LPAC Fredags-webcast 18. september 2015:
Wall Street er død; Glass-Steagall og konkursbehandling nu
ISIS kan ikke bekæmpes uden hjælp fra Rusland
v/Jeffrey Steinberg

Wall Street er død, og USA’s regering må gøre en ende på dets lidelser og sætte det under konkursbehandling under Glass-Steagall. Hvad sker der så? Hvordan ville en “New Deal” for det 21. århundrede se ud? Dette og mere diskuteres på aftenens webcast. Engelsk udskrift. 

Wall Street is dead and the federal government needs to put it out of its misery beginning with a Glass-Steagall banking reorganization. What follows? What would a 21st century New Deal look like today? This and more discussed in tonight’s webcast. This webcast was prerecorded.

LaRouche on Bankrutcy of the Fed, the Total FDR Approach
Federal Reserve Makes an Error Based on a Lie

 Transcript- JASON ROSS: Good evening. This is the LaRouche PAC webcast for September 18, 2015. My name is Jason Ross, and joining me in the studio tonight are Jeff Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review, and Benjamin Deniston from LaRouche PAC. As a note to our viewers, we are pre-recording this event on September 17.

So, to jump right in to our first topic, which is the economy and Wall Street. LaRouche’s assessment is that Wall Street is breaking down; that we need Glass-Steagall, but that this can’t be seen as one bill in isolation, but rather as part of an entire FDR approach to the economy. One in which value is placed on something real, rather than simply money. So, I’d like to ask Jeff Steinberg to come up and tell us what is going on in the economy; and what do we do?

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thanks, Jason. Well, just in the last several hours, the Federal Open Market Committee announced that they will not raise interest rates. This comes in a context in which virtually everyone who has a view of what’s been going on inside the trans-Atlantic system is convinced that we are on the edge of a massive blow-out; something that goes way beyond what happened in 2007 and 2008 with the blow-out of the real estate bubble in the United States, which spread to the entire banking and insurance sector of the US. And then, over a period of time, spread into Europe. Nothing fundamental was done to change the nature of the situation; in fact, in the aftermath of the trillions of dollars of bail-out of Wall Street — in the range minimally of $15-20 trillion in direct taxpayer bail-out of hopelessly bankrupt financial institutions, those institutions took the message very clearly. Continue with the same reckless, irresponsible gambling behavior, and once again, taxpayers will be looted to bail out the bubble.

So, here we are in 2015, seven years this month virtually this week, since the Lehman Brothers debacle, and the too-big-to-fail banks are bigger by both capitalization, by derivatives exposure, and by percentage of the US banking sector that they have a vise-grip control over; and they’ve continued with the same exact behavior. Dodd-Frank was a pathetic, sick joke; the Volcker Rule was never even intended to be implemented. All it was, was a diversion to prevent the only viable starting point for a meaningful solution; and that’s the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall exactly as it was done in 1933 by Franklin Roosevelt, when Glass-Steagall was simply the obvious and necessary first step to launching a major economic recovery based on wiping out Wall Street’s bubble, and moving toward state credit directed at job creation and real economic recovery. That same solution is required today; Wall Street is far bigger, is far more bankrupt than it was at the time of the 1929 Crash and the follow-on crashes that were inherited by Franklin Roosevelt when he was elected President.

The global derivatives alone, is in the range of $1.5-2 quadrillion; and you’ve had a net decline in the actual global GDP by any kind of measurement of real physical economy. The GDP numbers, of course, are completely hoked up; and are virtually useless because they reflect so much activity that is purely parasitical and has nothing to do with the needs of the real world population or the requirements of a real economic recovery. So, we are at the very edge of a blow-out of the entire global financial system. Centered in the trans-Atlantic region, you’ve got Wall Street, which is now the epicenter of this financial bubble that can never be paid, that is thoroughly worthless; and is a reflection of the extreme to which we’ve gotten into a money system in which everything is measured by money, and there is no concern whatsoever for real, physical economic measurements of wealth. Mr. LaRouche, as many of you undoubtedly know, has been the author of critical writings on the subject of how to measure real economic value. And he’s developed several unique concepts; concepts of energy flux density, potential relative population density, that measure the actual physical capacity of the planet to sustain an expanded population.

Ultimately, the issue comes down to the fact that human beings are not animals. That human beings can conceptualize the future; can make decisions about the nature of the future that will inform policy decisions today. The greatest recent memory example of that kind of policy approach was the actions taken by President Franklin Roosevelt; and particularly in the first 100 days of his Presidency, where the Wall Street bubble was wiped out. The original Glass-Steagall Act of June 1933, completely broke up the Wall Street too-big-to-fail banks of that period; and established an absolute iron-clad separation between traditional commercial banks and investment banks and insurance companies and other institutions that engaged in wild speculative activity leading to the blow-out. And Roosevelt established the FDIC that insured citizens’ deposits in the banks, to prevent future bank runs. That system worked effectively; we had no systemic crises from 1933 until 1999, when, under impeachment threat and under the cloud of other scandals, President Bill Clinton capitulated to the like of Larry Summers, and signed into law the bill that repealed Glass-Steagall. There was no reason and no excuse for President Clinton to have done that at the time.

As a consequence of that action and other deregulation acts that followed after that, you had in a very short period of time, a build-up of the largest financial bubble in recorded history; which blew out in 2007-2008. It was bailed out — out of the hides of taxpayers — and then proceeded to build up once again to an even greater level. The Richmond Federal Reserve issued a report several months ago that basically said that were there to be a “new bail-out” of the banks in the event of a new banking crisis, the taxpayers would be obliged to more than they were obliged to in 2008, when the total bail-out fund made available to the banks was $23.7 trillion. That is according to Senate testimony by Leo [neil] Barofsky, who was the Inspector General of the TARP program at the time. Now the Richmond Fed estimate is that the immediate figure of bail-out would be $26.5 trillion; but that’s just a drop in the bucket. The entirety of Wall Street is hopelessly, irreversibly bankrupt, and the only viable course of action, for starters, is to reinstate Glass-Steagall.

By doing that, you immediately begin an audit of all of the US banks; and you separate out legitimate commercial banking activity from all of the gambling, all of the derivatives, all of the activities that should never have come under the umbrella of the FDIC under a Glass-Steagall system. The moment that that gambling debt is separated out, and is no longer subject to taxpayers’ bail-out, you will immediately have a blow-out of that entire system. Wall Street will vaporize, because some wise guy right off the bat will make a margin call; and in one fell swoop, the entire derivatives bubble, all of the insurance and gambling activities, the credit default swaps, all of those things will be gone. And basic message of Mr. LaRouche is “Good riddance!” This is a parasite that has been destroying the real economy, the real conditions of life for the overwhelming majority of Americans and citizens around the world. So, we don’t need it! Wall Street can basically disappear; it’s already dead, and the fact that it hasn’t yet been buried, simply means that there is a terrible stench over southern Manhattan.

So, this is the reality of the situation. I can just say, anecdotally, that in the last 48 hours, I’ve had discussions with two very prominent international bankers — one in London, one who commutes back and forth between London and New York — and they both said very bluntly, “The game is up. The system is hopelessly bankrupt. The mountain of debt that has been built up, the quantitative easing policies of the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, and until recently the US Federal Reserve, have created such a massive debt bubble that it is unpayable; and all it’s doing is choking the life out of the real economy.”

So, what do we need to do? We need: 1. Glass-Steagall immediately; and this should be done preemptively, because we don’t know whether we’re going to wake up tomorrow morning to find out that we’ve had a blow-out of the whole system. Now, one of the reasons to be sure, that the Federal Open Market Committee did not go with the quarter-point interest rate increase today is because there were hysterical warnings. Reports this week by the Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank; absolute hysteria coming from people like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard — one of the leading mouthpieces for the City of London — writing in the Daily Telegraph, warning that there must be a massive new quantitative easing. No interest rate hike can be tolerated; the bubble has to be bailed out one more time. Otherwise, the sky will fall in, and we’re all doomed.

Well, the reality is, the sky will not fall in if Glass-Steagall is followed by an orderly process of emission of credit through the existing commercial banks for viable projects, capital investment in critically-needed infrastructure projects, job creation projects, and emphasis on those programs which represent the kind of science-driver policy that Franklin Roosevelt enacted particularly with the launching of the Tennessee Valley Authority. So, there is no magic here. Wall Street is gone; it’s finished. There is nothing that can be done to salvage it. And the more that it’s kept from being buried, the more the pain will be inflicted. We need a series of emergency steps; we need directed Federal credit to inject capital into the legitimate commercial banks, because those banks will be greatly under-capitalized because they’ve been looted in the post-Glass-Steagall period. So, we need not only Glass-Steagall in the United States, but we need it internationally. And I am confident, based on some of the recent developments in Europe — particularly some of the dramatic shifts that we’ve seen in Germany in the past several weeks — that a Glass-Steagall action by the US Congress will be rapidly followed in Europe and in other critical parts of the world.

But then the critical thing is the full FDR agenda. Roosevelt used the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which had been created by Herbert Hoover, as a quasi-national bank structure through which to provide credit for job creation. Both jobs that fulfilled an urgent emergency need because of the massive rates of unemployment; and secondly investment in capital-intensive programs, again, typified by the TVA. So that by the time we reached the late 1930s, when war had already erupted in Europe and President Roosevelt knew it was inevitable that the United States would be brought into the war, we had built up productive capacity in this country; through modernization of infrastructure, through revival of manufacturing and particularly the machine tool sector, through the kind of innovative scientific and technological work being done already through projects like the TVA. And it was those programs that made it possible for the United States to carry out the biggest military mobilization in human recorded history, to defeat fascism both in Europe and Asia.

So, in the current context, we want to avoid war at all costs, because war means thermonuclear war of extinction. But in all other modes, the lessons and the policies that were adopted by Franklin Roosevelt are exactly what must inform the policies that are carried out right now. That means, by the way, that Glass-Steagall must be immediately enacted preemptively in order to create the foundation of a functioning, effective commercial banking system with Wall Street buried and long gone. And actions along those lines will also have the further beneficial effect of ending the Obama Presidency; because he’s been nothing but a tool of those Wall Street and London interests that will be basically vaporized by the kind of policy initiatives that Mr. LaRouche has been spelling out.

So, we’re in a moment of crisis. As I say, people whom I spoke to in London and New York are absolutely crystal clear on the fact that the system is doomed and it’s a matter of days and hours, and perhaps weeks and not much longer than that before some incident, some factor will trigger the detonation of the entire system.

ROSS: Moving over to the strategic situation involving Syria and Russia, this is the institutional question for this week. It says:

“Mr. LaRouche, Secretary of State John Kerry called his counterpart Sergei Lavrov and re-affirmed the US commitment to fight ISIL terrorist groups in Syria with a coalition of more than 60 countries — of which Assad could never be a credible member, according to Kerry — and emphasized that the US would welcome a constructive Russian role in the anti-ISIL efforts. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that during the call, Mr. Lavrov again stressed the need to form a united front to fight terrorist groups in Syria. In your view, can there be a collaborative process leading to the inclusion of Russia in the counter-ISIL efforts?”

STEINBERG: In a moment, I want to go to the notes that I took during that discussion with Mr. LaRouche, because I want to present his formulations very precisely. But let me start by saying that some elements of the question I think have to be commented on. The idea that there is actually a coalition of 60 countries fighting against ISIL today is in and of itself a fraud. How can you have a coalition that’s fighting against ISIL, when it includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, and Qatar, who are the four leading countries in the region who have promoted and facilitated the rise of ISIS? In fact, you’d have to go all the way back to the late 1970s and ’80s when we were labelling what became al-Qaeda as mujahideen freedom fighters, because they were terrorists who were financed and recruited by the United States, Britain, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others, to go into Afghanistan and wage warfare against the Soviet Red Army. When the Soviets left Afghanistan, those networks remained intact and turned their sights against the West, against the United States, as anybody with a brain would have anticipated and forecasted. So, the United States bears responsibility, along with the Saudis, along with the British, along with other Gulf countries, for creating this terrorist fiasco in the first place. Jihadist terrorism as it exists today, would not be the global threat that it is today, were it not for the actions that were undertaken to create these organizations that were ostensibly put together to fight against the Soviets.

So, there’s a real irony here. To this day, Saudi Arabia is widely known to be the largest financier and overall promoter of the spread of Salafist Wahabi terrorism around the globe. The Saudis have not taken in any of the refugees from the wars that are Obama’s wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan; but very cutely, they offered to build 200 Wahabi mosques in Germany alone, in order to provide religious training to the 800,000 Syrian and other Middle East and North African refugees that Germany will be taking in this year. In other words, the Saudis are saying, “We’ll come in there, and we’ll create another generation or two generations of new recruits to Salafist terrorism.” So, with that in mind on Saudi Arabia, with the fact that Obama’s wars in Libya, in Syria, in Iraq, have been responsible for the emergence of the Islamic State. The fact that Turkey has been making billions of dollars in black market profits for President Erdogan’s AKP Party as part of the support for the Islamic State and for the Nusra Front, simply tells you that this idea that there is a coalition of nations fighting against the Islamic State and Syria, is an absolute preposterous fraud. It’s untrue; it never happened, and it hasn’t happened.

What has happened is, as we’ve been discussing over several weeks now on this Friday night broadcast, is that Russian President Putin instituted a brilliant flanking move, by sending Russian military equipment, Russian military personnel, into Syria at a point that the onslaught from these Saudi- and US- an British-backed Salafist terrorists had reached the point where the survival of the Assad government was in jeopardy. So, Russia has stepped in, and Russia is now building up the military force capabilities; they’re establishing an air base south of the Syrian town of Latakia on the north Mediterranean coast of Syria. They’re building up a new naval facility. They’ve already airlifted and boatlifted into Syria significant military equipment — tanks, artillery pieces, and other capabilities including fighter planes. So that within a very short period of time, and this is fully at the invitation of the Syrian government through established treaty agreements between Russia and Syria that go back a long time, that in some cases predated Russia, and went back to the Soviet period.

So, what the Russians are doing in Syria is legal under international law, and under bilateral treaty agreement between Syria and Russia. And so therefore, the Russians are on the verge of launching conventional military operations — ground and air operations — against the Islamic State. We don’t know for certain whether that will happen; we don’t know for certain how many Russian troops will be sent in to Syria. But what we do know is that the mere fact that the Russians made this move, has fundamentally altered the strategic surface in the Middle East as a whole, and more broadly, on a global scale. So, this was a crucial flanking initiative by Putin, and were there to be an agreement between Russia and the United States to cooperate in a genuine campaign against the Islamic State, and against the Nusra Front, and against the Army of Conquest, which is the latest name for another element of the Saudi-bankrolled Salafist terrorist apparatus. Under those circumstances, so long as Putin was in the driver’s seat and Russia was playing a leading role and President Obama was sidelined all together, this could work.

What Mr. LaRouche said is,

“Without Russian participation, any such effort would be doomed to complete failure. And by inclination, President Obama will wish to see that process fail. So therefore, any effective military operation combined with a diplomatic initiative, has to begin by removing President Obama’s influence, which is one of the main blockages towards an effective operation. Obama has to be induced to back down, or he will make a mess of everything. Obama is an ugly loser; and nothing should be done to encourage Obama. And so, action is needed, surely; and that action must be taken under the Putin leadership.”

And Obama can, of course, be included; he can play a token role. He can even take credit to an extent; but under no circumstances can he actually have a real say in how such an operation is going to be conducted.

Now, President Putin has made three proposals, very specifically. He will be giving a major address at the UN General Assembly at the end of this month, and in that speech, we already know his intention is to call for a creation of a genuine, serious committed coalition to wipe out the scourge of terrorism. Secondly, he has made it clear that he would like very much to have a face-to-face, sit-down meeting with President Obama on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. They’ll both be in town at the same time. Perfectly normal for such a discussion to take place, and the White House is terrified over the prospect of such a meeting. Why? Because they don’t understand what Putin is doing. They don’t understand how his mind works. And they’re afraid that any such meeting would be impossible for Obama, because you could never bring in a teleprompter that anticipates in advance everything that the President would be saying in his discussion with Putin.

So, yes, there is a possibility, but, as Mr. LaRouche said, you’ve got to humiliate Obama into a corner. Now, you’ve had a dramatic shift just in the last several weeks, in which Europe, the leading countries in Europe, namely Germany, first, and now France along with that, have realigned in a fundamental way. The Europeans wereterrified, even before the Putin initiative in Syria. They were terrified that Europe was headed for another world war to be fought on European soil, but this time, centered around the Ukraine situation. This would be a thermonuclear war, perhaps beginning as an exchange of tactical nuclear weapons, because both sides are building up large arsenals of modernized tactical nuclear weapons, right in the center of Europe.

But the Europeans were terrified of the war danger.

President Putin, as part of the Normandy Four discussions, and as part of the Minsk agreements, has clearly made a move to ensure that the ceasefire that began September 1st, is being fully enforced by the Russian minorities in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine. And so, the Russians have taken definitive steps to de-escalate the danger of a war of that sort in Europe.

Leading European statesmen, people associated with the European Leadership Network, former defense ministers, former heads of state, former foreign secretaries, have come out and said, we must take actions to de-escalate, to reduce the danger of thermonuclear war, general war, in Europe. And as a part of that concern, that real existential fear about that war danger, the Germans first, and now joined by the French, have said that they would fully support President Putin’s initiative in Syria, and would welcome the idea of sitting down in an inclusive collaborative way with Russia, to solve the Syria problem, just as the Normandy Group has been making progress in de-escalating the danger of war over Ukraine.

The German population opened their arms and their hearts to the refugees from the Middle East, from North Africa, and this also has changed the character of the German leadership in Europe. Instead of taking the lead in pushing for murderous austerity, the Germans have now taken the lead in showing genuine compassion, and a willingness to go out of their way to basically save the lives of these hundreds of thousands, millions, of refugees fleeing into Europe from these Obama wars in North Africa and the Middle East.

So, that’s a fundamental break in the situation, and now, between Russia and the Europeans, you have a situation in which you don’t have to go to Obama for Obama’s approval. With European backing, with a new Russian fact on the ground — Russian forces now actively engaged on the ground in Syria, through airlifts and boatlifts that have been ongoing for weeks —you now have a different situation.

Mr. LaRouche concluded by saying, Obama is almost stymied. He’s been weakened. He’s been cornered. And the next step is to invoke the 25th Amendment, and remove him from office altogether. The crisis around the death of Wall Street, and the need for a fundamental revolution in policy, a return to FDR, and the need to remove Obama to be absolutely certain that the danger of a thermonuclear war of extinction is eliminated — these two situations now converge, and there is nothing more important, now that Obama has been weakened and marginalized, than to have him removed from office by Constitutional means, so that we can actually move on to genuinely solve these crises — whether it’s Syria, with a critical role by Russia; or whether it’s wiping out Wall Street, and replacing it with a Glass-Steagall-FDR system.

In both cases, Obama’s the blockage. The crisis is here and now. So, let’s use the Constitution to solve the problem.

JASON ROSS: For a final topic today, we’re going to talk about the discussions that have been taking place among Russia, South Korea, and China shaping up towards the creation of a North Asia Development Bank that would include the Koreas, Russia, China, and Japan. This comes in the context of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, held directly after the Victory Day celebrations in China at the beginning of this month, where Russian President Putin and Korean President Park were very prominent guests of President Xi.

Lyndon LaRouche responded to the development around the possibility of this North Asian Development Bank by stressing the necessity for completing, building, the Kra Canal, a project whose recent planning goes back to the 1980s, to build a canal across the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand, relieving the overburdened Straits of Malacca, providing new transportation route, development for the region, especially today, as seen in the context of the New Silk Road.

I’d like to ask Benjamin Deniston, who has some remarks on this topic, to tell us about the Kra Canal.

BEN DENISTON: Thanks, Jason. Just to open up, I think this is an excellent counterpoint to what we just discussed with the insanity of Wall Street, and the Wall Street system. The Wall Street idea of money, this money system that is now blowing out, where there’s this religious belief in the value of money per se, and this insanity around trying to defend this bubble, which is full of financial assets which don’t actually mean anything.

Now you contrast that with what was just referenced, with what China is doing in collaboration with Russia, the BRICS nations, their other allies, other nations they’re working with around the world, in this completely new orientation, where they’re created institutions, new financial institutions — some might say new monetary institutions: like the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (the AIIB); or as Jason just mentioned, the discussion of a prospective North Asian Development Bank.

So, new financial institutions, new financial structures, to deal with what some people might call money. I think what Mr. LaRouche would define, more rigorously, as credit, as distinct from simply a monetary policy. Institutions to provide credit, specifically for projects like the Kra Canal.

Now, if we can get the first graphic up on the screen: (Figure 1). Now, we’re particularly talking about a region in Southeast Asia, and currently all shipping that goes from East Asia — from China, from South Korea, from Japan, from this entire region, which has a substantial amount of economic activity — any of the shipping from this region that goes to India, to the Mediterranean, up into Europe, goes through [the Straits of Malacca] — and including the discussion on China’s work on the New Maritime Silk Road, which is the maritime aspect of their Silk Road project, cover this exact same territory as well.

The shipping goes through a very congested bottleneck, which you can see displayed here, the Malacca Straits. Here you have a very narrow canal, a very narrow region, which currently is something on the order of one-fifth of the entire world’s trade. Not just for this region. But if you take the entire world trade, something on the order of one-fifth goes through these narrow straits.

If you bring up the second graphic (Figure 2), you can get a sense of the scale of this. This was from a 2013 video production by the LaRouche PAC, which you can find linked to the video description here. It’s entitled “The Kra Canal and the Development of Southeast Asia, produced in 2013.” But in this graphic from that video, you can see that through these Straits of Malacca, which we just saw in the previous map, in 2012, for a representative year, you had something like 90,000 ships travelling through those straits, which was around three times the combined number of ships that travelled through the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal.

So the Panama and Suez Canal combined, times three, is the number of ships passing through the Straits of Malacca. And at the time of our production of this video, it was estimated that the traffic through the Malacca Straits was going to be increasing by about 20% each year, putting on a direction to rather soon reach just a maximum capacity. You can only fit so many ships through this region. And it’s also relatively shallow, making it difficult for larger ships to even be able to get through this region at all.

So, it has been long known that this particular point in Southeast Asia, these Straits of Malacca, is a critical bottleneck for world trade, and world development. If you’re going from East Asia to India, you’ve got to pass through this region. If you’re going from East Asia into the Mediterranean, you have to pass through this region. If you want to go from East Asia into Europe, to the Atlantic in this route, you have to pass through particular region.

There’s been a long-standing proposal to develop a new shipping route, a new canal through Thailand, through the Kra Isthmus, and you can see this on the third graphic (Figure 3) here displayed. Again, a screen shot from our video, which presents this entire project, and its history in greater detail. Now you can see the path running through this rather narrow isthmus, through Thailand, through the Kra Isthmus. And here we have the proposal to make this canal, which would cut out the need to got through these Straits of Malacca. This would cut off something like 1000 miles from the trip, from the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean — not a huge, a modest reduction in the actual distance travelled. Not the biggest in the world, but something certainly significant.

But probably more important than the distance, is this would be a keystone project in just alleviating this bottleneck for this whole region, and being able to rapidly expand trade, and facilitate the continued expansion of trade through the Maritime Silk Road, from the developments in Asia, East Asia, in particular, again over to India, and as you can see in the fourth graphic (Figure 4) here, if you pair this with the recent incredible developments with Egypt’s development of the New Suez Canal, and we pair that with this prospect for a Kra Canal, you have a completely new potential for economic linking between the Pacific Ocean, between China, Russia’s eastern borders, South Korea, Japan, this entire region, through the Kra Canal to India, to the entire Indian Ocean, up through the New Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, into Southern Europe, and then into the Atlantic.

So we have a new picture of linking, as LaRouche was saying earlier today, the entire Pacific, the Atlantic, in a completely new way.

Again, I’d like to direct people to the feature video that we produced in 2013 on this subject, The Kra Canal and the Development of Southeast Asia. You can see this in graphic 5 (Figure 5), just an advertisement for the video.

As we discussed there, this project has a long and important history, designs going back to the 70s, and earlier, and in particular, Mr. LaRouche’s important role directly in the early ’80s, with his Fusion Energy Foundation, and his Executive Intelligence Review magazine sponsoring, in collaboration with the government of Thailand, collaborators from Japan, in sponsoring a series of conferences dedicated to the development of Southeast Asia, to the building of the Kra Canal, which Mr. LaRouche himself attended in the early ’80s on this subject.

And so it’s only appropriate now, given the shifting world economic dynamic towards China, towards the BRICS, that we’re seeing come back up and being put back on the table, as a perspective development project now.

I’d just like to conclude by looking at — again, I think this is an excellent case study in the type of shift in thinking that we need in the United States now. The difference between this insanity of Wall Street, where people are panicked about defending money that doesn’t mean anything. Money that has no actual existence in terms of any actual physical activity in the real economy. A completely worthless speculative bubble.

Versus what we’re seeing with things like the prospect for the Kra Canal, the construction of the Suez Canal. You have new financial institutions being developed, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the North Asian Development Bank, the New Silk Road Development Bank. We have new financial institutions ready to create the credit to invest in these types of actual development projects. Projects that actually physically transform the physical economic potential of — as the case of the Kra Canal. Not even of this entire region, but really of the whole world economy. You’re talking about a region which currently — around one-fifth of the entire global trade goes through this region.

So, if you’re going to reduce the time of trade through this region, if you’re going to lower the physical costs, you’re having a net physical impact on the entire world economy. You’re lowering the physical costs of the goods, and in effect, you’re raising the physical value provided to the entire world economy by those goods, by investing in these types of projects which can facilitate this whole process more efficiently.

It’s a useful case in the use of actual credit, a real credit system, to invest in real physical development, which actually has a measurable, understandable increase in the productive powers of the world economy. As measurable increase in the physical wealth, the lowering of the physical costs, increasing the physical wealth of the productive process of the entire world economy.

So I think this is one among many of a critical lesson for what the United States needs to start doing, and thinking towards, in a post-Wall Street era. And this should remind us of what we used to do, we did under Franklin Roosevelt, of the types of real physical investment policies which contribute to creating a higher order future for our country, for the coming generations. And this is absolutely what we need today.

I think that Mr. LaRouche’s remarks about emphasizing the Kra Canal is an incredibly important and exciting keystone development for this entire perspective, and it shows us, again, another resounding clear message of where the rest of the world is going, where the rest of the world is going in creating a new economy, a new economic stage, a new higher-order future for their societies. And this is just another message for the United States to get away from the control of Wall Street, and get serious and participate in this type of development, these types of projects.

JASON ROSS: Thank you, gentlemen. That will conclude the webcast for this evening, so thank you for joining us, thank you for your support, past, present, and future — and we will see you again.

Friday, September 18, 2015