MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening. It’s December 18, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and you’re watching our weekly LaRouche PAC webcast here on larouchepac.com. I’m joined in the studio tonight by Benjamin Deniston from the LaRouche PAC Science Team, as well as Jeffrey Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review. And the three of us had a chance to have extensive meetings with both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche earlier this morning, and early this afternoon.
Now, those of you who have been watching the LaRouche PAC website over the course of this week, especially starting with the Policy Committee discussion which Mr. LaRouche held this past Monday, you’ll know that we are in a week of heightened mobilization as an organization, and as a national movement with the LaRouche PAC; because of Lyndon LaRouche’s analysis of the proximity of a total meltdown of the Wall Street-centered, trans-Atlantic speculative financial system. Mr. LaRouche has made very clear calls every single day of this week, for a very explicit program of a return to Franklin Roosevelt, a complete shutting-down of the Wall Street speculative so-called assets, and a revival of the kind of emergency mobilization that Franklin Roosevelt enacted in his first days in office.
Many of you might have participated in the Fireside Chat which Mr. LaRouche held yesterday with activists nationwide, and many of you also may have seen that a leaflet has now been posted on the LaRouche PAC website titled, “The New Policy for the USA Now”. Now this leaflet contains a transcript of remarks that Mr. LaRouche made during an emergency meeting with his associates on Wednesday night, and if you haven’t gotten a chance to read through the text of it yet, I wish to read just a few short excerpts to give you a flavor of what Mr. LaRouche’s analysis of the current situation is. What Mr. LaRouche had to say during this discussion is the following:
“We are on the edge right now. We’re on the edge of a totally uncontrolled global process of self-accelerated collapse. In other words, the acceleration accelerates the rate of acceleration. There is no existing solution to this problem,” he said, “and it is on a global scale, or at least a trans-Atlantic scale immediately, and will of course affect Asia as well, and Russia also. And the only thing you can do is Franklin Roosevelt’s policy. You have to say, ‘Declare Franklin Roosevelt’s policy now against Wall Street.’ That’s the only way we can solve this problem. Otherwise, you’ve got something that’s going to accelerate and there’s nothing that you can do about it. And what you have to do, is pose the fact that there will be no solution unless Wall Street is put out of business right now. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt did in effect; he shut down Wall Street, which ended the inflation that was going on at the point before his election. And the only way you can do this, is to shut it down.
“What you do is you cancel all the so-called assets that are not appropriate for this role, and you simply say: ‘Look buddy, you don’t get any money at all. You get no compensation whatsoever. You’re shut out of business. You don’t exist.’ And that’s what Franklin Roosevelt did, in effect, in his operation to shut down Wall Street.”
Now later in the discussion, Mr. LaRouche came to the question of what the necessary solution must be. And he said:
“If you realize that this is reality time, none of the rules that have been pushed along recently have any merit whatsoever. They’re canceled. And the first thing we cancel is Wall Street. Then what we’re talking about, is the Franklin Roosevelt-style of a new system of the creation of a new system of government, of financial management by government. And it has to be that way, because a lot of these categories are things that are put up as well — will we bail this out, will we bail that out—forget it,” he said. “It’s dead. It’s a dead issue. What you’re talking about is the practical activity of creativity, productive creativity, and you have to define it as such. What is actually productive creativity, which is actually what we will have to defend.
“And that’s what we have to do, and that’s what Franklin Roosevelt did. He managed this thing by going through the whole process about these emergency bail-outs of people, who were jobless, who were without hope. And what we have to do is now, with the background of the experience of Franklin Roosevelt’s work, you simply say, ‘We’re going back to Franklin Roosevelt’s policy, while we still have a chance to do it.’|”
So, Mr. LaRouche said, we have to make the announcement, and this is what we’re doing over the course of this week. We make the declaration that we have come to a conclusion, a solid conclusion; and we have to get more and more people to jump in onto this policy that we’re presenting. And very rapidly, you will find that this will become the trend of policy-making inside the United States, in particular. And if you just consider the crucial evidence that we have here at hand, if you just consider the developments that have broken out in the recent period, when Mr. LaRouche said, you just have to say, “This is the greatest Christmas present that we could possibly give you — the opportunity to shut down Wall Street, and save the United States.”
Now, let me, in that context, present the institutional question that we got in for this evening, and ask Jeff Steinberg to deliver Mr. LaRouche’s response. It reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche. In recent weeks four Italian banks have collapsed, along with a number of U.S. hedge funds. There’s a $3 trillion junk bond exposure in the U.S. domestic shale oil and gas sector, with prices continuing to fall, even in the winter period of maximum demand. How do you assess the financial and economic situation in the trans-Atlantic region going into 2016, and how do you propose to address these problems?”
JEFF STEINBERG: Thanks, Matt. We’re at a point right now where tomorrow morning, Monday morning, almost at any given moment going forward from today, we could experience the complete collapse of the entire trans-Atlantic financial and monetary system, which would in turn have repercussions on a global scale. There is nothing within the internal features of the current situation that can avoid this outcome. And look at some of the elements of this picture.
As the question indicated, we’re seen four Italian banks go under in the recent weeks, and we’ve seen bondholders and stockholders in those banks wiped out through bail-in — in other words, the grabbing up of their assets as a first stage towards a bail-out of those banks. And this has already resulted in widespread protests in Italy. It resulted in a suicide that is now being investigated by Italian authorities. You’ve got Ukraine facing a $3 billion unpayable debt to the IMF that comes due very soon; and the IMF has indicated, because of the geopolitical significance of Ukraine, despite the fact that Ukraine is a failed state, it is thoroughly bankrupt — that the IMF is going to pony up a bail-out of Ukraine that violates all of the IMF’s rules.
On Jan. 1, Puerto Rico has a billion dollar debt due — it’s part of an overall $35 billion in debt. They’ve made clear that they cannot make payments on that $1 billion debt due at the start of the new year. A number of U.S. hedge funds have already gone under, because of their exposure to that Puerto Rican debt.
The shale oil and gas sector, which has been touted by President Obama and others as the great driver for the U.S. so-called economic recovery, is in a state of complete collapse. Normally, going into the winter months, you would expect a substantial increase in oil and gas prices, because of the increasing demands, both for transit and also now for home and business heating. In contrast to that, the price in this past week has collapsed even further. Every time some of the major shale oil producers bring a barrel of oil out of the ground, and put it on sale on the market, they lose $30. There is a total of a $5 trillion amount between junk bonds and major bank lending into this shale oil and gas sector, that is about to blow up.
In the case of Canada, in the area around Alberta, in the western part of Canada, this blow-up has already occurred; and Canada is in a state of severe economic crisis. Obviously, on a scale of things, the United States going through the same process will have a far greater impact into Europe, into Asia, around the entire globe.
So, in other words, we are at a moment of reckoning, where the entire financial system is hanging by a thread, and will most certainly blow. There’s no way to predict a date certain, but, as I say, it could happen at any moment from now on; which means that you’ve got to basically shut down this entire system. The system that’s been in place and growing as a cancerous factor on the real economy of the world, going back for the last 40 years and more. You could go back to end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, carried out by people like George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, on behalf of the British. You could go back to 1999, when under the impeachment blackmail, President Bill Clinton signed into law the repeal of Glass-Steagall. And, of course, it goes back much earlier than that.
Mr. LaRouche made the point in our discussion today, that you’ve got to look at the degeneration of the entire world system that began at the outset of the 20th Century, when Lord Bertrand Russell launched a tyranny against the kind of scientific breakthroughs that characterized the work of people like Bernhard Riemann in the 19th Century, the work of Leibniz in the 17th and early 18th Century, the work of Kepler in the 17th Century, going back to Brunelleschi and the height of the Italian Golden Renaissance, when modern science was first launched. All of that has been effectively negated and wiped out through a tyranny of mathematics that has been characteristic of Bertrand Russell’s takeover of modern science at the very onset of the 20th Century.
It’s manifested itself in a cultural deterioration. The only major 20th Century scientist to stand up in the face of Russell was Albert Einstein. In a different way, President Franklin Roosevelt stood up against that tyranny. He was confronted from his first moment in office as President, with a population that had been brutalized, had been beaten down, was living through a Great Depression that was already ongoing for a number of years. You had rampant illiteracy in rural America, and he carried out a revolution; a policy revolution that was based on the principles of the founders of the American Republic, the principles of Benjamin Franklin, particularly the principles of Alexander Hamilton. Those same principles were adopted by President Lincoln, and it carried even beyond his assassination by the British.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, end of the 19th Century, you had the British overthrow of Bismarck in Germany; you have the assassination of Sadi Carnot, the president of France; and in 1901 you had the assassination of President William McKinley in the United States. Those British actions, those assassinations, laid the basis for what Bertrand Russell did, wreaking havoc on all of the principles of previous scientific discovery, and the 20th Century, with very few exceptions, has been a total wasteland.
So, that’s the backdrop to the crisis that we are facing today. You not only have a Wall Street-London system that is thoroughly, hopelessly bankrupt. All of the bail-in, and all of the bail-out in the world, cannot come close to dealing with the multiple quadrillions of dollars in purely speculative gambling debt, that have been built up as a cancer that’s eaten away at the real productive economy. You have, in reality, today the Bureau of Labor Statistics is claiming that unemployment has fallen to 5%. This is total rubbish. By using their own statistics, and looking at the entire working age population, rather than just what they call the labor force, you see that real unemployment is more than double the number they claim. And furthermore, 40% of those employed workers in the United States are earning $15,000 a year or less. That is minimum wage, full-time employment.
Half of that number are earning below $5000 a year. If you work one day a month, you are considered to be part of the labor force. So the real conditions of life here in the United States, across Europe, are collapsing at an accelerating rate, as Mr. LaRouche indicated in his discussion with us on Wednesday.
The fact of the matter is that to understand what’s going on to the American people, and to the European population, you’ve got to look at some other statistics. You’ve got to look at the fact that there is a persistent rise in the rate of deaths among middle-aged people in the United States, from the ages of 45 to 54. It’s gone up precipitously. It started in 2001 — not coincidentally when Bush and Cheney came into office. It’s accelerated at an accelerating rate since 2009, when Obama came into office.
The Centers for Disease Control has declared that the United States is experiencing an epidemic increase in heroin addiction, and there has been in the last four years, a 60% increase in heroin addiction among households earning $50,000 a year or more. In other words, the middle class itself is going into a psychological breakdown. So this is the consequence of toleration for Wall Street.
Members of Congress. I was up on Capitol Hill yesterday for a good part of the day. Members of Congress know we’re on the verge of a major junk bond blow-out. They know about the looming crash. They know about the Glass-Steagall opportunity. Yet they’re showing cowardice in the face of the greatest threat that mankind has faced ever. Because this kind of collapse, under the conditions of Obama remaining in office, means that we are also simultaneously on the very edge of potential thermonuclear confrontation with Russia and China. And that would be a war of extinction of mankind.
So the question is: Is there a combination of leading citizens, of Democrats and Republicans, who are prepared to come together and show the courage to simply declare that Wall Street is finished. It’s shut down. No money in. It’s doomed. So shut it down; and if we shut down Wall Street in a timely fashion, that opens the door for the kinds of measures and actions that were taken by Franklin Roosevelt, in the very first days of his Presidency. Massive infusions of Federal investment into real job creation, into vital infrastructure. And we’ve got to then set our sights on the Galaxy. We’ve got to begin a revival of our space program because man doesn’t belong stuck here on Earth. At this point, we have the ability, by coordination and cooperation with other leading nations, like China, for example, in particular — to explore where our Solar System stands in the larger Galaxy. That’s where man’s future. That’s where the discoveries lie that will define and guarantee a bright future for mankind.
But if you don’t start by facing the fact that Wall Street must be shut down totally right now; then there is really no chance.
OGDEN: Thank you, Jeff. Now, when you consider what Mr. LaRouche declared the policy must be, and take a look at the Franklin Roosevelt precedent, you begin to ask yourself the question that Franklin Roosevelt asked himself: When you have a completely broken-down population, when you have a nation in chaos and in desperation, when you’ve had multiple previous administrations which have been disasters, if not traitors, to the people of the United States, how do you have an immediate turnaround from Day One?
And Roosevelt had to ask himself, how do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate value? How do you distinguish between something which has a productive, creative effect — as Mr. LaRouche said in the remarks I read earlier—versus something which has a destructive cancerous effect. And how do you protect what is legitimate and valuable, while cancelling and writing off everything which is illegitimate and destructive?
And this is exactly what Franklin Roosevelt enacted from the very first day that he was in office with his national bank holiday; shutting down all of the banks, sending in an army of auditors, and not allowing them to reopen again until they reopened under his terms. And this is what he enshrined in the Glass-Steagall Act. There is a bill in the House of Representatives and in the United States Senate, as many of our viewers know, ready to be cosponsored, ready to be passed into law, to reinstate Glass-Steagall. And this is obviously urgently what is needed.
When you look at the fact that since the 2007-2008 crash, rather than having the biggest Wall Street banks broken up, the ones that were responsible for the crash in the first place, and having their chief executive officers sent to prison; instead they were bailed out, and now the four largest banks in the United States have accumulated an ever-greater share of the financial bubble, holding, between the four of them, assets of almost $6 trillion concentrated in just these four biggest banks.
With all of the quantitative easing that has been sent nominally into the economy, all of this money has gone into propping this bank gambling financial bubble, while the lending to the real economy has steadily collapsed, showing you exactly what the administration of Barack Obama has been all about.
Now, if you look at Franklin Roosevelt’s actions on the other side, taking a population that was idle, depressed, uneducated, unskilled, wasting away, and immediately putting them to work: this is the precedent for what has to happen right now. Franklin Roosevelt — one of the very first things that he did was to get his adviser from New York State, Harry Hopkins, with whom he had previously worked to enact many of these New Deal measures in the laboratory, in the incubator, of New York State itself, the hometown of Alexander Hamilton, whom Franklin Roosevelt saw himself directly in the tradition of. Even through the lineage of his great-great grandfather Isaac Roosevelt, who worked directly with Alexander Hamilton to set up the first national bank [Bank of New York]. Franklin Roosevelt immediately ordered the large-scale, mass employment of millions and millions of idle and out-of-work Americans.
He did this with the PWA. Later he did it with the WPA for much larger-scale projects. This was done through the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which absolutely transformed the entire Southern states of the United States, and created the possibility for the United States to fight and win World War II. And emphatically he did it with the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was one of his very first programs that he enacted from the very first day that he was in office. Taking young people from the streets of the cities and from the backwards rural countryside, who were uneducated, many of them completely illiterate and completely unskilled; enrolling them in the CCC program; sending them to camps that existed in every single one of the states of the United States at that time, as well as the territories. And ultimately employing over 3 and a half million young men, and young Americans, in the CCC program over the course of its entire existence — from 1933 until it was disbanded in 1941-42, for the war effort.
These are the precedents that can be taken right off of the shelf, and enacted immediately if we are able to take the Wall Street administration of Barack Obama, shut it down, shut down Wall Street. So, what we’ve done here at LaRouche PAC is, we’ve put together a programmatic sort of outline of exactly what has to be done along these lines in today’s terms, with an eye towards what is being done currently by countries such as China, such as their ally Russia, other nations of the BRICS, other countries in southern Asia — for example, India — and the program which is now become the official policy of the most populous nation on Earth, the so-called Silk Road. What China calls, One Belt One Road, or what originally was called the Eurasian Land-Bridge, when the LaRouche movement conceived of it over 20 years ago.
So, here to present a little bit of the details of this upcoming, forthcoming pamphlet — “The United States Must Join the Silk Road” — is LaRouche PAC Scientific Team leader Benjamin Deniston.
BENJAMIN DENISTON: Thanks, Matt. So I think we’ve mentioned this on a few of these broadcasts before, this new report. And to put it in context, we have the EIR full special report on the “New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” and about a month ago, in the process of her work organizing around that report internationally, Helga Zepp-LaRouche put out the call to develop somewhat of an addendum to that report, focused on the United States.
And her idea was that we have to move the U.S. population to fight for its future. And this is how we can do it. We have to give the American people a perspective for what it can mean for their own nation, their families, their legacy to join in this future orientation of the New Silk Road, the World Land-Bridge orientation. So we’ve been pulling together this addendum report as kind of a presentation of this thesis, to really try and give people a clear vision, a clear sense of what we can do with this country; if people decide to fight, if people decide to follow the actions we just heard. Especially now in this immediate day-to-day crisis conditions, we need to also bring to people a real positive conception, as Mr. LaRouche was actually saying emphatically earlier this week. We have to have a positive,— not just attacking the negative — but we have to have a new idea, a new concept, for what the future has to become. And that can give people the strength, the rallying point, to fight to win this fight right now.
So, I have a series of graphics here, and we can go to the first graphic, as a teaser for this report: some of the actual images directly from a draft version of this report, which will I think be available next week on LaRouche PAC. So here we have the cover — “The United States Joins the New Silk Road, a Hamiltonian Vision for an Economic Renaissance.” [Fig. 1]
If we go to the next graphic [Fig. 2]: It’s broken into a couple main sections, but after the introduction, which covers some of the material which we already discussed here today, the first bulk section of the report is pretty much a reconstruction program for the United States. Something going along with what LaRouche has called for, for a return to true physical economy. We’re seeing the end of this speculative Wall Street system, the end of this fantasy of money having intrinsic value, the end of this speculative insane system, and if we’re going to survive, we need to return to a real conception of physical economics. How do we improve the physical capability to produce the goods needed for society? How do we increase our ability to more effectively, more efficiently produce what’s needed to sustain society at ever higher and higher levels? These have to, again, become the metrics for economics. Wall Street’s metrics are death; and we’re seeing that right now. So, we have to return to a conception of physical production, the physical productive powers of the labor force. How do you increase the ability of the labor force to produce more goods at a higher value and a higher quality with less labor power? These physical economic conceptions. And how do you build up the infrastructure of the nation to most efficiently facilitate that process for the national economy as a whole, as a single, integrated territory?
So, this is some of what is dealt with in this first section; and here is kind of an opening spread, as you can see in this image of a development perspective for the United States. I’m going to go through how each one of these elements are treated in slightly more detail in the next section of this report.
So, if we go to the next image[Fig. 3], we have, in one sense, kind of a keystone for this whole project. Something that Lyndon and Helga LaRouche have been very much at the center of organizing for, for decades now. The long-standing proposal for a Bering Strait connection; connecting this relatively small gap between Alaska and Russia. Connecting that with a tunnel, perhaps a bridge, depending on whatever seems to be the best design; and connecting these two major land masses with high-speed rail systems. And this, in a sense literally, but also figuratively, connects the United States and North America directly into this entire New Silk Road orientation, this entire Eurasian Land-Bridge development which is now ongoing, as Matt referenced; this is ongoing. China is leading the way in building the New Silk Road program; extending it into other nations in collaboration with other nations — Russia, India, other major players throughout Eurasia. They’re pursuing this development of their interiors — high-speed rail, water projects, developing more power, more energy. And we can plug directly into this development orientation with the Bering Strait connection. A lot can be said on this project; it’s been on the books for a century, in conception. Now we have the perspective to actually do it; we can extend the rail network of the United States up to Alaska. Russia can extend through Siberia. We can build the connection across the Bering Strait; and we can actually connect these two land masses with this grand project, which will be a keystone for this whole development perspective for the coming time.
If we go to the next graphic [Fig. 4], this would connect directly into what we would need to build as a new high-speed rail system for the United States. Here we have displayed one particular two-phase proposal for the development of an actual modern, high-speed rail network for the United States. Our rail system currently in terms of passenger transport is almost nonexistent; we have a disastrous transportation system. So, if we’re talking about actually rebuilding the physical productive capabilities of the nation as a whole, this is going to be one critical element. Having an effective transportation system increases the physical economic potential of the national territory as a whole. Lowering the cost of transportation, increasing the speed of transportation, increasing the efficiency of transportation for goods and people as a medium to facilitate the increased productivity of the nation as a whole. So, this is going to be a major keystone project.
If we go to the next graphic [Fig. 5], we can see that this is not just about connecting the economy as it currently exists; but this will also open up the potential for the development of new territories. These rail lines you see here aren’t simply a means for getting from point A to point B; but they can also become new corridors of development. Creating corridors of high density of infrastructure, high-speed efficient transportation, canals and water projects as needed, electricity, power, communications. So, we can bring a high density corridor of all the basic advanced infrastructure needed for the development of entire new regions of the country. And I don’t have a graphic of it, but I’m sure many people are familiar with the distribution of population in the United States; and we have entire regions of the country which are virtually empty. Entire regions which have little to no development; so we have huge room and potential for the growth for the development of our territory, including the development of new cities — something that Helga Zepp-LaRouche has been campaigning for in the United States. The idea of actually building new Renaissance cities is part of this whole perspective; cities actually organized around the understanding of mankind as a creative force on this planet. Cities as cultural centers actually embodying and reflecting the conception of mankind which we need to rise to. Cities which actually inspire the population and encourage the population and push the population to rise to a higher cultural level; recognizing mankind as a creative force. The type of cities you saw in certain parts of the great 15th Century Renaissance, for example. We can actually be looking at, instead of disbursing our population in this terrible urban sprawl; we can actually have centralized, highly efficient scientific cultural cities, centered around a high density of creative focus, scientific focus, cultural focus. That’s the center of your city, your cultural process; and you build the city around that.
So, these are some of the things that — again, they’re treated in more detail in the report — but these are some of the basic elements that are just needed right now to save the United States. As Matt had referenced the historical precedent of Franklin Roosevelt, we’re going to need very similar actions in terms of actually retraining and rebuilding our labor force to do this. Just with what’s been put on the table already, this is going to be a major driver to force our nation, our people, to figure out how to re-industrialize our economy; to rebuild our productive capabilities. That means the physical productive capabilities themselves; but that also means the labor force itself, the actual skill set of the labor force itself. Things like a new CCC program to retrain an entire new generation with new skills, new capabilities; so they can become a part of this process of creating a new higher level for the economy for the United States. So, in a sense, this is going to force a driver program to rebuild an entire new generation as a highly productive, advanced section of the economy.
So, this is kind of the leading section of this addendum report, focused on rebuilding the United States. If we go to the next graphic [Fig. 6], we can see it is followed by a section on some of the science driver programs that are part of this whole perspective. Actually looking into pushing into the new frontiers beyond just rebuilding the nation with the available technologies, the available capabilities, and implementing what we have; but also looking into expanding the potential of the economy into new domains, into new levels.
In the next graphic [Fig. 7], we have a section on power, on energy, on energy-flux density. And the longstanding need to finally push for the development of fusion power; the longstanding need to explore, implement, and develop the domain of the nucleus — the nuclear economy. This is something that has been denied and suppressed for decades already now; we’re long past the time where we need to fully develop the capabilities of the nuclear domain for mankind. Giving us dramatically higher levels of energy-flux density; enabling us to power all these programs we’re talking about here, and many more programs. But also opening up a whole new domain of mankind’s ability to interact with the very nature of the universe itself. Moving man beyond just being limited to the domain of chemical reactions, and chemistry on a chemical domain; but moving into a nuclear domain. Not dealing with just the interactions of chemical elements; but dealing with being able to control the very chemical elements themselves on a nuclear level, which opens up whole new potentials for mankind.
This includes areas that are still anomalous — low-energy nuclear reactions, so-called “cold fusion”; hot fusion, advanced fusion power. There’s an entire new domain of potential that is just lying in wait for mankind to develop with this nuclear economy.
If you go to the next graphic [Fig. 8], we have the issue of water; the development of the water supply. And a lot can be said on this issue; there are many available options to develop the water resources needed: water transfer projects, along the line of the original NAWAPA project; proposals for desalination, the processing of ocean water to create new freshwater supplies. Those are available to us. We also need to look into the new frontier areas of being able to control the water cycle on a higher and more fundamental level; and this goes to what we’ve discussed with new methods for controlling the weather, controlling precipitation patterns.
As I said at the beginning, this was called for by Helga out of the need to move the US population; we have to give people a sense of what their potential future is. Not just getting jobs for people; there’s all this talk about jobs, the insanity of Green jobs. You have a bunch of these Presidential candidates still talking about Green jobs as if that would do something for the economy. What we’re talking about here, is giving people a sense of an actual higher level of the economy that we can build; a higher state of existence for the nation; that we can organize society around creating. And we can actually inspire and move our population to fight for this future; to fight for their own ability to have access to creating this new future.
And I think just to round it off, we were talking with Mr. LaRouche about this whole perspective earlier today; and I think what he had to say was also very important as a concluding point in this whole discussion. He said, we have to really go at the core issue; that in essence, underlying, we have these projects; we have the perspective for rebuilding the United States. We have to do this if we’re going to exist as a nation; there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about that. This is the future of our nation if we’re going to exist; returning to this orientation towards a physical economic approach to rebuilding our nation at a higher level. But in a sense, that is just an effect of something more fundamental; which is understanding mankind as the only species which can really do this. Understanding that this process, this ability to change the state of your species from state A to state B, to a higher order existence; is the most fundamental expression of what makes mankind unique as a living form on this planet.
And that, I think, gets at some of what Mr. LaRouche was saying earlier today about what’s happened over the past century; the disaster of the past century. That you had a fundamental attack on the economy, on the population, but also a fundamental attack on this most fundamental principle; the principle of understanding of human creativity. That there is something that the human mind can do uniquely that is the cause, that is the reason we can have these types of changes. That’s the reason we can have a higher population with a higher standard of living, higher population density, than we had before. Because mankind has the ability to create his own future; to create a higher level of existence for society. But where does that come from? You go to education today, people are taught that the human mind, the human brain is just an advanced computer; that thinking is just a deductive process, that the way that human beings think and discover things is essentially just an advanced form of a computer process. That even a basic understanding of human creativity as a distinct potential, as a distinct capability has been not just attacked, but virtually eliminated from society today. That the understanding that the human mind acts in a unique way which I think we don’t really understand yet, in a non-deductive, non-mathematical fashion to generate a new conception, a new discovery which didn’t come from the lower-order understanding; but is a new generation, but it’s that new generation which comes from the human mind itself which is the substance which enables mankind to move to a higher level.
I think that’s what we have to put up front; and this is part of a longstanding fight. If you just look back to the work of Kepler himself, the great genius who completely revolutionized mankind’s existence in the universe by discovering that we’re part of this higher order Solar System. And you look at Kepler’s own understanding of his own discovery process; and if you go to his works — go to the Harmony of the World — go to Book 4 of the Harmony of the World, where he says this is really the essence of my entire discovery process. Where he discusses the actual process of thought of discovery; and he, himself, roots his whole investigation in the continuity of the fight going back to the fight of Plato against Aristotle. The fight over whether the human mind actually generates new discoveries, or is just merely a product of sense perceptions. Kepler right then and there himself declares the evil of Aristotle’s view that the human mind is just a blank slate; that sense perceptions are just written on the human mind as a blank slate, and that’s all you are. That’s the nature of knowledge, is just the impressions upon you through your sense perceptions; which Aristotle posed as an attack against Plato’s idea of recollection, that discovery is more of a process, it’s almost as if the mind is remembering something it had within it. That discovery doesn’t come from sense perceptions from the outside, but there’s a potential in the human mind to generate something for which the potential was already there in the mind itself.
But then you have the fact that what the human mind can do in that regard, actually enables mankind to come to a higher state of coherence with the universe as a whole. And this is what Kepler himself, I think, developed in a new, higher order way in his conception of harmonics, of harmony; that he himself explicitly sided on the side of Plato and Socrates in this understanding of the human mind. He said quite frankly, Aristotle shouldn’t be allowed in the Christian religion; because his views are evil, his views deny this creative capability of the human mind. Kepler himself recognized that Plato was much closer to the truth, and that you have this ability of the human mind itself, of its own potential, to generate new conceptions which are not deductions, which are not mathematical processes; but as a creative process of the human mind. And the amazing thing is that those productions of the human mind itself, of itself and from itself, are the substance of what allows mankind to move to a higher state of organization of the universe; a higher state of coherence with the universe. And that, for Kepler, was the highest sense of harmony, of harmonics. And that’s the current of understanding of real human creativity that Einstein was coming out of; and as Mr. LaRouche has said, was the last hold-out against the attacks against this true understanding of human creativity.
So, I think this is the highest challenge we have in this whole process; that we have to rebuild our nation, we have to move society forward. We have to do it premised most fundamentally on the recognition of human creativity per se as the real force, the real substance of mankind’s ability to exist in the universe. And if we don’t win that fight, then the evil legacy of Russell will just continue to reign. So, I think that’s a challenge that we all have before us.
OGDEN: Thank you, Ben. Now let me just say in conclusion, just to reiterate the point that Mr. LaRouche made in the remarks that I read in the beginning, and what Jeff went over; what’s preventing this vision from becoming an actuality, is the slavish capitulation and acquiescence of the majority of our elected leaders — Congress and otherwise — to Wall Street, and to the wishes and the demands and the frankly extortion that representatives of Wall Street hold as their power over Washington. Now when you examine that though, it’s a ridiculous proposition, because Wall Street is bankrupt; Wall Street has no power. We’re in the midst of a total meltdown of the entire Wall Street-based system. And the only solution for the future of anybody in this country is to take the Franklin Roosevelt precedent and say, “You’re bankrupt; we’re shutting you down.” That’s done through Glass-Steagall and the entire program that’s laid out in this pamphlet, as was just reviewed by Ben.
Now, the other point I’ll make is that Mr. LaRouche has emphasized that the pivot point, the leverage point around which we can move and transform the entire country, is what he’s called the so-called “Manhattan Project”. The highly focused activation over the last 12, 13, 14 months of our association’s activities in Manhattan and the broader Manhattan region. Now one thing about this that many of you may be aware of, is that in addition to the regular Saturday afternoon discussions that Mr. LaRouche holds with a live audience in Manhattan, also this weekend, there will be a series of concerts which are going to be presented by the Schiller Institute Community Chorus of Manhattan, as well as co-sponsored by the Foundation for the Revival of Classical Culture; which will be presenting a large excerpt of Handel’s Messiah. The entire Part I, and much of Part II and Part III. The performance of this piece — which includes participation from a large array of activists and other volunteers from the New York area, as well as professional soloists and a very highly skilled orchestra — is that this performance will take place at the natural, scientific so-called “Verdi tuning” of A=432. And this is a very significant aspect of what Mr. LaRouche’s association’s intervention into a revival of true Classical culture in the United States and worldwide, is built around. So, one of the performances will be at a church tomorrow afternoon, Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn near the Park Slope area; and the other performance will take place early on Sunday afternoon in downtown Manhattan. So, if you are in the area, and you have not yet gotten the details about that, please make sure that you contact our representatives in the New York region.
So, with all of that said, I thank everybody for joining us here today. I especially thank Jeff and Ben for the presentations that they’ve made here; and I would implore you to keep your eyes glued on the LaRouche PAC website, as the updates on a regular basis over the next coming days and hours. So, thank you very much for joining us here tonight; please stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good night.
