Looking the Beast in the Eye

How The Government And Army Built America's Railroads

2011-01-29T01:18:00.000-05:00

by Anton Chaikin

Should nations promote productive industry through government subsidy or other encouragement? Or, should financiers and their spokesmen be listened to, respectfully, when they denounce such efforts as ``corruption'' and ``government interference''?

Poor countries are threatened with terrorism and disunion. But they are warned, in the name of human rights, not to allow their armed forces to be nation-builders. Is such advice wisdom, or hypocrisy?

Public officials are everywhere confronted with infrastructure breakdown, transport crises, and traffic gridlock. Must their impotent lament, that no resources are available to solve these problems, be the final word?

The proud record of America's own creation of railroads is a useful guide for national strategists everywhere in answering these questions. This record demonstrates the power of the American System of political economy, as against the British ``free-trade'' system of colonialism and looting.

In the United States, the railroads were planned by the Army, and financed by government, as projects vital for national defense and economic development. Then, Americans went abroad to build railroads, to secure other nations as America's allies against British Empire geopolitics.

These assertions of ours fly in the face of enormous public prejudice, resulting from indoctrination by British ``free-trade'' propagandists. History texts agitate against the railroad as a locus of corruption and an instrument for the oppression of the masses.

Leftist writers feature such ``robber barons'' as Cornelius Vanderbilt, who bought up railroad lines after they had been built, ``watered'' the stock, and stole vast sums of money. The socialist writer Gustavus Myers passes over the whole story of how the transport network was created, suggesting only that the public was tricked into paying for building the rail lines and the canals.

Writers favoring ``free trade'' expound against the legislatures and such statesmen as Abraham Lincoln for the supposed folly of committing public money and credit to public works. In recent years, the post-industrial speculators' frenzy has gone so far that their theoreticians have denounced America's 19th-century railroad building altogether; University of Chicago economist Robert W. Fogel won the 1993 Nobel Prize for his claims that slavery was productive and efficient, while railroads were unnecessary.

But, the purpose and the republican mentality of the railroads' strategists, and the political and financial means by which the lines were built, are simply absent from the general historical literature; the reigning orthodoxy thus avoids a nasty embarrassment.

During 1997, a work was made available in print which will aid in overcoming this deficiency: Stanford University published the first English translation of Franz Anton von Gerstner's 1840 report on the early American railroads. Gerstner's detailed evaluation of U.S. rail lines and canals, written to instruct the Russian government on America's progress, has the great value that it is not censored or filtered through later anti-industrial or anti-American ideology. Rather, the author was himself a civil engineer and railroad builder who admired the U.S.A., and knew and shared the enthusiastic outlook of those who actually built America's rail lines.

We have worked through Gerstner's engineering history of every single U.S. railroad that had been, or was then being built, in conjunction with other sources which present the same topic from the standpoint of the Federal government and engineers, and from the state government political level. We have thus gained access to a story which is shockingly different from the line of the International Monetary Fund, refuting the lie that national progress somehow arises from submission to speculators' demands for unrestrained looting. As we shall see, America did it another way.

Defending the Union: the General SurveyAct

John Quincy Adams, President from 1825 to 1829, began ordering U.S. Army engineers to design the country's first railroads. Adams made the assignments under the General Survey Act of 1824. During the previous administration of James Monroe, that bill had been pushed through Congress by the two leaders of the nationalist faction, House Speaker Henry Clay, and Adams himself, who was then Secretary of State. The act authorized the ``President of the United States ... to cause the necessary surveys, plans, and estimates, to be made of such Roads and Canals as he may deem of national importance, in a commercial or military point of view.''

The 1824 Survey Act was a political companion to the nationalists' protective tariff legislation. In the following year, Adams was elected President and he appointed Clay Secretary of State.

The original rail project carried out under the Survey Act, and America's first commercial railroad, was the Baltimore & Ohio, chartered in 1827. President Adams ordered a dozen or more Army engineers to plan and supervise the B&O's construction, to link the Atlantic port of Baltimore with the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Adams also deployed Army personnel to start up railroad projects in New York, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, until the end of his Presidency in 1829.

Adams's Secretary of War, James Barbour, explained the administration's thinking on these assignments:

``The successful introduction of Rail-Roads, into this country, is viewed by the Department as of great national importance, and especially any practicable mode of connecting the Atlantic States with the Western;|... so that the commodities to be found in either can be conveniently and cheaply conveyed to the other, across the barriers which divide them, and which ... offer the most sure and economical means to the Government to convey, to the different parts of the Union, the means of defence, in the transportation of men and munitions to the seat of war, wherever it shall exist.''

Under the General Survey Act, the technologies of steam power and metal rails were implemented by Army design, officially, on at least 60 railroads. Army men also worked on other new lines during personal furloughs, or ``in their spare time,'' with official sanction.

President Andrew Jackson, John Q. Adams's successor, gradually emerged as an enemy of government economic activities. But in his first term, President Jackson continued Adams's initiative of assigning Army engineers to plan railroads. As a senator back in 1824, Jackson himself had voted for the General Survey Act, and the program was widely popular. Its high point was reached in 1835, when some 20 U.S. railroads were using active-duty Army personnel in their construction and management.

The General Survey Act was repealed in 1838, under the administration of Martin Van Buren. This attack on American economic development followed on the heels of the destruction of the nationalist-run Bank of the United States, a course of action promoted by Van Buren and his faction aligned with the British and Wall Street bankers. Army officers were ordered to cease aiding railroad construction; active-duty personnel did not resume this role until the 1850s, in the preliminary surveying for the transcontinental railroad.

The government initiative under the General Survey Act had been indispensable to the development of the railroads. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point was America's only engineering school when railroads began, and the only significant such school until the Civil War era. West Point's officer-graduates made up almost all of the civil engineers available to plan the lines, and Army regulations were implemented to discipline and organize the new railroad companies.

Although these companies were mostly private enterprises, state and local governments, and later the Federal government, subsidized all the significant rail lines with public money and credit, using loans, grants, stock purchases, and other means. As with the Army engineering, this public funding was absolutely essential. The biggest private financiers would not invest in constructing such enterprises, and the smaller investors could not sustain projects of such scope and duration without public money and guarantees.

The results of this national commitment were spectacular. By 1840, after a decade of construction, the United States had about 3,000 miles of railways in operation, as compared to 1,800 miles in all of Europe, including Britain.

The main issue for President Adams and his nationalist factional allies, military and civilian, was the strength and survival of the American Union. The British Empire and its political friends were still trying to bar America's westward expansion (by instigating Indian wars and slaveowners' land-grabs), a British policy which had been a major cause of the American Revolution. Canals and railroads would open up the West, and would strongly link western settlers to the older northern states. Southern plantation slavery, politically manipulable against the Union, would be potentially overpowered; and westerners would not have to depend on the Mississippi River, flowing through the South, for their market connections.

West Point and France's École Polytechnique

The small U.S. Army was prepared for its railroad work by the extraordinary transformation which had just taken place in the Academy at West Point. Gen. Winfield Scott and Maj. Sylvanus Thayer had spent many months in France after the fall of Napoleon, immersing themselves in the methodology of the École Polytechnique, where Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, and others had educated a new generation of French leaders in science and military strategy.

In these pages, one year ago, Pierre Beaudry described the École's uniqu e educational methodology as

``based on universal principles which subsumed and linked together methods applicable to both Arts and Sciences.... Its principal mission was to give the new Republic ... scientists and engineers to serve in public works as well as the military. Also were required, numerous architects, manufacturers, artists, physicists, chemists, etc.; and the polytechnique method of descriptive geometry instituted by Monge served as the theoretical and practical epistemological basis for that purpose.''

An example of the École's republican approach can be seen in Carnot's discussion of the importance of perspective drawing, in classes for beginners:

``Linear perspective ... is calculated mathematically [but] aerial perspective ... can only be grasped by the sentiment. By comparing these two sciences, where one is sensual, the other ideal, the methodical course of one will help penetrate the mysteries of the other.... [Aerial perspective in painting is] the art of generating ideas by means of the senses, of acting on the soul by the organ of vision. It is in this way that it acquires its importance, that it competes with poetry; that it can, like poetry, enlighten the mind, warm the heart, excite and nourish higher emotions. We shall emphasize the contributions that it can bring to morality and to government; and how, in the hands of the skillful legislator, it will be a powerful means of instilling horror of slavery, and love of the fatherland, and will lead man to virtue.''

The American officers returned from Paris with a thousand-volume library on military art, engineering, and mathematics, a collection of maps, and French experts in descriptive geometry who would now train Americans. Thayer implemented the École regime as West Point Superintendent, while General Scott reorganized the U.S. Army to ensure professional rigor and accountability.
President Monroe created a Board of Engineers for Internal Improvements, and appointed Gen. Simon Bernard its leading member. Educated at the École Polytechnique, Bernard had been in command of France's army engineers in the 1790s, had designed U.S. East Coast forts, and led the Board of Engineers when President Adams began assigning Army personnel to plan U.S. railroads. Bernard later returned to France and was Minister of War (1836-39).

The Team That Built The B&O Railroad

The War Department sent engineers to begin surveying for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1827. During the first two years, three survey brigades were headed by Col. Stephen H. Long, Dr. William Howard, and Maj. William Gibbs McNeill. As the surveying progressed, the B&O company and the Adams administration decided to send Major McNeill, Lt. George Washington Whistler, and another engineer to England to gather intelligence on railroad construction.

While Colonel Long, Major McNeill, and Lieutenant Whistler managed B&O engineering activities in 1829-30, Whistler superintended the first track-laying. Ten to twelve Army engineers were in the company's service at any one time.

McNeill and Whistler would go on from the pioneering B&O project, to work together in engineering the majority of America's new railroads. In 1831, Whistler married McNeill's sister Anna; their son, artist James Abbot McNeill Whistler, would paint Anna's portrait, the famous ``Whistler's Mother.''

George Washington Whistler became the most celebrated civil engineer of his day. He had graduated from West Point in 1819, a master of the projective geometry taught in the new Thayer-reorganized curriculum. A serious musician, he was nicknamed ``Pipes,'' because of his facility with the flute.

Beginning with their first report to the B&O Board of Directors on April 5, 1828, the builders used Army Engineer Department accounting and reporting procedures, and adhered to Army technical and administrative standards as developed by General Scott.

Company president Philip E. Thomas asked McNeill for a set of written regulations for the railroad. The result was ``similar to those which govern generally in the U.S. Engineer Department,'' wrote McNeill, and ``when I thought applicable, I have transcribed literally from the printed regulations of the U.S. Engineer Department.''

This detailed accountability and formal, Army-originated hierarchy, is reported to have been unique in the American business community. The B&O's activities were written up in railroad periodicals and were closely studied by other railroad managers. The Army reassigned its officers off the B&O in 1830, but the regulations adopted afterward were along the same lines as those instituted by the Army personnel.
In 1836, after many intervening projects, McNeill was assigned to the crucial Western Railroad of Massachusetts as consulting engineer, with Capt. William H. Swift as resident engineer. Whistler, who had since resigned from the Army, was also at the Western Railroad, and was to become its chief engineer.

Boston to Albany through-service was inaugurated in December 1841. The Western Railroad adopted from the outset procedures like those used in the Army. Captain Swift had a free hand in establishing procedures for accounting and reporting, and created a ``transportation department,'' similar to the staff, as distinguished from line officers, in the Army.

In response to a head-on train collision, Whistler was asked to set up tight regulations for all trains and all employees. The Western Railroad's ``Report on Avoiding Collisions and Governing the Employees'' (Nov. 30, 1841), is seen as a milestone in U.S. railroad management practices.

There was an important military-civilian overlap on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Chief engineer J. Edgar Thomson hired West Point graduate Herman Haupt as his chief assistant in 1847. After studying the New England railroads, Haupt reorganized the Pennsylvania's management to be like the U.S. military. Line officers ran the day-to-day railroad operations; staff officers in a General Transportation Office concentrated on the company's broader strategic problems. With Thomson as president and Haupt as chief engineer, the Pennsylvania grew to be the country's largest railroad, and served as a tool of the nationalists and their military-scientific-industrial complex in Philadelphia. Haupt served as chief military engineer of Union forces during the Civil War; the Pennsylvania Railroad's vice president, Thomas A. Scott, was Assistant Secretary of War, and ran all government railways and transportation lines.

The pattern of government-financed railroads

The Baltimore & Ohio, America's first great trunk line, was organized in 1827. To begin with, Baltimore community leaders sold $1.5 million in B&O bonds to private investors, and the city of Baltimore bought $500,000 worth of bonds. The city bought $1 million more during 1828, while private investors subscribed to another $1.5 million. In 1833, the state of Maryland granted the railroad company $500,000. The company ran out of money in 1836, whereupon the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore each bought $3 million in B&O bonds. During the depression of 1837, Baltimore allowed the railroad to pay its debts with $1.5 million in ``railroad notes,'' in lieu of money. The 178 mile line to Cumberland, Maryland was completed in 1842; Wheeling, West Virginia was reached in 1853, thanks to a $500,000 subscription from the city of Wheeling.

The state and local government financing given to the B&O was typical of American rail lines during their construction phase.

On local lines of minor importance, municipalities might provide the main, or the only government aid. In New York State, around 300 localities invested in railroads.

But, state governments led the way; up to 1861, they put in about $300 million in cash and credit for transportation infrastructure, primarily railroads. Local and county governments contributed another $125 million. Between 1861 and 1890, state and local aid to railroads amounted to around $250 million.
Altogether, state and local governments provided more than half of the capital invested in early American railways. Not only that, but, quite often, private sources would make railroad construction loans only if the state government guaranteed repayment.

Most of the private capital came from small investors--merchants, local manufacturers, farmers, and tradesmen--on the route of a proposed railroad. There was virtually no eastern capital available for the construction of western railroads, and the easterners who invested in their section's railroads were those small investors who responded to civic leadership of the statesmen and promoters.

The Charleston and Hamburg was a Chamber of Commerce affair, backed by leading merchants. The Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad was backed by the Scranton family, to aid their iron operations. Small coal operators backed the coal-carrying railroads, whose construction was promoted by Nicholas Biddle, Mathew Carey, and other nationalists.

Neither the New York stock market, nor the wealthy Boston bankers played a significant role in the creation of the American railroad system. As historian George Taylor wrote, ``The New York Stock Exchange does not appear to have played an important role in providing capital for early railroad construction. Only a small proportion of railroad stocks were even listed before 1860, and among these, leading roads such as the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio, do not appear.''

Later, these big financiers bought up lines and began to treat them as speculative instruments, with very unwholesome results.

Pennsylvania built the state-owned Philadelphia & Columbia and some other lines, to connect with the thousands of miles of state canals. The gigantic Pennsylvania Railroad Co. was jointly owned by private investors and the city of Philadelphia. The state built the Main Line, then sold it after completion to the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. The Philadelphia & Reading (``Reading Railroad'') was about one-quarter owned by the Bank of the United States, whose president, Nicholas Biddle, was also the fiscal manager for the Reading.

Biddle used every possible resource of the Bank of the United States to develop American railroads and canals. It is often said that ``the British'' or ``the Rothschilds'' built America's railroads. This is simply untrue. The fact is that, by 1853, largely through the marketing of state bonds and other railroad securities by the Bank of the United States, 26% of American railroad bonds outstanding had come to be foreign-owned; railroad stocks, valued at nearly twice the figure for bonds, were only 3% foreign-owned. As time went on, however, the Morgans, Rothschilds, and other British Crown-linked financiers came to hold a dominant interest in American railroads. Ultimately, this financial power was used to loot the existing lines, rather than to develop them.

The state of Georgia built the Western and Atlantic Railroad, completed from Atlanta (the railroad terminus city, which was named for the railroad) to Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1851. Virtually no private capital was available, so the state owned and managed the line until the Civil War.

Virginia enacted a unique construction subsidy: The government would buy three-fifths of the stock shares of any railroad built in the state, thus guaranteeing the market for such stocks. Up to the Civil War, Virginia's state government provided more than $21 million for railroad construction, with much more coming from localities. In the same period, North Carolina's state government went into debt for more than $9 million to subsidize railroad development. In the Southern states before the Civil War, more than 55% of railroad capital was provided by states and local governments.

Private railroads failed in Michigan, so, in 1837, the state government, defying the great economic depression that followed the destruction of the Bank of the United States, began building an ambitious set of rail lines. By 1846, the Michigan Central and Michigan Southern were in operation. Under financial duress, the state was then forced by creditors to privatize the lines and specify in the state constitution that it would never build such lines again.

Indiana had spent more than $1.6 million for a rail line from Madison to Lafayette when, in 1843, the state was forced to turn it over to the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad Co. The line was completed 1847, as the first railway in the state.

Up to 1857, Missouri authorized loans of almost $25 million to seven railroad companies to build their lines.
In its first year of statehood, 1858, Minnesota amended its constitution so as to legally lend $5 million to four railroads.

By 1860, Texas had given 5 million acres and lent about $2 million for railroad construction.

By 1856, local governments in Iowa incurred debts of more than $7 million for railroad construction.
The city of Milwaukee lent $1.6 million to railroad companies in the late 1850s.

It is rather well known that Abraham Lincoln, as the Civil War President, commissioned the transcontinental rail lines. But before this, Lincoln also personally brought about the creation of Illinois' great railroads.

Lincoln first headed ``The Long Nine'' (all quite tall) group of Whig Party men in the state legislature, who pushed through expenditures for canals and railroads to crisscross the state. The Illinois Central Railroad portion of this comprehensive state program failed, despite state financing. Lincoln then served as attorney and lobbyist for the Illinois Central, working to complete the state's transportation network. A Federal law enacted on Sept. 20, 1850, gave Federal lands as grants to Illinois, Mississippi, and Alabama to build railroads, amounting to a subsidy of 3.7 million acres.

The Illinois Central Railroad was finally completed, in 1856, as a direct result of the Federal subsidy. Its $23 million cost came largely from mortgages on Federal lands donated to the company. Less than a sixth of the construction money was contributd by stockholders.

Federal land grants in the 1850s totalled 25,464,018 acres, going to Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Wisconsin, the Minnesota Territory, and 45 railroads. The transcontinental railroad legislation, put through by President Lincoln in the 1860s, used similar grants, other Federal credits, and extensive Army involvement, uniting the Pacific coast with the eastern rail grid.

Rail projects of the Yankee statesmen

The image of the New York and Boston monopolists dominates the public view of the history of the railroads, eclipsing the outstanding leading role of patriotic political leaders in northeastern rail development. The prevailing spirit of improvement was shown in the 1812 report of New York State Canal Commission (including New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton and steamboat inventor Robert Fulton), on the results to be expected from building the Erie Canal:

``A man's life is short; the time is not far off when those who make this report will have passed away. No time, however, is fixed for the existence of a state, and the highest desire of a patriot's heart is that the state to which he belongs might be immortal.... And even when our constitution shall be dissolved and our laws be lost in the current of that unending stream which destroyes all human institutions, the offspring of our children's children will nevertheless remain, these same hills will stand and these same streams flow.... [A]fter the lapse of two thousand years ... when the records of history shall have been obliterated ... this national work shall remain. It will bear witness to the genius, the learning, the industry, and the intelligence of the present age.''

A state enterprise, the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, connecting New York City and the Hudson River to Lake Erie and the Midwest. Political allies of President John Quincy Adams now pressed for the construction of a railway line to parallel the canal. Such a railroad would connect the Atlantic port of Boston, the interior of Massachusetts, the Hudson River, the large undeveloped western area of New York State, and the Great Lakes. Action on this project came in both New York and Massachusetts, led by the Adams forces.

The New York & Erie Railroad, incorporated in 1832, had its route surveyed under direction of the New York legislature in 1834. New York State in 1836 authorized a $3 million loan for it. But the panic of 1837 had ruined the credit of investors, and the railroad had to stop construction. At a special convention on Oct. 17, 1837, William H. Seward, an aspiring politician and an avid follower of John Q. Adams (later, Adams's biographer), wrote the address promoting the re-starting of the Erie railroad as a public project.
Seward wrote:

``It is well to remember that the experience of human government affords not a single instance in which a state or nation became impoverished or subjected to an irredeemable debt by works of internal improvement. Ambition, revenge, and lust for extended territory, have been the only causes, and was almost the sole agent, in entailing those calamities upon nations. Palaces and pyramids, the luxurious dwellings of living tyrants, and the receptacles of their worthless ashes when dead, have in every country but our own cost more than all its canals and roads.... Egypt, Rome, Netherlands, England, and France, and even our own peace-loving country, have severally disbursed more in a single war than was required to complete a system of improvements sufficient to perfect their union, wealth, and power.''

Seward's political lieutenant, Samuel R. Ruggles, put forward as the principal promoter of the Erie rail line, was elected a few days later to the state legislature and became chairman of the ways and means committee. Seward was elected governor the following year, on a platform of building transportation infrastructure. In the legislature, Ruggles wrote the 1838 ``Report upon Finances and Internal Improvements of the State of New York.''

The state paid for the revival of the Erie railroad, contributing more than $6 million, with localities donating still more. Virtually the entire construction of the line was at public expense. In return, the state was allowed to appoint several directors to the Erie's board. In his 1840 annual message to the legislature, Governor Seward recalled Gen. George Washington, in 1783 at the close of the Revolution, having foretold New York's future inland navigation to Lake Erie. He described the results of the great projects to open up the interior districts and cities of New York State, and allowing the distant city of Chicago to easily and cheaply exchange its products with those of New Yorkers.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts proceeded with the line westward from Boston. The first leg, the Boston and Worcester railroad, was completed in 1835, despite opposition from powerful Tory interests. The key promoter of the whole project was Edward Everett, a teacher of Greek, proud of calling himself ``the first American to receive a Ph.D. at Germany's Göttingen University,'' and a close supporter and relative by marriage of John Quincy Adams. His brother, Alexander Hill Everett, had been Adams's private secretary when Adams was U.S. ambassador to Russia (1809-11).

Edward Everett was elected Massachusetts governor on the platform of extending the rail line west into New York. Everett put through state government stock and bond purchases totalling $3,700,000, to build the Western Railroad, as against the $800,000 which came from private investors. The state got four out of nine directorships on the Western, to coordinate with George W. ``Pipes'' Whistler, the line's chief engineer. Governor Everett promoted a series of other railroad enterprises, all to converge on Boston.

New York Governor Seward is best known historically as the Secretary of State for President Lincoln during the Civil War. Massachusetts Governor Everett is remembered, if at all, for delivering the long oration at Gettysburg, overshadowed by Lincoln's Address.

Keeping in mind how globalist policymakers now denounce ``state-subsidized projects'' in would-be developing countries, see how Seward's son described the patriotic elation at the completion of the great multi-state rail line:

``The opening of the railway to Boston was considered as the beginning of a new era in commerce, and was greeted with appropriate demonstrations. On the 27th [of December, 1841,] the first through-train from Boston over the Berkshire Hills arrived at Greenbush [on the east bank of the Hudson] in the evening, and was welcomed with rockets and cannon on both sides of the river. ``The Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the Common Council of Boston ... and the directors of the railroad, were on board; were received at the ferry by the Common Council of Albany, and escorted in triumph by military and fire companies, with torches and music, to Congress Hall.''

During the extensive celebrations, Governor Seward toasted,

``The States of Massachusetts and New York: they have combined in the prosecution of the Western Railroad; may they become as united in maintaining the faith and the integrity of the Union!''

Seward's son wrote that they celebrated their new power over nature, having effectively reordered the region's geography:

``On the table was bread made of flour which was in the sheaf, brought in a barrel that was in the tree, at [far-distant] Canandaigua two days before. Sperm [whale oil] candles, made by Mr. Penniman at Albany in the morning, were burning in Faneuil Hall [in Boston] in the evening. Salt was on the table which thirty-six hours before was three hundred feet underground at Syracuse.''

These transport projects created cities such as Buffalo and Rochester from what had been wilderness, and made New York City into one of the world's leading metropolises. Huge areas were suddenly connected to markets for their farm, forest, and mineral goods, which now took on great economic value. The resulting increase in land prices represented real progress, not speculative hot air.

Americans build foreign railroads, Brits launch war

American nationalists employed the power and resources of government to develop the U.S. interior with an immense railroad grid; they built 121,000 miles in 55 years, from the Army engineers' 1828 startup of the Baltimore & Ohio, to the 1883 completion of the Lincoln-commissioned Northern Pacific out to Tacoma, Washington. This task was accomplished over the resistance of the British faction, the London-Boston-Wall Street axis, which sought to block the integration of the West into an American industrial republic.

We may put this strategic contest between America and the British Empire into sharper relief by reviewing two cases of American railroad-building in foreign countries--Russia and Peru--and by observing Britain's bloody counteractions.

Russia

Franz Anton von Gerstner, whose 1840 report greatly aids any serious study of early U.S. railroads, himself built the very first railroad in Russia in 1837, just before he came to America. Gerstner's experimental line covered only a 17 mile stretch from the Tsar's palace to St. Petersburg.

Five years later, the Russians were ready for their first serious railway project. In 1842, Tsar Nicholas|I hired ``Pipes'' Whistler to build a line from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Whistler had spent the previous several years working on the Great Western Railway (from Boston to the Erie Railroad). Whistler moved to Russia and planned and supervised construction of the 400 mile Russian railway. Philadelphia manufacturers provided locomotives. Whistler also built Russian rail factories, docks, bridges, and fortifications. At the same time, Russia adopted its first high-tariff system, emulating the Henry Clay-John Quincy Adams ``American System'' economic policy, thus protecting against British trade war and launching Russia's modern iron industry. Whistler died in Russia in 1848.

The British looked coldly upon this initiative, which threatened to ``Americanize'' Russia. Their attitude may be seen in a diatribe written in 1852 by a high-ranking British intelligence operative:

``Russian railroads seem to be meant for Russian soldiers; and it is the facility thus afforded of moving large bodies of men that invests this mode of communications in Russia with an importance which does not attach to it in Great Britain, or perhaps any other country in Europe, to an equal extent. When St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Warsaw become connected, Russia assumes an entirely new position with regard to the rest of Europe. A few days, instead of many months, will then suffice to concentrate the armies of the north and south upon the Austrian or Prussian frontiers. Through this same quarter of the world, many hundred years ago, poured those barbaric hordes which overran civilized Europe; it would, indeed, be a singular testimony to the spirit of the age, if the next invaders made their descent by means of railroads.''

This is the traditional British hate-propaganda which today uses the trick phrase, ``dual-use technology.'' Of course the Russians could use railroads to move troops (though they built their lines with a different gauge from that of western Europe, to defend against invasion!). But the Americans acted to create an anti-imperial concert of modernized, sovereign nations.

Britain responded by launching the Crimean War against Russia. Alexander II, who became Tsar during that 1854-56 bloodbath, was so shocked at British superiority and Russian backwardness, that he moved his country rapidly into modern times, allying Russia with Abraham Lincoln and inviting in new American railway builders.

Peru

Our other foreign case study is of a project generally unknown in the United States, but famous to Peruvians: the railroads built in the 1870s across the Andes Mountains by an American, Henry Meiggs. This was the most ambitious railway program ever planned in South America. Meiggs is revered in Peru, and hated with a hot passion in London and in U.S. Anglophile circles. Meiggs and his Peruvian sponsors, including economist and statesman Manuel Pardo, proposed to cut rail lines from the Pacific coast across the Andes into the interior. Aiming to integrate the continent economically, they proposed to transform social relations and make the backward peasantry into modern citizens.

Henry Meiggs had a ``spectacular'' life, to go with the railroads he ultimately built.

He was born in 1807 in the town of Catskill, New York, on the Hudson River. As a young man, he ran a family lumber enterprise in Catskill, and in Boston. From 1828 into the 1830s, U.S. Army engineers surveyed and supervised construction on a rail route from Catskill northwestward. The line through Catskill was to be one of two rail links from Boston to Lake Erie, designed to bring sudden prosperity to precisely Meiggs's kind of business. The Army officers, led in 1831 by William Gibbs McNeill, took the rail line across the Catskill Mountains to meet the Erie Canal, using many bridges and scaling sharp gradients. When the Van Buren depression of 1837 wrecked Meiggs's business, and stalled the railroad construction, New York restarted the Catskill and Canojoharie Railroad with a $300,000 state loan.

With this historic, state-sponsored, mountain rail-building enterprise as his inspiration, Meiggs went into business in New York City, and then, during the California Gold Rush, moved out to San Francisco. Meiggs became a political leader in the patriotic pro-Union faction running the California Democratic Party. An alderman and entrepreneur, he built the North Beach district of San Francisco, founded the San Francisco Philharmonic Society, built the Music Hall, and sponsored the best Classical music talent. His faction, led by New York-bred political boss David Broderick, Gov. John Bigler, and banker (later general) William T. Sherman, came under murderous attack by pro-secession/pro-slavery operatives, including the ``vigilantes.'' Under terrible financial pressure, Meiggs fled with his family onto the high seas, pursued unsuccessfully by an armed mob of creditors against whom he had defaulted. He eventually made good on all his California debts.

Meiggs sailed to Chile. California Gov. John Bigler, the U.S. ambassador there, met Meiggs and recommended him highly to Chilean leaders. As Bigler's brother William had been governor of Pennsylvania and president of the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad Company, Meiggs was now evidently well enough connected to make an ambitious new start, late in life. He undertook to organize and manage difficult railroad constructions in Chile, whose success came to the attention of the nationalist faction in neighboring Peru.

During the American Civil War, Europeans took advantage of U.S. military preoccupations to try to restore imperial rule: Britain, France, and Spain invaded Mexico, and Spain invaded Peru. The American nationalists and military, as they became able to do so, sided with the Hispanic republics, and the European armies withdrew. Under President José Balta (1868-72), Peru's government hired Meiggs to build an astonishing set of railroads into the Andes. The lines ran from the southern port of Mollendo to Arequipa, on to Puno and Juliaca en route to Cuzco; and from Callao next to Lima, up the Rimac Valley and on across the heights to Huancayo. Meiggs employed his laborers under uniquely humane conditions, and the results were considered a wonder of modern times, the most daring and ingenious mountain engineering known to the world.
On New Year's Day, 1870, Meiggs spoke at a celebration in Lima marking the opening of his second Peruvian project, the Central Trans-Andean Railway, known popularly as ``the railway to the moon.''
Meiggs told the proud civic gathering that the object was to:

``scale the summits of the Andes and to unite with bonds of iron the people of the Pacific and the Atlantic.... Its immense transcendancy will very shortly be felt in all spheres of human activity. This happy event proclaims in the future a great social revolution whose triumph and whose benefits are entrusted to the locomotive, that irrepressible battering ram of modern civilization. At its pressure will fall those granite masses which physical nature has until today opposed to the agricultural, industrial, and mercantile agrandizement of the Peruvian nation. Its whistle will awaken the native race from the lethargy in which its dominators, supported in abjection and isolation, have kept it for so many centuries under ... error and ignorance.... ``Steam, which shortens time and cuts distances, is the most rapid and secure means of introducing life and material development to the backward Amazonian regions.''

The Meiggs projects had long been envisioned and promoted by Peru's nationalist economist Manuel Pardo. In an 1862 booklet calling for development of Andean railroads, Pardo wrote of the need for a true national revolution:

``If railways are called to exercise a redeeming mission in the wild deserts of America, no less are they to effect a moral and intellectual revolution in the backward and ignorant masses that form the bulk of our population. Means of communication will exercise their beneficent influence in two ways. In one way by giving mobility to men who today pass their life and die nailed like stones or plants where nature cast them down, for mobility for them is shortly material liberty.... Mobility also brings enlightenment; not, of course, the enlightenment of books and theories, but the practical science of life which frequent communication with men gives.''

Pardo challenged the supposed inevitability of a backward state of the populace that allows oligarchs to rule by manipulating mobs or terrorists:

``Merely bettering their moral condition can give them those principles of personal dignity and independence without which they can never be anything but miserable helots, commoners attached to the soil and blind instruments of everyone who cuts a cudgel to order them about. By bettering the material condition of our people, we shall oppose the most effective barricade against the advances of tyranny ... [and] against the forces of the anarchists. That is the second means whereby railways ought to exercise their moral influence upon populations.''

The British Empire mounted a political, diplomatic, financial, and ultimately military offensive to stop this menacing initiative. President Balta was murdered in 1872, and was succeeded as President by Manuel Pardo. Squeezed mercilessly by international finance, Meiggs and the Peruvians were unable to carry the project across the continent into Argentina or Brazil, thus preventing the uniting of the continent. Peru was bankrupted, and Meiggs died, impoverished, in 1876.

In 1879, the British ran a puppet Chilean Army and Navy attack against Peru, known as the War of the Pacific. The invasion aimed at destroying Peru as a nation, and smashing up the newly built railroads, which were the greatest in South America. U.S. President President James Garfield, inaugurated in 1881, replied with U.S. overt and covert aid to Peru, at the same time cooperating with railway projects in Russia, and allowing Americans to sponsor the revolutionary underground against British rule in Ireland. President Garfield and Tsar Alexander II were both assassinated within the space of a few months in 1881.
Garfield's Secretary of State, James Blaine, testified in Congress about what had happened in Peru:

``The ... English bondholders ... put up the job of this war on Peru.... England sweeps it all in.... The iron-clads that destroyed the Peruvian Navy were furnished by England.... It is a perfect mistake to speak of this as a Chilean war on Peru. It is an English war on Peru, with Chile as the instrument.... Chile would never have gone into this war one inch but for her backing by English capital, and there was never anything played out so boldly in the world as when they came to divide the loot and the spoils.''

Winning this war, the British financiers, led by a British immigrant to America, W.R. Grace, in their own name then foreclosed the entirety of Peru, putting the railroads and virtually all other enterprises into British ownership.

W.R. Grace, the founder of the imperial trading company that ran western South America for the British (and spun off Pan American Airways), rendered the financiers' verdict on Henry Meiggs, as paraphrased in an American newspaper:

``New York, October 12 [1877]--W.R. Grace, head of the chief Peruvian firm in this city, speaking of the financial condition of the late Henry Meiggs at the time of his death, says he thinks that really nothing but a mass of worthless securities and contracts are left behind Meiggs.... Meiggs was a visionary man, who carried out vast schemes, but they were often things that a sound business man would consider worthless.''

In recent years, Peru's Shining Path terrorists, whose terrorist operations receive backing from London, have sought to destroy Peru's railroads, and all advanced civilization. Russia is collapsing under the misrule of plundering speculators, its infrastructure collapsing. In the United States, the rail system has ground to a halt, sucked dry by financial adventurers. The looters will not invest a penny in building up a rail line; but they are free with their warnings, that no nation must ever again dare to do so.

Footnotes

Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (New York: Random House, 1937).

Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner, Die innern Communicationen der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika, originally published 1842-43, English translation from the German, edited by Frederick C. Gamst, published as Early American Railroads (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997). Gerstner was a German-speaking Czech subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who allied himself with the Philadelphia-based U.S. nationalists to such an extent, that he named his U.S.-born daughter, ``Philadelphia.''

Alan Levinson's research has been of great help in the present work. See Levinson, ``America's Railroads: Success Story for Dirigist Nation-Building,'' The New Federalist, Jan. 27, 1992.

Forest G. Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways: The Army Engineers and Early Transportation (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977), p.|47.

Ibid., p. 102.

The Corps of Engineers, created in 1802, was directed to locate at West Point and there to constitute a military academy. From then until the Civil War, the Academy was controlled by the Army's Engineer Department and was operated as the national school of engineering. Most cadets actually resigned from the Army within a few years after graduating, with the blessing of the government, so as to supply their vital government-furnished training to the nation's enterprises, private and public. Thus, beyond those active duty officers directly assigned to railroad planning and construction, many more engineers with Army backgrounds made careers managing the growing U.S. railway network.

``The Bourbon Conspiracy that Wrecked France's École Polytechnique,'' EIR, June 20, 1997.

Charles F. O'Connell, Jr., ``The Corps of Engineers and the Rise of Modern Management, 1827-1856,'' in Military Enterprise and Technological Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985), p.|99.

George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Rinehart & Co. 1951), p.|100.

Thomas P. Kettell, railroads section of 80 Years' Progress of the United States (Hartford, Connecticut: L. Stebbins, 1867).

March 14, 1812, quoted in Gerstner, op. cit., p.|48.

Frederick W. Seward and William H. Seward, Autobiography of William Henry Seward, with a Memoir of His Life (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1877), pp.|342-343.

Ibid., pp.|573-574.

Ibid., p. 574.

Ibid., p. 575.

For the British-financier faction's 1870s attack on U.S. railroad building, see Anton Chaitkin, ``London's Murder of McKinley Sets Up U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship, War,'' EIR, March 24, 1995.

Laurence Oliphant, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea in the Autumn of 1852, quoted in Albert Parry, Whistler's Father (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1939), p.|1.

Watt Stewart, Henry Meiggs, Yankee Pizarro (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1946), pp.|61-62. This biography, a raving hatchet job against Meiggs, is openly favorable to the British financiers who eventually swallowed up Peru.

19. Manual Pardo, Estudios sobre la Provincia de Jauja, Lima, 1862, pp.|47-48, quoted in Stewart, op. cit., p.|73.

Ibid., quoted in Stewart, op. cit., pp.|73-74.

Congressional Testimony, House Report, 47th Congress, 1st Session, No. 1790.

Stewart, op. cit., p. 341.

NOTE: This article is a rough version of the article that appeared inThe American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The NewFederalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to TheNew Federalist, and The American Almanac.

http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/railroad.htm

Great rail projects raised living standards

The earliest U.S. railroads, government projects with private participation, as in the 1960s Apollo space program, immediately increased Americans' standard of living. The expense and time involved in travel, and in shipping farm and factory goods, were dramatically minimized, increasing freedom, productivity, and overall profitability, while making everything more affordable. These figures, suggesting the change, are taken from George Taylor's The Transportation Revolution.

Freight rates per ton-mile

Transportation	1816	1853	1860
Turnpikes	$30.00 and up	$15.00	$15.00
Mississippi-Ohio rivers downstream	1815	$1.30	$0.37
Mississippi-Ohio rivers upstream	1815	$5.80	$0.37
Erie Canal	...	$1.10	$0.99
Chesapeake & Ohio Canal	...	$0.25	$0.25
New York Central Railroad	...	$3.40	$2.06
Erie Railroad	...	$2.40	$1.84
Pennsylvania Railroad	...	$3.50	$1.96

Time for freight shipment, Cincinnati to New York City

1817:	Ohio River keelboat to Pittsburgh, wagon to Philadelphia, wagon or wagon and river to New York City:	52 days
1843-51:	Ohio River steamboat to Pittsburgh, canal to Philadelphia, railroad to New York City:	18-20 days
1852:	Canal across Ohio, through Lake Erie to Erie Canal and down Hudson River:	18 days
1850s:	Steamboat to New Orleans, packet boat to New York City,	28 days
1852:	All rail via Erie Railroad and connecting lines:	6-8 days

What Does Culture Do?

2011-01-28T06:42:00.003-05:00

As we have documented this fact in locations published earlier, the turn in direction of pathway, away from President Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, toward the catastrophe which is our nation's terrible condition today, was begun as part of an operation in which the later head of our Central Intelligence Agency, John Foster Dulles' brother Allen, played a key role, toward the close of World War II. This is a role he played together, and over the later decades his life, with accomplices, including his James Jesus Angleton. Dulles and Angleton, typify those who played a key role in bringing a key part of the Nazi SS intelligence apparatus into the inside of what became, later, the NATO system.

This integration of key elements of the Nazi SS apparatus into our postwar intelligence system, was the outcome of a process which had begun when leading Nazis, such as some around Hermann Goering, recognized that the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, when combined, in effect, with the U.S. naval victory at Midway, foretold the coming defeat of the Adolf Hitler phase of Nazi Germany. These Nazi circles are typified by Dulles' Geneva-based contact François Genoud, Walter Schellenberg, and former Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht and his Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny, as Anglo-American-protected ex-Nazi assets in Europe, such as operations conducted through Spain's fascist dictator Franco. These assets, such as the notorious "rat-line," were used as channels for relocating significant elements of the Nazi apparatus in the Americas, where the circles built up around descendants of those Nazi assets are a key threat to the security of our hemisphere, including the interior of the U.S.A., today. Meanwhile, as the case of Falangist ideologue Blas Piñar's present leadership among Nazi relics in Europe and the Americas attests, the parts of the Nazi SS apparatus which were rescued by aid of Dulles et al., are presently an active influence and security threat, in the present disguises of the Nazi International, in both Europe and the Americas generally.

Those Nazis themselves were only part of the problem. As we have documented this in earlier reports on the "Beast-Man" phenomenon, the fascist organizations which took over Western and Central Continental Europe during the interval 1922-45, were political assets of a network created and directed by a network of private financier houses, a network which was brought together in the context of the unworkable form of international financial-monetary system created, at the close of World War I, under the authority of the Treaty of Versailles. This apparatus, run top-down by these financial circles, is properly filed under the counterintelligence category named the Synarchist International. The Nazis were but one among the sundry brand-labellings included in the assortment of "left-right" political conspiracies created by this Synarchist International.[1]

Once the probable doom of Hitler was apparent to relevant German leaders, as early as during the first half of 1942, the intent of those inner circles of Nazis around Hermann Göring, was to save the financial kernel and certain personnel of the Nazi system for a role in the postwar world. Their intention was, to create a system of universal fascism, an imperial system, a new version of the Roman Empire, to either eliminate all nation-states, or absorb them into an imperial system of what today's Michael Ledeen has designated as "universal fascism," his translation, for practice, of Allgemeine-SS. Those Nazi and other varieties of philosophically existentialist elements, were collected to form a combination of other Continental European fascist networks, and were integral to the Franklin Roosevelt-hating, Anglo-American networks associated with Henry Luce's already existing project for "A New American Century."

The integration of these elements into a common, Anglo-American-dominated, "right-wing international" network occurred, all under the direction of the "Bilderberg" or kindred expressions of the fascist international financier syndicate. This same Synarchist International, which had created Hitler, also produced that subversive enemy of ours who later appeared under such significant labels as "The Congress for Cultural Freedom." To sell Nazism today, package it into a can bearing an Orwellian label such as "Project Democracy."

The history of the background to the connection between Synarchism and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, includes the following notably relevant historical features.

Like that co-founder of what became the fascism of Mussolini, Hitler, and Francisco Franco, the pro-Satanic Count Joseph de Maistre, and like the forerunner of Adolf Hitler, Friedrich Nietzsche, the characteristic of those forces of evil expressed both as fascism and as those followers of Allen Dulles promoting the philosophy of the so-called Congress for Cultural Freedom, is their "Silenus" cry of hatred against the legacy of progress of European civilization. So, Maistre expressed his hatred against the legacy of the 15th-Century Renaissance, by worship of the Beast-Man image of that Satanic anti-Semite Tomás de Torquemada. So, the Christ-hating anti-Semite Nietzsche harked back to the pagan brutishness of a Phrygian Dionysus.

To understand Synarchism today, we must recognize and understand that modern fascism then, as now, takes its origins from the Martinist freemasonry which worked with Lord Shelburne's London to organize France's Reign of Terror. This is the same freemasonic order which produced Napoleon Bonaparte, and the interchangeable parts known as Talleyrand and Fouché. It is also, today, expressed in the form of a modern fascism unleashed by the financier plotters of that 20th-Century Synarchist International which also gave us the legacy of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco.

To understand this persistently recurring threat to modern civilization, we must focus attention on the historically specific characteristics of that European civilization which was first brought forth in Greece by what Socrates would have acknowledged as the midwives supplied by a great Egyptian tradition. The legacy of evil expressed by the image of the Congress for Cultural Freedom today, is the image of a potentially fatal infection which is the leading specific threat to a particular species of culture, the specific culture of a European civilization traced in its original best aspects, as Plato did, from the images of Thales, Solon, and Pythagoras.

When that matter is placed in that historical light, the history of the problems of the globally extended European culture, since ancient Greece, can all be defined in an appropriately elementary way. One feature stands out in significance above all others: How does that European civilization define, or reject, the existence of a fundamental, principled distinction, of man from beast? How does this conception function, in principle, as in practice? What crucially relevant lessons does history, real history, show to the actually thinking U.S. citizen whom I address here? What does it show him, or her, about the crucial issue posed by the influence of CCF and its like?

Are You a Man or a Monkey?

Closer, modern study of the astrophysical principles expressed by the architecture of Egypt's Great Pyramids of Giza, has provided crucially typical, scientific evidence bearing upon the way in which Egypt contributed to the specific quality of greatness achieved by what we call today the Classical Greek culture of Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, and Plato. Since the birth of the modern Europe of the sovereign nation-state, an institution which emerged from the Italy-centered 15th-Century Renaissance, European civilization, as defined by that Classical heritage, has been expressed, typically, as the modern notion of a sovereign nation-state republic. With this 15th-Century emergence of a new institution, the sovereign nation-state, demanded by such preceding leaders as Dante, and described, as to essential points of principle, by that century's Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, had become the most effective form of existing institutional power for improvement of the condition of mankind.

The distinction of the emergence of modern Europe, through the struggles against the shackles of an ultramontanist form of medieval imperialism, is that, for the first time, in the shadow of Filippo Brunelleschi's crafting of the cupola of the Cathedral of Florence, the bestializing legacy of empire gave way to the notion of a community of sovereign nation-states each and all committed to promotion of that general welfare of mankind. This was the same prescribed goal sought since Solon of Athens, as defined by the Classical Socratic Greek, and Christian, principle of agape.

Unfortunately, as the role of the pro-Satanic Tomás de Torquemada illustrates this, the Venice-orchestrated, ultramontane forces of reaction against that Renaissance, struck back with bestial, homicidal fury, as typified by that interval of A.D. 1511-1648 religious and kindred warfare which was brought to a close only through the leading role of France's Cardinal Mazarin in bringing about the great 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. That principle of the Treaty of Westphalia is the achievement upon which civilized modern European life has depended, since then, to the present time.

Unfortunately, the conflict did not end, as settled, in that treaty, then and there. A fresh threat to civilization arose in the rise to power of a new imperial pretender, the 1688-1763 rise of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal party, as expressed by the British East India Company of Lord Shelburne et al., to the rank of a global imperial power. It is the issues defined in the rising conflict between that Company's imperial power and those patriots gathered around the North American colonies' leading intellect, Benjamin Franklin, which has been implicitly the principal axis of reference for all notable, long-term forms of global conflict since 1763, to the present day. Although the British East India Company has passed on, its legacy, like the effects of an epidemic infectious disease, has continued its impact on modern, globally extended European history, up to the present day. The impact of that legacy has continued to define the matrix of world conflicts, from 1763 to the present day.

To understand adequately what the legacy of Allen Dulles et al., continues to represent, as a continuing threat of fascism in the world today, we must place our finger on the subject of the origin of Martinism, and its outgrowths such as Synarchism. What we know as 20th-Century fascism, or Synarchism, as we fought against it under President Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, lies in a persisting effort to overturn those principles of civilized relations among sovereign nation-states which were adopted by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

As I shall explain summarily, now, and conclude discussion of that point later in this present section of the report, what was called, interchangeably, the "Venetian Party" or empiricists' "Enlightenment" of 18th-Century England and France, emerged as a newly attempted form of worldwide successor to the Roman Empire. This imperial role was established with the British East India Company's triumph at the 1763 Treaty of Paris. The Martinist freemasonic order which led the unleashing of the French Terror of the 1790s and Napoleon Bonaparte's tyranny, was itself a joint instrument of the imperial British East India Company's Lord Shelburne (1737-1805) and anti-U.S.A. forces of continental Europe. The Martinist order was an instrument created with the initial intention, as assigned by the Company's Lord Shelburne and his flunky, Adam Smith, to play a crucial role in wrecking the cause of the English-speaking colonies in North America and bankrupting and destroying Liberal London's most potent continental rival, the great Louis XI-Mazarin-Colbert tradition which was the best of France at that time.

Leading U.S. patriots in the tradition of the early Cincinnatus Society had come to understand this more and more clearly, especially since the time John Quincy Adams began to clear his own head in such matters, during the period he virtually created the functioning form of the U.S. State Department. [2] Notably, John Quincy Adams went on from there, as later President and senior member of the U.S. Congress, to launch what later became the Abraham Lincoln Presidency and the tradition which I, personally, represent, as an informed spokesman, as a U.S. Presidential candidate, today.

As I have said above, the roots of modern European civilization go much deeper than modern times. In the history of European civilization, it was from the Egypt of those Pyramids and of the founder of the ancient nation of Israel, Moses, that European civilization adopted a specific quality of rigorous notion of a fundamental, principled distinction of man from beast. The initial realization of what became known as European civilization, occurred principally as the impact of that same conception associated with the universalized, Mosaic nature of man, in forming the Classical tradition of what we call ancient Greece today.

Although the nature of the human species is the same everywhere, and although there is, therefore, a necessary, long-ranging tendency for convergence of nations upon common principles of mutual conduct, the history of the development of a European culture, by that name, as rooted in the history of ancient Greece, has a distinct quality of historical specificity, from beginning to the present date. This requires competent thinkers to treat the internal development of the offshoots of ancient European cultures since Solon's Athens, as an historically specific process which must first be studied as a distinct subject of converging cultural developments in its own right.

The most essential feature of that history is the long struggle, as since Solon's Athens, between the effort to establish a true nation-state republic of citizens, and the opposing effort, typified by Sparta under the Constitution of Lycurgus, or the Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, and ultramontane forms such as medieval, Venice-centered Europe. The backers of the CCF project represent the latter, imperial impulse, an impulse toward eradicating the existence of sovereign nation-states, as the presently wildly utopian thrust toward plunging the planet into the doom of imperial "globalization," attests.

The issue so posed by the CCF legacy, in particular, is the nature of the functional, constitutional distinction between men and apes. That principled distinction is defined as follows.

Egyptian science as echoed by that of the Pythagoreans, Thales, and Plato, was associated with a pre-Aristotelean conception of mathematics, which was derived from astronomy, a conception of physical geometry, rather than an aprioristic mathematics such as that of Euclid. This pre-Euclidean, and, implicitly anti-Euclidean method of physical science was then known as "spherics." This notion of a physical geometry, rooted in the concept of "spherics," rather than an aprioristic, merely formal geometry, provided the basis for defining an experimental proof of the existence of a fundamental physical principle, principles designated as what we call today "powers" (Greek: dynamis), as Carl Gauss's 1799 attack on the frauds of Euler and Lagrange, in Gauss's first statement of The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra supplies an implicitly geometrical statement of the mathematical-physical representation of "powers."

Typical proofs of powers so defined, included the notion of the doubling of the line, of the square, and of the cube. Added to this was, most notably, the notion of the construction of a series of Platonic solids, as this was reported by Plato, and was addressed by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa[3] and his followers, Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci, and the avowed follower of all of these, that founder of modern astronomy, Johannes Kepler, who set the pace for the singular achievements of such as Fermat, Pascal, Huyghens, Leibniz, and Jean Bernouilli.

The experimentally based discovery of, and willful use of such physical principles, expressed the provable, absolute distinction of persons from animals, the distinction between man and ape. These principles were of two general categories, principles of man's intervention in nature, and principles of the social processes through which mankind increases our species' power in and over nature.

Otherwise, the most significant implication of these considerations, is the Promethean way in which mankind transmits the act of discovery of such powers (experimentally demonstrable universal principles) from one person to another, and thus from one generation to another. Through the transmission of the replicatable act of generating such discoveries of universal principle, we have the only way in which the human species has been able to increase its potential relative population-density, above the level of the millions possible for a species of higher ape, to more than 6 billions living persons today.

These principles have three most notable qualities, as follows.

Although a valid universal physical principle is never, itself, an object of sense-perception, its experimentally proven universality of efficiency is an efficiently existing object of the mind. In other words, although the effect of application of a principle must be a subject of a mathematical description, the principle itself is not the mathematical formula, but is, rather, an integral, indivisible object of the mind, in the same way that the notion of an irreducible object of sense-perception is the idea of an object.[4]
The standpoint of "spherics" adopted by the Pythagoreans, et al., thus divided human experience of the physical world between invisible, but efficient principles, and their implicitly visible sense-perceptible effects. In modern mathematical physics, this set of ontological distinctions is expressed as the notion of the complex domain as introduced by Carl Gauss and refined by his follower Bernhard Riemann.
The true notion of a universal physical principle is never a way of merely explaining nature (contemplation), but is a method of acting efficiently to change nature in ways which only efficient comprehension of a discovered universal physical principle permits. It expresses an intention, whether an intention by the Creator of the universe, as Kepler defined the principle of universal gravitation which he had discovered, or by man acting in a way like that of that Creator. We must presume, at least to the present date, that all principles of the universe existed prior to man's consciousness; however, when man discovers the power to deploy such a pre-existing principle, man's action, as an intention, changes the ordering of the universe within which we act.[5]

The Prometheus Principle in History

However, in societies in which a relatively few hold others in the status of human cattle, the ruling strata of that society, like the Roman Emperor Diocletian before them, are careful to prescribe that society must not educate those we intend to condemn to the status of human cattle, above their intended station in life. The implication of that is, that the society committed to the notion of maintaining people in the status of human cattle, or, perhaps monkeys, does not wish to advertise the existence of those mental powers which set human beings apart from, and above the beasts. In European civilization since ancient Greece, this intention, to hold a large number of people in the status of human cattle, is expressed systemically by what is termed "philosophical reductionism," as this is expressed as the tradition of those opponents of the Pythagoreans known as the Eleatics, Sophists, and radical Euclideans, or the modern philosophical empiricists, positivists, and existentialists such as Nietzsche, the Nazi Martin Heidegger, and his co-thinkers Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Karl Jaspers.

That issue is famously typified by the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. The evil gods of Zeus's Olympus captured the immortal Prometheus, chained him to a rock, and tortured him perpetually, to induce him to abandon the intention to give knowledge of universal physical principles to those human beings whom Zeus intends to hold in the status of nothing better than dehumanized, human cattle. This issue, as posed by the image of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, has proven itself to be the most important issue in the history of European civilization as a whole, since no later than the founding of that civilization in ancient Greece.

It is the issue of the individual person's right to discover, and to know experimentally, provable universal physical principles, and to apply these principles of knowledge to change man's relations to nature in ways which increase the potential relative population-density of the human species. It is, in other words, the right to know, and to practice that truth which the Satanic Olympian Zeus and his oligarchy hate with the fiercest hatred. It is the right of mankind to enjoy the blessings of progress, the right to improve the condition of the human individual in the broadest and deepest sense of that notion. It is the notion of agape posed by Plato's Socrates, in opposition to the historically defined characters Glaucon and Thrasymachus, in Plato's Republic.

The transmission of knowledge of experimentally definable universal physical principles, from one person to another, and one generation to the next, is the expression of an immortal character of the role of the mortal individual in society. As Plato insists, and as the Christian Apostle Paul emphasizes in his 1 Corinthians 13, this principle of agape, so conceived, is the highest rank of moral and other law respecting human behavior. Jesus Christ's expression of the Creator's love of mankind, as agape, is the essence of the principle of natural law in the practice of civilization. So, Leibniz, in repudiating the evil intrinsic to John Locke, placed agape, as the principle of the pursuit of happiness, above all other law. So, the central Constitutional principle, and statement of intention of the U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence, defined Leibniz's notion of the pursuit of happiness as the highest principle of our Constitutional law.

The term "Satanic" should be understood as controlled in its practical meaning as expressing a vicious form of practice of denial of the individual person's likeness to the Creator. Every person's life is therefore sacred. The Beast-Man behavior of captors in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, is an example of people, those captors, as like Nazi concentration-camp guards, captors self-degraded into the likeness of inhuman predatory beasts. Similarly, the widespread attempt to interpret the U.S. Federal Constitution as a body of "contract law," especially among those mentally crippled by the burdensome tradition of the U.S. Confederacy, such as the radical "dictionary positivist" and U.S. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, is an expression of that quality of the "Satanic," the degradation of human beings to the rank of property (e.g., "shareholder interest"). The treatment of any human being as a subject of "shareholder value" (i.e., Lockean property), as the current practice of the 1973 overturn of the Hill-Burton legislation by the HMO "reform," is therefore an implicitly Satanic mode of behavior. This Satanic quality is the characteristic feature of such evil British Fabian Society celebrities as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, their crony Aleister Crowley, and their sorcerer's apprentices Aldous and Julian Huxley. The pollution of the U.S. by the relevant influences of Wells, Russell, et al., has become an expression of a Satanic influence in U.S. intellectual and other behavior.

In these matters of natural law, it is not the act as such which is crucial for law. It is the expressed intention underlying the act which is crucial. For this purpose, we must define "intention" as Kepler defined the Creator's intention which is expressed as that universal principle of gravitation (His, not the empiricist Galileo's) which governs the composition of the Solar System. Ignorance of the intention by which an act might be judged, is, in a certain degree, exculpatory, as in the case of a person lacking the powers or will for knowledge, to distinguish between right and wrong. In human behavior, it is the person's assignment of an intention as the purpose of his, or her life, which is of crucial bearing on the way in which society must judge the degree of actual culpability in, and remedies for, violation of a principle of natural law.

This point is illustrated by recognizing the experimentally validated discovery of any universal physical principle, such as Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the principle of gravitation, as expressing the Creator's intention. Thus, we must intend to promote such forms of scientific progress, as discovering the Creator's intention, and must regard ourselves as morally, constitutionally bound by the intent to pursue that course, and enforce the implications of such discoveries, as effectively as might be possible.

This distinction is made clearer in nature and importance, when we consider those misguided persons who refuse to recognize the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Federal Constitution as enforceable intentions to which all interpretation of any other features of that Constitution, its amendments, or Federal law, must be made subject. Any positive law, any contract which violates those intentions, such as Scalia's evil reading of "shareholder value," must be nullified, as if axiomatically, even as if retroactively. Or, a contract negotiated by the relevant parties in apparent good faith, must be nullified in those aspects which might be discovered to be in conflict with natural law.

For example, in the history of the U.S., and other nations, the fact that a person had been property (e.g., a slave), by prior determination, or birth, was treated under a reading of that pro-slavery doctrine of John Locke which had been repudiated by the language and intention of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Similarly, as in the case of those current debts of the nations of Central and South America which were imposed arbitrarily, upon those states under the newly imposed rules of a post-1971 floating-exchange-rate monetary system, rather than being incurred by the will of the debtor, are properly nullified under any judicial ruling consistent with natural law. No self-evident sanctity exists in any contract as such, except as there is no implied violation of natural law in the relevant terms at issue.

A true national constitution, such as our Declaration of Independence, and under the terms of the Preamble of our Federal Constitution, derives its authority from those of its statements of intention which are comparable to the notion of necessity that man-made law must be consistent with the same principles of knowable intention attributed to the Creator's law. In this matter, mankind must hold itself and its nations accountable for herding the national law of sovereign states into channels of intended effects consistent with the same notion of intention properly attributable to the notions of universal physical laws.

In all this and related matter, the Promethean right of the human individual and society to participate in the benefits of scientific and technological progress, must be enforced as a matter of natural law. This principle of law of statecraft must be viewed from the standpoint of the absolute distinction of man from ape. (If you reject scientific and technological progress, as the Luddites did, then you might apply for status, under law, as a monkey: A witty judge might merrily grant your plea.) Man's nature is his likeness to the Creator of the universe, in the respect that man's power to discover and employ universal physical principles, is a quality of human nature shared only with the Creator, and that any suppression of that right, by Zeus or any other force, is Satanic by implication.

The implication is, that the only just society is one which fosters scientific and technological progress, in changing both nature and man's mode of practice to this effect. In the language of a science of physical economy, this signifies the development and application of knowledgeable practice to the effect of increasing the physical expression of potential relative population-density of the human species, per capita and per square kilometer. Therefore the related notions of economic growth, and of physical profitability, are restricted to measurements made in physical terms, rather than, and often in defiance of, monetary terms of financial accounting. The attempt to shackle the physical practice of a society to the accounting office, e.g., usury, is implicitly a form of Satanism, and has often proven to be just that in many instances of practice. The only true profit is that which is an increase of good for mankind as a creature made in the likeness of the Creator.

The most essential consideration, therefore, is the need to promote the development of those mental powers of the individual which generate revolutionary changes in practice to the effect of increasing the net physical productivity of society per capita and per square kilometer.

For example, the greatest increase in the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer, was set into motion by the 15th-Century Renaissance's launching of the modern form of sovereign nation-state whose principles are prescribed in such locations as Cusa's Concordantia Catholica and De Docta Ignorantia. It was the achievement of modern forms of sovereignty by more nations, such as India and China, through their gaining the right to conduct their affairs in a way informed by the achievements of the European form of modern sovereign nation-state, which has made possible what has been already gained, as echoes of the anti-colonialist policies of the U.S. Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and greater foreseeable advances in the human condition among such peoples under a renewal of that President's intention today. This is the policy which affords us today, not only a way of escape from the threat of a global new dark age descending upon the world today, but a brighter vision of the future of humanity as a whole.

Shelburne's Evil Legacy Today

Through the mechanics of the British East India Company's orchestration of the so-called "Seven Years' War" on the continent of Europe, that Company diverted France's attention sufficiently from the larger world, to continental strife, that the British Company neatly snapped up control of what we know as Canada, India, and relevant other locations. Thus, the Treaty of Paris which acknowledged this outcome as a matter of law, established the British East India Company (rather than the British monarchy as such) as, in fact, a global, nominally British empire.

What became known to this day as the Bank of England's role as a keystone of a so-called "independent central banking system" has been the dominant feature in the long-range unfolding of the history of both the United Kingdom and continental Europe, up to the present day. This system was known, during that century, as the system of "The Venetian Party." The slime-mold-like concert of financier-oligarchical interests, which had exerted de facto imperial power with the medieval alliance of Venice and Norman chivalry, had, so to speak, reincarnated itself, from the late 17th Century on, as a new Anglo-Dutch-pivotted "Venetian" financier oligarchy, based in the maritime regions of Northern Protestant Europe. Intellectually, the imperial potencies of the Company's empire, spoke Dutch, English, and so on, but they thought as Venetian, as Francesco Zorzi (a.k.a. Giorgi), Giovanni Botero, Paolo Sarpi, Galileo Galilei, Antonio Conti, Voltaire, and Giammaria Ortes had taught them to think.

In this setting, Lord Shelburne emerged as the frankly diabolical, rising figure of influence within that Company. Shelburne and his circle of personal lackeys, such as Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and the consummately pro-Satanic Jeremy Bentham, played key roles as Shelburne agents, in setting out the intended ground-rules for the consolidation of the Company's empire as a permanent successor to the defunct Roman Empire.

Shelburne's role and rules, so defined, set the dominant features of the patterns of Europe-dominated global conflict which has, predominantly, determined the course of the general flow of world history, from that time to the present.

The concerns of Shelburne and his circle were the potential dangers to the eternal perpetuity of that empire from the inside and outside, respectively. The chief external threat they feared, was the impact of the American Revolution as a model which might infect Europe. Otherwise, they continued the proven policy of the Seven Years' War, a policy of keeping the nations of Europe more or less at one another's throats, as a way of preventing the emergence of a continental-Europe-based power which might overturn the imperial power represented by the Bank of England. Within the latter context, the immediate concern of Shelburne's circles was to destroy the power of the U.S. allies of 1776-83, Charles's Spain and Louis XI's France, chiefly the economic power represented by the Colbertiste tradition still alive within France.

President Abraham Lincoln's victory over Lord Palmerston's asset, the insurrectionary, slave-holders' Confederate States of America, became a principal threat to the continuation of that British Empire's hegemony over the planet. Not only had the victorious U.S. emerged as a continental nation-state power which could no longer be crushed by the methods of external attacks and internal subversion which Britain had employed up to that time. The startling success of the U.S. economic model, over the interval 1861-76, was drawing leading powers such as Alexander II's Russia, Bismarck's Germany, and others, including Japan, during and beyond the late 1870s, into adopting leading features of the Hamilton-Carey-List American System of political-economy, as the preferred alternative to the British system.

The result was a massive emphasis by pro-British influences, on subversion of the Republican Party, in addition to assets already in tow from within the traditionally pro-slavery Democratic Party. Meanwhile, that Prince of Wales and later emperor, King Edward VII, plotted to unleash what we call World War I, which led to the subsequent plotting of what became World War II, by the British fellow-travellers of the Continent-based Synarchist International.

During the course of World War II, the leading intention for perpetuating the empire in the postwar world, was supplied by the circles of H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, as in Russell's public acclaim for Wells's 1928 The Open Conspiracy and Russell's key role in organizing the introduction of warfare with nuclear-fission weapons as the instrument for establishing a form of imperialism called "world government," then, and "globalization," today. These are the current forms of the proposed continuation of the imperial perspective developed under the leadership of Shelburne. The doctrine of a "perpetual war" in the guise of "preventive, nuclear-weapons-armed warfare," of Prime Minister Tony Blair's confederate, Vice President Dick Cheney, is the present expression of the imperial policy set forth by Wells and Russell.

Throughout the postwar period to date, the "Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" has complemented the development of nuclear-fission and nuclear-fusion weapons, as an integral feature of this same imperial intention to uproot and exterminate the institution of the sovereign nation-state. The intended function of that "Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" associated with the CIA project linked to Commentary magazine and others, has been to destroy the institution of the U.S. sovereign nation-state at its root, its commitment to the American System of political-economy associated with the Constitutional founding of the U.S. republic and with the U.S.'s rising to a long-term world-power status under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The corruption of the post-Lincoln U.S.A. in such directions, was premised on a political alliance between the London-allied, Manhattan-centered financier oligarchy and the relics of the slave-holding Confederacy. The legendary conflict between Republicans of the New York and Ohio varieties, is typical of this. The takeover of the U.S.A. to this effect, was accomplished through aid of the assassination of President William McKinley, and the domination of the next three decades of U.S. life by the impact of two Presidents in whom the tradition of the Confederacy was deeply embedded, Theodore Roosevelt and Ku Klux Klan enthusiast Woodrow Wilson. It was under the influence of this combination assembled around the Teddy and Woody show, that the origins of the U.S. role in the post-World War I Versailles Treaty, and the launching of what became the "Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism," took shape.

Looking back at the history of the U.S.A. since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, we can appreciate why certain trans-Atlantic, English-speaking partners came to support Wells and Russell in placing such emphasis on the efforts to uproot and destroy the traditional U.S. commitment to the benefits of scientific and technological progress in development of basic economic infrastructure and modes of agricultural and industrial production and employment. To defeat the U.S.A., the imperialist must take the American commitment to the beauties of scientific and technological progress out of the American, as this process of extraction has been fully ongoing during the recent four decades.

This pattern of change in British strategic outlook since the 1861-76 developments in the U.S.A., is signalled by the emergence of the circles of Thomas Huxley, and of the related circles of George Bernard Shaw and other notables of the history of the Fabian Society. Huxley's personal Zauberlehrling, H.G. Wells, a key figure in preparing for World War I, typifies this. The post-World War I reconciliation of Wells and Bertrand Russell around a common evil intent, expresses this in the continued life of the postwar world whence Wells and Russells have now long departed.

Roosevelt's leadership of the U.S. economic recovery, and the role of the U.S. under him at war, showed that the earlier attempts to subvert the U.S. had failed, failed because the earlier attempts to crush the American patriotic character had failed to uproot it. This time, they, decided, they would uproot it. The Congress for Cultural Freedom project, and the closely related "Frankfurt School," like the Fabian Society, typify the subversive modes employed to the latter purpose.

The `New Dark Age' Syndrome

Relatively speaking, those who, like bellwethers Cheney and Tony Blair, have come into key positions of Anglo-American power, are not notable for qualities of intelligence, nor even sanity. Their principal dupe, poor President George W. Bush, would be sympathetic as a poor, pathetic person of less than meager intellect, were he not so damnably mean about it all. Even if they conquered the world, as they have conspired to conquer and loot Iraq, they would fail more or less precisely as the lessons of the continuing asymmetric warfare in Iraq forewarn intelligent professional observers in the U.S. and elsewhere today. Their success, were it to occur, would mean nothing but the collapse of the planet as a whole into a prolonged new dark age of humanity, during which world population-levels would drop toward something substantially less than a billion miserable souls, perhaps even much, much less. These would-be tyrants would make Genghis Khan retch in disgust at the poor quality of monster, such as those, the world is apparently capable of producing today. These are not true leaders, even evil ones; these are a kind of demented slime-mold.

There is no victory for the U.S.A., Britain, or anyone else, under a continuation of their combined present reign over much of the world's policy-shaping. Those incumbent governments are failures, catastrophes from the outset. The issue is, whether or not we choose to send our posterity to Hell with them.

There is nothing particularly exotic about foreseeing a new dark age as the consequence of failing to dump what Cheney and Blair represent today. The distinction of the human individual from the beasts, lies in the development of those creative cognitive powers of the individual from which Classically scientific and artistic powers of composition spring. In former times, when most men and women have been subjected to a more or less brutish existence as virtual human cattle, a relatively few individuals have escaped from that prevalent dementation, to become the creative personalities on which the potential basis for progress is provided, even under mean conditions for society at large. What "The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" has attempted to do, and, to a large degree, already done, is to eradicate even those relatively limited institutional arrangements under which some creative individuals were produced in sufficient supply to keep society in a manageable state of more or less continued progress. The attempt by the freaks of Commentary and their like to devise a perfect program for preventing the reappearance of generalized scientific and cultural progress, has been all too successful. The continuation of the proposed form of imperialism, called euphemistically "globalization," would mean the virtual eradication of any remaining, institutionalized capability for organizing a recovery of mankind's potential relative population-density, until such time as the present system of rulership had died out by the effect of the works of its own hand.

Throughout the history of European civilization, the relatively effective approaches to bestializing at least a large part of the human population, have always taken forms which converge upon a formal method of thought and argument which is called reductionism. One example of this is the introduction of derivatives of what is called Euclidean geometry today, a flawed notion of geometry which was introduced to eliminate the method of scientific discovery associated with Thales, the Pythagoreans, and Plato, the method associated with "spherics." All efficient forms of intended systemic corruption of the European human mind's potential for scientific thought, have taken the tactic of Euclidean geometry as a model of reference. This tactic occurs, in various times and places, in a more or less radical form; but, the underlying principle is the same fraud introduced, as what we know as Euclidean geometry, to replace "spherics."

Whereas, in Classical pre-Euclidean notions of science, the form of geometry associated with the Pythagoreans, as with Plato, and, for example, Kepler and Bernhard Riemann later, was not abstract geometry, but, rather, physical geometry, a concept of physical geometry implicitly defended by the 1799 Carl Gauss against the reductionist sleight-of-hand of d'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange, a defense later developed into the view of the complex domain provided by Riemann.

However, the essence of the dirty trick copied by Euler, Lagrange, et al., was to adopt the outgrowth of Euclidean geometry known as the Cartesian Model, an abstract, a priori model of space, time, and matter, based on the set of unproven, but arbitrarily asserted definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Euclidean, or like form of schoolbook geometry. In this way, by excluding the way in which discoverable universal physical principles are expressed in the forms of the complex domain, the reality of the existence of fundamental physical principles, is replaced by a linearized mathematical approximation. Thus, the essential act of discovery, and related quality of actual proof of principle, is banned from the typical classroom and textbook. In this way, the real notion of the act of discovery of a universal physical principle is more or less banned from the knowledge of even the putatively highly educated ranges of the population.

The same crime is committed by sly plagiarist Galileo's wicked pupil Thomas Hobbes, who bans Classical irony and the related role of the subjunctive from speech! I explain this critical point.

In oral communication, especially as in Classical poetry and drama, the audience is presented with principled conceptions for which no name pre-existed in the known vocabulary of that audience. These previously unknown conceptions are the pivotal subject-matter of any Classical form of drama or poetry. The bridge provided for inventing, and imparting the name for the previously unknown conception, is Classical irony. Classical irony uses the creation of a paradox (e.g., "ambiguity"), by means of which the mind of the hearer is challenged to make a discovery of a kind tantamount to an experimental discovery in physical science, such as Kepler's discovery of a principle of universal gravitation. The mind of the member of the audience is motivated, and induced to discover the needed new idea by being challenged with that artificed paradox of the author and speaker. The recognition of that paradox now becomes the utterable name of the newly discovered idea, just as the name of an original discoverer is often attached to the notion of the relevant discovery as an cognizable object in communication. Reenacting the process of discovery of the thought-object called principle, as experienced by the putative original discover, becomes the experience which the student must relive, to make the same unified thought-object (Geistesmasse) his or her own. So, the idea enters the vocabulary through the mechanisms of Classical irony, just as the discovery of a universal physical principle, and that principle's recognition as a definite object of thought, proceeds in the work and teaching of physical science.

A discovered principle is not a mathematical statement by means of which an idea of principle is constructed. A discovered principle is a physical principle which exists outside previously known mathematics. It is an integral, indivisible object of the mind; the mathematics which may be properly associated with the expression of that principle, is not the principle itself, but, rather, the trail it leaves behind in its motion. One does not derive a principle by mathematics; one derives a new mathematics, as Riemann prescribes this, by the discovery of a form of object of the mind known as a universal physical principle, a principle whose trajectory can be mapped in a newly recreated, enriched mathematics.

The degradation of education and communication to systems of deductive/inductive derivation from putatively self-evident definitions, axioms, and postulates, is the most effective way of turning putatively well-educated populations into persons ignorant of, and hostile to, actually creative human thought. The people so brutalized, are like the people to whom Zeus forbade Prometheus's efforts to educate them in their native powers of creative thought. Thus, even the educated strata of society are induced to degrade themselves in a likeness of their mental behavior to that of human cattle.

In ancient Greece, such methods of reductionist brainwashing were known as the work of the likeness of the Eleatic school and, later, the Sophists whose way of thinking and behaving led Athens toward doom in the course of the Peloponnesian War.

What is being done to the U.S. population today, under the more radical programs of the "Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism," is an extremely radical version of the same type of "dumbing down" of an entire generation, which we associate with the ancient Sophists of Athens.

The frequent effect of such practices of "dumbing down" masses of people into the likeness of human cattle, is a propensity for the spread of wild-eyed religious and other cults, such as those of the right-wing U.S. religious fanatics of today. For example, the use of reductionist methods by the 18th-Century Enlightenment, produced the related lunacies of Physiocrats such as François Quesnay and of Adam Smith. Quesnay's notion of "laissez-faire" was premised on the insistence that the profit of the estate was not produced by the action of the human cattle, called serfs, but by the magical powers of the landlord's title to his "shareholder value." This particular piece of lunacy, as advocated by Quesnay and Turgot, was plagiarized by Shelburne's Adam Smith as "the invisible hand"—the hand that Cheney and his cronies put into your personal pocket, for example. In such cases, arbitrary choices of clusters of words "Which I have chosen to believe," however arbitrarily, however fancifully, became a substitute for truth. The result is a form of mass-insanity, reminding us of the spew of Flagellants in the 14th-Century New Dark Age.

The actual conceptions of Christianity are well known, beyond doubt, from not only reading, but reliving the historically specific experience of the New Testament against the background of the Platonic influence pervading the educated strata, such as the Apostle Paul, as also of Philo of Alexandria, of the Hellenistic culture of that time. So, J.S. Bach composed his St. Matthew and St. John Passions, that the congregations might relive that historically specific experience on a suitable occasion. That Christ was sacrificed by the Roman occupying authority of Judea of that time, as Christ's followers, such as many of his Apostles acting in the imitation of Christ, like Jeanne d'Arc and the Rev. Martin Luther King, is the kernel of belief in Christianity as a doctrine of the Creator's love for a mankind which that Creator esteems as redeemable, because it is the noblest creature in his Creation, a creature made in His Own likeness. Christianity is a faith based, not in the Satanic qualities of hatred expressed by a Grand Inquisitor or a John Crowe Ransom "Fundamentalist," but in the form of love for mankind which Plato's Socrates identifies as agape.

By contrast, the thundering cacophony of hate spewed currently by the indecent union of war-like pseudo-Catholics and Protestant neo-flagellants, like the anti-Semitic rants of Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, has nothing to do with Christianity, but has a great deal to do with the more or less Satanic depravity which has been greatly increased in depth and scope by the spread of the virulent irrationality fostered by the transit of the culture of the Americas, and elsewhere, during the recent 40 years.

Thus, considering the effects already displaced by the regime directed by "true believer" Vice President Cheney, no sane person who could honestly propose sincerely that the program we have denounced here, is anything less evil than literally Satanic.

The only remedy is to impel the leading institutions responsible for recent trends in policy to simply "Give it up!" Sooner or later, of course, a Renaissance will come, as it did after the New Dark Age which Venice and its Norman allies bestowed upon Europe's 14th Century. Human nature is divine in that sense; unsuppressed, since man is naturally good, mankind will seek out its reconciliation with its Creator. On that account, Satan can not triumph in the long term; precisely the contrary outcome is ultimately inevitable, because it is man's nature to work to bring that about.

My point is, therefore, that the onrushing New Dark Age is not as inevitable as the poor weak-brained commentators suspect. It is not inevitable, if we choose to prevent it from happening.

We have come to a time in the development of humanity, at which the principle of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia must be consistently applied to the effect of establishing a world order premised upon a community of perfectly sovereign nation-state republics, each and all committed to the guiding principle of "the advantage of the other." We of the U.S.A. must heartily recommend this change to our neighbors in the United Kingdom, for example: "Give it up! You have been at it much too long; look where it has brought us now! Empire in any guise, by anyone, is an expression of the most deadly of the childhood moral diseases of humanity." The essential self-interest of any person, and of any nation, is not what he, or she, takes away from life, but what his or her developed talent gives to humanity at large. We are each and all born, and shall surely die, sooner or later. Let us be accordingly wise; let us not hope to keep what dies with us, in any case, but treasure that which lives after, especially that which has come into existence because we have lived.

A wonderful person, Getrude Pitzinger, one of the great singers of the past century, who had become our friend during a preceding decade, received my wife and me, her brother, and a friend, for some hours spent together, during a time shortly before she was to die. She organized those hours to such effect, that she instructed my wife Helga, who is known in Germany as a person of exceptionally appropriate insight into the German Classic, to go to our host's library, to draw a book containing a poem which Frau Pitzinger wished Helga to recite. Then, Frau Pitzinger would select one of her own recorded performances of a song-setting of that poem. As those hours of that meeting drew to a close, Frau Pitzinger exclaimed with a special kind of satisfaction, "I have lived to sing these songs." She died a short time later.

A great artist, born of simple background from Olmütz, the place where Lafayette had once been imprisoned as a favor to the British, with an extraordinary talent, a familiar of the greatest artistic performers of her time, could sum up her life happily: I have lived to give these things. Her performance of the Brahms Four Serious Songs and the Schumann Frauenliebe, are among our outstanding memories of her. She was, as Schiller and my wife concur, and I too, a beautiful soul, who gave much, much more than she took, as every patriot who is also a world-citizen, should do.

That, simply summarized, is the kind of world state of affairs which we should be content to build. It is time that a new President of the U.S.A., who has a deep devotion to such things, step forward as the rallying-point for a world which, by now, should be more than tired of the experience of the foolishness to which I have pointed here. Let us bring the sovereign peoples of the world together, for the kinds of collaborative developments of which a President Franklin D. Roosevelt would not have been ashamed. Let us give something good, and timely, to future humanity, before we, in our turn, pass on.

1. Otherwise known by World War II-period U.S. military intelligence as "Synarchist: Nazi-Communist," a network then including the lists of such notable Synarchist assets as Houston's de Menil, Mexico's Soustelle, and Soustelle's former teacher Paul Rivet, in Ayacucho, Peru. This was also known by U.S. intelligence in France as the Banque Worms conspiracy. Soustelle's later operations, including the targetting of France's President Charles de Gaulle from bases in Franco's fascist Spain, are typical.

2. The collapse of the U.S. Federalist Party was, most immediately, a result of the blunder of the Administration of President John Adams, in being taken in by a fraudulent propaganda-piece, Sir John Robison's The Roots of the Conspiracy, crafted and circulated within the U.S. by French Terror-controller Jeremy Bentham's British Foreign Office. The issue of the Alien & Sedition Acts, as posed by the circulation of Robison's hoax, is typical of that folly, President Adams' toleration of his wife's, Abigail Adams', foolish, continuing tirades against the most clear-headed U.S. leader of that time, Alexander Hamilton, typifying the state of confusion which led to the self-inflicted doom of the Federal and Democratic-Republican Parties.

3. E.g., De Docta Ignorantia.

4.Compare Herbart's and Bernhard Riemann's coinciding, but different, uses of the German term Geistesmasse (i.e., "thought-object").

5. This view subsumes a notion which is at least as old as ancient Greek culture, that the universe is composed of three specific, interacting classifications of universal physical principles: non-living, living, and cognitive; the latter, although an existing universal, is a power unique to the human individual among mortal individuals of living species. This Classical Greek view was afforded its modern expression by the work of the great Russian biogeochemist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky, and his definitions of Biosphere and Noösphere. It is man's discovery and employment of universal physical principles which accords with the notion of man and woman made equally in the likeness of the Creator, as in Genesis 1.

- Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

May 27, 2004

The Emperor's New Statistics

2010-02-04T07:07:00.004-05:00

The Obama Administration and Wall Street would have us believe that the economy has turned the corner and is recovering, each for its own reasons. But as with all habitual liars, watch what they do, instead of what they say. If they really believe the crisis has passed, why are they so committed to ramming fascist austerity measures down our throats?

Saving the Parasites

The great success of the "economic recovery," we are encouraged to believe, has been the rebound of Wall Street. To believe that, however, you have to swallow some real whoppers.

The first of these is that Wall Street has actually recovered. Despite the biggest theft of public funds in history, Wall Street remains hopelessly bankrupt, its financial institutions holding enough uncollectable debt and toxic waste to sink them all many times over. The level of fraud is so great that, were proper investigations to be done and all the guilty punished, we'd have to build new prisons to hold all the bankers, accountants, lawyers, and regulators being incarcerated.

The second whopper is that the profitability of Wall Street is a valid marker for the health of the economy. That's akin to measuring the health of a dog by the growing number of fleas it carries, since, just like the fleas, the bankers of Wall Street thrive by sucking wealth out of the economy. It was Wall Street, after all, which oversaw the dismantling of the industrial might of the nation, and promoted the transfer of U.S. production overseas, in the name of profits.

We would also have to believe that Wall Street is an American phenomenon, dedicated to the welfare of our nation. Wall Street is actually an arm of that London-centered global financial oligarchy known as the British Empire, and its actions are designed to destroy our nation. As it has.

The giant theft known as the "bailout" is actually designed to keep this imperial looting operation alive during the transition to an intended global fascist dictatorship. No recovery is intended, or even possible, under this regime.

Instead, what is planned is the systematic looting of the population, to keep the financial profits flowing as the economy continues to decline. President Obama's health-care plan is a good example of what is intended, forcing people to pay premiums to the insurance companies, while at the same time cutting the care people will receive for their money. "Pay more, get less," is the motto for this unholy future. As governments at all levels go broke, they will be under increasing pressure to raise fees on such basic infrastructure as roads, water, and sewer systems, or sell them to private companies which will jack up the fees.

The imperial bankers know we will rebel against such austerity measures, which is why they are so determined to expand the police-state apparatus. They know they will need it! This is the future that awaits us, under the present "recovery" policy.

An Honest Recovery Plan

An honest recovery plan starts from the standpoint that the people come first, and that the way to raise the standard of living of the people is to increase the productive power of human labor. The history of our own nation is exemplary of that principle. We developed our inland waterways and then transcontinental railroads to tie us together; we improved the quality of our land, generation after generation; we developed new technologies to expand the power of our machines, and so on.

This commitment to science and technology for the benefit of all our citizens, was what turned our land into a nation, into the most advanced economy the world has even seen. It enabled our young nation to not only break free of the British Empire, but to begin to transform the world. We saved the world from fascism in World War II, largely because of our physical-economic prowess—we produced more ships, more planes, more trucks, and guns than anyone else.

After the war, we had the great promise of the Atoms for Peace program and the peaceful use of nuclear power. But that was shut down by a campaign organized by the British, who wanted to stop the world from advancing to a new technological level. As a result, our scientific advancement was halted in crucial areas, and our economy began to stagnate. Since then, we have watched one industry after another wither, to the point where we are today just a shadow of our former productivity.

To compensate for this loss in wealth-production, the bankers of Wall Street stepped in with loans. We gradually became a nation of debtors, and as that debt grew, Wall Street developed new financial instruments such as derivatives, which were used to turn the growing mountains of debt into new classes of assets, fueling even more speculation, and debt. In the end we had so much debt that it could never possibly be repaid, and we were choking on paying even the interest.

This is the system that the bailout would restart, the system which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner defended so ardently in his Congressional testimony on AIG last week. These fools are not saving the world, they are destroying it, and turning back the clock to the days before the American Revolution changed the world.

If we are to have a real recovery, we must return to those American System principles we have abandoned, restoring sound physical-economic development. We must not only rebuild, but expand our infrastructure, using the most advanced technologies. That means building lots of nuclear power plants to generate the electricity we will need to power a new Renaissance. We need to build a national network of high-speed mag-lev trains, and connect that network into Ibero-America, and across the Bering Strait into Russia, from whence it can reach into the rest of Asia, into Europe, and Africa. We need huge water-management projects, to provide water for our arid western states, and the new cities we will build there. We must put a man on Mars. Such projects are not just costs, they are investments—real investments—in the future of our nation and of mankind. They are absolutely necessary for our survival.

To do this, however, means a complete reorganization of our existing structure. We must put the financial system into bankruptcy protection, where the financial claims associated with the imperial casino can be written off, and the financial claims associated with economically useful activity can be protected. We must shut down the casino, and end the power of the Federal Reserve and other private banks to control the issuance of our money. We must break the grip of the British Empire over global finance, so that we can move forward in the interests of the people, instead of the financial "elite."

We must do so now, while we still have the chance.

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by John Hoefle
johnhoefle@larouchepub.com

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2010/3705new_statistics.html

Fascism And The World Company

2010-01-25T09:21:00.003-05:00

by John Hoefle

February 29, 2008--With virtually every passing week, new reports of financial disaster surface, with previously obscure financial instruments becoming front-page news, new multi-billion-dollar losses at major financial institutions—including those that were said to be sheltered from such events—and more calls for emergency actions to stave off a spreading crisis we were assured was under control. We have moved with impressive swiftness from what have been reported as individual crises—subprime mortgages, subprime-backed securities, CDOs, SIVs, monoline bond insurers, et. al., to the latest, auction-rate securities—as if the financial system were a series of dominoes in a row, each problem triggering the next one. The regulators have treated the problems in the same way, trying to prevent particular dominoes from falling as a way of stopping the chain reaction. Obviously, this has not worked, and can not work, because it does not address the real problem, which is that the global financial system itself has collapsed. One could say that the dominoes are themselves disintegrating even as they topple in chain reaction, but even that understates the case.

This article will not cover the ins and outs of the financial disaster now unfolding, because, frankly, the details are not that important. LPAC is not "CSI Finance," and the process by which the carcass of the dead financial system decomposes is far less important than the fight over what type of system will replace it.

Few, if any, among the financial elite seem to understand that their precious financial system, which made them huge amounts of money and elevated them to great power, was based upon a simple fraud, namely treating a growing garbage-pile of unpayable debt as if it were a great mountain of wealth. Now, even as their delusion lifts like a fog, revealing the garbage, they are in denial. It is cyclical, they maintain, the fundamentals are sound and all we have to do is hang on until things return to normal. One can almost imagine the dinosaurs saying the same thing, as they went extinct.

Far from being in control, the financiers are reacting to events beyond their comprehension. They are acting on impulse, and their impulse is to try to save themselves no matter what the cost to the people of the United States, and the world. One can see this in the proliferation of bailout schemes being proposed on Wall Street and in Washington, all based on the premise that this is a temporary crisis, that the fundamentals are sound, that their delusions are real and that the reality of the collapse is the illusion. That, is a serviceable definition of insanity.

Cartels, and Fascism

What is left unsaid in all these bailout schemes is that they have the common aim of saving the speculators by passing the losses on to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which would pick up the tab, be it in the form of increased government debt and taxes, cuts in services, or the Rohatyn/Bloomberg plans to loot the public through the privatization of infrastructure.

As we have indicated in numerous locations, what is being proposed is a form of Mussolini-style corporatism, in which government becomes the agent for rule by financier-run corporate cartels. Since corporatism has a bad name, this variant of fascism has been re-branded as "globalism," a new and improved way of managing the world. Within the new packaging, however, lies the ancient evil of imperialism.

The cultural and political changes which burst forth in 1968 lay at the heart of the baby boomer generation's susceptibility to imperial manipulation. In addition to the cultural and political attacks upon the population in that period, an assault on the structure of the U.S. economy was also launched by the imperial gamemasters. The name of the project was the "world company," and it was introduced by senior Lehman Brothers banker and top Establishment figure George Wildman Ball at the Bilderberger meeting at Mont Tremblant, Canada, in April, 1968.

The aim of this world company project, as explained by Ball, was to eliminate "the archaic political structure of the nation state" in favor of a more "modern" corporate structure. "The world company has a great potential for good as an instrument for efficiently utilizing resources," Ball said, revealing the Malthusian nature of the project. Ball made explicit that what he was outlining was a return to the imperial form by citing "the overlapping sovereignties of the governments of Europe and the House of Rothschild," thus putting the financiers on the same level as governments. Ball also called for further political integration in Europe, as a precondition for expanding the power of the world company apparatus in Europe, a process he assisted by working with Jean Monnet and Robert Marjolin in laying the framework for what became the European Union.

After his Bilderberger speech, Ball and his co-imperialists gave a series of presentations designed to advance the project. One event, a 1974 seminar at the American Assembly, a Columbia University-affiliated operation housed at the old Harriman estate outside New York City, was turned into a book, "Global Companies, The Political Economy of World Business." Edited by Ball, it consists of transcripts of speeches attacking the very concept of national sovereignty and asserting the need for corporations to run the world.

In one of these speeches a top IBM official, Jacques Maisonrouge, used language similar to the claims made by globalists today. "Pandemic inflation, skyrocketing oil prices, scarcities of raw materials, disequilibrium in international payments, poor harvests, rising unemployment, high interest rates, growing fear of a global depression-these are only some of the problems bedeviling the human race," he said. "The seminal problem appears to be the lopsided distribution of the world's resources, both material and human. What is needed are mechanisms whereby those resources can be identified, managed, and more equitably distributed. One such mechanism-the international company-already exists. It is my contention that no better tool has yet been devised for realizing these goals than the international company." Presaging the claims made by Felix Rohatyn, Michael Bloomberg and the Rockefeller Foundation's Judith Rodin today, Maisonrouge claimed that "it is all too clear that purely political solutions do not work in the long run" as governments "place national interests, or their views of them, ahead of long-term international cooperation."

Felix the Fascist

While Ball was pushing this concept, his Lehman Brothers was working hard to implement it, and working closely with the Synarchist investment bank Lazard Freres to do so. Working together, these two firms were at the forefront of the assembling of the conglomerates, the predecessors to today's supranational giants. Cartelization, under the euphemism of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), has been the life's work of Felix Rohatyn, the long-time Lazard banker who, after a stint with Rothschild, joined Lehman. Rohatyn headed the New York Stock Exchange's Crisis Committee in the early 1970s, helping to restructure Wall Street to pave the way for this cartelization, and then became the most prominent of the M&A bankers. His sleazy role in orchestrating the machinations of one of his clients, ITT, involving deeds ranging from illegal stock parking to the installation of the fascist Pinochet government in Chile, earned him the insulting sobriquet Felix the Fixer, a name which, while true, was far too kind. Lazard, as U.S. and French intelligence reports have shown, was a controller of the Synarchy, the French variant of fascism, and Rohatyn was their man in the United States.

Over the years, Rohatyn has played a major role in building the globalist cartels that increasingly dominate the world economy. Now we have Rohatyn, a major power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, moving to complete the world company project by using the current financial crisis to defeat the nation-state. The intention is to use the financial crisis and the political paralyzation in Washington to "prove" that the "archaic" nation-state is unable to deal with the complex problems facing the modern world, and that it is therefore necessary to move "beyond politics" into a more efficient, corporatist structure. This is what lies behind the "public-private partnership" privatization schemes. Politics has failed, and it is now time for change, they say, offering as the model the very system against which we fought the American Revolution.

Should we allow this project to come to fruition, the world will rapidly descend into austerity and chaos, as the financier imperialists consolidate their grip over the planet. Their intention is to restore the predatory system represented by the British East India Company and the Venetian Levant Company, using the modern technology of Big Brother. This means consolidating their control over raw materials, using their control over the restructured financial markets to rig prices on the necessities of life (and making what Enron did to California look like a walk in the park), and dramatically reducing global population. Much of this has already been completed, but we still have the opportunity to stop it, restore national sovereignty, and put these evils back in their Pandora's Box. Forget the financial system, which is already dead. What is on the line is civilization itself.

http://www.larouchepac.com/credit

Cognitive Infiltration--It can't happen here...

2010-01-18T08:44:00.004-05:00

Glenn Greenwald has exposed in salon.com, a 2008 paper by the behavioral economist, Obama crony and Obama appointee Cass Sunstein. Greenwald began:

"Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for 'overseeing policies relating to PRIVACY, INFORMATION QUALITY, and statistical programs.' In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-'independent' advocates to 'cognitively infiltrate' online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems 'false conspiracy theories' about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.

"Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into 'chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.' He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called 'independent' credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false 'conspiracy theories,' which they define to mean: 'an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.'"

Finally, Greenwald quotes Sunstein at greater length, asking:

"What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5)."

To which Greenwald responds appropriately:

"So Sunstein isn't calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government 'ban conspiracy theorizing' or 'impose some kind of tax on those who' do it — but he says 'each will have a place under imaginable conditions.' I'd love to know the 'conditions' under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will 'have a place.' That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment. Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position."

Amidst other fun, Greenwald makes the obvious reference to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, who was paid almost a million dollars by the Obama White House to consult on its health reform, but posed for a year as an "independent expert" backing up White House claims. Greenwald briefly took on the sorry Paul Krugman for defending Gruber's corruption, whereupon Krugman promptly went ballistic on the internet.

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http://www.larouchepac.com/node/13164

How Obama's Healthcare Plan Will Impose Hitlerian Genocide on You and Your Family

2010-01-17T04:31:00.009-05:00

Under the pretext of extending health insurance to more Americans, Obama's so-called healthcare reforms would actually accelerate death-rates, especially among the aged, the chronically ill, minorities and the poor.

This is not some unfortunate error of one or another clause or provision. Rather, it saturates the entirety of the Senate bill from the first page to page 2409, the last page, and similarly for the House bill.

This is no accident; it is completely deliberate. This was the policy of Hitler's secret "T4" directive of September-October, 1939. This is the crime of genocide, for which, under the label of so-called euthanasia, Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg.

This too much to read? Try a 12 minute video report.

To begin to raise the curtain on the murderous intent of these "reforms," we will focus here on three features: first, the falsely so-called "Cadillac tax," which, in reality, is neither a tax, nor does it involve luxuries like Cadillacs. Second, on what physician Richard Cooper has called the "Dartmouth memorial clause," which would selectively withdraw Federal funds from hospitals in certain areas, and award those funds as bonuses to hospitals in other areas. Finally, we will refer, as we have before, to the IMAC or IMAB, an unlected, unconstitutional, Presidentially-appointed board solely dedicated to slashing Medicare, with little interference permitted from the elected representatives of the people in the Congress.

But before proceeding, it must be pointed out that the entirety of the Obama "healthcare" package, every part of which centers on subsidies for the Nixon-spawned private health-insurance entities known as "HMOs," is now completely under the cloud of the massive, unresolved AIG case, because of AIG's tentacles into the entirety of the insurance industry, including the HMOs.

Although the new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has done a sloppy job on this so far in its first days of hearings, nevertheless former New York Governor (and Attorney General) Eliot Spitzer and his friends have been effective in defining some of the problems from the sidelines. As Spitzer and his friends point out, still-secret Federal Reserve and AIG emails and other documents are critical to the investigation.

A related civil case against AIG is progressing in California, and the House Oversight Committee of Reps. Towns and Issa has subpoenaed those emails with a return date of Jan 19, while Geithner is to testify there on Jan 29 on this matter, in which he is a central player.

In the light of this, and since the entirety of what Obama and company are pushing as a healthcare reform, goes into this question,— and moreover when the indications are that there is something legally smelly about the whole insurance aspect of the Obama healthcare legislation,— then the entire package must be suspended until this can be sorted out. If this is all one big fraud, then Obama's bill is killed on that ground.

The Cadillac Tax Isn't a Tax

Begin with the so-called "Cadillac tax:" what all healthcare economics insiders know, including all sentient Senators and Congressmen and their staffs, is that the Senate bill's "Cadillac tax" is not a tax at all. It is simply a Congressional PROHIBITION on any employer-provided health insurance above a certain level of premiums, presently $8,500 for an individual or $23,000 for a family. The reason that it is falsely designated as a "tax," rather than what it actually is, a prohibition, is merely so as to try to evade the question of the constitutionality of such a prohibition. That is, for example, many state attorneys general have rightly challenged the constitutionality of any law which would require Americans to buy health insurance from private companies.

But what would they say of a Congressional prohibition on purchasing health insurance above some Congressionally-designated minimum price? Moreover, a minimum price which is quite openly pre-programmed to DROP still further every single year in real terms, so that more and more Americans lose more health security, each and every year into the indefinite future?

Again, there is no one "on the inside" so stupid as not to know all of this in full detail. Only the gullible general reader of such trash as the New York Times and Washington Post is fooled, in the hope that by the time he finally wakes up, it will be "Too late, sucker!"

The proof that the so-called "Cadillac tax" is a "tax" in name only, begins with the fact that no one expects it to be paid. This so-called tax will be assessed by HMOs and charged to employers, to the extent of 40% of the excess of every premium over the permitted minimum value. But official US government studies expect only very few of these employers to pay it. (Documentation on all these related questions of the "Cadillac tax," can be found through Rep. Joe Coakley's website, and through a Jan 13 post by Jane Hamsher on Huffington Post.) Or, as official expert Jonathan Gruber (more on him below) wrote in the Washington Post on Dec 28, "The Cadillac Tax Isn't a Tax."

But you might reply, "You say the Cadillac tax is not a tax. But if it were not really a tax, it would not produce revenue. But then how can you explain that the fact the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that it will contribute $149 billion to the Federal budget between 2013-2019?"

The simple and straightforward answer to that honest question, is so richly unbelievable, that no reader could be blamed if he thought it a joke. Here is how the misnamed "Cadillac tax" will produce that revenue, according to the CBO.

Rather than pay the "tax," employers will either reduce the health coverage of their employees, or drop it entirely. Here's the next step: for every dollar they save in premiums in that way, employers will turn around and give a dollar back to their employees in increased wages! Thus, the way the "Cadillac tax" contributes to Federal revenues (in this fantasy), is overwhelmingly (80-83%) through the increased social security taxes and Federal income taxes, which will be paid in by those millions of employees who will get all these raises from their employers! This when real unemployment exceeds 20%, and the wages and hours of those lucky enough to be still employed are falling rapidly.

If you can believe that, you may be eligible for a professor's chair at MIT, and even perhaps for a one-year, $400,000 grant from Nancy DeParle's White House Office of Health Reform. Jonathan Gruber has both, but he didn't disclose the $400,000 grant. Instead, he spent the past year as a so-called "independent expert," being continually cited by the White House in support of this bizarre theory, which Gruber says is demonstrated by some private, proprietary economic model which he runs in secret.

He wrote op-eds on this for both the New York Times and Washington Post after explicitly lying to each newspaper about his conflict of interest,— for which both papers have now had to apologize. But the game ended when Marcy Wheeler exposed Gruber's $400,000 secret payoff this Jan 7 on firedoglake.com. Now it's hard to find anyone to defend the "theory!" Never mind that the whole Senate bill, and the "Cadillac tax" on which Obama personally insists, all depend upon it!

Now, what will really happen if this "Cadillac tax,"— what International Association of Firefighters head Harold Schaitberger has rightly called "a disaster, a nightmare,"— what will happen if it becomes law? Gruber claims that employers will cut $223 billion in health coverage over a decade, and workers will gain $223 billion in wages. The wage part can be disregarded, but employers will indeed cut $223 billion in coverage, and likely a lot more,— this by closing down many of their health plans entirely, leaving workers with the much-inferior "exchanges," or Medicaid.

What coverage will these workers lose? Will it be luxuries? Gruber and other flacks cite a $40,000 plan at Goldman Sachs which includes free gym memberships and yoga lessons. Is that what will be lost?

Of course not. What determines premiums is not primarily benefit levels, but the age, health status, sex, and geographic location of the insured,— and completely arbitrary decisions by crooked HMOs even more so. The average coal miner's policy costs about $32,500. Group policies are far more expensive in the Bronx, as they are in the vicinities of other urban ghettos, than they are elsewhere. And the very same Senate bill which includes this "Cadillac tax," also allows insurers to TRIPLE their rates based on age, alone.

These are the things which determine the level of premiums, not luxury, "Cadillac" benefits. Therefore, who will be cut? Obviously: The aged, the poor and minorities, the chronically ill, women, especially of childbearing age, and those in health-imperiling occupations like mining.

Or, as one study says, this pernicious measure will "make healthcare unaffordable for many families that currently have employer coverage,... especially women, older workers, and those with chronic conditions."

To what effect? As if it weren't obvious enough already, when benefits are cut, as through increased co-pays, what happens? Every study shows that the first thing that happens is that the victims "forego care for the chronic conditions which determine the 'excess' insurance." Diabetes, for instance. High blood pressure, and many others. And they die faster; but that's the whole point, isn't it?

And lastly and most important: never forget that this is only the beginning. That the "Cadillac tax" is carefully pre-programmed by the Senate, to take a bigger bite every year, year after year after year, as the minimum allowable real level of employer plan drops relentlessly down every year like the scythe in Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum."

Obama has been instructed by his controller, Britain's Tony Blair, that we must die faster and more often. That's just what Blair did with Britain's National Health Service when he was Prime Minister. And behind Tony Blair stands the British Royal Family of Prince Philip, the Royal Consort, who has repeatedly demanded that the world's population must be reduced from a presently estimated 6.7 billion, to less than two!

The Wennberg/Dartmouth Scam

The four legs of the US healthcare system today are, first, employer-provided insurance, covered above. Second is Medicare for those aged 65 and over, which we will treat last. A third leg is the veterans' system, and, finally, the fourth could be said to be Medicaid for the indigent, combined with free emergency care for those who have really nothing. With the sole exception of the veterans' system,— for now— the genocidal Obama plan is out to cut off each of these four "legs" in its drive for death.

The Wennberg/Dartmouth scam is designed especially to cripple what's left of Medicaid, along with free emergency-room care for those who have absolutely nothing else to resort to, by pushing into bankruptcy just those hospitals which serve urban ghettos and the poorest parts of the rural South.

Both the House and Senate so-called "healthcare" bills will shift money out of the hospitals which serve poor ghetto areas, and shift it into the so-called "more efficient" hospitals in the Northwest and Southwest which do not. This genocide is rationalized by the studies of Jack Wennberg's Dartmouth Institute, which have been exposed as fraudulent by EIR's Ned Rosinsky and other writers, and even exposed in a paper by the Federal Medicare Advisory Commission, MedPAC, as even the whorish Washington Post was forced to admit in a Jan 6 article by Alec MacGillis.

To make it more blatantly genocidal, penalization of the so-called less efficient hospitals will be done, not by individual hospital, but by county. This insures that if your hospital serves Harlem or the urban ghettos of Los Angeles, Texas or elsewhere, or poor areas in the South, it will be deprived of the Federal money it needs to operate, no matter what its so-called "efficiency," in costs per Medicare patient. All teaching hospitals will also be screwed.

The so-called more-efficient hospitals which will be rewarded with the funds stolen from treatment of the poor, are exemplified by the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, which has lobbied heavily for these changes. But besides the fact that it treats virtually no ghetto poor, another reason for Mayo's low cost is that it charges significant co-pays for Medicare patients. Another is that it simply triages the indigent. Mayo announced in October that its flagship Rochester, MN, facility will no longer accept Medicaid patients from Nebraska and Montana. Already, only 5 percent were on Medicaid there, a much smaller percentage than other big teaching hospitals, and less than Rochester's other hospital.

Mayo's facility in Glendale, AZ, recently announced that it will no longer accept Medicare patients for primary care without an additional fee of $250 per year plus $175-400 per visit. And Bloomberg reported that one of Mayo's Arizona primary-care clinics announced Dec 31 that it would cease to treat Medicare patients at all as of Jan 1.

Starve the hospitals that treat the poor! This is reform?

IMAB, or the Secret "T4" Committee

On the third major genocidal feature, EIR has extensively covered the body variously called IMAC or IMAB, or most recently also called the "Independent Payment Advisory Board," IPAB.

Like the ironically so-called "Cadillac tax," this is a feature of the Senate's bill, which Obama has personally insisted must be included in final healthcare legislation. It is an unelected, unconstitutional, Presidentially-appointed dictatorial board of 18, which has vast powers to slash Medicare, and only to slash Medicare, never to improve it, with little interference from the elected representatives of the people in Congress.

The IMAB most closely resembles the committee of leading physicians set up under Hitler's "T4" order, to determine which of the ill or handicapped Germans were living a "life unworthy to be lived," and were therefore designated be murdered by doctors and nurses in a so-called "mercy death." The Chief of Counsel on War Crimes for the US at Nuremberg, estimated that they murdered 275,000 non-Jewish Germans in this way, beginning with handicapped children, before they started in on the Jews, Communists, gypsies and other undesirables.

Who does not know that the biggest funding source for the Obama deathcare bill is $500 billion in cuts for the Medicare program for the aged? The Senate health-care bill, passed, ironically, on Christmas Eve, not only gives an unelected, Presidentially-appointed commission dictatorial powers to slash Medicare reimbursements and deny treatments, but it attempts to prevent future Congresses from altering the dictates of the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB), violating the Constitution, as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) pointed out on the Senate floor.

And never forget that IMAB, like the "Cadillac tax," is designed to cut a bit more, every year, on top of last year's cuts. Forever.

Thus does Obamacare aim to destroy every part of the American medical system (with the temporary exception of the veterans' system). The goal is death, as with the Spanish fascist who cried "Viva la muerte!", or "Long live death!"

There are those who have claimed that every German was responsible for the crimes of Hitler, saying that "each of them must have known what Hitler was doing." Well, your Senator and your Congressman knows everything we have written above, and more, and he probably even voted for all of it as well. And now, you know it too!

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The above article will appear in the Jan. 22, 2010 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Iceland President Stands by His People

2010-01-08T12:03:00.001-05:00

January 8, 2010 (LPAC)-- Despite the hostility of the governments of Great Britain and the Netherlands, which have threatened to kick Iceland out of the "international community," Iceland President Olaf Ragnar Grimsson is standing by his decision, and defending, in interviews and statements, the right of his people to national sovereignty. In the Financial Times today, he is quoted as saying, "The Icelandic constitution is based on the fundamental principle that the people have sovereignty. It is the responsibility of the President to make sure that the will of the people will prevail."

He then called on the peoples of Britain and Netherlands ("and their political leaders") to stand "with the longstanding democratic traditions of Britain and the Netherlands, acknowledging that a referendum is a democratic way of making a decision,"

Grimsson was also interviewed in Swedish radio.

In an interview with BBC on Wednesday evening, Grimsson was verbally assaulted by the host, who looked like an attorney for Shylock and treated the President of a state like a felon. "Don't trust an Icelander," "Aren't international agreements more important than a President's will?" and "Are you happy with these results?" (downrating, loss of international credit, etc.) were the interviewer's questions and remarks. Grimsson taught the arrogant fellow a lesson, telling him, "I understand that Britain is not familiar with systems where the people is called to express its will " and that in Iceland, "not the parliament, but the nation is sovereign."

In contrast to the oligarchy, the British people continue to express their sympathy for Icelanders, at least judging from readers' comments continuing to flow in to major dailies (see below). It is probably due to this that a faction of the British establishment, represented by the Financial Times, has taken a distance from the government and openly rejected the "hard-line" approach towards Iceland. Significantly, an FT editorial today is entitled "Do Not Put Iceland in a Debtors' Prison." The FT also chose to publish a letter by Advocacy International, saying that it is "unjust" to make Iceland take sole responsibility for the "reckless behavior of private bankers and risk-takers."

The FT ran as a blowup quote, the view of its chief financial commentator, Martin Wolf: "This is not about cutting a running deficit, which is, indeed, unavoidable. It is about forcing innocent people to assume gigantic liabilities for which they have no legal or moral responsibility. How would U.K. citizens feel if they were forced to assume a debt of ￡400 billion because of HSBC's failure to meet deposit insurance liabilities in Asia? Let the U.K. take the bank's assets and leave it at that."

Also, Michael Hudson from the University of Missouri writes that "Iceland has the right to refuse debt servitude." Hudson argue that Iceland could pay foreign debt only out of balance-of-payments receipts, i.e. through export revenues. But already fish export revenues have been entirely earmarked to service existing debt; the same goes for aluminum exports and its geothermal and hydroelectric resources. Add to this the fact that most families have mortgages which, if the currency is depreciated, can only get worse, and you have the picture: It is impossible for Iceland to pay the debt. "A pragmatic economic principle is at work in such conditions. Debts that cannot be paid, will not." If we have learned the lessons of the collapse of living standards in post-Soviet Russia, he ends by asking, "by how many years must Icelandic lifespans shorten?"

According to a European banking source, the British and the Dutch are going to dump the burden on Scandinavian countries. On their side, the resistance organization in Iceland is calling on the Scandinavian governments to support them against the London and The Hague.

Obama's Approval Rating--How Low Can He Go?

2010-01-05T00:55:00.000-05:00

January 4, 2010 (LPAC)—The Rasmussen Report's latest daily Presidential Tracking Poll, done Dec. 31, shows that Obama's approval fell 3 percentage points in December, compared to 2% declines in October and November, respectively. The poll shows that 42% of U.S. voters "strongly disapprove" of Obama's performance as President, while only 24% "strongly approve"—yielding a negative approval rating of -18%.

Rasmussen polls also show that 47% of voters think states should have the right to opt out of whatever healthcare plan Congress adopts.

In addition to the Hitler healthcare, firedoglake.com blogger and liberal Democrat Jane Hamsher has pointed to the White House-allied groups who insisted that no Democrats attack the AIG bailout early in Obama's term. Hamsher wrote, "The natural people who would have been organzing at that point in time were the liberal groups. The bankers came to the White House and said, 'We want you to ratchet down the rhetoric,' and that's what happened. The word went out at those meetings, 'Don't criticize the bankers; don't criticize Geithner and Summers,' " Hamsher wrote, referring to the gatherings of groups organized by the Obama campaign apparatus. "All that populist anger migrated over to the teabaggers and grew over there. That was a huge mistake, and we're going to pay for it in 2010."

Following Republican gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey in November, the January 19 election for Senator Ted Kennedy's Senate seat may be another shocker. In perennially Democratic Massachusetts, over-confident Democratic candidate Martha Coakley has gone on vacation, while Republican State Senator Scott Brown is running an ad showing President John Kennedy delivering his speech advocating tax cuts, and then cutting to Brown, who continues reading from it. In the past 6 weeks, Scott Brown's online donations have exploded.

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/13011

No More Shooting for Little Fixes and Reforms. Let's Go fot It.

2009-12-31T02:43:00.005-05:00

Every move to take down the protections put into place by President Franklin Roosevelt after the banking collapse of the early 1930s, was done in the name of reform. The repeal of interstate banking prohibitions, the deregulation of the savings and loan sector, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, along with a host of other measures, were all done in the name of reform.

Today, we are up to our chins in calls for reform. Some of them are genuine attempts to restore sanity to our regulatory process, others are well-intentioned but misguided efforts that would fail to have any meaningful impact, and still others are malicious measures that would advance the plans for a global financial dictatorship. It is imperative, therefore, that we have a standard for sorting the wheat from the crap and the Trojan Horses.

Fortunately, such a standard exists.

The Whole Enchilada
Nothing less than the full plan will work. Write off of the giant mountain of speculative debt currently choking the global economy, reorganize banking according to the Glass-Steagall standard, and replace the Anglo-Venetian imperial monetary system—including the scam known as globalization—with sovereign national credit systems, complete with a return to fixed exchange rates among national currencies, providing stability for long-term international cooperation.

With those measures in place, supported by the combined power of the U.S., Russia, China and India, joined by other nations, to keep the monetary casino empire from weaseling back into dominating position, we, humanity, can begin serious work on rebuilding the physical-economic productivity of the world, through large-scale investment in infrastructure—led by building state-of-the-art nuclear power plants, a global network of high-speed, magnetically levitated trains, and water management systems to provide the water for people, agriculture, and industry. We will move beyond making "things" to making history again.

It is not sufficient to merely repair existing facilities, or to build new facilities at existing technological levels. What we must do is to replace them with higher levels of technology, raising the productive power of human labor to new levels. This requires the adoption of a mission which will motivate and encourage us to make the scientific and technological breakthroughs necessary to push forward into this new Renaissance; we give ourselves problems to solve, we imbue humanity with a sense of optimism, and engage human creativity.

The perfect mission in this regard is the mission to put a manned base on Mars. To get to Mars requires not only returning to the Moon, but developing the capability on the Moon to build the spacecrafts necessary to make the trip to Mars. It also means developing the propulsion systems necessary to maintain a constant acceleration, and then a deceleration, of one Earth gravity, and solving an incredible range of other problems.

This is not a collection of programs, from which to pick and choose. It is a coherent program which must be adopted in its entirety if mankind is to avoid, at this late date, a collapse of civilization as we have known it.

To understand why the Whole Enchilada is required, we must understand the full extent of the problems we face. We are not facing merely a financial crisis, though we certainly have one. Neither are we facing merely a political crisis, which can be fixed by replacing one party in power with another. What we are facing is the very fabric of society itself, crumbling away.

Look around you, at the rate at which our brothers and sisters are losing their jobs, their homes, their ability to survive. Look at the rate at which governments at all levels are going broke, unable to perform their proper functions. Look at the way that all attempts to solve these problems are failing.

Nothing works anymore. Our ability to fix things has broken down, because we have become so caught up in entertainment and money, that we have forgotten how to drive our economy, and have allowed our political system to be taken over by the financier interests that are the agents of our destruction [ultimately theirs as well--they can't eat their paper... or shall we labor to feed them?]. We have allowed our schools to devolve into intellectual deserts where children are taught what to think, not how to think. We have allowed giant insurance and pharmaceutical companies to turn the study and practice of medicine into a looting ground, and allowed giant corporate cartels to increasingly dominate all essential needs of our lives.

Far too many among us allow ourselves to be distracted by the latest celebrity gossip, the local sports teams, the business news, partisan politics, and a host of other trivia. We have allowed ourselves to become stupid, and thus, easily manipulated.

This is what we must correct, and the Whole Enchilada offers the way to do it.

Real Reform
The propagandists of the monetarist empire have gone to grrrreat lengths to try to convince us that our future depends upon restoring their predatory financial system. We are induced to focus on such real, but relatively minor issues as bankers' bonuses and accounting issues, while the financial predators continue to rape and plunder and kill. They make us think that we need them, even as they lead us into a worsening nightmare life on Earth. WE DON'T NEED THEM!

Real reform means reorganizing, as through bankruptcy, their fetid system, with its control over the issuance and price of money, and replacing it with sovereign credit systems. It means an end to the power of the private central banks, beginning with the Federal Reserve, and a return to the principles laid out in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.

Anything that reeks of globalization, we toss. Beginning with the idea any global tax to support global financial tyranny. Same goes with cap and trade, and all the other greenie taxes. No public funding of imperial schemes!

Derivatives regulation is easy. We outlaw derivatives. All derivatives contracts currently outstanding are declared null and void, and all new contracts prohibited. Problem solved.

The mountain of speculative debt gets written off through the bankruptcy reorganization, and the banking system that emerges from that process will operate under the Glass-Steagall standard. We will have banks, not casinos—and we'll make sure they behave. Banking serves the society and economy, not the other way around!

We'll set up a new Bank of the United States, to act as the intermediary between the government and the private banking system. We'll audit the Fed, after we shut it down.

Lesser measures, such as the moves in Congress to reinstate Glass-Steagall, are useful and should be encouraged—as long as everyone understands that they are steps along the way to a larger solution, and not solutions in and of themselves. We must not fall into the trap of confusing winning a battle or two with winning the war. Truly, whole civilizations have been lost to such errors.

Finally, we need to change, so that we citizens can understand what can and must be done, and make it happen.

---------

This is an edited version of an editorial written by John Hoefle. His original is here:
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2009/3649lar_only_reform.html

Christmas Carols and Songs, 2009

2009-12-22T20:02:00.004-05:00

.

Just reading the lyrics comes nowhere close to doing these justice. Listen. Act.

ObamaCare
MP3 Audio

You better not cough,
You better not sneeze,
You better not get a fatal disease,
Obama's keeping healthcare costs down,

He's making a list,
And checking with NICE,
If keeping you breathing is worth the price,
Obama's keeping healthcare costs down,

Obamacare is thrifty,
'Cuz they don't give a damn,
If you are under fifty and you need a mammogram,

So you better be young,
With plenty of cash,
Or help shave off his Hitler mustache,
Obama's keeping healthcare costs down,

Obama's health advisers,
Are genocidal jerks,
Just like the Nazi doctors that were hanged at Nuremberg,

Obama's healthcare,
It mustn't be passed,
So light a fire on your congressman's ass.
Obama's keeping healthcare costs down.

----------------------------------------

Obama's lost it all
MP3 Audio

What kind of president is this,
Emitting noble gasses,
A Nobel Prize winning piece of work,
Who's trying to kill the masses,

Obama has lost it all,
For a little queen who's not so tall,
Obama is plunging fast,
Don't let your country go with him,

Somewhere between East Anglia,
And the Chicago Board of Trade,
A green financial bubble grows,
As'the City of London gets paid,

Obama has lost it all,
For a little queen who's not so tall,
Obama is plunging fast,
Don't let your country go with him,

A global holocaust is here,
But citizens do not dismay,
If Mars we reach in'a fusion fleet,
Then safely we'll be out of harm's way,

Obama has lost it all,
For a little queen who's not so tall,
Obama is plunging fast,
Don't let your country go with him.
----------------------------------------

Outside of a shelter
MP3 Audio

Outside of a shelter you wait for a bed,
thrown out before Christmas all thanks to Fed,
Foreclosures are soaring and credit has froze,
But where's Barney Bailout nobody knows,

Away in London they scheme for your life,
Obama bends over to prince Philips' wife,
In DC he gave all you had to the banks,
On London's orders he'll bring out the tanks,

We warned Barney Frank but he said things were fine,
Guess what? He's a liar and you're on the line,
The system is crashing but it's not your fate,
Now pass the LaRouche Plan before it's too late,

Tell congress move over we're taking your job,
Vote Rachel for Congress she'll clean out the slobs,
The future is calling for you to embrace,
Put Rachel in congress and mankind in space.
----------------------------------------

The unemployment line
MP3 Audio

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
Obama's little mustache,

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
Bailout Barney Frank,
And Obama's little mustache,

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
Nancy Pelosi,
Bailout Barney Frank,
And Obama's little mustache,

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
London's little queen,
Nancy Pelosi,
Bailout Barney Frank,
And Obama's little mustache,

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
They're worse than Bush,
London's little queen,
Nancy Pelosi,
Bailout Barney Frank,
And Obama's little mustache,

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
Evil Peter Orzag,
Timothy Geithner,
Ben Bernanke,
They're worse than Bush,
London's little queen,
Nancy Pelosi,
Bailout Barney Frank,
And Obama's little mustache,

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
Scary Larry Summers,
Dr. EZ-Kill,
And his brother Rahm,
Evil Peter Orzag,
Timothy Geithner,
Idiot Bernanke,
They'll kill us all,
London's little queen,
Nancy Pelosi,
Bailout Barney Frank,
And Obama's little mustache,

Who should be sent to the unemployment line?
Nazi John Holdren,
Scary Larry Summers,
Dr. EZ-Kill,
And his brother Rahm,
Evil Peter Orzag,
Timothy Geithner,
Idiot Bernanke,
Don't forget Al Gore!
London's little queen,
Nancy Pelosi,
Bailout Barney Frank,
And Obama's little mustache.

-----------------------------

A gift from the Boston LaRouche Youth Movement, and the Lyndon LaRouche PAC.
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12877

China Youth Daily Covers LaRouche Youth At Copenhagen Summit

2009-12-19T09:09:00.001-05:00

December 19, 2009 (LPAC)—"Global warming? I don't believe it!" This was how China Youth Daily began an article today on growing "global warming skepticism" after speaking to Sebastian Perimony, a LaRouche Youth organizer outside the Copenhagen global warming summit. "Every day outside the Copenhagen climate conference stand a group of European protesters. They are passing out leaflets, shouting 'Global warming is a lie!,' making known to the people around them their firm skepticism over the notion of global warming.... They are members of a non-governmental organization supporting the so-called LaRouche Plan, and on the issue of 'climate change' they're going against the mainstream of public opinion.

"Standing in the midst of Copenhagen's Raadhustorg, one young Frenchman passing out leaflets, named Perimony, pointed to the pictures on his placard and asked the China Youth Daily Reporter, 'Who do you think is the biggest liar when it comes to global warming?' On his poster he had the pictures of some of the British supporters of global warming, global warming economist, Nicholas Stern, Prince Charles, who established an international environmental protection foundation, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is supporting climate change measures in his state, and wants California to be in the vanguard climate change movement, as well as some world leaders."

"We are not interested in the establishment of a world unitary executive," China Youth Daily quotes Perimony as saying.

The article then goes on to explain how the global-warming skepticism is greater in the U.S. than in Europe, proceeding to cite Dale Robertson, the organizer of the Tea Party organization, and Richard Sandersen, a global-warming skeptic from MIT. China Youth Daily then gives some of the poll numbers indicating this growing skepticism, with an ABC poll showing that the number of people who believe that global warming is actually occurring has fallen from 80% to 72%, and a Pew Institute poll showing that only 57% of the population believe that there is evidence of global warming (down from 71% last year), and that only 36% believe that it is caused by human activity (down from 47% in 2008).

The article ends by quoting a Chinese energy expert, Yang Fuqiang, who says that the growing skepticism about global warming may result in new studies being conducted, "stricter and more rational," that might provide a competent basis for drawing conclusions in the matter.
.

We Have To Bring Forward the Positive.

2009-12-18T11:13:00.003-05:00

We have to bring forward the positive. The appeal of scandal doesn't get to the point. The negative is necessary to show what the enemy is doing; in that sense, it is relevant. But it merely goes to the symptoms of the horrors oozing around and toward us, not to the alternative.

The whole system is coming down. There are a number of measures on the table, contrary to Larry Summers. And our job is to recruit around the positive.

Blaming human beings for the worlds ailments instead of uplifting them to solve these problems must cease

2009-12-16T21:55:00.002-05:00

Summer Shields, Congressional Candidate from California's 8th Congressional district [Nancy Pelosi's] and LPAC activist statement on Copenhagen Summit:

"The concluding days of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen should be cancelled at once for scientific negligence. With what is at stake in this present world economic breakdown, it is more necessary than ever to expose the fraud of anthropogenic climate change and the intentional plans already concocted to cut the productivity of the world down to levels that would cause the death, and prevention of life, to billions of people. This is an expanded version of Henry Kissinger's 1974 NSSM 200 memorandum calling for population reduction.

"The recent walkout by the G77 nations at the Copenhagen conference, while good, should now proceed to expose this genocidal policy for what it is: British Imperialism. The deranged Prince Philip's infamous comments about returning as a "deadly virus" to control the world's population, his role in the creation of the World Wildlife Fund, and the recent address to the conference by Prince Charles and Tony Blair should help in making this clear.

"I believe that the developing sector countries should immediately support the 'Four Powers' solution of Lyndon LaRouche. Russia, China, India and the United States have the clout and the need to join forces to put an end to globalization by reorganizing the world economic and financial system into bankruptcy.

"John Holdren, Obama's science adviser should step down suddenly for collaborating with a known anti-humanist, Paul Ehrlich of 'Population Bomb' notoriety, and for supporting a policy of population reduction. When did 'killing people' replace 'saving people' when it comes to scientific method? Blaming human beings for the worlds ailments instead of uplifting them to solve these problems must cease."

December 16, 2009 (LPAC)
.

How a Book Saved the Nation

2009-12-16T03:05:00.002-05:00

Rediscovering Mathew Carey;
`The Olive Branch':
How a Book Saved the Nation
by Roger Maduro
with Excerpts from `The Olive Branch'
PDF

The Climate May Be Changing

2009-12-11T12:00:00.002-05:00

In no particular order...

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/dutch-gore-wrong-on-snows-of-kilimanjaro/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/03/gore-cancels-on-copenhagen-lecture-leaves-ticketholders-in-a-lurch/

http://www.copenhagenscandal.org/

http://www.climate-sense.com/

http://climateaudit.org/

Smoke & Mirrors: Bank of America Repays TARP Funds

2009-12-10T21:51:00.002-05:00

Please excuse us, but we're laughing so hard it is difficult to produce this report. Our amusement comes from the announcement by Bank of America yesterday that it had repaid the U.S. Treasury the $45 billion in bailout funds it had been given under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

"We owe taxpayers our thanks for making these funds available to the nation's financial system and to our company during a difficult time," said the bank's CEO, Kenneth Lewis, in a press release.

No kidding, Ken. We'll politely overlook the fact that we taxpayers—as reflected by the huge public protests at the time—vehemently objected to the bailout, which was shoved down our throats, against our will, by a near-treasonous government, under the orders of the international financiers of Wall Street and the City of London. We objected then, and we still do, and no amount of revisionist spin will change that.

What we won't overlook, however, is the continuing duplicity, corruption, and fraud which this so-called payback represents, and the way in which the bailout policy as a whole continues to destroy the nation, and has put us on the verge of a complete breakdown.

We aren't buying your claims that Bank of America has returned to health, Ken. Your bank is even more bankrupt now than it was when it was bailed out, and you yourself are being shown the door. According to your own press release, the bank went another $19 billion in debt to help raise the funds to repay the government. By our calculations, giving the government $45 billion and borrowing $19 billion puts you $64 billion deeper in the hole, which doesn't exactly seem like progress. We realize, of course, that by repaying the government you make it easier for the bank to hire your replacement, as it removes you from the pay restrictions, but isn't $64 billion a bit much to pay for the privilege of overpaying some new guy to finish the job of running the bank completely into the ground?

We'll concede that Bank of America is now the biggest financial institution in the country, with a whopping $2.3 trillion in reported assets, although we must add that we don't believe that those assets are worth anywhere near what you claim, and we can't help but think of puffer fish when we look at your balance sheet. We're also impressed by your $75 trillion in off-balance-sheet derivatives. It looks to us like you've dug yourself a world-class smoking hole in the ground. Even the guys at J.P. Morgan Chase are starting to feel a little envious, from what we hear, though their smoking hole is still bigger.

The only problem, and we hate to bring it up, is that you're killing us. The TARP is just a tiny part of the overall bailout scheme, which has destroyed the real economy in its zeal to save the parasites. We're losing our jobs and our houses at an accelerating rate, our state and local governments are going broke faster than they can cut their budgets, and President [Obama] seems determined to slash and burn the social safety net upon which an increasing number of our citizens depend. As happy as we are that you are doing so well—or, at least, as happy as we'd be if we actually believed a damn thing you say; we know you're broke—we'd be even happier if the nation and the world weren't collapsing around us, destroying the lives and hopes of this and future generations. But at least as we descend into Hell, we have the comfort of knowing that Bank of America can tell lies with the best of them. That's gotta be worth something, right Ken?

johnhoefle@larouchepub.com
Reposted by gm here. From:
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12734
December 10, 2009

Copenhagen: Empire Launches Full Court Press In Defense of Genocide

2009-12-09T05:12:00.002-05:00

Determined to ensure that the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen comes out the way the Queen wants, her imperial toadies today launched a full court press on behalf of killing people.

Most telling was the piece of fascist filth drafted by the Guardian which was published Dec. 7 as an joint editorial by 56 dailies in 45 countries, including France's Le Monde, Italy's La Reppublica, Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung, El Universal of Mexico, Clarin of Argentina, Canada's Toronto Star, the Miami Herald, among others.

The message? There had better be action now, to avoid global catastrophe. There are "fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation," it warns. "The science is complex but the facts are clear. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea." And although it is likely that no ironclad, legally binding agreement will come out of Copenhagen at this point, next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be the absolute deadline for reaching a rigorous treaty.

The Economist, The Times, Financial Times, Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Gordon Brown himself, were all fully mobilized to get out the Queen's royal emissions, and especially cheering on Obama, for deciding to attend the summit at the end, rather than the beginning. Changing the date of Obama's attendance supposedly means there's some "emerging consensus" on an agreement, Bloomberg News panted. WWF President Carter Roberts was beside himself, squealing that Obama's new attendance date "is a game changer. It's huge!"

In a separate article published in the Guardian, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown went through a chest-thumping exercise, Tarzan-style, proclaiming that he will "take on with evidence, argument and moral passion all the anti-science and anti-change environmental Luddites who seek to stand in the way of progress." As for Obama, "I am delighted that President Obama is not only going to Copenhagen to help conclude the deal, but leading the way on this, he has committed his country to paying its fair share."

December 8, 2009 (LPAC) I changed the heading/title (only) slightly.

Sanders and Senator Bunning To Put Hold on Bernanke Nomination

2009-12-05T04:30:00.008-05:00

(Emphases, links and notes in square brackets are added to the below reports.)

December 4, (LPAC)—Reflecting growing opposition to the Wall Street bailout policy of the Obama administration and the surge of opposition to the Federal Reserve and its monetarist policies, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) said on Tuesday that he was placing a hold on Bernanke's nomination for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman. If the hold is not withdrawn, Senate leaders will not be able to bring up the nomination for a vote by unanimous consent. Instead, they may need to garner 60 votes in order to consider the nomination.

In justifying his move, Sanders said:

The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities, to put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few. What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.

As head of the central bank since 2006, Bernanke could have demanded that Wall Street provide adequate credit to small and medium-sized businesses to create decent-paying jobs in a productive economy, but he did not.

He could have insisted that large bailed-out banks end the usurious practice of charging interest rates of 30 percent or more on credit cards, but he did not.

He could have broken up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that took Federal Reserve assistance, but he did not.

He could have revealed which banks took more than $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed secret loans, but he did not."

"Mr. Bernanke has failed at all four core responsibilities of the Federal Reserve," Sanders concluded. "It's time for him to go."

[full press release snipped out of this space for brevity]

Republican Senator Bunning Joins Sanders in Call for Hold on Bernanke
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), who is retiring in 2010, announced that he would try to block the nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term at the Federal Reserve.

In a prepared statement during the Senate Banking Committee hearings, Bunning said to Bernanke, "You are the definition of a moral hazard." Bunning, who is the only Senator to have voted against Bernanke in 2006, stated: "I opposed you because I knew you would continue the legacy of Alan Greenspan, and I was right."

Excerpts from his statement follow:
* "It took you two years to finally regulate subprime mortgages after Chairman Greenspan did nothing for 12 years.

* Alan Greenspan refused to look for bubbles or try to do anything other than create them. Likewise, ... you failed to spot the housing bubble despite many warnings.

* Instead of close supervision of the biggest and most dangerous banks, Greenspan ignored the growing balance sheets and increasing risk. You did no better. In fact, under your watch everyone of the major banks failed or would have failed if you did not bail them out. [They should have been put under bankruptcy reorganization and Glass Steagall applied.]

* The Greenspan policy on transparency was talk a lot, use plenty of numbers, but say nothing. ... You still refuse to provide details on the Fed's bailouts last year and on all the toxic waste you bought.

* Under your watch, the Bernanke Put became a bailout of all large financial institutions, including many foreign banks.

* You have created zombie banks that are only enriching their traders and executives.

* Even if all that were not true, the AIG bailout alone is reason enough to send you back to Princeton.

* Your time as Fed Chairman has been a failure. You stated time and again during the housing bubble that there was no bubble. After the bubble burst, you repeatedly claimed the fallout would be small. And you clearly did not spot the systemic risks that you claim the Fed was supposed to be looking out for. Where I come from we punish failure, not reward it. Judging by the current Treasury Secretary, some may think Washington does reward failure, but that should not be the case. I will do everything I can to stop your nomination and drag out the process as long as possible. We must put an end to your and the Fed's failures, and there is no better time than now.

In this video, Sen. Jim Bunning tells Mike Stark of Stark Reports that he will indeed place a hold on the nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term for the Federal Reserve, as expected after his blasting of Bernanke above. The transcript of that interview:

MIKE STARK: Will you be placing a hold on the .. ah… (they are walking in a hallway)

BUNNING: I think that's pretty obvious.

STARK: ...that you will be

BUNNING: ...that I will be.

STARK: Do you know if any other Senators aside from Bernie Sanders will be joining you?

BUNNING: It's been discussed. There will be more than one hold than mine.

STARK: I know you make two. Right. Any others from the Republican side?

BUNNING: There are others that are going to hold.

According to Rep. Ron Paul, who was interviewed on Fox News, Jim DeMint has also put a hold on Bernanke's nomination.

-----------------
from
LPAC Breaking News (center column, lower page)

SCIENCE VS. GENOCIDE: WHAT THE 'CLIMATE-GATE' EMAILS DON'T SAY

2009-12-03T04:13:00.001-05:00

The little secret of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit emails is that there is no "global warming." A point of even greater significance lies outside them.

The 90 megabytes of email and data files provides evidence that leading figures at East Anglia were covering up or massaging data that disputed global warming, particularly land surface temperature records, and the evidence of a period of warming temperature well before the industrial era, known as the medieval warm period. What had them upset was that the slight upward spike in surface temperatures over approximately two decades preceding 1998 has disappeared from the land surface records, and for the past approximately 8 years there has been a cooling trend that has largely eliminated the previously alleged 0.6 degree centigrade increase in the "global averaged temperature" over the previous century.

Highly influential figures in Britain have denounced the affair, some in scathing terms. Lord Nigel Lawson of Blaby, Chancellor of the Exchequer for six years under the Thatcher government, called for an inquest, and announced the formation of a new climate advisory group. Lord Christopher Monckton, Britain's leading spokesman against the global warming fraud, called leading figures at East Anglia "criminals" and "arrogant fraudsters," and suggested they will soon be prosecuted for procurement of data destruction.

Yet, the far more serious crime is that "global warming" is a fraud whose real intent is to promote a genocide worse than Hitler’s. Since its first promotion in 1975, the claim has been that carbon dioxide emissions from industry will warm the planet, melt the ice caps and fry or drown us all—therefore human beings would have to do without. There never was scientific proof, and the argument went against all competent understanding of climate science that it is the Sun and the variations of the Earth-Sun orbital relationship which is the principal determinant of climate variability. The explicit intent in promoting this and other anti-science hoaxes has been to halt the development of scientific and technological progress in order to drastically reduce world population, perhaps to the level below 2 billion persons that the World Wildlife Fund's Prince Philip has proposed as desirable.

In fact, by the laws of human physical economy, no such planned reduction in global living standards is possible without unleashing a downward spiral of famine, pandemic disease, and social chaos of such a nature that its final outcome cannot be predicted by any human agency. Thus, the hoax of "global warming" is no mere question for academic debate, but rather a matter of the survival of the human species.

To prepare the citizen to combat this almost unthinkable evil, it is necessary that we go beyond mere refutation of the climate hoax, and understand more clearly the nature of the enemy. We concentrate here rather upon the essential points that are not widely understood. Most important is that the environmental movement is an arm of a global financial empire dedicated to reducing world population, eliminating scientific progress, and increasing the control of a financial oligarchy. It is not acting in the interest of any single nation, but rather against the sovereignty of all nations. The forces associated with the still undead British Empire, or Anglo-Dutch financial empire, continue to play the principal role. The partnership of Britain's Prince Philip with former Nazi Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and sundry oligarchical forces of Europe in such promotions as the World Wildlife Fund, is exemplary. Credulous people, such as those bred to be servants or slaves of a ruling oligarchy, are told they must not entertain such ideas as may appear to be "conspiracy" theories. Yet who does not know that all historical movements, for good or ill, are the results of conspiracy?

The Environmentalist Record

To get an understanding of what is at play, begin with this simple historical fact: By the early 1960s, human society was poised for a breakout in the rate of physical economic progress. No technical obstacle stood in the way of combining already known agricultural and industrial technologies with the proven capability for generating high energy-flux density nuclear electricity and process heat, such that the entire world's population could be brought up to a modern standard of living within a generation or slightly longer. Further, the United States was poised to follow up its program for manned lunar exploration with a plan for manned exploration of Mars. Plans for the development of nuclear and thermonuclear powered rockets capable of achieving constant 1g acceleration to power human travelers to Mars, a Moon industrial base, and Earth orbital way stations were all in the works.

Suddenly all that changed. We can look briefly at what happened in the United States, recognizing that a similar pattern played out in all the industrialized nations of the West. By the late 1960s, students from the leading U.S. universities had been transformed from supporters of technological progress into enraged opponents of science, and anything to do with its application including blue collar workers and farmers. By 1969 an organized anti-science movement had emerged under the banner of "ecology," which found public expression in the March 1970 Earth Day celebrations. (Margaret Mead, the organizer of the first conference to promote the global warming fraud at Research Triangle, N.C. in 1975, gave her endorsement to the 1978 Earth Day with the statement "Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders." Ms. Mead never failed to appear in public without a forked witch's staff.)

Mass layoffs in the aerospace industry had already begun, as a result of measures taken under Presidents Johnson and Nixon to wind down the space program, a decision reached even before the first manned landing on the Moon.

By January 1971, DDT was under courtroom attack from the Environmental Defense Fund, and a year later Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Ruckelshaus who had first opposed a DDT ban, banned it, stating afterwards that the decision was made for political reasons. Months of scientific testimony had not proven any valid scientific argument against the widely used insecticide which had saved millions of lives. The ban has cost the lives of tens of millions of residents in tropical countries, mostly children. Because of the chemical's unique excito-repellent effect, indoor spraying of DDT remains the most effective means to prevent malaria-carrying mosquitoes from infecting humans.

Next came the attack on the chemical industry. Then the leveraging of an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, arguably a case of sabotage, into a movement that successfully prevented the breaking of ground on a single new nuclear power plant installation to this day in the United States. And there was more: CFCs, asbestos, PCBs, food preservatives—almost every invention of modern chemistry was declared to be dangerous to your health. If the atomic nucleus could have been banned from the human body it would have been. It is not out of the question that some court may yet try.

What Is Needed?

Today, about 5 billion of the 6.7 billion world population survive below an acceptable human living standard. The conditions for over one third the human race are perpetual misery, disease, and hunger. It is not yet too late to remedy that situation. The solution requires a mobilization of precisely those scientific resources the anti-science movement has targeted. The problem we face today, as compared to 40 years ago, is that a larger population must be supported with a depleted base of resources, both human scientific and material.

For example, it would take the construction of 6,000 new nuclear power plants by 2050 just to meet the electricity generation requirements of a properly fed, clothed, and housed world population. The power equivalent of another 6,000 one-gigawatt plants will be needed to supply process heat to industry and mining. Railroads, roads, water and sewage systems, hospitals, schools, factories, etc. are needed now throughout the world. The depletion of the most easily available mineral resources means that new sources must be discovered and developed. How will such needs be met?

The greatest limitation to achieving such aims is not any deficit in finite resources, but the lack of sufficient human creativity to solve the many challenges. The only remedy for such a situation is a rapid mobilization to increase our creative scientific capabilities. This is not a matter of merely opening up some schools. We have lost almost two generations to science, thanks to the environmentalist onslaught. When we look at the crucial areas of nuclear science and space, for example, we find that much of the genius, knowledge, and capabilities of an older generation has been lost without replacement. The biological sciences are increasingly mired in reductionist dogma, where they are not dominated outright by the green movement, and the Earth sciences increasingly taken over by the climate mafia.

The Science of Culturing Science

The proven method for achieving a rapid rate of scientific progress is the mobilization of the creative powers of youth around the tasks that challenge the imagination and invite breakthroughs in thinking. Today that challenge remains, as for a prior generation, the manned exploration of the solar system.

The leading practical problems of space exploration are: the achievement of a thermonuclear powered rocket to provide a constant 1g acceleration to manned vehicles, and mastery of the Vernadskyan domain governing the relationship of life to the cosmos. The pursuit of those aims will prove the fastest route to solving the problems facing human development on Earth.

For example, the nuclear fission reaction can produce 1 to 10 million times the energy flux density of chemical reactions, such as from burning of fossil fuels or hydrogen. Thermonuclear fusion can exceed that of fission by an order of magnitude or more, and also provide other advantages. The most likely candidate for powering manned vehicles for planetary exploration is the neutronless helium-3/deuterium fusion reaction, utilizing the abundant helium-3 resource found on the lunar surface. Mastering the means to directly convert the kinetic energy contained in the high-velocity proton produced by the reaction into electrical power, will prove a boon to power generation on Earth or any fixed station. Bypassing the need to first boil water in order to turn a turbine blade to rotate a generator will place power generation from thermonuclear sources on an entirely new footing. As Dr. Richard Post reported in respect to 1980s experiments on the axisymmetric tandem mirror device at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, efficiencies up to 80 percent were possible in direct conversion of the energy of alpha particles and ions shot out the ends of this linear type of fusion device, using the standard deuterium/deuterium reaction. (Research on that reactor along with all other approaches to fusion except the tokamak device were scuttled in the 1980s, under budgetary pressure shaped by the environmentalists’ Luddite onslaught.)

The million degree temperatures produced by a fusion reactor can provide the heat to process raw rock, even garbage, into its constituent elements, magnetically separating the ionized gases of each element by a device known as the plasma torch. Laser and plasma isotope separation, techniques demonstrated in the 1970s, permit a new level of control over the Periodic Table for the use of man.

Space exploration also challenges our understanding of life and its relationship to the cosmos. The great challenge, to keep man alive in the space environment, as he travels at high velocity in an inertial gravitational field, and lands on a completely new environment of changed gravitational and magnetic field strengths, will prompt new discovery. What is the relationship of cosmic radiation to life? Can life survive without a magnetic field; without the low-level radiation that is a constant companion on Earth? What is the significance of the electromagnetic spectrum in intercellular communication and development of an organism?

The details of the East Anglia emails are not the significant point. Defeating the genocidal intentions of the promoters of global warming is.

- by Laurence Hecht
Editor in Chief, 21st Century Science & Technology
December 2, 2009 (LPAC)— http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12623

Bernanke Declares War On Constitution, Asserts Primacy of Global Central Bankers

2009-11-30T14:30:00.003-05:00

In a lengthy op-ed, published today in the Washington Post, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress, in no uncertain terms, to butt out of his and the Federal Reserve's business, and leave the U.S. central bank independent and fully integrated into the global system of private central bank dictatorship. Bernanke tore into two pieces of so-called Congressional reregulation, that would reduce the power and independence of the Fed: Chris Dodd's bill to remove Fed oversight authority over the banking system (a desperate populist ploy by Dodd, who is widely expected to lose re-election next year); and the Ron Paul bill to force an annual audit of the Fed's books. Bernanke wrote that "These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States."

Put in stark terms, Bernanke asserted that the "global consensus" among central bankers trumps the U.S. Constitution, and Congress should back off from its Constitutional responsibilities. Senior U.S. intelligence sources have confirmed that, were the Fed to be subjected to transparent Congressional audit, top Fed officials and leading bankers from the "too big to fail" institutions would be frog-marched off to jail en masse, for the preferential bailout treatment they have gotten—and continue to get—from the Fed, as regional and community banks are allowed to go under at record rates.

Paradoxically, the same issue of the Washington Post that gave nearly a full page to Bernanke's self-promoting rant, featured a regular column by David Ignatius, in which he cited the official Fed notes from the Nov. 3-4 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, to show that the Fed policy has been a total failure with respect to the real economy and the conditions of life for the vast majority of Americans. The FOMC members assessed that there will be no reversal of the high unemployment rates for the next five years, and that there is no sign that bank lending to small businesses will resume anytime soon.

Ignatius' conclusion is that Obama and the Congressional Democrats are in deep trouble: "The politics of rage aren't pretty. But in this case, it's hard to argue that the anger isn't justified. The Fed's analysis shows what we see in the daily stock market summaries. People on the top are recovering their losses; people on the bottom are out of work and out of luck." Obama, he warns, "will need all the political genius he showed during the 2008 campaign—and which he has displayed too little lately—to handle what's coming at him next year."

November 30, 2009 (LPAC)—
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12590

Cancel the Copenhagen Climate Summit!

2009-11-28T22:36:00.002-05:00

The Climate Summit in Copenhagen, which is to take place from Dec. 6 to 18, and in which 193 nations, approximately 65 heads of government, and up to 20,000 delegates are to participate, is based on a gigantic fraud, and must immediately be cancelled—and not only to save the substantial expenses for this neo-malthusian propaganda event, whose real aim consists in establishing a de facto world government.

After almost 1,000 scientists have recently distanced themselves from the thesis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning allegedly anthropogenic global warming, now the scandalous manipulations that hackers have unearthed in the e-mail communications of "scientists" of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University in Great Britain, are the final proof of the climate fraud—in case anyone still needed it.

In reality, the raw, unalterated data from long-term weather stations show little or no change during the last 150 years. Half of the stations show a slight cooling, and global cooling has been occurring for around ten years. So what is behind this enormously expensive campaign?

The answer is clear: Apart from all sorts of profiteers, who see the C02 emissions trade as a new opportunity for ripping off the population, it is essentially the policy of the British Empire, or, more precisely, of Prince Philip, who has repeatedly said publicly that he wants to be reincarnated as a virus, so as to more effectively contribute to population reduction. On Nov. 12, the CEO of Prince Philip's World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told reporters: "We believe it fundamental for the President to go to Copenhagen, to look other leaders in the eye, convey our commitment as a country, and secure theirs." And promptly Obama announced, contrary to earlier statements, that he would be in Copenhagen on Dec. 9.

Moreover, it is monstrous that an official UN organization, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Danish government, want to place the question of population reduction officially on the agenda.

According to the Danish newspaper Berlinske Tidende, Danish Development Minister Ulla Toerness has admitted the controversial character of this proposal, which in several nations is still considered a huge taboo. But since, she says, there's a connection between population growth and climate change, this proposal also has the complete support of the Danish Prime Minister.

The British organization Optimum Population Trust (OPT), which crusades for global population reduction, asserts in a study that one of the best opportunities for combatting so-called "global warming," consists in preventing births, because preventing the birth of new "polluters" would be a far cheaper means to prevent "climate catastrophe," than acquiring renewable energy sources. According to the study, by spending £200 trillion, we could prevent a half-billion births and thus the emission of 24 billion tons of CO2, over the next 40 years.

Also revealing, is the fact that according to Forbes magazine, the "14 richest men in the world" (who owe their wealth not least to the casino economy) met back on May 5 of this year at the home of the president of the private Rockefeller University. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Peter Petersen, David Rockefeller, Jr., and the other participants in this illustrious gathering agreed that the problem of population growth poses the worst environmental, social, and industrial threat.

Another in a whole series of conferences, which served to prepare for the Copenhagen summit, was the conference of the Policy Network think-tank on June 5 at the London School of Economics, at which Tony Blair, whose authorship of the Iraq War is right now under investigation in Great Britain, delivered the keynote speech, emphasizing that a "revolutionary change in behavior" is required. To this end, the United States alone would have to reduce its emissions to one-tenth of the current level! Blair left no doubt that he sees the greatest problem in the fact that China wants to implement "the greatest industrialization that the world has ever seen."

During a three-day conference in Essen on the theme "The Great Transformation," organized by the Mercator Foundation in collaboration with the Climate Institute in Potsdam and Wuppertal, a prospectus for its Working Group 4 stated: "Could open democratic societies keep up with the impact of serious changes in the global climate, or could authoritarian regimes be better suited to enforce the measures required?" One of the participants in this conference was the head of the Climate Institute in Potsam, Hans-Joachim Schellenhuber, a recent host of Prince Charles for an "Experts' Discussion on the Environment and Climate Themes" at the Postdam institute, and who has also been awarded the highest English order, the Order of the Garter.

One can only agree with Lord Christopher Monckton in his characterization of the climate fraud and the Copenhagen conference: It is the attempt to establish an unelected world government with enormous and unprecedented powers. A small, closely linked grouping of so-called scientists is now exposed as frauds and criminals. Another grouping under the leadership of former British Finance Minister Lord Nigel Lawson, along with a substantial group of other Lords, authors, and journalists, has just now established a new website, and a Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which has dedicated itself to the fight against this fraud.

Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that there is a consensus in the pro-British part of the international establishment, to respond to the systemic crisis of the global financial system with a new fascism, in which the poor, the weak, and the sick are to be sacrificed for the benefit of speculative interests.

To aim for such a policy falls under the Nuremberg Laws after World War II. All who want to participate in the Copenhagen conference should remember that. After all that has come to light until now about the climate fraud, there is only one reasonable solution: Cancel the conference immediately.
-------------------------------
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche -- This statement was released by the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo), a German political party, on Nov. 27, and has been translated from German.

SHIFT TO THE PACIFIC: THE HISTORIC MISSION OF THE UNITED STATES

2009-11-24T08:05:00.002-05:00

"Go West, Young Man" was a popular admonition in the United States of the post-Civil War period, when the Transcontinental Railroad, industrialization, and millions of enterprising settlers moved across the vast territory of the country toward the Pacific Ocean, thus fulfilling the historic vision of the founders of the American Republic to establish a continental republic on these shores. Today, that admonition must be extended further, through a determination of the U.S. government to establish new partnerships for economic development with the nations of the Asian-Pacific and Indian-Ocean Basin, specifically, the nations of Russia, China, and India. The establishment of the United States republic, from 1776 through 1865, provided a "beacon of hope" for rallying against the powers of Empire in the world, but that empire, now run through the supranational financial institutions of the world, still maintains a stranglehold over the planet, and threatens to bring it into an unspeakable devolution into a New Dark Age. Only the revival of the United States' anti-colonial mission, in concert with the nations of the Asian-Pacific-Indian Ocean Basin, can now break the power of that monetarist empire, and bring an era of prosperity to the planet.

Lyndon LaRouche has long campaigned for this reorientation of U.S. policy. Back in 1983, he produced a policy document entitled "A Fifty-year Development Policy for the Indian-Pacific Oceans Basin," which argued for the necessity of orienting a world economic development program toward the region of the world with the largest population, and the greatest ration of poverty to be overcome—the Pacific Basin. Here is where the potential, and necessity, for the greatest growth exists, he argued. He revived this perspective once again after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, putting forward the perspective of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which represents the mission of bringing economic development to the vast interior regions of Asia, which have been left as centers of impoverishment and desolution. In the 2003-2007 period, he further refined this concept from the standpoint of pulling together a strategic alliance of sovereign powers who collectively could crush the British financial empire—specifically proposing a Four Power agreement of Russia, China, India, and the United States as the core of a new world financial system, oriented toward economic development, and an alliance for stymying the perpetual warfare policy of the British Empire.

As of October of this year, with the signing of a series of ground-breaking economic agreements between Russia and China, the first concrete step toward such an arrangement was taken. This advance, occurring as it does in the midst of the most dramatic disintegration of the world financial system, especially in the United States and Western Europe, puts the question even more urgently to the United States, for joining in a Four Power alliance. Despite the apparently impossible situation of having a de facto British puppet as President, and a Congress so corrupt as to virtually kow-tow to this President, patriotic institutions around the institution of the Presidency, as well as leading patriotic citizens, have no choice but to rally around LaRouche's Four Power perspective, as the unique means of saving not only their own nation, but the planet as a whole.

To reach a Four Powers agreement, demands the U.S. orienting to the Pacific-Indian Oceans Basin. Here, in the nations of Russia, China, and India, you have proud sovereign states, who, despite the fact that they are operating within, and are crippled by, the global imperialist monetary system, maintain national identities, not to mention the sizeable populations, which impel them toward resisting the depredations of the British Empire. Note, for example, India and China's resistance to the genocide being sold as measures for "climate change." Contrast this with the European system, where the City of London-dominated European Community runs a financial dictatorship over the member nations, who have adopted an ideology, and reality, of Green depopulation and death; with Africa, which remains, to this day, a brutalized colony of the British Empire, a mere source of raw materials to be wrested from its land and its people; or with Ibero-America, which is still dominated by the crippling cultural heritage of being subjects of the imperial Habsburgs.

As LaRouche recently put it, "Europe is essentially dead. It's captive territory of the British Empire. South and Central America are captives of the drug rings." They are all British-dominated, and the only area where you can initiate the changes required to save the planet, is the Pacific-Indian Ocean Basin, of which the United States, still hereditarily the world's leading republic, is an integral part.

In taking up this mission, the United States will, in fact, be fulfilling the promise and commitment of its original Founding Fathers, those of the Italian Renaissance, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. An understanding of that mission was the driving force behind those who built the United States into a continental power which extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, most crucially, John Quincy Adams. The idea was taken up and expanded by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—and must be renewed today. In the following pages, we present a summary of the case for the immediate adoption of this Pacific Orientation Policy, as a cornerstone of the strategy for survival from otherwise onrushing disaster.

- Start with the General Welfare -

"Our Manifest Destiny lies in Classical Greek civilization, its unique contribution to global civilization. It lies in the role of Christianity, especially the Apostles, like John and Paul, in taking this Greek Classical legacy, and using this as the tool of Christianity, to improve the condition of mankind, as the Renaissance did later.

"We need to develop the nation state, the idea that a national government has no moral authority, except as it is founded on an absolute commitment to promote and defend the General Welfare of all of its people, including their posterity."

This statement of the historic purpose of the United States was delivered in a major policy speech by Lyndon LaRouche in his 2000 Presidential campaign. In that speech, LaRouche identified the specific role played in developing the idea of a moral nation state, with Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the pre-eminent scientist of the 15th Century. Nicholas of Cusa, in his writings on "Catholic Concordance," put forward the concept that all legitimate power of the state depends upon the consent of the governed, and that the purpose of that state, and its elected officials, or counselors, was to "provide for the general welfare" of the population. Those who govern "ought to constantly defend the good of the public which they represent," Cusa argued.

It became clear to the Cardinal, however, that it would not be possible to fulfill his vision of a moral sovereign nation state in oligarchy-dominated Europe. Rather, he conspired with friends to spread the idea of establishing colonies in the New World. Among those collaborators was Paolo Toscanelli, known as the author of a map of the spherical Earth, a map which included the ultimately-to-be-discovered American continent.

It was Toscanelli's map which found its way into the hands of one Italian-born sea captain, then operating in Portugal, named Christopher Columbus. Through Toscanelli's associate Fernao Martins, Columbus entered a correspondence with Toscanelli, and ultimately received the backing from the Spanish throne to be able to fulfill Cusa's goal of travelling to the New World.

Unfortunately, however, Cusa's vision of establishing sovereign nation states devoted to the general welfare of their populations, was unable to be realized in Hispanic America. Those who emigrated to Central and South America had not thrown off the cultural domination of the imperial system which ruled their culture in Europe, specifically that of the Habsburg dynasty. That dynasty treated its subjects like beasts, and inculcated that very servile, often racist mentality within them—the very antithesis of the republican idea that man is defined by his ability to reason, and to improve both his knowledge and his lot, and that of his fellow man.

Instead, the first solidly republican experiment, in the spirit of Nicholas of Cusa, which took root in the United States, occurred in the Massachusetts Bay colony, nearly 130 years after Columbus's voyage. Under a small group of Englishmen, whose leader John Winthrop was an eloquent spokesman, a group of 800 men, women, and children travelled to New England to establish what Winthrop called "a City upon a hill," which was devoted to the following mission: "The end is double, moral and natural, that man might enjoy the fruits of the earth and God might have his due glory from the creature. Why then should we stand here striving for places of habitation... and in the meantime suffer a whole Continent, as fruitful and convenient for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement?"

Winthrop's settlement immediately set about improving the land and the conditions of his people. Within a few years, a university was established, and the first public system of compulsory elementary education put in place. A constitutional government was established, which acted to stimulate local manufacture and technological progress, including the creation of an iron works which almost immediately far outproduced that of the best works in England. The Massachusetts Bay government also minted its own currency, in order to provide credit for industry and commerce. It moved as well to provide for its own defense, with a militia and fortifications. In short, until the experiment was crushed by King Charles II, and then the takeover of England by William and Mary, Massachusetts represented a model for republican self-government, along the lines Cusa had laid out, which itself had an eye to expansion throughout the entire continent.

Given the leading role played by that child of Boston, Benjamin Franklin, in shaping the battle for, and ultimate establishment of, the republican government of the United States, it should not be properly surprising that the foundations of our government, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, continue that Massachusetts Bay republican tradition. We are the only nation on the planet committed, by Constitutional law, to the pursuit of the General Welfare of our population and our posterity, as a principle of organizing our society.

- Becoming a Continental Republic -

The fledgling American republic, dedicated to principles directly counter to those of the European oligarchy, had the advantage of being separated by a large body of water from those who would destroy it. But the mere separation was not enough. The United States was weak and isolated in the wake of winning its independence, and lived in constant danger of being crushed by those empires who still operated in the Western Hemisphere, surrounding it on every side. To gain the strength necessary to defend itself, and its republican mode of government, leading American patriots adopted the strategy of moving West, with the ultimate aim of developing all the territory, up to the Pacific Ocean.

One of the clearest ways to grasp this policy is to see it through the eyes, and actions, of John Quincy Adams, a son of Massachusetts who had grown up steeped in both his colony's republican heritage, but also in close collaboration with the elder statesman-philosopher Benjamin Franklin. It's no exaggeration to say that John Quincy Adams personally negotiated nearly the entire shape of the continental United States, from its borders with Florida and Canada, to its expansion to the Pacific coast. He did so as first, a Senator, then Ambassador to Russia and England, and finally as President Monroe's Secretary of State from 1816 to 1824.

Adams' motivations were both defensive, and positive. He expressed the first view to his mother Abigail in 1811, on the eve of the war of 1812, in a letter attacking the treasonous Essex Junto of New England. He wrote:

"If that Party [Federalist] are not effectually put down in Massachusetts, as completely as they already are in New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the southern and western states, the Union is gone. Instead of a nation coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the most populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact, we shall have an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport and fable of European masters and oppressors."

At that time, those European "masters and oppressors" who had footholds on the North American continent, included Great Britain, Spain, France, and Russia. All but Russia, with whom John Quincy Adams had formed an extremely close relationship during a visit in his youth, as well as his ambassadorship there from 1809-14, were determined to cut off the United States from Western expansion, and/or otherwise cut it "down to size." For example, during the negotiations at Ghent, for a peace treaty at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the British were conniving to cut off large parts of New England, and to shut off the Western frontier, if possible by extending the Canadian border all the way down to the Ohio River. As part of the negotiating team there, John Quincy Adams played a crucial role in outmaneuvering the British strategy—helped immensely, of course, by the victories of the American Navy on Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes.

But Adams was inspired more profoundly by a deep understanding of the universal significance of the American revolution and its unique principles of government. Adams often referred to this principle as the "anticolonial" principle. In a speech celebrating the Fourth of July in 1821, he put it this way:

"In a conflict [of] seven years, the history of the war by which you maintained that Declaration, became the history of the civilized world.... It was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the cornerstone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke, the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. From the day of this Declaration, the people of North America were no longer the fragment of a distant empire, imploring justice and mercy from an inexorable master in another hemisphere.... They were a nation, asserting as of right, and maintaining by war, its own existence. A nation was born in a day.... It stands, and must for ever stand, alone, a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light ... a light of salvation and redemption to the oppressed."

Adams said that colonial establishments "are incompatible with the essential character of our institutions," and concluded, "that great colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them, as they are now endeavoring to abolish the slave trade." The message was not missed by the Russian imperial minister, who reported it to have been "a virulent diatribe against England."

It was from this self-conception of the United States that Adams formulated his concept of relations with other nations. He, like Nicholas of Cusa before him, emphasized supporting other nations in their drive toward republican institutions and political and commercial independence from Europe. He advocated treaties of commerce and amity on the basis of the most-favored-nation status, or, if possible, a reciprocal equality of nations in each other's ports. The U.S. stood for "civil, political, commercial, and religious liberty," and intended that its relations with other nations would spread such principles. As he put it in discussing his aims for the outcome of relations with South American nations, "its foundations must be laid in principles of politics and of morals new and distasteful to the thrones and dominations of the elder world, but coextensive with the surface of the globe and lasting as the changes of time."

In other words—the basis for cooperation among nations was a joint commitment to resist the imperial powers of Europe!

It was from this standpoint, that Adams negotiated the crucial agreements of 1818, 1819, and 1824, which set the northern, southeastern, and western borders of the United States. The 1818 convention with Great Britain preserved the U.S. stake on the Oregon coast, and codified the 49th parallel northern border up to the Rocky Mountains. The 1819 Treaty of Onis, in which Spain ceded territory along the 42nd parallel, all the way to the Pacific coast, was considered by Adams the most important accomplishment of his life. The 1824 agreement with Russia, eliminated that Empire's claim to territory down to the Columbia River in the Northwest, thus leaving the way clear for the extension of the 49th parallel northern border, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

- Across the Pacific -

Once secure in its borders, especially after the Civil War assault by the British Empire had failed, the United States looked both South to the Americas, and East across the Pacific, for partners in commerce and economic development. We were helped by the tremendous enthusiasm for the American industrial model which spread throughout the world, an enthusiasm which was explicitly promoted by the circles around Abraham Lincoln, such as Henry C. Carey, E. Peshine Smith, and many others of their circle. As a result of the work of these circles, we soon saw the takeoff of national industrial economies, complete with railroads, heavy industry, and other modernizations, in Germany, Russia, China, and Japan, among other nations.

The history of America's attempts to cooperate with, and develop, these nations is voluminous, and little known, but worth summarizing here. Take the cases of Russia and China, our two prospective partners today.

Even before the Civil War, the writings of the American System economists, who promoted the policies of republicanism and industrialization epitomized by John Quincy Adams, had spread widely in Russia, through the work of Abraham Lincoln's chief economic advisor, Henry C. Carey. After the Civil War was won, the Careyites greatly expanded their contacts with Russia, to the explict end of helping Russia develop its vast territory, especially with railroads. The purpose was strategic, as well as economic, of course: As U.S. General Joshua T. Owen put it, during an 1869 send-off dinner for the new American ambassador to Russia, through this collaboration in industrialization, Russia and the U.S. could "outflank the movement made by France and England, for predominance in the East through the Suez Canal; and America and Russia can dictate peace to the world."

This American-Russia collaboration only deepened over the last decades of the 19th century, with the convening of the American Centennial Exposition in 1876, and the deployment of U.S. industrialists to aid in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was seen as a means of providing more direct relations between the U.S. and Russia, including outflanking the British control of the seas.

During the period that Count Sergei Witte served as Finance Minister of Russia, collaboration between the U.S. and Russia on what was considered the Land-Bridge of the day, was extensive and intensive. Even more upsetting to the British Empire that the combination of these two land giants was the fact that they were working on bringing China into the rail network projects. Witte and the Americans conspired to build a spur of the rail through Chinese Manchuria, a route that would considerably shorten the travel distance to the Pacific. In 1898, the Russians had ordered a massive amount of equipment from the Americans in order to proceed with the Manchurian Railroad: 168 locomotives from the Baldwin works in Philadelphia; 1900 tons of bridge-girders from Carnegie Steel, 15,000 shovels from the Wyoming Shovel works—and on and on.

China, which had suffered the direct assault of the British to destroy their people in the Opium Wars, was a natural ally of the United States, the premier opponent of the British Empire.

The potential for this alliance, bound by railways of steel, between Russia, China, and the United States struck deadly fear in the heart of the British Empire, then the greatest military, and well as financial, power of the world. By geopolitical maneuvers, they were able to break it then, but the danger of its re-emergence persisted during the 20th century. Not only were the Americans in the Carey-Lincoln tradition the direct inspirers and collaborators of Sun Yat-Sen, the father of the Chinese republic, but the Americans kept providing support for the resistance to the British colonial domination in Russia and China. This reality was underscored during World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt forged close working bonds with the Soviet leader Stalin, as well as China's Chang Kai-Shek, not only as a means of defeating Nazi war aims, but explicitly in support of Russia and China's aspiration for industrialization, and uplifting their populations.

- The Four Powers Today -

Those Americans who upheld the principles of John Quincy Adams—such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in particular—found themselves continually countered by the machinations of de facto British agents, located not only in Wall Street, but often in leading institutions of the United States government. Even our own development of the Western lands was continually sabotaged, to the point that we have many regions of the Western United States which are pathetically underpopulated and underdeveloped, thus limiting our potential to provide the proper assistance to those billions of people to our West, who are even more in need of improved standards of life.

Thanks to the British, and their successful manipulation of puppets such as Harry Truman, our nation was brought into direct conflict with Japan, and steered into the so-called Cold War with Russia, which had its derivative, proxy conflicts throughout Asia, as well as other places. The post World War II period, which FDR had envisioned to be the opportunity for the end of colonialism once and for all, was turned instead into the occasion for the reimposition of a new form of imperialism, this time operated through a global monetarist system, which stripped sovereignty from all nations, including the United States.

We have now reached the time when this system, which has bankrupted itself to death, is threatening to bring the entire world into depopulation, and death. Even the United States, the only republic to have defied the British Empire and won, has been weakened to the point that it cannot defeat that financial empire on its own. Where do we look for allies, in order to prevent disaster for ourselves, and mankind?

The answer, which LaRouche also gave in the early 1980s, is: the Pacific. There, in China, India, and Russia, we find the most populous nations in the world, combined with large deposits of mineral wealth. Most of the population, of course, is very, very poor—and their life expectancy is insecure because of it. But, they are alive, and eager to work and improve their lives. Each country also has developed unique qualifications to contribute to joint rapid development of the region: the Russians, the scientific capability of developing the mineral resources of the Siberian-Arctic region; the Chinese, the mastery of high-speed rail technology; the Indians, the mastery of the thorium nuclear cycle and other associated technologies. But, as long as these nations fail to throw off the yoke of the British-style monetary system, literally replace that monetary system with an American System-style credit system, they can not do the job required. Both the current dollar system, and the collapse of the dollar system, will kill them.

The solution lies with the Four Power alliance proposed by Lyndon LaRouche, an agreement among these Pacific-based nation states to finally bury the British imperial system, and replace it with a new, fixed-exchange rate system, bolstered by the adoption of national banking systems in all nations, and united by the determination to realize a common mission: an era of scientific progress that looks ahead 50 years, to the colonization of space, and finally realizes mankind's aspirations to be truly human, in cooperation with his fellow man.

by Nancy Spannaus, November 23, 2009 (LPAC)—

History--The Crash, November 22, 2009

2009-11-23T08:41:00.002-05:00

With every passing week, it becomes more apparent that the Obama Administration has been a complete failure. Wipe away the grimy layers of hype and spin, and all you find is catastrophe, a galloping, accelerating disaster.

The touted success of the stimulus program is exemplary: Behind all the lying claims lie non-existent jobs, created in non-existent Congressional Districts, in a non-existent recovery. Washington keeps talking about its success, but the people who have to live with the results know better. People who are worried about where their next mortgage payment—or their next meal—will come from, are not impressed with press releases.

A raft of reports released recently show how the American standard of living is being rapidly destroyed, while certain Wall Street interests are being propped up. In medical terms, the Obama Administration's policies amount to letting the patient die, while keeping the tumor on life support.

- Home, Crashing Home -

One of the fundamental requirements for human progress is shelter. Every person, every family, needs a place to live. Civilization depends upon it, and one of the marks of a civilized society is that it never lets such an essential requirement become the playground of speculators. But that is exactly what we did, in allowing the financial markets to turn housing into "financial assets," driving home prices into the stratosphere.

Ultimately, the prices became unsustainable, the bubble popped, and housing prices began to fall. Rather than welcome this return toward "normalcy," the Bush and Obama administrations rushed to save the speculators. They did this by launching a slew of bailout schemes designed to arrest the decline of home values, in the hopes of salvaging the values of trillions of dollars of securities based upon mortgage debt, and of preventing a chain-reaction collapse of the entire global monetary system.

They did not move to save the families stuck with hugely overpriced mortgages. They moved to save the values of the financial assets leveraged on top of those mortgages. They moved to save the tumor!

The result of this betrayal, for the population, has been a disaster. More and more people are falling behind in their mortgage payments, foreclosures are soaring, and increasing numbers of Americans are homeless. Tent cities of the sort last seen in the Great Depression, are becoming commonplace.

A survey released this week by the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that, as of Sept. 30, nearly 1 in 10 households (9.6%) was a month or more behind in their mortgage payments, and that 1 in 11 households (8.9%) was either 90+ days past due, or in foreclosure. Overall, 4.5% of residential mortgages were in foreclosure, a 50% jump from September 2008.

Not surprisingly, the subprime loans fared the worst, with just over 1 in 4 (26%) homeowners being 30 days or more behind in their payments; but delinquencies on prime loans are also rising sharply: 1 in 14 (6.8%) of prime mortgages is 30 days or more behind, and 1 in 8 (12.4%) of all prime adjustable-rate mortgages is delinquent. All of these rates are rising sharply.

As this mortgage meltdown accelerates, the government agencies being used to subsidize the bailout are taking heavy losses. The Federal Housing Administration, which is used to turn private mortgages into government-guaranteed paper, is hemorrhaging money. One in seven of its loans is a month or more past due, and 3.3% are in foreclosure. The FHA's losses from this boondoggle are so large that it has wiped out its reserves, and will soon have to turn to the Treasury for cash.

Then there are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises which were effectively nationalized last year. Since the current phase of the financial crisis began in July 2007, Fannie Mae has lost $120 billion, and Freddie Mac $68 billion. That combined $188 billion is equivalent to the 14th-largest bank in the United States losing all of its assets.

Taken together with Ginnie Mae (the Government National Mortgage Association), these mortgage subsidies are going to cost taxpayers mind-boggling amounts of money down the road, if sane heads don't reverse this stupidity.

We should also note the rather obvious point that the foreclosure rate tends to increase with the unemployment rate, and that both are quickly rising. With 1 million people facing the loss of unemployment benefits in January 2010, on top of the job losses, it's going to get even uglier.

- Commercial Real Estate, Too -

The banks may have been successful in transferring much of their mortgage losses onto the taxpayer through such schemes, but commercial real estate is proving more problematic. Fitch Ratings recently projected that U.S. banks could face defaults on $110 billion in commercial property loans they hold, but we find that figure highly optimistic, since $138 billion of such loans is already in default. With commercial real estate prices down by more than 40% in the past two years, more than half of the $1.4 trillion in commercial mortgages maturing in the next five years is underwater (meaning, the property is worth less than the amount of the mortgage). The delinquency rate is rising here, too, up fivefold, to 5%, in the last year.

Those who were foolish enough to buy properties at the peak of the market are really suffering. Exemplary is the case of Tishman Speyer and BlackRock, which paid $5.4 billion to buy Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village—Manhattan's largest apartment complex—in 2006, only to see the value of the property fall to $1.8 billion. The Tishman-BlackRock partnership had hoped to plug the hole by raising rents, only to be slapped down by New York State courts, which ruled that rent hikes on some 4,350 apartments violated the law. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own $1.5 billion in commercial mortgage-backed securities backed by deeply troubled loans.

Tishman and BlackRock are hardly alone. Goldman Sachs recently unloaded 158 condos near Miami for about one-third of their land and construction costs; and Bank of America is suing Maguire Properties, the largest landlord in downtown Los Angeles, for skipping payments in August, September, and October. The properties in question were bought by Maguire for $2.9 billion in 2007. Deutsche Bank is taking a beating on the unfinished Cosmopolitan Resort †Casino in Las Vegas, which it seized in foreclosure next year. Commercial real estate exposure is also sinking many smaller banks, including most of the banks which have failed this year.

- Shut It Down! -

Delusions die hard. Just this week the Comptroller of the State of New York released a glowing report touting how the big four investment-banking operations on Wall Street had made $23 billion in profits so far this year, compared to $40 billion in losses last year. The top six bank holding companies did even better, with $51 billion in profits this year versus $62 billion in losses last year.

These "profits" are illusory, the product of Federal subsidies, accounting fraud, hidden losses, and unbridled criminality. The attempt to keep these big zombies alive, is a major factor in the disintegration of the rest of the economy. Far from helping the U.S. economy, the bailout is killing it. How many people must lose their jobs and their houses, to keep Wall Street going? Isn't it time we put a stop to this monstrosity?

We must return to what works, the American System. Put the monetary system through bankruptcy, write off the speculative debt, reorganize the banks, return to a credit system, with a Four-Power alliance. It's time for the LaRouche Plan.

This report originally here.
HAVE WE GOT AN (UNDERWATER) DEAL FOR YOU!
by John Hoefle

How To Survive Without Derivatives

2009-11-10T00:13:00.001-05:00

by John Hoefle

[PDF version of this article is available here]

Nov. 6—The derivatives market is a lot like heroin. The people who use it become convinced that they can't live without it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. These poor, desperate creatures ignore nearly everything around them in their obsession with their next fix. Everyone who comes in contact with them can see that they are destroying themselves and hurting society, but the addicts are gripped by something they cannot control, something which, in truth, controls them.

No society can tolerate letting junkies write the drug laws—even boneheads in Congress understand that much—but when it comes to derivatives, their minds tend to turn to smack. When it comes to financial regulations, the inmates are running the holding company. We suspect it might have to do with the millions of dollars in campaign contributions and other perks the derivatives addicts pump into the political system each year. We're not saying Congress is a bunch of whores, but FBI drag queens contend they have evidence to support that contention.

Here we are, more than two years into the biggest financial crisis anyone alive has ever seen, a crisis which is widely understood to have been caused by derivatives, and yet these weapons of mass destruction continue to be not only tolerated, but actively supported by our Federal government. It is beyond insane.

If a doctor were to keep a patient on life support after he died, in the hope of reviving the tumor that killed him, we would expect that the doctor would quickly lose his license. That is essentially what is happening today, as the Feds and the Fed twist the whole nation out of shape trying to keep Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the other derivatives giants from suffering their well-deserved fate.

Since our future depends upon kicking this nasty habit and returning to more wholesome economic policies, we hereby offer an alternative to the terminal stupidity of a derivatives-driven doom.

Production

There it is! Let's all say it together: "Production." Come on, you Wall Streeters in the back, speak up. We promise it won't hurt, and you may even get to like it after a while, as you dry out.

We know you like to promote yourselves as the engines of the economy, providing the capital that makes the world turn 'round. But, let's get real: All you really do is skim way more than your fair share of the money circulating through the economy. You don't produce anything for your cut; you don't add anything important. You are, to the economy, as fleas are to a dog, and we're just trying to give you the opportunity to correct your ways before the big flea dip.

We used to understand that a nation produced wealth by physical transformation and production. We would take iron ore, turn it into steel, use the steel to build the railroads that transformed our nation, the power plants that produced the electricity that powered our homes and factories, the pipes that delivered our drinking water and carried away our wastes, and much more. In our short history as a nation, we have gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear power, with each step dramatically raising our standard of living.

What made these advances in productive potential possible was the creativity of the minds of our citizens, who made discovery after discovery. We went from the first manned flight, to putting a man on the moon in six decades, because we were committed to progress and the development of the potential represented by each and every one of our citizens. We weren't perfect. Sometimes, far from it, but we were, in general, on the right path.

We began to go off the rails in a big way in the late 1960s, though the decay actually began to set in after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. The rise of the Baby Boomer culture, which turned its back on production, in favor of paper-pushing and financial gambling, marked a visible turning point. Each decade after that, the problem got worse, the parasite problem grew, and the real economy declined. Four decades later, when we should have already been on Mars, we've lost the capability to even go back to the Moon. We're going backwards.

You can't blame that on derivatives, per se, but you can certainly blame it on the post-industrial insanity which made derivatives possible. Stupidity breeds failure, not success.

If we are to pull out of this death spiral, we must return to science, to infrastructure, to manufacturing, and other things the Baby Boomers hate. Being a nation of gamblers hasn't worked, so let's go back to being producers.

Risk

Get a group of Wall Street types together and, after they finally quit whining about how hard it is to live on a mere million times the average unemployment compensation, the subject usually turns to risk. They'll talk about risk management, about appetite for risk, about the need for investors to begin taking risks again. They will tell you that the derivatives markets serve a valuable function, that they help establish the proper prices of various types of assets, and so on. It is all a bunch of crap.

By risk, they really mean speculation, and by speculation, they mean separating suckers from their money. When they call for investors to start taking risks again, think of the casino advertisements touting all the money you'll win if you'll just start feeding money into the slots. Or think of a sheep-shearing pen. Come on in, Mr. and Ms. Sheep, our tailors are waiting to serve you.

The price-setting part is a scam, too. The parasites—oops—financiers, tell us that these markets are needed for "price discovery." How can you possibly know how much a barrel of crude oil or a CDO is worth, without us?! What they really mean is: How far can we jack up the price?

For physical goods, the formula for determining price is fairly clear: Take the cost of production plus a reasonable profit, and that's your price. The only time you need a "market" to figure it out, is when you're selling something that is intrinsically over-priced—like the trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities that Wall Street sold over the last few years. They went for top dollar "market prices," but the securities turned out to be worthless. The buyers took the risk, the sellers took the cash, and, in the end, they all went bankrupt. Who wouldn't want a sweet deal like that?

One thing you have to admit, though. These idiots did take a lot of risk, and discover a lot of prices. All of it wrong, and it did blow up the world, but what the heck, nothing's perfect.

Enough Already!

The first step toward turning this global collapse around is to stop being so damned stupid. Most of us have no problem with that, but the junkies only care about that next fix. Not just the financial junkies, but the political junkies, and the media whores, too, who suck up to the big money because, they like the power, the fame, and the corruption that comes with it.

We all know what needs to be done. We are the People, the body which founded our government, and in which the responsibility lies to keep that government on the track expressed by the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We, the Citizens of the greatest Republic in world history, have to begin thinking, and acting, according to those principles. If we do, the government will follow. The Brutish Empire and its stooges will howl, but that's a good sign. We didn't ask their permission the first time, and we don't have to now. Our job is to help lead the world out of this mess. Lyndon LaRouche has already got this bandwagon started, so grab your friends and climb on board. We can live without derivatives.

johnhoefle@larouchepub.com

-------------------------

Enough!

2009-10-02T12:05:00.002-04:00

On the surface it sounds insane, and it is: Wall Street is resorting to its old "financial engineering" tricks—the same ones that helped blow up the world. And as weird as it sounds, there is a strange, book-cooking consistency to this madness.

Though a lot of activities fit that description, we're talking specifically here about "re-remics," or the re-securitization of real estate mortgage investment conduits ("remics"), a process in which existing mortgage-related derivatives are broken up and repackaged into new securities. In a re-remic, the assets of a remic are sorted into "good" and "bad" piles, and new securities created out of each pile. The new securities are then given new ratings by the ratings agencies, such that the capital the financial institutions have to set aside to cover those assets is reduced, even though the assets are the same. If this sounds nuts to you, you're on the right track.

The re-remic scam is one aspect of "Let's Pretend We're Not Broke," the most popular game on Wall Street these days. The more loaded down the banks' books get with toxic waste, the more capital they have to have to cover their "potential" losses, and the lower their capital ratios. Since they've got mountains of toxic waste on their books, the banks are expending considerable effort to reduce the level of capital they are required to set aside, and the re-remic gimmick is one of the techniques being used. The banks are also holding as many government-guaranteed loans and securities as they can, for the same reason. The polite phrase for this is "regulatory capital arbitrage," but "accounting fraud" is more accurate. The end result is to produce a phony statistic that can be used to claim that the bank—or insurance company, etc.—is healthy, when it is not.

This sort of nonsense is what killed the financial system in the first place. The derivatives market itself was created to hide the bankruptcy of the banking system and transfer future losses on unpayable debts from the banks into the securities markets, where it could be sold to pension funds and other suckers. A big part of AIG's credit default swap (CDS) business was just this sort of regulatory capital game: banks bought CDSs from AIG as a way of reducing the capital they had to set aside as reserves, and when AIG exploded, it was bailed out in order to save those banks. It should never have been allowed.

The fact that Wall Street thinks it can get away with such criminality today shows both that the players on the Street have learned nothing from the blowout, and that the so-called regulators have done nothing to clean up the system. The whole thing reeks of corruption and collusion, and demands a new Pecora Commission investigation. Had the Federal government put the financial system into bankruptcy protection, as it should have done, this activity would not be possible. That such activity is occurring again, serves as an indictment of the President and his administration, the Congress and the Federal Reserve. It is time to end the corruption, and end the monetary system which is preying upon us all. Enough is enough!
---------------
Wall Street Insanity: Cooking The Books With "Re-remics"
October 2, 2009 (LPAC)—

We Shall Overcome

2009-09-06T00:45:00.001-04:00

September 5, 2009 (LPAC)—Exactly 20 years ago, on Sept. 4, 1989, the first Leipzig Monday Rally took place, with several hundred citizens taking to the streets of the then East German city, demanding the freedom to travel and freedom of speech. Even arrests by the special police of the State Security Agency, the Stasi, who deployed massively, could not crush the protest rally, which was joined by a couple hundred more. The genie was out of the bottle. Only three weeks later, on Sept. 25, already 20,000 took to the streets of Leipzig, chanting "We Shall Overcome" among other songs. By the end of September, their numbers had increased to 40,000. Protest rallies also began to be held in more and more other cities.

Then, from October on, the number of protesters exploded: In Leipzig alone, a quarter-million people joined for a mass rally, and another quarter-million protested in other east German cities. Already during September, slogans changed, and the famous "Wir sind das Volk" ("We Are the People") began to prevail.

--------------

During a revolutionary wave sweeping across the Eastern Bloc, the East German government announced on November 9, 1989, after several weeks of civil unrest, that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans climbed onto and crossed the wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, parts of the wall were chipped away by a euphoric public and by souvenir hunters; industrial equipment was later used to remove almost all of the rest. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on October 3, 1990.

(paragraph just above from wikipedia, “Berlin Wall”)

Now you are ready for a most excellent 10-minute video: The Dynamics of Mass Strike

The United States of

2009-09-01T13:01:00.002-04:00

America, which I knew and loved has not died. It's still there.

Unfortunately, it is represented by very few people actively.

Sure people are totally fed up with the U.S. Congress and the Omamination administration, But they don't really see a solution.

There is one. And there is something else you should be doing with any time you spend staring at the Teevee or reading the distractions of blogland to pass the time until what you known damn well is going to happen happens.

You can be part of the solution.

I didn't write this.

2009-08-24T07:01:00.003-04:00

But I think it is very well said:

------------------------------------------

We concede that being Treasury Secretary at a time when the global financial system is disintegrating is no easy task, especially when you are trying to implement policies that haven't got a snowball's chance in Hell of working, but even so, it is sometimes difficult to feel sorry for Tim Geithner. Geithner is not such a bad sort, at least in comparison with sleazeball Larry Summers and the Nazi-policy-pushing Nero Obama, but he sure has helped make a mess of things.

While his cohort Benny "Bubbles" Bernanke was at Jackson Hole claiming the equivalent of George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" in his hyperinflationary war against the financial crisis, Geithner was trotted out to an interview with the Wall Street Urinal and Digg. The questions were from Digg users, who are apparently less adept at playing the kiss-up game than are the Urinal's professional reporters. In response to questions about the great bailout swindle, and the relationship between Washington and Wall Street, Geithner produced some truly impressive spin:

"We have been forced to do just extraordinary things and, frankly, offensive things to help save the economy," Geithner said. "I am completely confident that none of those decisions had anything to do with the specific interest of any individual firm, much less Goldman Sachs."

We would agree that extraordinarily offensive things were done, and are continuing to be done, but asking us to believe that the bailout wasn't a gift to Goldman Sucks, JP Morgan Chase and the rest of the British Empire's financial vampires is a bit much. Does he really think we are that stupid?

Apparently so, as he also took the time to praise the great men who ran the biggest swindle in history:

"These are deeply honorable men, great public statesmen willing to come serve their country in very challenging times and they did exceptionally good things for the country," Geithner said.

What a load of self-serving crap! Disgustingly corrupt jerks who sold the nation down the river while shoveling trillions of dollars of our money down the bankrupt maws of their parasitic cronies, is more like it. You really expect us to believe that, Tim? Or are you just trying to get yourself fired before it all blows up in your face?

Then again, what do you expect in a period where the "Big Lie" is the game of the day, where looting and pillaging is presented as a "public service," where policies to "cull the human herd" are called "reform," and where fascism is on the march? By that standard, Geithner did a fine job. We're dying to see what comes next. Literally.

johnhoefle@larouchepub.com
Geithner Praises The "Honorable Men" And Their "Offensive Things"

These accurate reports will be hard for many to accept, but here they are…

2009-08-17T10:49:00.004-04:00

Aug. 15—The British imperial interests have suffered a serious blow at the hands of Lyndon LaRouche, and they are reeling from the impact of that unanticipated strategic setback. Over the past 72 hours, President Barack Obama's failure to deliver on a made-in-London euthanasia scheme, disguised as a health-care "reform" program, has shocked the British media and the entire British political Establishment, and prompted them to launch a desperate defense of the British National Health Service and its affiliated NICE "death panel," which is the model for Obama's plan.

"The British elites suddenly found themselves facing a significant strategic defeat, in the face of the massive and spreading American popular revolt against the Obama Administration, and they were forced to launch an all-out defense of their own deeply flawed health-care system, as their last chance to salvage their Obama project," one senior U.S. intelligence source told EIR yesterday. "The issue is, London losing its grip over the Obama White House, and that is a really big deal, given all they have invested in that program."

Indeed, in response to the continuing mass strike ferment throughout the United States against the Obama Administration's failed policies, the British media, from the Fabian Society-linked London Guardian to the right-wing Tory Daily Telegraph, is carrying out a coordinated black propaganda campaign, to save London's grip over the White House—by defending British health care as a world-class system—far better than that of the United States. The normally middle-of-the-road British Independent today ran an article, headlined, "The brutal truth about America's health care," describing the thousands of poor people who turned out in Los Angeles for free health care, and defending the Obama plan. The Independent screed is typical of the propaganda line coming from the entire British media this past week.

Politicians from Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to his Tory opponent David Cameron, have also delivered nearly identical defenses of the British system. Given the top-down orchestration of British politics, it is not unfair to presume that the Queen's Privy Council, headed by Lord Peter Mandelson, issued orders for the engineered effort last week, when the situation in the United States broke totally out of control.

The single biggest cause of hysteria from British quarters is the fact that Lyndon LaRouche has been publicly identified as the catalyst of the revolt against the Obama White House's efforts to shove a Hitlerian euthanasia scheme down the throats of the American people. Beginning with the Aug. 6 Romulus, Mich. town hall meeting by Rep. John Dingell (D), the LPAC poster, depicting President Obama with a Hitler mustache and the caption, "I've Changed," has grabbed headlines in newspapers around the United States and around the world.

This past week, as town hall protests swelled in size, more and more U.S. and international media began airing interviews with LaRouche PAC organizers; and the Washington Times went so far as to publish an interview with EIR Editor-in-Chief Nancy Spannaus, spelling out LaRouche's critique of the Obama health plan scheme, and his alternative.

The next day, an hysterical reporter for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) conducted a live interview with LaRouche national spokesperson, Debra Freeman, in which Freeman launched into a frontal attack against the British health-care system, as a genocidal mess.

LaRouche's well-documented denunciation of the Obama Administration's plan for the creation of IMAC (Independent Medical Advisory Council), modeled on Hitler's September-October 1939 T-4 program of government enforced euthanasia, has been picked up by leading Republican Party figures, including House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio); former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin; conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan; and scores of lesser known columnists, bloggers, and activists.

One senior political operative told EIR that the Republican Party, desperate to regroup after the electoral defeats of 2006 and 2008, picked up the LaRouche attacks on the Obama health-care swindle, studied the documentation, concluded that LaRouche was absolutely correct, and jumped on the bandwagon. By last week, according to the source, every faction within the GOP had picked up on the LaRouche message—to the point that a frantic Karl Rove jumped in, to warn Republicans that they were losing control over the issue to LaRouche.
Furthermore, a wide range of Democratic Party-linked voices, from The Nation's David Greider, to the New York Times's Frank Rich, to cultural commentator Eli Siegel, to Arianna Huffington, have also joined the attack on President Obama, denouncing him for cutting a dirty backroom deal with "Big Pharma" and "Big Insurance," and accusing him of being a corporativist—i.e., a fascist.

In fact, White House sources have leaked to the media, some details of the agreement, reached in recent weeks, between PhRMA, the industry lobbying group, and the President, further fueling the "revolt from the left" against Obama.

What LaRouche started, on April 11, 2009, with his webcast warning that Obama suffers from a severe "Nero Complex," has now mushroomed into a far-reaching popular revolt. The ostensible issue is the President's fascist health-care scheme, but underlying factor, is that the American people are fed up with bailouts of Wall Street at taxpayers' expense, massive job losses, home foreclosures, and the bankrupting of nearly every state government—translating into a collapse in social services, and even basic infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and core transportation systems.

That [the oligarchy] is acutely aware of the danger that such a popular revolt—informed by LaRouche's clear alternative recovery policies—represents, was made perfectly clear by a pair of articles, that both appeared in the past 24 hours.

Edward Luce, the London Financial Times Washington bureau chief, penned an article today, dripping with sarcasm, titled "Healthcare paranoia is part of America's culture war," which did, in fact, admit that the health-care battle is actually a much deeper one, centered on American values and the U.S. Constitution. "Anyone who visits a few of this month's rowdy town hall meetings can grasp that opposition to Mr Obama's healthcare proposals is a lightning rod to a far larger world view, which seeks to protect American values and the US constitution from an alien takeover," Luce writes. "Their issues are diverse. But their sentiment is common: America's constitution is being trashed by un-American values.... No amount of contrary evidence will puncture the view that Mr Obama plans to establish 'death panels' that will decide which grannies get to live or die. Nor will reason counter the view that countries such as Canada and the UK push their weakest to the back of the queue.... Forget the details of healthcare reform. The side that identified with American values will get the upper hand."

The second article, posted on the widely read Huffington Post, written by Chris Weigant, went directly at the central issue that has London and Wall Street totally up in arms: The fact that the decades-old containment of LaRouche has totally broken down.

Back in 1976, Washington Post editorial writer Stephen Rosenfeld published a now-infamous op-ed, speaking for the Anglo-American Establishment media. He declared that, henceforth, there could be no media coverage of LaRouche, that was anything other than a mocking slander. Rosenfeld put in writing, what had been delivered, face-to-face, in December 1971, as an official Establishment pronouncement to LaRouche. Sidney Hook, the grand-master of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told LaRouche, moments after he had decimated Keynsian economist Abba Lerner at a Queens College debate, that he would be placed under total containment. LaRouche had dared to commit the crime of publicly proving, before a large university audience, that Professor Lerner was a devotee of Hitler's chief economist Hjalmar Schacht.

In his Huffington Post rant, Weigant assailed the Establishment media for breaking the more than 35-year containment pact:

"I truly believe that some of the overpaid well-coiffed talking heads on television finally woke up and became embarrassed that they were lending so much legitimacy to people who normally would be referred to as the 'tin-foil hat brigade' (see, for example: followers of Lyndon LaRouche). There's an unspoken rule in the mainstream media that once a consensus is reached that any one person or group is from 'the fringe,' then all they deserve from that point on is ridicule. Look at how they treated Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul in last year's campaign, for instance.

"But," Weigant continues, "the media found themselves in a quandry last week. They loved the 'angry person screaming at member of Congress' video so much (and ran it so many times) that they knew they were culpable...."

The reality is obviously more profound than Weigant's nasty admission about the Establishment media's black-balling. LaRouche called the shot on President Obama's Nero Complex, and dared to draw the accurate historical parallels between the President's healthcare reform swindle, and Hitler's universally despised T-4 euthanasia program, which was the precursor to the concentration camps and the Holocaust. As events proved LaRouche to be right, and as the American people suddenly woke up one day and realized that they were about to lose everything, because they had foolishly gone along with a culture and an economic policy that has brought us to the brink of total breakdown, all hell broke loose.

- For the Record, Mr. President -

After initially cancelling all scheduled town hall appearances by President Obama, the White House spin-meisters decided last week that the President had to be sent out to salvage his all-but-lost health-care reform plan. A series of tightly screened and engineered "town hall" meetings were thus staged, to give the President the opportunity to lie through his teeth. President Obama tried—unsuccessfully—to reassure the American people that he does not plan to create "death panels" to set limits on medical care.
But, at the same time that Obama was visiting New Hampshire, Montana, and Colorado, delivering carefully scripted lies to carefully screened audiences, sources on Capitol Hill were telling a far different story to EIR. In fact, the top White House health-care aides, from Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, to Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag—to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm's brother and a leading euthanasia advocate—were all arm-twisting and threatening Congressional leaders, telling them that the only issue that is not up for negotiation is the President's plan to create an independent board, to set absolute limits on health-care services and payments. The very "death panel" that the President said was off the table, is the only issue that the White House insists is non-negotiable.

One senior U.S. intelligence source verified the Congressional accounts and explained that the President has been sold on the need for massive austerity. "The bailout could cost $24 trillion, so there have to be austerity cuts, to reduce the Federal deficit," the source revealed. "Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House chief economic advisor Larry Summers have both promised the Chinese, and other major holders of U.S. government debt, that there will be massive cuts, to reduce the deficit. Unless they get their independent panel, to impose severe cuts in health-care services and payments, they won't succeed.
"This is what the President believes, for now. Health care is just one part of the overall austerity scheme they are trying to pull off."

These austerity schemes are doomed to fail, and that poses the next big question for Obama's ultimate controllers in London: When do they decide that the President is beyond salvation, and what do they do then? ...

----------------------
Want more detail?

White House in Hiding, Senators Say Obama Doesn't Have the Votes to Pass Reform

August 17, 2009 (LPAC)—The White House and Nancy "Marie Antoinette" Pelosi were in hiding from the cameras on Sunday, while more than 4 hours of TV "talking heads" shows addressed nothing but health care, and demonstrated that Obama's Nazi health care policy is becoming more and more hated. The TV talk shows, from Fox Sunday, to ABC This Week, to Meet the Press, were total brawls that revealed that the votes are not there to pass the health plan in either the Senate or the House. Among the major revelations indicating that Obama is doomed were that:

(1) the public option is "not essential" — HHS Secretary Sibelius;

(2) "there are not enough votes in the U.S. Senate for the public option. There never have been," and for the President to pursue this is a "wasted effort" — Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), a member of the "Gang of Six" bipartisan negotiators in the Senate Finance Committee;

(3) there is no September 15th deal promised by Sen. Max Baucus to Obama to produce a Senate Finance Committee bill. Instead, the Committee "will be ready when we are ready," pending answers from the Congressional Budget Office — Sen. Kent Conrad;

(4) there will be no "mandatory end of life counseling" included in any bill that passes, according to Sen. Conrad, and Secretary Sibelius made a similar announcement that end of life counseling is "probably off the table" now due to the "horrific" opposition;

(5) IMAC and NICE are major targets of the Republicans who oppose the existing plans, but both TV moderators interrupted the Senators when they mentioned the names of these bodies. Instead, the moderators only wanted to use the term, "death panels."

Specifically, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) went after the end of life counseling as intolerable, and also cited NICE as the model for "rationing," and the reason that he recently told reporters that the "Democrats' health plan will kill Americans." When the moderator goaded him, "Is that reasonable discourse?" Coburn replied, "Absolutely ... let's look at the NICE system." That led fellow guest Tom Daschle to cut him off in a frenzy.

Sen. Shelby repeatedly accused the White House of advocating rationing; a video was shown of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), another member of the bipartisan "Gang of Six" negotiating the Senate bill, has been at several town meetings in Iowa, where he is saying that we "should not have counseling on the end of life ... we should not have a government program that determines you're going to pull the plug on Grandma." And Sen. Orin Hatch, who has co-sponsored health bills with Kennedy, Waxman, and Dodd, said he will not negotiate with the White House until the "government option" is removed completely, and went after the "IMAC" board by name, directly noting that this rationing board would be appointed only by the President.

More and more people are saying that the health plan is doomed. A.B. Stoddard from The Hill reported that in a conversation with a "leading" Blue Dog Democrat, he revealed that they "are not going to be able to pass" a bill in the House, because the Blue Dogs "are peeling off" from support. Polls show that opposition to the health care is about 7 percentage points above support; Sen. Shelby said that the Town Hall protests are having a major effect on how the Congress will vote.

------------------------------------------
We don't want another 9/11

"We want the President safe. Unless he changes his policies in the immediate days ahead, he will become an ever increasing object of hatred from the American people. We want to assure his safety, because there should be no guilt associated with hatred for the President's horrible policies, from bailing out Wall Street, to his so-called health care reforms.

"These guys [see below] are spreading degenerate lies. They are lying about the American people, and lying about the actual popular upheaval against policies that will kill. The American people do not want to be killed, and these two British writers are stupid jerks who don't know the first thing about what is going on here. In point of fact, the people putting out this kind of propaganda are doing the most to set up the conditions for such an attack on the President. The citizens showing up at the town hall meetings around the country are showing a decent respect for the person of the President, while voicing their strong opposition to the policies he is promoting. The lying claims of racism are exactly the opposite of the truth. The made-in-London policies being promoted by this Administration are where the racism is to be found—hatred of the human race.

"The [oligarchy] may very well be attempting to orchestrate U.S. politics by assassination. It would be dangerous to deny this. That is why I am speaking out, as a responsible public figure, now. If anything happens to the President, you can start with the assumption that the orders came from London. Preemptive exposure is the best insurance against something happening to the President."

[Actually, the four paragraphs above were the last four of the following:]

Oligarchy, Furious At Obama, Could Go For the Kill

August 17, 2009 (LPAC)—Two major British Sunday newspapers—the Observer and the Independent—published black propaganda stories today, claiming that the outpouring of opposition to the President's health care "reforms" is coming from a rabid rightwing extremist movement, that could attempt to assassinate the President. Lyndon LaRouche promptly denounced these British stories, warning that if there is any attempt to assassinate the President, it will come from top circles in London, who are furious at President Barack Obama, for flubbing the British demands to impose fascism on the United States.

Writing in the Independent, Rupert Cornwell touted a recent study by the ADL-allied Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), claiming a massive increase in radical militia activity as proof that a major domestic terrorist attack or a direct hit on Obama is likely. "As one SPLC official puts it, every element is in place for a 'perfect storm' of home-grown extremism. For the first time, the detested federal government is run by a black man. A struggling economy fuels discontent, with illegal immigrants accused of stealing American jobs. The military, long a breeding ground of the far right, is sending home veterans in vast numbers. Finally, there is the internet, which simultaneously propagates and intensifies the feelings of true believers—and the conspiracy theories they devour. The US has always had a taste for conspiracy theories, but rarely as now."

Writing in the Observer, the Sunday edition of the Fabian Society-linked Guardian newspaper, Paul Harris was even more blunt. In an article headlined, "Fears for Barack Obama's safety as healthcare debate fuels extremism," Harris wrote, "Welcome to the disturbing new face of the radical right in America. Across the country, extremism is surging, inflamed by conservative talkshow hosts, encouraged by Republican leaders and propagating a series of wild conspiracy theories. Many fear it might end in tragedy... Such extremism is becoming a major security issue, prompting fears of an attack on Obama's life or some other incident of domestic terrorism." Harris not only cited the same Southern Poverty Law Center study as did the Independent's Cornwell. He interviewed Chip Berlet, the sexually ambiguous longtime slanderer of Lyndon LaRouche, who cackled, "This is a very dangerous situation that can spin off 'lone wolf' individuals who decide now is the time to act against people they see as an enemy."

[T]here is a threat against the President's life, but not from the so-called extremist fringe in America. [ . . . ] It is estimated that the greatest danger to the life of the President is [ . . . ]aimed at attracting sympathy to the dead man's cause. Were this to happen, it would represent a new 9/11 attack, with even more devastating consequences.

------------------------------------

Looking to the Future

2009-08-15T15:39:00.003-04:00

Beyond today's debate... A New Global Economy, The Path to Optimistic Cooperation and International Development. (What school could have been.)

Plants are not surgeons, surgeons are not plants.

2009-08-15T15:15:00.002-04:00

Nevermind. You'll see after watching this 6-7 minute video. A young woman with a view to the future...

Healthcare Reform: What the Obama Administration is Up To

2009-08-14T00:24:00.003-04:00

August 13, 2009 (LPAC)—Reliable sources inform LaRouche PAC that the Obama White House and OMB director Peter Orszag have told Congress they will refuse to accept any healthcare "reform" legislation which does not legislate Orszag's killer Independent Medicare Advisory Commission (IMAC) into power. Orszag's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is openly "fixing" the so-called scoring of healthcare reform plans in order to compel Congress to do so.

The IMAC is at the core of the Obama healthcare "reform's" actual fascist agenda; it copies the "T-4" (Tiergarten 4) euthanasia program Hitler established in 1939, to create a board of physicians charged with saving hundreds of thousands of Reichsmarks yearly by terminating care to "lives not worthy of life." The IMAC part of the legislation was written personally by Orszag, giving power to this Commission to order prompt and mandatory cuts in Medicare/Medicaid funding of specific tests, treatments, procedures, drugs, etc. for seniors and poor people. This commission is also supposed to be made up of physicians, and healthcare "experts," but at Orszag's insistence it can be overruled by government actuaries and ordered to make even deeper, faster cuts.

But the deadly IMAC—due to Congressional Democratic resistance to a panel that clearly can kill elderly and poor people by cutting off funding of their medical care—has not been incorporated in any healthcare "reform" bill produced by any Congressional committee so far.

Sources say that White House staff are telling Congressional leaders that the IMAC must be put into that legislation by September. And Orszag has told those leaders that in order to enforce this, OMB is predetermining that any bills not creating a powerful IMAC are being "scored" by OMB to appear to cost very large, $1 trillion-plus sums, in order to rule such bills out as unacceptably expensive. The closely watched "scoring" process, in a word, is fixed—openly and arrogantly so. The White House will bludgeon the Congressional committees until they get IMAC—their euthanasia board—passed; or until the American people force them to abandon the whole criminal campaign.

This is not intended as entertainment

2009-08-12T20:14:00.005-04:00

The Revolution is underway. Let us not forget that those who are accustomed to using us as beasts to be herded and sent to slaughter are well-practiced in steering revolutions to their usurious ends.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance . . .

Pelosi Goes Psycho with Op-Ed Calling Opposition "Un-American"

2009-08-11T13:13:00.001-04:00

Aug. 11 (LPAC)—Nancy Pelosi is insane, and is trying to get the Congress to goosestep to Obama's Nazi policies, but her latest attempt—an op-ed (so-signed by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer) called "'Un-American' Attacks Can't Derail Health Care Debate" has backfired, making her even more desperate. Pelosi's insanity was driven home dramatically in Hoyer's home state—Maryland—where as of 7:00 PM, more than 2,500 angry people had shown up for a town meeting on health care, and only 500 of them were let in.

Clearly in a disassociated state, Pelosi writes that she and Hoyer will spend August working with House Dems to combine the three separate health bills passed in the house to "produce one strong piece of legislation that the House will approve in September." She tries to dismiss the mass strike as "an ugly campaign [that] is underway not merely to misrepresent [the issue] ... but to disrupt public meetings.... The tactics have included hanging in effigy one Dem member of Congress in Maryland and protesters holding a sign displaying a tombstone with the name of another congressman in Texas, where protesters also shouted....

"Drowning out opposing views is just plain un-American."

Incredibly, she never mentions FDR, but rather, credits racist British agent Teddy Roosevelt for putting health care on the "national agenda as early as 1912, thanks to [his] Bull Moose presidential run." In deference to TR, she says, "This fall at long last, we must reach it."

This psychotic rant has already triggered furious backlash, with editorials and denunciations from all over the country beginning with House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). By the end of the day, even the White House spokesmen and Obama himself in Mexico had made Pelosi a laughingstock, by praising, not denouncing the "vigorous" opposition as a national tradition.

Pelosi is so hated that Washington, D.C.'s leading all-news radio station, WTOP, on its website reporting the story of Pelosi's op-ed, anticipated an avalanche of opposition to her, and warned: "Please note that WTOP strives to be a family-friendly website, so please keep the language clean when you add your comments..."

Reality of Collapse Destroys Fantasy of Recovery

2009-08-11T11:43:00.003-04:00

Headlines blare that the recession has ended, and the recovery is on. The hype machine is all revved up, pushing the line that the worst is over, the economy is stabilized, and poised for a recovery that, if it hasn't already started, is just around the corner.

The nominal reason for this giddy burst of propaganda is that the rate of collapse of U.S. GDP has slowed significantly. That means, according to legions of experts, that the uptick is on, just as they predicted. These are, of course, the same experts who have been telling us, constantly, since the crisis began, that the worst was over and the recovery had started. And they are the same economists who assured us, before the system died, that the fundamentals of the economy were sound.

Our admiration for experts and their statistics is without bounds, but if once, just once, reality would follow their fine theories! Unfortunately, reality does not seem to share their lofty views of their own competence. Maybe that's because these so-called experts are a collection of idiots, incompetents, and whores, who can't see the collapse, even as it crushes them. They are little more than well-paid cheerleaders for a recovery that never comes.

It Is Gross

We've thoroughly debunked the statistic known as gross domestic product (GDP) over the years. GDP is a number which purports to represent the dollar value of the nation's output of goods and services. It has two devastating flaws:

First, it makes no distinction between productive and overhead activities; and,

Second, it is denominated in dollars rather than in physical units. GDP makes no distinction between, say, the steel industry and the derivatives casino. Both add to the nation's dollar output, so both are treated as useful. GDP does not discriminate between the creative organism and the parasites. Good thing, too, since if it did, the hypnotic chart-line would be falling like a rock.

The keepers of the GDP are the folks at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), of the U.S. Department of Commerce, largely run for the benefit of big business--the giant companies and cartels, and the financiers which control them. Commerce does its best to please them: If they want statistics which hide the damage, that's what they'll get.

It's getting harder and harder for them to hide that destruction, but they do try. So they tell us that
GDP fell at an annualized rate
of just 1% in the second quarter of 2009,
significantly less than the 6.4% in the first quarter.
That's practically no collapse at all,
and no collapse means the recession is over,
and that means the recovery is on!
Simple,
once you non-think it through.

The '-Less' Recovery

We've already been told that this is a jobless recovery, but it appears that there are quite a few other "-lesses" as well.
Production-less,
trade-less,
home-less, and
profit-less,
just to name a few.

Let's start with jobs. When Lyndon LaRouche declared at his July 25, 2007 webcast that the financial system was dead, the official U.S. unemployment rate was 4.7%, and it doubled since, to 9.5% as of June 2009. The real unemployment rate is probably around 30%, but even the "official" figures show a disaster.

During that period, the "official" number of unemployed persons has jumped from 7 million to nearly 15 million.

During that same period, the initial claims for unemployment insurance have also doubled, rising from some 308,000 for the week of that webcast, to 584,000 the week of July 25, this year.

Manufacturing employment, which was already at historic lows, has dropped another 15% since LaRouche's 2007 webcast, and is down 39% from its 1979 peak. On a per capita basis, manufacturing employment is at levels not seen since the Civil War era. Given the importance of manufacturing production to an economy, this is a disaster.

Jobs are also disappearing in the service sector, which had shown virtually uninterrupted growth since the 1940s. Some 2.4 million jobs in the "service-providing industries" have been lost since July 2007. Also hard hit is the financial sector, where employment has dropped 7%—563,000 jobs—since July 2007.

Manufacturing production itself has fallen 17% since LaRouche declared the system dead, according to the manufacturing production index, while the production of durable goods has fallen 32%. Sales of autos and light trucks are off 37% over that period, and down 56% from their peak in October 2001.

Imports and exports have fallen off the cliff, with imports of goods down 27% since July 2007, and down 39% from their peak a year ago. Exports of goods are off 14% since the webcast, and down 30% from their peak in July 2008.

These elements are just a sampling. A recovery is underway?... or, even on the horizon?

We are swirling wildly into a total breakdown.

Not even in the financial sector—where banks are claiming to make big profits and the financial markets are said to be improving—is there a recovery. The bank profits are an illusion, the result of accounting tricks, lying about losses, gouging customers, and apparently even stealing.

If the big banks reported the truth about their financial condition, they'd have to shut their doors, despite the trillions of dollars poured into them via the bailout swindle!

The Dow Jones [post-]Industrial Average has climbed back above 9,000, [whoopie!]

...but the rise is largely the result of the criminal activity known as high-frequency trading. Goldman Sucks is the leading culprit.

There are other bodies waiting to surface, as well. AIG remains in deep kimche, as do Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and a company named Capco appears poised to also take its place on the roll of disasters. GE Capital is also in big trouble, and will likely require huge amounts of government funds.

Years ago, when Enron was imploding, we noted that the difference between Enron and GE was just a matter of time. Most people took that as a joke, but we were serious.

Is it time to quit listening to all the fools and cheerleaders, and start listening to the man who has been on the mark all along? Listening is not enough, though. What is required is to act on LaRouche's ideas, and to force the implementation of sane policies of an FDR type.

There is a solution, but we must act. Will we rise and meet the challenge? It is up to us.

------------------------

johnhoefle@larouchepub.com wrote the above, but I messed with it a bunch. His original can be found here.

Will someone PLEASE

2009-07-28T07:43:00.004-04:00

see to it that this creep gets put under adult supervision?

I stole the graphic from this page and put my own words on it.

There is no joke involved here. This is life and death stuff. Look around you.

Alicia'sIQis^2U

2009-07-27T14:24:00.001-04:00

See for yourself.

The Real Question Is

2009-07-27T12:48:00.006-04:00

Summer, 2009

Look Around You

Take a good look at the economy around you. Compare the standard of living of your family, your friends, and your neighbors now, with the way it was in previous decades. What kind of work do you do—productive or overhead? Do you earn enough income to pay your expenses and have a comfortable surplus? Do you spend hours every week in bumper-to-bumper traffic, commuting to and from work? Are you optimistic about the future? Or, are you grimly holding on, hoping for a break? Are conditions getting better, or worse?

Our nation is dying. Forty-seven of the 50 states are bankrupt, as are thousands upon thousands of cities and counties. As the economy sinks, as people lose jobs by the hundreds of thousands, as real estate and financial assets collapse in value, revenues are drying up. At the same time, prices are soaring on food, energy, and other staples. When incomes plummet and costs soar, even President Nero should be able to figure out we're headed deeper into trouble.

Six U.S. states hit contemporary-record unemployment rates in June, with Michigan being the first state in a quarter of a century to top 15%, according to the Labor Department. Fifteen states have unemployment levels above 10%. These are the official rates—real unemployment is probably twice those rates. What do you think that means for the families involved, the governments which depend upon them for tax revenues, and the financial institutions which hold their mortgages and their credit cards?

Look at the "bank profits" in this context. Even if the banks were solvent, they would not be for long, as the economy collapses beneath them. But that's only half of it. The other half is that the population, and the physical economy upon which their lives depend, is being systematically looted by banks like Goldman Sucks, with the deliberate, knowing collusion of the Obama Administration and the Federal Reserve. The more money these fools give away through the bailout, the faster the real economy collapses. We are throwing out the baby to save the bathwater.

Four of the biggest banks in the U.S.A. declared huge profits for the second quarter, prompting a predictable chorus from the usual lame-brained cheerleaders about how the financial system has weathered the storm and returned to normalcy. "Put your party hats on, kids, because the money machine is back in business!" Oh yeah, and the tooth fairy is going to leave the winning lottery ticket under your pillow tonight.

The levels of delusion, duplicity, and stupidity among the government, financial, and media circles are incredible. Virtually nothing they are saying is true, because virtually nothing they believe is true. It would be hard to find a bigger pack of idiots anywhere on the planet.

No matter what they say, the banks are not earning profits. The system is dead, and so are they. No amount of accounting fiction and asset-puffery will change that.

Deadly Fantasies

Rather than debate them on all their silly talking points, let's demolish their fantasies from the top down, beginning with the belief that the return of the financial system would be a positive development.

We're talking here about a global monetary system which was created and run by parasites, for the express purpose of subjugating and looting the people of the planet. This Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, more generally known as the British Empire, has been the bane of the planet for centuries. Its power lies in its control over global finance, acting through a system of central banks and powerful financial houses, using its money to buy off and corrupt private and government interests in every nation. This empire is the entity which created the derivatives markets that blew up the world in mid-2007; it is this empire that has stolen trillions of your tax dollars to cover its losses, leaving you to face savage cuts in your standard of living. Reviving this monstrosity is about the worst idea a person could have, which presumably is why President Obama supports it.

The second fantasy is that the system is coming back. It's not—it's deader than Adam Smith. The derivatives markets are dead, the banking system is rapidly consolidating—with the biggest and most bankrupt banks kept open on the Federal teat, while the little ones are being closed at a pace not seen since the early 1990s. The only thing keeping the banking system from a visible collapse, is phony accounting on a world-historic scale, with trillions of dollars in worthless assets being carried at "whatever it takes to make us look solvent" valuations. It is a criminal conspiracy of the first order, and a monumental stupidity.

The third fantasy is that this is a financial crisis, for which the so-called financial "experts" must provide the solution. That's a fallacy of composition, with a so-called "financial solution" being dangled in front of desperate bankers and citizens, as a way of keeping them distracted, while a very nasty political solution—fascism—is being put in place. While we stare at the carrot on the stick, the world is being reorganized into a global financial dictatorship, and our nation is being politically destroyed.

Just as the financier oligarchy imposed fascism around the world in the 1920s and 1930s, it is attempting to do so again. Franklin Roosevelt, and the American spirit and industrial capacity stopped them then, defeating a coup attempt in the U.S., and defeating Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan. This time, however, we have President Obama openly pushing Hitler-style policies.

Far from being a good sign, even the illusion of a revival of the financial system is a dangerous development, because it takes us further away from the only real solution to this crisis—the abandonment of imperial monetarism in favor of a return to the American System of political economy, and its core, the Hamiltonian credit system. Anything else is a one-way ticket to global, corporatist fascism, the end of the United States as a sovereign nation, and the death of the nation-state system for decades to come.

Rise to the Occasion

The issue is not can we save the nation, but will we.

Don't wait for the proverbial "them" to do it for you. "They" are either deliberate plotters of the destruction of the nation, corrupt individuals looking out for themselves while the nation collapses, or cowards hiding under their beds. There are good people out there who want to do the right thing, but they don't believe they can win. Our job is not only to show them that it can be done, but to lead the fight.

Without such action on our part,

the nation is doomed.

The oligarchy can not win,

as its success in implementing

its "solutions" ensures its demise.

The real question then, is,

will we let them take us with them?

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johnhoefle@larouchepub.com wrote the above,

I just hacked the formatting in an attempt to hold your attention for a long moment.

The original text is here.

You should go here.

Obama: S.O.S

2009-06-09T14:24:00.000-04:00

Some healing for those who were infatuated with the illusion of hope that the P.R/propaganda orchestra wrapped around Obama—some healing for those who may, by the time they see this, have realized the error of allowing themselves to be swept along into a pile of trouble and the same old shit in a brand new bottle:

B. B. King & Eric Clapton - The Thrill Is Gone

Now let’s try to move on and work for a future, for an accelerating increase in development and a cease to the stupid wars and measureless suffering, and daily hunger, starvation, unnecessary disease and grinding of human dignity into the dirt. Good works come only through work. Rise up.

Which part of this is unclear to you?

2009-06-03T09:00:00.003-04:00

With every passing day, the Obama Administration more closely resembles the fascist regimes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Underneath all of Obama's promissory rhetoric lies a policy of unlimited support for the parasitic financier class, while savagely gouging the middle and lower economic strata.

That this is the policy advocated by the financier elite should be no surprise: Wall Street helped the Brutish Empire create both Hitler and Mussolini, and funded a fascist movement in the U.S.—the American Liberty League and its satellites—in the 1930s, as elements of an attempt to create a world fascist movement. This fascist cabal even tried to organize a coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. That coup fortunately failed, and FDR defeated the fascists, both foreign and domestic. But the victory was only temporary.

We have repeatedly identified this grouping as the American wing of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier oligarchy, centered in the City of London and operated through a worldwide system of central banks, private financial institutions, and corporate cartels. It is more commonly known as the British Empire.

Today, these imperial fascists are attempting another coup. After decades of financial deregulation and corporate cartelization, they have amassed great wealth and power, to the point that they dominate both the financial system and the Federal government. They are now using their power to run the greatest criminal swindle in history—the Wall Street bailouts—while using the financial crisis to gut what remains of the productive economy.

They were the power behind Bush and Cheney, and they are the power behind Obama. Thus, it should be no surprise that on the major policy issues—led by the financial crisis, the war in Southwest Asia, and the police state—the Obama policies are essentially the same. Obama, the man we elected to reverse the Bush disaster, is turning out to be just another fascist front-man, accelerating the collapse instead of halting it.

Globalization

The major issue facing the world today is the drive by the financier oligarchy to destroy the nation-state system, and return the world to imperial rule. They intend to use the financial crisis to force that change. Virtually everything the Obama Administration has done, has weakened the nation and strengthened the oligarchy.

On financial policy, Obama has supported moves toward global, rather than national, regulation and oversight. He has endorsed the British plan to turn the International Monetary Fund into a supranational regulator able to issue its own money. He has used U.S. taxpayer money to bail out the speculative bets of both U.S. and foreign banks, and has allowed the banks to virtually dictate financial regulatory policy. After the phony stress tests, banks which are insolvent are not only allowed to remain open, but encouraged to sell more shares to the public, adding fraud upon fraud. The speculators are being protected, while the general public is looted.

Everywhere we turn, the parasites are proposing Orwellian "reforms" to fix the system, which actually make things worse. The high-sounding Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, for example, just issued its "plan for regulatory reform," which is actually a call to head off reforms. It calls for more global "coordination," recommends against a return to the FDR-era Glass-Steagall law, which separated commercial banking from investment banking, and defends the derivatives markets, including credit default swaps. That is not reform, it is surrender, a surrender of national sovereignty. The Treasury's plan to "regulate" over-the-counter derivatives is little more than a scheme to protect the monopoly of the big derivatives banks, and is based upon a proposal submitted by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Barclays, and Crédit Suisse! Goldman Sachs is also a major player in the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation.

To pay for all of this, the Obama Administration is considering implementing a value-added tax (VAT), or national sales tax, of the sort common in the oligarchy-controlled nations of Europe. Such a tax is, by intent, hugely regressive, falling hardest on those who can afford it least. Advocates of the tax claim that the proceeds could be used to pay for health care and other benefits, but that argument is a fraud. The real purpose of the tax would be to loot the population and weaken the nation, hastening its collapse: yet more fascism.

The restructuring of the auto sector, under the guise of "saving" General Motors and Chrysler, is more of the same. What is really being rescued are the fictitious values of the debts of these companies, and the derivatives piled upon them. Chrysler is being turned over to Fiat, while GM has stated that it will increase its sales in the U.S.—of cars it builds elsewhere. What is playing out is really the globalization of the auto sector, under the supervision of bankers associated with Felix Rohatyn's Lazard, a bank with a sordid history of assaulting America on behalf of the financier oligarchy. We have a former Lazard banker, Steve Rattner, serving as Obama's auto czar; Lazard bankers advising the United Autoworkers; and former Lazard banker Jim Millstein, as the senior restructuring officer at Treasury. Add to that Lazard's historic role advising the Agnelli family of Fiat, and the true nature of the "auto rescue" becomes obvious.

With every step, the Obama Administration is furthering globalization, which itself is a policy designed to replace the nation-state with financier-run corporate cartels, which control the world by controlling the production and distribution of essential goods and materials. Step by step, the empire is tightening its grip over the world's population, for the purpose of dramatically reducing not only the number of people, but also their ability to defend themselves against imperial designs.

Defend Sovereignty

At the Bilderberger meeting in 1968, Lehman Brothers banker and senior Establishment figure George W. Ball outlined a plan to replace the "archaic" nation-state with what he called the "world company." The scheme was explicitly Malthusian, based upon the claim that the world's resources were too limited to be trusted to mere nations, which are too often swayed by domestic concerns, such as the general welfare. Instead, the idea was that these resources should be managed by global corporations, which would administer them in ways which maximized imperial control and profit. That "world company" scheme was implemented, and today is known as "globalization." Both terms are mere euphemisms for imperialism.

It might seem to some that these oligarchs are far too powerful to defeat, but, in truth, the financial crisis has made them highly vulnerable to a counterattack of national sovereignty. The empire is bankrupt, its parasitic looting policies—a.k.a., "the bubble"—having destroyed the global economy, and is now dependent upon the U.S. and other nations to cover its losses. If we were to quit bailing it out, and instead put its financial markets and institutions into bankruptcy protection, the empire would collapse, and the world would be free to begin rebuilding.

Lyndon LaRouche has laid out the policies needed to save humanity, via his Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, a return to sovereign credit policies, and a Four-Power agreement among the U.S., Russia, China, and India, to form a united front against the British Empire. The question is: Will the people of the U.S. find the will to act, and set the example for the world? We are headed into fascism, under a President who has adopted explicitly Nazi policies. We have seen this before, and it does not end well. We must stop it, now.

johnhoefle@larouchepub.com

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I have copied John's work here in the hope that a few more people might read it and think about it. God-willing, it might even seep out into the world in the form of some constructive decision-making or action.

John Hoefle 5-22-09: Exactly

2009-05-28T13:26:00.005-04:00

Brainwashed people just are not ready for the truth; been trained by behaviorists.

Whoops! "Can't go there... That part conflicts with my OPINION"... "Well that's true, but if I said it in public, people would think I was nuts"... and so it goes, deeper and deeper into hell on earth.

Read:

Genocide is the policy of the financier oligarchs of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal empire—deliberate, knowing, intentional genocide. This genocide has a racial bent, as one would expect from these specimens of master-race delusions, but it is also aimed at destroying the structures which keep people alive, including the modern nation-state.

The goal of these parasites is to prevent the world from developing to the point that their medieval imperial power structure is cast aside into the feudal moat of history, as it so richly deserves, rendering these relics of the past into little more than horrible curiosities. The oligarchy knows that the more the creative power of humanity is unleashed, the weaker the empire's hold on the planet will be.

Look at a map of the world, and compare the size of the nations of Africa, Ibero-America, and Asia, with the size of the British Isles and Europe as a whole, and you get an idea of what they fear. Imagine how the balance of power in the world would shift, were truly sovereign nations to develop on these continents, in the tradition of the United States—the United States of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as opposed to that pale reflection we've seen under Bush-Cheney and Obama.

It's obvious that the power of the London-centered European oligarchic system would quickly be broken, its ability to rule and loot the world ended, were the world to develop along such lines. That system was broken for a while with the emergence of the United States, but never fully beaten, and has used its control over culture, finance, trade, and raw materials to keep progress at bay, while it plots to regain undisputed control.

Slime Mold

The empire functions as a form of slime mold, enveloping new victims and discarding refuse as it adjusts to changing conditions. We can trace the modern manifestation of the empire back to Venice, and from thence trace its heritage to Rome, Byzantium, and beyond. The British Empire is really Venetian in character; its geographic base is Britain, but it lives in the financial institutions and corporate cartels it has spawned worldwide.

This amorphous, slime-like structure is key to understanding how the empire functions, and how it takes over nations. It works largely by using its financial power to corrupt the elites of targetted nations, giving them a taste of the riches and power they can have if they cooperate.

That has certainly been the case in the U.S., where our elites have been thoroughly corrupted. Over the last four decades, we have seen the dismantling of the world's greatest industrial power, in favor of the emergence of a giant financial casino. We have replaced productivity with speculation, buying that which we no longer produce from overseas, and making ourselves dependent upon the imperial cartels in the process.

This casino, and the bubble it spawned, was in reality a giant trap, a way to induce the U.S. to commit suicide by destroying itself from within. Then the bubble popped in mid-2007, and the final phase of the trap was sprung.

The Suicide Trap

While the fools on Wall Street think the bailout is designed to save them, what the bailout really is, is a scheme to bankrupt the United States and remove it as a obstacle to imperial domination. The empire used the growth of the bubble to turn a large section of the U.S. elite into babbling idiots who then blew up the nation. Now the empire is using the desire of these idiots to save themselves, to finish the job. Thus we get the spectacle of the Wall Street crowd and the political fools it owns, running an ever-increasing bailout which will not only fail to save the financial system, but destroy the dollar in a hyperinflationary collapse. We are accomplishing from within, what the oligarchy could not accomplish from without, the destruction of our nation.

Our belief in environmentalism, in particular the belief that human progress is destroying our climate, is a similar trap. The purpose of this environmental hoax is to stop the scientific and technological progress upon which mankind depends. The claims made by the "climate change" lobby have been repeatedly disproven, yet they still claim to have consensus in the scientific community. It is a fraud.

Take, as an example, the push for carbon cap and trade. Were the goal to reduce pollution, as is claimed, the proper approach would be to simply put a limits on the relevant pollutants, and let it go at that. It is the "trade" portion, that gives the game away, because it effectively turns a pollution limit into a right to pollute that amount, in effect creating an asset out of thin air—an asset which can then be traded on financial markets. The result of the "trade" is more pollution, not less.

The real purpose of cap and trade, it would appear, is to use the promise of riches to induce the speculators—who desperately need cash to cover their losses—to support the oligarchy's de-population through de-industrialization scam. It is a trap, yet another inducement to commit suicide.

The push to legalize drugs is the same. The oligarchy would like to see us all on drugs so that we will be ineffective in resisting its designs to cull the herd. Many among us are already zonked to the gills on prescription drugs; and drug legalization would only make it worse.

The restriction of health care is another long-standing oligarchic policy, designed to increase the death rate. The push to slash health care is nothing new, as we demonstrated in our feature last week (EIR, May 22, 2009), but the Obama Administration's endorsement of a Hitlerian "useless eaters" program represents an ominous collapse of public morality.

Genocide

The effects of all of these policies converge in one place: genocide. Each in its own way will increase the death rate, and taken together will rapidly destroy the nation, and the world. We believe that some of the people involved are probably too stupid to understand how they are being played, but that has no bearing on the effects of the policies they support.

Britain's Prince Philip stated publicly in 1988 that, "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation." Lord Bertrand Russell called in 1953 for a "Black Death" to be "spread throughout the world once in every generation" as a population control measure. British policy, as stated by Prince Philip, is to cut the world's population to 2 billion people, from its current 6.7 billion. That is imperial policy, and it is genocide.

Those who would support the bailout, global warming, the legalization of drugs, and the "useless eaters" policies would do well to reflect upon what it is that keeps them alive, and how they are being duped into destroying it. You cannot eat marketing slogans! Food must be produced and distributed, as must energy. We need transportation, education, health care, and science—all of which are being destroyed in the name of "saving the system" and "saving the planet."

We are being played for suckers, killing ourselves for the purpose of saving a pack of medieval parasites whose power should have been curtailed centuries, even millennia, ago. Our so-called leadership is clearly too stupid to survive. It is past time to throw the bums out and replace them with people with the brains and the guts to force a change.

This is how civilizations end, how once great powers fade into oblivion. We who were once the promise of mankind, are on the verge of failure. We can stop it, we know how, we must simply do so. The future of mankind rests upon our shoulders.

johnhoefle@larouchepub.com

Feeding the Rising Costs of Overhead

2009-05-27T10:28:00.002-04:00

is just stupid.

Listen to a bright young lady narrate a video for five minutes.

http://www.larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=10369

First Victim of Nazi Law in Washington State

2009-05-23T04:20:00.004-04:00

On Thursday, Linda Fleming, a 66-year-old woman with pancreatic cancer, committed suicide under the new assisted suicide law which was approved in Washington State in November. The announcement of her death was made by the group, Compassion & Choices of Washington, which had campaigned for the law, which is modelled on a 1997 law which went into effect in Oregon. The law in Washington went into effect on March 5, 2009.

Compassion and Choices was in the coalition of groups led by the Death With Dignity National Center that pushed for passage of the Washington State law. The Death With Dignity National Center has received grants directly from the Open Society Institute of Nazi collaborator George Soros.

Under the Obama Administration Nazi health-cost reduction plan, more such deaths can be anticipated, as assisted suicide is far less costly than adequate medical treatment. In fact, in 1998 Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel--brother of Obama's chief of staff and currently tasked by Peter Orszag to draw up a list of permitted cost-cutting medical procedures--co-authrored with Margaret Battin, an article entitled "What are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide?" In 1992, Battin had written another article entitled "Assisted Suicide: Can We Learn From Germany?"

Under the Death with Dignity Act in Washington State, the state Department of Health is required to run a website to track the number of patients who request and use the medication. This morning, the website reported that at least five people in the state have requested the medication, and that the medication has been dispensed at least six times. In Oregon state, about 400 people have used the law passed there 12 years ago to commit suicide.

If Obama's Nazi medical policy is not defeated, such laws will proliferate throughout the nation, and the pressure to use such laws will accelerate for the stated purpose of saving trillions of dollars under conditions of financial and economic breakdown.

The above is copied from
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/10347

How about Congress giving some of "the medication" to the dead investment banks! They appear alive only because of "creative" accounting methods which count as "assets" a bunch of nonsense dreamed-up by insane greedy clever idiots. We NEED the chartered community banks and international banking/trade. But the transnational mega-financiers are LITERALLY KILLING US and it can only get worse until more and more people can understand this simple fact.

They and such as mega-financier insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies have no human decency. They must be controlled by law. They are very dangerous beasts. They (of course) do not want to be controlled. They subvert, or try to, ALL THAT IS GOOD AND DECENT in order not to be controlled.

What part of that don't you understand?

Obama's Useless Eaters Healthcare Program

2009-05-19T07:40:00.007-04:00

During the past days, President Barack Obama has announced his intention to enact a health-care policy which is, in effect, a copy of the infamous Adolf Hitler proclamation of September 1939 on the subject of "lives not worthy to be lived." The recent announcements by President Obama are the most extreme step in the direction of Hitler-like fascist dictatorship we have heard from him so far.

This insanity is not merely the product of his own personal idiosyncrasies. These are the policies of the "Behavioral" psychologists around Peter Orszag, and the direction of the economic and other policies of Larry Summers, and those of the brothers Rahm and Ezekiel Emanuel.

That team of his close personal advisors, such as Summers, Orszag, and Rahm and Ezekiel Emanuel, damn well mean the words which Obama has spoken in this case. They have spelled it out in terms of the policies on which the Obama Administration is already acting. Obama's words are not just words; they are the actual content of the policies which are being expressed in action by those so-called advisors.

Do not be fooled about all of our citizens. The revolt against Obama's direction is building up at an accelerating rate outside of occupied DC, and behind doors where potent political circles meet. You will not see it accurately reflected on TV! Only the foolish, creeps, and cowards among us are refusing to see what is going on.

More and more of the veterans of the cause of the sane and sensible have not only recognized the voice of September 1939 Adolf Hitler in Obama's words; some recall, vividly, what those words from Hitler meant and manifested during the years 1939-1945.

It will not be long before those evil words from President Obama's mouth will acquire an irreversible effect in the same direction as Hitler's similar words did before: unless President Obama is impelled, not only to repudiate them very soon, but to dump those elements within his own administration who are the current filthy paws and claws of this copy of Adolf Hitler's policy of genocide.

It is past time for those who have been "dragging their feet" for Obama on this issue, either to honor, or tear up, their fraudulent tokens of membership in the human race.

Obama must repudiate his presently stated "wealthy-care, not health-care," Hitler-like policy now, not merely with words, but by action.

Find on YouTube, "Obama's Useless Eaters Program" Equating these policies with Hitler's is not hyperbole.

also, search - Obama health "May 11" - and shake off the cobwebs of inaction.

Amy Goodman of Democracy now has just done a fine (relatively short) interview: ...five doctors, nurses and single-payer advocates were arrested at a Senate Finance Committee hearing, bringing the total number of arrests in less than a week to thirteen. She speaks with two of those arrested: Single Payer Action founder Russell Mokhiber and Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program. Check out how people with knowledge, morality, respect for human beings, and courage look the Beast in the eye and take action.

Globalism is Just Another Word for "Starve Them to Death"

2008-05-06T12:28:00.002-04:00

The fiery letters of an unprecedented human catastrophe already stand flickering on the wall, and it will be fatal for the world as a whole, if we do not succeed immediately, in the coming days and weeks, to declare globalization a failure, and to set everything into motion to double agricultural production capacity in the shortest possible time!

This is of the utmost urgency: Since October 2007, there have been food riots in over 40 nations. According to Rajat Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, 1 billion Asians (!) are already at serious risk from the hunger crisis, and in Africa, Ibero-America, and among the poor on the other continents, an additional 1 billion face the same fate. But according to Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), since December his organization has been unable to raise 10.9 million euros (!) in order to purchase seed for poor farmers in developing countries. The rich states are simply not willing to support the developing countries with money, seed, and investment in infrastructure, Diouf told an FAO conference on Latin America in Brasilia in mid-April.

Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, pointed to an additional aspect of the crisis; namely, that the use of food for biofuels is a ``crime against humanity.'' In order that we might fill our gas tanks with ethanol with clear ecological conscience, people in the Third World must starve (and also die). Speaking of the resulting food riots, Ziegler said, ``These are riots of utter despair by people who fear for their lives, and who, nagged by deathly fear, take to the streets.''

And that's only the beginning. Because, as long as the current policy of the ``rich'' nations--i.e., the free-trade doctrine of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Union Commission, and so one--continues, the food cartels and speculators will take advantage of the conditions created by the escalating systemic crisis of the world financial system, to maximize their profits and to feed price inflation, without the farmers reaping any benefit therefrom. And if the world's central banks continue their practice of using tax revenues in an attempt to make up for the speculative losses of private banks, then we are going to see hyperinflation like Weimar Germany spread around the globe.

Under these circumstances, the entire planet will be swept by the storm winds of food riots, until humanity descends into a new dark age of chaos, gang warfare, and climbing death rates--or, until justice and life with human dignity is established for all human beings on this planet.

- The Oligarchy's Malthusian Axioms -

For the year 2050, the UN forecasts a population growth of 33%, that is, from the current 6.7 billion to approximately 9 billion human beings. The demand for food will rise correspondingly, and if we add the approximately 2 billion who are currently undernourished, then a doubling of food production is a good rough measure on which we can orient our planning efforts.

One would be hard put to find another issue which more effectively unmasks the oligarchical axiomatic state of mind, as this one. The U.S.-Eurocentric outlook regards the prospective population growth as a threat, bringing with it the challenge of mass immigration of poor people into the developed countries, and the struggle to secure raw materials (most of which are located in the poor countries). This viewpoint was most recently expressed by Michael V. Hayden, U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, at a speech at the University of Kansas. He asserted that this growth will occur chiefly in the nations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, places where this population growth cannot be sustained economically, thus leading to a heightened danger of violence, rebellion, and extremism. This same oligarchical axiomatic outlook underlies the unspeakable strategy paper issued by five retired generals, who count as the first among the six primary challenges to the world community, population growth and the unequal distribution of the demographic curve in the various continents. This poses the greatest threat to prosperity, responsible government, and energy security, these generals say. The model for this neo-Malthusian, imperial world-view is the infamous National Strategic Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), drafted by Henry Kissinger in 1974, which declares all raw materials around the world to be a U.S. strategic security interest.

The truth is, that the oligarchical model which Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz set into motion on Aug. 15, 1971, with the end of Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system and of fixed currency exchange rates, thereby systematically guiding the economy into the direction of unregulated free trade, has now completely failed. This 1971 paradigm-shift away from production and into speculation--unregulated credit generation in the so-called offshore markets such as the Cayman Islands, where 80% of all hedge funds are headquartered--ushered in the emergence of today's casino economy.

Since that time, step by step, each new precedent has gone in the direction of the neo-liberal model: the creation of the eurodollar market; the 1974 oil price swindle; the 1975 hardening of ``IMF conditionalities''; the assaults by the Carter Administration, beginning in 1976, against ``mercantilist tendencies in the developing countries''; Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's 1979 high interest rate policy; the policies of ``Reaganomics'' and ``Thatcher economics'' in the 1980s, including the mergers and hostile takeovers typifying a process of ever greater cartellization; Alan Greenspan's invention of miraculous ``creative credit instruments'' following the Crash of 1987; and the unfettered globalization following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the transfer of industrial production into ``cheap production countries''--all these were further mileposts in the same direction.

- Behind Today's Hunger Catastrophe -

It is in this context that we must consider today's exploding hunger catastrophe. Formerly, since 1957, the European Economic Community's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had been designed to supply the population with sufficient foodstuffs at reasonable prices, so that farmers had an appropriate income and agricultural production could be increased. But with the introduction of unfettered globalization, other, entirely different criteria took precedence. With the 1992 agricultural reform, consumer price reductions were instituted, for example: beef farms 20%, grain farms 30%, and milk farms 15%. But there were no provisions for corresponding compensation to the farmers. Instead, they were offered financial assistance tied to compliance with ``ecological criteria.''

The farmers had been talked into this deal with the argument that they ``must hold their own on the world market,'' i.e., they must be able to compete with cheapened production abroad. In practice, however, it meant that many farmers had to shut down completely, while others could run their farms only as a part-time occupation, such that a career in farming became unattractive for the young generation, resulting in the loss of many family farms.

This trend in the direction of free trade was escalated by the so-called Uruguay Round, the final negotiation session of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which ended their former practice of considering the rules of agricultural production from the standpoint of food security, and instead bound themselves to the strict rule of free trade, and thus to the food cartels' demand for maximization of profit. Since that time, millions of farms have gone bankrupt, and the process of cartellization has taken hold to such an extent, that in five months, the FAO has been unable to pull together a pitiful 10 million euros so that, in the midst of this hunger catastrophe, the poor countries might be able to sow seed--seed which is controlled by only three companies!

The replacement of GATT--which still had the form of a multilateral agreement among states--by the World Trade Organization, a supranational bureaucracy with far-reaching independent powers, portended a further round of deregulation, abolishment of all trade barriers not bound by collective bargaining agreements, and ``harmonization'' of member-states' standards. The chief beneficiaries of these measures in the direction of free trade, were, once again, the food cartels. Since then, completely anonymous WTO boards of experts have enjoyed the right to impose penalties on violators against free trade, without these ``experts'' being obliged in any way to account to voters for their actions.

For the European Union, the Agenda 2000 and the agricultural reform of 2005 further stepped up the tempo in the direction of reduction of surpluses (and thus the destruction of foodstuff reserves and exports). Instead of setting fair producer prices which could cover production costs, compensatory payments were made for leaving land fallow--``set-aside'' policy--and for completely arbitrary environmental protection measures. And so, the trend toward sell-offs of independent family farms proceeded apace.

Former German Economics Minister (and later Consumer Protection Minister) Renate Künast, and Agriculture Minister Franz Fischler, were correct when they spoke of a systemic change being introduced with this agricultural reform. Fischler cynically observed at the time, that the compulsory price reductions would also bring about a reduction in the intensity of cultivation, because the farmers would not have any money left for fertilizer or pesticides.

A bit later, some farmers fared better financially for a while, because of the EU subsidies for cultivation of plants for biofuels--but with the above-mentioned catastrophic consequences.

And it should be pointed out that the pioneer in the use of foodstuffs for the production of ethanol, was Benito Mussolini. Under the WTO and EU Commission regime, production capacity was reduced in the industrial nations, while at the time, the developing countries were forced to export cheap foodstuff in order to earn cash to repay foreign debt--and this, frequently, even though their own population was not adequately supplied with food. And so, today, the economic and moral bankruptcy of this system of British free trade and Manchester capitalism is plain for all to see.

Fortunately, there is also resistance against the genocidal policies of WTO and EU free trade. In recent weeks, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier and German Consumer Protection Minister Horst Seehofer have begun a campaign aimed directly against the EU policies. Barnier started a European-wide campaign in defense of the CAP, a policy which some free-trade fanatics (such as David Spector, an Associate Professor at the Paris School of Economics, and the Financial Times) are demanding be completely abolished, despite the hunger crisis. Barnier attacks the idea that the poorest countries should export food to the rich countries, as a total departure from reality, since it is precisely such a policy which has ruined subsistence agriculture and local production in the poorest countries. Instead of this, Barnier demands that Africa, Latin America, and Asia likewise institute their own CAPs--i.e., a protectionist parity system.

- Emergency Measures Needed Now -

There can be only one answer to the obvious bankruptcy of murderous free trade: We need a worldwide mobilization for the most rapid possible doubling of agricultural production. The WTO itself must be dissolved, immediately.

Leading up to the FAO conference in Rome on June 3-5, all means, including unconventional ones, must be made available for enabling the FAO to set a program into motion to increase agricultural production worldwide. This must include a new ``Green Revolution,'' as well as medium-term measures for the expansion of infrastructure, the building up of food-processing industries in developing countries which do not have them, and for water management.

The topic of a new and just world economic order must be put onto the agenda. In view of the existential significance of this issue for the future of all humankind, a special session of the UN General Assembly must be convened on this theme. The New Bretton Woods system, and a New Deal for the entire world, in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt--measures which many heads of state and economists have been calling for--must immediately become the subject of an emergency conference of heads of state, who must decide upon a new world financial system which would permit all nations to develop. The building of the Eurasian Land-Bridge must be agreed upon as the keystone for reconstructing the world economy.

In the U.S. Declaration of Independence--which the Schiller Institute's founding conference in 1984 adopted as its charter by making it applicable for all nations of this world, by just a few wording changes--it says:

``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.''

This Declaration of Human Rights must hold true still today--for all human beings on this planet. What we need today, is men and women who fight with passion and love for the idea of a just world order, one in which the community of nations can live together in peace and human dignity. Life, Liberty, and Happiness mean, above all, that all people have enough to eat and that poverty is abolished--something which we have all the technological means to bring about. Whether we can make this vision into reality, or whether we instead speed humanity into collapse, is how each one of us will be measured by history.

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Retitled, copied from
http://www.larouchepac.com

We need a Good-Neighbor policy!

2008-05-06T12:24:00.002-04:00

The flow of tens of billions of dollars in remittances sent home to Mexico and other Ibero-American countries by migrant workers in the United States, is drying up, according to official statistics provided by Mexico's Central Bank and a recent study issued by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). After rising at the rate of nearly 20% per year between 1994 and 2006, remittances stalled out in 2007, and in the first quarter of 2008 fell by 3%, compared to the same period in 2007.

Total remittances to Ibero-America were about $46 billion in 2007, with a little over half of that amount ($24 billion) going to Mexico. Entire communities, states, and even nations have become dependent on the flow of remittances, as genocidal British free trade and globalization policies forced huge chunks of the populations of these nations (30% in the case of El Salvador; 10% in the case of Mexico) to flee to the United States in desperate search of survival for themselves, and their families back home.

Now, the collapse of the U.S. "importer of last resort" means that starvation and chaos will be visited on the nations of Ibero-America--exactly as Lyndon LaRouche warned would occur, if the insane British economic policies were not changed. A recent Bank of Mexico study reported that 86% of all remittances are used by the families back in Mexico for basic "sustenance," i.e. survival.

The recent quarterly trend in remittances sent to Mexico tells part of the story:

2Q '06 = 21%

3Q '06 = 13%

4Q '06 = 8%

1Q '07 = 3%

2Q '07 = -1%

3Q '07 = 3%

4Q '07 = 0%

1Q '08 = -3%

But the reality is actually much worse than these average figures suggest. According to the IADB, although the total dollar amount of remittances to Ibero-America has stagnated or fallen somewhat, the number of workers who send money back home "regularly" fell dramatically from 12.6 million in 2006, to 9.4 million in the first quarter of 2008--i.e., 3.2 million workers stopped sending money regularly. In percentage terms, 73% of all Ibero-American born adults in the U.S. were sending money home regularly in 2006, whereas in 2008 that had fallen to only 50%. This is a tectonic shift in economic activity of nearly 25% of the Hispanic migrants in the U.S.

According to the IADB, 3.2 million fewer remitters translates into some 10 million people back home no longer receive support for their most essential "sustenance." The agency estimates that some 2 million families will, as a result fall below the poverty line, mainly in Mexico.

Ironically, this will lead to more people trying to flee their countries to come to the United States in search of survival--at exactly the point that the economic collapse and viciously anti-immigrant policies in the U.S. are expected to lead to the expulsion from the U.S. of up to 2 million people in the near term.

The shock front has hit.

copied from
http://www.larouchepac.com

The Shaping of Public Opinion

2008-04-27T08:14:00.003-04:00

This web site is still very much "under construction," but I want to take a minute to post this. The body is apparently the beginning of a book you can find at Amazon.com, Pr!: A Social History of Spinby by Stuart Ewen. It's bracketed by poster "lapis" comments made some five years ago.

Here Goes:

Lapis 7/15/2003

Shaping public opinion is a Science that is utilized by the globalists. The media is the message in this case and the carving tool of the collective mind. The world has fallen under a hypnotic spell with a very carefully scripted message. It takes reading between the lines to decipher this message..a message of tyranny and control.

One of the recent pioneers of this reality shaping was Freud's nephew, a man by the name of Edward Bernays. Here is some insight into his ways of deception, and just who utilizes these tools masterfully.

******************************************************************

Visiting Edward Bernays

When I began the research for this book-attempting to discover the social and historical roots that would explain the limitless role of public relations in our world-one of my first stops along the way was a sojourn with Edward L. Bernays, a man who, beginning during the 1910s, became one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations; a person whose biography, though not widely known, left a deep mark on the configuration of our world.

Born in Vienna in 1891, Bernays was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud. (His mother was Freud's sister, his father was Freud's wife's brother.) His family background impressed him with the enormous power of ideas, and accustomed him to the privileges and creature comforts of bourgeois existence.

Bernays was also a far-sighted architect of modern propaganda techniques who, dramatically, from the early 1920s onward, helped to consolidate a fateful marriage between theories of mass psychology and schemes of corporate and political persuasion.

During the First World War, Bernays served as a foot soldier for the U. S. Committee on Public Information (CPI)-the vast American propaganda apparatus mobilized in 1917 to package, advertise and sell the war as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the mold in which marketing strategies for subsequent wars, on to the present, would be shaped.

In the twenties, Bernays fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and popular social causes, when-while working for the American Tobacco Company-he persuaded women's rights marchers in New York City to hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic "Torches of Freedom." In October of 1929, Bernays also originated the now familiar "global media event," when he dreamed up "Light's Golden Jubilee," a worldwide celebratory spectacle commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored-behind-the-scenes-by the General Electric Corporation.

While by birth an Austrian Jew, Bernays' work and vivid writings served as an inspiration for Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propaganda minister-or so public relations folklore records.

Bernays influence would continue to hold sway well into the post-World War II era. To put it simply, Edward Bernays' career-more than that of any other individual-roughed out what have become the strategies and practices of public relations in the United States.

I had encountered Bernays before. In the early 1970s, while writing a book on the social history of advertising-Captains of Consciousness-I had happened upon some of his writings-mostly from the 1920s. In the pages of Captains he fittingly looms as an eloquent and influential ideologue of an American consumer culture in formation.

Then, in the mid-1980s, while working on another book (All Consuming Images), I again ran into Mr. Bernays. This time it was primarily through his writings from the forties and fifties, when-as an enduring student of mass persuasion-he helped to educate political leaders on the uses of the mass media, and to the particular advantages of visual symbols as instruments for what he christened the "engineering of consent." Once more, through the agency of his fertile and suggestive writings, Bernays had emerged as a leading character in one of my manuscripts.

Both times my encounters with Bernays were like those that usually take place between historians and the "historical figures" that they write about. They were exchanges between old documents and the inquiring mind of their reader and interpreter. As I commenced work on my social history of public relations early in 1990, I assumed, reasonably, that Bernays, himself, was long gone. Once more, the picturesque record that he had left behind was as close as I was likely to get to him.

Soon, however, I stumbled onto the fact that my reasonable assumption was incorrect. In a conversation with a neighbor of mine named Richard Weiner-who is, himself, a prominent member of the public relations fraternity-I learned that Bernays was, in fact, still alive, residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Weiner instructed me: "If you're going to do this book, you've got to talk to Eddie Bernays." I was astonished and delighted to hear Bernays referred to in the present tense; I was also amused to hear him referred to as "Eddie." Behind the aura of historical figure, stood a guy called Eddie. I obtained Bernays' telephone number and set out to arrange an interview. He was then on the brink of his ninety-ninth birthday, and I didn't know what to expect. Would he see me? Would he be enfeebled? He was very old.

An exploratory call to Bernays reached an answering machine. A woman's voice, official in tone, informed me that I had reached the offices of "Dr. Edward L. Bernays," and that "Dr. Bernays" was currently unavailable. I was instructed to leave a message. For a man of almost 100, Bernays was still communicating an air of business-as-usual. I told the machine:
My name is Stuart Ewen. I am an historian, a writer. I'm currently working on a book on the social history of public relations. I would very much like to come to Cambridge, to visit with 'Dr. Bernays' in order to conduct an oral history interview. I left my phone number, and indicated that, should I not hear back from him shortly, I would call again. Two days later, I received a phone call at home from Edward Bernays.

It felt weird, like a dream. Given my experience tracking his historical footprints, it was like talking-via dixie cups and a string-with a piece of history. His voice was soft, a bit hoarse, the voice of an elderly man, to be sure, but he also sounded deft and businesslike.

He asked me about myself, my background, where I taught, the book I was writing. I told him that I was a cultural historian, with a particular interest in the ways that the mass media have crisscrossed with the experiences of twentieth century American life. I told him that I knew a great deal about him, his life and contributions, and added that I had recently published a book exploring the influence of commercial imagery on the contours of American society. Without missing a beat Edward Bernays retorted, scrappily, "Of course, you know, we don't deal in images....We deal in reality."

My fascinating encounter with Edward L. Bernays had begun. I had already been offered a lesson from the master. Ideally, the job of public relations is not simply one of disseminating favorable images and impressions for a client. For Bernays and, as I would learn, for many others in the field, the goal was far more ambitious than that. Public relations was about fashioning and projecting credible renditions of reality itself.

Rather than pursue the interview by telephone-I wanted to meet him, face-to-face-I arranged to visit Edward Bernays at his home, on Columbus Day of 1990. In the weeks preceding our scheduled meeting, I refamiliarized myself with some of his writings: Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923); Propaganda (1928); "The Engineering of Consent" (1947); and his autobiography, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (1965). I also looked at a few writings I'd never read before: books, some short pamphlets and speeches. Bernays, meanwhile, sought to put his own spin on the forthcoming interview. He sent me a photocopy of a biographical piece about him that had appeared recently in a special issue of Life magazine, listing the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century.

+ + +
On the chill, gray morning of October 12, 1990, I took the shuttle from LaGuardia to Logan Airport in Boston, leaving myself enough time to arrive at Bernays' home for our scheduled one o'clock interview. Crossing the Charles River into Cambridge, the cab took me toward a maze of old, tree-lined streets bordering Harvard Square, stopping by the large red number "7" that Bernays had informed me marked his house. The house itself was stately, a large white wood-frame, surrounded by some hedges, unpretentious. Walking up the path to the door, I did not know what to expect.

I rang the doorbell and waited for an answer. A minute or two passed, and there was none. Not a sound. Had he forgotten? Was the apparent wit with which he had spoken to me on the phone only illusory? I rang again, and waited. Then, after another minute or so had passed and I had begun to grow disconsolate, I heard soft footsteps moving slowly toward the door. "Bernays?" I thought. Instead, a Chinese woman, of middle age, opened the door a crack and said, "Yes?" I told her who I was; that I had, a couple of weeks before, scheduled an interview for this afternoon with Mr. Bernays.

She looked at me quizzically, then muttered something about his having been ill yesterday. Inviting me into the house, and directing me to wait in the first floor library, she disappeared to inquire whether he was up to seeing me.

As I waited, I inspected the shelves of the spacious, high-ceilinged room in which I stood. It was a remarkable collection of books, thousands of them: about public opinion, individual and social psychology, survey research, propaganda, psychological warfare, and so forth; a comprehensive library spanning matters of human motivation and strategies of influence, scanning a period of more than one hundred years. These were not the bookshelves of some shallow huckster, but the arsenal of an intellectual. The cross-hairs of nearly every volume were trained on the target of forging public attitudes. Here -in a large white room in Cambridge, Massachusetts-was the constellation of ideas that had inspired and informed a twentieth century preoccupation: the systematic molding of public opinion.

Captured in thought, I suddenly heard steps moving swiftly toward the library door. Assuming it was the Chinese woman again, to report on Bernays' condition, I braced myself for bad news. But as the door swung open, there-standing before me in a comfy-looking brown, three-piece suit and tie, and transmitting a sparkle through his wizened eyes-was a puckish little man with thin, shaggy white hair. The swift steps I'd heard were those of Edward L. Bernays, moving toward the threshold of his one-hundredth year. Despite years of pondering him as a shrewd and cynical manipulator of public consciousness, I was immediately entranced. His physical countenance reminded me of pictures I had seen of an aged Albert Einstein. He moved toward me and, with smiles, we exchanged formal introductions. "I want you to have this," I said, and handed him an inscribed copy of my last book, All Consuming Images, which he accepted with a nod. He then instructed me that we should go upstairs, to his office, for the interview.

He led me to the bottom of a tall staircase. On the left side there was a chair-elevator, the kind one associates with wealthy invalids in the movies. "You ever ride on one of these things?" he asked me.
"No, I've only seen them in pictures," I responded frankly.
"Get on!" he commanded me, like an elfin carny beside an amusement park ride.
I turned around and sat down, my feet resting on a metal platform at the base of the chair. "Move your feet." he ordered.
"What?"
"Move your feet back."
Without understanding I drew my feet to the back of the platform, leaving a narrow ledge in front of them. Suddenly, he stepped onto the ledge, his small pear-shaped body hovering over mine. "Should I hold you?" I asked, concerned for his frail bones.
"No," he responded dismissively, as he pushed a button on the side of the chair, and we glided up together and, turning a slight corner toward the end of the voyage, arrived on the second story. At the summit of the climb, Bernays hopped off onto the landing, and I-somewhat shakily-proceeded off behind him. "We don't deal with images," I thought, "we deal in reality."

He led me through a dark room off the landing. Its walls were covered with scores of framed black and white photographs, many of them inscribed. Wordlessly, yet eloquently, the pictures placed my ancient host close to the heartbeat of a century. Bernays on his way to the Paris Peace Conference, 1918. Bernays standing with Enrico Caruso. Bernays and Henry Ford. Bernays and Thomas Edison. Bernays and Dwight David Eisenhower. A photo portrait of his uncle, Freud, was also conspicuous. Bernays with the "great men," at the "great events" of the twentieth century. I looked ...awestruck. He said nothing. In silence, I was fascinated, entranced by it all.

From the photo gallery, we stepped into his small office, a solarium, and took seats by a cluttered desk. We began to talk. He began by asking me questions: about myself, my background, what had attracted me to his work in particular, and-more generally-to the broader study of communications in twentieth century America.

I opened with a rhetorical response."How can you deal with 20th century culture without dealing with...?"
"...the basis of the exchange of ideas that makes the culture," he completed my thought.

Coming from very different vantage points, from different epochs, we understood each other. He knew what I was looking for. Within my historical study of public relations, I sought to make sense of the the peculiar processes of representation and perception-the "exchange of ideas," as he put it-that have come to distinguish cultural life in the era of mass communication.

+ + +
The next four hours were vintage Edward Bernays. Again and again I heard word-for-word reiterations of themes, stories, even specific catch phrases that I had encountered many times before in his writings.

None the less, beyond the actual experience of meeting with Bernays, some parts of the interview were new to me, contributing to the scope and texture of the history that follows. I was particularly intrigued, for example, by Bernays' reflections on the connection between his own thinking and that of Walter Lippmann, who published a book entitled Public Opinion in 1922, just one year before Bernays' first public relations manifesto, Crystallizing Public Opinion, appeared. (Bernays' book, Propaganda [1928], would later follow Lippmann's sequel to Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, by one year.) There are, however, some aspects of the interview that are worth mentioning here, aspects which reflect on the history and meaning of public relations itself.

+ + +
First. Throughout the interview Bernays expressed an unabashedly hierarchical view of society. Repeatedly, he maintained that, while most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought, there exist an "intelligent few" who have been charged with the responsibility of contemplating and influencing the tide of history. Perceived by Bernays as one of these "few," he was willing to share his outlook with me in straightforward terms.

Although he had written extensively, over a lifetime, about democracy and on the important role that public relations plays in a democratic society, Bernays, himself, was clearly no democrat. He expressed little respect for the average person's ability to think out, understand, or act upon the world in which they live.

"There are strange things about the culture," he intoned. "The average IQ is 100 of the American public, did you know that?" Assuming I grasped what for him was obvious, Bernays then sketched a picture of the public relations expert as a member of the "intelligent few" who advises clients on how to "deal with the masses...just by applying psychology."

As a member of that intellectual elite which guides the destiny of society, the PR "professional," Bernays explained, aims his craft at a general public which is essentially, and unreflectively, reactive. Working behind the scenes, out of public view, the public relations expert is "an applied social scientist," one educated to employ an understanding of "sociology, psychology, social psychology and economics" in order to influence and direct public attitudes. Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: a highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians are continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.

Undoubtedly, this point of view offers a glimpse into Edward L. Bernays. More importantly, it reflects a foundational conceit governing the field of public relations more broadly. While some have argued that public relations represents a "two-way street" through which institutions and the public carry on a democratic dialog, the public's role within that alleged dialog is, most often, one of having its blood pressure monitored, its temperature taken.

+ + +
It should be noted that Bernays, at the time of our conversation, felt that the field of "public relations" had failed to live up to his "professional" expectations. "Today," he related to me with some dismay, "any nitwit or dope or anybody can call himself or herself a public relations counsel. I had a young woman call up two months ago and she said I hear you're nice to young people. Can I come in and see you? And I said, what do you do? She said, ' I'm in public relations.' So I made a date with her and when she came in-she was about 27 years old, young woman, apparently intelligent...
I said, 'What do you do?'
She said, 'I'm in public relations.'
I said, 'I didn't ask you that. I asked you what you did.'
She said, 'I give out circulars in Harvard Square.'
She was in public relations! [The term public relations] hasn't only been misused. But people have used the name for press agents, flacks, publicity men or women, individuals who simply try to get pieces into the paper that are favorable to a client. Whereas, by my definition, a public relations person, who calls themselves [sic] that, is an applied social scientist who advises a client or employer on the social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the publics upon whom his, or her, or its viability depends."

+ + +
Another phase of the interview deserves special mention. I came to visit Bernays because he was both a participant in, and a witness to, the rise of public relations over a period of nearly three-quarters of a century. Anticipating the interview, I hoped that his recollections would provide me with some new and clear sense of the particular historical soil out of which public relations, as a phenomenon, grew. In this regard I was, for the most part, frustrated.

Bernays' take on public relations was remarkable in that it tended to ignore the particular processes, or details, of the periods which had given rise to it. Throughout the interview he described public relations as a response to a trans-historic concern: the requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.

For Bernays, public relations reflected the refinement of techniques developed to serve ancient purposes. He appeared to have thought little about his life, or his field, as bearing the imprint of a specific historical era. As I prepared to depart from him, I felt a bit disappointed in this regard.

Then, as we began discussing the means by which I would get from his house back to the airport, a curious conversation unfolded. Amid a general complaint about the cost of taxicabs, and after counselling me to save my money and hop a trolley, Edward Bernays indicated that he, himself, had never learned how to drive an automobile. I expressed surprise. He explained that he had simply never had to learn to drive; among his family's train of up to thirteen servants, there was always a chauffeur. Bernays then proceeded to tell me the story of one chauffeur in particular, a man he called "Dumb Jack."

Each day, he related to me, Dumb Jack would awaken at 5 o'clock in the morning, and prepare to drive Bernays and his wife (and partner in public relations), Doris Fleishman, to the office. The trusty chauffeur would then return to the family home to carry their two daughters to school. From there, he would return to the office in order to chauffeur Bernays and his wife to business meetings throughout the day, taking time out to retrieve the daughters from their school. At the end of the day, according to Bernays, a subdued Dumb Jack would step into the kitchen and, as the cook prepared the evening meal, he would sit at a kitchen table, lay his head in his hands, and take a nap. He would go to bed at nine, only to begin his routine again the next morning at five. Comparing this situation favorably to the cost of one cab ride to the airport today, Bernays ended his story by saying that for all of this work, Dumb Jack received a salary of twenty-five dollars per week, and got a half a thursday off every two weeks.

"Not a bad deal," Bernays confided, characterizing the benefits that his family had derived from Dumb Jack's years of compliant service. Then, with a lilt of nostalgia in his voice, he concluded his story: "But that's before people got a social conscience."

At that moment, in that nostalgic reverie over a bygone era, my quest for historical explanation-or at least a piece of it-was satisfied. In an incidental reference to "social conscience," Bernays had illuminated an historic shift in the social history of property, shedding inadvertent light on the conditions which gave birth to the birth of the practice of public relations. As the twentieth century progressed, people were no longer willing to accomodate themselves to outmoded standards of deference which history, for millenia, had demanded of them.

Bernays was the child of a bourgeois world that was, in many ways, still captivated by aristocratic styles of wealth, where relations between the classes were marked, to a large extent, by deep-seated patterns of allegiance-of obedience and obligation-between masters and servants. Like Mr. Stevens (the Anthony Hopkins character) in Remains of the Day, Dumb Jack was also a child of these circumstances.

The "social conscience," to which Bernays had referred, arrived at that moment when aristocratic paradigms of deference could no longer hold up in the face of modern, democratic, public ideals that were boiling up among the "lower strata" of society. At that juncture, strategies of social rule began to change, and the life and career of Edward Bernays, I should add, serves as a testament to that change.

The explosive ideals of democracy challenged ancient customs that had long upheld social inequality. A public claiming the birthright of democratic citizenship and social justice increasingly called upon institutions and people of power to justify themselves and their privileges. In the crucible of these changes, aristocracy began to give way to technocracy as a strategy of rule. Bernays came to maturity in a society where the exigencies of power were-by necessity-increasingly exercised from behind the pretext of the "common good." Bernays, the child of aristocratic pretense who fashioned himself into a technician of mass persuasion, was the product of a "social conscience" that had grasped the fact that a once submissive Dumb Jack, in the contemporary world, would no longer be willing to quietly place his tired head in his folded hands at the end of each day, only to awaken and serve again the next morning. Born into privilege, developing into a technocrat, Bernays' biography illustrates the onus that the twentieth century has placed on social and economic elites; they have had to justify themselves continually to a public whose hearts and minds now bear the ideals of democracy.

As I pursued my research following my encounter with Bernays, and repeatedly ran into the fear of an empowered public that ignited the thinking of early practitioners of public relations, the story of "Dumb Jack"-the man who was no more-came to mind again and again, reminding me of the human flesh that encircles the bones of broad institutional developments.

+ + +
Another story bears repeating here. Towards the middle of our interview, hoping that I could gain insight into the way Bernays approached his practical work, I asked him to describe how he would plan and attend to a specific public relations assignment. First of all, Bernays instructed, one must rid one's mind of the conventional "press agent" image. "We've [speaking of himself] had no direct contact with the mass media for about fifty years." Rather, he continued, the job of a public relations counsel is to instruct a client on how to take actions which "just interrupt...the continuity of life in some way to bring about the [media] response."
"How would you do that?" I asked.
Bernays thought for a moment, and then turned toward his desk, where he had earlier placed the copy of my book. He picked it up and began to fondle its cover between his small, pinkish-gray fingers; glancing down at the front of the book, reading, to himself, the descriptive material and blurbs that appeared on its back. Then, with a tone of momentousness in his voice, he turned to me:

If you said to me, 'I would like more readers of this book' [tapping the cover] ...I would immediately get in touch with the largest American consumer association. And I would say to the head of the consumers association, 'There are undoubtedly...I can't tell you the exact percentage, but X percentage of your members who are very definitely interested in the images that come from a finance capitalist society, and who I think would enjoy hearing about that. Why don't you devote one of your twelve meetings a year to consumer images, the name of a new book, and I think it may be possible for me to get the author to talk to the New York meeting and you then make an arrangement with American Tel and Tel and have a video tape made of him beforehand and in thirty of the largest cities of the United States that have the American Consumer League, you listen to an in-depth concept of consumers and images....'

Then Bernays turned to me and, with an abracadabra tone in his voice, he summarized the imaginable result of his hypothetical phone-call to the head of the country's largest consumer association:

Every one of the consumer groups has contacts with the local paper, and in some cases the AP may pick it up, or Reuters, and you become an international star!

I must acknowledge that I was thoroughly charmed. Here I was, sitting with Edward Bernays-innovator and artiste of modern public relations-listening to him apply his costly wizardry to me and my book. I couldn't get over it, and thought to myself, "What a flatterer. This guy really knows how to polish up the old apple." For weeks after the interview, I was tickled by the incident, retelling it to friends, students, whoever had the patience to listen. For me the story captured Bernays' engaging personality, his ingenious thought process, his ability to garner a response.

Then, about three months after the interview-the above incident having faded from my immediate memory-I received a most surprising telephone call. It was from Steven Brobeck, president of the Consumer Federation of America, one of the nation's largest and most influential consumer organizations. Mr. Brobeck wanted to know if I would be willing to serve as a keynote speaker at the upcoming Consumer Congress in Washington, DC, a convention that would bring together more than a thousand members of consumer organizations from around the country. He wanted me to speak about American consumer culture and the ways that seductive commercial images are routinely employed to promote waste and disposability. C-Span, I was informed, would be taping my keynote, and would then cablecast it across the country.

I still do not know whether Bernays' hand was behind this invitation, or whether the phone call was merely a result of sly coincidence. When I inquired as to the origin of the invitation, nowhere was there any clear-cut, or even circumstantial, evidence of Bernays' intervention.

But then I recalled another point in our lengthy conversation, when Bernays sermonized on the invisibility with which public relations experts must, ideally, perform their handiwork.

When I noted that, even though Life magazine had included him in the list of the one hundred most influential Americans in the twentieth century, most Americans would probably no know who he was, he responded: I'm sure of it....To the average American your name has to be Walter Cronkite, or...[you have to be] the most beautiful girl... some movie actress they know.... In public relations, just as in law, you don't-nobody knows who the lawyer of most people is, and that lawyer may do more than the brain of the man who is theoretically doing it....And I think it should be that way because nobody knows who my doctor is. I mean, except friends. And he may be the basis of my living.

And there I was; the mystery still unsolved. Yet the question remained, and remains, open. Things had uncannily come to pass much as Bernays had described in his hypothetical disquisition on the work of a PR practitioner, and one was left to ponder whether there is any reality anymore, save the reality of public relations? Magnified by my seductive encounter with Edward Bernays, it is this question, and its implications for contemporary life, which stands at the heart of this book.

+ + +
One last point. I had gone to Cambridge to interview Edward Bernays and gather hidden details about the history of the hidden-yet omnipresent-activity of public relations. In retrospect, I had greatly underestimated the individual with whom I would be talking. I had presupposed that this keenly aware shaper of public perception, this trader in realities, was at the same time open to being candidly cross-examined. Yet in the days following our meeting, it became clear to me that my entire visit had been orchestrated by a virtuoso.

He had even offered me the key by which the pageantry of our encounter might have been unlocked. During the extensive taped interview that I assumed I was conducting, Bernays had at one point turned to me, and announced:
News is any overt act which juts out of the routine of circumstance. ...A good public relations man advises his client...to carry out an overt act... interrupting the continuity of life in some way to bring about a response.

From the time I had approached the door of his house, waiting impatiently for an answer; to my ride on the staircase elevator; to my walk through the gallery of historical photographs, on to the time, five hours later, when we parted company, Edward Bernays-who still claimed to charge $1,000 per hour consulting fees-was giving me, free of charge, an empirical object lesson in public relations. Above all else that I gathered from my journey to Cambridge, this was the prime benefit of my brush with Edward Bernays; experiencing the man himself-still spry at one hundred-in action.

© 1996, Stuart Ewen
*****************************************************************

Keep in mind much has been learned since the father of modern deception has passed away. These principals have grown in sophistication but the globalists still hold their power by the very use of these tools. Politicians and the media carry out the plans of this deception with growning expertise. Opinion polls are the measure of their success.

Please...snap out of the trance before its too late.