THE WORLD SINCE JANUARY 12TH

- LaRouche vs. George Shultz -

- Behind the Social Security Issue -

- Bush's 'Fire in the Mind' -

- Where We Stand -

- A Domestic Marshall Plan -

From Volume 4, Issue Number 6 of EIR Online, Published Feb. 8, 2005

This Week You Need To Know

THE WORLD SINCE JANUARY 12TH

Here is Jeffrey Steinberg's keynote to weekend cadre schools of the LaRouche Youth Movement Feb. 5, that took place on the West Coast, Ohio, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Following his keynote, questions continued for just under an hour and a half.

I'm going make a presentation that will probably run in the vicinity of about 45 minutes, and hopefully, it will provoke a lot of thinking and room for questions and discussion afterwards. I'm calling this address, "The World Since Jan. 12," because, on Jan. 12, in his keynote address in Berlin, addressing an extremely impressive audience of leading political figures—intellectuals, people with important political voices in their home countries, representing the whole spectrum of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas—Lyn launched a vital new updated, global strategic initiative. And since those remarks of Jan. 12, and the day and a half of intensive discussion that took place after that, the world has gone through some very dramatic changes, and we're in a fundamentally different strategic situation now, than we were when those keynote words were delivered by Lyn.

I would really urge people, as I did this morning, to re-read Lyn's keynote remarks from Berlin, because it reflected a kind of distillation of all of the key ideas that Lyn has developed in the two major strategic studies that he wrote in preparation for the Berlin summit: namely, his "New Treaty of Westphalia," and the planet in the next 50 years ["Earth's Next 50 Years"]. Lyn began in Berlin, by simply stating a certain axiomatic reality, which many of us understand quite clearly, namely, that the current, post-Bretton Woods, floating-exchange-rate monetary system, is dead; it is unsalvageable, and it is crashing down around us at an accelerating rate.

Now, we understand that concept. But, what's occurred in the intervening weeks, since Lyn's remarks in Berlin, is that this issue has bubbled to the surface, in a way in which we are in the here and now, back at a moment when the issue of a new global financial system is not merely a luxury item, something that leading intellectuals like to talk about without any near-term prospect of action. But, this has now emerged center-stage as an action agenda, for the United States and the world. And happily, Lyn's forecast in Berlin—that we have reached a point of discontinuity in the strategic situation, in which revolutionary changes can be achieved—has been born out.

Now, again, going back to Lyn's keynote remarks, and then the entire major thematics direction of the Berlin seminar, Lyn understood that this was a crucial moment, to make a strategic intervention around the issue of the indispensable role that the United States has to play in shaping this revolutionary moment of discontinuity. And he minced no words, when he said, particularly to the assembled leading representatives of Western European governments who were there in Berlin—Western and Central European governments who now make up the expanded European Union—he said to them, that, basically, there is not a country in Europe that is a sovereign constitutional nation-state. And the litmus test that he presented was, that there is not a government in Europe, in which elected officials are more powerful than the central bankers. And he said that this reality became virtually a death-grip, when the governments of Europe capitulated to the Maastricht Treaty, the Stability Pact, and that whole set of arrangements.

And so therefore, no meaningful change, no meaningful opportunity to exploit this moment of revolutionary discontinuity, is possible without a change in the political situation inside the United States. And frankly, Lyn's objective at this conference, was, I think, first and foremost, to make a breakthrough on this issue: to give people who represent leading thinking political circles—in Western Europe, in Russia, in China, in India, in Africa—an idea that the prospects of a political revolution inside the United States are very real. And particularly, in the keynote panel, the exchange between Lyn and Professor Menshikov really put the challenge squarely on the table. Because Professor Menshikov stated explicitly what practically everybody else in the room was thinking privately: namely, that whatever Lyn's intentions, whatever Lyn's brilliant ideas, the notion that the United States could play a positive role in world affairs in the foreseeable future, was something that was systematically rejected by all of these people.

And so therefore, the tendency was to think in a defensive strategic fashion, about the nature of the world situation over the period of the next four years: to think in terms of defensive regional alliances, to forestall the worst possible policy disasters coming out of Washington, without challenging any of the fundamental aspects, the fundamental axiomatic crises that the world is facing; which is not a crisis that began when George Bush stole the 2000 election and repeated that in 2004. These are axiomatic problems that go back, minimally, to the breakup of the Bretton Woods system, and the end of the last true vestige of the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and the American System on a global scale.

- LaRouche vs. George Shultz -

And that goes back to 1971 and slightly earlier, and gets us very much to the heart of the present battle for the soul of the United States of America, which you could characterize as a fight between Lyndon LaRouche, the heir of the legacy of the American System and FDR, and of course, a much longer republican scientific revolutionary tradition; versus the personality and policy outlook of George Shultz, the controller of the Bush Administration, the controller of the future would-be Nazi dictator of America, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the man, who in our current political epoch, personifies the central banker fascist: George Shultz is the latter-day Hjalmar Schacht. As Lyn indicated yesterday in a phone discussion: Before you can have Hitler, before you can have the jack-boots movement, you must have a Hjalmar Schacht. You must have the person representing the combined interests of the private central banking system, which was codified in 1930-31, with the creation of the Bank for International Settlements, and which earlier was established in Europe at the time of the American, and then French Revolutions, as the European Anglo-Dutch system—the more modern representation of what was earlier known as the Venetian system.

So, we've got a fight in the United States between Lyndon LaRouche and George Shultz. And the outlook and the machinery, and the near-term policy intentions of LaRouche and Shultz, represent the two, diametrically opposite poles of political conflict in the world today.

Now, at Berlin, I think we did a pretty credible job, overall, of forcing the participants in the conference to confront their own cynicism, and their own false-axiomatic assumptions, about the political situation in the United States. And people will remember, Lyn's direct comments after the presentation at the morning keynote panel by General Saighal from India, where General Saighal presented the idea of the discontinuity, from only the standpoint of the grave danger represented by it. Lyn addressed the discontinuity, and also identified it as a revolutionary moment, when the discontinuity posed the greatest opportunity for new ideas to be put on the table and implemented.

And the essence of Lyn's new ideas—which are really not new ideas at all, but new expressions of the entire republican, American System trajectory—was, number one: Now is the moment to reorganize the hopelessly bankrupt global financial system. Number two: We've got to do this, in the framework of a new, extended Treaty of Westphalia. And Lyn discussed the fact, that we were on the verge of achieving a second Treaty of Westphalia in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan adopted Lyn's own strategic concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was far more than a military doctrine. It was the framework for a new set of relations among sovereign nation-states of Eurasia, the Americas, Africa, based on an alternative security structure to the Mutually Assured Destruction threat of constant nuclear holocaust, that had been set in motion with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the death of Roosevelt.

So, we failed to seize that opportunity in 1983, because the then-Soviet head of state Yuri Andropov rejected Reagan's offer. And that set in motion a whole chain-reaction series of events that a half-decade later let to the collapse of the Soviet Union—just as Lyn forecast would be the consequences of their failure to act.

So, we've been through a lot since the 1983 Andropov rejection: Lyn was targetted for political or physical elimination. He went to jail. The Soviet Union collapsed. We had the revitalization of the Bertrand Russell doctrine of preventive nuclear war, initiated in 1990 by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. We've had several further steps of erosion of the post-Bretton Woods floating-exchange-rate system.

And so, now we've arrived at this moment, where this new Treaty of Westphalia idea is once again squaring on the table. Because, just as the Soviet Union inevitably collapsed, as the result of Andropov's refusal to accept Lyn's and Reagan's offer of a new Treaty of Westphalia arrangement, centered around the Strategic Defense Initiative, now we've reached the point, where the slower process of absolute disintegration of the post-Bretton Woods system has reached the point, where reality has inescapably bubbled to surface. And we're fortunate, in some respects, that this issue has emerged in a very concrete and very immediate form, which is the fight around Social Security privatization, which is really the surface edge, of the much-deeper fight which I'm going to address in a few minutes on several different levels: the economic and political level, and also the more underlying philosophical level.

- Behind the Social Security Issue -

So, what's the real meaning of the Social Security issue? The drive behind the Bush push for Social Security privatization—not partial, not toe in the door, not pilot project, but the grab for the entire Social Security pot of gold, is drive precisely by the fact that we have reached the end-point of the post-Bretton Woods floating-exchange-rate system, and everybody knows it. The dollar has collapsed by approximately 40% against the euro and some other major world currencies, over the last two-year period, and we're poised on the verge of an even more precipitous dollar collapse in the immediate days and weeks ahead. You can't predict with any certainty the date it's going to happen, but it's on the table to happen at any moment, and any one of a number of factors could trigger it.

Right now, the dollar is eroding slowly, rather than rapidly, because there is still a net inflow, every single trading day, of about $2.1 billion in money coming into the United States stock and bond markets. Should that money dry up—and there is no question that it will in the very near future—the dollar will go through a precipitous crash, and that will mean that the entire global financial architecture has disintegrated. And this is well known, among the leading financier circles of the planet. And those who want, at all costs, to defend this system, to keep it propped up for a further period of time, have zeroed in on the Social Security Trust Fund, which is a continuous stream of about 6.2% of the entire weekly wages of the private sector of the U.S. economy; not counting people working in the underground economy, under the table, whose wages aren't identified and taxed. That is the biggest available income stream in the United States. I don't have the precise number in front of me, but it offsets the $2.1 billion a day that right now is the net inflow from overseas.

So, Shultz and Greenspan and this apparatus are desperate, hysterical, psychotically desperate, to get their hands on this money; to get their hands on all of it; and to get their hands on it, right away. Which means that they are moving, rapidly, with very little of a political safety net under them. They're walking a tightrope between two mountains, with a gorge down below that drops several miles before you hit, splat-bottom. So, they're on a very, very precarious course of action. And therefore, they can be politically defeated. And by politically defeating them, we defeat something much larger.

When Lyn talks about the Anglo-Dutch political system, he's talking about a system of parliamentary government, in which the elected officials, and therefore the general will of the electorate, is not represented in any powerful form. There's no constitution, with a general welfare clause that prescribes the mission of government. And even if there were, under a parliamentary constitutional system, there is no center of political power, to make changes during periods of crisis; there's no strong Executive branch. And when you get an insane asylum called the White House, as we have now, with psychopath Bush and sociopath Cheney, there's also no system of checks and balances, to offset the potentially great power of the Executive branch to do evil.

So, you don't have a system like we have under our Constitution, of a bicameral Legislative branch, which has the power to veto the actions of an insane Executive. You don't have an independent Judiciary, with the authority to step in and prevent the Executive branch from acting above the law. And, if you look back over the last six months, you'll find that even this completely insane bunch of Conservative Revolutionaries, like Scalia and Thomas on the Supreme Court—even they intervened unanimously, when the Executive branch tried to claim that there are categories of American citizens who don't enjoy the protection of the court. When the court was being told that they don't have jurisdiction and authority versus the Executive branch over a segment of the American people—namely, the so-called "enemy combatants"—they came back and slammed the Executive branch in a series of unanimous decisions, that turned parts of the Patriot Act and the interpretations of Guantanamo Bay, and all of this stuff, on its head. So, we still have, even in this depraved Supreme Court, an institutional impulse to protect the role of the Supreme Court and the Judiciary in our Constitutional system.

Now, with the vote theft of November 2000, and the repeat performance in November 2004, and with the existence of a Republican majority in both the House and in the Senate, there has been an attempt to basically impose the Anglo-Dutch parliamentary model on the American System. What have we seen with Cheney's role, along with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, in attempting to beat down the Republican majority in the Congress, into the kind of willing pawns of the Executive branch, that you would see in a parliamentary system, where there's really no distinction between the so-called prime ministerial office and the parliament.

This attempt to essentially eradicate, de facto, the Constitutional framework of checks and balances between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, and between the states and the Federal government, has now suddenly run up against some roadblocks. And so, the efforts at this point, to, in effect, create a parliamentary system, to ram through the final dismantling of the FDR legacy and to force through into implementation the Bertrand Russell doctrine of preventive nuclear war, is on the table and is being fought out. And because of Lyn's intervention, really going back a long way—but I can sort of date back to 1996—the intensification of the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, within a short period of time of Lyn getting out of jail, we have now reached the point, that the Democratic Party, in the period since Lyn's Berlin address of Jan. 12, has finally resolved, in a pretty definitive way: the battle over the soul of the party, the battle over the identity of the party. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won out, against the suburban Soccer Moms and SUV Dads.

Because, remember: People in the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the party, the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party, had argued through the 2000 and the 2004 elections, that the Democratic Party could no longer be the party of the Franklin Roosevelt, and had to be merely a "kinder, gentler" version of the Republican Party, oriented to the upper 20% income bracket in the wealthy suburbs.

That whole approach has been defeated, in a rather dramatic way. You had a symbolic statement of this on Thursday morning, when the Democratic leadership in the Senate, travelled to the FDR memorial to issue an open letter to President Bush signed by 44 of 45 members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, outright rejecting Bush's privatization of Social Security.

So, as Lyn said, at that time: We have won the argument, the debate, inside the Democratic Party over the issue of Franklin Roosevelt. And there will be increasingly, people within the Republican Party in Congress, especially within the U.S. Senate, who are going to cross the aisle and join a bipartisan revolt, against the Bush drive to privatize Social Security, because, at stake is not just the issue of Social Security and stealing those funds from the elderly and launching Schachtian austerity here in the United States: but, this will mean a decisive end of the entire American System, and American experiment in Constitutional republican government—the most successful experiment in government in the history of mankind.

- Bush's 'Fire in the Mind' -

Now, there is no doubt that the George Shultzes, and the students of Leo Strauss inside the apparatus around the White House, know perfectly well what they're attempting to do. Remember, back in 1994, when the Republicans initially took control of the House of Representatives under the so-called Gingrich Revolution, the "Contract on America." Gingrich made it absolutely clear at that time, that his self-conception was that of a Jacobin, and that what he was instituting inside the United States, was a replay of the French Revolution.

Now, on Jan. 20 of this year, a week and one day after Lyn delivered the keynote in Berlin, President Bush gave his Second Inaugural Address before a Joint Session of Congress. And, of course, Bush's crowning achievement, was that he did a relatively less-psychotic-than-usual reading of a speech that was prepared for him, and which he scarcely understood. You know, Bush is going around bragging that he's read two books, not just one. As of Sept. 11, 2001, the whole world knows that Bush had actually successfully read one book cover to cover. And the name of that book was The Pet Goat. Now, Bush at least claims that he's read a second book, which is a kind of a pamphlet-sized book by Natan Sharansky on the subject of the global democratic revolution—in effect the global Jacobin revolution.

But, the people who wrote Bush's speech, people like William Kristol, self-conscious, trained student of Leo Strauss, filled up Bush's Inaugural Address with all sorts of key and code words, and in particular, they made two references in the speech to a concept of "the fire in the minds of men." In the third paragraph of the Inaugural Address, Bush said—or, "Bush read" I should say—"at this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half-century, American defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of Communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical. And then, there came a day of fire."

Later in the speech, he developed that image of fire more extensively. When he was talking about America's global mission to conduct a "war on tyranny." He said, "from all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you've granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet, because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it." Here comes the key formulation: "By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power. It burns those who fight its progress. And one day, this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world."

Now, I can assure you, that George Bush has not the foggiest notion of what those words meant, or what the context, or esoteric interpretation of those words would be, by his Straussian controllers. But, I can assure you, that people like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and others from this fascist, Straussian camp, were laughing up their sleeves over what this actually means: Because, this term "fire in the minds of men," originates with a book by Dostoevsky, called The Possessed. It's actually about somebody who goes mad, goes insane, so it's a perfect reference to President George W. Bush. But, what this is a further reference to, is the Nietzschean revolution, the rejection of all of the fundamental axiomatic assumptions of the great monotheistic religions; all of the axiomatic assumptions that Lyn discusses when he talks about the nature of man, what are the universal characteristics of man, as a creative being in the living image of God.

There's a very useful book on this subject, that was written in the 1970s, by a man who's now the Librarian of Congress, named James H. Billington. The book is called Fire in the Minds of Men: The Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. And he traces the anti-humanist revolutionary movement, begun with the French Revolution reaction against the American Revolution, carried through the Bolshevik Revolution and the Frankfurt School cultural revolutions in Europe and elsewhere, that dominated the 20th Century.

So, this reference to "the fire in the minds of men" is precisely a reference to this notion which is behind the policy of this Bush Administration, to destroy every fundamental principle that is embedded in the American Revolution, in the U.S. Constitution, and in the principles that we've seen through the Founding Fathers; through the efforts of John Quincy Adams to define an American foreign policy, based on the Treaty of Westphalia, through the revolutionary of Lincoln, in which we spread the American System around the world, and ultimately the revolution of Franklin Roosevelt.

So, this is what we're about today. We're at a moment of discontinuity, when the opportunity exists to give a new meaning to the founding principles of the American Revolution, and to defeat the notions embedded in the concept of "fire in the minds of men."

- Where We Stand -

Now, where do we stand since Jan. 12? I got up at the conference, because it was very clear to me, in Berlin, that despite the enormous respect that all of the participants at the conference had for Lyn as a universal genius, they failed to recognize the fact that Lyn is also a leading representative of the American political institutions, that are in a state of active revolution against everything that George Shultz, the latter-day Hjalmar Schacht, and the Straussians represent. And so, we had a very lively discussion back and forth, about what was actually concretely occurring in the United States. And because these events center around the personality of Lyndon LaRouche, these events are the subject of hysterical efforts to black them out, in the media of the United States, and in the international media, particularly in Europe.

So, the point that I made, is that nobody who is not closely following Lyn's activities in the United States and the activities of those people who have joined with us to defeat this Jacobin insurgency, can understand or truly appreciate what the nature of the political fight in the United States is. And I think we made a lot of progress, in giving people a certain handle on what was going on. Of course, this just days after the Joint Session of the Congress, in which the Democrats in the House and Senate, got up and challenged the legitimacy of Bush's election in Ohio. So we already had the advantage, that there was one very concrete demonstration of the power of Lyn's ideas to marshal the Democratic Party, behind these principles.

And, of course, since then—since Jan. 12—there have been a series of stunning developments, principally coming from the Democrats, but now increasingly coming from certain leading members of the Republican Party, in both the House and the Senate: That there is a coalescing of forces, in the two parties, in the Congress, among leading active-duty and retired military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel, around the idea that the Bush Presidency has to be brought down, and brought down now. And that the very survival of the United States and the planet, as Lyn has been saying for a long time, depends upon exactly that occurring.

So, what have we had, just to tick off the obvious?

* We had the challenge to Alberto Gonzales, which rose to the level of a debate over the highest principles of the mission of the United States as described in our Constitution. You've got people openly discussing the fact that the Bush Administration is pursuing precedents that can be readily found in the Hitler dictatorship.

* We had the fight over Condi Rice, a nine-hour debate, a historic debate, on the floor of the Senate, in which 13 members of the Senate—12 Democrats and one Independent—voted against Condi Rice. And, of course, the important thing was not the number per se, but the fact that representatives of every wing of the Democratic Party cast representative votes against Rice. And then, we had something like 36 Democrats voting against Gonzales.

* Then, you've had the fight that's erupted, visibly, around opposition to Social Security privatization. And here's where we've seen Republicans as well, coming into the fight over the last several days. Bush left town to try to put pressure on certain potentially weak Democrats coming up for re-election in 2006 in the Senate. And, as soon as he left town, leading Republicans, including the chairman of House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, Rep. Jim McCrery from Louisiana, came out rejecting the Bush plan for privatization of Social Security.

* And today, and yesterday, we've got some rather extraordinary developments, which further indicate that the underlying, axiomatic issues are bubbling to the surface in an unprecedented fashion; and that the issue of a new global financial architecture is on the table, right now. People know that the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank heads are meeting in London over the weekend. And on Friday, as a sort of a preview of the G-7 discussions, there was a forum hosted by Gordon Brown who is the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the equivalent of our Secretary of the Treasury. And the event turned into a rather heated, unusually blunt debate between Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin—there's a lot more coverage that we'll have over the next 24 hours, because it's sort of broken out in the international media, as a rather significant development.

On the one hand, Greenspan used his typical, unfathomable, incoherent bastardization of the English language—Greenspan-speak—to essentially say, that there is no problem with the U.S. Federal government deficit; there's no problem with the U.S. balance of trade deficit; that these are minor nuisance problems that will be self-corrected by general mechanism of globalization. Now, this was really tantamount to Greenspan saying, there's no problem with the Federal government massively expanding its debt by privatizing and stealing the Social Security funds. There is no danger to the dollar world financial system, if the Federal government, over the next decade, incurs $2 trillion in added debt to transfer the Social Security Trust Fund into the greedy hands of Wall Street brokerage houses.

And after Greenspan spoke, Rubin, uncharacteristically, got up and said, with all due respect, Greenspan's dead wrong. And he in effect said, that if the U.S. government goes ahead with a massive expansion of Federal government debt—i.e., goes forward with Social Security privatization—then the global financial system will come unglued.

Now, these are the kinds of things, that we understand, are said privately among major figures in the financial community. But it's a rare occasion, that these disagreements come out in such direct and blunt terms.

So, in a very real respect, the issue of a new global monetary system is on the table, right now—and we have some very important events coming up, very fast: The day before the Presidents' Day conference, on Feb. 18, Lyn will be meeting with a group of predominantly Americans—elected officials, labor leaders, other strategic policy makers; there'll be a smattering of international guests, but it'll be largely American policy-shapers, for a sit-down discussion, to discuss what we're going to do, to deal with this global strategic crisis, a crisis that's now out of the bag, and is being openly discussed in international financial forums like this weekend's G-7 meeting.

And then, of course, the next day, is the opening of our Presidents' Day conference in both Reston and in Los Angeles. And those two events, a small, closed-door discussion among perhaps 50, or 60, or 70 or so people, and then the East and West Coast conferences where one would expect over 1,000 people combined to be attending—including hopefully, a very, very large contingent of young people: This is going to be a truly historic weekend.

What Lyn said this morning, is that the agenda item for that series of meetings is moving towards implementation of this New Bretton Woods program. Now, what the means, is that the Bush Administration has got to be politically brought down. It's obvious that the Bush Administration is not going to take the needed measures, that Lyn has so clearly spelled out. And therefore, now is the moment to seize the immediate opportunity which this Social Security fight presents to bring down and destroy the Bush Presidency.

There are already significant ruptures in the Jacobin coalition running out of the White House and strangling the Republicans in the Congress. We saw it this week, with a number of Republicans outright rejecting Bush's Social Security privatization call, after his State of the Union Address. It was also reflected on Thursday, in hearings in the Senate in the Armed Forces Committee, where a number of Republicans strongly challenged Wolfowitz and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Myers on various aspects of the Iraq occupation; joining with the Democrats, to say that the administration is continuing to fail to meet its obligations, is continuing to lie, even to the Congress, and something's got to be done about it.

So, we're at an inflection point, where if we deliver a crushing defeat to Bush on Social Security—and I don't care if it takes the form of a vote and a bipartisan defeat of privatization; I don't care if it takes the form of Bush being forced to admit he can't get it through his own Republican majority in Congress and dropping it. Either way, Bush at that moment, Cheney at that moment, become instant lame ducks, and you have the ability to govern this country in the interim period, through a bipartisan coalition in the Congress, around the revival of the FDR principles, the LaRouche principles.

And whether or not Bush and Cheney go down through impeachment, or they just simply spend time drooling in their rubber rooms at the White House, letting Congress, unimpeded, go about the business of governing—one way or the other, we've got to create the conditions, where we are clearly and visibly running the show in the United States—this year. Really, over the immediate months ahead. That's the importance of the Social Security fight. Make no bones about it. And, if we do our job right on this, we will bring down Schwarzenegger, hard, in California. And we will put George Shultz on the equivalent of the Nuremberg Trial, that unfortunately acquitted his antecedent Hjalmar Schacht.

- A Domestic Marshall Plan -

Once we've done that, we have the ability to move ahead with a legislative mandate, and Lyn's idea is very simple: We're going to create the conditions for a global and national debt reorganization, bankruptcy reorganization. What Lyn said this morning, is, we're going to freeze the short-term debt demands inside the United States, and focus instead on issuance of long-term, cheap credits, oriented towards the launching of massive infrastructure projects, a domestic Marshall Plan to parallel the international Marshall Plan approach to implementing the Eurasian Land-Bridge with its spurs all over the globe.

He said, we'll cover the short-term chaos of putting short-term debts in freeze, by expanding the long-term assets which will flood enough capital into the system for real economic growth, and to turn over those necessary short-term debts that are legitimate and have to be covered. Lyn said, globally, only a U.S.-led, FDR solution, to the global economic crisis will work. And in fact, the Social Security funds, which are in the form of 3% interest-rate, long-term, 30-year-plus, special Treasury bonds are among the safest investments around.

So, these are the issues that are going to be taken up at the conference. A domestic Marshall Plan: We're going to go back to a John F. Kennedy-type investment tax-credit incentive system; we'll increase taxes to cover the costs of a massive infrastructure recovery program, but we'll offset the tax increases by preferential tax breaks who either invest their personal savings, or their business plans in projects that increase the infrastructure development of the country.

And we're going to do this quick, in the form of emergency measures. These emergency measures are going to be the basis for discussion at the VIP meeting on Feb. 18, and at the conference as a whole starting the next afternoon.

Now, what Lyn said, is, we're going to find some allies in this fight, because the institutional issue of what the United States actually represents in the world, is something that runs deep, particularly when someone like Lyn is on the scene to actually make these ideas self-conscious to people who often carry them in a much more intuitive fashion. Lyn also said today, that there are people inside the financial community, itself, who do not subscribe to the Schachtian agenda of people like George Shultz, and will see the wisdom, even from their own survival interests, of what Lyn is proposing as an alternative.

So, here we are, less than a month (really about three weeks, slightly more), since Lyn delivered his keynote message in Berlin, launching a global dialogue around the need for a revival of an FDR-style, global Marshall Plan, and we've moved several significant steps forward to achieving that same critical mission inside the United States. I was very struck by the fact that the European media, almost without exception, yesterday, was picking up on the level of combativity coming out of the Democratic Party and certain Republicans in the U.S., against Bush; against Bush on his global doctrine of preventive nuclear war, and particularly against Bush on the idea of a Schachtian fascist scheme to loot Social Security at home.

So, the message that we brought to a group of leading citizens in Europe and Eurasia, where we met with a lot of resistance—back just three weeks ago—cut through that resistance at the conference, no doubt about it. But now, that message by Lyn is radiating in the European media itself, because of events going on, on the ground in the United States, that have burst through the veil of media blackout, and are too big to cover up.

So, we are—to conclude—truly in a moment of revolutionary discontinuity, in which what we do over the immediate days and weeks ahead, will determine history for generations to come. We're at a crossroads, where either we win decisively, or we are on the verge of a planetary-wide dark age that will take us three or four generations to crawl out from under the consequences of.

So, on that note, why don't we break into discussion, questions.

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