to save
Europe itself, from self-destruction. That remains a thing today, and
that is the built-in dynamic quality of the United States as a nation,
still today. And anybody in the United States, who has any real
patriotism, and intelligence about it, will think that way: We don't
like oligarchs! We can have all the Hollywood fools and sillinesses we
want; we don't like oligarchs! A typical American, a patriotic American
does not like oligarchs, and does not like
oligarchical thinking. Europeans are too sensitive, they—you know— "von
This" and "von That" and whatnot.
We don't like oligarchs. We believe
that it's from the people
themselves, that the natural, native leadership of a nation arises. And
we want people who are national patriots, as leaders. Not people who
are—you know, because of bloodlines or something; because they
descended from the right animal or something.
So that's the function of the
United States. That is still, whenever
the United States moves in the correct direction, and we have a see-saw
in our history—always, back and forth! — the pro-British people are no
damned good; the anti-British people, are sometimes no good, too, but
the best ones are always found in those quarters. Those who are national
patriots,
who are not concerned about great wealth, not concerned about titles,
or going to drinking parties or that sort of thing. But people who are
concerned about developing the nation, and who often have family
traditions of service to the nation. You have, in terms of the core of
the real organic government of the United States, in terms of its
institutions, are people who often descend from families which, in the
family, have maintained a tradition, a family tradition, of service to
the nation. And whose loyalties are tied to service to the nation, and
to the nation's mission.
And that's our strength. It's our
strength, which in Europe, you
have to fight to get that established. For us, it's more easy; that's
why we've had such bad Presidents, because they kill good ones. That's
how they try to prevent us from doing what we're supposed to do.
So the mission, now, we're at the
point, is the United States is key
to this! We have to bring forth, in the United States, the full power
of that American tradition. And that American tradition is to try to
find a way of a safe world in which Americans and others can live. That
means, finding partners just the same way that Nicholas of Cusa
envisaged this: Partners in other parts of the planet, with whom we
enter into cooperation, for common ends, but from a standpoint of
different cultures! Because a people can only develop in terms of a
national culture. They have to develop dynamically, as a national
culture. You can not come in and chop these populations up, and discard
part of them. So you have to develop the entire
population,
with the idea of national culture, and national culture mission. And
then, with the same principle as the Peace of Westphalia, to adopt the
idea of a world mission, based on a collegiality among national
cultures, who work to a common purpose, in the same sense as the Peace
of Westphalia, the principle of Westphalia: That's what's needed.
So, what we have to do, is we have
to take nations which are
representative and willing, of this kind of goal: the United States,
Russia, for special reasons, China, India, and so forth, and organize a
collegium of nations, which are dedicated to this purpose, and are
willing to make a long-term commitment to fulfillment of that purpose.
"Long-term" means 80 to 100 years. Because the kind of investments
which are required, to accomplish this, are investments which, in terms
of capital investments, and investments in development of people, which
are counted in generations: 20 to 25 years perspective, minimal; 50
years perspective for infrastructure; and for certain special kinds of
infrastructure, such as major world water systems, major world
transportation systems, you're talking about a 100-year investment.
So therefore, you have to have a
perspective, a long-term
perspective of up to a century, the coming century, of commitment, to
lay down an intention for a coming century of commitment, broken down
into shorter periods of a half of a 25-year period, a half-life, that
sort of thing. And the purpose is to raise the productive powers of the
population, through a combination of infrastructure development, of
relevant kinds of infrastructure development, from which power comes.
But above all, the cultural self-development of the population, in
their national culture!
Or what they make as a national culture. Only with that, and only with
an orientation on scientific and related progress, cultural progress,
as the law, to reverse the anti-progress
tendency, since 1968—only that, that is, reversing the
direction of policy-shaping, from 1968 to the present,
and going back to what had been the implicit agreement among nations
coming out of World War II, an implicit agreement to build a world free
of colonization, free of subjugation of people, and free of the
traditions of oligarchism: the same principle which had motivated the
Europeans who had sent colonists across the waters of the Atlantic, and
tried to build a bastion for saving European civilization from what was
going on in Europe itself. And that's our mission.
Now: To accomplish that, we have to
bring together those four
nations, and others, that is, willing nations among those four who are
willing to cooperate with this kind of long-term perspective,
century-long perspective, at least among leading people; we have to
have that orientation; and you have to have a more short-term—a
generation. Remember, that before the idiocy of the recent time, a
family organization used to be counted in four or so generations.
Today, we can barely keep the same generation together, on agreement.
With the new, crazy culture, people develop subcultures, which are
anti- the previous subculture. People no longer think of their parents
as human, or the grandparents, and so forth, in the sense we used to.
We used to think about the family
as a machine, of a kind, which
would generate a goal in that society: the first generation would start
the second generation on their way; the second generation would start
the third, and so, society would progress. People would look back. A
man who was aging, retired, would take his grandchild out and show him
what he had helped build, to express his joy with that grandchild. And
say, "Here's what I helped build." They would go to these great dam
projects, great river projects, and so forth: "I helped build this.
That's who I am." And the grandchild would be proud. Not today.
So the point is, we had a reversal.
We have a cultural regression, and we have to reverse that.
Now, therefore, we look at that
from that standpoint, because we
have to, the leaders who must be mobilized to do this, have to
understand: We look at Russia, China, and India, from the United
States, right now: What is Russia's mission, when we look at it in
50-year, 100-year terms? What is China's perspective, in 50-year,
100-year terms? What's the perspective of India, in that? What's the
perspective of smaller nations? What's the role of Korea? What's the
role Japan in this picture? What's the role of Southeast Asian
countries in this picture? Hmm? So, how do we build a perspective, for
the coming period?
Now, the driver has to be,
essentially, to revive within the United
States, our own tradition, and provide that as a unifying factor, in
bringing together these nations. And to hope that by doing so, we'll
get Europe to abandon this crazy globalization that's been going on
here. And get back to a system of sovereign nation-states, which is
capable of making its own decisions on capital formation, and the
creation of credit. And restoring European culture back to what it had
been in the modern period, in terms of the struggle for progress, the
struggle for better ways of producing, the struggle for science, and
Classical culture: That's our perspective.
Now, in respect to achieving this,
I can report to you, what I know
of the present U.S. administration: It is well-staffed, in part. There
are some people in it, I don't like. And I don't like, not because I
have a personal dislike for them, like one dog disliking another, but
because I know they're no damned good! But in general, the
Administration, and the people around it, associated with it, with the
U.S. government in this Administration, are perfectly capable of
leading and doing the job that the United States must do.
The problem is, we have people,
such as George Soros, and the Wall
Street crowd, who typify the worst among us and the worst in Europe.
For example, George Soros is the world's biggest drug pusher. George
Soros, who's a British asset working closely with Lord Malloch-Brown,
does most of the evil in the world, as in Africa, for example. And it's
done by the international drug traffic. And the failure of nations to
take on the international drug traffic, today, is one of the major
problems internationally.
The drug traffic is still run the
same way the Anglo-Dutch set up
their operations toward the end of the 18th century. For example, you
have a farmer in Afghanistan, who produces a crop of opium; there's
maybe $500-$600 value at the time that it's in his possession. It's
increased by a thousand times, up to a thousand times, by the time it
reaches the consumer in Europe or the United States. We have the same
thing: All of South America, except Colombia, is now committed to a
drug program. And the drugs are flowing up, through South America, into
Mexico, and across the border from Mexico into the United States. Same
thing.
The strategic problem of the world,
of Southwest Asia and so forth,
is largely, drugs, the drug traffic. And sending troops into
Afghanistan to fight the terrorists, is crazy. What you have to do—the
farmer in Afghanistan is not naturally a terrorist: He's a farmer. And
he has the lusts and passions of a farmer. What you have to do, is, you
have to kill the cross-border traffic! Because the opium is not sold,
and consumed, in Afghanistan. It's consumed in Europe! How's it get to
Europe? It's transported. We don't need to put troops into Afghanistan
for this kind of purpose. What we have to do, is attack this source of
the income and power of the international drug traffic! We have to
crush them! No more deals with them. No more legalization! The traffic
will be considered a major crime against the civilization. It is
a major crime against the civilization! It's the greatest threat to
civilization we have in Eurasia today! And we have silly Americans have
been sending troops into Southwest Asia, and it's nonsense! We don't do
any good there! We just get troops killed and demoralized.
What we have to do, is stop the
drug traffic! But this means, taking
on the British Empire! Whose agent, George Soros, is the biggest factor
today, internationally, with his friend Lord Malloch-Brown, in running
this operation!
See, the purpose of warfare, is not
warfare: The purpose of warfare
is something you avoid, if possible. And you apply it only to the real
source of the problem. And try to get the job done quickly! Long wars
are bad. They are inherently bad. What you do is—warfare today,
military force is simply an adjusting factor — or should be — just an
adjusting factor in dealing with something like this drug trafficking.
As General McCaffrey has emphasized repeatedly, as kind of a spokesman
of what we're saying from the United States: The drug traffic is our
major enemy! Because, it's the major power of the British to control
policy throughout the world, today. You break that — and you've got
control of the planet, back with the people! Because the money
power, now, is coming from the speculation associated with
the drug traffic.
That's the center of these resources. The gambling industry—shut down
derivatives trading! Close down the derivatives market! And you close
down the drug traffic, and you've solved the biggest part of the
problem, or you've made it soluble.
So, therefore, our problem is, we
need cooperation to shut down the
drug traffic; we need cooperation to shut down other things. Therefore,
cooperation among nations, both negatively, against
these kinds of problems, and positively, for
cooperation in long-term economic development, nation-to-nation, and
groups of nations, and so forth, is what's necessary.
For the ordinary administration of
a recovery program in the United
States, I'm convinced that the present administration contains within
it—including a few misguided people—contains within it, the potential
of doing the job, on the part of the United States to get something
going in this direction. But what is going to be required, is long-term
credit for long-term investment, as in Russia, especially development
of raw materials of in Russia; and development of production, based on
those raw materials, inside Russia. That means transportation systems;
it means the tundra areas have to be exploited. And you have to—you
have a national culture that is capable of dealing with the
exploitation of tundra areas, which some of my acquaintances in the
Vernadsky Museum in Moscow are specialists in this area. We need their
cooperation for that, and for other purposes. It's the largest
land-area of any nation in the world: Russia. We need their
cooperation. All right. That is a Eurasian culture. It's been a
Eurasian culture since before Peter the Great, as an experience of the
Asian experience.
Then you have China: Totally Asian
culture. It can not survive, now,
without being reoriented, and supported, in cooperative economic
relations with the rest of the world. It can no longer rely upon the
United States as a dumping ground for cheap goods. It has to be put on
a long-term investment program, where credit is created by which the
Chinese population can increase its productivity by itself.
India has to be integrated with
that. Because you're talking, China,
1.4 billion people; India, 1-plus billion people today. And then
Southwest Asia added into that.
The cooperation of the United
States with Russia, China, India, and
associated nations, is really the major concentration of economic and
political power in the world, under these conditions. So we have to
have a concept of that type.
Finally, which is my very special
function in this: We have to get
rid of the idea, that money, in any way, represents intrinsic value.
Money does not represent intrinsic value. It is not money that
determines the value of goods. Money, as we used to do in the United
States, especially as Roosevelt emphasized this, is you need a fixed-exchange-rate
system,
in which, when you loan at 2%, you do not have fluctuations in currency
values, which raise the 2% to 4% and 5% and so forth. Therefore, you
must have a fixed-exchange-rate system among nations, and you must
have, not a monetary system, which is an imperialist system
intrinsically, but a credit system. And this was the intention of
Franklin Roosevelt, in 1944, before his death. This was changed by
Truman, fundamentally.
Roosevelt, when he made his
proposal, for reconstruction of the
world system around a credit system, a fixed-exchange-rate credit
system, fought against Keynes! He was an opponent
of Keynes.
Keynes was a filthy imperialist of the worst type. His type was
typified by a book he wrote, in German, published in Berlin in 1937, on
his system. And he wrote a preface to it, which is revealing — in
German, also — saying he had published his first great book in Germany
because the conditions in Germany at that time, 1937, were more
favorable to his ideas than those in the rest of the world! And that
was true. That remains true, today. So Keynes is not a solution.
We do not need a monetary system.
What is the monetary system? The
monetary system means that nations do not have a sovereign credit
system. Because you have an international monetary arrangement, which
is controlled by Venetian-style bankers, which use
governments and use their nominal currencies within arrangements, arranged
by a combination of international monetary powers, which are private
powers.
We have to go to a credit system,
where money can not be uttered, except by the sovereign act
of government. And money is uttered as credit, which can
then be monetized, under the law, as money.
What we need is long-term
investments. We need the ability,
especially, to build around 15- to 25-year investments, 50-year
investments, and 100-year investments,—like the great rail systems and
water systems of Europe and Eurasia, are essentially 100-year
investments. Other things of that sort, 50-year investments, long-term
power stations—a nuclear power station today, really is a 30- to
40-year investment, if it's a good one, a major one. Smaller ones are
different, but the major ones should be 50-year investments. We can
design them that way: We now know how to do that! And we need a lot of
nuclear power. We have to develop thermonuclear fusion, to go to even
higher energy-flux densities, for technologies we can not achieve
without those higher energy-flux densities!
So therefore, we have a program, an
agreement among nations, by
treaty agreements among nations, for a fixed-exchange-rate system;
treaty agreements on certain long-term objectives shared by nations,
for improvements. And with an objective of educating the population as
to what these treaty agreements mean.
But we must go back to the
sovereign nation-state.
Now, this is where I come in, and
that's where I have the biggest
fight: On the question of reform—when my proposed legislation of July
25th, 2007, that legislation actually would work. What I proposed was
to set up a banking operation, because at that time I knew we were
headed for a housing crisis. Therefore, we had to put the housing
system into bankruptcy reorganization; the entire mortgage system had
to go into that. We had to tie that to bankers: In other words, we
could not allow any evictions of citizens, mass evictions, of citizens
from their homes, because of this speculation. We could also not allow
banks, on which our system depends, to collapse. We had to put the
banks into bankruptcy reorganization, and under bankruptcy
protection:
The bank will not shut down its doors. We will go in and look at the
books, and if the investments on the books are legitimate, we will
support the bank. We will support them with bankruptcy protection in
the long term. If it's speculation, if it's these monsters that go
around with this speculation? "Nothing for you, buddy! You go bankrupt.
We get rid of you." And with that kind of agreement, we could have
saved, we could have prevented, if action was taken at that time, when
we launched it in September, actually, of 2007: If that had not been
obstructed by Senator Dodd, and Rep. Barney Frank, and others, we would
not be in the mess we're in in the world today.
The problem is, that, in the United
States, politically, financier
power is a powerful political influence, and tradition is also a
powerful political influence. So that's essentially where I come in on
this thing: Is the designing of this kind of system I just described.
An understanding of what investment means, because most people in the
United States today, and in Europe, don't know what investment means.
Thank you.
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