...... ...................Larouche Online Almanac

Published: Tuesday, Apr. 5, 2005

Today is:

Volume 4, Issue Number 14


Richard Nixon meets with George Shultz (far right) and other Cabinet members, May 4, 1971.

This Week You Need to Know:

BOOK REVIEW
Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium ; New York: Rizzoli, 2005 (192 pages, hardcover, $19.95)


IN DEFENSE OF CHRISTIANITY

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

April 2, 2005

About an hour ago, I received a terse report that Pope John Paul II had died. Some days ago, after I had begun the writing of a review of the English edition of the book Memory and Identity, I halted my completion of the review out of a saddening sense that these might prove to be the last days of his mortal life. In a manner of speaking, I paused to give this Pope the last word.

Nonetheless, I have changed nothing of what I had begun to write, except to situate that in an appropriate way as my personal expression of regard for my own mourning and others', for our common loss. Even then, as the present title I had already given to this review attests, when I had still hoped for some degree of his recovery to continue his work, the intent of my review was to have been a relevant reflection for today of what this Pope's ministry has meant for the continuity of the apostolic legacy of the Christian Church up through his ministry, to beyond his now-reported passing.

At this moment, as I feared already about the time this report was begun, it is time for me to speak frankly, from the vantage-point of both my special knowledge, and position in world affairs, of certain things concerning the role of the Church, things which have long occupied my innermost reflections.

...more

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Latest From LaRouche

The Build-Up to the Great Crash:

DIRICHLET PRINCIPLE AS POTENTIAL

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

April 1, 2005

The panic-stricken effort to locate the explosion of the "Great World Financial Crash of 2005" in this or that particular feature of the landscape, such as oil prices, or housing bubbles, reflects the widespread ignorance of the reality, that a crash of the currently onrushing type can be understood only from either "Dirichlet's Principle," or the approximation presented within Gauss's 1841 treatment of Earth's magnetism.

...more

Animation Studies of the
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The Economy

World and Nation-State

This Week in History

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April 4-10, 1935

70th Anniversary of President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration

In the spring of 1935, it was obvious to President Roosevelt that more measures would have to be taken to put Americans back to work. The Civilian Conservation Corps was providing work and income for young men and for a large group of veterans, and the large-scale infrastructure programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority were getting off the ground, but there were still millions of unemployed Americans, many of them unable to see where their next meal was coming from.

Therefore, on April 8, 1935, the President signed an appropriations bill aimed at providing work relief. The next month, a Presidential Order used funding from that bill to establish the Works Progress Administration. The concept of providing relief to the unemployed through useful jobs, rather than a simple dole, had several aims. It provided hope and a sense of self-worth to the unemployed, while giving them the buying power which would lead to increased production of goods and services.

In addition, the jobs which were provided were not random or make-work: they were requested by counties, cities, and towns which needed roads, schools, water systems, health clinics, and other infrastructural projects. President Roosevelt had made it clear that each local area had to decide what projects it needed and then had to match the skills which would be needed for the projects with the skills of the unemployed in that area. By March 1936, more than 3,400,000 people obtained work through the program, not counting the youth in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The President wrote that, "There has been a growing conviction on the part of the Congress and myself that the time had come when the Federal Government could well afford to withdraw from the field of direct relief, leaving that responsibility to the various States and localities, and to establish a larger Works Program for the unemployed who were employable.... With respect to work projects, the State and local governments were given the responsibility, with few exceptions, of originating and planning the work to fit local needs and also of determining the eligibility of workers on the basis of actual need. At the same time, through Federal approval of these projects and through the carrying out of a Federal wages and hours policy and by means of Federal accounting and purchasing, there were obtained a general centralized planning and responsibility."

Roosevelt continued by saying that "On the average, 85% of the Federal funds spent on WPA projects went directly into wages for labor.... Taking the program as a whole, local funds made up 16% of the total expenditures on WPA projects, the proportion increasing steadily, and 80% of these local contributions was used for materials, supplies and equipment.... In the few exceptions in which the projects were not initiated by States, cities, villages, towns, counties, districts, highway commissions, boards of education, boards of health, park boards, etc., the WPA itself acted as sponsor. These activities were usually devoted to artistic and historical and clerical work which was designed for the so-called white-collar workers."

Although the program operated for eight years, the number of workers enrolled in it peaked in February of 1936. Improving economic conditions soon enabled President Roosevelt to call for smaller appropriations in succeeding years. In total, the program employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million projects. These projects created 650,000 miles of highways, 125,000 public buildings, 8000 parks, 850 airports, and sponsored the construction and repair of 124,000 bridges.

The overall figures only give a hint of the scope of the program. The public buildings constructed and repaired included schools, hospitals, courthouses, and fire stations, as well as gymnasiums, stadiums, playgrounds, athletic fields, and other recreational facilities. The work on water supply systems included water mains, aqueducts, storage tanks, reservoirs, dams, treatment plants, pumping stations, storm sewers, mosquito control and fish hatcheries. The work on health infrastructure included the conducting of medical and dental clinics, nursing visits, and immunizations.

On the cultural side, there were over 2,000 branch libraries and almost 6,000 travelling libraries established. Classes were given in music, theater, and art, and the famous Writers' Project produced a valuable series of guides to the individual states and recordings of living history. Books and maps were transcribed into Braille, while literacy, vocational, and nursery school classes were established all over the country.

During his 1936 campaign tours, Roosevelt often referred to the work of the WPA; and, in fact, many times he was speaking in, or within sight of, an edifice constructed by the program. On Oct. 15, the President spoke at Atwood Stadium in Flint, Mich., and recalled the height of the Depression: "I am thinking of Flint as it was in January, or February, or March of 1933, and Flint was not the only city that faced conditions of desperation. Faced with that widespread suffering from unemployment, this administration, as you know, has followed a fixed policy—a policy that does not believe in the dole, on the ground that temporary charity without work results in a breakdown of self-respect....

"And so, we have come through the worst economic crisis in our history, and we have kept our morale. Money spent to do that was money soundly invested. We faced that choice in 1933; and it was a test of what I call straight economic thinking and good economic statesmanship, even if some professors did not agree with us.

"We could have gone into the relief problem by spending, let us say, a dollar for a dole. That dollar for a dole would have kept unemployed men just alive—just in a state of suspended animation. Or, we could think beyond our noses and spend, say, a dollar and a half on work instead of a dollar on a dole. That extra half dollar would maintain the normal relationships of the unemployed with their families and their grocers, and their merchants, and so on down the line. They could later slip back into normal industry in a normal way.

"Yes, we chose to spend money in order to save men. But who can measure in dollars and cents what the self-respect and the morale of a people mean to their nation? They must be measured, rather, in terms of the preservation of the families and the normal life of America.

...more

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Feature:

SITUATING HEALTH-CARE POLICY
What Is Infrastructure?
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
March 24, 2005
Perhaps the most dangerous kind of ignorance met today from among both today's leading U.S. policy-shapers and the breed of post-industrial businessmen, is their tendency to substitute the current, crudely mechanistic populist ideology of most of today's corporate financial accounting practice, for the practice of real, American System economics. That mile of difference is the crooked sixpence in Wall Street's style today.


International:

LaRouche: Project Democracy Was 'Coup-Coup'd' in Kyrgyzstan
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On March 28, Lyndon LaRouche issued his personal assessment of the ongoing events in the Central Asian, former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan, characterizing the political crisis that erupted there the week of March 21 as a Moscow-orchestrated 'coup-coup' against the Bush-Cheney Project Democracy apparatus that was deeply involved in the so-called 'rainbow revolutions' in Georgia and Ukraine. The U.S.A.-centered Project Democracy apparatus includes the likes of George Shultz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, and the entire neoconservative apparatus ensconced in the Pentagon civilian bureaucracy and the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Will the Kissinger Legacy Again Kill Lebanon?
by Jeffrey Steinberg, Michele Steinberg, and Dean Andromidas

In response to the recent Bush Administration efforts to once again blow up the situation inside Lebanon and Syria, LaRouche has emphasized that no solution to the Lebanon crisis is possible, without a clear understanding of the events of the past 40 years. To fail to learn the lessons of that sorry chapter in Southwest Asian history is to be condemned to repeat them. Condoleezza Rice, the evil spiritual stepdaughter of Kissinger and his close ally George Pratt Shultz, is, in fact, running a replay of the U.S. actions that helped plunge Lebanon into a 15-year civil war, from which the country is still recovering. For now, the leaders of the various religious communities inside Lebanon are holding together, struggling to avoid a replay of their collective tragic past.

France:
Cheminade Says 'No' to European Constitution

A national referendum on the European Constitution is to take place in France on May 29, and no one dares predict, as yet, what the outcome will be. Although the leadership of the major political parties has called for a 'yes' vote, there is tremendous popular opposition to it. The former head of the Socialist Party, Henri Emmanuelli, created a sensation on March 2, by announcing that he would campaign against the Constitution, and he has since been joined by other leaders of the left wing of the Socialist Party. Since then, the 'no' vote has been consistently rising, and the latest polls show that 55%of the French intend to vote against the Constitution. It is well known, that if the European Constitution is rejected in France, it will have no future.

Interview: Col. Jürgen Hübschen
No Future for Europe or America Without Cooperation Between Them
EIR Editor Nancy Spannaus interviewed Col. Jürgen Hübschen (ret.) on March 21, while he was in the United States for meetings, including discussions with EIR (see transcript, above). He served as military attaché at the German Embassy in Baghdad, worked for many years for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and has long-term experience working alongside his NATO colleagues from the United States who were based in Germany.

  • Germany's Colonel Hübschen Proposes Urgent Change in Policy Toward Iraq
    ...retired from Germany's Air Force, German defense attache´ in Baghdad from 1986-89. He worked in Latvia for several years with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and served in the German Defense Ministry until March of last year. He gave this briefing on March 19 to EIR staff in Leesburg, Virginia. Editor Nancy Spannaus also interviewed him during his visit (see p. 24). An earlier interview with him was published in EIR, Aug. 6, 2004.

The Not-So-Hidden Protectors Of Italy's Alessandra Mussolini
by Claudio Celani
We have often warned, in these pages, that there is a plan to promote neofascist parties as major players in European politics. This plan has recently taken a leap forward in Italy, where the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini has received an enormous political boost on the eve of the regional elections. By the time this article is published, the reader will probably know the result of those elections, scheduled to take place April 3-4, but independent of that result, Alessandra Mussolini has already achieved her goal of being 'the real leader of the Rightwing in Italy,' as a well-informed observer put it to this reporter.


National:

LaRouche Intervenes in GM Crisis: Save U.S. Industry
by Marcia Merry Baker
At the time of a March 23 LaRouchePACTown Hall Meeting in Detroit, Lyndon LaRouche launched a drive for collaboration on a 'reconstruction agenda' for the United States, to save the nation's industrial capacity in the face of the breakdown impact of the threatened financial collapse of General Motors/GMAC, the world's largest automaker and a $300 billion financing operation. LaRouche is calling for action, based on the conceptualization of the science of infrastructure for an economy, to start the re-industrialization of the United States, which will be of crucial benefit internationally as well.

Gen. Sanchez Memo: One More Link From Rumsfeld and Cambone, to Abu Ghraib
by Edward Spannaus
A newly-released memorandum on prisoner interrogation methods, written in 2003 by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, establishes yet another link from the policies set by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilians, directly to the abuse and torture of prisoners that occurred at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq. The content of thememoalso suggests that the commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, may have perjured himself in testimony before a U.S. Senate committee last year, when he flatly denied approving of the exact methods of interrogation which he listed and approved in the newly-disclosed document.

Government by Referendum
Schwarzenegger Chooses Demagogy To Impose Shultz's Fascist Agenda
by Harley Schlanger
On Sept. 18, 2003, as the campaign to recall Gov. Gray Davis was heating up, Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared at the California State Railway Museum, to establish his credentials as a 'reformer.' The site was chosen to make the link between Schwarzenegger and Hiram Johnson, who was elected governor as a reform candidate in 1910. Johnson won by campaigning against the leading special interest of his day, the Southern Pacific Company. It was under his guidance that the state Constitution was amended to allow voters to govern through 'direct democracy,' using the tools of: recall, to remove corrupt politicians; initiative, to pass legislation directly by yes or no vote; and referendum, to repeal legislation by direct vote.

  • Referendum: Hitler's 'Democratic' Weapon To Forge Dictatorship
    by Steve Douglas

    Arnold Schwarzenegger's professed admiration for Adolf Hitler has assumed many manifestations since he became the 'Governator' of California. One such is his brutal bullying of the state legislature; he clearly has little or no more regard for it, as a body of representative government, than Hitler had for the German Reichstag (parliament). Another such expression is Schwarzenegger's use of the referendum, as a way of bypassing that uncooperative legislature (see accompanying article).

Catholics Start Drive To Stop Death Penalty
by Nina Ogden
On March 21, at the National Press Club, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington D.C., launched the Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty. The Cardinal said, 'For us this is not about ideology, but respect for life. We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing. We cannot defend life by taking life. In his encyclical 'The Gospel of Life,' the Holy Father challenges followers of Christ to be 'unconditionally pro-life.' He reminds us that 'the dignity of life cannot be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil.' '


Economics:

Maastricht Anti-Growth Pact Castrated by European Leaders
by Rainer Apel
The March 22-23 summit in Brussels, of the European Union's 25 heads of state and government, endorsed the 'reform' of the EU supranational Maastricht 'Stability Pact,' as agreed to by the Eurozone Finance Ministers on March 20. The Pact, the key cause of the years-long depression of the European economies, should have been abolished, which would have restored national sovereignty in economic decision-making. But although not abolished, the Pact was softened up and diluted to such an extent that it has been castrated, even though it is not 'fully dead.'

Bird Flu: A Pandemic Waiting to Happen
by Colin Lowry
Faced with the looming threat of a new flu epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) called an unprecedented influenza summit meeting of health officials and vaccine companies inNovember 2004, to start work on preparing a vaccine and antiviral medicine production. Since then, the avian influenza virus has shown no signs of going away, as outbreaks in domestic chicken farms have recurred in Asia, and more cases of human infections continue. At present, the avian influenza, type H5N1, has infected 69 people in Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, causing 46 deaths.

OECD Conference Backs Nuclear Energy
by Emmanuel Grenier
Seventy-four countries and ten international organizations came together in Paris on March 21-22, for an 'International Conference on Nuclear Energy for the 21st Century,' organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its Nuclear Energy Agency.
The vast majority of the participants affirmed the desire to have nuclear energy, and also hydroelectric energy, make a major contribution to meeting energy needs and supporting world development. Because nuclear and hydroelectric energy sources would figure prominently in the international effort to reduce greenhouse gases, they were no longer the object of ideological exclusion, as has been the case up until now.

How the Pinochet Model Was Imposed On Peru's Social Security System
by Manuel Hidalgo
...[I]n 1990, the bankers' preferred candidate for President of Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa, brought Pinochet's former Labor Minister, José Piñera, and a slew of neo-conservatives, into Peru to promote the Chilean model of ultra-liberal shock treatment for the economy. When Vargas Llosa was defeated at the polls by Fujimori, who had campaigned in opposition to economic shock policies, the bankers maneuvered to ensure that their program would be enforced anyway.


Investigation:

Secret Warfare: From Operation Gladio to 9/11
An Interview With Dr. Daniele Ganser
Dr. Ganser is the author of NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005).
He is leading a research project at the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He was interviewed on March 3 in Basel, Switzerland, by Michael Liebig and Claudio Celani. See EIR, Jan. 7, 2005 for a commentary on Ganser's book.

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