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This webcast presentation appears in the September 4, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

U.S. Threat of Ungovernability:
Will It Spread to Germany?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the candidate for Chancellor of the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo), in Germany's Sept. 27 elections. She gave this webcast address, the second of her campaign, on Aug. 21. The video, which was translated from German, is archived at http://bueso.de. We include here a selection of her graphics, or illustrations similar to those she used. The moderator was Karsten Werner.

[PDF version of this presentation, includes graphics]

Werner: ... Before we come to the main remarks, we should consider how dramatically events have changed since our last webcast, [on July 21]. Helga Zepp-LaRouche said at the time that we were going into a period when people were going to experience things that they've never experienced before. In the meantime, there is an uprising among the U.S. population against their own President Obama. Even the German media are reporting on this, although they don't give the true reasons for it. This, and the dramatic collapse of the real economy, make it all the more necessary to open a public debate, including in Europe. I can't imagine anyone who would fit the bill as well as Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche, who has warned of this crisis for a very long time, and proposed solutions.

So, without any further ado, I'd like to welcome the BüSo President and Chancellor candidate, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Dear guests, in the audience and also our viewers over the Internet, as Karsten has already said, exactly one month ago, in my first webcast, I warned that, in the United States, we were headed towards a period of ungovernability, and that the world was nowhere near being out of the crisis, but that really dramatic storms should be expected. This time, I would like to concretize this. If we do not undertake radical changes in financial policy, immediately, within the next weeks, then, there is an acute danger that the entire international financial system, between now and October, is going to totally disintegrate.

The reason for this, is that on Oct. 1, the new fiscal year in the United States begins. That means that the accounts, the books, are going to be laid open, and the extent of U.S. insolvency will become totally clear—e.g., that 48 out of 50 states are de facto bankrupt. Despite many ideological illusions—because many people here think that if the United States collapses, Europe will be a kind of island that is separate from this reality—the fact is, that a collapse of the U.S., and of the dollar, would mean that no country would be spared from the consequences of the chaos which would ensue.

Deflation, Then Hyperinflation

Independently from this, you have deflation, and people are saying that prices are falling: "Isn't that great, prices have fallen by 7% in Germany; isn't that wonderful?" But this is only short-term, because shortly afterward, this deflation will be followed by an explosion of hyperinflation. That is a given, because the reason for the deflation is that the department stores and chains are dropping their prices dramatically, to ruin their competitors.

For example, in some food chains, milk prices are going down enormously. This has the unpleasant dark side, that farmers, who need 42 euro cents for a liter of milk to be able to cover costs, are only being paid 20 or 25 cents right now. It's clear that at a certain point, there will be no more cows, and there will be no more milk. That'sin all sectors, because once the inventory of a company is sold out, and the wares are gone, people will start hoarding goods that are in shortage, and price speculation will explode.

The other aspect of this, is the enormous debt of the states, due to the bailouts of the banks' toxic waste. The United States has a budget deficit of $13 trillion, but the total public debt is $56 trillion. And the danger is that, if the real economy continues to collapse, that money will create a hyperinflationary explosion. Even in Germany, it's being admitted that the worst is yet to come.

Some say that the bottom has already been hit, and we had 3% growth in the second quarter. But even the Federal Statistics Office said that this is very imprecise assessment, because you're not going to be able to have a real overview of the situation until four years from now! Hartmut Schauerte, who is the state secretary of the Economics Ministry, said that the most difficult phase is still before us, in the first and second quarters of 2010.

Other experts warn of a credit crunch throughout industry. Even Axel Weber, who is the head of the Bundesbank, warned of a second round of the financial crisis. The first round was brought about by the toxic waste, the so-called "structured financial products." This toxic waste is in the so-called "bad banks," or still on the books of the banks. The second phase is going to come from an increase of the insolvency of companies and private individuals.

Both warnings are interesting, because they show that some people are not going along with the line that everything is going to be fine. Yet, they also fall short of the reality. The U.S. collapse will prove that all the calculations in Europe are wrong.

Mass Strike in the United States

The really new factor in the strategic situation is the fact that, since Congress recessed in the United States, at the beginning of August, there has been an unprecedented revolt underway, and it is totally different from what is being described (or not described) in the media. The reality is, that the population is recognizing that what Obama says, and what that means in reality for people, are two different things.

In the European media, Obama is still being presented as wanting to give Federal public insurance to the 50 million people who now have no health insurance. But what does that mean, if, at the same time, overall health-care expenditures are supposed to be cut by 30%? And, in the meantime, even the idea of public insurance is off the agenda. The American population has awakened to what Obama's health-care reform will mean for them. A revolt is growing, as can be seen in the town hall meetings; even in this month of August, of Summer recess, you have Congressmen facing—in hundreds of town hall meetings—hundreds, sometimes even 2,000, or even, in some cases, up to 3,000 citizens showing up! You have people standing outside when there are no seats left. I want to show you two examples, to demonstrate this incredible situation.

[She shows video clips of town meetings with Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.).]

The Congressmen and Senators are confronted with a totally enraged population, which has understood that their very existence is on the line. Obama's popularity has collapsed, and the population has psychologically broken with the Administration and the Congress. It's a totally new situation. They have understood that the Administration, as well as the Congress, have failed in this crisis, and that the political leadership has to change, if they're going to survive.

What's at Stake in the Health-Care Debate

I'd like to give a couple of explanations of this, because there's a very important difference between what we've seen in Greece or in the Balkans, and what is now happening in the United States. The difference between the U.S. and Europe, is that in the United States, you had a successful American Revolution, where the population fought for the right to a Constitution, that guaranteed the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." And this idea, which was in their Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution, is the recurrent theme in American history. It was represented by the first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, by Abraham Lincoln, by Franklin Roosevelt.

The outcome of the current conflict will determine the destiny of Germany and Europe. What is really at stake in this struggle? The health-care reform of the Obama Administration is based on the model of the British health-care system, in particular, the so-called rationing board called NICE—but it's not nice at all. It stands for National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, and it basically determines which categories of patients are going to get medical treatment, and which are not.

This is the same as what happened in 1939 in Germany, with the so-called Tiergarten-4 laws, which determined that there were "lives unworthy to be lived," and medical care was denied to the elderly and the disabled.

You have something now called Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY), which is the idea that certain lives are not worthy of living. And that is the basis of the proposals of the Obama Administration, for the discussion about an IMAC—an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an efficiency council of five experts who are answerable only to the President, who decide what treatments, medicines, and care will be available for elderly and disabled people. And one point that really brought people into a huge uproar, was this question of "end-of-life counseling." "When people reach a certain age, is it not better for them to sign up for their lives to be ended early?" That means a rationing of health care. It's important, therefore, to look at the U.S. and Britain, because the president of the German Medical Association, Prof. Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe, warned last May, at the German Medical Assembly in Mainz, that you already have, here in Germany, rationing of care, that should be openly debated before the elections.

Obama's plan was originally to push this legislation through, before the Summer recess, and this has already failed, because of the popular revolt.

This is significant for the situation in Germany, and, of course, for the election campaign here. Because, if the American population manages to resist this policy, which is supposed to save the banks' toxic waste, by having the taxpayer pay for it through austerity, then the German people can also do it.

The head of the police labor union, Konrad Freiberg, said: "We, the employees of the public, the civil servants, have to foot the bill for the formidable cost of the financial crisis, and the people who have caused the crisis get off scot-free. They even get money thrown at them! This is about social justice, and distributive justice."

Therefore, politicians have to come clean, before the election. But the illusion is kept up that everything will be fine—like on the Titanic, the music will play on till the end.

New figures have just come out showing that many communities in the United States are firing policemen, firemen, and prison guards, and services are being shut down. For example, you have prisoners being set free, because there's no money for their upkeep. You can imagine where this is going!

As I said, the reality in the U.S. is totally different from what the media are reporting, which is that the revolt is supposedly being organized by the Republican Party and the right wing, and paid for by the pharmaceuticals industry. In Spiegel Online, there was a video discussing a hate campaign against Obama. The Obama Administration itself described the protesters as a mob, "Brown Shirts." Then, the White House asked citizens to send in e-mails about "suspicious remarks," made by others, concerning the health-care program! The rage in the population was so great, that this program has already been shut down. So in reality, large parts of the population have just broken with this policy of the Administration, especially retirees, the elderly.

The Role of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel

Now, I want to give you a chronology of how this occurred.

Since the onset of the crisis, in July 2007, the U.S. government gave out $20 trillion of taxpayers' money for bailouts. In the meantime, unemployment is now 30%; 48 of 50 states are bankrupt; only one-third of the unemployed get compensation, because most communities and states don't have the money. Two to three million people have lost their homes since 2007, and this year alone, 2.4 million new foreclosures are expected, many people are living in tent cities or in their cars, and thousands join the ranks of the unemployed weekly.

The rage over paying out bonuses to executives is tremendous. The nine largest banks that have been bailed out, to the tune of $175 billion of taxpayers' money, have given their executives $34 billion in bonuses! The population has had enough.

The key to understanding the uprising in the United States, is the main health-care advisor to Obama, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who advises the Office of Management and Budget, where Peter Orszag is the director, and Orszag has said repeatedly that health-care costs have to be cut back by 30%.

Now, let's take a closer look at Ezekiel Emanuel. He wrote, in October 2008, when the Bush Administration was still in power, in the online Huffington Post, that, "with trillions of dollars evaporating in this crisis, millions of Americans face the prospect of losing their homes and jobs, and witness a dramatic contraction of their retirement savings. In response, the public will desperately want financial security, and health care is a critical element of that. Under the threat of losing everything, Americans may feel content with the guarantee of a decent plan that covers cost-effective treatments with some restrictions on choice and services to save money." And now it comes: "The huge increase in the Federal debt that these bailouts will entail, intensifies the pressure to rein in health-care costs" (emphasis added).

So, he openly admits that the main reason for cutbacks in health care is to have bailouts for the banks. The article cites Emanuel's co-author Victor Fuchs, that he's convinced that this type of health-care reform will only be accepted under conditions of war, depression, or major civil unrest. And he says, "It's beginning to look like we might just get all three."

I have a list of the papers that Ezekiel Emanuel has written, which he's coauthored with Margaret Pabst Battin, such as, "What Are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide?" In other words, if you allow physicians to kill their patients, you can save costs.

And also by Battin: "Should Medical Care Be Rationed by Age?" (1987), and "Choosing the Time To Die: The Ethics and Economics of Suicide in Old Age" (1987). In 1993, "Can We Copy the Dutch? Can Holland's Practice of Voluntary Euthanasia Be a Model for the United States?" As you may know, in Holland, people over a certain age are even eliminated, without their consent. In 1996, "Is There a Place for Euthanasia in America's Care for the Elderly?" In 1987, "Age, Rationing, and the Just Distribution of Health Care: Is There a Duty To Die?" And in 1993, "An Easy Death."

Emanuel and Battin are on the board of the Hastings Center in New York, which is promoting the right to euthanasia. The idea is to give resources that are in short supply, as a priority, to people between 20 and 40 years of age. So, the very young and the elderly do not have the same priority.

[Emanuel shows[1]] that the most money is spent on prolonging life during the last two years before death. Even if you raise life expectancy by ten years, the problem remains, that the last two years are still the most expensive. Emanuel writes further that 40% of Medicare expenditures, which are financed by the Federal government, occur in the last months of life. And then, you can't really know in advance when people are going to die! (This is totally absurd!) So, he says, since rationing according to age does not have the desired effect, you need a new approach to denial of care: "You have to go beyond life-preserving measures. This means, in my opinion, discontinue the simple treatments such as the administration of antibiotics. Do you know what keeps a patient alive who suffers from Alzheimer's? Antibiotics, against recurring pneumonia, and we never talk about that in the United States."

He goes so far as to says that medical care for people who have lost the ability to participate in society should not receive high priority. And what Emanuel is saying is exactly what the Nazis said: that certain lives are unworthy to be lived. He also says that the Hippocratic Oath is not the highest commitment, but rather cost-effectiveness is.

Nazi Economics

And that's why my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, on April 11, when he realized the extent of these implications, pointed out the parallels to Tiergarten-4, the Nazis' euthanasia program. At first, the reaction was shock. But his arguments were carefully investigated by different circles in the United States, and they came to the conclusion that the parallels are absolutely correct.

Consider now, the conclusions drawn by Dr. Leo Alexander, who was the top medical advisor and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal on euthanasia. In 1949, three years after the proceedings, he pointed to the philosophical core of what led to these terrible deeds. He called it a philosophical principle based on rational utilitarianism, Hegelian, and Benthamite doctrines, which led to more and more sectors of the population being treated like animals, because they used up too many resources or were otherwise undesirable. Hundreds of thousands of German citizens, not to mention millions of foreign nationals, were sent to their deaths in the name of this principle. And this belief in utilitarianism, or perhaps one would call it "pragmatism," has been encroaching for decades in the U.S. and in Great Britain, and now it's making inroads here as well. It's interesting that a lot of elderly people in the U.S. say that that's exactly how it developed under the Nazis.

I want to quote again, from Dr. Alexander:

"Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were mere a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. This attitude, in its early stages, concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, and finally, all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus, was the attitude toward the non-rehabilitatable sick. It is, therefore, the subtle shift in the emphasis of the physicians' attitude, that one must thoroughly investigate."

On June 10, American historian Anton Chaitkin, a collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche, spoke before the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, and reviewed the introduction of the euthanasia policy in Germany in 1939. You should know that Chaitkin's father was a prominent Jewish lawyer, who tried to get the United States to boycott Nazi Germany. The video [of Chaitkin] is on YouTube, and has been seen by over 160,000 people, and has been studied by influential circles, not only in the Republican Party, but also by many Democrats and health-care specialists, who found that it was absolutely correct.

Since then, the protests in the U.S. have spread like wildfire. There will be hundreds more such meetings. I'd like now to show the video of the Dingell meeting, where the father of a young handicapped man confronts Congressman Dingell [shows video].

In all the various U.S. states, you have a similar process going on. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made an appearance at a community center in Denver, for example, and was surrounded by enraged citizens and had to flee. The Congressional security services issued a warning, before the Summer recess, that Congressmen should expect political disruptions in their home districts. Since then, 75 Congressmen have signed a letter opposing the creation of an "IMAC" of five experts who would decide what treatments will be authorized.

Another of Ezekiel Emanuel's favorite issues is his campaign against so-called "unnecessary care." For example, on Aug. 13, he said on ABC-TV that hundreds of billions of dollars are being wasted on unnecessary health care (sometimes he speaks about "harmful" care). In response to such statements, the American College of Surgeons, which has 74,000 members, vigorously attacked the President for his comments that unnecessary operations are being undertaken by surgeons just to earn money, saying this assertion threatens to damage the doctor-patient relationship. The above-mentioned assertions against giving antibiotics to people suffering from dementia were made by Ezekiel Emanuel here in Germany too, back in 1996, at a colloquium of health-care economists at the Robert Bosch Foundation. He said, "On the question of discrimination against specific persons in the health-care system, I'd like to say the following things.

"I'm aware how sensitive this issue is in Germany, but at the end of the day, it is undeniable that priorities have to be set.... If someone is in a position to participate in a process of prioritization, it should not be done simply on the basis of ethnic or racial background lines, but on a certain level or degree of physical and mental efficiency."

The sensitivity issue in Germany, comes from the fact that 70 years ago in Germany you had a euthanasia program, and it's considered differently here.

The other participants at this Bosch Foundation seminar had similar academic formulations. There was a presentation by Karl Lauterbach, the health-care expert of the SPD [Social Democratic Party], with the title, "Complexities of the Application of Ethical Theories." He presented various ethical theories and then asked the question, can there actually be any objectively correct moral act or decision? He described himself as a deontologist who doesn't necessarily believe that rationing care for the elderly is automatically unethical.

He says: "Anyone who accepts rationing of care for old people asserts it, as a rule, because he accepts the principle of prioritization of claims to medical treatment, which is different from maximizing preferences or happiness. This principle can be based, for example, on the fact that younger people should come first if there is a shortage of resources, simply because the elderly, as a general rule, have already lived their lives, whilst youth have not yet done so."

In other words, you could basically kill off old people, because they've already lived for a long time.

Other presentations in this forum had such titles as, "Why the Denial of Care in Managed Care Is Not Unjust," or "Why a Worsening of the Quality of Care under Managed Care Is Not Unjust as Such," or "Health Care Is Not a Genuine Public Good."

I would say that it is a genuine public good, but they don't seem to think so.

These health-care economists in Germany operate under the model of the HMO system, which has been implemented for 16 years now. Since we introduced this whole tiered cost system, 100,000 jobs in the health sector have been lost, health-care delivery in rural areas is catastrophic in some cases, and home care was destroyed. Independent physicians have quotas for their patients, and if they go over the limit, they have to pay the difference from their own pockets. Many tests are no longer covered, and some insurance companies have told doctors to get rid of their very expensive patients. Professor Hoppe, in Mainz, clearly stated that doctors in Germany do not want this rationing of care. But the danger is, in this breakdown crisis, that you would also get triage here in Germany.

Emanuel's article in The Lancet, which is a British medical journal, "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions," discusses how to decide how hospital beds, organ transplants, inoculations, and so on, are to be specifically allocated.[2]

For example, if we have a swine flu pandemic—and it certainly looks like we will—this will be very much on the agenda. And just how perverse this way of thinking is, is shown in Holland, where a new video game has come onto the market, called "The Great Flu Pandemic." The gamer is the head of the World Health Organization. He has $2 billion at his disposal which he's supposed to spend on different measures that are associated with different costs, for example, closing down airports, which costs $250 million; it's cheaper to close schools—that only costs $10 million—and so on. Of course, this is a form of brainwashing, to habituate people to cost-cutting and distributing scarce resources. Emanuel, already in 2006, said, in the case of the spread of avian flu, that you would not be able to inoculate everybody in the U.S., and a selection would have to be made.

The reason I have gone into detail here, is because Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is the "idea man" here. In Germany, where such a policy already led to the huge catastrophe in the past, you would think that it would be a major theme. But there is not a single article or report in the media here that mentions the name of Ezekiel Emanuel, whereas in the United States, there is a totally hot debate; it's being discussed in the town hall meetings, because everybody knows that he is the author of these articles. If I had to choose one example of control over mass media that I've seen—and I've come up against a lot of it—it would be this.

The point is, this whole policy is a completely wrong method of thinking. It's just wrong, methodologically. You operate in a closed system; you discuss that you have to get used to the fact that there are going to be shortages. It's an entropic view of the world, which has nothing to do with the real universe. Whole categories of limited resources, limited habitats, overpopulation, rationing of the health-care system, triage, selection of who is allowed to live and who must die—that is the essence of fascist ideology.

The real principles of the universe are anti-entropic. The real universe develops into more complex systems, and the human mind and its creativity is the spearhead of this development. I'll go into this more later.

So, it should be clear that these Federal elections in Germany are not occurring under normal circumstances, but in the midst of a breakdown crisis, the greatest in the history of mankind, with a mass strike in the U.S., with Lyndon LaRouche, my husband, recognized as the intellectual leader of this development. He's feared by some, but he's also celebrated as a folk hero by others.

The Real United States

For Europeans, who don't know much about the real history of the United States, it's very important to underscore that, in the United States, you have two traditions that are diametrically opposed to each other.

You have on the one hand, the Anglo-American "special relationship"; the last example of which we had, was the cooperation between Bush and Blair in the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. This group wants to dominate the world, as an empire.

But there is a totally different tradition, that of the American Revolution to gain independence from the British Empire. That tradition is represented by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. And if there is to be a chance to come out of this crisis with a positive solution, then the outcome of this revolt in the United States has to be a return to the tradition of Roosevelt and a New Deal and Bretton Woods, the policies that he used in the 1930s and 1940s to get the United States out of its crisis.

And I think that the only chance that we have, is to use the upheavals in the United States to evoke this Roosevelt tradition. At that point, the plan that my husband has devised should be implemented. An emergency conference should be convened, initiated by the United States, Russia, China, and India; and Germany and other nations should absolutely be part of that. And they should, as a first step, put this financial system into bankruptcy. The toxic waste in the banks should be cancelled. You need a bankruptcy reorganization! There has to be help for the public banks, and you have to go back to a system of fixed exchange rates and a system of National Banks. Could we show the diagram of the organization of this new system? This is the idea, according to the American Constitution model, that a National Bank should be created, where only the Congress has the right to create productive credit. It's a credit system, as opposed to a monetary system. This national credit would then go for well-defined investments for the common good, into productive industry, to relaunch the economy.

Global Infrastructure Development

Next, I'll show you a picture of industrial ruins: This is the way it already looks in certain parts of Berlin, in the East. Now we see the Brandenburg Gate. This is my negative vision: If we don't change things very quickly, Berlin might end up looking like this. (This is modeled on the decline of the Khmer Empire, which was then overtaken by the jungle, and I certainly hope we don't come to that in Germany!)

Now here is the Eurasian Land-Bridge. The idea is that, after the reorganization of the bankrupt international system, every country will set up a National Bank, and then the different countries can cooperate in ambitious reconstruction projects. Now, since 1989—that is, since the fall of the Berlin Wall—we here in Germany have proposed that the major industrial and population centers in Europe be connected to the centers in Asia, through three principal lines.

This is the Bering Strait Tunnel, which would connect to the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then lines going [across North and South America] farther south, all the way down to Chile. You would also have corridors extending into Africa, through a Gibraltar tunnel to Morocco, or we could also have a tunnel going from Sicily over to North Africa, to Tunisia, and then continuing southward.

That is an entire, integral transport system, to allow world economic reconstruction in the 21st Century. The most important thing, is that you need three pillars to this project: water, energy, and transport. This graphic shows the idea of development corridors, which could be 100 kilometers wide, and through these transportation arteries, you could have the Transrapid [maglev] lines, highways, railways, waterways, and so on. Energy production and distribution would be set up. And this would allow us to open up the landlocked regions of the world, which have been terribly disadvantaged up until now, compared to those that are on seacoasts or rivers. By opening up of the interior areas, thanks to infrastructure, we would give Slovakia, for example, which has no access to the sea, the same advantages as Hamburg or Rotterdam have.

So, the idea is to have long-term projects, to raise the productivity of the populations in these areas through economic and technological progress. And with that, you would have a new system, which is not based on short-term profits, but on long-term development of the world population.

[She shows a picture of the Shanghai Transrapid, the German-built maglev technology.] Yet the project to build one from Hamburg to Berlin, or from Munich to the airport, which would have just cost EU2.8 billion, was rejected—the financing was rejected.

But the Chinese were not as stupid as that, and they built the maglev line between Shanghai and its airport, Pudong, in 22 months, under Commander Hu. They had to develop new patents to get through swampland, with swamps up to 60 meters deep, and so on. The Chinese engineers worked on this, and came up with very good patents on their technology.

Then we also have the Transrapid cargo aspect: The maglev would be designed to transport cargo. If we want to have infrastructure development of all of Eurasia, and propel industrial development forward at the same rate that the population is growing, then we have to have this kind of transportation through highly populated areas. The time factor is decisive here.

Now the argument that it could also be transported by ship is not really right, because in the Ruhr area, or in densely populated areas, time is a cost factor. And here we have the Cargo Cap project, an underground system of transportation for cargo, where a lot of the freight could be transported through underground tunnels, particularly in urban areas. That would be a great way of getting a lot of the truck traffic off the roadways in the cities.

Now, here in Germany, even our Minister Steinmeier[3] (who probably looked at the BüSo program), wants to create 4 million jobs, he says. That is very inadequate, given the number of unemployed, and he said he wants, for example, to create a lot of "green jobs." He plans to solve the transportation problem with a system of satellites to observe traffic patterns and advise people what detours to take, to avoid traffic jams. That's just a ridiculous idea! We should rather use the Transrapid and the Cargo Cap systems, with underground transportation.

[She shows maps of the proposed Transrapid transport network in Scandinavia; and the idea of a bridge or tunnel from Sicily to North Africa, to ensure a better connection between Europe and Africa.] Then you have the Bering Strait project ... with different modes of transportation going through tunnels under the Bering Strait, from Russia to Alaska. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was quite favorable to this project. So there is a real chance of pushing such a project through. Then there is the Alaska-Canada Rail Corridor, and the floating nuclear power plant. This is the idea of putting nuplexes onto pontoons, so that they can be transported by sea to almost anywhere in the world.

There is no reason why we could not decide to have a World Land-Bridge. In Europe, for example, an overall network is taken for granted. Every year, the transport ministers get together several times, and discuss what projects to have here in the EU, for highways, for bridges, for this and that. But what we need is an overall, global concept of where we want to go in the future. If we were to agree to such a project, we could develop millions of productive jobs pretty quickly.

Some of those jobs would help to develop the domestic market, because this has been severely neglected since the euro was introduced. The backlog in infrastructure investments, according to the Urbanistics Institute, amounts to about EU1 trillion. Such a project should be integrated into the Eurasian Land-Bridge, from the very beginning. That would then be the basis for the reconstruction of the world economy, once this financial crisis is cleared up.

This conception really offers the only chance; there is no alternative. We have to think of how mankind can ensure enough energy security and food security in the long term. And in North Asia—in particular, in Siberia—you have an incredible amount of natural resources and raw materials, which are urgently needed in other parts of the world, for example in China. China already has a 1.4 billion population, and just to feed them and to sustain them, over the medium term, we would need to develop new resources. And the same thing is true for Germany; we have basically no raw materials here, and we also have to think of our future.

As for Africa, Africa is a continent that is now dying! Every day, you see hundreds of refugees fleeing hunger and sickness, and that's no answer. We have to free Africa from British imperialism. It must become part of the World Land-Bridge, and then Africa will have no problem, because they have, for one thing, some of the best land in the world for agriculture. But irrigation systems are lacking. They could have several harvests a year! Africa could become the breadbasket for the world, instead of being the continent of hunger. Africa also has tremendous raw material wealth, and these resources belong to Africa, and not to multinational companies that are trying to loot the continent. For that, we need infrastructure, we need ports.

[She shows nighttime satellite views of Africa, illustrate the almost total lack of electricity; and an artist's representation of how Africa's electrical grid will look some years from now.] These graphics show the existing railroad networks, and the ones we hope will exist soon.

We need a railway network, highways, water management. I have been convinced for a very long time, that the issue of the development of Africa is the moral test for Europe: If we don't succeed in developing this continent and in reversing the injustice that has been done to this continent, through slavery and looting over centuries, if we don't manage to eliminate the moral indifference in our cultures, then we will fail.

The 'Extraterrestrial Imperative'

The question is, how can we get rid of the false axioms that led to the present crisis, and completely change the wrong way of thinking? The problem is, that when one speaks of the economy, most people only think of monetary values, of linear models in a closed system. But as I said, the real universe is not entropic, but rather anti-entropic.

Therefore, we need exactly what the great German scientist Krafft Ehricke called "the extraterrestrial imperative": that is, the idea that man, through space travel, has to take into account the real laws of the universe, otherwise, he will not be able to survive.[4] To put it in more colloquial terms, you cannot simply get out of the spaceship, if you don't feel like travelling anymore!

Krafft Ehricke came to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip [the OSS program to recruit German scientists to the U.S. after V-E Day], and he became one of the main engineers, one of the major scientists for the development of Atlas rocket, which was critical for the Apollo program. He also had very up-to-date concepts for interplanetary space travel, and for accessing and exploiting new materials on the Moon and on Mars. For Krafft Ehricke, the extraterrestrial imperative was a natural continuation of the process of evolution of the Biosphere itself, which means overcoming physical frontiers. They are there so they can be overcome, somewhat like the emergence of life out of the oceans, onto land, with mammals. Then, the technological capabilities of man will be so developed that he will be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere and go into space.

Krafft Ehricke said that this is not an unnatural development. Technology is rather man's main weapon in life, since his creation. He said that photosynthesis was the first really big industrial process, to gain and keep access to suitable energy sources, to enlarge the basis for raw materials, and to cover the basic needs of production. It was that which allowed man to resort to extraterrestrial resources. And it's obvious that Krafft Ehricke was spiritually closely associated with the Russian scientist V.I. Vernadsky, who also explored the qualitative superiority of the creative activity of man, the Noösphere, as compared to the Biosphere, and that that is the law of the universe. And what man, with his creative abilities, can create through new discoveries, is superior to whatever processes are developed in the Biosphere.

This goes back, in fact, to the ideas of the first modern scientist, Nicolaus of Cusa, in the 15th Century. Ideas that Prof. [Rudolf] Haubst once called the law of biogenetic evolution.

If we want to get away from monetarist and linear ways of thinking, there is no better way to do so, than through manned space travel, because it inspires creativity and imagination. Some of us may remember when we were young, the tremendous technological optimism during the Kennedy era, with the Apollo program. At the time, if you asked children, "Hey, what do you want to become?" They would say, "I want to be an astronaut!" People were also enthusiastic about the dogs that went into space, like Laika. I found that fascinating. And this program would have been carried forward, had Kennedy not been assassinated.

The world would look quite different from what we have today, if that program had been carried forward. We could have solved the problems on this planet a long time ago, because the byproducts of space travel are enormous: For every 1 cent invested in the Apollo program, you had 14 cents returned to the civilian economy. That money was not wasted! Through the spillover effects of this technology, there was an enormous increase in productivity in all sectors—Teflon, computer chips, all kinds of things, developed out of those programs.

First the Moon, then Mars

Krafft Ehricke at the time, said that the first phase of the space program should be the industrialization of the Moon, including construction of the city Selenopolis on the Moon. That that could then be the base for missions to Mars, and beyond.

Since then, space travel has come quite a ways further. In January 2004, the Mars Express sent wonderful pictures of the Red Planet back to Earth. The first Mars orbiter of ESA, the European Space Agency, began its scientific activity, and now it has been proven that there are enough water deposits on Mars to supply human presence there. So the long-term plan for ESA, for Aurora, is to develop technology, step by step, for building up infrastructure to go toward exploring the Solar System and allow for man to be present in space, mainly on the Moon and Mars.

At first, the missions will be unmanned, to test the technologies needed for manned flight. And the first high point in the existing ESA program is a permanent manned station on the Moon, and then, in 2030, hopefully manned flight to Mars. There are a number of problems that have to be solved. For example, if you have conventional power sources, such a trip would take at least 200 days, during which time, the astronauts would be in space without gravity, which is not so easy [for the human body] to handle. It would take 200 days to get there, 200 to come back, and then 600 days on Mars. That's quite a lot! So the object is to have nuclear-powered rockets to go there, which accelerate during the first half and then, in the middle, the deceleration process begins. Such a trip would only take four to five days.

Therefore, we have to develop fusion energy, and the isotope economy, as quickly as possible, so that the elements in the now known Periodic Table of Mendeleyev would be broadened, and replaced by a much more complex system of isotopes. Then we would be able to solve this problem of "limited" resources and scarcity, which is "managed" by the financial markets.

This would also have a tremendous pedagogical effect: Vernadsky pointed out, that when man is concerned with the macro- and micro-areas, subatomic and astrophysics, that in both of these domains, sense perceptions don't work: You can't see isotopes, nor can you touch the entire universe with your hands. You really have to understand the universal physical principles at work, and that completely blows out of the water the monetarist axioms of thinking.

Krafft Ehricke became a good friend of ours, especially toward the end of his life. In 1981, he took a three-week trip with us throughout Germany, where he presented his program, and we presented ours. He had really thought through this whole problem, of how this extraterrestrial imperative has to be the next phase in the maturation of humanity. I am convinced of that. Shortly before his death—he died of cancer—he said to me, "The problem is not technology. The problem is that human beings are not developing as they should." That's why he so much appreciated the work of the Schiller Institute, because he said that a humanist education absolutely must go hand in hand with scientific and technological optimism. When that's the case, then man will truly "grow up."

[She plays a video from LaRouche PAC-TV, on a Moon-Mars program. http://larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=11573]

Video narrator: The industrialization of the Moon is the grounds for productive human operations in space, and will include the establishment of primary industries to build facilities on the Moon and the export of a handful of precious commodities to Earth, such as the Earth-rare isotope helium-3.

The lunar economy will develop in stages, beginning with nuclear fission-powered research, mining, and industrial facilities. Without a Biosphere to concentrate certain minerals, the high energy densities of fission, followed soon after by fusion, will be indispensable in processing huge amounts of lunar material for the export of raw materials for further processing in orbital factories around the Moon or Earth; for the shipment of oxygen, foodstuffs and other consumables to travellers on their way to Mars, or even more distant destinations; and for the supply of semi-finished goods to be finished in orbit for the spaceships and equipment to go to Mars, all supported by an integrated lunar infrastructure. With a flight time between Earth and Moon of no more than several days with chemical rockets, and mere hours with fission propulsion, the entire region between the Earth and Moon will be heavily trafficked with freighters and personnel vehicles coming and going on a daily basis, utilizing a continually expanding orbital space infrastructure of communications relays, fuel depots, research stations, and production facilities. The sphere of human activity will thus extend from the entire lunar surface, through the region between the Earth and Moon, down to the entire terrestrial surface, including now-inhospitable regions, like the deserts, polar caps, and ocean floors that will be opened up by space technology.

Once the lunar economy becomes self-sufficient, new cities, and with them, new cultures will emerge on the foundations of lunar industrialization, forming, in effect, Earth's seventh continent. The Moon will be the first extraterrestrial home of mankind. After man has successfully industrialized the Moon, he will turn his sights to the first interplanetary manned mission—to Mars.

Zepp-LaRouche: I quote Krafft Ehricke, again:

"The concept of space travel carries with it enormous impact, because it challenges man on practically all fronts of his physical and spiritual existence. The idea of traveling to other celestial bodies reflects to the highest degree the independence and agility of the human mind. It lends ultimate dignity to man's technical and scientific endeavors. Above all, it touches on the philosophy of his very existence. As a result, the concept of space travel disregards national borders, refuses to recognize differences of historical or ethnological origin, and penetrates the fiber of one sociological or political creed as fast as that of the next."

In other words, if we take the Eurasian Land-Bridge as the basis for reconstruction of the world economy, then that must include a commitment to space travel. So far, ten countries have adopted a program for space exploration. This commitment must have very high priority, because to come out of the ruins of the last 40 years of neo-liberal policies, we need very rapid rates of scientific progress, and that is best achieved with a science-driver, such as space travel.

And to conclude, I would like to read the basic principles of astronautics of Krafft Ehricke:

  1. Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe imposes any limitations on man, except man himself.

  2. Not only the Earth, but the entire Solar System, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are man's rightful field of activity.

  3. By expanding throughout the universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself."

So, in this, the worst crisis in the history of mankind, we cannot be content with pragmatic solutions of side issues, but we must, in the tradition of Nicolaus of Cusa, of Leibniz, of other great humanist minds of European history, reach back to the highest ideal, to find the strength to deal with the current situation, and usher in a more positive era in human history.


[1] A graph is displayed from Gesundheitsversorgung im Alter: Zwischen ethischer Verpflichtung und ökonomischen Zwang (Stuttgart: Schattauer GmbH, 2003). The book is based on a colloquium at the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart, Germany, in December 1996. Emanuel was one of the speakers—ed.

[2] Jan. 31, 2009, http://www.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/emanuel_lancet.pdf

[3] Frank-Walter Steinmeier is German's foreign minister, vice-chancellor, and the candidate of the Social Democratic Party for Chancellor in the Sept. 27 elections.

[4] See Marsha Freeman, "Mars: The Next Fifty Years," p. 4 in this issue.

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