The Global Crisis: Why Mankind Needs Russia

Transcript

Current economic problems are only a particular expression of a systemic crisis of mankind, a crisis whose character is changing. The most important developments, as usual, are taking place outside the realm of the economy. They involve a fundamental change in mankind’s relationship to nature.

We are operating today according to the law of conservation of risk: minimizing individual risks in a closed system increases systemic risk—until the system breaks apart.

We have seen this in the U.S. stock market, where the derivatives system reduced risks for investors in top-rated corporate bonds to levels an order of magnitude lower than the risks borne by the issuers of such bonds. Individual risks were minimized, while total potential risk was driven to a systemic level, and the system collapsed….

Meanwhile, since the beginning of globalization, the development of technology has turned the shaping of consciousness into the most profitable type of business that is easy for people to get into. Being “the most profitable that it is easy to get into” makes it also the most widespread. This means that a person’s main preoccupation now is no longer to change the world around him, but to shape his own mind. Mankind’s very mode of action is changing. In our entire history as a biological species, there has never before been such a transformation.

The human mind is being turned into an object of the most intense and chaotic influences. The appearance of a huge number of feedback links makes the world more difficult to grasp. This lessened intelligibility of the world increases demand for mysticism and reduces the thirst for science, and therefore, for education, too. Education then degenerates into a tool of social control. Mankind is becoming more primitive and dehumanized, sliding into a new Dark Age.

From a strictly economic point of view, this could be explained as the adaptation of social relations at all levels (from the family to the state)—relations developed in association with industrial technologies that are now disappearing—to new, post-industrial technologies. The first set of these has been informational technologies, with biological technologies likely to be next. When discussing economic issues, however, it should be borne in mind that these changes are much broader and deeper than the range of phenomena studied by economics.

Financial Breakdown Crisis

People underestimate the depth of the global financial crisis because they ignore its fundamental cause: the exhaustion of the previous global development model after the destruction of the Soviet Union. Having defeated us in the Cold War, the West egotistically reshaped the world in the interests of its global corporations, denying normal development to the territories thus acquired (to prevent competition against these corporations).

But this limited the markets available to the developed countries themselves, creating a crisis of overproduction—not primarily of traditional commodities, but rather of information and management technologies aimed at changing people and managing them: high-hume, ((This sociological jargon term, referring to technologies intended to change the human mind, both individually and on a mass basis (political technology, public relations, marketing, etc.), has become popular among Russian analysts.)) rather than high-tech.

Lending to the underdeveloped world to stimulate demand, an attempted crisis exit route that was found by instinctive groping, caused the 1997-99 debt crisis, which boomeranged against the United States in 2000-01.

The United States has been dragging itself (and the world economy, of which it is the linchpin) out of the recession using two strategies.

“Pumping” the market with unrecoverable mortgage loans no longer works.

The second strategy is to “export instability,” undermining competitors and forcing their financial and intellectual capital to seek “safe havens” in the West. The growing instability is used to justify an increase of military spending in the U.S.A. itself, providing a stimulus for the economy and for technology (such “military Keynesianism” was used effectively by [former President] Reagan). This strategy, implemented in 1999 in Yugoslavia against the Eurozone, ran its course in Iraq. The Arab Spring and the terrorist war against Syria show that the strategy of “exporting instability” has degenerated into “exporting chaos,” which is also dangerous for the United States: Washington does not try to administer the areas it destabilizes, and these have become a catalyst for a global military and political crisis.

According to the Obama Doctrine, the U.S.A. has to act as much as it can through others, wasting the resources of its NATO satellites rather than its own; the idea is not to “Americanize” non-Western societies, but to plunge them into self-perpetuating chaos, thereby to control whatever resources they have, using a minimum of military force. That is the reason for the alliance with Islamic terrorists, which [former Vice President] Cheney had promoted and which became obvious in Libya and Syria.

In financial terms, however, this strategy appears to be inadequate for maintaining sufficient demand for the dollar, and thus preserving the status quo.

The West today is not trying to increase its competitiveness, but simply to push the world back to the 1990s and 2000s—a world which is gone forever—when, under the guise of talk about globalization and humanitarian interventions almost everywhere, even in Eastern Europe, what developed was essentially a new brand of colonialism.

This means that the West has lost the strategic initiative, and so far, there is no one else to pick it up.

The organic inability of the United States to relinquish even a small part of its current interests for the sake of solving its own strategic problems, its truly devastating egoism, is thrusting new powers to the forefront of global development: the European Union, China, and, if our leaders have enough intelligence, Russia, thereby ending the Pax Americana.

From what we understand, the integration of humanity has once again, as in the early 20th Century, exceeded the capabilities of its governing systems; now mankind has been forced to reduce the depth of this integration, taking a step backwards and partially restoring governability through more primitive processes.

The Global Monopolies

The purely economic aspect of the current crisis is the state of decay of the global monopolies. There is no scope for external competition in the global market. Technological progress, which could be a source of competition, is hampered both by these monopolies (including their abuse of intellectual property rights), and by the absence of significant non-economic threats (without which the discovery of new technological principles, as distinct from their subsequent commercialization, is not profitable).

Therefore, the decay of the global monopolies will continue until it leads to a breakdown into depression. Due to lack of demand, the single global market will disintegrate into an intricate system of macro-regions; the reduced size of the markets will lead to the loss of a number of technologies and to technogenic catastrophes.

The macro-regions will engage in harsh and chaotic cultural, political, economic, and technological competition, as in the period between the First and Second World Wars. Perhaps the very formation of these macro-regions will limit the absolute power and, therefore, the decay of the global monopolies; despite their power, their access to the macro-regions of “others” will be limited. That is precisely why this scenario is unacceptable to the global ruling class and the U.S. leadership, which comes closest to expressing the interests of that class. They prefer to plunge potential macro-regions into chaos, rather than allow them to hive off from global markets that are controlled by the global monopolies.

Nevertheless, it may be assumed that equilibrium will be achieved for some period of time through the restoration of a bipolar political system (counterposing the U.S. and China, with the European Union, Japan, India, and possibly Russia serving as a balance, analogous to the Non-Aligned Movement) and a multi-currency economic system (each currency zone will have its own reserve currency).

The fundamental problem of development today, however, is not the egoism of the United States, not the lack of liquidity, and not the debt crisis, but the lack of a source of economic growth in the United States, and along with it, in the entire world economy. There is nothing to alleviate the global monopolies’ crisis of over-production and create a new economic engine to replace the broken ones. This means that the crisis will not end in a recovery of the world economy, but in a long and quite severe depression.

Reversion to Mysticism

The situation is aggravated by the proliferation and constant improvement of computers, which are the embodiment of formal logic. Access to them puts us all on the same level, and competition among individuals and groups is gradually beginning to be based not on logic, but on non-logical thinking: both creative and mystical.

The impossibility of educating people in this kind of thinking, as easily as the ability to think logically is taught, makes competition more biological and less social than we are accustomed to consider acceptable. This will increase the downward trend in the social significance of knowledge and the quality of our specialists, a process that threatens to cause technological catastrophes because of our inability to maintain existing infrastructure.

The growth of mysticism, stiffer global competition, and the emergence of a global ruling class which, having neither voters nor taxpayers nor influential shareholders, is essentially free from responsibility—all of this will dehumanize society.

Destruction of the Middle Class

The proliferation of information technology is leading to a crisis of governance, including a crisis of traditional democracy, which is ceasing to function before our very eyes.

The exhaustion of the liberal and market-oriented paradigm has been apparent since the 1997-99 currency crisis of the underdeveloped countries. Remember that the current market paradigm assumes that a person lives for profit, and the liberal paradigm puts the state at the service of global business, not of its people.

One manifestation of the exhaustion of the liberal paradigm is the elimination of the middle class.

For one thing, if there is too much debt and the money supply cannot be increased any further, then the global monopolies begin to cut costs. This means reducing the consumption of that part of the population, which is already consuming from the market more than it produces (although it can provide human capital, which is not a market product)—that is, the consumption of the middle class.

Secondly, super-productive post-industrial technologies are making the middle class superfluous. The global monopolies have destroyed the middle class in Africa, Latin America, and the post-socialist countries. Now they are destroying it in the heart of the capitalist system: the United States and the developed countries of Europe. The impoverishment of the middle class in developed countries—the infamous “golden billion”—will not save anybody from the crisis, but it is shifting this crisis into new post-economic and post-democratic dimensions.

After all, democracy exists on behalf of and in the name of the middle class. After its downfall, democracy will degenerate into a new dictatorship, based on the reshaping of minds. This will complete the process of dehumanization and the repudiation of civilization. We will see the West reject individual sovereignty and self-consciousness, that most important achievement of the Enlightenment, and revert to the Middle Ages—perhaps because of a disaster that smashes the public and individual psyche. The first step in this direction has already been taken: Descartes’ maxim, “I think, therefore I am,” has been replaced by a more profitable business formula: not even “I consume,” but rather “I buy, therefore I am.”

Advertising tells us that when a particular brand label is attached to an item, its price increases many times over. This means that the mass exchange of goods and services has already become inequitable. And inequitable or “non-equivalent” exchange is nothing but stealing. If stealing has become the norm, that means that the traditional market no longer exists. And this is natural: The impoverishment of the middle class deprives a modern economy of demand, and an economy without demand is a non-market economy.

At the same time, the systemic loss of control by the owners of large corporations over their senior executives, strictly speaking, abolishes private property, and, with it, capitalism in the classical sense. Thus traditional democracy and the market have come to an end; we just haven’t recognized this fact yet.

The crisis of democracy and the development of a global ruling class, exercising external control over all the rest of humanity, tends to revive systems of governance that are covert in nature, like the medieval orders.

These systems accumulate knowledge; but hidden knowledge, by its very nature, will inevitably die, degenerating into rituals. So the computerized Middle Ages that is bearing down on us and is so relished by a section of the global ruling class, will not remain computerized for very long.

Thus, a painful and deep retrogression awaits us, with considerable loss of life: a kind of plunge into a new Dark Age….

Russia’s Potential Contribution

We do not know whether humanity will succeed in avoiding a catastrophic continuation along this route, but we must make every effort to prevent it.

The task is two-pronged: to preserve the technologies we have and continue technological progress, despite the contraction of markets (and, consequently, a reduced division of labor), and to save humanism by putting an end to the general dehumanization.

Russia has considerable prerequisites for solving this problem.

For one thing, the Soviet military-industrial complex created the basis, which has largely been preserved, for super-productive so-called “closing” technologies, ((A “closing” technology, in Russian zakryvayushchaya tekhnologiya, is one that produces such economies of labor and other resources that it may cause the shutdown of less advanced industries.)) which are distinguished from traditional technologies by their cheapness and simplicity. Although these have been blocked by the monopolies, after the collapse of the latter in the global depression they will be able to maintain their high profitability even in small markets.

Secondly, our culture is fundamentally humanistic because of the exceptional significance it attributes to the pursuit of justice. The pursuit of justice yields ongoing advantages, based on a preference for the effectiveness of society as a whole over the effectiveness of any individual firm; this is an essential precondition both for collective survival and for the preservation of humanism.

Russian culture is fundamentally messianic: The bearers of this culture do not live without a grand purpose, even when they are living in comfort (this is a common feature of the human species). Moreover, they are capable of independently generating such a grand purpose, even at the brink of ruin.

This allows Russia to make a serious attempt to find a way out of the trap in which modern society finds itself, through a kind of “technological socialism.”

Translated from Russian by Susan Welsh

Transcript

Originally, when I was requested to make this presentation on Confucius in today’s China, I thought of it as a kind of break without coffee, among so many difficult issues regarding the geopolitical crisis, financial crisis, and so on. But now, I find it’s almost a Mission Impossible, because for me, even as a Chinese person, it’s too difficult to make clear Confucius’s role in today’s China, in just a few minutes.

There are two key points. First, who is Confucius, and what is Confucianism? And then, what is the problem of today’s China?

I will try. Firstly, I think Confucius is only publicized a little bit in Europe, compared with other Chinese thinkers, such as Lao-Tze. I think for most German people, you prefer Lao-Tze to Confucius, because some German philosophers point out that Lao-Tze’s theory is that more of a philosopher, especially from the perspective of German thinking.

But I would like to say that, compared with Lao-Tze, Confucius is an ancient Chinese thinker with more theory, more thinking about law for the human being. How should we live and work? I think it’s very, very inspiring for our day, for our problems and the challenges, for the crisis we are facing, that Confucius have a very, very high reputation now in the world. In 1988, more than 35 Nobel Prize winners called for humanity to learn something more from Confucius’s wisdom, for the survival of mankind. ((For an in-depth discussion of Confucius and Confucianism in China, see Michael O. Billington, “The Deconstructionist Assault on China’s Cultural Optimism,” Fidelio, Fall 1997.))

And also, as the American philosopher Mr. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson said, Confucius should be regarded as a glory for all nations in the world.

Here I need to quote a sentence from a German philosopher, [Karl] Jaspers. In his book The Origin and Goal of History, he coined the term Axial Age — which means that there was a time [800 to 200 B.C.] when some very great, wise men were found in both the East and the West. In China, there was Confucius; in Europe, Aristotle and Plato; in India, there was Buddha. So, Confucius has a very high reputation in China, and in the world at large.

As some Chinese have described the law of Confucius in the history of China, if Confucius had not been born, mankind would have had to grope in the night. And also now, Confucius is estimated as one of the greatest thinkers, educators, politicians, and moralists in China and the world. His contribution also laid the basis for the Chinese political, philosophical, educational, and ethical system.

Confucius was born more than 2,500 years ago. Of course, his thought was inherited by other Chinese thinkers, and also ordinary Chinese people. So now we call this kind of theoretical system Confucianism. Among the people who inherited from Confucius, as we know, are Mencius, Xunzi, and Zhu Xi, and so on. In different historical periods of China, they developed Confucius’s theories.

The Pillars of Confucianism

In the very comprehensive system of his theories, I just want to take what I think are some of the main points. The core value of Confucianism is, firstly, the spirit of rationalism. What is the meaning of rationalism for Confucius? He believed that mankind’s existence has its evolution guided by laws, not by natural laws, but by human beings’ laws. And secondly, he thought that everybody, all people, should be educated to be a gentleman — but of course maybe you settle for the British Queen!

And secondly, he had a very obvious dialectical methodology. He believed that there is a transition or conversion between being good and bad, between gain and loss, so that maybe the biggest treasure for life, for mankind, is balance. We need to make clear what are two extremes; for example, what’s the left and the right? What’s the best and the worst? And then we need to keep to the middle way.

Third is his pragmatic activism. When we talk about the Chinese people’s behavior, I think “pragmatic” is one of the most useful words of all to describe them. It’s certainly from the very deep influence of Confucianism. As we know, Confucius didn’t produce any books, articles, or papers. We can know what he thought only from some notes left by his students. And throughout his life, he just did one thing: He traveled to different countries. Of course, at that time China was not a unified country as it is today. There were many small countries, as in today’s Europe. For the purpose of proselytizing his political ideal, Confucius and his students traveled to different countries, to promote his theories, to persuade the kings to do something better for the people.

But, in the end, he failed. Almost nobody understood and accepted what he was thinking, what he was doing.

Finally, I think the most important characteristic of the Confucian idea is humanism. There are very remarkable words by Confucius: Whether a law or theory is useful or not, depends on whether it is useful for the people. Otherwise, it’s nonsense. I think that’s a very remarkable reflection of this humanism of Confucianism.

Confucius asked for politicians or kings at that time to practice a kind of ren, which means benevolent governance. Because it’s a Chinese word, it’s a little bit difficult to translate into English or some other language, but now we can find a very comprehensive explanation in English of this word: It means benevolent politics, and it also means humanity. Because it was not so clear a concept, his students kept asking the exact meaning of this word. Finally Confucius said, “What’s ren anyway? What’s benevolence? It’s loving somebody else.” So, we can find some similarity between Confucius and the Christian.

Confucianism and the West

Now, I will try to make the main point as quickly as I can.

After 2,500 years, we need to be concerned about the fate of Confucianism in China. I think that in what we call the modern China period, there is some kind of a clash between Confucianism and some other theories, or laws.

In the 18th Century, especially when the European countries expanded into Asia, I call it the first meeting between Confucianism and capitalism from Europe. Because China was defeated by the European countries, and became part of the colonial system of some European countries. At that time, the traditional Chinese intellectual felt more and more disappointed with Confucianism, because they thought, no matter how good it is, it did not help the Chinese people to avoid this destiny, of being conquered like that.

Then there is what happened in the 1960s and the 1970s — the Cultural Revolution. It was the aim of this revolution, as was said at that time, “to break down Confucianism.” That was another tragedy for Confucianism in China.

The third period was after China “opened up,” implemented the reform policy: We called it a “modernization period,” when the market economy was introduced into China. The traditional mindset, the traditional lifestyle of the Chinese people, has been challenged by this very different style of life, style of thinking. These challenges to China are still going on.

That’s the reason we are talking about Confucianism and Confucius today. Frankly speaking, because of the very fast economic growth in the past 30 years, China now faces some huge problems, some big challenges. We have to pay the price for this high-speed economic growth.

Now the problem is that the traditional social structure was broken up by some political movements, and the economic growth was too fast. People felt uneasy about everything, and as a result, the traditional moral system in China needed to be reconstructed.

The bad thing now, in Chinese society, is that most people live only for making money as quickly as possible. I felt a little bit ashamed, as a Chinese person, to hear some days ago, that in the last year, China overtook the United States to become number one in the world as a buyer of luxury goods! Okay, the Chinese people become richer and richer. But the problem is, it is just a few people; according to the per-capita income, China is still a poor country. It could not be acceptable that in a poor country, only a few people have such big purchasing power.

I think that this whole problem is because the government missed some opportunities for rebalancing economic laws and social justice. With the opportunity of upgrading manufacturing and infrastructure, most of the time, the policymakers in the government were driven by an economic bubble, for example, the real estate bubble. So now, China has to pay the price for these mistakes. Now China has to adjust its economic model, and to slow down its economic growth.

I think, especially under the impact of the American crisis and the euro crisis, this is maybe a last chance for the Chinese government, and for the Chinese people, to rethink the gains and losses of the last 30 years. The government has to do something more with some new ideas, to have some new model of development.

The goals of the government are clear enough. They want to upgrade manufactures, and invest more into the real economy, not this financial or real estate market. And also they are trying to follow up the thinking of Mr. LaRouche, to develop the national economy, not driven by the foreign stock markets. Some days ago, I heard that Chinese foreign currency reserves have reached US$3.53 trillion — almost the same amount as the German GDP! I don’t think that’s good news. I think that there is very great pressure on the Chinese government to keep a balance, because now there are more and more complaints from average Chinese people: How could you give so much money to Wall Street, or some other speculative market? Why don’t you give that to the Chinese people? Because you are the Chinese government!

We should go back to the way of thinking, the life-style, of Confucius and Confucianism. Even after 2,500 years, I think all of these theories, these thoughts, are still very useful, very instructive for the Chinese people — and maybe not only for the Chinese people, but also for people from other countries. Because Confucianism means that for everybody, for every part of society, for every organization in a society, we should make clear what our mission is, our position, and our joint efforts for the same goal.

So I think that now, especially for Chinese society, we need to do something more to get to a new consensus among the government, the people, and businessmen — everybody — to reach the same goal. And not only the Chinese people, but all mankind, human beings, do have the same goal. We need to reach a consensus between China and Europe, between China and Russia, between China and some other parts of the world.

I think that maybe in the future, Confucianism will meet with Goethe and Schiller, because I think that in China, Confucianism should be regarded as the Classical face for all of Chinese culture.

So I imagine that once, between China and Europe, we have more and more communication, especially cultural communication, we can have more and more mutual understanding. Maybe we can find from each other, more and more solutions for our own problems, and for each other. I think it looks good; but what we need to do is start right now!

Some days ago I joined a meeting in Brussels, between an NGO delegation from China and the European Union Economic and Social Committee. We talked about the issue of intercultural exchange. And we recognized some principles: We need to recognize diversity and the differences between us, before we start to find more common ground. It’s my wish — I hope that it’s also your hope — that we can try to do more, for the last chance for mankind.

LaRouche: A Confucian Mentor

Finally, I will express my tribute, as a Chinese scholar, to Mr. LaRouche and his wife. I know that the relations between Mr. LaRouche and his wife, and China, track back to 20 years ago, when a very popular Chinese journal published an article by Mr. LaRouche. In that article, Mr. LaRouche predicted that China needed to do something more at that time; otherwise the Chinese wealth would transfer from the mainland rural area to the coastal area, and then be exported to other countries. And Mr. LaRouche also reminded us that there was very bad thinking in China at that time: that we need to make money, as quickly as possible. He said that would be dangerous to the moral system of China, and it would be dangerous, harmful for those people, those elites, who can decide what’s the right direction for China as a big country.

So, Mr. LaRouche suggested that what China needed to do was to go back to a Classical, national economic principle, because that is the basis for all of these Western big powers’ rise in history. And ten years ago, one of my friends, Mr. Ding, conducted an interview with Mr. LaRouche, and he told me that he very, very much admired Mr. LaRouche, because he’s almost a legend, as a person who lived in the United States, in a Western country, but he has this kind of encouragement, wanting to reshape Western civilization.

Time is flying, and also for the Chinese people. We have always respected those people who believe that they practice life for one goal, as a Confucianist. So, finally, please permit me to call Mr. LaRouche a Confucian mentor.

Thank you.

Transcript

Dear friends, distinguished guests:

Let’s consider what I’m going to say now, as an attempt to reflect upon the process of what happened yesterday [the first day of the conference — ed.], and is going to unfold today.

First, everything can change overnight. Ours are times when everything can change overnight. Either we commit ourselves to that change for the better, locate our identity in the future, and fight to become its cause, or we are finished as a human culture. There is no third way, because the present world system is a living dead. The consequence of its submission to the British imperial monetarist law is trumpeted, as Lyn said yesterday, at the highest level of the British system: a reduction of human population from the present 7 billion people to slightly more than 1 billion, or even less.

It means a policy of mass killings, either by an organized extinction or by a thermonuclear war. The conditions to produce the foodstuffs required by even our present population, not to speak of the more than 9 billion human beings allegedly expected for 2050 — these conditions are not met. The conditions for energy production are not met. The conditions for scientific discoveries and technological improvements are not met.

The conclusion is tragically obvious. Nobody who is informed could say they did not know where the present policies lead. It is like at the Nuremberg Tribunal: “knew or should have known,” and there is no excuse. However, the European heads of states are behaving like servants of the time bomb: They react with sophisms, compromises with the murderous conditions created in Greece, in Cyprus, in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and, soon to be, France and Germany. Their policies spread murder because their minds are occupied by a culture of death.

Look at the spread of tuberculosis and malaria in Greece; look at the Greek kids, as it was said yesterday, scrambling into garbage cans; and this past Winter, adults cutting trees in private gardens, in public parks, along the streets, to get wood to avoid freezing. Look at the masses of Spanish people thrown out of their homes, people dying because there is no medicine in Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, and Spain. And look, also, at the increase of the rates of suicides, not only there, but in Italy and in France. There are presently French workers setting fire to themselves, not only unemployed, but also those broken down by unbearable working conditions. It is not only in some remote country, it is coming to us, us as a whole, here and now. Even to Germany, which remains a safe haven only in the desperate illusions of the humble and offended from the South.

The Future Is in Eurasian Cooperation

If we would take such conditions as a reference point, the future of Europe in Eurasian cooperation would be nothing but the transmission of a venereal disease. This is the immediate reason why a paradigm change is not only necessary but mandatory. The future of Europe is in Eurasian cooperation, provided we change our way of thinking and acting. To think about it as some economic decision within the present system would be not only dishonest, but idiotic.

The truth is, first, that there could be no European recovery, without the development of the Mediterranean and Africa, and there could not be that development without the development of Eurasia as a whole. And there could not be, in turn, the development of Eurasia without the development of a World Land-Bridge. It is not a question of interlinked logics, it’s a question of political necessity.

Our enemy is operating on a world scale; we also have to operate on a world scale, from the top down. There could not be today a solution for a partial cause, without rising to the cause of all the causes. In other words, for a European future in Eurasian cooperation, we have to make the change at the top, which means at the level of the United States. At present, both the United States and Europe are occupied countries, on a trans-Atlantic scale, and the fight to free ourselves from the shackles of that occupation should be, and has to be, trans-Atlantic. There is absolutely no way that Europe or any European country can “fara da se,” do it by itself. It cannot be.

This doesn’t mean that the European countries should wait to be freed by an uprising in the United States. It means that we have to think of ourselves, human individuals, as a link between Eurasia and the United States, to help that uprising in the United States to happen as soon as possible. This is the starting point for the future of Europe in Eurasia, which necessarily lies in the United States.

The second truth is that we have to identify the true nature of the enemy: the British Empire. It is not “British” as a matter of nationality; it is British as a matter of empire, the empire of the “animal kingdom,” as Lyndon LaRouche puts it. It treats human beings like beasts, and promotes for that cause, the worst drug in human beings, the drug of money and gambling. It imprisons them within the empire of money and the compulsion to gamble, to be fascinated in a morbid game, to come out on top at the expense of all others — the exact opposite of the “advantage of the other,” which was the basis for the creation of the nation-state at the Peace of Westphalia. This empire is organized both to destroy the individual sovereignty of human beings, and the sovereignty of nation-states.

We are now at its end phase. After the murders of the Kennedy brothers and of Martin Luther King, it spread, to unprecedented amounts in world history, both fictitious capital and fictitious pseudo-goods. By pseudo-goods, I mean goods produced for an early collapse, to compel people to buy again to replace them, thanks to credit made available by the banks, without any real technological development for the economy in the process.

Now we have reached a point at which the pyramids of debts and credit can only be maintained by hyperinflation — the bail-out — and the looting of people’s assets — the bail-in, seizing the deposits in the banks.

This is no longer capitalism, because the respect for private property is thrown to the wolves. It’s no longer capitalism, not even financial capitalism, because the system continues to buy people with cheap credit and cheap goods. It has become a financial fascism based on the looting of all, except those protected by an electrified financial and law-enforcement ring-fence. And that’s what the British oligarchy is promoting now, right under our noses.

The Crucial Role of the United States

It is on the basis of fighting against this enemy, which is nothing more than the modern version of the old Roman Empire, that the common future of Europe and Eurasia is located. The crucial role of the United States lies not only — as people sometimes mistakenly believe in Europe — in its physical power, but on the power of its Constitution — what LaRouche stressed yesterday — its Hamiltonian Constitution, explicitly based against the British Empire, the oligarchic system of predators.

It is based on the fact that the existence of the human species lies outside the bounds of life defined by the animal kingdom. Therefore, the American Constitution is based on the future conditions to be created for the common good of all, and not on an extrapolation or deduction of given present conditions. It is a “bet on the future,” not a bet on futures’ prices in some financial market. This requires the existence of a national banking entity which will secure public credit to build that future, reimbursed by the pay-back of the development created by the related investments. This is, in simple terms, the principle of a Hamiltonian economic principle, as a law of the American Constitution, issuance of credit for the capacity of human beings to create in the physical universe, and not to bet on markets.

The starting point, again, is what LaRouche defines as the foremost distinction of human life from all other forms of life, the human species’ power to effect willful increase in the quality of its energy-flux densities, which, in the case of the human species, is the systematically functional distinction of the qualitative leaps upwards, into willfully chosen higher orders of magnitude of energy-flux density.

This is the very important issue of “progress,” which is not an indefinite extension of what already exists. It is not basically quantitative, but it is to create the conditions for those qualitative leaps toward the future. Not pseudo-goods at a relatively fixed stage of technology, and traded with funny money, but a set of new products based on the application of new scientific principles. And that is precisely what the oligarchy of the Empire wants to prevent at any cost, because it raises the question of the necessity of human freedom to create. Without human freedom, there is no creation. The oligarchy wants to manage a fixed universe, in space and time, and when the conditions of the fixity of its power, the conditions of its control, are not met, it destroys, more and more like the Roman Empire of yesterday, and the British Empire of today. Money, then, which under normal conditions is an idiot, becomes a criminal.

That’s why, to be something useful for the future of Eurasia, our European countries and people have to understand the issue of change in the United States. This means the combined effect of the Glass-Steagall principle and a public-credit system — the explicit and implicit basis for the American Constitution that was applied in the United States under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and also in Europe for the reconstruction after World War II. Since the death of Roosevelt and the murder of John Kennedy, this principle of the Constitution has been betrayed in the United States and replaced by the British monetarist system.

In Europe, worse, our heads of state have become the lackeys of that British system and the enemies of their own states. To recover the Constitution in the United States, where this reference of principle does exist, is therefore, the issue for Europe and Eurasia.

First, Glass-Steagall

It means, first, Glass-Steagall, originating in America, in the United States, and then spread to the whole world as a global Glass-Steagall. It is not a mere separation of commercial banks and investment banks. It is an anti-monetarist principle — it is a principle — to stop the hyperinflationary looting: The banks that have bet on the markets will be left on their own, without bail-outs or bail-ins, and therefore, become officially bankrupt. They are already the living dead; Glass-Steagall will be their death certificate, and for all of us, the liberation from their murderous pollution — that’s the true pollution.

All the European heads of state may expect it, or some would expect it, but they have not the courage to face the British Empire, as exemplified by the fake banking reform in France. They are historically so much plunged into the system of the British Empire, that even those that are not outright accomplices are like rabbits caught by the lights of an oncoming truck: They are paralyzed by their fear. Therefore, our initial fight for the future of Europe in Eurasia is to push for the Glass-Steagall principle where we can win, in the United States, and then to adopt it in Europe as a rebirth of the post-World War II reconstruction, to be the basis of a common European/Eurasian recovery, from the Atlantic to the Sea of China.

This means to make known, and to spread the fight of the friends of Lyndon LaRouche, both in Europe and in Eurasia; that’s our task, to make the organizing known here. And that’s why they are here, why Diane Sare [see National] is here, among us today. Because we need them! We need them as an inspiring motion, an essential leverage, to give us the courage to free ourselves from what we have allowed ourselves to become.

Next, a Hamiltonian Credit System

The positive complement to Glass-Steagall is a public credit system: Once the grounds are cleaned up, or the Augean Stables are cleaned up, we need an engine to build our future. This is, again, the notion of Hamiltonian public credit, based on a national banking principle — not allowing the oligarchy to seize the state privilege to issue currency. The reimbursement of the credit is provided by the accomplishments that that credit has generated.

“The Kiedrich Resolution”

The following resolution was passed, unanimously, by the 350 participants in the Kiedrich, Germany conference of the Schiller Institute on September 16, 2007:

The central feature of the conference of the Schiller Institute in Kiedrich of mid-September focussed on the need to implement a just New World Economic Order in the near future. Given the advanced state of disintegration of the world financial system, it is urgent that the governments and the parliaments of the nations of this world put the question of the reconstruction of the physical economy on the agenda.

The conference on the building of a transport corridor between Siberia and Alaska through the Bering Strait, in April of this year in Moscow, highlighted one crucial project in what must become a global system of transport and development corridors, uniting the sovereign nation-states of this planet in a peaceful way. The new world economic order must focus on reconstructing the physical economy in order to provide the physical and economic means for all human beings alive today, and to overcome poverty in the shortest possible time.

The Eurasian Landbridge as the cornerstone for this new world economic order is a development perspective for the 21st Century and will end the period of barbarism, in which conflicts among peoples were carried out through war. The worldwide land-bridge therefore will establish a method of war avoidance through peaceful economic cooperation for the coming aims of mankind.

We, the participants of the conference, call on the governments of the world to adopt this program at the upcoming General Assembly of the United Nations.

Our publications have shown what could be done with it, even at the present level of technologies: the Eurasian Land-Bridge (Figure 1), an economic miracle for the Mediterranean region and Africa, a world New Deal as stated in our Kiedrich resolution of Sept. 16, 2007.

My purpose here is not to enter into the different aspects of those projects, but to show what we are missing by not launching them. At this point, what we are truly missing is the future of humanity. Indeed, the euro system prevents that creation of a credit system. It was created to prevent the creation of that system, and instead, to promote austerity for the people; meaning now, the policy of mass murder, and safe havens for the ring-fenced principalities and powers. That’s the main reason why the euro system has to be dumped — not as a single monetary issue, but as a monstrous system created to destroy the physical economy, an intrinsically evil system, not a honest failure, as Mr. [Bernd] Lucke may believe wrongly and stupidly. ((Bernd Lucke heads a new, fake “anti-euro” party, Alternative for Germany. When Lucke was recently in Paris, he said that the euro is made for the strong countries, and the weak countries of the South should return to national currencies.))

Our projects, in a word, mean instead, to open the gates of the global concentration camps that are now being established by the oligarchy of the British Empire and its allies. Look at Greece, Portugal, Spain; then look at our projects: It is the difference between life and death, not the difference between two available programs.

At this point in our present Europe, I meet a lot of people who say “Yes, yes, you are right, you are right, but it is not possible to go there.” “It is utopian. It is too beautiful to be true. It is too beautiful to be done.” This suicidal European pessimism is our worst enemy, and the best, induced weapon of the British oligarchy, at a moment of decision between self-destruction and a better future: the perfectibilitas humanitatis [perfectibility of humanity]. What is here now at stake, is the understanding and the capacity of the human mind to master and improve the future, and to rationally believe that an improvement is possible, and not only possible, but necessary.

Cusa: The Coincidence of Opposites

At this point, to give a sense of what Europe can bring to Eurasia as a gift to our common destiny, I am convinced that it is more than legitimate to bring in the example of somebody who fought in a similar moment of change like ours, between the Middle Ages and modern times: the man of the Renaissance after the Great Plague of the 14th Century and during the Hundred Years War of the 14th and 15th centuries, Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa. He is one of the greatest thinkers of human history, but do not imagine him settled in some monastery “thinking.” He was engaged in the public life of his times, and we don’t say it enough, many times at the risk of his life, and had to reform the religious organization in a region of Europe going from Switzerland to Hamburg, and from Louvain in Belgium to Magdeburg, a sizable portion of Eurasia. He was twice imprisoned in the fortress of Andratz and had to abandon everything he owned.

It is in 1438, when he was accompanying the theologians from Constantinople to the Council of Florence, that he conceived the concept at the center of all his theology and philosophy, the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. This concept is crucial for world history, and in particular, for our decisive moment here and now, as it was in Florence in 1439. Because it defines how, from above, from the top down, ideas or forces that seem and are in contradiction at a certain level, can coincide at a higher level, after a “leap” beyond any established conjunctions or disjunctions. These leaps correspond exactly to the qualitative leaps upwards that a public credit system has the mandate to promote, and, also, the basis for a dialogue of religions that Cusa later elaborated in his De Pace Fidei, as the common foretaste, the common pregustatio, of truth in its quest for unity, in Europe, Eurasia, today.

What is so revolutionary about it, is that the concept of coincidentia oppositorum, which locates truth in the motion to know, and to improve beyond the apparent circumstances, is in absolute opposition to the principle of non-contradiction of the then-prevalent Aristotelian cult! The principle of non-contradiction operates in a world of fixed formal logics, of controlled rituals, preventing the mind from reaching the level of intellectual imagination to discover new principles in the “splendor of truth.”

There you have it: The world of the oligarchy is the Aristotelian world of a finished, fixed nature, opposed to the discovery of new physical principles, and opposed to change. “It can’t be done. It is too beautiful to be true. It is not possible — it’s even impossible.” This is precisely the world of the European and trans-Atlantic oligarchy today, once again, and Cusa gives us the keys to get out of it.

In his time, after discussions with his friend Paolo Toscanelli, he conceived the solution as an escape from the grip of the European oligarchy in an outreach toward a new found land. This mission, conveyed to Columbus first, and to the Mayflower later, gave birth to the American principle of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the America of the Mathers, of Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, based on the rising of humanity through the transformation of man and nature for the common good, the General Welfare principle, and the service of future generations.

This is, beyond the population and the territory, America as a principle, a human creativity system: This is what it is. It doesn’t exist today in the present organization of the American Presidency, but it does exist as a principle there, and our task is to make it happen, and to organize its rebirth.

Our task today, is that this process of becoming, associated with the discovery and creation of the United States, continues with the development of Eurasia and beyond, with a space policy, beginning with a planetary defense. It is the condition for the human mind to maintain its integrity. “Daydreaming! Daydreaming!” we hear in Europe, some would say. And some would scream, from their position in the low, frozen valley of Aristotelianism, “It’s impossible! It’s impossible!” Their blindness mistakes daydreaming for an experiment in thinking, for a Gedankenexperiment. They have no sense of what it is.

Daydreaming? Well, the answer is that the same Cusa who elaborated these philosophical and theological conceptions, is the one who, in the fourth dialogue of his Idiota, De Staticis Experimentis [The Layman on Experiments Done with Weight-Scales], elaborated the principles of all modern mechanics and medicine, through his conception of knowing through weighing, the weight being the reflection of a higher reality: weighing of human weight, respiration, breath, and urine, according to age, to measure the overall physical condition through such reflections; and also, by the same token, conceiving in the same way, in the same trust, music, astronomical, and meteorological instruments, hygrometers, barometers, and also soundings.

The point, here, is that it was a philosopher who established a principle of a perfect balance capable of correcting the imperfection of the human senses; it is that philosopher, who laid out the basis of mechanical science, and not an Aristotelian obsessed by mechanical relations between objects!

Energy and Power

I want now to put it in another way, related to yesterday’s discussion on energy: It is to understand energy and power, as two opposed species. The Aristotelian, oligarchical concept is that of energy. It is linear. It takes into account the units produced, and then it takes their quantity and establishes it as addition of the units, independent of their creative process. It is meat for academic asses, a mathematical dead-end.

The anti-Aristotelian, Cusan, or Leibnizian conception is that of power. It measures the progression of flux density according to the process of production, corresponding to the level of the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer. It is not meat, it is matter for creative minds. It means the future, reached through progress — “progress, progress,” as LaRouche said yesterday. It means fusion power, and it means fusion as a way to Mars.

I must add that it is Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as an expert in the creative commitment of Cusa, who conceived the Eurasian Land-Bridge principle, and not an assembly of learned asses muzzled to the trough of their formal expertise, and satisfied with the fodder provided by the Academies. It was Helga.

Cusa himself makes a very interesting point in expressing his optimism about the human mind, in his Hunt for Wisdom, his second to last work: “Since I have now read in Diogenes Laertius’s book, On the Life of the Philosophers, about the various hunts for wisdom of the philosophers, I was impelled to devote my mind to this so-pleasing speculation, that which nothing more delightful can occur to a man.” And he concludes: “Therefore, I believe, I have unfolded the rough and not completely purified concept of my hunts, De venatione sapientiae, as far as it was possible to me, and now submit everything to him, who is better able to contemplate these lofty things.”

“Him?” Who is he? We! That is we! There we are — there we are, challenged to hunt for wisdom, challenged to progress, to improve, and make the impossible possible, which is the most joyful thing that can be accomplished, because it is the most human. Glass-Steagall, a public credit policy, the Eurasian and World Land-Bridges, an Earth defense policy — this should be the European philosophy, unfolding in the process of an active, compassionate hunting. It should be our common European/Eurasian philosophy to get humanity out of the pit.

As I said before, now everything can change overnight. And it depends upon us, that it is for the good, and not for what the British have prepared before us, a terrestrial Hell.

Thank you.

Transcript

As a director of the Ministry of Finance, I was in charge of liquidations of major financial institutions in Japan in 1997 and 1998, such as Yamaichi Securities, LTCB, and NCB. At that time, we succeeded in containing the gigantic scale of liquidations, and avoiding Japan becoming an epicenter of world economic crisis. During the weekend when we liquidated these institutions, we unwound all cross-border transactions, including huge amounts of derivatives. Such unwinding was not done by the authorities of the United States and the United Kingdom at the liquidation of Lehman Brothers, which triggered the world economic crisis.

Despite our success, however, we were heavily criticized by the national public and international opinion leaders, including [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers, those who are struggling now to deal with the crisis. As a result, we went through an investigation of public prosecutors, and I lost several friends who worked with me; some were arrested, and others committed suicide, as did board members of major financial institutions which were liquidated.

It is quite strange to see that those Japanese who worked to avoid the world economic crisis were punished, while nobody that was responsible [for the latest crisis], has been punished.

In the meantime, as a survivor of the crisis, it is easy for me [to see] what will happen next in the ongoing crisis: a déjà vu of ten years ago.

The Lehman Shock

Why are people in Europe suffering from economic crisis? The answer is simple. The bubble created, since the early 2000s, exploded with the Lehman shock. What is an economic bubble then? An economic bubble occurs when people dream that prosperity will last forever. In the case of Japan, people dreamed that prices of real estate and stocks would rise forever. What happened in the Western world? The crisis now was triggered by the completion of the abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. This policy change enabled investment banks to mobilize deposits collected by commercial banks as the source of their dealings; which sometimes could be called gambling.

It also set the stage whereby the loss incurred from dealings of investment banks could be covered by the injection of public money to save the financial system. The amount of dealings by investment banks, including derivative transactions, skyrocketed. False, virtual, and imaginary profits or commissions resulting from these dealings brought investment bankers extraordinary incomes and bonuses. Investment banks on Wall Street, such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan, and in the City of London, such as Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Lloyds, enjoyed an unprecedented level of profits. Some institutions outside the Anglo-Saxon countries, which were partly Americanized, such as Deutsche Bank and UBS, followed suit.

The other imaginary bonanza that was experienced in Europe during the same period should be called the EU membership bubble. Newcomers to the EU, and sometimes candidates for membership, enjoyed extraordinary capital inflows, which led to steep increases in wages and prices of real estate. The membership standards were sometimes maneuvered artificially, using derivatives proposed by investment banks.

These bubbles collapsed in 2008 with the liquidation of Lehman Brothers.

What Did They Learn?

In the U.S.A. and in Europe, they seem to have learned nothing from the crisis in the late 1990s—that is, how we should try to maintain confidence in the financial markets, and the difference between the regular kind of economic slowdown, and the crisis that was caused by the financial crash. Examples are abundant, starting with the crisis in Mexico in 1994, followed by the Asian crisis and the financial crisis in Japan, which happened while I was in charge.

As I have mentioned again and again, repeatedly, there are two steps countries must take to deal with an economic crash caused by a financial crash:

Firstly, countries must restore confidence in their financial system, and then, secondly, by way of fiscal stimulus, countries must revitalize the real economy. In order to restore confidence in the financial system, countries must create three kinds of safety nets:

1. Establish a mechanism to bail out financial institutions;
2. Establish a system by which you can log the non-performing loans; and,
3. Establish a system whereby you can guarantee interbank lending, by the government.

These safety nets were established in the trans-Atlantic region in October 2008, after the Lehman shock. But, then, the order of the actions taken to deal with these systems was completely wrong. Let me present you an ideal way that should have been done.

1. A rigid examination of balance sheets by public authorities, based upon mark-to-market accounting, would calculate an honest amount of non-performing loans.
2. Such a calculation must have disclosed an unprecedented amount of non-performing loans, because there were no quoted prices for securitized products after the Lehman shock.
3. Most of the major banks in the Western world, investment banks in particular, would become largely insolvent as a result.
4. The total amount of public injection required to bail out those banks must be calculated honestly, and be disclosed to the public. This process is essential to inform the market of the magnitude of the problem and, once the bailout is done, restore confidence by showing that all amounts of non-performing loans were covered by the injection of public money, and that surviving banks are clean.
5. Most of the investment banks must be liquidated, because the amount of public money required is beyond the level which can be covered.
6. Managers and board members of failing institutions that needed public money have to be prosecuted for their responsibility for making the use of taxpayers’ money indispensable to save the financial system.

In the case of the United States and the European countries, those kinds of very neutral, dependable financial examinations by the banking authorities have never been conducted. Instead, a fake examination, called a stress-test, was introduced to distract attention. Bankers have been window-dressing their balance sheets, which should have been condemned as insolvent long ago. Without that kind of transparency, it is impossible to persuade all the participants in the market that all the financial institutions’ balance sheets have been cleared.

Bad Advice

This is an anecdote: When we suffered from the financial crisis in Japan, we received much advice and preaching from prominent economists in the U.S.A., including Larry Summers. The advice can be summarized as follows:

1. Banks should be hard-landed, that is to say, should be liquidated.
2. Stick to mark-to-market accounting to calculate the amount of non-performing loans.
3. Do not stop short sales.
4. Do not bail out banks.

As you can easily recall, after the Lehman shocks, these recommendations were never observed by those who gave them.

If most of investment banks had been liquidated after the Lehman shock, European government bonds would have not been under the attack of short sales and credit default swaps by investment banks. It was those investment banks that attacked European government bonds, seeking high profits in the short run, in a desperate struggle to get out of insolvency. Such attacks brought about the tightening of budgets, despite the fact that, after the financial crisis, the government is required to put in a fiscal stimulus, because households and private corporations have to squeeze their balance sheets in order to repay their over-borrowing.

As mentioned above, however, activating such a fiscal stimulus was made difficult by the attack of the investment banks on government bonds. European authorities have not prosecuted the banks which caused this crisis, and gained the most. Instead, they have recommended the completely wrong policy of fiscal austerity, and put the burden on ordinary taxpayers. This is a ridiculous situation and, if such a stupid policy were to continue, Europe will have to suffer from two lost decades, I am afraid.

Cyprus: A Stupid, Crazy Policy

Taking this opportunity, I would like to comment on a stupid, crazy policy taken by the EU authorities regarding Cyprus. It is of the utmost importance to guarantee a certain level of deposits for all depositors in the country. So, in most countries now, we have a certain ceiling under which all deposits would be protected during any kind of financial crisis. But what happened in Cyprus was completely opposite to this policy. They have been trying to introduce a system whereby depositors are also asked to lose part of their deposits. This will completely destroy confidence in the financial system, and thereby aggravate the financial crisis.

So, I can’t understand why people in Brussels should use this kind of stupid policy, which in everybody’s eyes, at a glance, is a completely wrong policy for maintaining the confidence in the financial system.

Let me elaborate why. As you know, a bank can operate as long as it maintains 10% of its total assets as equity. The essence of the banking business is this creation of confidence. Take an example whereby a bank has total assets of 100 million. It does not need to keep 100 million available for payment, because, as long as confidence in the system is sustained, depositors would not demand their deposits back in an instant. The difference between the 100 million and the requirement of 10 million can be used as the source of lending, in addition to the equity held by the bank.

The policy taken by the EU completely destroys such confidence. It violates the basic notion of how a bank can exist and operate. I hope that this kind of policy, which has been advised by Brussels, will be reversed as soon as possible, because this will have tremendous contagion effects for the other countries in question.

It is of vital need now, that the Glass-Steagall Act be reinstated and investment banks be liquidated as soon as possible to save Europe. This is a war against filthy bankers who gained a lot of money from gambling, and let taxpayers pay for their losses, while they avoided paying taxes, using tax havens, and against the financial authorities who are their allies. This is a war for diligent workers who work hard, save small amounts of money in deposits in commercial banks, and honestly pay their taxes.

That’s my view. Thank you.

Transcript

I would like to start with the greetings from Congressman Walter Jones, which I think is very important, because Walter Jones is a Republican Congressman. He is an important figure on two bills in the Congress: One is that he was the first Republican co-sponsor of Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s bill to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. He also introduced HCR 3, a bill which says that a President who goes to war without consent of the Congress has committed an impeachable offense.

And what I hope to make clear in my presentation, as Mr. LaRouche has said, is that the fight for Glass-Steagall—and as my fellow panelists have said—is an absolute war, and one aspect of the war is the necessary removal of Obama from office, since he is functioning as the tool of the Queen to block all of this.

So, we’ll start with the greetings from Congressman Jones [click to view].

What I wanted to do, is to give you a picture, because I think it’s hard to grasp the nature of the battle, if you start simply from right now, and don’t look at a little bit [of the history] of this fight. And Helga brought up yesterday the forecast that Lyn made July 25, 2007, when he said that this is not a mortgage crisis; that this is the end; it’s over, it’s finished.

So, he made a very shocking forecast. And then he wrote the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, and we mobilized across the country. In the state of Pennsylvania, dozens of city councils passed resolutions in support of this. We had maybe seven states, or so, that passed resolutions in their legislatures. We were not able to get it introduced into the Congress because of pressure, explicitly from George Soros, Felix Rohatyn, and others, as Helga mentioned.

But I think, after that, the really big and really ugly shift was the election of President Barack Obama. And Lyn has referenced repeatedly, this question of the poison of the party system in the United States. What happened was, Obama came in, and first, of course, we wanted to hope that maybe there was something that could be done. Maybe some of the people from the Clinton Administration could be prevailed upon, such that the guy wouldn’t be as horrible as we knew his profile had him likely to be.

Off to London To Visit the Queen

But by April of 2009, after Obama’s first two foreign visits—and I don’t know if people remember where they were: The first one was to London, to visit the Queen! And Michelle Obama had the famous incident where she touched the Queen, but it was okay, because the Queen loves the Obamas, so nothing bad happened.

And then his second visit was to Saudi Arabia [June 2009].

So immediately, he was paying homage to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Lyn made a forecast in April of 2009, saying that this guy was a malignant narcissist, a failed personality, like Nero or Hitler, and shortly thereafter, Obama began to ram through his health-care bill, which I know was promoted in the European press as being some kind of European-style health care. It was actually a Hitlerian scheme to get rid of the useless eaters by turning the entire health-care system over to the private insurance companies, and then setting up boards of statisticians to determine whether it was too expensive, statistically, to keep you alive, and to give you medical care. And the bill itself called for $750 billion in cuts from Medicare, for the private insurance.

So, we began the campaign with the Hitler mustache.

Now, what happened at this point, is that all of these people who had worked with us on the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, to maintain party loyalty, disappeared. They ran under the bed, they hid under their desks, they slammed their doors, they said, “Never call me again. Don’t meet with me again. I can’t believe you’re saying this—you’re over the top, you’re over the top.”

Then what happened? Well, we had this genocidal health-care bill. Then Obama did the “humanitarian mission”—you might remember the humanitarian mission, where we bombed Libya for 250 days, without Obama ever going to the Congress for consent, but it was “humanitarian.” And it wasn’t a war—and I was told this by one of the people I ran against in the Democratic primary, a Marine—the reason that this was not a war was because no Americans were killed. So, if we were just killing other people, this did not qualify as military action.

And then, of course, we found out since, that there were American boots on the ground, and the whole thing was a lie, not surprisingly. And then Obama had Qaddafi killed, while he was in custody.

Then, later, as Congressman Jones referenced, around the Benghazi question, you had the peculiar case of our U.S. Ambassador repeatedly requesting security. We get an attack on our consulate, and Obama gets a briefing for 15 minutes, and then goes to bed, and sleeps for 8 hours, while four Americans are killed, because he has to prepare to do a fundraiser in Las Vegas the next day, which obviously was much more important to him than dealing with this emergency.

Now, while Obama was presiding over all of these wonderful things, and as each one of these developments occurred, some of the people who had scurried away because of the mustache, would begin to come out from under their beds, and out from behind their desks. And it was beginning to dawn on them that perhaps Mr. LaRouche had not been “over the top” in his comments about the malignant evil nature of this Presidency, this puppet of the Queen, who wants to depopulate the planet.

Glass-Steagall Introduced

While all this was going on, what else was going on was Quantitative Easing. Quantitative Easing, number one, number two, number three, number four—I’m not sure what number we’re up to now. And whereas, when Obama had come in, we had under George W. Bush, and Paulson, the beginning of the bailout, the $700 billion TARP, by the end of Obama’s first term, the amount of money in all of these various bailouts was something around $29trillion.

So, there was a fight for Glass-Steagall. There was a bipartisan attempt from Senators Maria Cantwell, a Democrat, John McCain, a Republican, to add it as an amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which I find humorous, because it basically would have nullified all of the garbage in the Dodd-Frank bill, and we would have had the votes to pass it, but Obama, Rep. Barney Frank, and others went on a war to stop it.

Then we got a bill introduced in the Congress by Marcy Kaptur—Walter Jones was a co-sponsor—and over this period of a couple of years, we got about 84 co-sponsors.

Now, what’s happening is a revolutionary shift in the United States. It is a result of the fact that the population is not suicidal, and over the years, LaRouche and our organization, for decades, have been providing a certain quality of leadership which people can see is right. And when people sign on to Glass-Steagall, it is not because they are not aware that we have six-foot tall posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache in front of their offices. They are very aware of this. It’s a topic of discussion, and they are deciding to sign on.

What has happened to push this along—people have heard of the sequestration. You may remember Standard & Poors and Moody’s decided to downgrade the U.S. debt; we had to cut $4.1, 4.2 trillion out of the budget. This is Obama’s policy. In the last week, what’s been effected, is a loss of 750,000 jobs. Medicare is no longer being accepted by many doctors, because Medicare is not in some cases reimbursing the doctors and the hospitals. So, many senior citizens, people with serious illnesses, including cancer, are being turned away, not being treated, and we are picking this up all the time in our organizing. Our own supporters are telling us horror stories of their family members going to get their regular chemotherapy, and being told, “We’re sorry, this is no longer covered. If you want the treatment, put it on your credit card.”

There was a cancer treatment facility in New York City which had 16,000 patients receiving chemotherapy; they just had to tell 5,000 of them, “We will not treat you anymore.” They also are starting a new policy—or an old policy—of debtors’ prisons; now the collection agencies are coming after the people, and if you can’t pay the fines, you can go to jail.

So, what’s happened is that this crisis, and the fact that we have been present with the solutions over decades, have created a momentum where there’s now a fight. As Congressman Jones says, we’re up to 53 sponsors of the Glass-Steagall bill in the House. We are going to have a spectacular war to get it introduced into the Senate. We have had it introduced in 15 states. As Walter Jones said, North Carolina is the latest of the 15, and the two that have passed it, are the states of Maine and South Dakota.

And in the state of Maine, it passed in the House and in the Senate unanimously. And then, the legislator who was moving it knows we have to get the U.S. Senate to do this, so he wrote a very sharp press release about this, targeting Angus King, who is the newly elected Independent Senator from Maine, who made a big stink about the financial blowout. He was very aggressively calling for Glass-Steagall all the way up until he was put in the Senate—and now he’s been silent. So, the Maine state legislature is using the fact that they passed this, to target him.

The other state where it passed is South Dakota, and that’s the legislator we’re going to hear from now. You should know it passed in the House by a vote of 67-2, and we [LaRouchePAC] do not even have an office in that state, as we don’t in Maine. This was done by a group of longtime LaRouche activists and supporters, who are largely farmers. This is from [South Dakota State Rep.] Patty Miller [see below].

She was motivated enough that she went to Minnesota to help us get it introduced there as well. We have another state legislator, Tom Jackson [from Alabama], who came to our Schiller Institute conference in Virginia [March 23], who not only met with members of Congress, but when he got back, he got on the phone to organize other legislators.

So what you have in this fight now, is the quality of passion, because it’s clear that we don’t have forever. We have days, weeks. I think what Jacques [Cheminade] said at the beginning [see his speech elsewhere in this issue]—it’s a moment where things can change overnight, and the world is a different place—is the way that we have to act.

A Shift in the Population

I want to give you a sense, a few of the details of the various interventions we’ve been making, to give you a sense of the qualitative shift in the American population, which is driving the shift in the legislatures, and the Congress—and hopefully, soon, the Senate.

Sen. Ron Wyden was the one Democrat who joined Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster, when he was demanding an answer to the question of whether Obama thought it was constitutionally legal to kill Americans with drones in the United States, without due process. And you might wonder—it took the Administration six weeks, and a filibuster, to answer that question. So, Ron Wyden, you would think, has some guts. He joined the filibuster as a Democrat—he broke party ranks.

So, what happened was, he was having a town hall meeting in Oregon, and it was a couple hundred people, and 200 more high school students. And we had organizers—Dave Christie, one of my fellow candidates, was present, and someone on the phone in Seattle just got a list of everyone whom we’d met in the street in that area of Oregon, to see if we could find some other people who would go to this meeting. So, just on the spur of the moment, we got two people who said, “Yes, I’m going to go to this meeting.” And both of them went, and what happened was, it was clear, to get your question asked, it was a lottery. You might have a chance of 1 in 400 that your question would be picked. And this was too much for the activist.

So, here’s a guy who had only met us once, and he decides to take matters into his own hands. So, when Wyden gets to the end of his speech, the guy jumps out of his seat and says, “Wait a minute! I want to know. You supported Dodd-Frank. You didn’t support Glass-Steagall. Do you know that Dodd-Frank says they can steal our money like they did in Cyprus? Do you support them stealing our money?”

At that point, Dave Christie gave a very cogent briefing on Glass-Steagall, and so on. Then, of course, the security guards would not allow Dave to get anywhere near the Senator at the end, to give him the literature, but that worked out okay, because the other supporter, who had been called that day, had the sense to run up and get in line to talk to Senator Wyden personally.

So, what you have is a degree of self-activation, where people don’t have to be told in detail what to do.

We have a similar situation right now in the state of Connecticut, because a supporter, an inventor, who met us in the street, came to a couple of meetings. Then he came to my campaign-launching meeting where we had all this music at the beginning, and he said, “You know, I am in heaven. This is the organization I’ve been looking for for my entire life.”

He went back to Connecticut, and decided he was going to organize a town hall meeting. And he worked his butt off going to, I don’t know, 150 family members and friends; and he said to us, “God, you guys do a lot of work. I had no idea it was this hard.” So, we helped him, and we organized a very good town hall meeting, and there were other people there who had met us recently in the field. They have now become a core force to organize the state of Connecticut.

This slimy little Congressman Jim Himes was speaking [at his town meeting] and slithering around about why we don’t need Glass-Steagall. There were eight of these people, plus my husband [Chris Sare] and another organizer at this meeting, who were able to keep hammering him on the question of Dodd-Frank, and Glass-Steagall, and he said, “Well, we’re doing something now about Too Big To Fail. We’re going to break up the banks.” And then Chris, who was in the back, yelled, “It’s not about size, it’s about function.” And then the whole audience applauded.

And then, the local newspaper coverage of the town hall meeting with this slimy little Congressman was all about Glass-Steagall. The press coverage was, well, the whole town hall meeting was about Glass-Steagall. So, that didn’t work so well for him.

A Different Dynamic

We have an activists’ phone call every Thursday night, across the continent. And this is because there are so many areas where we don’t have full-time offices, but we have people who want to be active. And this call is growing and growing—it’s gotten to be over 200 people. We had to get a new conference system, so we can hold now at least 1,000.

So, right after this Cyprus situation broke, we decided we had to have an emergency conference call. And the e-mails started going out to all these different places. And 500 people tried to get on the conference call. Unfortunately, the system has this really obnoxious beep when each person got on, so when Paul Gallagher was trying to give the briefing, all these beeps were going—so we had to cut it at about 340. But you can see the potential for just the explosion of activism.

Also, on the shift with Obama, an African-American Congresswoman, Karen Bass, in California, was holding a town hall meeting, and when the question of Glass-Steagall came up, and the sequestration, she was forced to say, “Look, this is the policy of Obama. This is Obama’s policy.”

So you’re getting a shift from these people. We sent a team to deploy at Wall Street, in Manhattan, which is typically already a somewhat difficult site. Last week, an organizing team raised $700 at Wall Street, and they said that it was extremely polarized: that the bad people were really bad, and really nasty, and that organizers would get invigorated from yelling at them. And the good people were very good, and really wanted to fight.

And we deployed in midtown Manhattan, and a person who worked at Citibank came running down from the bank with a copy of large internal Citibank report, which was still warm from the xerox, because he wanted us to have the secret information about what the Citibank policy is for this crisis.

So, this is a really different dynamic.

Confronting Pelosi

I got a report last night from the Democratic Convention in California, where we have organizers. Mr. LaRouche had made the point that the political parties have so disintegrated, they’ve so destroyed themselves with this stupid re-election of Obama, that they don’t have a quorum to kick us out any more. So, at the Democratic Convention, we had a meeting with Nancy Pelosi, and the entire discussion that Pelosi wanted to have, was on the subject of gay marriage. So, one of our organizers asked: “Why are we discussing this? They’re cutting Social Security; they’re cutting Medicare. We’re all going to be dead. Can we talk about something real?” The entire room burst into applause, and people came running after her afterwards, to videotape interviews with her to put her on their Facebook pages, saying this.

Then, in the Labor Caucus, Michael Steger, another member of the LaRouche Policy Committee, was invited to speak on Glass-Steagall. And then we got a report that in the senior citizens’ meeting, someone who was not with us said, “How come we’re not here to talk about the impeachment of Obama? He’s cutting Social Security. He’s going to kill us.”

So, these are just a few snapshots of the changed dynamics. But I think it is why Lyn said during a recent policy discussion, not that we have won, but that we could win. We have a lot of work to do, but we could win. The fight in the U.S. right now is that we have to build up critical mass to break up this ugly logjam in the Senate. And the key to that, I think, is to get these Senators to stop being afraid of Satan, and to fear God.

Transcript

Thank you for all appearing today.

I want first to alert you all, as to why there might be some suspicions about my credulity. First, you need to know, I have no TV set; I don’t go on Facebook or Twitter; I, in fact, read hard books, not off of Kindle, things like Plutarch’s Lives in the real, hard volume. I never watched, or were concerned with American Idol or who wins the Super Bowl. I concern myself with the moral barometer of myself in the world. So you just need to know those kinds of background understandings.

The second observation I’d like to make is, today isn’t the first time where mankind has given concern to the dangers from outer space, and what it could harbor. There’s a tale told about Pope Calixtus III [r. 1455-58]—it may have been apocryphal—but, the Christians were battling the Ottoman Turks in Serbia and elsewhere. The Pope excommunicated Halley’s Comet: He thought it was a bad omen for the outcome [of the war]. It didn’t seem to affect the clash, and indeed, Oliver Cromwell took that to heart at the Battle of Marston Moor [1644] in the English Civil War. He instructed his troops, “Pray to God, but keep the powder dry.” Still, very Earthbound.

Now, I want to discuss what I consider is necessary to make civilization worth preserving; because we have to ask, well, there have been many other species that have gone extinct as well, and we don’t necessarily mourn over the dinosaurs, for the lack of Tyrannosaurus Rex. So, we want to make certain that our species is worth preserving, before we decide to deflect all the dangers from outer space.

A ‘Civilization Genome Project’

So I’ve decided to undertake what I call the “Civilization Genome Project.” It’s different than the Human Genome Project, because it focuses on what we need, collectively, as humans, in organizing government and developing a political and social culture that’s worthy of survival; that raises us above an animal-like existence, whose preoccupation is with money, power, sex, and creature comforts; domination for the sake of domination. That’s the animal-like existence that we, as humans, need to repudiate.

And I’ve attempted to make a sketch of what I describe as the “Misery Index of the World,” and to ascribe what proportion is human beings killing, oppressing, persecuting other human beings, and what proportion is from tsunamis, natural disasters; well over 95% is human beings murdering, oppressing, dominating other human beings for reasons of bigotry, control, and other very pernicious motives. And if we want to make the life of society of the world better, we need to focus in the short run, on stopping human beings from creating misery for others. And this is not just tens of thousands; this is billions. If you think of the oppression, killing of people because of gender; they can’t go to school; they’re killed because of their racial, or religious, or national, or ethnic affiliations—very, very bigoted and morally contemptible motivations.

Now, when we think about the bedrock, the Genome Project for government, the first principle that we have to accept, which has been repudiated for most, if not all of mankind, is the understanding that the final end of the state, is to make men and women free to develop their faculties and be morally accountable for their trajectories and destinies. That is the final end of the state. It’s not to have a level of health insurance, or GNP, or unemployment; it’s not to dominate others and be number one or number two in the world, where nations line up like football teams, who get rankings every week.

But that is the final end of the state: It is promoting individual challenge, strength, and happiness through their own ways. That is success. Success is not being able to tell other countries what to do. Success is not attempting to cram what you think virtue is, down the throat of somebody else. Success is giving every individual a fair opportunity to succeed in their individual ambitions. Say, that’s the number-one precept that needs to be inculcated amongst every single government of the world! And that would reduce the Human Misery Index, many-fold overnight.

Checks and Balances

Now, the second fundamental genome principle of civilization, is in the organization of government, recognizing that, because men are not angels, we must separate or fragment power, so no one faction can tyrannize over another. It’s what our Founding Father James Madison styled, “making ambition counteract ambition.” We cannot depend upon angelic features of those who cling to power, especially among the political species, who are not a random sample of the population. People are attracted to politics because they love domination, they have egomania. They need attention.

And that’s why we need checks and balances. We know what will happen: You give them limitless power, no matter what their background. For example, the current occupant of the White House: He claims the authority to kill anyone on the planet that he says, in secret, “Hey! You may be an imminent danger. You may be associated with al-Qaeda. I need no checks; I always get it right.” That’s what happens with limitless power.

So checks and balances are indispensable to creating civilization. Without them, tyranny ensues. And that’s in part a recognition that if we have to choose between a danger of too strong a government, that has to be endowed with some authority, because the [lives of] creatures in a state of nature, are what Hobbes described as “poor, brutish, nasty, and short—we know human nature is depraved without leadership, and we need government to prevent predation, stealing, killing. But, between choosing between a too-weak government, and a too-strong government, we know we have to choose for a weaker government, because government is always capable of vastly more evil than any individual or group of individuals.

If we think of the mass murders, the suicides, the genocides, Mao, Stalin, hundreds of millions! Hundreds of millions! The genocide, the Holocaust, compared to individual murders, dwarfs the amount of evil that can be perpetrated. And that’s why the fundamental principle of all government action is, the rule is liberty; the exception is the encroachment on liberty. And the government always needs to surmount a very high hurdle to justify encroaching on your liberty—spying on you, detaining you, suppressing your speech—a very, very high standard. Because a government too strong is a government that will destroy the whole reason that we have civilization and liberty.

Due Process of Law

Now, perhaps the most important idea in the history of civilization, and the one that has to be inscribed in our government, is due process. Due process of law. It was the first recognition of man that, “I could be wrong”; there’s more than my way to look at an event. Nietzsche once said, there are no facts, only interpretations. There’s great wisdom in that. There are multiple ways to interpret an event! You don’t have a monopoly on wisdom. Due process: Before you impose any kind of sanction, any kind of penalty, hear the other side out, an opportunity for a defense, a decision by an impartial individual who has no vested interest in a particular outcome.

Due process: That intellectual humility, “I could be wrong”, has to be a centerpiece of every Constitution, everygovernmental dispensation. Because we see what happens without due process: That is the history of injustice, right? Anonymous, unchallenged accusations that send anybody to prison, anyone to the death chambers.

Those are the fundamental principles of government that are essential to preserving civilization.

The last one, and perhaps the most important, is the understanding that nations, as nations, have no independent interest that transcends that of enabling all of its citizens to live free. There’s no national interest in controlling resources, in expanding its territory, controlling oil supplies. This idea of national security—well, we don’t dominate the East China Sea, the West China Sea, the Asia pivot, we have to control the Middle East—what is that? A nation as a nation, it’s an artificial construct! They’re only human beings! Nations are made of human beings. You say, “the goal of the nation”—the final end is to make the individual in that nation free, to develop their faculties, and have moral accountability for what they do with their lives. That is success. The process itself is success.

These challenges that we confront are not at all novel. We aren’t the first generation that has conceived of these necessities, in order to diminish the Misery Index of the world. And it goes back to the Old Testament of Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the Sun.” Now, that doesn’t mean there are not new technologies; he wasn’t writing at the age of the Internet, and I’m sure there will be something that will supersede the Internet. There are technological changes. But the motivations of mankind, the challenges to live a life that’s beyond animal existence, has been with us from the outset. It’s like the French say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Adult Virtues

Now, I’ve articulated at least the Genome Project with regard to how we can see and construct governments. But government alone is not the success story that we need to pursue. We need a political and a social culture as well, a political and social culture that undergirds these precepts of governmental action if you will, or limits on government. And perhaps the most important social, cultural norm, has to be one where you and I, the society in general, honors and applauds what I call the “adult virtues”: wisdom, restraint, humility, modesty, resisting domination for the sake of domination; not selling our soul for a mess of potage. That’s what the social culture needs to reward, not necessarily through money, but by giving deference and social status, applauding people who display those virtues, and ostracizing those who are like Donald Trump, or Bloomberg, or other people who flaunt wealth and utterly have philosophically empty lives! Empty! These people are moral wretches, and they need to be treated in that way!

And we need a culture, then, that rejects as juvenile, as something you grow out of at age five in the sandbox—the craving for sex, money, power, creature comforts, “Hey, pay attention to me”—all those ill-conceived habits that we see on every stage in the world, every day, in the world of politics. We have the most wretched people, who acquire, and assert, power, which has led, in the world, to this high-water mark of a Misery Index.

We need to go back, in our own private lives as well, and understand, as Socrates did, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Just existence for its own sake is not good enough. We have to ask ourselves, “Why are we here? Why are we on this planet?” What can we do, to make life more gentle? More honorable, than exists simply by pursuing and seeking gratification for appetites? The higher life form.

And this is the challenge that civilization faces today, as it faced it yesterday, and it will face this challenge tomorrow. Because every individual is born with the same DNA, right? Doesn’t matter where, whether you’re in New Zealand or in Siberia, the United States, or Somalia. All the species start at the same point, the same DNA. And these same moral challenges are going to confront every generation! All we can do, the living generation, is, for those yet to be born, to preserve those standards of freedom and honor and morality, that will give them the same opportunity that we’ve enjoyed, to struggle against these evils that persist in mankind.

And that is what I suggest is our obligation in leaving the conference at the end of two days. We don’t control the world. What we do control, is us! What we do control, is what motivates our lives. What we do control, is whether or not, within our space, within our ability to motivate others, we are able to live an honorable life that eliminates what we see as the oppression, the preoccupation with adolescent goals, that has led to the degradation of the species, whether we’re on the edge of a thermonuclear war—we’ve been that way for a long time—most of you in the audience probably lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, where we did think that maybe the Earth would perish, very soon.

But remember, you control your destiny, your moral life; you can have no excuse for blaming somebody else for that.

Now, we may not succeed. The history of mankind is not one that shows that people with the greatest and most noble ideas succeed. Many of them get burned at the stake; many of them perish without being rewarded at all for their courage and heroism. And we have to accept that that may be our possibility as well, because we know, in this audience, we are not the majority. The majority sits on Wall Street—they’re defense contractors, they’ve got vast amounts of wealth. They exert vast amounts of political power. They have a monopoly on legalized violence.

But what they don’t have, and what we have, is a philosophical soul, that marches forward, irrespective of these enticements that are intended to divert us from what we know is a higher life form.

Thank you.

Transcript

Hello. My name is Jason Ross. I work with Mr. LaRouche’s Basement Research Team in Virginia. My other hat is that I’m the editor-in-chief of 21st Century Science & Technologymagazine, and our last published issue was on planetary defense.

I am very happy to follow the excellent presentation of Mr. Benediktov on planetary defense, on the Russian proposals for international cooperation. He covered many of the technical aspects and the threat of asteroids very well.

What I would like to focus my presentation on today, is Mr. LaRouche’s economic outlook, which underlay his initial proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Mr. LaRouche’s view, of human creativity as the fundamental source of economic wealth, and of being able to consider a global measure of economic value, as opposed to an addition of local economic values, saw the buildup of the SDI not as a cost, not as a burden, but as a source of great economic profit. Think how different that is from the current U.S. anti-missile system, which has a cost, is expensive, but provides no great spin-off technologies, as the Strategic Defense Initiative would have.

So let me discuss the concept of energy-flux density that Mr. LaRouche referred to. He did not propose kinetic kill vehicles in the proposal made in the 1980s, but instead the use of “new physical principles,” including breakthroughs in laser and particle beam technologies, as well as fusion. Now, while there were advancements anti-missile system, these were not the SDI.

We heard about some of the developments in the anti-missile system at our last Schiller Institute conference in the United States, but this did not represent the intention of the SDI, or the Strategic Defense of Earth, now. The purpose of the SDI was not only defense against missiles, but for political cooperation with the Soviet Union—which the U.S. is not pursuing with its anti-missile system, in regards to Russia—and, for the spin-off technologies and the economic profit that it would bring. It would be similar to, but much greater than, President Kennedy’s mission to go to the Moon. The Apollo program had a large cost, but it had zero net cost, a negative net cost because of the benefits that came from the technologies.

In the case of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the need today for technologies for Strategic Defense of Earth, including the necessity of fusion, the developments will not only be technological, but scientific as well. This has a very great potential.

Energy-Flux Density

So, what is energy-flux density? There is a problem in applying scalar metrics, where we use one kind of ruler to understand many different processes. For example, economists, who study the economy in terms of “money,” are never actually studying the economy. Or, if you look at physics, there is a unit of “energy.” There is something real about energy, but there is an understanding that is lost when we consider purely energy itself. Rather, with the concept of energy-flux density, we begin to look at the quality of sources of power, not only the quantity.

Now, by the quality of power, I don’t mean a fancy Swiss watch—I mean the opposite of quantity. So, for example, if you have a scientist who studies rocks, he’s used to dealing with mass, density, perhaps temperature, electrical conductivity; if he were looking at a dog, he isn’t even considering many of the things a veterinarian would look at, such as heartbeat, metabolic rate, nutrition. A pure biologist could not understand human beings; without a concept of culture, a biologist might try to cure all social problems with medicines, instead of changing the culture in which people exist, or their thoughts.

So, from the standpoint of physics, from the standpoint of economics, energy-flux density is crucial for understanding the different sources of power.

For example, if we use muscle power, whether human muscle power, or the muscle power of an animal, it’s very limited, and it consists in mechanical motions. With the use of burning coal to create a steam engine, yes, we still make mechanical motions, but they’re much more powerful than what could be done by, say, a horse. With the use of electricity, you can measure electrical power, in terms of horsepower as a physical unit, but electricity does so many things you cannot do with an animal. I think we can all think of many examples: There’s nothing you can do with a horse that can make the headphones we’re wearing, work. It’s a different kind of power.

With fission power, and then especially with fusion power—if we develop fusion, the benefit will be that electricity will be almost free; the other benefit is that new qualities of economic activity are possible. Take, for example, the ability to use a fusion torch for recycling purposes, to break down material into its elements, in a similar way that we break down petroleum products into the different kinds [of elements] now.

For the SDI, or the SDE, we need, as a source of power, fusion; we will not be able to move asteroids with windmills! We cannot use mirrors to take the solar power to move an asteroid. We’re not going to do it by returning empty soda bottles for 15 cents. This outlook of humanity will not defend us against an asteroid. And currently, fusion power, at least in the U.S., is funded far below the funding for stupid solar panels—it’s ridiculous. We could completely change our relationship to the physical world by the development of fusion power, which would change our relationship to materials, for example.

Potential Relative Population Density

So, to apply this to human economy, Mr. LaRouche has used the concept of potential relative population density. So, the potential population density, in a certain area: How many people could live there? What is the potential? How has that changed over the years? If we look at this chart (Figure 1), of European population, over the past centuries and several millennia, we see a dramatic increase in the number of people that are able to live here. This is not because people are having more babies; it’s not for reasons like that. It’s that, as we transform as a species the way that life does as a whole in evolution, we really do become like a new species, when we have a new platform of scientific development to stand on.

When life moved from the oceans to land, it dramatically began to increase its power on the Earth. We do the same thing when we develop new sources of power, for example, for agriculture, or the study of medicine.

This is something that’s very natural for human beings. It would be unnatural for us not to continue this trend. That would be like a reptile saying that a mammal is “unnatural.” Or, it would be like a rock saying a lizard is “unnatural.” The rock says, “Hey! I’m just sitting around here, and you’re moving, you’re walking on top of me, you’re sitting on me. You know, I don’t enjoy this, it’s unnatural.” But lizards aren’t rocks, and human beings are not animals.

So, compare different cultures today: As was just discussed, China today has some ambitious programs. They have a three-phase lunar program that they began several years ago. Phase two will land devices on the Moon. Phase three is to bring back material from the Moon, something that, until now, only the United States and the Soviet Union have done. India is moving forward: They sent a probe to the Moon in 2008. They plan to send a satellite to Mars this year, which will make them the third nation to do so.

We just heard a great deal about Russian proposals for international cooperation on missile defense, which, yes, if we’re using nuclear weapons, it absolutely must be international—and it must involve civilian and military aspects, something that NASA must understand.

And in the U.S., NASA has a mission to land a man on an asteroid by 2021. This is a joke. Nobody really takes this seriously. There’s really no point in standing on an asteroid. You would probably need special boots to do it, because the gravity is so small on an asteroid, that if you sneeze, you will fly off of it! In fact, right now, with the sequester in the United States, NASA scientists can’t even go to meetings anymore! They can’t go to conferences! So, right now, NASA can’t send a man to the Moon, NASA can’t send a man to Mars; they can’t even send a man to Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo for a conference!

The ‘Basement’ Science Project

So, we must have a total shift in our activities and our priorities, and we also have to have a revolution in how we practice science. I want to say something very briefly on this: Mr. LaRouche’s “Basement” project has taken up a study of the internal history of science, going back to the first modern scientist, Kepler, up through Fermat, Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, Planck, Einstein, and Vernadsky. I will show you briefly, one very amazing result that came from some of our studies.

This might be difficult to understand, but we can talk more later. What you’re about to see here is, you’re seeing these rings appear. What the animation (see video below) is showing, is, in each frame of the video, all of the dots that make it up are the centers of the orbits of various asteroids. And we’re choosing the asteroids based on their average distance from the Sun. Here, they’ll be drawn in, as we’re moving farther from the Sun.

Now, there’s not enough time to fully discuss this, but taking the approach of Kepler and Gauss, that there must be a reason for why the universe is so, and not otherwise, from the standpoint of Leibniz, who said: Yes, God is completely powerful, but He is also so wise, that he does nothing without a reason.

We decided to apply this approach—Kepler’s method—to the asteroids, to start trying to look at the asteroids, as a system, to look for a structure in the Asteroid Belt. The swarm of asteroids that Mr. Benediktov discussed, where they seem to come in a greater number all at once: Why is this? If we have a hypothesis about the structure of the asteroids, maybe this will make it much easier to find them; maybe this will change our view of how to move them. ((A written report on the Basement’s asteroid research is available at: http://schillerinstitute.org/conf-iclc/2013/0413_frankfurt/AsteroidUpdate.pdf (PDF format. Right-click the link and select “save as” or “save target as” to download. Use Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the downloaded file. Opening this in your browser may not work.)))

So this is something that the LaRouche Research Team is discussing, and we’re starting to confront NASA scientists with this, who are trying to figure out—no one has seen this before. So this is a new observation. Kepler would be very happy.

A Wonderful Gift to the Future

Let me say, to conclude here, that the path to that is offered by the SDE concept of the common aims of mankind; this allows us to give a very wonderful gift to the future. In one generation, or more like two generations, as some of the first visitors and perhaps settlers to the Red Planet, to Mars, are taking their one-week trip to get there on a fusion rocket, they might wonder how foolish we were, in the beginning of the 21st Century, to confuse banks for the real economy, or why we were so fixated on using less energy, instead of developing better sources of new energy? Or why we separated our trash into 15 different colored bags, instead of recycling it with fusion?

Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche was telling me the other day about a report she had read, that German youth are among the least happy, but it is not because of physical poverty. I think a large part of it comes from the omnipresent Green outlook, where children are taught that they are disease on the planet—you know, “you are a cancer”; that the best possible role for your life, is to not exist! To have no impact on the world—you come, you go; it’s as if you were never there. That’s not exactly an optimistic outlook!

Compare that with a mission to go to Mars, to discover new sources of power, to master matter-antimatter. And I think what we can do, is really give a wonderful gift, because the greatest gift that a nation, or a culture, can give to its members and its future members, is the knowledge that those people lived lives that were not only good and useful, but in fact, necessary for the future.

We have to have a direction, that we’re moving to where people are necessary, and not burdens that we should euthanize when they reach 70 years of age. So, by adopting this SDE approach, the new technologies needed for planetary defense, and getting Glass-Steagall and a credit system immediately to make it possible, I think we are giving the future a very wonderful gift!

Thank you.

Transcript

There’s a certain element of short but sweet in what I have to say. It may be sweet for some people, but not for others. It’s sweet for me, because it’s the truth. And it’s a truth which is generally not recognized at all; and therefore, the truth that is not recognized at all is inherently the most beautiful of them all.

We’re in a situation now, where, in point of fact, especially in the Americas, and in Europe and Africa, for example, mankind is in the greatest danger of virtual extinction of the species ever known to us in historical times. There may have been prehistorical periods which are legendary, shall we say, as opposed to historical, but never before, since those prehistorical times, has mankind ever faced a danger to the human species as great as the world as a whole faces today.

The center of that problem lies between Europe and North America. All the other regions of the other nations are simply secondary. They are not the principal drivers, nor do they provide the solution for the situation.

The key to understanding this is to shock a number of you, especially those who are European, as to what the situation is today. Everybody knows, I think, in Europe and beyond, that we have a great hyperinflationary financial crisis, and that populations are being starved, probably starved to death, in great numbers, in various parts of this part of the world. And they’re doomed, unless the solution to this problem is identified and understood.

Mankind is on the verge of a quasi-extinction. This is not something “down the line.” This is something in the immediate future. It’s a problem which must be identified now, correctly; it’s a problem which is not understood in most parts of Europe; it’s little understood in the United States, though in the United States we have a better understanding than anyone else does. This system is about to go into a collapse.

A Doomsday Sign

Now, there’s an intention behind this. The intention has been bespoken by the Queen of England, who considers herself the Empress of the world—and to a large degree she is. Europe, for example: Western and Central Europe are nothing but puppets of the British Empire. You don’t have nation-states any more. You don’t have sovereignty any more. You have a system, and the system is run essentially from London. And if their system continues, and is not defeated, the power of the British Empire over Europe, or most of Europe, most of Western and Central Europe, the power over the United States, right now, means that the doom that is threatened, seems to be almost inevitable.

The hyperinflation which has struck Europe and the United States, simultaneously—it’s a Doomsday sign. And the rate of production of necessities is falling, and it’s falling at an accelerating rate, and will continue to fall at an accelerating rate, as long as this trans-Atlantic system of power continues.

And no one in Europe has a chance, now, of doing much about it. Because they’re all tied in, so heavily, to the so-called euro system. The euro system is a mass suicide system of the unwilling.

Now, what’s wrong? Why is this hyperinflation—and this is a hyperinflation which makes what happened in Germany in 1923 a simple problem—this is the virtual extinction! Now, the British Empress, the Queen of England, has specified—we had this series of discussions involving Copenhagen, ((The November 2009 British Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, prior to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, was addressed by Queen Elizabeth II. Sir John Schellnhuber, who was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order (CBE) of the British Empire in 2004, by Queen Elizabeth, told a March 13, 2009 pre-meeting for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that the carrying capacity of the planet is below 1 billion people. See http://larouchepub.com/other/2011/3845london_war_depop.html.)) at one point; it was shifted from there, and the British Queen went off in a different direction. It now has gone with a program of explicit genocide, mass genocide. Specifically. She’s said it not on one occasion; she’s said it repeatedly. She emphasizes it today. It’s the policy of the President of the United States today—it’s a policy of genocide against the trans-Atlantic population, in particular.

And it’s a very efficient genocide. If not stopped, it will kill. What her goals are: The immediate prospect is to reduce the world’s population from 7 billion people, to somewhat in the order of magnitude of 1 or 1.2 billion people. That’s her policy.

That policy is being implemented throughout Europe, especially Western and Central Europe. That policy is being implemented inside the United States itself; a policy of deliberate genocide has been specified by the Queen of England and her puppet, the President of the United States, has now declared his support for that policy. We’re going to have the greatest rate of accelerated death in the United States coming on, if this President remains President.

The policy is not his. The policy is hers. She bought and paid for him, with drug money, a vast flood of drug money which was used to secure his election as President of the United States.

He carried out that kind of program all the way through. He carried it out in the form of warfare. What happened in Libya; what is spreading into Syria; what is threatening throughout all of Africa; what is going on in the Middle East; what the threats are to Russia—all these things—the threats to China now. All these things are being done by her, chiefly through her instrument, the current President of the United States, who’s nothing but her stooge, for her!

That’s what we face.

Beating the Money Game

Now, how do we deal with this? They have an argument. The argument is, we’ve got a money problem. And we’ve got to solve the money problem: “We’ve got to be nice to money, even if it means being mean to people. Even if it means killing them!” And that is exactly what the policy is of the current President of the United States. He has not gotten it voted up yet, but that’s his policy. That’s his intention. His intention is genocide against a major part of the population of the United States, as well of Europe.

So, unless we can solve this little mystery, of what’s the money game, then we’re not going to solve the problem.

So, therefore, I’ve come to that particular point. What is the problem? Why are Europeans so stupid as to put up with this? Why are European governments more stupid than the people? Naturally, they’re more stupid—that’s how they got to be governments. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been allowed into government, if they hadn’t been stupid, malleable.

There’s only one solution, and that solution is Glass-Steagall. But most people don’t know what Glass-Steagall is. They think it’s a new kind of adjustment system. No. Glass-Steagall is the fundamental law of the United States. Glass-Steagall is the name given to that law, at a specific time in history.

It was not just the United States. It was the forerunners of the United States. This is something that comes out of Nicholas of Cusa, for example, and his great influence, and the great scientific development which occurred, that was then destroyed largely, by periods of great warfare, in Europe, in particular. Civil war.

Columbus was a follower of Nicholas of Cusa, who said the solution is to leave Europe, and go across the oceans to the people of other parts of the world, and build up a civilization, a global human civilization, which will make it possible for all parts of humanity to enjoy what human beings are, and should be allowed to be.

We had religious war. What did this lead to? Well, Columbus’s expedition didn’t work out too well; the original Columbian settlement, the middle Mexican settlement, these things worked out fairly well. But they were destroyed under the influence of the oligarchical system.

So, then you had this thing that came from a few Dutch, a few French, a few British, Irish, and so forth, and they came over across the water into the North American continent, as well as the South American continent. And in the United States, in particular, in that area we made two efforts to solve the problem which Europe faced, as a result of this situation.

They said, let’s leave Europe. Let’s get some people out of Europe. Because it is impossible to solve this problem in Europe. And it never has been solved. It just vibrated back and forth. Some progress was made, but things became weaker and weaker and weaker.

Well, we had something that worked out in Massachusetts, finally, in that century, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Now the Massachusetts Bay Colony was an act of genius. It created the economic system on which the United States was based.

Now the Massachusetts Bay Colony was crushed by the Venetian party, so-called, the same Venetian party that destroyed the independence of the Britons, and made them slaves of the New Venetian slavery system. And so, the new slavery system came into North America, into Massachusetts, where we had had the first economic system on which the United States was based.

We then got into a war with Britain, which had been taken over by the New Venetian Party. And Britain had become an empire, during the middle of that [18th] century.

At that point, in the middle of the century, the people in North America, including some of my ancestors, had set forth on a new system of economy, a revival of the same system as the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s system. And it worked. And there was one man who actually figured out how to make the principle work, and he was, of course, Alexander Hamilton [1755/57-1804], whose brain designed the American System, the only competent system that solves this kind of problem.

Then the effort was made which succeeded.

But then we were crushed. The British, in particular, were constantly trying to get us to crush our new republic. We had a few great leaders in this republic, initial leaders in this republic. And then we had another group; and then they were crushed in turn. We were crushed again; we were crushed by a British intervention in what was called the Civil War of the United States. We came out of that successfully, but then we were betrayed again by British intervention, British imperial intervention.

Churchill’s Perfidy

And then we got our power back, and then some damned fools in the United States decided to go join and support the British in the war called World War I, the most stupid thing that was ever done.

We came out of [War War II] successfully, under Franklin Roosevelt, who represented the same policy as Alexander Hamilton did, in defining the economic policy, the founding constitutional principle, of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt understood that policy, and put a version of it through. And it worked. We won the war. Unfortunately, Franklin Roosevelt died.

He died; why did he die? Because the British killed him. How did they kill him? Well, we were fighting this war, World War II, as it was called, and Roosevelt was the leader of the nation; he was the leader of the international effort to save civilization. But then Churchill had a cute idea: Let’s not win the war too soon. That was the British policy. Let’s not win the war too soon. Let’s wait until Roosevelt is dead. Then when they saw that Franklin Roosevelt was about to die—and this is a matter of eyewitness, not my witness knowledge on some of this stuff—then they went and ended the war, after Roosevelt had died.

They wore him out, with the illness he’d gone through. They wore him out deliberately. And Churchill did itdeliberately. He prolonged the war in Europe, to prevent the United States from going back to the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, and the commitments that Roosevelt had made to the peace. The entire peace policy of Franklin Roosevelt was obliterated, under the direction of Winston Churchill, and that sort of process.

Well, then, we were in trouble. Harry Truman, the President who replaced President Roosevelt, was a bum, a Wall Street bum, and a whore for the British Empire. They used nuclear weapons. Started by whom? Started by the British Empire, not the United States.

Nuclear Power, Not Nuclear Weapons

Then we got that straightened out, and went through a process of fighting back against what Churchill and others had done. We had weapons, yes. We had a nuclear arsenal, yes. (And Britain had a nuclear arsenal, given to them by us.) But it was not to be used unless there was a real need to use it. We did not want to unleash what nuclear weapons meant as a weapon of warfare. We were willing to have the weapons, but don’t utilize them as a policy. Don’t try to get into a war by using nuclear weapons. Do anything possible to avoid having to use nuclear weapons.

And nuclear weapons were not the purpose. Nuclear weapons were a variety of something else. Nuclear weapons were a reflection of nuclear power, where people like Einstein and Max Planck, in the 1890s, had already envisaged the basis for nuclear power.

And it’s a natural thing for mankind to use nuclear power. It’s an unnatural thing not to use nuclear power. It’s an insane thing not to use nuclear power. Because the continued existence of man, in the face of the threat from inside the Solar System, from asteroids and other things in the system, which are now becoming an increasing threat, and source of threats—that will be reported elsewhere, later today. There was never a purpose for nuclear weapons. The Nazis had even thought about using nuclear weapons. Hitler had killed it, at that point.

But the intention of the nuclear policy did not come from a nuclear-weapons policy. It came from the need for progress of man’s condition; of increasing the productive powers of mankind; for raising the standard of living of mankind; for increasing the density of power per capita and per unit of territory. We are now going to be going to thermonuclear power, not as thermonuclear weapons—we’re going to thermonuclear power in order to get to Mars faster.

Because without thermonuclear fusion, you cannot get to Mars conveniently; mankind will never get to Mars, to live on Mars, without thermonuclear fusion as a power source. We will never be able to deal with the threats to mankind from asteroids and things like that, unless we bring those means to practice. Not for warfare, but for the development of man’s role inside the Solar System, at least in the inner part of the Solar System. So, that’s our nuclear policy.

Glass-Steagall Will Save the United States

How does all this work with the economy? Well, what we are proposing, and what we are working for—I’ll just give you brief background—we had an organization inside the United States, which had in it a branch of our organization, which involved younger people. I positioned myself in the recent years to take the group of young people, young adults, and to build an organization within our existing organization, which would be the part of growth and our future role in politics.

Then, during last year, during the Summer and early Autumn, I just said at one point, “Look, what we’ve got to do, we’ve got to shut down everything else we’re doing, in order to take the core of our organization and get into Washington, D.C. in the period of this election campaign, and just sit on that whole pile of people, of members of Congress and similar kinds of people. And let’s get our policy put through, and let’s educate the Congress.”

And that’s what we did. Now today, we have reached the point where we do have a significant influence, far greater than anything we ever had before in terms of the United States. And the core of what we are proposing is Glass-Steagall.

Simply, the Glass-Steagall policy, if applied, will save the United States. If Europeans wish to survive, they will do the same thing. They will take a carbon copy of Glass-Steagall and bring it into Europe immediately, and eliminate any other variety of economic-policy system. And that’s what’s needed.

What people don’t understand in all of this, what Europeans don’t understand—they don’t understand what economy is all about. That is, actual physical economy, human economy. We can learn a lesson from the animal kingdom, because the animal kingdom evolves. Evolution is the natural state of living processes. As far as we know, the general trend of all living processes is based on evolution. The evolution to higher energy-flux forms of existence.

And every bit of progress in mankind’s status has always been a result of utilization and recognition of this principle. Now, in the animal kingdom, the animals that aren’t so efficient, die; they go extinct. The same thing is true of nations. Nations that don’t progress, die; they go extinct. Europe is going extinct. The United States has also joined the self-extinction club, under the past two Presidents, under the banning of Glass-Steagall.

And therefore, what’s happening in Europe, in not considering Glass-Steagall, or not applying it; what’s happening in the United States, even though we have a better knowledge of Glass-Steagall, and we have much more support for Glass-Steagall; but even in Europe, independent European thinkers are thinking in terms of Glass-Steagall as an economic reform. Even many people in England, many people in the British system, who are bankers, are saying, “We must go to Glass-Steagall.” They know in fact that nothing else will work except Glass-Steagall. Without Glass-Steagall right now, civilization is dead! It cannot survive.

Mankind Evolves Voluntarily

What does all this mean?

First of all, take two things: One, all life is based on an evolutionary process, under which species go from lower qualities of development to higher. That’s the animal kingdom; that’s the law of evolution. Now mankind is different than all other kinds of animals, because mankind has the power to evolve voluntarily. Mankind evolves voluntarily, not by changing his biology, but by changing his mind. And the utilization of noetic powers of mind, and no animal species really has noetic powers of mind. Only human beings have noetic powers of mind.

And therefore, the object is always to go to higher levels of technology, which means kill off the green policy! If you want to survive, end the green policy; because that’s a death sentence. It’s a suicide pact! Mankind must always progress; we must always learn from the animals and apply the principles the animals don’t know how to do. Rise to a higher energy-flux density. How do you do that? You make physical discoveries; you go from lower forms of energy-flux density to higher forms of energy-flux density. You find new applications.

Mankind is, for the moment, helpless against the asteroids which have arrayed against us inside the Solar System. We’re helpless against the comets. We saw recently in Russia, we saw some quickie asteroids shooting through there. If they had a little more energy-flux density in that territory, you wouldn’t have had a large number of people injured, you would have had mass deaths. Mankind is faced with mass death if we fail to progress adequately and rapidly enough to defeat the problems.

In the United States and in Europe, you have a common suicide pact; it’s called the green policy, which is a species suicide pact. It’s mass death! Without the increase in energy-flux density expressed in terms of technology and pure power as such, there’s no future for mankind on this planet.

Therefore, what’s this economic problem then? Which is what all my talking up to here is about. Unless we go to the equivalent of a Glass-Steagall policy, which is to say that our policy is to increase our energy-flux density represented by applications to man’s benefit. At the same time, this is reflected in another way.

Again, we can learn from the animal species. Progress, evolve, or die! Progress, evolve, or go extinct! That’s the law; that’s the law of nature. Mankind is the only creature which does it voluntarily and can do it voluntarily, and that is by making discoveries with the mind, with the powers of mind to discover new principles, higher principles of development. Nobody but mankind is known to be able to do that voluntarily. And people who decide to give up that voluntary right, that voluntary capability, are committing their own mass suicide.

Nicholas of Cusa in the totality of his work and his influence, he was the engineer of science, was the engineer of progress. He was the salvation of Europe, from what had been the misery and the horrible conditions of the earlier centuries.

And therefore, this is a moral question. What’s our economic system? Why is our economic system such a genius, as opposed to the poor Europeans who don’t understand this yet? What is the principle? The principle of progress, the principle of going to higher energy-flux density, to higher standards of productivity. To be able to defend Earth and the people on it from the kinds of things that threaten Earth now, and the kinds of things that threaten the people of Earth now.

The American System

How do we do that? Well, it goes back to the American System. The American System is progress, progress, progress, as expressed in the currency of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Again, that’s the beginning of it. We were crushed, we went back to the same thing.

We had a genius among us—Alexander Hamilton—who made it clear how the United States economic system could be made to work. And because we existed, even as a relatively weak power inside the Americas, the fact that we were promoting, as Benjamin Franklin had done, as his predecessors in Massachusetts had done—they based themselves on a policy of progress, of scientific progress. And on an understanding that scientific progress is based on increasing the productive powers of labor, which means such things as just plain innovation, or scientific discovery.

And we actually drove Europe into progress. Our existence forced Europe, it forced even the British to reckon with progress. And that the basis of money as such is not the basis of economy; the basis of economy is productivity, of increase of the energy-flux density, or increase of the productivity of our production in general.

The problem is, what are the other systems? You have the monetary system, the pure monetary system, the currency system. What’s wrong with that? Well, the common currency system has no built-in feature of a drive for progress. Therefore, currency, a gold currency, is not the basis for progress. A silver currency, a monetarist system, is not a basis for progress.

The basis for progress is an increase in the manifest benefits of the productive powers of labor, so that every time that you are acting and producing, you are producing at a higher level than you were producing the day before. You do that in Classical music; you do that in Classical drama; you do that in everything that man does that’s good.

And therefore, our currency, our system, the American System, the American Constitutional System, is baseduniquely on the concept associated with Alexander Hamilton. We have never achieved anything of notability as a nation in the United States, except on the basis of the application of Hamilton’s principle! And if you base yourself on a monetary system, a pure monetary system, you are not requiring progress; you’re not requiring physical and technological progress. So how can mankind survive if we don’t progress? If we just wear ourselves out, and, like animals, die because we become antiquated?

So therefore, our system is based on a credit system; the same system that was used in the United States, by our greatest early Presidents and their associates. The great things that were driven by the science-driver program. In Europe, the great pressure of the American Revolution forced more attention to this, because nations were competing. If they wanted to compete in Europe, they had to do something about trying to overtake and catch up with each other, to do something better than the next guy.

And it came to the idea of the system of investment, in our system; when it’s applied, we always increase the productive powers of labor. And we recognized, that to do that, you have to increase the productivity potential of the population. You have to go to higher technologies, always, always, always, higher technologies. Master territories that before you couldn’t inhabit. Conquer things that frighten you.

And the next phase we’re at now, now, as you will hear from our other source here today [Jason Ross], the concentration is going to be on energy-flux density and things of that nature. It means getting out there in the Solar System, out to our neighbors in the Solar System. And beginning to get the power through scientific discoveries, and scientific development; to get out there and control the threats to mankind which are represented by these flying rocks out there, of which there are millions, between the Venusian and the Mars vicinity. They’re out there waiting to destroy us. The intensity of these rocks coming by us is higher.

One of our people noted today, that if we were going to be hit by an asteroid, which was big enough and fast enough to destroy human life on Earth, there’s not a damned thing we could do about it, within a year. If mankind’s survival is going to depend upon going out and developing systems of defense against these kind of threats, and going out and reaching farther and farther, so the ability to defend the existence of the human species is made possible. We cannot do that without thermonuclear fusion as a standard of productivity for mankind in the future.

And so the principle is simple. It’s the principle of the United States: progress. The principle of Nicholas of Cusa: progress. The principle of Charlemagne: progress. Charlemagne understood economy better than anybody in Europe today does. It’s true! He actually calculated, he had a whole census. He examined the whole domain that he dominated during the period of his lifetime. He united the water systems. That was still being done in Germany back in the 1990s, in the final stages. He found out how much people had to eat, how much it cost to build a great system—which broke down after he was out, as they went back in history, went back to an earlier form.

But always this is a principle of progress, that man has a duty of progress, and has had it all along.

But now we’ve come to a time where we’re now not looking out at the Solar System as a passive thing. We’re now seeing new kinds of problems; and the thing that threatens mankind now, that really should frighten everyone, frighten us into doing something good about it, is to increase technology, the energy-flux density of technology; reverse the green policy which is our suicide pact in Europe, and in part of the United States. A green policy is a policy of human mass death, because without progress, the conditions of life under which man is able to continue life, human life on this planet, cannot do it.

And right now, the landmark of that at this stage lies in dealing with the threats of those asteroids out there. What once I used to call the Strategic Defense Initiative, when I pushed that policy and we got a lot of people to accept it, in Russia as well, or in the Soviet Union as well. And similar kinds of things. These kinds of inventions; these kinds of discoveries of principle, which depend upon mankind always becoming better than himself. Whoever you are, whatever you represent, you must become better than yourself.

We have a Solar System, and the Solar System is a nice thing to have, and we can use it; but also the Solar System is something which can kill you. And you better learn how to use that. And that’s my point.

Just the whole point of the U.S. system, the system which we’re trying to revive as a Glass-Steagall system today, is the only system which provides for a survival of civilization. So let’s dump all those things that people have as cheap-shot successes. There’s only one thing that will save mankind—increase the productive powers of labor. And don’t stick to stagnant old ideas. There are new threats and new opportunities and new happinesses out there waiting to be seized. People have to know they exist, and then they have to choose to accept them.