So, Are You Finally Willing to Learn Economics?
On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971
August 14, 2021
(Find the event program and transcripts of presentations below.)
Panel I
Panel II
Program
Panel 1: “On LaRouche’s Discovery”
(click on the name of a speaker for a transcript of his or her remarks)
Moderator: Dennis Small (US), LaRouche Legacy Foundation
+ Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Board of Directors, LaRouche Legacy Foundation
“The LaRouche Method”
I greet you wherever you may be around the globe. The history of the trans-Atlantic world is unfolding as a drama in which it is unclear whether it will end as a tragedy or point the way to a new era of universal history. Contrary to the two-dimensional assumptions of many contemporaries trapped in the here and now of sense perception, the current state of the world is in no way the result of natural processes, forms of historical materialism, or chance. But rather, the result of false axiomatic assumptions concerning the reality on the part of important decision-makers and their influence on leading institutions.
We are gathered here today on the 50th anniversary of the prophetic forecast of Lyndon LaRouche on the effects of President Nixon’s fatal decision of August 15, 1971, to destroy the Bretton Woods system and replace it by a system of flexible exchange rates. LaRouche, my late husband, at the time was the only economist worldwide who recognized the systemic break in all of its implications, represented by such a switch from an economy based—despite all of its imperfections of the postwar period—on scientific and technological progress, to a monetarist model of economy. LaRouche warned at the time that the continuation of this monetarist policy would inevitably lead to a new depression, a new fascism, and the danger of a new world war, unless it were replaced by a new world economic order.
LaRouche’s forecast now seems to be borne out with terrible precision. Given the explosive discrepancy between a fragile real economy and an overhang of some $4 quadrillion of the trans-Atlantic financial system that is moving to hyperinflation; given the blatant threat of the central bankers and bankers to “shift the trillions” into a global ecological dictatorship which would lead to a massive depopulation; and given the outrageous fact that the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Richard, instructed the Pentagon in February to shift the possibility of a nuclear war from “nearly impossible” to “very real”; it is time to examine the methodological approach of Lyndon LaRouche. Hopefully, the world could then correct the false axioms underlying the sinking leading institutions.
Lyndon LaRouche is unquestionably one of the most productive original authors of his time. And to understand his economic method in depth, it is necessary to study the major parts of his enormous works, which the LaRouche Legacy Foundation is committed to publishing. But as an entry point into his method of thinking, the best is to begin with his own description, as he presented it in his essay, “On LaRouche’s Discovery” published November 21, 1993. LaRouche said:
“The central feature of my original contribution to the Leibniz science of physical economy, is the provision of a method for addressing the causal relationship between, on the one side, individuals’ contributions to axiomatically revolutionary advances in scientific and analogous forms of knowledge; and, on the other side, consequent increases in the potential population-density of corresponding societies. In its application to political economy, my method focusses analysis on the central role of the following three-step sequence: First, axiomatically revolutionary forms of scientific and analogous discovery; second, consequent advances in machine-tool and analogous principles; finally, consequent advances in the productive powers of labor.”
That is, in a nutshell, the quintessence of LaRouche’s discovery, which provides an unerring yardstick as to whether an idea, a technology, or an investment is conducive to ensuring the sustainable long-term existence of mankind, or whether it contributes to the collapse of society. Russian scientist Pobisk Kuznetsov considered this concept so fundamental that he was convinced that it would go in the history of science under the name of “la”; just as other measurements were named after their discoverers, such as watt, ampere, or volt.
From an early age, LaRouche was a truth-seeking mind who very quickly recognized the hollowness of accepted manners, as well as the epistemological defects of various theories and convictions. Early on, he embraced the work of Leibniz; his notion of the pre-established harmony inherent in the universe, and the existence of monads, which reflect in almost folded-in ways, the entire lawfulness of the universe, as well as the principles of physical economy defined by Leibniz and the principally infinite degrees of freedom that arise from Leibniz’s concept of the best of all worlds.
LaRouche described, in his autobiography of 1988, how he, on the basis of his understanding of Classical Greece, identified a clear notion of the harmonic proportions of living processes. Here you see the perfect city and the painting by Leonardo, as it’s reflected in the principle of the Golden Section in great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and in similar ways in poetry and music. His knowledge about the great thinkers and artists of the Italian Renaissance had taught him that all the living processes, morphology of those is harmonically ordered in a manner consistent with the Golden Section, and that ordering is a guideline for beauty; and that of non-living processes is not. His love of Classical music and the study of the principles of bel canto polyphonic harmonic compositions from Bach to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as his acquaintance with the works of Kepler, and emphatically Bernhard Riemann’s 1854 published inaugural dissertation on the hypotheses which underlie geometry, had created for him a rich understanding about the negentropic character of the actual developing physical universe, as well as the negentropic character of the impact of man’s discovery of those universal principles and their application in the production processes in the form of scientific and technological progress.
Starting from this very rich perspective, LaRouche recognized the inadequacy of the theories of Norbert Wiener and von Neumann and their linear statistical methods of cybernetics, information theory, systems analysis, as to their ability to communicate ideas about the real universe. The negentropic character of the productive economy is one that is based on the continuous discovery of new physical principles and their application to the production process. Since all ideas depend on metaphorical communication of hypotheses and the meaning of discontinuities in the transition from physical principle and the discovery of the next higher principle, the conscious creation of paradoxes in the minds of the listeners is necessary. It is precisely this living principle that is left out in information theory and systems analysis.
This fundamental error is in no way lessened by the fact that the systems and subsystems have become more complex over the decades since Wiener and von Neumann, and that their complexity and information processing now permeate almost all areas. Rockets and satellites sent up to space; the control of drones for remote warfare; round-the-clock supercomputing in nanoseconds all around the globe; algorithms that are supposed to predict when the people will commit statistically speaking a murder in what street five years from now. And quantum computers that are used for data collection and analysis and for the surveillance of society. John von Neumann was perfectly aware of the extensive impact of his conceptions when he predicted, “I built something better and more efficient than bombs. I built computers.” That is not to say that these highly complex systems have no useful applications. For example, to program the rovers for Mars missions so that they can apparently make autonomous decisions. But the crucial question remains the moral quality of the people who program these systems; what their intention is; and what goal they hope to achieve.
In addition to this unrivalled ability in terms of economic analysis and forecasts, Lyndon LaRouche had the unique ability to define historical processes and categories that beforehand appeared obscure, but became clear in his definitions. Regarding the radical positivism of the defenders of information theory, he stressed that this way of thinking reflected a constantly recurring folly that for the past 6000 years had acted in a certain sense like a curable infection of European history. Curable because the propensity to this folly does not actually correspond to the nature of man. The foreign infection was characterized by LaRouche as an almost genetic weakness of the intellectual character of European civilization up to the present. Namely, the propensity to accept the oligarchical model of society. Also, specific forms of these mainly imperial oligarchical models have changed over the centuries from Babylon to the Roman Empire; then to Byzantium; Venice; the British Empire; and today’s Anglo-American special relationship. LaRouche compared these transformations of the same system to a slime mold that changes color and shape, but remains a slime mold. In principle, the same, whether it be the viewpoint of the priest class of Mesopotamia, or the laws of Sparta’s tyrant Lycurgus. Until the 15th century and the image of man of the Golden Renaissance of Italy and other regions in Europe, these various forms of oligarchical model assumed that the destiny of the majority of people was to live as cattle—as cows, pigs, sheep, or chickens that can be bred to fit one’s needs; used for work; and even, if they become too many, can be culled.
While the average Euro-centric liberal or neo-liberal snobbishly puts his nose in the air and thinks he is miles above such supposedly antiquated forms of society, Lyndon LaRouche identified the essential unity between the ideology of cybernetics, information theory, and the oligarchical model. In his article, “Information Society: A Doomed Empire of Evil,” published April 13, 2000, he emblematically takes apart the confessions of Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, as the latter expressed them in an article in the April issue of the magazine Wired, titled, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” The subject is the scenario still rampant today in the IT community of how computer scientists succeed in conceiving intelligent machines that are faster and more efficient than their inventors, who will then become so dependent upon their capability, that they will ultimately have no choice but to accept their decisions. Joy reports about his discussion with Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of the first reading machine for the blind, and his book The Age of Spiritual Machines in which he quotes the so-called Unabomber, who held the United States in suspense for 17 years with his terrorist activity. The quote is: “But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to machines, nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines, that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it became more and more complex, and the machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than manmade ones. Eventually, a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”
Then, according to Joy, it would be enough to have the enormous machines operated by a small elite. The masses would be a useless burden on the system. The elite could reduce their birthrate to such an extent that most of them would disappear, and the rest could pursue some harmless hobby and leave the world to the elite. “These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will almost certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.” The methodological hideousness of oligarchical thinking that LaRouche recognized as of 1953 in the theories of Wiener and von Neumann, and that inspired the kernel of his own discoveries in his economic method, is stated openly here by Joy.
From here, it’s a short distance to the terrorists who believe that scientific progress and the emergence of industrialization are the source of all evil. LaRouche points to the morbid irony that Joy sites long passages from the manifesto of the Unabomber; an eccentric mathematics professor well linked to eco-networks named Theodore Kaczynski, whom Joy does call criminally insane and a Luddite. But he is nevertheless fascinated by his argumentation. In the meantime, a whole series of eco-terrorists have emerged, who describe themselves as eco-fascists, and who cite in their manifestos their radical ecological ideology as the motivation for their acts. Such as the mass murderers of Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas.
At a time when so many of the leading institutions of the trans-Atlantic world are attempting to establish a global eco-dictatorship on the basis of the same radical positivist logic of cybernetics, information theory, and systems analysis as those of Wiener and von Neumann, it is more urgent than ever to study the economic method of Lyndon LaRouche. The Biden administration’s Green New Deal; the EU Green Deal; the regime-change that Mark Carney addressed at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming conference in August 2019, which would take not only all monetary policy, but also all fiscal policy out of the hands of elected governments, to give it to the central banks, and de facto to the mega-players of the City of London and Wall Street. All these systemic changes are designed to channel investments exclusively into Green technologies, and thus, into very low energy-flux density energy sources.
In countless writings, LaRouche has shown the connection between the relative potential population density and the energy-flux density used in the production process. If the trans-Atlantic elite alone were to hold sway, the population both in the soon-to-be formerly industrialized nations and in the then no longer developing nations would soon be rid of that useless faction that the eco-fanatics consider too burdensome for the Earth’s eco-system.
Of course, the proponents of the Green Deal do not use such crude methods as the Unabomber, but the effect is all the greater. For example, in the agreement between Norway and Gabon, in which Gabon undertakes not to develop its rainforest area, which is no less than 90% of the total area of the country, for a paltry 150 million euros over 10 years. One could estimate how many hospitals, schools, and industrial parks will not be built. How many children will not reach the age of five, etc., because of that. One could also calculate by how many years the lives of people living in poverty in the United States and Europe will be shortened if hyperinflation eats up their savings while the billionaires continue to rake it in. But of course, these are only armchair criminals or computer designers, as von Neumann noted.
Hopefully, it is not too late to reorganize the hopelessly bankrupt financial system by adopting the Four Laws proposed by Lyndon LaRouche, and to rescue the world from the brink of an abyss of geopolitical confrontation between NATO and Russia and China. Such a solution requires the West to understand the reasons for the relatively phenomenal success of the Chinese economic model. Namely, that it focusses in practice on continuous innovation and the excellent education of an enormously large number of young scientists and professionals, while spending 10% of GDP on the cultural development of its population. This is several orders of magnitude closer to the criteria LaRouche defined for the physical economy than is the case for the United States or the EU, which seem determined to pursue monetarist policies to the end-point LaRouche warned about 50 years ago. And it is not too late to bring about the cooperation among the four major nations—the U.S., Russia, China, and India—without which none of the major strategic issues can be realistically be resolved; beginning with the common fight against the pandemic and the creation of a modern health care system in every single country on this planet. But this requires an honest reflection and the correction of the axiomatic flaws in the thinking of the past 50 years, of which Nixon’s decision is exemplary.
It should be a challenge to the honor of any economist as to why their profession has failed so remarkably to forecast the systemic nature of the financial crisis. Before the crisis of 2007-8, many asserted that from now on, the stock markets would rise indefinitely, and everybody could become a millionaire. LaRouche, on the contrary, has been accurate in all of his forecasts, and that has to do with his method, which is not based on statistics and linear projections, but on what Nicholas of Cusa called prescience—fore vision, previous knowledge. Since LaRouche has a clear conception about the negentropic character of the laws of the universe and the necessary affinity of those laws with those of the creative powers of the mind, he knows in principle what the next step of the necessary discovery has to be. In that sense, factors that determine the development, or do damage to the creative powers of the minds of the workforce are much more meaningful in respect to the future productivity of an economy than monetary figures. For that reason, he was the only economist in the 1960s who recognized the devastating impact of the rock-drug-sex counterculture on the creative potential of entire generations, and therefore the long-term productivity of society. The GDP, on the other hand, is happy to calculate the income of drug-infested rock concerts, as well as the income of brothels and tattoo parlors as positive quantities.
It is that quality of prescience which explains why with LaRouche, the science of physical economy achieved the quality of the “queen of sciences.” Since physical economy encompasses all fields of knowledge which are necessary for the long-term survivability of mankind; i.e., all the natural sciences and all the Classical arts. It is the absolute merit of LaRouche that he demonstrated, contrary to the importance given to the job specialization in modern times, that the faculties of the mind which make great discoveries of breakthrough knowledge, are the same for both the natural sciences and great Classical art. It is that same quality of prescience, the capacity for adequate hypothesis which enabled Eratosthenes to calculate the circumference of the Earth with the help of a sundial to within a 50-km precision, despite the fact that nobody had ever seen the character of the planet as a sphere from space. It is the same quality which enabled Kepler to take reflections of the “divine Nicholas,” as he called Cusa, a step further, and to discover gravitation as the principle accounting for the orbits of the planets.
The most important distinction, however, which separates LaRouche from the bloodless accountants of the linear world of the rules-based order, who apparently have no problem wiping out millions of human beings with a click on their computer, is that he was motivated by a passionate love for mankind. In literally hundreds of his articles, he emphasized the central importance of Plato’s principle of agapē, of the idea of Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13 of love, of which he says that it is the only universal principle upon which true morality can be premised. This love for humanity was the guidance behind all his works in economics. Be it his early infrastructure development plans for all continents of the planet, or his visionary conception about the “Woman on Mars” and the idea of future forests on Mars. In everything he did, he was motivated by the principle that “Each and all members of mankind are made in the image of what Plato in his Timaeus identified as both the composer and the continuing efficient principle and personality of this universe.” Some may object and ask what this fundamental conception about the identity of mankind and the principle of the universe have to do with economics. As Bernhard Riemann says in his dissertation, often quoted by Lyndon LaRouche, “Here we leave the realm of mathematics, and enter the world of physics.”
The chance for a positive outcome of this present era of human history may very well depend on the hope that enough human beings—economists included—understand that difference, and replace the quackery of cybernetics, systems analysis, and information theory with LaRouche’s science of physical economy in all universities, faculties, and textbooks around the world. Thank you.
+ Ding Yifan (China), Deputy Director of the Research Institute of World Development, China Development Research Center (DRC)
"The Importance of Physical Economy in Today's World"
American economist Lydon LaRouche is the inventor of “Physical Economics”. When the Nixon administration defaulted in 1971 and decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold, and the Bretton Woods system collapsed, Mr. LaRouche forecast the danger of excess liquidity in the world. And 70 years later, many things predicted by Mr. LaRouche are happening. If we do not pay attention to these matters today and let them continue to develop, the world will advance in a more threatening direction in the future, bringing us into a dangerous abyss.
We must be wary of the two incidents mentioned by Mr. LaRouche: the abuse of currency and the disorderly development of the financial industry.
When the U.S. dollar is decoupled from gold, the U.S. government is easily tempted by making monetary mistakes indiscriminately. In fact, many countries in history have done the same thing, but they have all paid a heavy price for it. 2000 years ago, under the Han Dynasty, Wang Mang usurped the power and issued new coins, he decided to mix gold in the newly issued currency with brass. Prices soared, and Wang Mang’s regime was overthrown 14 years later. After the Mongols occupied the Central Plains, they established Yuan Dynasty. They found that the paper money system created by the Song Dynasty, the previous dynasty, was very convenient, and they accepted it all. However, in the Song Dynasty, paper money was only a substitute for metal currency, which facilitated commodity transactions. The Yuan Dynasty turned paper money into “fiat money,” and traders had to exchange metal currencies for paper money in the market before purchasing commodities. When the Yuan Dynasty was short of money, more paper money could be issued to supplement the finances. Soon, the proliferation of paper money caused inflation and also uprisings everywhere, and the Mongols were soon driven back to the northern grasslands. Since the 1970s, the currency issued by the United States has flowed all over the world. As the U.S. dollar has a unique status as the world’s reserve currency, the excess liquidity of the U.S. dollar has brought huge inflationary pressures around the world. In recent years, the US government seems to be addicted to the use of “debt monetization”. Since the Covid 19 epidemic, the Federal Reserve, central bank of the United States, has bought as much bonds as the volumes of bonds he had purchased since the 2008 financial crisis. When the central bank buys bonds from the market, it means in economic textbook, it’s “printing money.” The consequences of printing money in this way can be imagined.
The disorderly development of the financial industry has become the entropy of this era, rather than a tool to provide blood for the economy. Mr. LaRouche in the book “So, you wish to know all about economics?” used the concept of “entropy” in physics, to describe those activities in the economy that are working, but cannot generate the kinetic energy to promote technological progress. Entropy was proposed by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius and refers to kinetic energy that cannot be used for work. LaRouche believes that if a society becomes entropic, it is a dissipative structure. It will consume a lot of energy without producing any real usable value, and will eventually exhaust the resources of the entire society.
Since the “deregulation” of the US financial market in the 1980s, financial institutions and financial transactions have grown exponentially. Although wealth on paper has increased a lot, it has not greatly contributed to the real economy. Although the expansion of financial assets has absorbed somehow the excessive liquidity, it did not allow money to flow into the physical market. Although it contributed to preventing an overall rise in prices, it created a vicious circle of “boom and crush”. Since then, without bubbles, the capital market cannot operate normally. But the bubble will definitely burst. Therefore, to maintain this vicious circle, we must continue to create “myths” and make the poor retail investors in the stock market believe that as long as they follow these “myths”, they can get rich overnight.
Today’s financial derivatives transactions have been completely decoupled from actual demand, and they are the entropy of today’s economic development. Taking the oil futures trading as an example, the annual oil futures trading is as high as more than 380 billion barrels, while the annual global oil consumption is only about 36 billion barrels, and the trading volume of oil futures is more than 10 times that of oil consumption. Most oil futures transactions are conducted only by financial institutions. They don’t care where the end user is, they only care about making the difference of investment. Although oil futures trading is an important product in the financial trading market, it may not be the trade with the largest gap between futures and real products. In other words, the degree of disconnection between the virtual economy and the physical economy is very high, perhaps more than 10 times. And most of the virtual economy is idling there, and in the end it is not transformed into a real thing. This is the “cancer” of the world economy today, and without getting rid off this cancer, we may slip into an entropic society that Mr. LaRouche mentioned.
+ Jozef Mikloško (Slovak Republic), Former Vice Prime Minister of the first Czechoslovakian government after the fall of Communism
“The World Is Waiting for the Ideas of Lyndon LaRouche.”
Dear Helga Zepp-LaRouche, dear my old and new friends, thank you for the invitation to speak on this panel.
The heritage of Lyndon LaRouche is a very important question for this crazy world. Lyn was a politician, an economist, mathematician, and musicologist. I had never met a more educated person in my life. He was a generator of new ideas, of variously to save Christianity, family and life.
I’ve met with him 17 times, 6 times in Germany, 2 times in Slovakia, and 3 times in Rome, when I was the ambassador of Slovakia for five years. In my book Very Top Secret, I devoted about 80 pages to him.
His political program was the need to produce, not speculate; moral principles must be established in politics and in economy. His proposed alternatives to reform the financial system, he predicted a crisis due to the destructive impact of derivatives speculation. Printing money with no backing in the U.S. and Europe today is called “quantitative easing.” Lyn criticized the current financial system, its focus on speculation in the stock exchange, and operations in derivatives trading. The financial market is currently destabilized by pumping money into crisis areas, as the International Monetary Fund has still been doing for years.
Lyn often criticized the decision of President Nixon about the cancellation of Bretton Woods agreement. He proposed the creation of a New Bretton Woods agreement which would introduce fixed but adjustable exchange rates, the possibility of respecting convertibility if national government deemed it necessary, controlling currency trade and capital movement. His proposals have long been ignored, his topics have been taboo in the speeches of politicians.
I became familiar with Lyn’s case in 1990, when I was, after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, two years the Vice Premier for Human Rights in post-Communist federal government. I quickly understood the many irregularities of his political persecution. It was a tragedy, that at the time of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, when it was possible to change history, Lyndon LaRouche was in jail, and could only watch his forecasts about the West and East being fulfilled.
Our friendship with Lyn began in ’93, at the prison in Rochester, where I visited. For him, a sentence of 15 years was a death sentence. He met me in the prison with a smile and optimism. We spoke for six hours. He introduced Christian moral principles to political economics. He was a fighter for moral renewal and the saving of Christian civilization. I was always surprised about his knowledge about Mozart, Beethoven, about supercomputers, the situation in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China, the protection of life, culture and education. He was a hard fighter, but also had humor and tenderness when speaking about love and agapē.
Lyn was sentenced on Dec. 1st, 1989, [sic—Dec. 16, 1988] just after the Velvet Revolution. It was a political process, and 15 years in prison was a terrible decision. His five associates had sentences of a total of 209 years; the trials of him and his colleagues had so many irregularities that the broad international community, including myself, protested many times against it. I wrote several letters of protest to top U.S. leaders. I visited U.S., with former politicians of several countries. I visited both squalid American prisons where LaRouche collaborators were imprisoned. I am proud of having contributed to his parole in ’94, and later to the release of the entire Virginia five: Mike Billington, Anita and Paul Gallagher, Lawrence Hecht, and Donald Phau.
I was very glad that in August ’94 Slovakia was the second country, after Russia, that Lyn visited, following his release in ’94. The same was repeated, he visited Slovakia, also in 1996. We met in the house of a Slovak scientist, and 120 young people from 17 countries, showed that man kind can tend toward unity. I remember tears in Lyn’s eyes, when at the fire, we sang folk songs. I was proud when he told me, “In Slovakia, I spent one of the most beautiful and happiest weeks in my life.”
We met also in Washington in September ’95, during the hearing to investigate the misconduct of the Department of Justice. As a committee, we fought for the exoneration of LaRouche, and for the freedom of his five collaborators. The commission concluded that there had been a gross abuse of inquiry and criminal violence in this process. The same situation occurred later in Wiesbaden, where Lyn spoke for almost three hours. “The new wine I bring cannot be in old skins. The culture of death is a scandal. We must start a new revolution based on love toward our neighbors.”
Lyndon LaRouche, the Sakharov of America, the big dissident of Russia, was a politician of original views. When he was 75 in September ’97, and a gala was held in the United States for prominent singers, musicians and politicians, I was very honored and proud that I was the master of ceremonies.
At the end of my speech, I’m going to introduce some important ideas of LaRouche’s. Man is created in the image of God, and has a highly positive worth. Everything is decided in childhood. By protecting the family, we protect society. Money, the counterculture, and borderless freedom reduce people for prisons. Compromise is evil and tolerance for evil must end. Commentary on lies is a lie. Let’s start a revolution of Christian love, without thinking about ourselves, like a Good Samaritan.
Dear Friends, the world is waiting for the ideas which can change the problems of today’s situation. Especially the United States and the countries of the West are on bad tendency of hedonism, consumerism, materialism, and atheism. We must explain and spread Lyn’s ideas. Therefore, I suggest to publish in all languages, a small book about Lyn’s basic principles, in understandable and simple and clear form, and distribute it in the whole world.
Thank you very much for listening to me, and excuse me that in many years, I’ve forgotten how to speak better English. Maybe Italian, or German, or Russian would be better. All the best to you and all countries in the world.
+ Dr. Natalia Vitrenko (Ukraine), Doctor of Economic Sciences, Chairman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, People’s Deputy of Ukraine (MP) 1995-2002
Saving Mankind Is a “Mission—Possible”
Dear conference participants, Dear Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche,
I have titled my presentation “Saving Mankind Is a ‘Mission—Possible’”, because I deeply believe that, if at last three conditions are met, tragedy for mankind can be averted. Those conditions are the following: a New Bretton Woods system, global banking reform, and providing mankind with powerful sources of energy.
Just as the great American scholar Lyndon LaRouche forecast, the world community is inexorably approaching a hyperinflationary collapse—a crisis unprecedented in its scope and the threatened loss of billions of human lives.
The great danger of a world catastrophe is something practically all experts around the world now agree on. At the summit of U.S. President Biden and Russian President Putin in June of this year, the problem of strategic stability was foremost in their talks. But there will be no positive results from strategic stability talks, unless the fundamental problems are solved, which are causing that instability and leading toward catastrophe.
These questions have to be answered: What is behind the situation in the world economy, where international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are failing to cope with the problems; rather, on the contrary, they are fostering and deepening the crisis? Why don’t they, the world regulators, give mankind a model for a developing, crisis-free society?
And I am grateful to Helga Zepp-LaRouche for her universal patriotic activity, to help the world intellectual elite creatively master the legacy of Lyndon LaRouche. And for organizing this conference in that context.
Now, specifics on what I see as the most important three conditions for heading off the looming destruction.
First. We need a New Bretton Woods system. What was adopted at Bretton Woods in the U.S.A. in July 1944 played an important role in creating a functioning world financial system. It facilitated the reconstruction of economies destroyed by the war, and created conditions for the growth of international trade and cooperation in obtaining credit. Those were the declared purposes of the IMF and the World Bank. The exchange rate of the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per ounce (31.1 grams). Fixed exchange rates for the currencies of participating countries were a firm foundation for the recovery of national monetary systems. This allowed national banks the possibility of supporting a stable exchange rate for their currencies. The U.S. dollar’s peg to gold made it a reliable world reserve currency.
But the growth of national economies after World War II and the formation of transnational corporations and, related to that, an enormous demand for dollars, simultaneous with the U.S.A.’s growing aspiration to establish world hegemony, produced the outcome, that the United States itself began to subvert the fundamental principles of the Bretton Woods system.
In August 1971 U.S. President Nixon announced a temporary ban on the convertibility of the dollar to gold at the official rate, thus laying a fuse under the world monetary system. At the Jamaica international monetary conference in 1976, that fuse was lit, with the replacement of fixed exchange rates with a floating rates regime. That was a powerful impulse for the development of financial speculation, first and foremost in the U.S.A. itself, as well as in the banking systems of all the capitalist countries.
Dollar emission itself was outsourced to a private organization (shares in which have a special status), the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Printing paper money with a face value of 1 to 100 dollars, when it costs 20 cents maximum to produce a bill, was a profitable business. Meanwhile, the Fed’s assets are growing like yeast. From 2008 to 2020, they increased eight-fold, from less than $1 trillion to $7.8 trillion. And the U.S. power elite is not greatly worried by the constant growth of the U.S. national debt, which reached $28.3 trillion as of May 2021, or 149% of GDP.
The foreign debt of almost every country in the world is increasing. It increased by $24 trillion in 2020, reaching 366% of global GDP. This process is promoted by the IMF’s vicious policy, in line with the Washington Consensus, of making loans on condition of reforms, which require a reduction of the role of the state in national economic development (and especially in the real sector) and in social services.
National economies are drained by the constant devaluation of the U.S. dollar. As of July 20, 2021, the lowest price of gold on exchanges was $1,806.20. That means that the dollar has fallen in value 52-fold since 1944!
Therefore, convening a New Bretton Woods conference is an urgent necessity. The Schiller Institute has been doing enormous work to initiate this, for more than one decade. In 2008 French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and German President Horst Koehler likewise called for holding a new Bretton Woods conference to work out a new global financial system.
We need a system based on multiple reserve currencies. I think that the basket of currencies could include, besides the dollar and the euro, also the Chinese yuan, the Russian ruble, the British pound sterling, the Japanese yen, and the Indian rupee, bringing together the currencies of the countries that are economically the most powerful and the largest in population and natural resources potential. We need a new peg to gold as the basis for fixed exchange rates among the leading world currencies.
Without question, there need to be radical changes in the policies of the IMF.
Second. Global banking reform. Abandoning the principles of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference led to an unprecedented increase of bank speculation. Instead of a well-conceived credit policy (with a priority on long-term credits, which are needed for developing an economy, especially the real sector), banks everywhere started turning into speculative giant squids, sucking monetary resources out of businesses and the population. And then these resources are put into short-term microfinancing or repeatedly sold, to maximize bank profiteering. From here you get financial derivatives bubbles. The financial bubble of derivatives is now greater than $1 quadrillion, which is 10 times world GDP. The rotten financial system can collapse at any moment, in a chain reaction. The scope of destruction from a collapse of the world financial system may be apocalyptic. Even now, the ongoing process of pumping up financial bubbles is leading to a continuous reduction of investment in manufacturing and infrastructure, and widening the gap between wealthy and poor people.
As a response to the devaluation of the U.S. dollar (and the related devaluation of the labor power and natural resources of nations), cryptocurrencies have appeared. Absolutely anonymous and backed up by nothing.
But a rescue of the banking system will be reasonable and progressive, only if there is global banking reform. Lyndon LaRouche never tired of repeating the need for this, proposing, on the model of the Glass-Steagall law, to amputate speculative banking capital, putting an end to what he called the “casino economy”, and making it possible to replace the monetarist system with a new, credit system. That was essential to the American credit system, established by Alexander Hamilton 200 years ago, which proved to be highly effective.
Third. Powerful energy sources. Vladimir Lenin, the ideologue and organizer of the socialist revolution in Russia and leader of the first socialist state in the world, the U.S.S.R., 100 years ago uttered this ingenious phrase: “Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country.” That was an astoundingly precise formulation of the key idea that human society would achieve perfection, when the government was just, and was of the people and for the people (U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had this idea as well). That second condition was the complete electrification of the country. Thence came the ingenious GOELRO plan, which became the basis for the rapid development of the Soviet economy.
The question of a just government is a separate conversation. Let’s now look at the issue of providing the entire planet with the energy necessary for meeting the most difficult scientific and technological challenges, ensuring economic growth worldwide and safe and comfortable conditions of life for people. That is the task of all tasks.
LaRouche did not merely philosophize about the need for the constant growth of energy sources; he aimed physical economy at precisely this goal. For evaluating this process objectively, he developed the criterion of the relationship between energy-flux density and relative population density. LaRouche saw the solution of this problem in providing for mankind the most reliable and cheapest energy: nuclear energy. Therefore he welcomed the technological improvement of nuclear power reactors, insisting on the need for international cooperation in developing them and putting them into operation.
We remember how Lyndon LaRouche declared with emotion: “We should tear down all the damned windmills in the United States and destroy the solar panels. These are low energy-flux density technologies. They mean bankruptcy!”
And what do we have now in reality? Contrary to scientific logic and the real requirements of scientific and technological progress, “green energy” is being spread. No attention is paid to how this suits the climatic conditions of a given country. In 2020, the “Great Reset” was openly proclaimed, under which the “Green New Deal” became the official doctrine of U.S. President Biden—openly and brutally imposed on all nations around the world. That means the developing countries, first and foremost. With blandishments about fighting for climate improvement and defending the environment, Third World countries are driven into the trap of chronic energy insufficiency. This deprives them of the possibility of lifting up their national economies, defeating poverty, and stopping their population from dying out.
The catastrophe in Texas in the winter of 2021 clearly showed the vulnerability of windmills and the impotence of the government to defend the population. And that was in the United States!
We see very well in Ukraine, the artificial, aggressive imposition of green energy under pressure from the West. In 2020, Ukraine’s nuclear power plants generated 51.2% of the country’s electricity, while 35.2% came from thermal power plants running on coal or natural gas. I stress that Ukraine has enough coal deposits for the next 100 years. Ukraine’s own natural gas extraction covers the country’s entire housing and utilities requirements. 5.1% of Ukraine’s electricity came from hydroelectric power plants and only 7.3% from wind and solar. But while generating only 7%, green energy accounted for 25% of the cost of electricity. The constant increase of electricity rates is an unbearable burden on practically the entire population
For 30 years, Ukraine has been experiencing the destruction of material production. GDP in 2020 was only two-thirds of its 1990 level. The country’s energy base has been destroyed at an even faster rate: from 298.8 billion kilowatt-hours in 1990, electricity generation has dropped to 148.8 billion kilowatt hours in 2020. It has fallen by half!
But instead of increasing energy-flux density, which would mean developing nuclear power first and foremost and improving our thermal power plants, the West is twisting the arm of the Ukrainian government, forcing green energy on us. Government guarantees, big enough to bankrupt the national budget, are being offered for windmill and solar panel installations, which already occupy millions of hectares of Ukraine’s fertile, arable land.
President Biden and German Chancellor Merkel, meeting on July 15, 2021, agreed (without Ukraine’s participation or approval!) to give our country $1 billion for a “green fund,” the purpose of which is a transition to renewable energy sources. This is a fund for the murder of Ukraine.
I would like to remind you that before the destruction of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine was among the top ten developed countries by GDP per capita, but now it is the poorest country in Europe, with the lowest life expectancy. A UNICEF report this July acknowledged that 10 million people in Ukraine are going hungry. That’s one out of three! (Only 30 million people are left, out of Ukraine’s population of 52 million in 1990.)
What awaits Ukraine in the future? Will it be a cemetery with windmills in place of crosses?
Therefore mankind must choose: either fight for our own salvation and progressive development, or acquiesce to the horrific prospect of global destabilization and catastrophes.
Thank you for listening!
+ Dr. Kirk Meighoo (Trinidad and Tobago), political analyst, media commentator, author, and former independent Senator in Trinidad and Tobago
“LaRouche: Development for All, and the New International Order”
Hi! My name is Dr. Kirk Meighoo. I am the public relations officer of the United National Congress, the official opposition party in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. I’m delighted to be here at this conference in honor of Lyndon LaRouche.
I’m going to speak on the topic today of “Lyndon LaRouche: Development for All, and the New International Economic Order.”
In 1975 at the United Nations, Fred Wills, the Minister of Foreign Affairs from the Caribbean and South American country of Guyana, made a call for a new international economic order and an International Development Bank. While Fred Wills was an ally of the LaRouche movement, he also came from a tradition of Caribbean intellectual and political critique. Many from this tradition led their countries into independence in the 1960s, and some in the 1970s. The new international economic order had been embraced by many in the region, including the charismatic Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. This flowed from the experience of independence in the 1960s for the larger English speaking Caribbean countries—Jamaica in 1962, Trinidad later that year in ’62, Guyana and Barbados both in 1966. Many young people however, at the time, were disillusioned by independence. The dreams they had were not fulfilled; the economic development that they envisaged was not occurring; the type of freedom and creativity they longed for was not forthcoming from the new independent political class. Indeed, the independence leaders were seen as perpetuating neo-colonialism or neo-imperialism, and political independence was seen as insufficient, or just the first step towards freedom and development. Throughout the region, matters came to a head between 1968 and 1972, with Black power movements, trade union movements, and other protest movements sweeping up and down the islands. Some of these dissident movements came to power during the 1970s as well, while others became part of the official opposition. Our own political party emerged out of these struggles.
The new international economic order was embraced and advanced by these leaders, because they realized that formal independence did not mean prosperity and progress for their people. Caribbean economists like Lloyd Best, Clive Thomas, Pavlov Rousseff[ph], and Latin American economists as well, started looking at structural and historical reasons as to why our countries remained poor. Analysts like Fernando Enrique Cardoso saw the terms of trade being rigged against the raw materials suppliers in developing countries. Theorists like Andre Gunder Frank spoke about the development of under-development, and looked at the structural relationships between the center and the periphery, noting that under-development was a product of exploitative relationships. This began to inform national and foreign policy of the more radicalized countries. Institutions like the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development or the United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean [UN ECLAC] were established by radical governments in Latin America and the Caribbean who wanted to deal with the structural problems of under-development in the global economy. Raw materials producers’ cartels were attempted on the model of OPEC in commodities such as bauxite, to have more control over the exploitative, manipulated, and rigged global markets. Reform of the IMF and World Bank to include developing countries at the center had been on the agenda for decades, but consistently rejected by Europe and the U.S..
With the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s and ’90s, and the massive debt crises which plagued many of these countries, that vision of the new international economic order faded; even within our countries where it was embraced. As a young student, I learned about these theories at the University of Toronto. Later, during my master’s degree in Jamaica, I was taught by many of the advisors of these radical governments throughout the Caribbean, and by the thinkers behind these ideas. In the UK, where I read for my PhD, I worked with advisors to the British government, advisors to the Reagan Administration, and development policy experts who had decades of experience in the field, working with governments in the developing world, and also advising the U.K. government on development issues. During this whole time, however, I had never heard the name of Lyndon LaRouche. But in the 2000s, I began to discover him through the magic of the internet. I discovered the vastness of his vision, and the 40-year involvement he had in this struggle. I saw how he worked with López Portillo in Mexico; Indira Gandhi in India; how he advocated for the industrialization of Africa and India since the 1970s, as opposed to third-class appropriate technology. He called for the establishment of an International Development Bank after the U.S. was de-linked from gold, and fixed exchange rates were abandoned. And he came up with the phrase New International Economic Order. I also saw the Fred Wills connection, and I realized that this part of history had been censored. Not even at the universities where I specialized in the subject of development studies were we taught about the theories of Lyndon LaRouche, which were not only crucial intellectually, but also practically, in terms of his political mobilization.
As I began to delve into his work, I read LaRouche articulate and promote the American System of Economy, which interestingly went back to Alexander Hamilton, who himself was born in the West Indies. LaRouche’s elaboration of the American System was fascinating to me personally, because my own intellectual mentor was one of Trinidad and Tobago’s and Caribbean’s great intellectuals—Lloyd Best. One of his lasting intellectual contributions was the articulation of the plantation society and economy model, which articulated the imperial system under which the West Indies were exploited by the metropolitan countries and by local social and economic structures, and by which they remained shackled during independence, even though imperialism and colonialism had formally ended.
These theories were necessary complements to each other, to understand the system as a whole as it moved and developed through time and space. Best himself had begun to uncover these distinctive models before he died. But I later found them fully elaborated by Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche’s analysis of the British Empire and the trans-Atlantic system is extremely important in terms of the perpetuation of under-development. The critique of the so-called free trade model of development and the focus on deep structural issues in the economy is crucial. The neo-liberal models which have dominated since the 1980s, need an effective economic counter argument and set of policies. LaRouche’s ideas must be central to that.
The rise of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—should have naturally led to a reorganization of the world economy, and perhaps is doing so slowly. Which would take into account the needs of the developing world much more centrally. The previous moves towards this, such as the formation of the Group of 77, or the Group of 20, to counterbalance the cabal of the G-7, prefigured this. But while there has been some of this change occurring, and conflict brewing because of it, neo-liberalism has essentially prevailed as a dominant theory in practice and the BRICS have generally broken up.
LaRouche’s idea of the World Land-Bridge, science drivers, the enhancement of productive capacity, as opposed to financial speculation is crucial. The pandemic today and the policies of lockdown have destroyed global economic productive capacities throughout the world, which instead, have been replaced with a flood of printed money. This has been central the massive increase in wealth inequality, historic economic contraction, and an obscene transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. LaRouche’s championing of the World Land-Bridge, much of which was incorporated into the New Silk Road, is extremely important. The global Four Powers Agreement between the United States, India, China, and Russia, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other measures, can only be adopted when one moves away from the entire discourse of neo-liberalism. Not only as a strategy, but also as an understanding of economics itself.
I commend the LaRouche Legacy Foundation for carrying on this mission, which is so crucial for the full realization of the potential and capacity of the human species on Earth and in the universe itself. Thank you very much.
+ Yekaterina Fyodorovna Shamayeva (Russia), Candidate of Sciences in Engineering, Senior Lecturer
"Design and Management of Sustainable Development, and an Interdisciplinary Synthesis of the Fundamental Ideas of the Schools of Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov"
Good day, dear colleagues and friends. Allow me to begin with two quotations.
The first comes from that outstanding person, Lyndon LaRouche, and consists of excerpts from two of his works:
[From a 2000 article] “The crucial fact upon which all sound economic decisions are now premised, is … that the presently reigning financial and monetary institutions, are … hopelessly and profoundly bankrupt…”
[And from his 1984 book on economics] … “[T]he correlative of increase of potential relative population-density is an increase of both the per capita and per square-kilometer increase of energy-flux density, as measurable in some term such as kilowatt degrees per square meter, a measure combining consideration of the number of kilowatts per square meter and the energy-flux density (as reflected by temperature equivalents) at which that energy is supplied.”
The second quotation is from Lyndon LaRouche’s colleague from the USSR and Russia, the encyclopedic scholar Pobisk Kuznetsov:
“A transition to sustainable development requires that economic science not be isolated from physics and technology, but that they undergo a new synthesis. The conflicts that arise are a struggle for sources of energy.”
The ideas of Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov bring together their fundamental views and the requirement for value to be linked to natural-science processes and measurements; in the words of Pobisk Kuznetsov, human activity needs to be brought into accordance with the laws of Nature and their projection—the laws of social development (in terms of power, rising labor productivity, and a budget of social time).
Turning to the topic of my remarks: Sustainable [or, rather, sustained] development.
The phrase “sustainable development” raises many questions for any normal person. More than 30 years have passed since the approval of the principle and concept of sustainable development. Many works have been published on this problem. As a rule, these works look at various aspects of sustainable development: political, environmental, technological, energy-related, and economic.
They all share one flaw: the absence of a measurable connection among the various aspects and, as a first consequence of that, the impossibility of seeing a coherent picture; and, a second consequence, the impossibility of reliably designing and managing sustainable development. This problem exists not only for the concept of sustainable development.
Today the basic concepts and laws of various disciplines are incommensurate. As a result, they are not interconnected (or are interconnected in some undetermined way), which gives rise to a mental failure to understand the actual connections within the real world, and creates an illusion of [their] independence, a world of false values, aggravates the “professional failure to understand” actual problems, and forces people to make mistakes, leading to a global crisis. It is fundamentally wrong to view society’s sustainable development separately from the laws of Nature, since that strips the idea of any lawful basis.
The central idea in the works of P.G. Kuznetsov is the law for the development of life as a cosmic and planetary process, as the fundamental law of all open socioeconomic systems. The collection of his scientific works, published in 2016, indeed is titled The Science of the Development of Life (to date, there are five volumes in Russian, published under this title).
The development and application of P.G. Kuznetsov’s ideas gave economic science a new method for formulating knowledge on the basis of natural science. The scientific works of Pobisk Kuznetsov were based on the discoveries of S.A. Podolynsky, V.I. Vernadsky, E.S. Bauer and other scientists.
In the course of many years of fundamental and applied work, the P.G. Kuznetsov Scientific School was formed. It is represented by Boris Yevgenyevich Bolshakov, Victor Igorevich Belyakov-Bodin, Victor Mikhailovich Kapustian, Andrei Yevgenyevich Petrov, Vyacheslav Stepanovich Chesnokov, Alexander Yevgenyevich Armensky and others, too numerous to list in this short report.
As of today, this scientific school has shown that underlying the generally accepted principle of sustainable development is a general law of Nature—the law of conservation of power or energy flux (the discovery and application of which is linked with the names of Lagrange, Maxwell, and P.G. Kuznetsov) and its projection—the principle of “conservation of the development of living systems,” described by V.I. Vernadsky and E.S. Bauer. These principles postulate, for development, a non-decreasing growth in the efficiency of utilizing society’s net capacity [useable power] (its resources), interacting with the environment.
On the basis of these fundamental laws and principles, a system of models has been developed (on the national level and for regions), which make it possible to design and manage changes in society on a lawful basis, viewing sustainable development as a projection of the general laws of nature onto particular systems of coordinates. This is especially important in the difficult conditions of the world today.
It is no surprise that the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov continue to animate the minds of scientists, educators and politicians, because they provide a fundamental organizational basis for a way out of the crisis—for preserving, and for the possibility of developing, Mankind (Lyndon LaRouche and his team have produced strong practical solutions, and organizational and political recommendations).
There has been cooperation between these two schools, in response to requests and needs, and in the framework of scientific research programs: there have been meetings (such as the discussion between Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov), seminars, and scientific conferences. From 2013 on, presentations by Lyndon LaRouche and his associates became a regular part of the annual International Conference on Fundamental and Applied Problems of Sustainable Development in the System of Nature—Society—Man.
Their presentations (on “The World Crisis and Sustainable Development: Fundamental Contradictions in World Development”; “Prospects for Preserving the Development of Mankind in the Face of Global Challenges and Threats”; “The Strategic Significance of the New Silk Road”; and others) were warmly welcomed by the Russian scientific community and youth.
In addition, after the collapse of the USSR the scientific ideas of Pobisk Kuznetsov were integrated into educational curricula. In early 1999 the Dubna International University of Nature, Society and Man was founded, including a Department of Sustainable Development. Later, in 2000, a subdepartment of Sustainable Innovative Development was established, which brought together several leading scholars in the P.G. Kuznetsov International Scientific School of Sustainable Development.
The purpose of this subdepartment was to train people in fundamental and applied knowledge for the design and management of development on the basis of the natural-science laws of development of the system “nature—society—man”; and skills training in the use of methods based on the general laws of Nature, expressed in universal spatio-temporal (LT) parameters. The unique works in this regard are those of Roberto Bartini, which were synthesized with the works of Pobisk Kuznetsov.
In the course of their studies, students are introduced to scientific heritage and its applications, including the foundations of physical economy and the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche. The director of this educational program, which was called “Design and Management of Sustainable Development,” was Boris Yevgenyevich Bolshakov, who for more than 20 years engaged in teaching, scientific research and educational work with the public, conveying these unique scientific ideas to younger generations. He also made, and published, several outstanding discoveries, such as his unique work The Law of Nature, or How Space-Time Operates, which presented the fundamentals of LT-physics, LT-chemistry, and economics.
In 2018, B.Ye. Bolshakov passed away, and the educational work he had directed underwent big changes. But today there is a unique organizational tool for the development of these ideas: a public organization called the Space Society, under whose umbrella various educational, engineering and organizational projects are being done, including ones related to the above-mentioned scientific schools.
I represent the area concerned with designing regional development in terms of natural-science measuring tools, derived from the law of conservation of power. This involves multi-country applied models in terms of power, by which it is possible to evaluate the equivalence of exchange between countries. There are also interregional models, within a country, for evaluating living standards and quality of life in terms of power. We also model technological trends and possibilities for development, which requires formalizing and evaluating innovations using both value and natural-science measuring tools.
I work with several youth groups on developing criteria and evaluating the budget of social time, both for the country and for macroregions, as well as technologies for organizational planning and management based on the SCALAR system (its authors were P.G. Kuznetsov and the Management Systems for Systems Developers Laboratory (LaSURS) at the Moscow State University of Instrument-making and Informatics).
We provide the multilevel statistical database, necessary for modelling power systems.
Thus, we have a developed theory, methodology and technology for the design and management of sustainable development of systems at various levels, all based on universal natural-science parameters. What’s especially needed today, is new methodological guidelines, practical solutions, and applications, as a synthesis of the fundamental ideas of these two scientific schools.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers of this seminar and representatives of Lyndon LaRouche’s school for inviting me, and for our ongoing collaboration and responses to our work.
Dear colleagues and friends, thank you for your attention to my report.
+ Paul Gallagher (US), EIR Editorial Board
“The Early Economic Forecasts of Lyndon LaRouche”
At the start of 1957, Lyndon LaRouche made a very accurate forecast, in a privately circulated study, of the recession which hit of August 1957-58, the most significant recession in the postwar period and one not expected by economists at all. Then, beginning in 1961 with a published article headlined, “Depression Ahead?,” LaRouche began to forecast the break-up, by the end of that decade—with the potential consequence of economic depression—of the Bretton Woods system, what most people understood as the dollar-gold system. When Bretton Woods was broken up at the start of the 1970s, it became widely known among liberal and left economists and also American university and graduate students radicalized by the Vietnam War, that Lyndon LaRouche, uniquely, had been warning this was coming.
These forecasts by Lyn came from his view of the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and his knowledge that the Bretton Woods credit system in which the United States was the dominant economy with the reserve currency, was not the Bretton Woods that Franklin Roosevelt intended in creating it.
In 1945, Lyn had warned fellow soldiers in the India-Burma theatre when FDR died, that the shift to the “little man” Harry Truman meant a fearful period for the United States. He had watched his fellow returning veterans quickly forget FDR’s mission of remaking the post-War world without colonies and with “20th century, not British 18th century methods.”
When he began his studies on the U.S. economy in the 1950s, LaRouche confirmed that the American economy was not focussed at all on capital goods exports to underdeveloped nations. And this was degrading capital formation. It lowered the economy’s productivity from the industrial infrastructure of FDR’s great projects and war mobilization. For a long time afterwards, he insisted that the economic failure of Eisenhower’s administration, with Ike equaling Truman’s two recessions in two terms, was that it did not follow through on that postwar mission, and export capital goods for development as we had exported machines to win the war. The World Bank under Wall Street capo John J. McCloy, appointed by Truman, did not make low-interest loans for great projects in the Third World.
Eisenhower’s economic policy pushed domestic consumer credit and an American consumer goods “boom.” U.S. Census Bureau reports show that American exports of manufactured goods in 1955, at $8.6 billion value, were 30% lower than they had been in 1950; they were still 20% lower in 1960. The U.S. trade balance in manufactured goods was of course positive in that period, but it was +5% of American GDP in 1945, +3.5% of GDP in 1950. I’ll skip the intervening constant decline; it disappeared entirely before 1970.
Credit was going elsewhere. Mortgage loans issued went from negligible in 1950 to $57 billion in 1960. Auto loans issued went from essentially zero in 1950 to $16 billion in 1960. Cars on the road went from 30 million in 1950 to 80 million in 1955. It was in analyzing that auto sales credit bubble, the bust of which was about to hit both car manufacturers and dealers, that Lyn saw the 1957 recession coming. U.S. auto production was 5 million vehicles in 1950, 8 million in 1956, but back down to 5 million in 1958. Auto then employed 15% of the entire workforce.
Later, LaRouche called his recession forecast “a study of longer-term capital formation trends completed in February of 1957, which forecast the forthcoming recession to occur that year as exceeding those in 1947-49 and 1954, and to persist for an extended period.” More extraordinary was his first published long-term forecast, “Depression Ahead?” in 1961, which he said was intended to be the first of three studies in the International Socialist Review. That journal cut relations with him, and he completed the study in his 1967 Third Stage of Imperialism, the first mass publication of his own independent movement.
With that “Depression Ahead?,” LaRouche began to forecast not only the fateful economic events of the 1960s leading to the Bretton Woods break-up, but also their impact on society. The U.S. economy’s concentration on its own consumption would end surpluses in goods trade which were important to the dollar’s global reserve function—and indeed the American goods trade surplus disappeared in the late 1960s. There would be “an inevitable impulsion toward adoption of Schachtian economics” in the United States and European nations. This meant Hitler’s central banker Hjalmar Schacht’s policy, an austerity policy involving steady, indefinite ratcheting downward of real wages. And there would be “a new kind of approach to the underdeveloped sector.” That approach, the transfer of production of some industries from industrial nations to what essentially were Schachtian work camps in the Third World, was the subject of LaRouche’s criticism in The Third Stage of Imperialism in 1967. This serious attack on “globalization” appeared long before that term was invented.
Just as important, LaRouche noted that “The leveling out of the rate of technologically oriented expansion of U.S. industrial plant (and employment) capacity meant a drastically lowered rate of assimilation of racial minority strata.” That is, in the workforce. He wrote there was “a demoralizing shift of high school and university graduates’ post-matriculation employment prospects away from production-oriented” jobs. And this, he forecast, meant that many strata of youth would be radicalized in the United States and Europe in the 1960s, but working people only later, in response to real deterioration of economic conditions.
This pre-Vietnam insight was perhaps the most extraordinary early forecast LaRouche made. It defined his strategy for starting his independent political movement: Find radicalized students and graduate students of above-average discernment and commitment to the welfare of others. Teach them his method of economics, to prepare them to be able to show radicalized working people their common interest with the unemployed and the working people of the under-developed nations. The Third Stage of Imperialism intended that anti-Vietnam War students should recognize the Schachtian fascist policy underlying such a fundamentally colonialist war. They could organize for a policy of Third World industrialization and development projects. This could make common cause with those students’ political antagonists, namely American and European skilled workers, who didn’t realize how or why their job and wage prospects were heading south to Schachtian labor camps. One of Lyn’s first campaign posters was, “This man can get you a job rebuilding the world!”
LaRouche’s 1961 article had already forecast that a series of monetary crises by the end of that decade were likely under continuation of U.S. monetary policy, and would lead to the break-up of the Bretton Woods fixed-currency, gold-reserve system. The pound sterling crises of 1966 and 1967, leading to the uncontrolled 15% devaluation of the pound in November 1967, turned out to be the trigger. In the postwar period the British had maintained their colonial “imperial trade preference” system and “pound sterling bloc” within the dollar-based Bretton Woods system. And starting in the later 1950s, London banks blatantly violated the Bretton Woods rules by opening high-interest accounts for dollar deposits in London, then creating very high interest rate, actually unpayable dollar debt of Third World countries; the so-called Eurodollar loans.
This was the diametric opposite of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intended policy at Bretton Woods toward the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch colonies as they freed themselves. The huge pound devaluation put great pressure on the dollar, already weakened by the near-abandonment of FDR’s capital goods export policies, the resulting collapse of the U.S. goods trade balance, and inflation.
LaRouche frequently attacked Arthur F. Burns, the politically conservative, liberal Keynesian economist, Milton Friedman’s teacher and mentor, head of Eisenhower’s Board of Economic Advisors, and Nixon’s Federal Reserve chair. As the last, Burns simultaneously raised the money supply rapidly during 1970-71, while pushing for wage and price controls, until Nixon imposed them in August 1971 after breaking the dollar’s link to its gold reserve. Those wage controls, and that Schachtian fascist policy to the under-developed countries, were the major issues in Lyn’s famous debate with Prof. Abba Lerner of Queens College, City University of New York, in December 1971. Professor Lerner was considered the most brilliant of living Keynesian economists. In the debate, he supported Nixon’s action; supported the wage and price controls; finally, under the pressure of LaRouche’s reasoning that this would lead to Schachtian fascism, Lerner supported Schacht by name, before an audience of hundreds of New York City College students and teachers.
It has been noted that Lyndon LaRouche’s reaction to the vindication of his economic forecasts and method by these events, was to organize his own intelligence system and launch an intelligence service, known as Executive Intelligence Review. Consider: EIR’s leading preoccupations in its first years in the 1970s in economic coverage were: toward the formation of the European Monetary System, the so-called “golden snake” of fixed exchange rates in the European Economic Area; toward creation of an International Development Bank, Lyn’s concept adopted by the Non-Aligned Nations in 1976; toward the United States issuing gold-backed industrial development bonds at $500 per ounce of gold.
What were these but LaRouche’s organizing steps towards recreating Bretton Woods as FDR intended it to function? Since the beginning of what he called his “three phases of economic studies” in the 1950s, LaRouche’s understanding of the urgency of FDR’s goal was fundamental to all his extraordinary forecasts.
+ LaRouche on the World Stage: Through the Words of Ramsey Clark (US, former Attorney General); Dr. Enéas Carneiro (Brazil, former member of parliament and presidential candidate); José López Portillo (Mexico, former President)
“LaRouche on the World Stage”
Lyndon LaRouche was a central actor on the world stage over the last half century, far more than most Americans realize, and far more than his opponents would like to admit. His ideas profoundly penetrated leading political and intellectual layers around the globe, even when they disagreed with some or even most of what he was saying. In addition to the wide circulation of his writings and videoconferences, Lyndon and Helga LaRouche personally visited over 40 countries, where they met with hundreds, if not thousands, of leading figures.
Are you aware of the fact that Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, along with a couple of their direct envoys, met with some 24 heads of state and government from 20 countries over the years? From India’s Indira Gandhi, to Mexico’s José López Portillo, France’s Michel Rocard, Israel’s Abba Eban; and Ronald Reagan of the United States. There are among them sterling individuals who would be here speaking to you today, but for the fact that, like Lyndon LaRouche, they have passed away. And so, we decided to make sure that their voices were heard in recorded form, to conclude this morning’s discussion of LaRouche’s ideas.
We begin with an American, Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General of the United States under Lyndon Johnson, who was also LaRouche’s attorney on appeal of his railroad conviction in the Alexandria “Rocket Docket” in 1988. Clark here addresses the August 31, 1995 Independent Hearing on Misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice, which investigated the LaRouche and other legal atrocities in this country.
RAMSEY CLARK: But in what was as complex and pervasive a utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focussed on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. There are some where the government itself may have done more, and more wrongfully over a period of time, but the very networking and combination of federal, state, and local agencies, of the Executive and even some Legislative and Judicial branches, of major media and minor local media, and influential lobbyist types—the ADL preeminently—this case takes the prize.
The purpose can only be seen as destroying—it’s more than a political movement; it’s more than a political figure. It is those two, but it’s a fertile engine of ideas. A common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost….
In the LaRouche case, they’re book people. I have to confess to intellectual weakness; I find reading easier than thinking, so I read constantly. Nearly blinded myself from too much reading. Got 15,000 books at home; read most of them, unfortunately. As you can tell, I haven’t learned much, but I haven’t stopped yet. These are book people. They had publishing houses going on; important publications. Non-profit stuff. The government comes in a completely—these are just some of the peripheral things that Odin and others might not have explained to you. But these are what they were about; ideas, information, social change, meeting the needs of human people all over the world, humanity all over the world. We’re going to have a billion more people before the end of this millennium, century, decade. And the vast majority—80% of more—are going to have beautiful darker skin, and they’re going to live short lives, short lives of sickness, of hunger, of pain, ignorance, violence, unless we act radically. And these books have ideas, some will work, some won’t work, but they’re ideas that can be tested in the marketplace, as we used to say.
SMALL: We travel next to the city of São Paulo, Brazil, where on June 12, 2002, then U.S. Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche was awarded honorary citizenship for São Paulo by the City Council of that city of more than 18 million people, the third-largest in the world.
LaRouche was invited to Brazil to receive this honor by Dr. Havanir Nimtz, the principal representative on the São Paulo City Council of Brazil’s PRONA party, founded by Dr. Enéas Carneiro, one of Brazil’s preeminent cardiologists and a former Presidential candidate. Less than four months after hosting LaRouche’s visit, Dr. Eneas was elected to Brazil’s national congress with the largest vote total ever achieved by any candidate in the entire history of Brazil.
DR. HAVANIR MINTZ: There is a tidal wave which is today shaking the nations of the planet. Nations enslaved to a repugnant, obscene, fetid, filthy financial system which is already in the process of full global disintegration. As Mr. LaRouche forecast many years ago, there is not an Asian problem, nor a Russian problem, nor an Argentine problem, nor a Brazil problem. The crisis is systemic; the crisis is planet-wide. All of civilization is heading towards a dark age. It is for all of these reasons that today, in this chamber, Mr. LaRouche is honored as the legitimate representative of the worldwide struggle against ruinous speculation which is dragging the world into the abyss.
Some centuries from now, when none of us will be here any longer, LaRouche’s name will be remembered with admiration and respect by all those who, like those of us here present, know how to treasure intelligence, knowledge, and love of the human species.
DR. ENEAS CARNEIRO: Who is Mr. LaRouche? Mr. LaRouche doesn’t stop at mathematics; he discourses with an exceptional fluency in matters of the physical world. Speaking with intimacy and profundity about the ideas of Gauss, Ampère, Oersted, and Kepler, and so many other great men of physics. When we turn to philosophy, the man is really something else! From Plato to Leibniz; from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas; Descartes, Spinoza. The depth of his analysis is enough to leave any of us with our mouth open. He speaks about ancient history as if he were seated on the sofa at Plato’s Symposium. It’s as if he had been sitting at their side.
He who reads Mr. LaRouche’s articles receives a refreshing shower of science, art, and philosophy. But, beyond such incontestable knowledge, what most impresses me about Mr. LaRouche, is his social concern; his concern for the fate of humanity.
SMALL: Another world leader who worked closely with LaRouche was the former Foreign and Justice Minister of Guyana from 1975 to 1978, Fred Wills, who was one of the most courageous leaders of the fight for a New World Economic Order. He called for LaRouche’s proposal for a new International Development Bank from the floor of the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 1976, and in 1984 he became one of the founding board members of the Schiller Institute.
On matters of scientific physical economy, I cannot fail to mention the preeminent Russian scientist Pobisk Kuznetsov, who was discussed in an earlier presentation. Kuznetsov was so taken by his personal discussions with LaRouche in Moscow in mid 1994, that he shortly thereafter proposed that an actual unit of measurement of the physical economy, related to Potential Relative Population Density, should be named after him: “Let us introduce the physical magnitude of ‘a larouche,’ designated by ‘la’, which gives the number of persons who can be fed from 1 square kilometer, or 100 hectares, during one year. We share LaRouche’s view that the magnitude of potential relative population density can serve as an indicator of ‘intellectual culture’.”
Our final guest is the former President of Mexico, José López Portillo. Over the period of his 1976-1982 Presidency, López Portillo grew to respect and admire U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche (with whom he met personally on May 23, 1982 in the Presidential palace in Mexico City), and the movement of youthful Mexican patriots associated with LaRouche, in whom López Portillo saw the best hope for Mexico’s future. As the ex-President himself put it in an exclusive EIR interview on September 17, 1998:
“As President, I had a relationship with Mr. L.H. LaRouche of respect for his solidly independent and tenacious ideological position, which I share in large measure, largely because of the adherence he had achieved from a group of young Mexicans, whom I equally respect and admire.”
So, as I’m fond of repeating: If you want to educate a President, organize a youth movement.
A year later, on Nov. 18, 1999, López Portillo issued an open letter calling for support of LaRouche’s presidential campaign: “I would like to recognize the tireless and generous efforts carried out by Lyndon LaRouche, for whom I hope for the best as a pre-candidate for the Presidency of the U.S.A. I wish that his voice be listened to and followed by those in the world who have the grave responsibility of stopping this situation from continuing on its calamitous course, and I hope that his fellow U.S. citizens, who will elect their President in the coming elections, will give him their timely recognition and support.”
And on Dec. 1, 1998, López Portillo stated the following in response to the keynote address given by Helga Zepp-LaRouche at their joint seminar at the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics, in Mexico City:
JOSÉ LÓPEZ PORTILLO: I congratulate Lyn and Helga for these words, which impressed me especially because first, they trapped me in the apocalypse, but then she showed me the staircase by which we can get to a promised land. Many thanks, Doña Helga.
Doña Helga—and here I wish to congratulate her husband, Lyndon LaRouche—… and it is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche. Now, it is through the voice of his wife, as we have had the privilege of hearing. How important that they enlighten us as to what is happening in the world, as to what will happen, and as to what can be corrected. How important that someone dedicates their time, their generosity, and their enthusiasm to that endeavor.
For my part, I fulfilled a period of responsibility, and I can report in a somewhat dramatic way what happens to national economies in an international financial order such as that which has ordered our affairs since Bretton Woods.
SMALL: To which we can only add that it is now necessary that it is not only necessary to listen the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche, but to study them as well. We have now had a shower of ideas, as Dr. Eneas Carneiro referred to it.
Panel 2: “Earth’s Next 50 Years”
(click on the name of a speaker for a transcript of his or her remarks)
Moderator: Megan Dobrodt (US), LaRouche Legacy Foundation, Board of Directors
+ Jacques Cheminade (France), Founder and President of the Solidarité et Progrès Political Party in France, former Presidential Candidate
“Lyndon LaRouche’s Method of Physical Economy in Coincidence with France’s Republican Humanism”
+ Roberto Fritzsche Argentina), professor, Department of Economic Sciences, University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires; and Eduardo Fernández (Argentina), Systems Analyst, government of the province of Chubut
+ Harley Schlanger (US), Schiller Institute
"John Connally on August 15, 1971: Schultz Did It!"
According to the vast majority of journalistic and historical accounts of the process leading up to the Aug. 15, 1971 decision to sever the relationship between the dollar and gold, the most forceful advocate for this action was Treasury Secretary John Connally. Wikipedia, for example, says that Connally "presided over the removal of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard," and reports that President Richard Nixon "relied heavily on the advice of Connally" in reaching that decision. Economic historian William Greider, in his book, "Secrets of the Temple", writes that it was Connally, along with Paul Volcker, who "engineered the most fundamental change in the world's monetary system since World War II."
Connally, a former Governor of Texas, who had built a reputation as a tough, no nonsense wheeler-dealer in the best tradition of "independent", rugged Texans, had just been appointed Treasury Secretary by Nixon, as the dollar crisis was peaking. Though he had limited experience in, and knowledge of, international financial policy, it is said that Nixon admired him greatly, and especially respected him for his self-confidence and commanding presence.
This same view of Connally was held by George Shultz, as a negative factor, as he was clearly not as enamored with him as Nixon was. Shultz, who was part of the team working with him to advise Nixon, wrote in his book "Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines," that Connally was pursuing "an extremely hard line toward European governments" in talks on dollar exchange rates, and took an "aggressive posture." Shultz added that he "flashed the signal [in defense of the dollar] in true Texas style, with both guns blazing in the corridors of international finance."
I had an opportunity to meet Connally, and have an extensive conversation with him about the process leading to the Aug. 15 event, under slightly more humbling circumstances for him. What follows is the report I filed on that conversation, which was published in the {Executive Intelligence Review}:
Far removed from the buzz of more than 500 people, in the back of the Hart Galleries in Houston, a tired John Connally surveyed the scene before him. It was January 23, 1988, the second day of a bankruptcy auction held to sell off a lifetime of possessions collected by him and his wife. With millions of dollars in debts, and little in the way of liquid assets, he could do little but watch as the auctioneer took bids on his worldly goods, with the proceeds earmarked to go to his creditors.
For the moment, Connally was alone. Although the press had written of his strength, how he had been standing firm in the face of adversity, he appeared tired.... I approached him and asked if I could ask him a few questions. He straightened up and said, "Only if they are not about bankruptcy."
I asked about his memories of August 15, 1971, and the announcement by President Nixon of the end of the post-war system of fixed exchange rates. He immediately brightened, saying: "Yes, that was my idea. I took that to the President two nights earlier." He continued, saying that we were facing a terrible crisis and that no one else would face it. He said it was his most difficult decision as Treasury Secretary, but events of the subsequent sixteen years had proven it was the right decision.
I told him I disagreed, that the shift away from fixed exchange had led to a series of devastating crises. I mentioned the August-September 1982 debt crisis for Mexico, with the vulnerability of the U.S. banking system to a default or moratorium; and the October 1987 stock collapse, as a result of the shift of the economy from production to speculation, a shift made inevitable by the action of August 15, 1971.
As he listened intently, I told him that I work with Lyndon LaRouche, who forecast that Nixon's actions of August 15, 1971 set in motion what would become the worst financial crash in history. I asked if he had any comments on that.
"Well," he replied, "I'm not sure about that. Of course, the crisis was already under way before I arrived." He told me he had little familiarity with international finance prior to his appointment by Nixon, and that he was first made aware of the problem during regular briefings from William McChesney Martin [then Chairman of the Federal Reserve].
I asked him, "So how was the decision made?"
He said there was a working committee, which included himself, Paul Volcker, and George Shultz. Sometimes Herb Stein attended, sometimes Arthur Burns. Of this group, only Arthur Burns was opposed to closing the gold window. They met on Aug. 13. Kissinger was not there, but Shultz was the most forceful in insisting that the fixed exchange system must end, and that Connally must brief Nixon immediately.
"Did you object?" I asked.
"No...These were the smartest men around. I figured they knew what they were doing." He added that he briefed Nixon the next day, and Nixon had only one question -- have you run this by Shultz? When told that Shultz was for it, Nixon asked him to get a draft to his speechwriters, and it was announced the next morning that he would give a major policy address.
I asked Connally if he had any regrets about the decision. He looked wistfully around the room and said, "Right now, I have lots of regrets about a lot of things." Any about Aug.15? With that, he walked away, saying he didn't want to think about it just then.
Left unsaid, but perhaps understood by him, was that his misfortunes were the direct result of the mid-1980s collapse and subsequent looting of the Savings and Loans, and the bust cycle of the real estate and oil sectors, into which he had invested heavily--which resulted from the deregulated, free market economic measures imposed after the August 15 transformation he had supported.
+ Fred Huenefeld, Jr. (US), Schiller Institute Board member; former President of the Louisiana Association of Soil Districts; former President of NORM (National Association of Raw Materials); former Treasurer of the Louisiana State Democratic Party
+ Theo Mitchell (US), Former State Senator, South Carolina
LaRouche in the Universities:
+ Gretchen Small (US), LaRouche Legacy Foundation, Board of Directors
“LaRouche in the Libraries”
Hello to all! It is appropriate that we return in this final section of today’s seminar to where we began: with Lyndon LaRouche’s discussion of how he set out to change the West’s disastrous policy course over 50 years ago, by picking intellectual fights at universities in order to recruit and educate a new leadership out of the-up and-coming younger generation.
The oligarchy has long understood how dangerous this can be to their cause. Socrates was poisoned for just such “corrupting of the youth.” Socrates, like LaRouche, had set out to be the “gadfly,” whose “sting” would provoke young minds to search for Truth, the Good and the Beautiful as the basis of government.
Over two thousand years later, who is left standing from that fight? Those who poisoned Socrates? Or Socrates, whose thoughts are still “pricking” minds into motion through Plato’s beautiful dialogues?
You have heard much today about how LaRouche’s ideas shaped the last 50 years of human history. Our subject now, is how to ensure that LaRouche’s ideas shape the next 50 years – for starters. I invite all of you to join the LaRouche Legacy Foundation in carrying out this mission!
One crucial role you can play, is to help place LaRouche’s books in every community and university library possible. We must get people to read Lyndon LaRouche’s writings. Not merely hear about him, but experience for themselves why the Oligarchy still hates him so. Think of the effect it will have upon the United States, for starters, if Volume 1 of LaRouche’s Collected Works, containing four of his most important and influential works on the subject of physical economy, is available on the shelves of libraries around the country. We can use that to help spark small groups to gather to read and study LaRouche together. People are tired of slogans, and are searching for real answers to the existential crisis we face. You don’t know who from your community —which farmer, which business-man or woman, which parent or grandparent agonizing over the future of their children and grandchildren--might find the volume in the library, and begin to find the answers they are seeking.
And if you haven’t dug into reading LaRouche yourself, now’s the time to experience the joy of rediscovering LaRouche’s discoveries for yourself. That may not be easy, but don’t worry, he will make you laugh along the way.
Now, LaRouche is controversial! The Legacy Foundation could simply donate copies of this beautiful book [hold up book] to local and university libraries, but many would end up on the table at the next library book sale. If a local citizen, or better yet a group of local citizens sends the book along with a letter explaining why they, as members of the community, think it is important for LaRouche’s book to be on the library’s shelves, then there is a better shot at it getting there. It doesn’t take a long letter, but personal requests are key.
The same thing goes for getting LaRouche’s book onto university library shelves. Letters from college alumni to a library at their alma mater, requesting that LaRouche’s book be added to their catalogue, can help bring the fight for LaRouche’s ideas to those universities.
If you’d like to get involved in this project, and want some ideas on how to get it done, please get in touch with us.
Now you will hear from a group of young people from different parts of the world speak, on their discovery of LaRouche today. But first, we are going to hear a short audio clip of LaRouche himself in action 50 years ago: in his famous December 1971 debate with Queens College economics professor Abba Lerner which you heard about this morning.
After August 15 th , LaRouche had launched a nationwide campaign challenging the “Quackademics” teaching economic theories which had just been proven to be utter failures. He or his associates debated professors, and even gave an eight-class economic course on physical economy and the human mind at such campuses as the University of Michigan, Rutgers in New Jersey, the University of Miami, and at least three New York City colleges. If there were more time, I could tell you about LaRouche’s course and debate at Swarthmore College which I attended!
The debate with Lerner was the most momentous, historically. LaRouche was taking on the leading Keynesian economist in the United States at the time, who was backing Nixon’s August 15 th announcement.
Lerner was also a key associate of Sidney Hook, the first chairman of the American branch of the Dulles Brother’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. If you don’t know how evil that operation was, look it up on LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review website. And LaRouche hit them head on.
The room was packed with students. Here you’ll first hear some of Lerner’s opening protests that he was no fascist, followed by Lyn’s opening salvo. Later on, as the debate went on, a cornered Lerner would blurt out that “even if I were a member of the Nazi Party, everything I said here would be true,” --and then his infamous admission: “But if the German Social-Democracy had accepted [Hjalmar] Schact’s policy, Hitler would not have been necessary.”
Hook, present for what had turned into a debacle for the financiers who ran him, told a LaRouche organizer when it ended: “Your man has shown himself to be an effective advocate; therefore, he will never be allowed to intervene” in public policy debates “again.”
The war against LaRouche had begun. It is high time we win that war once and for all!
+ Carlos “Itos” Valdes (The Philippines), The Philippine LaRouche Society
“LaRouche's Education of the Youth”
Good Day to all!
My name is Itos Valdes. I am the son of the Butch Valdes, the founder of the Philippine Larouche Society, among many other organizations.
Im sure many of you know his own Larouche experience by now. So allow me to narrate my own.
I first met Lyndon Larouche at home.
It was in the mid-90s, and my father would bring home assorted magazines and reading materials, and I happen to catch an issue of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR). I recall that the cover had the headline: “The Philippines: Kissinger’s Next Iran?”
Of course, that first issue slowly built up to many issues piling up at home, as he had since subscribed to EIR.
I would pick up a few issues here and there when the inspiration hit—especially as world events unfolded. Before long, as I read more EIR material, and an occasional 21st Century article, my classes at University seemed to lose significance.
Fast forward to 2000, and my first President’s Day conference in Leesburg, Virginia. I was sent by my father, along with associates, to attend.
My host was the late Gail Billington, wife of Mike Billington, who was still incarcerated at the time. Her special responsibilities, I later learned, focused on Southeast Asia, and it was a joy conversing with her to and from the offices. I will never forget Gail.
Needless-to-say, the conference was life-changing. From Lyn’s opening address, the presentations, the panels, all the way to the cadre classes – which had music, philosophy, economics, and history.
The next period saw my father, brother, and myself return to the Conferences in separate occasions, all returning home with similar fervor to change the world.
I always treasure one visit where we met Lyn and Helga at their house for an intimate dinner. As always, my goal was to absorb as much as I could at the time. Not easy, as you know with Lyn-- there was a whole Universe to absorb in those several hours!
Each visit was a life-changing event, and each reading of Larouche’s work continues to affect minds today.
I learned to man book tables, engage in Plato and Shakespeare reading sessions, and sing beautiful songs!
My love for history was redefined, made tangible and personal, and wholly enhanced – as I visited the Washington, FDR, JFK, and Lincoln Memorials, the Smithsonian, Gettysburg, and Fort McHenry.
Plato, Beethoven, Kepler, and Schiller became some of my best friends, while Lyndon Larouche, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alexander Hamilton became family.
Those visits solidified our association with Larouche and has led to setting up our own organizations, built on the same principles.
My brother, Anton, and I started our weekly Plato readings. Sometimes it would just be the two of us left. But we started the Philippine Larouche Youth Movement and were fairly successful for several years.
We had set up speaking engagements and meetings when Gail and Mike Billington, and Richard Freeman came over to visit.
We learned how to organize people through great ideas, just as we were organized.
We taught ourselves to look into our own history for similar ideas, related events, and world historical figures.
The association with Lyndon Larouche has not come without challenges, as we all know.
The ideas are universal, and the work required to understand the principles is not easy. Especially since it compels you to consider the whole question of Mankind’s place in Creation—in relation to all sciences, subjects, and events.
Many times, frustration got the better of us. Many times, we had to take breaks from the fight. Many times, we sought refuge in popular culture. But we always returned to Larouche.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave describes this challenge perfectly.
Larouche provided us the guiding principles in order to appreciate the Universe and mankind’s role in it; a lens with which to examine current and future history.
The current history of the world has seen many upheavals, more so in the last decade, as the current financial system continues its violent breakdown, as Larouche correctly forecast. His call for a 4-powers summit remains the only truthful, viable, and long-term solution, providing a profoundly beautiful alternative to the depopulists’ Great Reset plans.
In the Philippines, we continue to battle the Oligarchical forces controlling government, as well as the decades-old dumbing down of our population amidst increasing poverty. Our resources are limited, our platforms small, and our forces spread out. But, as Lyn said, the power of ideas will always win the day.
Confucius once said- “May you live in interesting times!”. I think that might be a bit of an understatement for today.
As we continue our fight for a new world Renaissance from our little corner called the Philippines, our anchor will always be the great ideas and principles learned from Lyndon Larouche, the people he introduced to us, and the Organization he built.
Through this, we hope that future generations of Filipinos will discover and work on the ideas of Lyndon Larouche, and, by doing so, help secure the future, not only for the Philippines, but for the community of sovereign nation states as well.
LaRouche always advised us to HAVE FUN! We intend to do just that!
+ Carolina Dominguez (México), LaRouche Youth Movement
+ José Vega (US), LaRouche Youth Movement
What makes a society successful? Let's start with a quote from Lyndon Larouche’s In Defense of Common Sense: A swimmer is rescued from the sea, moments before his strength had ebbed fatally. This is momentary survival. Is this a paradigm for the successful survival of an entire society? How must we distinguish between merely momentary and durable survival?
To answer that question, let's look at an example for each of these terms. Let's start by looking at momentary survival. When the pandemic first started, thousands became unemployed, businesses were forced to shut down and people were afraid of what was to come. One of the immediate resolutions passed was to give money to those directly affected by the Pandemic in the form of “stimulus checks''. These stimulus checks and unemployment checks were desperately needed so that people wouldn't lose their homes, would be able to eat another meal, and could survive another day….
But can a society thrive on handouts alone? Of course not. A society requires it’s people to be productive.
Let’s look at how the mentality of “durable” survival could’ve not only prevented mass unemployment, but required a rapid mobilization of over a billion people.
Imagine, right when the pandemic started, you had an immediate response to build more hospitals, more sanitation facilities, more power plants—the same kind of actions implemented by FDR during the Great Depression. We would not only be prepared for this pandemic, but all potential pandemics in the future. FDR had stated that every person, regardless of station, race, or creed had “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.” In his time, the General Welfare, along with public health, were mandatory commitments that the government was required to make to its citizens.
In this video, published in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration and the Roosevelt administration, we see the principles of a government focused on durable survival and how that attitudes defines the present.
(VIDEO: no transcript.)
What you just saw was an example of a country that had an idea of the future. And by implementing Larouche’s proposals of a physical economy, we use our greatest resource, our creative minds, as a way to think of a future thousands of generations ahead of us, who will teraform not just our solar system, but other galaxies and distant bodies in our universe. LaRouche, in his Four Laws, identified the need for a space program to increase the productivity of the entire labor force. Taking from FDR’s CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) program, the increase of participation of youth would be emphasized in a CCC-styled space program. Youth, from all over the country, would be employed in building rockets, building satellites, and discovering new frontiers of our universe that we don’t even know exist! This program could be exported globally in the form of modular science cities, which could easily to be built across the entire world. These cities would be powered by nuclear power plants, and we would equip these cities with clean water, sanitation, public health, and education. The fact that over 2 billion people currently do not have access to clean water, and over 2.5 billion face some degree of food insecurity, is a moral failure on our part, and must be remedied immediately.
Greetings to the Conference
(click on the name for a transcript of his or her remarks)
+ Carlos Gallardo, President of the Christian Democratic Party of Peru
I’m Carlos Gallardo Neyra, the President of the Christian Democratic Party of Peru, and I greet you from this beautiful country, bathed with its coasts on the Pacific Ocean; with extremely high mountains with brilliant, radiant snow-capped peaks; and its mighty rivers with exotic climate -- to which we invite all of you to come and visit. But the purpose of this message is to greet you on this 50th anniversary of the forecasts made by Lyndon LaRouche in favor of a Christian economy for the world.
Allow me to take this opportunity to send a big fraternal “abrazo” or embrace from Peru, from my country, to Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who is witness and a living testimony to the sacrifices of Lyndon LaRouche over the years, with his writings, including from the shadow of prison. We wish to salute you for the immense sacrifice of Lyndon LaRouche over the 50 years of his activities; today his leaders in different countries around the world provide proof that the flame of his efforts and concern for the development of the poor, and the improvement of the living conditions of the weak, is still a promise and a challenge to be fulfilled.
Thank you all very much, and from Peru I send you our fraternal “abrazo,” as President of the Christian Democratic Party. Thank you very much, and congratulations.
+ Daisuke Kotegawa, former high-level Finance Ministry official in Japan, and Representative from Japan before the International Monetary Fund
As Lyn repeatedly stated, it is the manufacturing industry that would help human beings develop; not financial industry which monetarist supports.
In the meantime, the Glass-Steagall Act introduced in 1933 in the United States to separate investment banking from commercial banking was completely abolished in 1999. This led to a moral hazard of bankers who know that the government would always save banking group which include both commercial banks and investment banks them. Reckless gambling type of investment by British and American investment banks after 1999 caused the Lehman shock. Based upon this experience a new rule to impose a heavy requirement on banks’ lending to hedge funds has been introduced. This new rule killed venture fund type of commercial loans. As Lyn always emphasized, it is urgently needed to reinstate the Glass Steagall Act to restore healthy financial sector in the world.
Such was also the case for other Asian countries which developed mainly through manufacturing. Only exception was China, which was able to escape from the application of the Basel rule and has become the world manufacturing center. It can be said that the world economy transitioned from manufacturing-dominated economy to the era of monetary gambling. This transition went completely against Lyn’s proposal while it was supported by Anglo-American monetarists. The result of such transition was the widening gap between the rich and the poor, which caused voters revolt starting 2016.
Event Invitation
Click for this invitation in Español, Deutsch, or Italiano.
The LaRouche Legacy Foundation is pleased to invite you to an online seminar with leading international experts to examine the unique contributions of Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) to the science of physical economy. The seminar will consist of a morning and an afternoon panel, and it will be held on the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s fateful announcement of the end of the Bretton Woods system on August 15, 1971.
This is also an urgent invitation to reflect on what went wrong with economic policy in the trans-Atlantic sector over the last five decades, in order to correct those persisting policy blunders and change course before we plunge into a breakdown crisis comparable only to the 14th century New Dark Age.
Some background:
On August 15, 1971, Nixon delivered a dramatic 18-minute national television address in which he announced:
The dollar was being taken off the gold standard: the dollar would no longer be redeemable in gold;
A floating exchange rate system would replace the existing fixed exchange rate international monetary system;
A temporary wage and price freeze would be instituted in the U.S., which quickly became Phase I, II and III drastic austerity measures.
Although Nixon announced these measures purportedly to rein in financial speculation against the dollar, they in fact opened the floodgates to the most massive, lengthy speculative binge in the history of mankind, coupled with physical economic collapse— which continues to this day.
The August 15, 1971 announcement was the most far-reaching and catastrophic economic policy decision of the 20th century in terms of its consequences down to the present. One economist, and one economist alone, called it. He warned that it was coming and explained what it meant within hours of its announcement.
That man was Lyndon LaRouche.
LaRouche spent the next five decades warning that, if those policies were continued, the world would head into a systemic breakdown crisis and the likelihood of fascist economic policies. All the while he presented detailed programs to reverse the crisis, based on the idea of peace through development and on fostering the productive powers of labor of every person on the planet.
For this, LaRouche was reviled and unjustly imprisoned for five years. His policies were not implemented in the trans-Atlantic sector, and the planet today is paying the price for that folly in the form of a hyperinflationary blowout, an uncontrolled and deadly pandemic, and the danger of thermonuclear war. As a result of the campaign to defame LaRouche and silence his ideas, most people in the United States and elsewhere have never studied his writings.
But some people, leading scientists and political leaders in different parts of the world, did listen to LaRouche and did study his works— such as the Russian scientific giant Pobisk Kuznetsov and former Mexican President José López Portillo.
Other specialists and students of LaRouche’s works will participate in the Aug. 14 seminar, and you will be able to hear from them directly about LaRouche’s economic breakthroughs, about his unmatched record of forecasts, and about his programmatic proposals to develop every corner of the planet—and the solar system. The seminar will help you understand why it is past time to exonerate LaRouche’s ideas, both for reasons of simple justice and to be able to at last implement his policies.
As José López Portillo, the former President of Mexico, stated in 1998 in a joint seminar with Helga Zepp-LaRouche: “It is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche.”