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Lyndon LaRouche Webcast Questions and Answers

The Ides of March 2010

Dialogue with LaRouche

[This dialogue followed LaRouche's opening address. A PDF version of LaRouche's webcast address and the dialogue which followed is available here.]

Freeman: Before I ask the first question, I want to recognize some of the audiences that are listening: I know that prior to today's event, listeners to one of the leading radio stations in Buenos Aires, Argentina, listeners to Radio Splendid, were urged to watch the webcast. This came after Mr. LaRouche was interviewed on that radio station yesterday. I know that the webcast was also announced repeatedly on Radio 530 AM in Quito, Ecuador. And as I understand it, there are meetings all over in Ibero-America taking place today, in Peru, in Bolivia, and elsewhere.

But I especially want to recognize, and to welcome, two groups that are listening in Haiti. One group is comprised of university students, who are with the Association of Literary Youth, which helps poor Haitian youth with reading, singing and study programs; they are gathered in a city near Port-au-Prince which was also devastated in the earthquake. And also listening is the Movement for the Reconstruction of Haiti, which is a group led by Haitians currently based in the Dominican Republic, and they are organizing everything they can for their fellow countrymen.

Both groups have been circulating Mr. LaRouche's "Emergency Call To Save Haiti," and they greeted the victory of Kesha Rogers with great happiness, stating that this was evidence that this world as a whole, can, in fact, be saved. So, I'd like to extend a special welcome, on behalf of LPAC and really on behalf of all citizens of the United States, to those groups.

The Role of the Space Program

Now, the first question comes from a group of academicians and economists, that has been tasked to work on various elements of Mr. LaRouche's policy. These individuals originally started out as a study group that was an arm of the Obama Administration. That is no longer the case, and with help from private foundations, they are continuing their work. They have become familiarly known as the "Stanford Group."

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

 

Photo: EIRNS

The LaRouche Youth Movement “Basement Team” of scientific researchers (left), is now working on the question of cosmic radiation: that the real universe is not organized according to a granular, particularate kind of structure, but rather, on the basis of what we call cosmic radiation (as seen in this artist’s conception), away from the reductionist standpoint. “We’ve been hoodwinked for too long,” LaRouche says.

Photo: NASA/Simon Swordy (U. Chicago)

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.  

They say, "Mr. LaRouche, since the days of Charlemagne, the very idea of 'nation' had its foundations as a program of internal development in infrastructure, and our study of history would indicate that those programs have always served to increase what you refer to as the potential population density of those populations. And also, to raising their standard of living. That idea of what a nation is has obviously persisted over many successive generations. One of the things that we've been discussing here over the last couple of weeks is that, essentially since prior to the end of the Second World War, such projects, which could be defined as rail systems, as waterways, and other such items, were in fact science drivers in their day.

"But since the end of the Second World War, it would seem that those types of programs were replaced by what we can best discuss as the space program. If America's commitment to that program is terminated, our argument is that it would not only lead to an almost immediate decline in labor productivity, as well as the relative potential population density of the U.S.A., but that, in fact, it would denote a disintegration of the nation-state itself, and we'd like you to comment on what your thoughts are on this."

LaRouche: One of the things we're involved in now with the Basement operations and similar things, is a breakthrough in recognizing certain things that were actually working, but whose identity was not adequately recognized.

For example: Everything about mankind is different than the monkeys, or apes, or some Democrats. This difference lies in a quality which we call creativity, when it's properly defined, as typified by creativity leading to scientific progress. Now, this is typified in one of the great developments in science which occurred toward the end of the 19th Century, when there was a breakthrough in having discovered the Periodic Table, and gone through a development of the Periodic Table, to a different conception of mankind, which was reflected in things such as the development of what we call nuclear physics. Actually, the proper term is physical economy, or a science of physical chemistry.

In other words, chemistry meant essentially that we're not taking something as fixed elements, and putting them together as in ordinary chemistry, but recognizing there's a process of development embedded in the universe, on which man's actions are acting, having an effect. And that what we should be looking at is that.

And when you talk about physical chemistry, as people like William Draper Harkins and others defined that toward the beginning of the century, we come into the area of the work of Vernadsky, in terms of this idea of physical chemistry. And Vernadsky's division of the world among three different categories of existence, all of which are creative. That is, there is no non-creative part of the universe. The universe in its so-called inorganic form is creative. It creates new star systems, it creates new chemistries, it creates all kinds of things. The universe is creative, inherently creative.

Then you have life. Life is inherently creative. The difference is that non-living matter doesn't think; it just creates, through lawful processes embedded in the universe. Animals don't really think, unless people tell them to, and then they disobey. But people are different than animals in the sense that we are also creative inherently, but our creativity is expressed differently. We don't see ourselves evolving very much. We see some devolving going on—but that's mostly due to some bad Democrats. But the human race's voluntary role is conscious; it's the process of invention. It also is expressed in Classical artistic composition. And it's Classical artistic composition, together with the idea of physical chemistry as a process of anti-entropic evolution, which defines what goes on with mankind.

Mankind has always been creative—before we discovered what creativity is. It's the nature of mankind to be creative; it's the characteristic of our species. It's a different kind of creativity than we find in the animal kingdom. But we didn't understand it. Not this way. We didn't understand it from the standpoint of chemistry, or physical chemistry, and since the work of Vernadsky, Harkins, and so forth, we have a different view. Or, actually, since the influence of Riemann, we have a different view.

And so we should be understanding what this means, and the current breakthrough in response to this particular question is that—is coming to an understanding of what a higher level of creativity, in terms of achievement, has brought us. And to make ourselves a willful agent of that, rather than sort of like a frictional agent. We do it because it's in us and we like it, so we do more of it. Then we have to ask ourselves the question: Well, what is this thing that we like to do, which is so useful? How can we understand how to use it better? What's the intention of this tool? It's a nice tool, but what is the tool telling us we've got to do?

And again, the simple problem here is typified by the corruption which occurred, especially after the Peloponnesian War in the history of the Hellenes. If you go back to the earlier period, of people like the Pythagoreans, such as Archytas or Plato, you have a completely different mentality than you find after the Peloponnesian War, in the rise to power of Macedon, and Aristotle of Macedon—a reductionist view. The reductionist view, which was called in ancient society by various terms, translated into English as the oligarchical model.

The oligarchical model was the concept that people should be essentially cattle. That a person should do what their grandfather did, and not change. They should not progress. They should not develop. They should leave that to their "betters." So you had a condition of peasantry which was tantamount virtually to slavery, and this was the condition of society under the oligarchical model.

It was like the British model today: "There must not be too many people. Look, we made a big mistake. We've got 6.7 billion people on this planet. That was a big mistake! We've got to reduce it immediately," says Barack Obama's master, with his health-care program.

But we've said no. Mankind is inherently, voluntarily creative. When mankind is self-educated and developed to understand consciously those powers which we have as human beings, which we are using almost accidentally under certain conditions, just because we like to do it, without understanding fully what it is we're doing. And thus, we come into this business of the space program.

Now, the space program was more productive than anything ever that humanity did. That is, the rate of benefit of new technologies produced by the space program far exceeded everything expended on the space program. What happened is, by government decision, beginning in the middle of the war in Indo-China, 1967-68, we stopped it! In fiscal year 1967-68, we cut back. If you look, for example, around Massachusetts, around the Route 128 programs—almost like the Silicon Valley today. Silicon Valley is a desert of has-beens or has-wanted-to-be. And the Route 128 region became virtually like a Silicon Valley in 1967-68, because of budgetary considerations by the Johnson Administration.

But still, the thing was going on. And into the 1970s, we were producing ten cents of science for every penny spent, in terms of benefit. Why? Because when we go into very high energy-flux-density technologies, as you have to do, to even think about getting to the Moon, the rate of the increase of the productive powers of labor is accelerated, as in no other way, in a general way.

The Disease of Reductionism

We are now also at a point where science is suffering from the heritage of a disease. The disease is called reductionism. It's also called mathematics, modern mathematics, reductionist mathematics, positivism. Positivism defines the universe as a sort of granular texture. And that's the problem. The universe is not organized like granular textures. It's not reductionist. It's not dirt. It's actually a cosmic process, but because we accepted the reductionist conception of science which we associate with Aristotle, or worse, with the followers of Paolo Sarpi, that belief—in the case of Sarpi, behaviorism—destroys our ability to understand the processes of the human mind, and the relationship of those processes of the mind to nature in general, to the principle of creativity, or the principle of anti-entropy.

So, we're now, in the Basement, working on a program which has been defined as the subject matter called the question of cosmic radiation: that the real universe is not organized according to a granular, particularate kind of structure, but it's organized on the basis of what we call cosmic radiation, away from the reductionist standpoint. But the entire tradition, especially of the positivist mathematicians, is against that.

So, what we are saying now is, we look at the space program in particular, which is what inspired this, with Sky [Shields][1] and others, we're looking at that, and saying, "Well, look. Let's take this thing: We've been hoodwinked for too long. We've been told that the universe is granulated, is particularate. But it's not. And while we think like that, we're stepping on our own feet, because the universe is not organized that way. It's organized much more the way the Pythagoreans, and Plato, and others, understood earlier, before Aristotle, and before this modern stuff. And therefore, we have to look at this from a different point of reference."

For example: human creativity, all these kinds of things—when we get into this area, all kinds of doors fly open, and you realize what this crazy idea has been, which has been preventing us from doing the things in science we should be doing.

So I think the question you're posing, as asked, if, considered in the light of what I just said, put together, you have a key to understanding this problem, and the opportunities that it represents. So, we have to keep going along this direction. We have to break through the barriers which have been self-imposed by a reductionist method, which is encouraged by this kind of systemic positivism, mathematical positivism. Get rid of it! Free ourselves of it! And look at the universe in the way which the founders of 20th-Century physical chemistry, such as William Draper Harkins, or Vernadsky, or Max Planck, understood. Go back to that! Look, we abandoned what should have been our treasure house. Go back to it! We have now created the circumstances where we force ourselves to realize what we have ignored, because the teachers told us to ignore it for too long.

What Was the Nature of the SDI?

Freeman: The next question is also from the Stanford Group.

They say, "Mr. LaRouche, you addressed this somewhat in your presentation today, but we have had an ongoing controversy in our discussions here, on the issue of the SDI. Some among us have argued that the SDI, at least as it was adopted by Ronald Reagan, was principally a military policy; but some of us, who have looked at this thing for quite some time, have taken a different approach, and it is our contention that the SDI has to be looked at, essentially, as an extension of the space program, but one which has the potential to be a science-driven effort that would increase the quality of life not only for Americans, but for mankind as a whole.

"It's our view, as a group, that, for the most part, especially since the Second World War, that most of the wars that we have fought have largely been wasteful, and have not been wars fought for any particular principle, and that, therefore, it would be a denigration of the ideas implicit in the SDI, to consider it as merely a military effort. Could you expand on this a bit, and share with us your view, and what you were thinking when you first designed the concept?"

LaRouche: Well, this goes back to my childhood. You know, people make mistakes. They think the world is sort of granulated, with little particles hitting against each other, a sort of stochastic effect. It's not like that at all.

For example, when I look at the genealogy of my own family, and look at what my mind is shaped to become as a result of the colonization of the United States and Canada. My first ancestors in this country came here in the first half of the 17th Century, in Quebec, and also in Massachusetts, at about the same time. One of the ancestors of note came over in the Mayflower. Others came over to Massachusetts in that period.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.


Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

EIRNS/Philip Ulanowsky

Once President Reagan announced his commitment to the SDI, in March 1983, the LaRouche movement went into an all-out mobilization to win support for it. Shown: A rally in Washington, organized by LaRouche’s National Democratic Policy Committee in September 1983, in which tens of thousands of petition signatures were presented to Congress; and, the LaRouche Democratic Campaign’s mass pamphlet of 1983.

And then I look back at my age: My grandparents were born at the beginning of the 1860s. That's a little bit more than a hundred years, isn't it? And their ancestors were born, again, 60, 70 years earlier. One part of my family were Quakers, but there was a group of Quakers called the Free Quakers, such as James Fenimore Cooper. And his father was a general officer of some rank in the Continental Forces, the American Forces. He became the head of the U.S. intelligence service abroad and the U.S. branch—James Fenimore Cooper—and he was of course a naval specialist. He founded the conception of naval warfare as a political conception, and, together with a whole group of people in the 19th Century, intermingled with people in France, in the Carnot circles, in Germany, and so forth. So, when I look at my family background, I've got a very clear picture of what the environment was which shaped what became me! It's rather awesome.

So, you realize that you are not a product of something that was born, physically, like some ape that chose to get smart, or something like that, but you are a product, a conscious product, of all kinds of ingredients—especially intellectual and cultural ingredients—which went into the formation of your personality, the development of your personality.

And what's one of the most important things about this is that when you choose a profession, or choose a commitment which has the effect of a profession, you reach out to those things in your environment, your social-cultural environment, which fit something within this evolution of the United States. And so not only does the environment influence you, but you influence the environment by the way you trace your intellectual ancestry, as well as your biological ancestry. And you treat your biological ancestry as an accident, which happened to your cultural ancestry. And that's the way we have to look at these things.

So, in the case of the SDI, this is me. I, at the age of 14-15, did not accept Euclidean geometry. I just didn't accept it, and I had a good reason not to accept it. Because I observed some construction, and I said, if this thing is right, then the construction couldn't occur. And it proved that you could not have a positivist conception of mathematical geometry; you had to have a physical conception of geometry.

That changed my whole choice of things, because I made it a fighting issue. So I fought, during my whole educational experience, I fought for this approach, as opposed to the general so-called Euclidean approach, in everything. And that defines the way you work.

Therefore, what happened with the creation of the SDI was my conception. I made choices, and I reached out in the culture, among certain professionals and others in the United States, in various parts of Europe and other parts of the world, and I became a catalyst who pulled together people who represented these traditions: the military circles of France, the circles around what had been Charles de Gaulle, leading military circles in Germany, and scientific circles in Germany, which also agreed. Leading military circles in Italy who agreed. Some Soviet circles who agreed also with those things.

So, what happened is, because I sparked this thing, all these things began to come together, through people who identified in themselves knowledge and attitudes which corresponded to this kind of experience. And then when I began to spread this thing, I had people from the former OSS (the faction which I was sympathetic to, as against the British faction), who came to me, and said, "Hey, we've got to work together."

In that sense, what happened was a leading circle, intellectual circle, of the U.S. political intelligentsia, military, and so forth, came together around me in Europe, in the United States and elsewhere, around this conception of how we could get out of this military bind, called this European-Anglo-American-Soviet conflict. How to get out of this thing! And you can only get out of it by going at it directly. You have to say, okay, here's the kind of skills you represent. Here's the way these skills should be used. To what purpose and to what effect.

Now, you want to take a case. Take the case of a guy who was recruited to this process, which I was involved in: Edward Teller. Edward Teller, at a meeting with a Soviet representative which occurred in Sicily, in Erice, defined the purpose of the SDI as "the common aims of mankind." Now, if you know anything about Edward Teller, and what his reputation is, and his role inside the United States over that period, you understand what that means.

The people in the intelligence community: What was my project? My project was headed under my plan for a U.S. intelligence university. I said, in the United States, the universities are no longer reliable. And especially for intelligence purposes. All we have is this British influence; it's coming into our universities. We no longer have American historians. We have imitation-American, British-trained creatures, a different species, like baboons from South Africa or something, carrying baobab nuts back and forth. And the people were not actually historians; they were chroniclers. They would chronicle events, and try to make an algebraic positivist interpretation of a chronicled series of events, like a mathematical formula. Their standard was that, and they would ignore almost everything of importance that they didn't like. It was fake.

I said, we in the United States have a problem. The problem is, we used to have historians, we used to have scientists—I had a list of names I could name—and we don't have that anymore. We need an American university which is dedicated to training historians, intelligence officers, and so forth, which has the competence to define an American-interest view through these professions, which would concentrate upon an academic training program of this type. So, I wanted another thing to succeed West Point and so forth, which would be the intelligence education, which would produce historians and people with various skills, including a resource from which to recruit intelligence officers, who go through this thing with the language skills and so forth that are necessary for an intelligence officer.

So, I had this plan for an intelligence university. At that point in this process, the head of the CIA, newly in there, who was a friend of an old friend of mine—we began to run this operation. And it was in that context, of that operation as an applied concern, to make a change in U.S. policy, from a trend portrayed as policy, to an institution which would actually represent what we as a people culturally represent as distinct from Europe. An American intellectual institution, which we were losing.

And so out of this, what was assembled in this process was, throughout the U.S. intelligence community or certain elements of it, a consolidation of people around this. And then one bright day, the President of the United States, after a January meeting on this subject, decided he liked it. And so, a few weeks later, he made a speech proposing it to the Soviet Union.

What he proposed was a speech designed by some people who'd been working with me, and he meant exactly what he meant at the time, which was my intention. So when it comes to the intention of the SDI, come to me. I'll tell you what it was. And I give you the case, swallow the case, of my dear old enemy Teller, and what he said at Erice and so forth, and we won people over, who had been on that kick, because they were intelligent enough to recognize that we were right! And this was the right way to go, not to go to a nuclear war but to take these weapons, and to turn them from weapons into building blocks, and get the military institutions of the respective countries themselves committed to this policy.

Because what you're going to do in warfare is what you can get the military to commit itself to do. So if you change their mind about what their mission orientation is, you change their objectives. And the problem with most military policy is, people go into war for war's sake. They don't think of their objective, their cultural objective. That's why we get into foolish wars which build up the power of the British Empire; because we go killing each other, out of some grudge fight, when we should be concentrating on how to build mankind.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.


Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
creative commons/William Warby

Library of Congress

America’s commitment to humanity as a whole was expressed in our immigration policy of the late 19th-early 20th Century: “We were for the people of the world ‘Come here! Come here!’ That was our motive; and that was right.” Shown: the Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor; immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, early 20th Century.

And in every part of society, in every culture, there are people—and people of generally potential influence, or influence—who will prefer that. And what you have to do is recruit those people, out of their own convictions and tendencies, to combine their effort for what they recognize should be their common interest, and to dedicate themselves to making it work.

And we came damned close, up to the point of the day that Reagan made that speech. We had it! It was only the intention of the British Empire, and people who I personally considered traitors to the United States, on this issue, who wanted to continue this conflict with the Soviet Union. And it came from Margaret Thatcher's circles in particular. They did not want peace. They did not want the development of mankind. They wanted things like this long war in Afghanistan. They wanted it, as a way of getting people to destroy their own nations and themselves. And if people had thought about it, they would realize the mission they were oriented to, was a war to destroy themselves. And to destroy the home from which they had gone to war.

We Cannot Avoid Impeachment

Freeman: The next question is: "Lyn, as I see it, the Democratic Party is on a path of self-destruction. If the Democratic Party sticks with President Obama, it's finished. However, if Obama is impeached, it seems to me that there are two alternative paths, both of which are bad for the nation. Either, the Democrats will be forced to defend him, which would be disastrous, or his impeachment will lead to a further implosion of the Democratic Party. Is it possible that your call for impeachment, and Kesha's victory in Texas based on that call, could lead to a purge of the Chicago boys, including the economic team around Obama, which is more of the same free trade crowd, more globalization, etc., and actually avoid the national trauma of impeachment?"

LaRouche: The national trauma of impeachment I welcome! It's a moment of joy, of liberation.

The question itself is posed on an assumption; the assumption about popular opinion and Democratic, and so forth, parties. I don't give a damn about the Democratic Party as such. I'm an American, and my view is, political parties should be instruments which further the kinds of discussion and debate and so forth, which are necessary to foster the process under deliberation. Arguments are useful; tough arguments are useful. You want to get at the truth. You can not be intimidated by the fear that somebody's going to take offense because you told the truth.

You have to say, "Look, this is the truth! C'mon!" But you don't like it; you say you dislike it; that's your prejudice, and you have a right to your prejudice. It's like saying you have a right to insanity, because it's arbitrary. You have to rise to always criticizing yourself.

Now, the way to criticize yourself in politics, is to look at the parties from the standpoint of the nation. Your interest is not the party! Your interest is the nation! I demand you choose, which! Are you for your nation? Is that your loyalty? Or is it to your party? If your criteria is to go to your party first, you're not a patriot. And that's what's been the problem in the function of the Congress and in the parties.

The parties should be a vehicle for the expression of a matured view of issues. And an instrument of education. But the objective is the body politic.

Look, we have a situation where the Congress has no relationship of accountability to the people of the United States. Sixty-three percent of the population, at a minimum, despises the Congress, despises the political parties. Democrats are running around—they're not calling themselves Democrats, but independents, en masse. So, party loyalty is worth nothing at this point. Decency about party relations is one thing, but party loyalty as higher than the commitment to the nation, is treason.

Because if you put the party above the nation, you are going to commit treason. You will betray the nation for the sake of the party. You will condition your choices to the condition of the party, not for the nation. "Well, I'm a good American, but first of all, I'm a Republican, first of all." Nobody knows what a Republican is anymore, and nobody knows what a Democrat is anymore. It's been very difficult to get a definition of either!

No, you have to start from what is good for the nation, and partisanship must be in the process of the dialogue, which is trying to bring about that which is good for the nation, and for the choice of mission of the nation in the world as a whole. The choice is reason! The party of reason. And people will go to that party, because they think that party is going to do something for the nation, that the nation needs. And you support that party as long as it's doing that, because it's a mission orientation for the nation. It is not something against the nation, or against the other parts of the nation, but it's for the nation.

It's like medical care arguments for people, the health of the patient; differences on the policy for the health of the patient. The health of the patient is what the purpose is, not the winning of that faction fight. And that's where our problem lies.

We do not locate ourselves in the fact that we should be concerned—first of all, for humanity. We have tested, and proven, the conception that the United States republic, in its Constitutional form, is a uniquely superior form of government. Therefore, we operate on those principles of the American Revolution, which are a partisan view of the fate of humanity. And we're sticking to that, because nobody has ever proven that wrong. Every time we have deviated from it, we've gone to hell. We are not going to betray our country anymore. Because we have as a nation—our commitment is to humanity as a whole. That's our commitment.

It used to be our characteristic. The Americans could be trusted to do something for the people. Our immigration policy of the late 19th Century, and the early 20th Century, was that. We were for the people of the world "Come here! Come here!" That was our motive; and that was right.

It was also our motive to use the fact of the cultures which were represented by people coming here, to enrich our own culture, which we did. That was right. We said: Okay, but then, the people who want to stay there or there, can stay there. Fine. They should make their own decisions. But! What is common between us, is this commitment. We are going to discuss and debate for what's good for humanity. And meanwhile, we're running our own country, according to our own standards, but we're going to consider what is good for humanity. And the dialogue will be based on that.

There is no substitute for the sovereign nation-state; and the role of culture as defining itself in a nation-state. That is sacrosanct. But the cooperation among nation-states, the understanding of the interpretation of differences in practice, policy, that's there. We have an American policy, but our commitment is to humanity, and we don't want our nation ever, to do what's not right for humanity.

And this is given to us by this question of the space program. Mankind must, for many reasons which are too numerous to be elaborated here on this occasion, mankind is committed, implicitly, toward developing an industrialization of the Moon, which is indispensable, with the aid of fusion power, to actually colonize Mars. There are an immense number of problems to be faced in trying this, many unsolved, and many uncorrect observations and beliefs to be removed. But, we know it can be done.

We know that mankind is not going to sit on this planet Earth, like a sitting duck, waiting for some solar catastrophe to wipe the human species out. We're going to move; we're going to extend the human species. We're going to extend its reach. Maybe we're going to find some humans out there someplace. But we're going to extend this. We're going to get the power, through relativistic flight, to be able to transport ourselves throughout this galaxy. It will take some time; we're not going to do that in my lifetime; I assure you of that. But, we're going to do that, because that's going to be our intention.

Our intention is the role of humanity in the universe at large. We're going to get the power to do that. In the meantime, we're going to do all the other things that go with that. But if we don't have that mission—.

That's why it's important to get beyond this positivist disease, and get into this concept of cosmic radiation. Because we know that the nature of mankind itself, the human mind itself, indicates that the present ideas of the organization of the universe axiomatically are wrong. We don't know what cosmic radiation really means yet. We know some things about it. We know that it means a correction against the dirty nitty-gritty thing that we have now, in terms of a positivist conception of reductionist science.

So, we're going to do that. We're going to discover where we were wrong. We're going to discover new principles. We're going to get new powers. We're going to find out how to maintain humanity, you know, such as Mars, which is not really habitable by human beings by our standards today, which means we're going to have to create an artificial environment for human beings in those places. We're going to have a similar problem to be faced on the industrialization of the Moon.

But we know we're on the verge of breakthroughs which will enable us to begin to discuss these problems. And as long as we're able to discuss these problems scientifically, we're going to be able to solve them.

Besides, the important thing is, we can live today, and we have a better health system than Obama would love us to have; we can have people living to 100 years and longer. We can actually prevent the deterioration of old age which is going on now; that's intrinsically, in principle, possible. So therefore, you're talking about nearly a century of human life for each individual. What can happen in a century of human life?

Let's take the best periods of scientific progress in known experience. What can happen in a century of human life? The foundations of a revolutionary change in the condition of humanity can be achieved. And that's the way to look at it. There's no limit to what mankind can do; that's what a human being is. And that's the principle, so we just have to do it.

Introducing Kesha Rogers

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

EIRNS/Will Mederski

Kesha Rogers, who won the Democratic nomination for Congress in Texas (22nd C.D.), called on the webcast audience to join her in giving leadership to the mass strike, by continuing to fight for the impeachment of Obama. She is shown here with LaRouche.

Harley Schlanger: Well, some of you may have heard, we had an election down in Texas about a week and a half ago. And this was an election determined by a process which very few people actually understand, but which Lyndon LaRouche has described as the dynamic process of a mass strike. It's a situation where you have a growing number of people who are barely able to survive, have no sense of the future for their family. They're angry, and they're frustrated, and they're starting to ask the right questions, like: "Who did this to us?" and, "Is there something we can do about it?"

Now, the existing leadership in the country, the political leadership, the economic leadership, as Lyn has been discussing, has woefully failed to address this crisis. It's not just incompetence at the top; there's an evil intent. And so the question is: When is the time that people will be ready for new leadership? And Lyn, a few months ago, said that he thinks that time is now.

We made a decision to run three campaigns, three candidates among LaRouche Youth Movement members, to provide that new generation of leadership that's not corrupted by the old ways of going along to get along, but will run campaigns on the basis of principle. And I am honored and delighted to bring you the good news, to introduce to you, one of those leaders, who won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Congress in the 22nd District of Texas, Kesha Rogers.

Kesha Rogers: Good afternoon.

So, we waged a hard-fought campaign in Texas, and we didn't just say, we must save NASA and impeach Obama, but we said that we're waging a war for the future of humanity. And if you want a future for your children, then you are going to stand with my campaign to call for the impeachment of Obama. And we did that very loudly and very clearly. And on March 2, the population and the voters of the 22nd District responded overwhelmingly.

And this response came from an organizing of the mass strike in the population that said, we want to put an end to the bailouts; we want a future for our children; we want a future for our nation. And as you saw from the response in the vote from the 22nd Congressional District, they didn't just respond to a slogan that said, "Oh, that's cool. 'Save NASA; Impeach Obama.' I like that." But people said, as we continued to go to their doors, as we continued to say to them, "Right now, this nation is in a dire crisis." They said that, they looked at their children as they were tucking them in to sleep at night, and they thought about what we presented to them, and the challenge for their future, the challenge for the nation that we presented to them, and they said, "I have to do something. I have to go out and fight."

And that's what happened. People got out; people fought.

And now, as the campaign continues, we're going to continue to develop that leadership, to promote the leadership which is necessary in the population to get people to recognize that, right now, the new challenge that is being put on us, the new challenge that is being put forth to the population, is that they have to determine what type of future that they're going to give to their children, to their grandchildren.

And so, we have a new phase of the campaign as we continue to go on, and the new phase of the campaign is what Mr. LaRouche has put on the ground, has put out very prominently, as the mission orientation for a Moon-Mars mission. And now, this campaign, as my friend Sky Shields has very clearly put out, and Mr. LaRouche in his new paper has put forth[2], this campaign has opened up a new phase of leadership in saying that, we're now going to move on to development of a rebirth of a Moon-Mars colonization policy and mission orientation for the country.

And so, I ask that each of you continue to join with me, as we fight in this campaign to provide the leadership, along with my campaign, and also the campaigns of other two representatives, Congressional candidates Rachel Brown [Massachusetts] and Summer Shields [California]. Thank you very much.

Freeman: I also want to recognize another candidate, a LaRouche Democrat, who is running for the Senate in the state of Indiana, for the seat held by Baron Hill, Carol Smith.

Human Intelligence Is Dynamic

This is a question from another section of the Stanford Group, from the section that was initially tasked by the Obama Administration to assess the overall state of the U.S. economy, and most specifically the state of infrastructure.

Their question to you is the following: "Lyn, you have frequently discussed Nixon's actions in 1971 as the beginning of the end of the current financial system and of the true decline of the U.S. economy. But in fact, our ongoing economic survey has led to a different conclusion. Our study shows that the taking down of the U.S. economy actually began much earlier. In fact, it began almost immediately at the end of the Second World War, or with the death of FDR.

And I add that, because some people will argue that the decline of the economy in the postwar period always follows the ends of wars, because of reductions in military production and spending. But we are attributing it to something different, in terms of what FDR's policies actually were. But the point is, that the decline began then. The downturn was, according to our study, temporarily reversed with the Kennedy Presidency, and most specifically the space program. After Kennedy's murder, the disintegration intensified, but was well under way already when Richard Nixon pulled the plug. Are we looking at this the right way, and would you take a moment to comment?"

LaRouche: Yes, it is. Some of these takedowns were crucial in the sense that they were irreversible. Others were the establishment of trends, which by failing to be reversed, created this process. The controlling factor in this, all along, was that the control goes back to before, long before World War II. It goes back to the assassination of McKinley, in particular, in the whole century.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Willner
(Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)

Every process in the universe, according to Vernadsky, is creative. It is not particulate; it is organized by principles, as seen in this photograph taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope of Spiral Galaxy M81.

Because remember what happened: McKinley was an obstacle to what? Well, McKinley was a patriot, and his successor, who was former Vice President, was not—Theodore Roosevelt. The policy of the United States as a nation, from the beginning, in terms of foreign policy and economic policy, had always been based on the issues of 1763, and the split between the British faction in Massachusetts and elsewhere, and the patriotic faction. The British faction was the British East India Company faction. The significance of 1763 was not the French and Indian Wars. The French and Indian Wars were a by-product of the problem, and they affected the Americans greatly on this account. But they affected them greatly because of a greater consideration.

That function was the Seven Years War!

Now, we'd had wars before, but the Seven Years War was crucial. What happened, typically, is that the British and the Dutch, together, conspired to organize a Seven Years War in Europe. This Seven Years War, in its effect, destroyed Europe, and not only consolidated the power of the British Empire, the India Company, but, the gaining of the control of Canada, and of India, by the British, through the course of the Seven Years War, established the British Empire as an empire of the British East India Company. At that point, the British monarchy was under the control of the British East India Company. It depended upon that; it was already an imperial interest.

The British Empire was lodged in the imperial form of the system, not in the fact of the British monarchy. The British monarchy became a tool of the empire, but the monarchy did not define the empire. The British East India Company, well, what is the British East India Company? It was Venice! The Venetian financial oligarchy, which had created all kinds of evil things.

So, the point has been, the British imperial policy always was the policy of the British East India Company, which is a policy of an essentially Venetian interest. Like a disease. You say, "I want to meet your emperor." You dealing with, say, bubonic plague. "I want to meet the Big Emperor of Bubonic Plague. I want the Big Bubo."

But no, what there is, is a culture. You know, this goes back to a more fundamental question which most politicians don't even know about. And most historians don't know about, either. Or, they call them "hysterians" for that reason. They don't know what the problem is, but they're excited about it.

So, anyway, what's the point? What's the nature of mankind? Forget particularism. What's the nature of mankind? Every process in the universe, according to Vernadsky, is creative. The non-living processes are creative. Living processes are inherently creative. Mankind is inherently creative, but it's not the same thing. Mankind's creativity is voluntary, and is located essentially in the capacity of the human individual.

So, we're dealing with mass phenomena, global phenomena, we're not dealing with a kinematic system. And most idiots, politicians and historians and so forth, are idiots because they think in terms of kinematic considerations. They think of ideas as spread kinematically from person to person, when most people don't even know why they think what they think! Therefore, what they think, about what they think, is not a definition of their interest. Nor is it, above all, a definition of their behavior. Mass behavior is not based on individual opinion. As Shelley illustrates in his concluding paragraph of his A Defence of Poetry.

What determines all processes in the universe, is what the ancient Greeks before Aristotle knew as dynamis, which was revived in the last decade of the 17th Century, as dynamics. And then you had people get frantic about what Leibniz had done in presenting modern dynamics, and they invented a new name, a new meaning, for dynamics, which is commonly used today, but which is worth nothing, it's totally incompetent.

Dynamics indicates that the processes that govern humanity, are dynamic. They are characteristics of processes, not reactions among things. They are not kinematic in any sense. They're dynamic—in Leibniz's sense; as Shelley describes mass behavior in the concluding paragraphs of his A Defence of Poetry. All human behavior is defined by mass behavior, and the role of the individual lies in the relationship between individual behavior's influence on mass behavior.

Mass behavior is dynamic. The individual acts not on the "I'm one individual," and then another, and then another. The individual acts on the mass, the process. The relation is not concrete, it's not particular; it's dynamic. And dynamic means not particular. Kinematic interaction among things is not dynamics, contrary to people who don't know any better and say so. So, therefore, that's the process you're looking at.

Now, human intelligence is dynamic, and the reason most musicians who try to sing fail, even when they're well-trained, is because they don't know dynamics. Dynamics is located in the action of the individual on the process. The process is primary. The individual expresses the conscious element, of action, of the individual with the process. For example, it is not the validity of ideas that determines what ideas will be accepted. In most societies, what they believe generally is wrong. And the innovations in ideas they make as processes are wrong, destructive.

So, therefore, the function is, the way in which the individual is able to influence a dynamic process. And that's the way this thing works. And therefore, when you have a society which is based on positivist thinking: Just think, how many people who are professors in universities, in scientific and related subjects, or any other subject, how do they teach? They teach the individual as an object, or as an object in a kinematic process, not a dynamic one.

And we know the universe is organized by what? It's organized by principles.

But the problem is, in modern European civilization, which is based on Sarpi's teaching, and on the followers of Sarpi, most people deny the existence of dynamics. Why? Because, as you should know, every professor of sociology will say, there are no principles in the universe, but we adduce from behavior what effects are favorable to our satisfaction, our greed, our lust. What it does for me. It doesn't "do" anything, for me.

That's it, isn't it? That's John Locke. That's Adam Smith. That's all of the British School. What dominates our universities today? The British school of sociology. It's all the same. The disease is British sociology. The disease is liberalism, which is exactly what this means.

There is no principle in this society. Why is there no principle in this society? Because the rulers of society don't want it. Because a principle would interfere.

Like the health-care case, right? Obama's fascist Nazi health-care policy, for example: They say it's for the good of the people. We've got to kill more people for the benefit of the people. That's what he's saying! Precisely. That's kinematics. There is no principle of humanity. There is no sacredness to human life. There's no sacredness to the right to human life. There's no sacredness to any human right. It's all based on what the mass decides, the pestilence decides.

And that's our problem.

So, therefore, we have the wrong conception, because we don't understand this process. That's why we go at this question of cosmic radiation, as opposed to particulars. But, if you just think about it, think about how many professors, and so-called experts, always think in these terms, as if it's a kinematic interaction among individual wills, and there is no principle except what the social process, by this statistical process of collisions, somehow determines. That the majority vote determines what's right. Well, the majority voted for it. It's right. That's what they said in Nazi Germany! So, what's the difference between people who support Obama, and Nazis from Germany? None. What's the difference between the British monarchy and the Nazis? None. As a matter of fact, the British monarchy created the Nazis, truth be known. But then the Nazis got out of control, and the British were unhappy about it. But then they adopted the policy. They killed the Nazis, but they adopted the policy, and said, "That's mine! This is my sacred belief."

That's what the nature of the problem is, is that we have not yet recognized this phenomenon. Which is what I'm working on now, with what they're doing. Everything I'm doing, apart from what I do from day to day, is exactly that. This question, is to get clear what the nature of dynamics is, what's wrong with positivism. What's wrong with our mathematicians. Why mathematicians are not physicists. They may claim to be, but they're not. And many times, I find a problem, where a guy says, I'm a mathematician. "You mean, you're an incompetent. Or you play with yourself too much. You're not doing anything physical, you're playing with yourself, for mental gratification."

So, that's the nature of the problem. This is one of these areas where we've come to a time in history, where everything that we need to do, depends upon understanding the truth about this matter. What is man? What is the nature of society? The real control in society comes from dynamics.

It works in an ordinary society, in the form of education. What you must do in society, is educate the population. What you're trying to educate, is not educate them to an opinion, but to stimulate them to think in ways which improve the dynamic which is operating within the society. It's what they take into consideration.

For example, take a simple case. Let's take the case of Haiti, the case of Haiti today.

What we decide to do on Haiti today, as a decision, and the considerations that come into place on the Haitian question, whether we do it or not, determines what we are, doesn't it? What the American people do, about the crisis faced by Haiti today, is the expression of the dynamic. If the United States, as a nation, rejects Haiti, and goes with Obama against the Haiti decision, as it's doing, that is a rejection of humanity. And he's no damned good, for that reason.

Not that he's no damned good because he does the wrong thing, or the wrong action. He's no damned good because his contribution to the dynamic is evil. Because if your policy does not recognize the humanity of the people of Haiti, and the inherent human rights at stake, and the need to defend the cause of those human rights as a dynamic in society, then you're evil. The President is evil. Right?

So, you want to do good? That doesn't do it for you. Are you committed to influencing the dynamic which influences society, in such a way that you are impelled to make choices which correspond to what is right? And the problem with the members of Congress today is, they don't do that. They have other considerations: "I have loyalties to my constituency," or "disloyalties to my constituency," as I guess, is the favorite sport today.

So, that's the problem. That's the way I would put it; in that framework, is the most important thing, in discussing the question, in particular the question: The framework in which we define what the problems are, and what the solutions are.

What Is Causality?

Freeman: This question comes from someone who is a leader of the Stanford group, but also was a former cabinet member. She's an economist. She says:

"Lyn, we're taught, for the most part, that any truly intelligible universal principles, and, I suppose, in that sense, any actual truth, doesn't exist. Now, it would seem to me, in reflecting on it, that it is that very notion that underlies the whole idea of monetarism. And this has come up, in discussions of our group, in comparing monetarism to what you have called for in terms of a new economic system.

"But, the fact is, that monetarism—and that is really what we are all taught—is that reality can somehow be represented by an essentially statistical notion of value, and of monetary value.

"Now, the question that this raises, at least as I see it, is one of mathematics versus physics. For the most part, economists are trained in mathematics, and we are told, in fact, we are ruled by the idea, that any economic principle that we put forward, must be qualified mathematically.

"Now, obviously, the physicist takes a very different approach. And one of the things that has become immediately apparent to us, is that your Triple Curve function (Figure 1) could never have been arrived at purely from the standpoint of mathematics. Therefore—and please understand we're not trying to replace you, but we're trying to figure out why it is, that you were able to do this, when no one else was. And somehow, it seems that it is in this area of mathematics versus physics, in dealing with questions of economy and of national economy, that the answer lies. Would you comment?"

Figure 1
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.


LaRouche: Well, of course, the whole mathematical system of economics is a fraud inherently. And it was based on an imperialist system, to begin with. And it's against humanity.

Now, the question should be, is: What is causality? There is no concept of causality in a mathematical economics. We choose one thing over the other. What's the difference? Well, someone says it's the mathematical equation. Crap! That has nothing to do with it. It's causality that's important. And when we use a financial system which is statistical, it never works.

Why? Look, in no case in history, the known history of mankind, has mathematics, or mathematical economics, ever succeeded in producing an improvement in the conditions of life. Never. So, mathematics has, in that sense, constantly failed, and will always fail.

What happens? First of all, look, you have to look at it from the standpoint of chemistry. Life processes and chemistry. In other words, you have to have an actual science, and there's no science in mathematical economics. None. And the results are always bad. As the case history of the United States since the death of Franklin Roosevelt shows. Always wrong. American history. Always wrong. History of Europe. Always wrong.

We have the greatest perfection of mathematics per se, with no physics in it, which was introduced by reductionism, especially since Alan Greenspan came into power, with these innovations. The greatest freedom of mathematics to test everything, without any difference for quality. The result has been the greatest catastrophe in all human history. So, any kind of mathematical economics, as such, has been proven, again and again, to be a total failure.

Now, if you want to say a failure is a success, your measure of success, then mathematical physics is superior.

The fact of the matter is, you live in a universe which is essentially consonant with what is defined by Vernadsky's conception of the three qualitative phase-spaces of which existence is composed, at least experimental areas: the non-living, living processes as such, and the human mind. Three different phase-spaces.

Now, what do we do? Mankind does not live naturally. Mankind's achievement is to be highly unnatural. I don't want to encourage certain tendencies by that, but it's unnatural in the sense of the typical ordinary physical chemist who is not really a competent physical chemist. What is the physical chemistry of the universe? We have the physical chemistry we identify with the non-living—that is, which has no antecedent as an organized process. Then we have processes which are living processes inherently, or residues of living processes. Then we have humanity, which is not quite the same thing as any other form of living process.

So, you have the three categories. These are dynamic, they are universal and dynamic. They interact. The universe is a composite of interaction of these three phase-spaces, and everything that's derived from it.

So now, how do we live? Let's take a typical case of iron. How do we get iron? Well, we could get iron in many ways, hypothetically, but how do we actually get it? How have we gotten it in terms of the 18th and 19th, and 20th centuries? We went to areas where a lot of little animals and plants died. We went and we robbed their graves, for iron.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

“How do we live?” LaRouche asked. Take the case of iron. How do we get it? From areas where a lot of little animals and plants died: We robbed their graves for iron. Iron is all over the planet, as around the Great Lakes area. Shown: the Hanna furnaces of the Great Lakes Steel Corp.; stockpile of coal and iron ore, Detroit, Mich.

Now, iron is all over the planet. It's a universal thing. But, why do we go and rob graves to get iron? As around the Great Lakes area—it's one of the great deposits of iron. And we rob the graves of the little creatures that died there. That's how we get iron. Why? Because the little creatures who used iron, as part of their biological process, would, when they died, have left a concentration of iron in their little dead bodies. And you can go there and say a prayer over them, hmm?

So, therefore, we found the sources of the richest concentration of iron ores, for us, such as bog iron in the Jersey swamp, which is where the Revolutionary War got its metal, iron—from New Jersey, the bog iron swamp.

So, we concentrate on grave-robbing of living processes, and we find that we go in, and we take the areas which have the richest concentration of iron, which means the least heat, the least coal, used up in order to refine the stuff, and we leave behind the things that are not quite as efficient, that consume too much power in order to reduce this thing to a form of usable iron.

Now we find out that by doing that, we tend to exhaust the richest resources, of various kinds, left behind in the graveyards of various kinds of species. That's how we get them. We have the Lithosphere, and on top of this, we have a Biosphere, which is developing. It selects certain materials in the environment; grabs it, takes it into their bodies—food, food, food, for this little creature. These things die, and they leave behind these deposits. And you go running around the world to find out what kind of species was loose in this area, and they will give you the best concentration of this kind of deposit from the Periodic Table.

But then—you're using it up! Are you using it up? No, you haven't diminished the total iron in the universe, or on Earth. It's still there, it's still abundant. But it's now dispersed! It's not in graves you can rob any more. You have to go out and rob other graves, or you have to take other resources, and you have to get more powerful means of reducing resources, in order to make them equivalent to what had been the richest resources of this iron.

So, the essence of the thing, is: For humanity to exist, several things are necessary. Humanity must increase its power, measured in heat energy, or heat power per square kilometer, per square centimeter, or smaller. And by increasing our power, by increasing the energy-flux-density of the power applied, we are able to make poor resources, better than what had been previously considered rich resources. To do that, we have to develop infrastructure, a total systemic infrastructure. We have to develop an infrastructure which is able to organize the application of energy, power, in various ways, which makes it possible at various points in the Earth, to extract economically a raw material from the Periodic Table, and to distribute it. Because you're getting it here, and you want it over here. That requires a system of power to deliver this damned stuff.

So, therefore, you can take the increase of the energy-flux-density, per capita and per square kilometer, of the planet, as a limiting consideration.

So now, let's look at economics, from that standpoint: Which is called the science of physical economy. Which, in its modern form, is based on the work of many scientists, especially the followers of Bernhard Riemann, such as Max Planck, such as Albert Einstein, and Vernadsky. That, is real economic science.

Now then, the other part of it—well, it's not just economics. It's political, also. Because what kind of a political system do you have, of coordination among people, to do all the various things, including distribution, to make this system work? Look at it from the standpoint of Vernadsky. Look at it from the standpoint of physical chemistry as defined by Vernadsky. What do you have to do in terms of organization of human activity, development of power systems, transportation systems, management in general, to make this work? And to keep society progressing, and not deteriorating, entropically?

That's physical chemistry!

Now, let's take those standards, and let's measure the performance of an economy by that standard, that yardstick, and you have it. That's the problem. You need a science of physical economy, which means that you do have to consider all these psychological and other things, because they're involved in the way in which you bring about the organization of the efforts of society, to solve this problem.

And it's the same thing we're going to go to industrialize the Moon, which is one of the easiest chores before us, and how we're going to get to Mars, in less than 300 days, and not end up as a piece of jelly—that's going to make it difficult to control the machine to get back.

So, therefore, the meaning of economics, as it's taught, is gibberish. And we know it's gibberish, because every time you use it, you end up in bad trouble.

So, you have to test things by their effects, but you have to choose the right effect. You have to find the time-scale on which you have to measure the effect. So, there's nothing scientific about what is taught as economics today. What is taught is, how to behave, to make the bloodsuckers rich.

A Policy To Rescue Mexico

Freeman: The next question comes from a Mexican Congressman. He is from the opposition party, the PRD:

"Mr. LaRouche, do you think that nuclear energy is the only thing that can help countries as a source of energy, or could it be nuclear in combination with other kinds of energy? Right now, nuclear energy is not being discussed for Mexico. No one seems to be talking about it. But we think that it's a very good idea, and a very good alternative. For, among other reasons, the fact that it produces large amounts of energy, without having any negative effect on climate change."

LaRouche: Don't worry about climate "change." Think about dollars. It's not "change," it's dollars that count.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Indymedia

The desperate, and worsening conditions of life in Mexico, as seen in this maquiladora along the Texas border, could be dramatically improved by the policies LaRouche has proposed, going back to the early 1980s. “The point is, you have to have a policy, you have to have sort of a love of a country, as I do for Mexico,” LaRouche stated.

Look, we went through this, in Mexico, in the period of the 1970s, and early 1980s. I was personally involved with López Portillo, and other people, who made an attempted revolution to save Mexico, in 1982. We would have saved Mexico, if we'd been allowed to.

Since the end of the López Portillo government, that October, with his swan song at the United Nations, Mexico has been going continuously down hill ever since, from worse to worser. And best, worsest. Now, what were the plans, which were not necessarily López Portillo's plans, for economic policy for Mexico, pertaining to nuclear power, which are relevant?

Well, first of all, as you know, the most accessible areas of Mexico are along the coastlines, naturally. And therefore, you will tend to say, if you want to have an efficient economy, you've got to move the people out of the dust bowl, or the smoke bowl, which is the Mexico City area. You know, you sit up there, years ago even, it's worse today: You sit up there and in the morning the filth is down. So, you can get up on the second story, or third story; you can breathe air. Down lower, it's more difficult. By afternoon and evening, everybody is struggling. It's not fit to live in.

And yet, the people of Mexico, the population, keeps concentrating, coming into this great bowl, in this mountainous area, more and more population, suffocating, and living with poorer and poorer standards, with less and less productivity, actual physical productivity. When you have all this territory of Mexico, most of which is left undeveloped. I mean, it's a territory which is useful.

For example, the Mexicans for many years have had this policy of these canals along the coastline of Mexico. The coastline, freshwater canals. Because the idea is, the southern part of Mexico is rich in water, and the northern part is rather not so rich in water, much worse. There is no significant railway connection directly between Mexico City and major cities on the northern coast.

So, therefore, what's wrong? The efforts are going in the wrong place.

Now, the problem of going to the coastal areas, if you want to set up, as was planned then—Mexico had a plan for ten nuclear centers, of power production, at that point. It was all in the plans, it was ready to go. Well, the first thing is, the temperature at some times of the day, and certain times of the year, is not so nice. Not nice for human beings. And it promotes siestas, and you know what siestas may lead to. They may lead to sex, and things like that. Therefore, you don't want too many siestas. You want people working.

Well, this means climate control. Now, climate control has many features, which involve things like water. The best way to have natural climate control is to grow trees. So, grow trees. Trees will tend to absorb 10% of the solar indicated radiation, up to that level. Grasses, poor policy. Grasses and bushes, 1 to 2% at maximum.

So, the first thing you want to do, you want to make a more habitable environment. And you don't want solar collectors, nor tax collectors. You want natural collectors, natural control of the environment, by trees. Rip up those solar collectors, we need trees! Same thing. So, therefore, in buildings and structures, you would have air conditioning, in addition to trees. You build in forested areas. Every place you can, you have a tree. You want nice climate control? Have a tree, as many trees as you can get. Find the best ones for this purpose. They're nice, anyway, to have.

So, anyway, get that. Now, in the areas of work, you control air conditioning. You have water purification. Suddenly, Mexico, areas that are considered unfavorable, [are made habitable] by sufficient water and sufficient power—because you can handle the power more easily and more profitably along the coastlines than you can in the desert in the interior. Of course, the objective is not to offend the deserts, but to eliminate them. But that's not to offend them. Because deserts aren't people. They don't have feelings. Trees may have feelings, but not deserts.

So, therefore, you want to transform a desert area, into a rich area of habitation, and so forth. So now, you use the areas which are the most profitable, in terms of energy policy, to develop habitable areas for the Mexicans to get the hell out of that bowl of breathing that stuff they have to breathe every day in Mexico City. Move out into areas where there's employment, there are decent environmental living conditions, and use the areas which are cheapest for getting this effect, because of transportation factors, and so forth, and use that to develop the inland desert areas, as areas suitable for habitation.

Because the Mexican population has, despite all methods to the contrary, shown a tendency to increase. I don't know what it is they do, but they do something that they increase their population. Maybe it's the lack of employment. Maybe if they had work producing other things, they wouldn't be producing so many babies.

But anyway, that being the case, that's the point. The point is, you have to have a policy. You have to have sort of a love of a country, as I do for Mexico. I've been there enough, and so forth, you get a certain love of the country. So, you want the country, like a beloved friend, to prosper. And you want them not to have these deprivations, of undeveloped areas, where poor people are starving, and suffering with diseases and so forth, in undeveloped areas. And that's the policy.

The only reason Mexico didn't improve, as López Portillo intended, in 1982, there's one reason—the British and the Americans said "no." They said, "Starve. We don't like you to get too rich; you get too uppity, we don't like that. Mexicans tend to be insolent, we don't like that. You want to work? Go to the United States. You'll work for nothing, but don't worry, you'll get work, huh? Don't complain, you'll get work."

That's the policy, isn't it? Why adapt to that? Why don't we recognize that we as nations, such as Mexico, have an interest in developing the minds of people. Don't we feel ashamed every time we see people die in poverty in some part of the world, where the poverty is something we've helped to foster, because we support policies which do that? Why don't we just coalesce, and combine the forces of patriots of various nations, to a common cause? To say that we have the technologies available to us to begin to make things better. And why don't we just do that? And let each do it their own way, but let it be smart, and also do a little bit of consulting about what's smart to do. That's all. That's important. The solution is that.

Mexico—after the defeat of López Portillo, Mexicans became cowardly. It's like that. I can tell you that as of, say, August of 1982, we had a cadre of the organic leadership of Mexico, which was already engaged in a commitment to a program which would have succeeded mightily, and would have changed the entire hemisphere from the north, from Canada, all the way to the southern tip of South America. We had it, we had an agreement among López Portillo, among the President of Brazil, among the government of Argentina, and others, to implement a program which I designed. It would have worked just fine. But this came in the period following the Malvinas War, in which the British Empire, and a bunch of British butt-kissers in the U.S. administration, prevented the proper action being taken. The United States should have kicked the British out of there. We didn't do it.

But anyway, so therefore, these political failures—and what happens is, people tend to respond to a political failure as if it were a law of nature. "We don't dare do that, we don't dare get insolent about nuclear power in Mexico, because we got our fingers burned once, for trying it. And therefore, can't we compromise, so the enemy doesn't get too upset?" And then, we lose!

I think the world is in a state now, that I'm ready to go to war on this question: I'm going to stop losing!

Health Care as a Mission of Government

Freeman: With recent developments in Washington, as you can imagine, we have a lot of questions on health care. But, I'm going to take a question which I'll read to you, which comes from a member of the audience, Ms. White. And she says, "Mr. LaRouche, I've recently discovered in my reading that concerning the large-scale projects and policies of FDR, that health care reform was included—i.e., the building of hospitals, training of health-care professionals, etc., was included under the banner of infrastructure, and therefore, funded under the Federal credit initiatives, just as other infrastructure projects and policies were. I found this fascinating, because I'm now beginning to realize that this must be exactly where health care should be, instead of the scam of Nazi-type health-care policies dreamed up by Congress and the Obama EZ-Kill Administration. Would you please comment on this?"

LaRouche: Well, this policy was partly a reflection of the experience of World War II, and also World War I, because of the massive warfare of the world wars of that period, which included, actually, the wars of the 1890s, as well as intermediate wars all over the place. Massive warfare of a protracted type, of, you know, five, ten years, that sort of thing, produced a problem in the wartime, as in both World War I and II, and in the immediate postwar period as a refraction of that. We, in the United States, had developed an excellent system, which is the military medical system, as a part of the medical corps of the United States. This is based on various institutions putting together a network of general hospitals, and we had a structural organization of the entire medical care system, generally focused on the general hospital all the way down. So, right to the battlefield.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

National Archives

The Hill-Burton-based health-care system, established in 1946, on FDR principles, came out of the World War II military medical system, a comprehensive system, from the battlefield to the general hospital. Shown: an underground surgery room, behind the front lines in the Pacific; an American Army doctor operates on a U.S. soldier wounded by a Japanese sniper, 1943.

So you had from the battlefield, or any condition of the troops, or the environment of the troops in any area, you had a response pattern all the way up to the general hospital and above. What we did in the postwar period is, you look at what Roosevelt did, what Roosevelt's policy was. And you take every county of the United States, like the local combat zone in Europe and so forth of the United States, and you have a system that goes through a chain reaction of institutions all the way up to the top.

And the whole thing is a single organism, which reacts as a single organism. Somewhere in the system, there is a means for dealing with every problem, somewhere in the system. And we try to make it as efficient as possible, from the standpoint of the aidesman who is out in the battlefield, who is picking up the wounded from the battlefield, and taking them to an emergency station. Transferring them quickly with emergency aid, and transferring to the next place, and the next place, and the next place. All the way up to the surgical hospital, the general hospital, and so forth. And it worked—it didn't work perfectly, but the system as an idea worked.

All right, so what would we do? With the postwar period, we enacted legislation which is based on this experience. Now, the motivation of the physicians in the military was not money, not under wartime conditions. Money ain't the standard! Getting the job done is the standard, and a little pleasure on the side, also. They tend to do that, you know? They make up their own entertainment, but that's not built into the table of organization. Actually, the table of disorganization. So, that's all there is to it. That simple.

Now, what does that mean? The postwar period: It means you have several kinds of doctors. in terms of the doctors. You have the doctor who is independent. How does he function? Well, he functions by relationship to a hospital, and in the Hill-Burton system, to the county; everything is from the county. There, every county has a characteristic number of beds which are specified for that county, and the types of care specified for that county. The system is for all kinds of things. Who pays for it? Well, the government pays for it; all kinds of things pay for it. But the job gets done. The doctor is independent.

Now, what we had is, we had a racket, called malpractice prosecutions. First up, was to destroy the Hill-Burton system, and that was to go with the HMO system. You brought the insurance companies in. Now, instead of having an HMO system, which was 2% overhead costs, you have now a system with 30% and higher, overhead costs. You're paying mostly for non-care. The malpractice insurance rates were used to jack up the insurance premiums paid by physicians and institutions. So, you put a lot of physicians out of business, or you restricted their business to certain things which are considered high-risk areas, which carried a bigger insurance premium.

So, the campaign to emphasize malpractice insurance compensation became a racket of the insurance companies, which then moved to loot, to destroy the health-care system. So the obvious thing is clear. AIG makes the whole point clear; shut it down! Go back to Hill-Burton. Shut down the HMO system, and go back to our wartime experience, which is the same for education and every other area, in which state and Federal government are involved.

You have a need of the society, a universal need! What do you do? The first thing you do, you set a premium on satisfying universal need. Health care, education, and so forth; that's universal. Now, you decide how this universal system is going to be organized. Who's going to control the various components, and how are these components going to be linked together to get the net result? Who's going to pay for it? How's it going to be paid for? So, you organize that.

You create a national infrastructural, environmental system, in which various kinds of private and other interests operate, professionally and otherwise, to get the job done. Like, you want freshwater in your town—the same thing. You want it out of the tap, not out of a bottle which comes from you know not where. Or who did it.

That's the basic problem here, is to recognize that the government must operate on the assumption of meeting a mission of government, and a mission of government is something that can best be done by government, and can not be done competently in other ways. What you do is, you build this system into the normal functioning of society, as in the Hill-Burton health-care system: Private interests of all kinds are involved there, completely private, autonomous, but they work on the basis of a relationship which is organized and specified.

Everybody has a place to go. If you're unemployed, there's a place to go. If you're starving, there's a place to go. If you've got a disease, there's a place to go, or have someone come to you. It's all organized. Which means that we decided that humanity has a universal right to a certain kind of assistance, or a certain kind of this sort of thing. Has a right, and we say society is going to provide it. And then, we'll work it out. We want the private initiative—we want it, but we want to find a place for it in the system, where it can be fostered, promoted. And that's what we lack right now. Only, we had it: The idea of the emergency of the Depression, coming out of this terrible thing.

Look what Presidents we had! We had the murderous Theodore Roosevelt, a real bum. Woodrow Wilson, a degenerate Ku Klux Klan fanatic, a real bum. Coolidge, a bum. Hoover, a bum. We got Roosevelt. Roosevelt died; we got a bum, Truman, worse than a bum. We got Eisenhowever, who was no longer a general in warfare, who was "Eisenhowever." And Kennedy, they killed him, to get him out of the way. Johnson, they terrified into submission. We don't know what, never did find out what some of the other guys were. Poor Carter, he was just a thing that they dangled with.

So, that's the situation. We've had in our experience as a nation—and we also can borrow some experience from other nations—we have an understanding of how to organize a society as a system. We know exactly why and how we base ourselves at the same time on private initiative. Because we want creativity! We want uncontrolled creativity in a certain sense. There's no restrictions on it, as long as there's nothing wrong with doing it. We want it. So we make it comfortable and easy to do that. That's all.

There's nothing problematic. Roosevelt was taking us in the direction, with his emergency reforms and his intention for the postwar period, so we did exactly that. Hill-Burton was one of the benefits that came out of that. And those are the models. And if we get back to government which recognizes these benefits and experience, we've got a pretty good idea of how to go about dealing with the problems now.

Housing Foreclosures: A Systemic Risk

Freeman: Okay, we have time for two more questions. One is a question from a state official, on matters of housing, and I'm asking the question, because he is something of an expert on questions of housing. And the other question comes from outside the United States.

On the question of housing: "Lyn, as you know, I was an early supporter of the HBPA [LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007], and the opposition to the HBPA seemed to be absolutely irrational. A different policy was adopted, as we all know, and that policy has unquestionably been a total failure. However, the argument that comes out of Washington is that actually, it has not been a failure. And that, indeed, during the course of the last month or two, property values have, for the most part, increased.

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
EIRNS/Will Mederski

A questioner raised the fact that an additional 20 million American homeowners face foreclosure during 2010. LaRouche recalled that, in the Summer of 2007, he had proposed his Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, which could have avoided this tragedy. Now, nothing short of a global Glass- Steagall will work. Shown: one of millions of foreclosed homes across the country; LaRouche Youth Movement organizing in Philadelphia, in May 2008, for the HBPA.


EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

"But I have some information that I think makes clear why these people pursued the irrational policy that they did in opposing the HBPA. Today, we are told that there are 7 million homes that are eligible for foreclosure. That number is arrived at, by looking at home mortgages that are six months or more in arrears. On top of that, there are, as far as we have been able to ascertain, at least another 12 million homes that are three months in arrears or more. These homes have not yet been foreclosed on, but it should be clear to everyone that the reason for that has nothing to do with Obama Administration policy, and it has nothing to do with concern for those almost 20 million homeowners.

"The only reason that banks have not foreclosed on these 20 million, is their fear of the effect of the introduction of these almost 20 million homes into the housing market, and the effect that it will have on property values. This has now become known as the 'shadow' real estate market. And the fact is, that in terms of its overall magnitude, it does indeed pose a systemic risk. This, in fact, is some of the reasoning that went into opposition to HBPA, and it is in fact, what underlies the so-called 'success' of the Obama housing program. I wanted to share this with you, because I think it's another feature of why the HBPA was opposed, and was wondering if you'd like to comment."

LaRouche: First of all, I dealt with this on the 25th of July of 2007. The whole system was coming down, and I said so, and we designed legislation. Now, the legislation would have worked, because the idea was to, essentially, suspend the—first of all, the whole market, real estate market, was highly overinflated. The estimated value of this housing was often far beyond any fair estimate of value. But people had been sucked into it, and they were sucked into it on the basis of an easy credit situation. At the same time, we were faced with the fact that the entire system was coming down, and it has come down. But it's come down on the people, not on the normal economy—it's come down on the people. It was a swindle. It was going from an already hyperinflated system under the Federal Reserve System, to a more hyperinflated system, which is now in a process of general breakdown.

So, in a period like this, we come back to actually human values. I said, "Put a freeze on the whole thing. Just put a freeze on it. Let people buy out, and buy and sell properties if they want to, at risk. If they want to. But we've got to freeze this thing until we get the economy back in shape, where we can have some kind of an estimate of what value is.

So, we came up with the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, which is, in a sense, an intent to re-establish a Glass-Steagall system for the United States. There was no way in which you could micro-manage this problem. There's no system of micro-management that would work. You had to take drastic emergency action.

The idea is, we're not going to have communities destroyed, we're not going to have families destroyed. We're going to stop it. We're just going to freeze it. And if somebody doesn't like it, fine. But we're going to protect the banks from the repercussions of freezing these mortgages, until we can straighten the mess up. So, we protect the homeowners and the banks, simultaneously.

That obviously means that the next step, is to take a Glass-Steagall system, legislation, and just go through this thing, and take everything that smells like Alan Greenspan and call it trash! In other words, pare the economy down to what is a manageable level of doing business day-to-day.

Then, having done so, to get this thing under control, then introduce a program, which was my other part of the program: go back to what I'd attempted to do in saving the auto industry. The auto industry actually contained the heart of our machine-tool capability, together with the aircraft industry and so forth. We couldn't let it go down. These sons-of-bitches wanted to shut it down, as they have done. I said, "No!" We take the existing auto manufacturing industry, we put it under a certain kind of freeze. We take the floor space and the activity, and we save it. The floor space and activity required to produce automobiles, which we will produce, should be kept in operation, period. Take the burden of the part that is not productive, but is valuable floor space and skill, and townships, cities, and give it a new assignment in what it's good for.

What we called the automotive industry before this crowd destroyed it, its remains, in 2005-2006, were communities and productive potentialities in populations and places, which historically had been the basis of the wartime mobilization of the United States for World War II! We could make railroads! We made airplanes! We made everything! We made tanks, we made everything.

And what was the heart of it? A machine-tool-design factor. The center of the auto industry is machine-tool design, which goes all the way up in terms of skill. Down to the development of the design of the product, which is manufactured on the factory floor and so forth. We had millions of square feet of empty floor space, owned by the automobile companies, which could be transferred to projects we needed, like a new railway system, other things, and systems we could develop. They destroyed it! They have destroyed the whole thing!

And that's the question. The challenge then was, we had to put the whole thing through reorganization, Federal reorganization under emergency conditions. Keep these things, this floor space occupied; keep these people working. They're going to produce automobiles; we'll produce automobiles on that floor space with those people. The machine-tool-design people, the other skilled people living in townships here and there, who are also associated with this floor space.

We're going to do projects there which we need. We're going to build railway systems, we're going to build other systems. We have systems we need, all kinds of systems. We're going to build them! We're going to create credit for building them. And building these things that are useful is going to increase the national economy. That's going to pay for doing it. We've got to create Federal credit in order to get the credit there, in order to be able to get these things to work.

Well, these SOBs destroyed it all. And they should be punished! At least they should be humiliated.

And so, it's what we have to do now. It's what the world has to do now. We have to create—we have all kinds of requirements. China has tremendous requirements; India has requirements; Russia has requirements, all kinds of requirements. The need for development, as in Africa, is enormous. It's all good. All this development can be paid back, in the sense that it will be productive. If it's productive, it means that you can afford it, because it's going to give something to society that you otherwise wouldn't have, which is needed. It's going to increase the productive powers of labor. So, do it! That's the business of investment. Do it! Make sure it's productive, and the proceeds of increased productivity will take care of the cost.

But you have to have a government system of credit which mediates that process. And that's what we still have to do today; there's no change from that. We have to go back a few years, and everything I said we should have done a few years ago, we go back and do it. And we make the guys who should have done it, and stopped it, do it. They spoiled it, they should fix it.

Prepare for Earthquakes: Build Infrastructure!

Freeman: The last question comes from Chile, and I think that people know that, very shortly after the earthquake that destroyed Haiti hit, the largest earthquake ever recorded, as I understand it, hit Chile. And actually, there was another massive earthquake there during their Presidential inauguration just a couple of days ago. This question was submitted by Marcelo Rubilar, from Puerto Montt, Chile, but it's a question that applies not only to Chile, but gets to some of cultural issues that Lyn has addressed in general, so I thought it would be a worthwhile question to entertain before we ended.

And he says: "Mr. LaRouche, I'd like you to comment on the psychological effects that populations suffer under extraordinary circumstances, such as the 8.8 magnitude earthquake, which we just experienced here in Chile. What should sane citizens do to try to maintain calm, and from there, proceed with some emergency plan to restore a basic economic system? That is certainly what we face now in Chile, but which many people all across the globe face under different circumstances."

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
EIRNS/Will Mederski
I am for shutting down the City of London and Wall Street. I think if we have to give up something, which is superfluous, something we can not afford at this time, it is London and Wall Street. We just can not afford these things any more. “Sorry, buddy, but people come first.”

LaRouche: Well, first of all, it's a scientific problem, but there's also a general policy question.

Normally—and this is really an impressive kind of earthquake scale—but normally, humanity knows this is true of the planet. The planet can produce some very nasty effects. We try to anticipate them, and deal with them if we're bright, and to fix them, if it happens.

What's happening now is, people are saying there is no money available to develop the resources for dealing with these kinds of problems. So, that's the problem. Essentially, it's a disregard for what should be principles of humanity, principles of development. We're not sending the money. We're not generating it. We don't care.

I think the more appropriate case to look at, because it illustrates the thing more clearly than Chile does—what illustrates the problem most clearly is Haiti. What's important is not so much the scale of the shock effect. What the important thing is, is that the level of the shock in Haiti, when looking around the planet at comparable levels of shock, earthquake shock, Haiti is much worse. Why? Poverty. Neglect.

Look at the case in California. And the case is a comparable case, in a sense. It's not the magnitude of Chile, but look at it. Look at the number of deaths, casualties and other things, in the California quakes, as compared with Haiti. What's the difference? Infrastructure!

Therefore, the problem here is, we should, when we know have an earthquake zone, we should anticipate that it's an earthquake zone, and increase our standards and increase our ability to produce to deal with that kind of problem. To avoid putting people at risk and to build systems that can withstand this kind of problem. And better research, better understanding, better forecasting, which is still weak. That's what we have to do; that's what we would do.

The problem now, is the answer you get is, "There's no money for this. How can we spend money for this, when there is no money for this. We have to pay all this money to these swindlers! And we can't pay the swindlers, if we do to fix these things."

I am for shutting down the City of London and Wall Street. I think if we have to give up something, which is superfluous, something we can not afford at this time, it is London and Wall Street. We just can not afford these things any more. "Sorry, buddy, but people come first."

[1] See Sky Shields, "Kesha Rogers' Victory Signals the Rebirth of a Mars Colonization Policy!" EIR, March 19, 2010.

[2] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Escape from Hilbert's 'Zeta' 'X': Mapping the Cosmos!" EIR, March 19, 2010.

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