..Larouche Online Almanac
Published: Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2006

Volume 5, Issue Number 46

*Sponsored by LaRouchePAC

This Week You Need To Know:

LaRouche PAC Reports: Bush Sings His Swan-Song

Leading Democrat and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. issued this statement Nov. 9.

Yesterday, President George W. Bush appeared somewhat humbled, but still wildly insane, in his internationally televised delivery to an East Room press audience. The impressive voter turnout for the election itself, had a great deal to do with causing what was in fact the Bush Presidency's electoral defeat; but the greater part of the credit for that belongs to the combination of an energetic minority fraction among Bush's Democratic and non-partisan opponents, as among youth associated with LPAC. It was also the result, very significantly, of the effects of a revolt from among the patriots within the permanent institutions of the Federal government, as signalled, conspicuously, by outspoken leading figures of the U.S. military.

Bush's already somewhat impressive defeat would have come in the form of a crushing landslide victory for Democrats, but for the sloppy behavior of those opportunistic Democratic Party leaders who, throughout most of 2006, have been more concerned with financial campaign contributions from right-wing financier circles, such as far-right Felix Rohatyn, than the welfare of the nation and its people. In some cases, Democratic candidates earned their victories; in other cases, they won despite their opportunistic lack of response on precisely those issues which remain, now as then, of the most crucial importance to the nation and its people.

Democratic candidates had better learn now, that, in the end, especially under conditions of global economic breakdown-crisis, as today, performance on the real issues of a terrible world crisis will be more important than a pretty face or flashy wardrobe. Such artifacts do not cut a favorable impression among those crucially important, wretchedly poor whom Shakespeare's self-doomed Julius Caesar would regard as presenting "a lean and hungry look."...

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Recent LaRouche Webcasts*

World Crisis on Eve of U.S. General Election - From Berlin Oct. 31, 2006
"A World-Historical Moment" - From Berlin Sept. 6, 2006
"Rohatyn as Satan" July 20, 2006
"Emergency Actions Required by Congress" June 9, 2006
"The Greatest Economic Crisis in Modern History" Apr. 27, 2006
"Make a Platonic Revolution to Save Our Civilization" Feb. 23, 2006
"Rebuild a Looted U.S. Economy"
video: Baltimore: from Industrial Powerhouse to Death Zones
Jan. 11, 2006
"The Tasks Before Us in the Post-Cheney Era"
Videos: US Dams, US Nuclear Plants
Nov. 16, 2005
"Rediscovering America: The Lessons of LaRouche's Famous Oct. 12, 1988 Forecast" Oct. 12, 2005
Sept. 16, 2005
Emergency Webcast,
"Pulling This Nation Together Now!"
Sept. 3, 2005
"LaRouche Addresses Urgent Changes in Economic and Monetary Policy"
Short video (WMA format)
June 16, 2005
April 7, 2005
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This Week in
American History


November 14—20, 1811

Construction Begins on the National Road to the West

In colonial America, the condition of the roads was generally so terrible that most people preferred to travel by water—either up and down the Atlantic coast, or by river. But when America won her independence and the new nation expanded westward, it was difficult to navigate any boat beyond the "fall line" of the major rivers, where they approached the Eastern mountain chain. To cross the mountains, Americans went by foot or on horseback, following, as did the Indians, the old buffalo migration trails, which took the easiest routes.

One of these well-known trails was called Nemacolin's Path, named for the Indian who helped Western scout Christopher Gist widen the trail so that settlers could reach Ohio Company lands near what is now Pittsburgh. The Washington family was the leading sponsor of this effort, and when the French burned the settlement on the Youghiogheny River, young George Washington supervised the widening of the road. His Virginia and North Carolina troops, who marched on that road, were badly outnumbered by the French and their Indian allies, and suffered a military defeat at the Great Meadows in 1754.

Britain was forced to answer the French action, and sent Gen. Edward Braddock to capture the French-held fort at the fork of the Ohio River. Thus, Nemacolin's Path and Washington's Road became Braddock's Road, and it led to the Ohio River and thus to the vast Mississippi Basin. But the road ran through an almost impenetrable forest, cleared to only 12 feet wide, and plunged and climbed through the wilderness at often death-defying angles. It would not do for commerce, nor for delivering the United States mail.

When Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801, the territory of Ohio was well on its way to becoming a state, and there was a pressing need for better communication with the expanding population west of the Allegheny Mountains. The U.S. Constitution gave the government the power to "establish post-offices and post-roads," but there was an ongoing debate in Congress over whether the Federal government actually had the power to build the roads. In December of 1805, the Senate passed legislation which made the construction of the national road to the Ohio River a Federal project, and it specified that the money to finance the construction would come from 5% of the proceeds from selling the Federal lands in the Northwest Territory to settlers. This procedure was followed as the road was extended to Columbus, Indianapolis, and eventually to Vandalia, the early capital of Illinois.

The first section of the national road was known as the Cumberland Road because it began at Cumberland, Maryland, the base camp for both the Ohio Company and General Braddock's expedition. Congress provided for a three-man Cumberland Road Commission to oversee construction and maintenance, and to map out the route of the road. The general route adopted was that of Nemacolin, Washington, and Braddock, but the ultimate destination was Wheeling, further down on the Ohio River than Pittsburgh.

Congress also set out specifications for the road, such as a 66-foot cleared width and a maximum grade of five degrees, or 8.75%, a very difficult requirement for mountainous terrain. In the summer of 1806, President Jefferson appointed Thomas Moore and Elie Williams of Maryland, and Joseph Kerr of Ohio, as the three commissioners, and they were sent westward to map out the route, along with two surveyors, two chain carriers, and two helpers. By the first week of December, they had done most of the work and were running into severe winter weather. Consequently, they sent a report and maps to President Jefferson and told him they would consult with him in Washington.

In their report, the commissioners wrote that the task of determining the route had become "a work of greater magnitude, and a task much more arduous, than was conceived before entering upon it." Not only was every locality and village begging them to bring the road in their direction, but the five degree requirement for the grade of the road was making the choice of route over the high Alleghenies very difficult.

The demands of the localities were not within the commissioners' purview, but they did find a way to solve the engineering difficulty: "The face of the country within the limits prescribed is generally very uneven, and in many places broken by a succession of high mountains and deep hollows, too formidable to be reduced within five degrees of the horizon except by crossing them obliquely, a mode which, although it imposes a heavy task of hill-side digging, obviates generally the necessity of reducing hills and filling hollows, which, on these grounds, would be an attempt truly Quixotic." Thus, the route followed horseshoe curves at the mountains, but ran straight ahead where grade was not a factor.

By the end of 1808, contracts were let out for clearing the right of way for the road, and the final surveying was completed to Wheeling. But actual construction did not begin until fall of 1811, and on Nov. 20, the road out of Cumberland reached the top of the Allegheny Front. The outbreak of the War of 1812 halted construction, but after the war it was resumed, and by 1818, the road was all but complete to Wheeling, and the first mail coaches began rumbling westward to the Ohio.

The road was greeted with enthusiasm when it came through any area. A farmer who lived near the construction site recorded that the workers came "a thousand strong with their carts, wheel-barrows, picks, shovels, and blasting tools, grading those commons, and climbing the mountain-side, leaving behind them a roadway good enough for an emperor to travel over."

After boulders were hauled away, trees were toppled, stumps pulled, roots grubbed out, and underbrush cut back, the workers would have a clearing 66 feet wide in which to construct the road. Ditches were dug along either side, leaving a sloped cradle 32 feet wide in the center. A 20-foot-wide section of that cradle was then dug out to a depth of 18 inches at the center and 12 inches at the sides. This was first filled with hand-crushed seven-inch stone, then by three-inch stone, and then by a surface of sand or gravel which was compressed by a three-ton roller.

The minute a new section was completed, the residents of the area would drive their horses, carriages, and wagons on it, often catching up to the work crew ahead and mixing in with their equipment. This ability to use the road immediately created more and more public support for the project, as was to happen in the not-too-distant future when the less difficult center section of the Erie Canal was built first, and every owner of a boat in upstate New York launched it on the canal.

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Latest From The LaRouche Youth Movement

LYM Report from Los Angeles:
UCI Students Join Fight Against Campus Gestapo
by Nick Walsh

As part of its nationwide assault on the John Train/Lynne Cheney campus gestapo, LaRouche Youth Movement members from Los Angeles intervened at the University of California at Irvine in the days before the election, culminating in a wild scene with Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, who spoke on campus Nov. 6. The key characteristic of the LYM interventions was an increased engagement of the student body itself in the political fight against the right-wing gestapo.

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National:

LaRouche PAC Reports: Bush Sings His Swan-Song
Leading Democrat and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. issued this statement Nov. 9.
Yesterday, President George W. Bush appeared somewhat humbled, but still wildly insane, in his internationally televised delivery to an East Room press audience. The impressive voter turnout for the election itself, had a great deal to do with causing what was in fact the Bush Presidency's electoral defeat; but the greater part of the credit for that belongs to the combination of an energetic minority fraction among Bush's Democratic and non-partisan opponents, as among youth associated with LPAC. It was also the result, very significantly, of the effects of a revolt from among the patriots within the permanent institutions of the Federal government, as signalled, conspicuously, by outspoken leading figures of the U.S. military.

Cheney Behind Press Campaign Duggan Hoax Rewarmed Again
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

November 8, 2006
London sources tied intimately to both U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and his wife, Mrs. Lynne Cheney, have once again launched a press campaign on behalf of a repeatedly discredited hoax concerning the causes and circumstances of the suicide by a young, emotionally troubled British national, Jeremy Duggan, who, as the official forensic evidence showed beyond doubt, threw himself repeatedly against moving automobiles on a highway near Wiesbaden, Germany.

Election Upheaval Led by Youth Vote
by Anita Gallagher

Democrats rode a nationwide wave of fervid rejection of the Bush-Cheney policies on Iraq, the economy, and the disastrous 'war on terror' to a 29-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a 51-49 dominance of the U.S. Senate, as of Nov. 10. The electorate's anger was taken out nationally against Republicans, with nearly 79 million Americans voting—a 40.4%turnout of eligible voters, the largest turnout in a midterm election in 24 years. This turnout was spearheaded by an increase of 2 million voters in the 18-29 age group—a bloc which is now poised to become the most important force in U.S. political life.

UCI Students Join Fight Against Campus Gestapo
by Nick Walsh, LaRouche Youth Movement

As part of its nationwide assault on the John Train/Lynne Cheney campus gestapo, LaRouche Youth Movement members from Los Angeles intervened at the University of California at Irvine in the days before the election, culminating in a wild scene with Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, who spoke on campus Nov. 6. The key characteristic of the LYM interventions was an increased engagement of the student body itself in the political fight against the right-wing gestapo.

Counterrevolution in Military Affairs Ambushes the U.S. Army
by Carl Osgood

When the Bush Administration took office in January 2001, military policy discussions were dominated by the so-called 'revolution in military affairs,' the idea that the information age was changing the way wars of the future would be fought.


Feature:

Anathema of Venice: Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's 'American' Librettist
by Susan Bowen

Susan Bowen reviews The Librettist of Venice; The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte; Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America, by Rodney Bolt.
In examining what Bolt's book doesn't say, she concludes that 'Any truly authentic biography of this Classical scholar, arch-enemy of sophistry, and indefatigable promoter of creativity in science and art, must needs bring to light that truth which Venice, even today, would wish to suppress: that Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838), like Mozart (1756-91), was a product of, and also a champion of the American Revolution and the Renaissance idea of man that it represented.'

Mozart in Houston
Don Giovanni 'Stays the Course'
by Harley Schlanger

A review of the Houston Grand Opera's presentation of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Oct. 28 to Nov. 11, 2006.


Economics:

Bursting Housing Bubble To Take 1.5 Million Jobs
by Richard Freeman

From 1992 to 2005, former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan built up the U.S. housing bubble to dizzying heights, a prime prop for both the speculative and physical sides of the economy. Especially from the start of 2001— when Greenspan threw this process into high gear—through October 2006, the housing bubble created 1.5 to 1.7 million housing-related jobs, directly and indirectly. That was half of all the jobs created in the United States in that nearly sixyear period.

  • Election 'Job-Growth' Fraud Turning To Plunge
    by Paul Gallagher

    The post-election, ending months of 2006 are seeing a plunge in the housing bubble, auto and construction industries, and the U.S. economy as a whole; they may also see an end to the jobs-growth frauds which the White House hyped in the preelection period, to claim falling unemployment and 'economic success.'

German Power: Back to Nuclear, or Blackouts
by Rainer Apel

Citizens in about 10 million households in Western Europe were cut off from electrical power on Nov. 4, many for several hours, when the overland power transmission grid collapsed, first in numerous regions throughout Germany, and then also in France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the North African nation of Morocco.

Senator's Shot at Free Trade Misses Its Core
by Paul Gallagher

Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America
by Senator Byron Dorgan
New York: St.Martin's Press, 2006
276 pages with index, hardcover, $24.95

Attacking 'free trade' with its anti-industrial devastation, and campaigning for fair trade, gained Congressional seats for Democratic candidates on Nov. 7, particularly in Ohio and Indiana, but also in North Carolina, California, and other states. A London Financial Times commentary on Nov. 9 ruefully concluded that 'the real casualty' of the U.S. election 'was free trade.' Shortly before the election, U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) brought out Take This Job and Ship It, a serious public attack on 'free-trade' policy, which is unique for a sitting Federal elected official in the post-1989 period of unbridled and almost unchallenged globalization, de-industrialization, and financial bubbles.


International:

Why Condi's Anti-Shi'ite Alliance Won't Work
by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach

As wild speculations are making the rounds in world capitals about possible changes in Iraq policy, in the wake of the electoral defeat of the Bush-Cheney regime and the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one insane option, known as the anti-Shi'ite coalition, has been sneaked onto the agenda by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. If this project were to be realized, it would not only accelerate the widening civil conflict inside Iraq, but draw neighboring forces into a region-wide war along sectarian lines.

Cheney and Neo-Cons Plotting More Wars
by Jeffrey Steinberg

On March 11, 2003, as final preparations were under way for the neo-cons' greatest triumph—the invasion of Iraq—New Yorker magazine investigative reporter Seymour Hersh exposed an extortion scheme by neo-con Richard Perle, to extract tens of millions of dollars out of the Saudi royal family, in league with the infamous Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

  • Bush-Cheney Policies Proliferate Hotspots
    The wave of irregular warfare, which has been set off by the Bush Administration's pursuit of an Anglo-Dutch global imperial strategy, has put the world on the edge of conflagration. In fact, none of the conflicts shown in this map has been generated by local forces, or causes, but by the financial oligarchy's international strategic drive for the elimination of the nation state. Without immediate action toward impeachment of the Anglo-Dutch puppets Cheney and Bush, one of these hotspots is likely to be chosen as a military target in the very near future.

What Is Really Behind The Crisis in Darfur?
by Lawrence K. Freeman

Lyndon LaRouche, in his Oct. 31 webcast (see box) exposed the current U.S. cause ce´le`bre campaign of 'stopping the genocide' in Darfur as an ignorant fraud, which is being used to cover up what is actually being done to Sudan and the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa. Is there genocide going on in Africa? Yes, there is; but it is not what is being propagandized by Hollywood actors, nor discussed on college campuses as the politically correct issue of concern, nor by government officials. What has been going in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C.), and is still going on today, is the true face of genocide in Africa, where almost 400,000 people have been dying every year for the last decade due to the lack of food, clean water, and basic health care. There is no doubt that there are ugly and unnecessary

  • LaRouche: Bush and Cheney Plan a New Iraq in Darfur
    During his Oct. 31 webcast, leading Democrat and statesman Lyndon LaRouche was asked why he doesn't support military action against Sudan. LaRouche's response, reprinted here, was also issued as a LaRouche PAC leaflet.

Beilin in Washington Pushes for Peace Plan
by Jeffrey Steinberg

Yossi Beilin, the head of Meretz Yachad, the leading propeace opposition party in Israel, spoke at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 9, giving an impassioned and very well-reasoned perspective on a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the larger Middle East crisis.

The Poet and The Slain Statesman
by Dean Andromidas

In ancient Greece, the true statesmen were the poets, because true statecraft could not be left in the hands of mere politicians. Through their immortal tragedies, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides labored to save Greece, while Pericles and Demosthenes, through their sophistry, labored to destroy it. Commemorating the 11th anniversary of the political assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, at a time of profound moral and political crisis in Israel, demanded a poet, not a mere politician.

Beijing Summit Puts Spotlight on Africa
by William Jones

In the largest diplomatic gathering ever held in Beijing, 48 African leaders, including 26 Presidents and 6 Prime Ministers, gathered Nov. 3-6 at the 2006 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). The summit is the climax of an intense diplomatic effort by China to establish a close working partnership with the nations of Africa. China is enhancing its traditional role as the largest developing country, in order to assist other developing countries on the path to economic development. This contrasts sharply with the major powers of the developed world, including the United States,whohave largely written off Africa as a target for development, and left it to suffer rapacious plundering by the international financial cartels.

Mexico
Calderón Has That Old Sinking Feeling
by Dennis Small

This week's 'Impeccably Bad Timing Award' was won, hands down, by Mexico's official President-elect Felipe Calderón, who arrived in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 8 for a highprofile, two-day visit with U.S. President George Bush—one day after the Bush-Cheney Administration's spectacular drubbing at the polls in the U.S. midterm elections. One is reminded of the glassy-eyed matron on the Titanic, who steps onto the ballroom floor and insists on dancing with the ship's captain—at exactly the point that the Titanic is going under. You have to wonder which of the two is crazier.


Editorial:

It's the Economy, Stupid!
There was no more telling indication that President George W. Bush is not in the real world, than his comment at his Nov. 8 press conference, that he didn't understand why the 'great economy' did not result in a Republican electoral victory. It's no wonder that our loopy President doesn't get it. The question is: Dothe Democrats?Do they realize thatwestand on the edge of financial disintegration that will take the entire world into hell on Earth, or do they believe in the fairy godmother called the stock market?


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