LaRouche Briefs Journalists
on Solutions to the Global Crisis

On Dec. 22, 1999, more than 30 journalists from around the world, including 10 from the United States, participated in a press conference with Democratic Presidential primary candidate Lyndon LaRouche. The press conference was conducted on the Internet, was carried live on LaRouche's campaign Website, www.larouchecampaign.org, and was broadcast live on several radio and TV stations internationally. We publish substantial excerpts here. In some cases, the names of the journalists were not stated or were inaudible.

LaRouche's opening statement

As many of you know, much of the international press in the recent weeks has been speaking of a Tulip Craze-type financial bubble in the United States and worldwide, which may collapse at almost any time. No one can predict exactly what day or week or month this collapse will occur. But one of three events, or a combination of two of the three, may occur very soon.

First, there's the possibility of a deflationary chain-reaction reverse-leverage collapse, as in Japan, the New York market, or so forth. Second, there's the possibility now, with the high rate of pumping of credit and currency into the financial markets, of setting off a chain-reaction inflationary bubble, somewhat like the model of Germany, Weimar Germany, in the summer and fall of 1923. We're on the edge of that.

In the meantime, since the events of August 1998 through the completion of the Kosovo war, there's been an escalation of conflict around the globe, of regular and irregular warfare, which threatens to explode into something--a situation where no nation now could win a war, in the conventional sense, but many nations have the possibility of unleashing vast destruction without any positive outcome. Something like the Thirty Years War in Europe. That's a possibility.

So, these are the three great crises. Up until the fall, until October 1998, it was my hope that the President of the United States would respond to the financial crisis by inviting nations, including China, India, Russia, as well as European and other nations, to meet in an emergency conference, to establish a New Bretton Woods agreement to forestall the kind of financial collapse and chaos which was then being unleashed on the world.

Up until recently, I have been the only Presidential candidate in the United States who has made any reference at all to these problems. And I have made copious reference, and will be making more.

In my view, these three crises that I have identified, just in a general way, are the things that we have to face; that what's being said generally on the TV debates, such as they are occurring in the United States--what we're hearing from Gore, or the Gore-Bradley debates, or from George W. Bush, or even from McCain, the opponent of George Bush--makes absolutely no sense and has no relevance, in terms of the kinds of conditions the world, including the United States, will be facing during the year 2000.

And thus, I think we can take off from there and get your questions.

Q: [New York.] Yes. How will you actually go about solving these questions that you are citing?

LaRouche: I still think the urgent thing is to reestablish the Bretton Woods-style agreements which were launched by President Roosevelt at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire. Admittedly, many of Roosevelt's intentions for the postwar period were not carried out fully, but some were.

We can, I think, agree that the pre-1958 phase of the Bretton Woods agreements, and to a lesser degree, until after Kennedy's assassination, had a generally positive effect in restoring the world economy, at least in most parts. The only part that was missing, which is essential I think today, was Roosevelt's intention to bring the Soviet Union and China and other countries into the agreement, and to define the postwar monetary system, as a post-colonialist system.

That is, Roosevelt's intention, which was never carried out, was to shut down all remnants of Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French imperialism and colonialism around the world instantly, at the end of the war, and to launch a general effort of economic development of sovereign nation-states rising where former colonies had lived earlier.

I think the time has come, that in order to establish a new monetary system, we must in fact go back to a proven precedent. And I would say the pre-1958 Bretton Woods agreements, which were successful under disastrous conditions of the postwar period, are the case we'd go back to.

But we must modify that in one degree. The conference we'd call--and I would hope that President Clinton would call it soon, or when the crisis strikes--would include nations from western Europe (centered, for example, around Germany and France right now), Russia, China, India, and other countries which would represent a majority of the human race; that these nations should be the co-sponsors of a new world monetary system, replacing the presently bankrupt system, in a Roosevelt-style general economic recovery of this planet. That's what has to be done.

If that is done, we can get out of this mess safely. If that is not done, if people try to continue to pump up the present bankrupt international financial system, and its attached monetary system, I think the world is headed for the worst disaster since the Seventeenth Century in Europe.

Q: [Question submitted by José Neme Salum from Mexico's principal daily newspaper, Excélsior.] Mr. LaRouche, if the change you are proposing does not emanate from the United States, if it doesn't happen in the United States, what alternatives are left? Could a nation like China assume the leadership in building "a new era for a new civilization"?

LaRouche: Well, I don't think so. But I think obviously that China and other nations should attempt to persuade the United States to play this role. Obviously, if the President of the United States fails to do what must be done, other nations must make the best approximation they can of this kind of solution. We don't give up. We fight all the way.

But, I believe that President Clinton, despite the fact that he and I are different types of personalities, when faced with an emergency, and knowing what I know he knows now, might take exactly the kind of actions--Let me point to something in that direction, which might give some more substance to what I'm arguing about Clinton. The President of the United States is presently engaged with a new Prime Minister in Israel, Barak, a very positive figure.

Now the importance of what he's doing there, probably the most important thing that Clinton has actually undertaken as President, is to bring a zone of peace into an area from the Carpathian--from Transcaucasia through Northern Africa. If that zone of peace is established, we would hope that that would become a basis for preventing some of the worst things from happening that could happen.

So, I'm confident that a President who would undertake what he's doing now with Barak, and with other nations, might be the President who would be willing to do what I propose.

The point is, that the reason I would place confidence in President Clinton's disposition, if he gets enough support--and I would hope that my campaign would help give him that support, to take the kind of actions I indicate--I think we should look at President Clinton's initiative with Barak and others, in trying to bring about a long-sought Middle East peace.

What the President is doing, is essentially moving, together with Barak, for the kind of solution which Europe found in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, an area of great conflict with much bitterness and bloodshed and so forth, where we must find a solution without recriminations, and without victimization, among these nations.

If that kind of cooperation, which the President and Barak and others are trying to initiate now, succeeds, I think that would set a model for the kind of action which I have just discussed in response to Mexico's question, on the question of the New Bretton Woods System. I think the President, under those conditions, with the successful negotiation of peace in the Middle East with the partners of the United States, Israel, and others, Egypt and so forth, that if that goes through, that would change the dynamic globally. And a global crisis hitting under the conditions of that precedent, might be just what would succeed.

Q: [Question submitted by La Semana, an Hispanic newspaper in Houston.] Mr. LaRouche, I wanted to know your opinion about the immigrants and about the Hispanics who are the second force in the United States.

LaRouche: Well, you've got a number of problems. You've got an injustice all around. What has happened, especially since 1982, in Central and South America, with the policies which were imposed, together with the attack on Mexico, launched from New York in August of that year, 1982, that since that time, the victimization of the peoples--economic victimizations--of peoples from Mexico south and throughout the Caribbean, has caused people to seek to fly from these countries, because of those kinds of conditions.

We also have had a collapse of the economic conditions in the United States, especially for those who are in the lower 80% of income brackets, who are living in extreme poverty.

Also then, you have a conflict among people who are losing jobs, among people who are "Anglo," shall we say, as opposed to Hispanics, new rivals from these countries.

So, this kind of conflict stems actually from a bad economic policy. If we can eliminate NAFTA, which I intend to have eliminated, go back to a protectionist type of economy in the world we had in the 1950s and early 1960s, and under those conditions promote the well-being of the country, economic well-being of the countries south of our border, at the same time that we open up more employment here, I think the sources of this conflict will be brought under control.

If we ... take the lessons of the civil rights struggle in the United States, and recognize that Hispanic-Americans also are part of that same civil rights struggle, along with Asian-Americans, and also retired citizens; that if we take that view, I think these policy questions can be resolved.

Q: This is Bev Smith from the American Urban Radio Network. My concern is about the recent embrace with the Russians and the Chinese, as it relates to what seems to be a cementing of their relationship, and what impact it will have on the United States. . . . I am concerned about civil rights, and I am cautiously watching how we approach China as it relates to trade.

LaRouche: On the China question, the recent meeting between the President of China and the President of Russia, is not the inauguration of this cooperation. This occurred during the spring of 1998. It occurred in meetings we had in Europe, in which representatives of Russia, China, and India participated, in which my wife and I and others attempted to promote--not an alliance, but a three-cornered partnership throughout Eurasia, which would hopefully involve western continental Europe, Russia, China, and India, as keystone nations of Eurasia, to bring cooperation for economic development and peace and security throughout Eurasia.

It was my hope at the time, as I tried to make this work too, that the President of the United States would become a co-sponsor of that.

All of this was working fine, and led, particularly with the accession of Yevgeni Primakov to the prime ministership in Russia, after the bond crisis, that under Primakov's influence, this effort became somewhat consolidated. And we have, in Eurasia today, including Malaysia, the sentiment for this, in Indonesia, India, other countries, you have a continuing commitment to the idea that these countries ought to form a three-cornered partnership, not excluding other countries, for peace and cooperation into the future, and with Europe, and with the United States.

This thing was soured considerably by the U.S. bombing of the China Embassy in Belgrade, during the course of the Yugoslav war. That problem has not been fully resolved, though I understand that President Clinton has taken measures to try to repair the relationship with China.

In the meantime, we have a mass of propaganda coming out, especially out of the George W. Bush campaign and its circles, which are trying to heat up, with a lot of false propaganda, a great danger to the United States from China. There is no such "great danger." It doesn't exist.

China, of course, has military capabilities. It is a regional power, it is not a global power. It will not be a global power for 20 years, or maybe 30 years. Also, if you deal with Chinese leaders, you recognize that the mentality of the Chinese leader, is they think in regional terms, but they also have desired cooperation with the United States, and with other parts of the world, as with Russia. They would like to have that partnership.

This bombing of the China Embassy in Belgrade, caused a near-break in those relations, which the President of the United States, Clinton, has taken some steps--I don't think adequate--to repair. I would hope we can repair that relationship.

Q: To the issue of human rights, though.

LaRouche: I think that also is greatly exaggerated. I know of human rights problems in the United States which would turn your hair. Look at our prison system. Look at what's coming out of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. You want to see violations of human rights? Look at our death penalty.

What civilized nation in the world, still has the death penalty? Every civilized nation in the world has abandoned it. We went back to it. We have a Supreme Court which says that a victim of a death sentence sitting in Virginia, has to be executed anyway, even though there is probable cause to suspect that the thing was a frame-up.

And when the Supreme Court says, "Proceed with the execution for the sake of public interest," when the person may be innocent, you have reached the limit of barbarism.

Q: I, as an African-American, have some concern about the leaks that are beginning to come out of the FBI and the CIA, about a plan for Dec. 31, 1999. According to my sources, there is a plan to initiate full-scale military-like tactics in inner cities around this country. . . . Have you heard of these charges, and what is your feeling about that?

LaRouche: I know some--I can't go all the way and say that I know that's fully true. But I do know the following, that's relevant to your question. That in the summer of this year, the British government announced an operation called "Operation Surety," which was to go into effect about the third week of September, under which the commissionaire operations in the United Kingdom, would set forth anti-terrorist and related security measures, throughout England.

In the meantime, we've had the launching, from London, by the head of the terrorist organization which includes bin Laden, of international terrorist operations. We had international terrorist incidents at Seattle deployed from Canada into Seattle, using domestic eco-terrorists as part of the operation, attempting to destabilize and confuse the proceedings of the WTO.

Also, we have millennarian cults, which are crazy people, which reflect some of the same kind of mental problems we saw at the Columbine High School.

There are actual security problems in the United States, caused by foreign and domestic, shall we say, private agencies, which do represent a threat to security at this time. The magic of the Year 2000 is--attracts a lot of nuts. There may be plots, but I don't know of any to utilize this crisis for coup-style military operations, though I wouldn't be surprised if some people, over-drugged on the influence of George W. Bush, might run away with their presumptions.

There is a risk, and I think your concern is justified. I can only say that I do not know of any such plots by the government, though I do know that there are activities internationally throughout the world, including by the U.S. government, anticipating terrorist incidents to break out during the final weeks of this year.

Q: My name is Dr. Vladimir Kilasonya, from Georgia. Georgian society is very interested in the situation in Chechnya. And I want to know your opinion, Mr. LaRouche, about this war against Russia in Chechnya, and the Georgian propaganda, anti-Russian propaganda. Who is behind this conflict in Chechnya, and what can happen in the Caucasus Dr. Vladimir Kilasonya after this war?

LaRouche: Following the war, or during the same period of the war in Yugoslavia, there was a general thrust toward Middle East destabilization--which I hope has somewhat been brought under control by what Clinton and Barak and others are doing together now--and also Transcaucasia and Central Asia.

The chief forces of destabilization were associated with what some people call "Islamic terrorism." That is, coming out of London, certain groups based in London, including those of Osama bin Laden, who's somewhat notorious nowadays, were deploying mercenaries who were veterans of the Afghan and particular things back in the 1980s, into causing destabilization in Central Asia, and causing various kinds of trouble.

Now, the attack of some of these forces from Chechnya into Dagestan, created a crisis for Russia. And there were various differentiated kinds of responses within Russia, particularly the allegation that the Chechens had caused terrorist acts on a massive scale in Moscow itself. There's now a great passion about this.

I think the essential thing is that Russia has taken the position--and I'd note, without differentiating among the different views in Russia on this question--that Chechnya has become a line in the sand; that if the terrorism which has been deployed into Chechnya, were to continue to use Chechnya as a base for destabilization of, say, for example, the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh and other areas in Transcaucasia, that this would spread throughout Eurasia, and would cause a kind of confrontation we don't need.

Therefore, while I'm very unhappy with some of the developments in Chechnya recently, in the Russian action--I think they're maybe not the wisest--nonetheless, I understand that all Russian tendencies, all Russian currents, including the various currents represented in the recent elections there, agree that there must be peace in Chechnya, and that the terrorist problem, of using Chechnya as a terrorist base, must be brought to an end.

I think that's in the interest of the United States. I would hope and I think that Clinton thinks in that direction. And I would hope that we would get something effective on that soon.

I think the United States, Germany, France, and other countries, should possibly cooperate with Moscow, to try to find a solution in that area, to bring this horror show to an end, but at the same time, making no compromise with international terrorism.

Q: Hi, Mr. LaRouche, my name is Yousef Elia Haddad, I am the Arab American Press Guild president. First of all, I would like to applaud your courage and your frankness in your answers. My question is coming in two parts. Number one, you mentioned about the positive movement lately in the Middle East by the Syrian-Israeli negotiation. How can we reach a peaceful solution, and are we forgetting, on the other hand, the suffering of Iraqi people, Iraqi children, and the sanctions against Iraq? How you can handle the problem in Iraq, which is causing 1.5 million people dying over 10 years, and still going? Number two, what's your position on moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, in regard to the Congress, the resolution, in the year 2000?

LaRouche: First of all, we in Europe--in European civilization--had, from the period from 1517 approximately, until 1648, a tearing-apart of all Europe by religious wars. That's nearly a century and a half of religious wars, which almost destroyed European civilization.

Finally, we came to our senses in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and said that past hatreds and grievances must not prevent peace from being obtained. That means that you must have justice for all of the participants in the peace process, including Iraq. But nobody has a right to vengeance or recrimination, because as long as we have the principle of vengeance and recrimination, there can be no peace.

Under the present circumstances, no one can win, and the world as a whole might lose. If the Middle East explodes at the same time that the other crises are exploding, who knows what can happen to this planet?

So, we have to learn a lesson of history: Stop the searching for vengeance. Now, but justice also. For example, that means that the United States and Britain, would stop bombing Iraq immediately. You will not have a Middle East peace, unless you stop the bombing of Iraq. That must occur.

Second, there must be justice for the Arabs throughout the region. And there must be cooperation. But justice means, delivery of the kind of terms of cooperation, which enable the people of each and all of these countries, to secure their rights, including the rights of Iraqi children.

Iraq has a right to rebuild its economy. If you don't have that, you're not going to have Middle East peace. You can not have recrimination over the Iraq-Iran War, which was actually caused by the interventions of British intelligence, and there was some from U.S. intelligence. So, we must bring about peace throughout the region, based on two things. We're going to end the war, no more vengeance, no more vows of vengeance, no religious warfare, no religious conflict. All religious groups are treated in an ecumenically equal way. But we must give justice, and that means primarily economic justice, in the sense of the right to rebuild their economies, and build secure nation-states, free of the fear of more war.

And that's the answer. That President Clinton could not succeed in getting a stable peace in the Middle East, as long as British and U.S. aircraft continue to bomb Iraq, and as long as that foul resolution in the UN to send back in the so-called peacekeeping observers, is allowed.

This must end. If people want peace, and if they don't want the world to go up in flames, they've got to stop this silly nonsense! And I think what you've got--

Look, let me just pick on the personality of Barak. Barak is a man in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. And every Arab who is concerned, should read the writings of Moses Mendelssohn, on ecumenicism. These are the principles which I believe Barak is trying to serve, the ecumenical principles.

These are also the principles of Christianity, of, for example, De Pace Fidei, of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa. These are traditional principles among Jews, Christians, and Islamic peoples. And therefore, I think we have a man of good intention in the prime ministership. We have a President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, who is a tough guy, but he recognizes the wisdom of this approach.

We have Arafat (who may not live too long), who is a very important factor of security. We have openings from Assad in Syria. We have many other good things.

Let us try to make it work. This means, however, not sit back and watch. This means that the United States particularly, with the help of people in western continental Europe, must cooperate to ensure that every party, including Iraq, in that region, is assured of just treatment. That the peace which will be negotiated, will be a just peace, with rights and repairs of the damage of all peoples equally, but no vengeance-seeking.

Q: [The India Post.] Mr. LaRouche, there has been a perception in India for a long time, that the U.S. foreign policy dynamics have accorded India an also-ran status. What do you think of that? And number two, would you support India's induction into the UN Security Council?

LaRouche: Well, on the second question, yes, I think India should be. India is a nation of--now approaching a billion people. It's a major nation in the world. If you don't want to make a farce of international diplomacy, then all nations which are major nations, should be principal nations which have a voice in the proceedings of the UN Security Council on a permanent basis. I think it's perfectly justified.

On the question of India, remember, the thing that broke Nehru's heart, was when the United States broke from him, during the period immediately following the death of President Kennedy. This was a heartbreaker. It has been for me.

The policy of the United States has often been influenced, as it was under Brzezinski, by the ideas of geopolitics, of managed conflict, the old British Hobbesian game of managed conflict. Manage a conflict by pitting one nation--neighbor against neighbor. And so, the United States government for a long time played the game of playing Pakistan and India back and forth, also trying to play China and India back and forth. All these kinds of games were played.

We have to come to the point that I--that my answer to this is that if the President of the United States, would agree with the government of India and the Indian state on the question of permanent Security Council status for India immediately, with China already in there, then I think we would have an enhanced basis for that.

Second, if India is recognized, together with China and the United States and others, as the key parties for the formation of what must be a reformed international monetary system, to achieve in that monetary system what was resolved, for example, by the India delegation at Sri Lanka in 1976, at the Non-Aligned Nations meeting there, that economic justice for all nations, and to realize that in terms of the new monetary system which must be established, and India must play it obviously, because India is not only important for itself, it's important for Southeast Asia, it's important as a partner of Malaysia, it's important for what must be done to try to restabilize the situation in Indonesia.

So, I think that all these things have to be considered together. Yes, the United States policy toward India, should be, on a permanent basis--India is a major nation of the world, therefore, India is a major partner of the world, and that must never change.

Q: [From Vienna, Austria.] I would very much like to have Mr. LaRouche's views on the expansion of NATO, and whether he thinks Austria should be included in such expansion.

LaRouche: The expansion of NATO was a disaster. What we've now done, in the aftermath of particularly the Yugoslav war, is we've created hell for--including Austria. Like the Danube situation. What if we get a freeze of ice on the Danube? It's going to jam the whole thing up. We have destroyed, by the outcome of the Yugoslav war, we have destroyed the economy of the underbelly of all Europe. We have a spreading disaster.

At the same time, with the increased intensity of conflict coming out of the Bush crowd and others on China, we've created a situation, with the Chechnya developments, in which we've now put former members of the Warsaw Pact states, like Poland, on the border of Russia at the time that Russia is now in the process of reuniting, at least in some degree, with Belarus, White Russia.

So, the expansion of NATO has turned out to be no benefit to the new nations which are brought into it, and has now become a point of dangerous conflict, particularly as long as you have a situation, where the Prime Minister of Great Britain, who is a certifiable madman, is pushing the United States into military conflicts which the President of the United States himself would not like to have, though some of the people in the U.S. join Blair in that sort of thing.

So it's a dangerous situation. The further expansion of NATO is a nightmare. I think much more sensible, is the agreement which is being worked out with France and Germany, on a European independent security force. I think something in that direction should actually emerge.

Unless there's an attack on western Europe, which requires support from the United States, I think that NATO has a diminishing function in the world to come.

Q: [Denver Community Television in Denver, Colorado.] Mr. LaRouche, to get back to domestic relations, do you consider the KKK and other members of racist parties, to be terrorists? . . .

LaRouche: First of all, I think that the idea of the category of terrorism is much misused. There are actually international terrorist organizations, which are used for that purpose. This one from London, which has issued this fatwa, is a typical case of an international organization which is terrorist, which is actually supported by some governments, which are the hand within, inside the glove of terrorism.

The Ku Klux Klan, which was revived in the United States with the sponsorship of a U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, who represents the Dixiecrat racist tradition of the Democratic Party, which I hope we would get rid of, especially for this election campaign--does not qualify generally as a terrorist organization.

The problem we have in the United States, goes more to the Justice Department. As long as you have pro-racist attitudes in the permanent bureaucracy of the Justice Department--and I name specifically the Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jack Keeney--as long as this Operation Fruehmenschen type of operation, which targets African-Americans for special prosecution and entrapment, on the basis of a policy admitted in court of racist motivation, to say they're out to prove that African-Americans are not qualified for positions of that kind of trust; as long as you have that, and as long as you have this kind of attitude, the death penalty attitude, which George W. Bush represents, for example. (The man's not civilized, let alone educated.) As long as this goes on, we do have an internal security threat to citizens from official forces which are misused by federal, state, and other forces, in what we remember from Mississippi, the three victims of terrorism down there by the local police.

We have that problem. My only remedy for that, is what I've proposed generally. In the United States, 30% of the voting strength in most elections, is controlled by what Al Gore and others have called this suburban Third Way group--what Dick Morris has identified.

What has happened is, we have just driven 80% of the voters largely away from the polls. They don't believe they have any power. So we've given power, voting power, to a minority, and excluded the majority. Now, the majority--the Roosevelt majority, as I would call it, the FDR majority--would represent African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, labor, and a persecuted race called senior citizens these days. Eh?

So that if the majority would organize itself--don't sit back and worry about stopping a problem. Take preemptive action. Let's get the 80% of the largely non-voting Americans, to march in and take control of the parties, especially the Democratic Party, and take control of the polls, and exert their rightful majority influence in the polls. Under those conditions, with a political alliance among African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, senior citizens and other hyphenated Americans, labor, and so forth; under these conditions, this kind of danger you talk about, can not thrive.

And I think, rather than sit back and worry about how do we fend it off, how do we prevent it? And the way to prevent it, is to bring the majority of the American citizenry back into power again. Under those conditions, we won't have that problem.

Q: [Pittsburgh Courier newspaper.] In your opening statement, you mentioned three crises that you thought were going on in the United States. One was financial, the monetary crisis. What were the other two?

LaRouche: The second one is the danger of a different kind of--you have a deflationary crisis, that is, a sudden chain-reaction collapse of all these Internet and similar kinds of high-gain stocks. That is, companies that have made no profit and have no financial assets, and their stock is zooming toward the stratosphere.

These things are vulnerable. The whole ball of wax can come down in a chain reaction. To prevent that from happening, led by the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, in approximately October--or before, but certified in October 1998--the United States and other countries, have been pumping cash, printing money, pumping cash in to try to keep the stock markets and other things from collapsing.

In the process of doing that, they have created a new nightmare just as bad as a deflationary collapse, an inflationary blow-out of the type that happened in Germany in 1923, the summer and fall of 1923. That's the second one.

The third one is, especially since the Kosovo war, the Yugoslav war, the rate of increase of global regular and irregular war conflict, throughout the planet, has become a danger as great to civilized order and peace and stability, as either a deflationary collapse of the world economy, or an inflationary blow-out of it. Those are the three dangers.

Q: And then secondly, are there any other issues in your campaign directly relating to African-Americans?

LaRouche: Oh, absolutely. The basic thing is take power. The way the African-Americans can get their rights back, is by creating a de facto alliance, a political alliance, of the forgotten men and women of America, who constitute almost 80% of our population. African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, labor in general, farmers, senior citizens, and so forth.

If that alliance is created, and it can be created now, which is what I'm trying to foster, then we will have the political power, and the political optimism, to turn the country back to what Franklin Roosevelt did in saving this country, back in the 1930s.

Q: [Argentine wire service, Noticias Argentina.] Argentine Vice President Carlos "Chacho" Alvarez says he favors an international tribunal to sit in judgment of those Argentine military charged with human rights violations. However, President Fernando de la Rúa has avoided saying openly that he favors the international structures of globalism. Given that framework, what do you foresee for Argentina in the next few years? Globalist tendencies, or a different stand?

LaRouche: I think that globalism in its present form is doomed one way or the other. What we saw at Seattle, in the WTO conference there, largely under the influence of developments which occurred in France and Germany just before then, around Schröder's action in Germany as supported by Lionel Jospin, the Prime Minister of France; that globalism is now in the process of being defeated.

Globalism is no longer "the wave of the future." That the tendency is now to restore the nation-state, the sovereign nation-state, as the primary political authority on this planet, and that relations among states must be relations among sovereign nation-states.

So, globalism must go. If it does not go, then the planet will go, because without the nation-state, the world has no resources and no political means to deal with the kind of financial crisis we face now. And therefore, things such as we saw in the case of Pinochet, the British-Spanish game against Pinochet.

Now, Pinochet is not one of my favorite characters. But he was given immunity. He was a former head of state, and the sovereignty of Chile had been destroyed. Of course, Chile is not the traditional ally of Argentina, but the same thing applies there. So, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh in London, has launched this Transparency International-type of operation, which now says that special international tribunals, not representing governments, but just bodies created by some kind of special, informal globalist organization, can go around the world, pick people up, and put them on trial, with no accountability to government.

That must not be tolerated in Argentina or any place else. The sovereign power of government must be the authority. And if there's problems--well, they're problems of war, aren't they?

Q: [Denver Community Television.] I never got an answer to my second half of my question, as to why the commercial media refuses to acknowledge Mr. LaRouche as a viable candidate. And is it because they take issue with his new monetary system?

LaRouche: In part. This goes back a long ways. Look, the United States has two currents in it, historically. One is the current of the Founding Fathers, which I follow. And I'm not--that's not popular these days. Then the other current, which is based on Manhattan, and also on what became the Confederacy, which was an alliance, had a different policy.

Now, I happen to represent the policy I represent: the General Welfare policy. I represent the same thing, in that respect, that Franklin Roosevelt represented in his quarrels with Wall Street, and with this Confederate tradition of Woodrow Wilson.

So, these guys, if you look at who controls the major media, what's their connection to Wall Street, and London, or British Commonwealth connections?

So you have a major media in the United States, which represents the viewpoint, the outlook, and the interests of international rentier-financier interests. And I am recognized as being not friendly to that. And, of course, I am no more unfriendly, I think, perhaps, than Franklin Roosevelt was. But that's not much of a wonder these days.

I think that that will have to change now. If we get the majority of the American voters beginning to move back into coalitions, and demonstrating that they can no longer fix elections the way they've been fixed in recent years, then the press will have to behave itself, and come back, and pay attention to the real issues.

I think also, in particular, the financial crisis, which in one form or another, is going to hit very soon, that this will teach everybody a lesson. We'll get back to real politics.

Q: This is Bev Smith with the American Urban Radio Network. I'm concerned about our trade policies around the world. That's why I was watching with curiosity the demonstration and the actions of the World Trade Organization countries that are involved in the Caribbean Initiative. I feel that the entire trade world, has reneged on its promises. I'd like for Mr. LaRouche to address the Caribbean Initiative that has not been enacted, and also, the world dominance of Chiquita Banana.

LaRouche: You take that up with the French President, Jacques Chirac, who had some references to that in a press conference he had with President Clinton, some time ago, on the question of the banana wars, between "Big Banana" Al Gore and the President of France.

Chiquita Banana is well-known. It's a well-known interest, and it apparently is one of Al Gore's special constituents.

The problem here is, that you've got to change the framework of economic policy, in order to address the Caribbean region effectively.

First of all, we have to protect the sovereign nation-state. We have to have a protectionist model, that these nations can not function without the right to a protectionist model. The present trade policies deny them that. They need credit for viable projects of infrastructure development. For example, Central America. The place is a hell-hole. There's no adequate infrastructural development there. Whole areas are a no-man's-land, virtually, as far as the central government is concerned. And then, of course, in the islands, you have a similar kind of situation.

But in the Caribbean region, we have to take a positive, pro-active policy, of the type that Franklin Roosevelt promised with his "Good Neighbor Policy," and that Jack Kennedy also promised.

If we change the framework of international economic policy, trade, and credit, then the United States can play a key role, with others, in ensuring that these nations have the means by which they can reconstruct.

I'll give you one of the worst cases: Haiti. Haiti is a nation which has no possibility, because it's a totally depleted territory, of rebuilding itself with its own resources. My view is the United States should actually take a pro-active initiative to provide the people of Haiti with the possibility, the means, of starting to rebuild their country.

Q: [From Houston.] What would be your politics against Cuba? Would you change something about the way the government is working now with Cuba? Would you work with Castro to change openly Cuba to something better, maybe?

LaRouche: I think the policy of the United States in general, the foreign policy, has to be: Stop looking for geopolitical games. Our policy has to be to start from "Go"--at least, if I'm President, my policy will be start from "Go," apply the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia to address all diplomatic and related problems. Set up a standard of justice, negotiate an agreement on standards of justice, and say, "Okay. If you agree to that, we start from `Go' as if there had been no conflict before."

Q: Nelson Thall, medianews.com and CFRB Radio, Toronto. Mr. LaRouche, just to get down to some specifics, because I enjoy hearing your ideas about hard-nosed economic issues. You talked about the free trade agreement. What's your feeling about the auto pact between Canada and the United States?

LaRouche: Well, of course, that's an old story. It was a two-price level, which was convenient for some people in Canada, and convenient for some people in the United States. I think we ought to go back to a strictly protectionist policy, and plus cooperation.

That is, we must eliminate all these free trade agreements, and go back to--we set up a protectionist policy, and then we agree to cooperate after we set up a protectionist policy.

Q: As supplementary, two questions. Recently, just within the last few days, it's been announced that Canadian National Railways has been making an offer to take over control of Burlington Northern Railroad. How would you handle that, if you were President? Would you allow that to go ahead?

LaRouche: I would oppose that, because the national railway system of the United States was established by the Federal government, chiefly. And what we used to have, in terms of regulation of our railway system: It is my intention as President to restore that regulation, which was taken down under Carter and afterward.

So therefore, the supervision of the railway companies of the United States, should be under U.S. Federal law and regulation. That notwithstanding that, that cooperation on this basis, with the railway systems which connect from Canada, for example, should be maintained.

Q: [Questions asked on behalf of Jan Engelgard, editor-in-chief of the Polish weekly newspaper Mysl Polska, and Daniel Podrzycki, chairman of the August 80 trade union, which publishes a weekly, Kurier Zwiazkowy.] In a few years, Poland and other eastern European countries are supposed to join the European Union. How do you think the situation in Europe will develop, and what should be our approach to the EU and the Maastricht Treaty? And the second question concerns the Pope's call for a debt moratorium for developing countries. How do you think this can be done in practice? Is it possible at all, given the pressure from the International Monetary Fund?

LaRouche: Well, no one knows what's going to happen to the European Union. In its present form, the European Union can not survive. That was forecast by a number of my friends and acquaintances in Germany, who understood it. I've always had that view: It couldn't work.

The Europeans are going to have to go back to some other arrangement. And the present crisis will force that to come into being. I would hope that, in the case of Poland and similar countries which are formerly so-called eastern European countries, that what we would do, is follow the policy of cooperation which was outlined by me, for example, in an address I gave in Berlin, on Columbus Day in 1988, a policy which was enunciated also in an address never actually delivered, but intended to be delivered in New York by Alfred Herrhausen, then the head of Deutsche Bank, in November 1989. That we should have these kinds of policies toward the areas of the former Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, which have never recovered from the effect of this process, and we should go with that policy. That under those conditions, new economic partnership agreements, and cooperation agreements, should be struck between the nations of western continental Europe, and nations such as Poland and further east and so forth, in Europe.

So, I think that what will have to happen, realistically, since the European Union is not going to survive in its present form, is that there will have to be a renegotiation, so that you will have something to supersede Maastricht, and this should have the provision for adapting to this kind of reality.

On the Pope's proposal, of course I'm all for it. I always have been for that sort of thing. For example, take the case of the debt obligations of Central and South America. My friends and I have proven repeatedly, that Central and South America generally has no debt--foreign debt obligation. If I go back to 1971-82, that period, and analyze the debts and debt payments by the countries of Central and South America since that time, these countries have already more than repaid every debt they actually incurred since.

What has happened, was a leveraging of debt, reassessment, reevaluation of debt, upvaluation, increasing the obligations of these countries, while imposing upon them conditionalities which destroyed their ability to produce the income to pay the debts.

So therefore, in the case of Africa, in the case of Central and South America, and similar situations, the best thing to do is write this stuff off.

Look at it realistically. We have now well over $300 trillion of short-term gambling debts, like gambling side-bets, called derivatives and similar things, in the world market, as against a Gross Domestic Product combined, of all nations, assessed currently at about $41 trillion.

So, obviously, the world as a whole is bankrupt. We have to write off entirely, the so-called side-bet debt, such as derivatives, to both creditors and debtors. Forget it. Just wipe it off the books. It can never be paid. Don't choke the world with that.

Other debt, which is questionable debt, has to be reorganized. In the process of a general debt reorganization, under the auspices of a New Bretton Woods system, we're going to--it's obviously the mechanism there, to write off debts of Third World countries, where they should be written off.

In general, I take the view that if it's a truly sovereign debt, as Hamilton argued on the question of the debt of the United States, in his famous statement on credit, that the sovereign state, such as the United States, must fully owe, pay, its Treasury debt. It must honor it, because the sovereignty of the nation-state is involved. But, on other forms of debt, if they're just debt, they should be paid. But if it's not just debt, as in the case of most of these debt excesses in Central and South America, or Africa, for example, they should be just simply written off.

Q: Bev Smith again. This time on the environment. As a former consumer advocate, I have been watching with interest the decreasing concern in America for what is happening to our environment. A year ago, I went to New Orleans to look at an African-American community that has been devastated by landfills, and an abnormal amount of deaths due to kidney and intestinal problems had occurred. A brand-new school had to be closed because of environmental problems. This is right in the alley, so to speak, of where Syntec and corporations like that would like to build: in low-income Latino and African-American communities. I am concerned that no one is addressing these issues on the campaign trail. I'm curious as to how Mr. LaRouche sees this issue.

LaRouche: Well, on this kind of thing, first of all, you have two problems on the environment. Much of what's been said in propaganda, or whatever you want to call it, is nonsense. But there's a real problem, and the real problem should be considered, like the one you just described. Our point was, we had regulation, public health regulation. We've taken that regulation off since the Carter years, since the Trilateral Commission had this panic of eliminating regulation in whole areas of Federal regulation.

The other thing is, it's not just a matter of regulation. We have had, since 1971, a net shrinkage in true value of the total infrastructure development of the United States. That is, much of what was called "profit" in the United States since 1971, was actually the profit on the margin of unpaid payments to the public account. That is, we have been losing infrastructure in transportation, in energy, in other things--in municipal infrastructure. And people have said, on the grounds of cost or the question of this or that, we can't pay this any more.

So the problem is twofold. First of all, regulation which should be regulation has been abandoned or is not enforced, and largely because the wrong people are in charge of government. That is, the top 20% and the big money interests, control too much of politics. And therefore, the people who are victimized, have very little voice, even though they may be 80% of the population.

Second, we have neglected the maintenance of those things which are necessary to develop and maintain a safe, general environment with the kinds of infrastructure required to meet the demands of modern society.

So, the two things have to be considered together. Neither one by itself can be adequate.

Q: [A journalist from St. Petersburg, Russia.] First, all I wanted to say is I share the optimism of my friend, Vladimir Kilasonya, from Tblisi, who is sure that Lyndon LaRouche will win the election race and become the President of the United States. I want to ask Mr. LaRouche about one particular issue of transition, that is, the new principles of international policy. In the capacity of the President of the United States, how would he deal with such a particular problem as oil transit and gas transit, which is a classical instrument of global geopolitics today, involving also the issue of Chechnya and, in general, the Caspian area?

LaRouche: Well, there's a faction which bridges some people in New York, which cuts into some parts of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, London, what not, which are playing games with this. And it's pretty clearly stated at various conferences, where in particular Brzezinski was present, and where Brzezinski's documented this in his The Grand Chessboard and other places.

The purpose of many of these operations, is to continue the New World Disorder which was launched by Margaret Thatcher and George Bush back in 1989 to '91. And so often, much of this is malicious. You see the lack of performance on these petroleum contracts, and you see that these are essentially primarily political, even though they involve large-scale financial operations.

One has to take the view of sovereignty, that the natural resources, which sometimes are called--I guess they're called in Russia, natural monopolies--that the natural monopolies or natural resources of a territory, belong to the sovereign state of that territory. The disposition of that, is their responsibility. There may be treaty agreements, but they have to be reached on the basis of agreement through the administration of sovereign nation-states.

This whole business, this whole scam, this "oil route" scam, coming out of Central Asia, must be stopped. It must end. This is nonsense.

Look, the thing to emphasize is, among all these hard-nosed idiots who want to build a tactical missile defense system, which can't work, which is out of date; it's been out of date in principle since the early 1960s! But some idiots, who want to make money, or their defense contractor friends who want to make money, are still bargaining for it.

People are talking about Air-Land Battle 2000, for example, in the United States, which is a piece of absolute idiocy. Yes, we have the possibility of bombing a lot of nations. We have the possibility of doing that with a certain amount of impunity. But that doesn't mean you can win a war that way.

So, what we have, is we have a situation in the world, in which no power is capable of actually winning a war in the conventional sense. Our economies are too bankrupt, our military services are too foolish. We can bomb things. We can act like terrorists. But that doesn't work.

So why do we want to go into wars, when the only result will be a perpetual state of chaos? And the people like Brzezinski, who I must certify is an absolute madman, who want to do these kinds of games, are simply getting the world entangled in war upon war, which no one can win, and everybody will lose.

So therefore, in the interests of peace, stop the nonsense. Stop the games. Stop the globalization.

The basic problem we have with Russia, is that the provocations which feed into Russia from some of these things, have the worst possible effect on the Russian population, the Russian system.

What we need, is we need cooperation among the United States, western continental Europe, Russia, China, India, and other countries, which are sympathetic to this idea that we do have a common interest of sovereign nation-states. We must bring this world back into order, cut this nonsense out for once and for all, for the sake of peace and for the sake of the future of our people.

Q: [From Mexico.] Mr. LaRouche, are you aware of the last provocation in the fall, in the foreign policy by Juan Enriques? And, what is going to be the impact of the flooding, of the catastrophe in Venezuela, on the entire region?

LaRouche: Well, you have to look at the Venezuelan crisis in the context of the Colombia FARC business; the official bankrupting of Ecuador; the attacks on the present President of Peru, and on Peru's institutions, and pro-terrorist things; the attempt to destabilize Brazil, to grab off large areas of its natural resources to give them to foreign countries, in names of various things; the targetting of Argentina, and so forth and so on; and the targetting of Chile, as symbolized by the attack on Pinochet, which is really an effort to destabilize the government of the nation of Chile.

So obviously, I know who's behind these kinds of things. I have fought them for years. I would say the United States--if I were President, that instant, the Inter-American Dialogue and similar institutions, are suddenly shut off from any influence on the policies of the United States government. My policies are those of, in a sense, John Quincy Adams, with his community of principle doctrine, as I stated in this two-hour and forty-minute television tape which I've produced on foreign policy. The policies of Roosevelt, the policies of Kennedy. Those are my policies.

The other policies--they're going to go.

Q: [Question submitted by José Lesta of the magazine Ano Cero from Spain.] Mr. LaRouche, what do you think about the behavior of the Spanish judge, Baltazar Garzón, in regard to the case of General Pinochet? What is the role of the British Commonwealth in all of this?

LaRouche: You have the same thing in Italy. You had the British yacht, Britannia, seated off the coast of Italy, not far from Rome, where a bunch of Italians came on board, received their orders from the British monarchy. The Queen wasn't there, but the monarchy was represented. They marched back into Italy, and ran what was called a "Clean Hands" operation in Italy, which destroyed all of the leading parties of Italy, and produced a state of rotting instability inside the Italian government institutions and nation.

They're now trying to do the same thing in Germany.

This guy Garzón in Spain is a part of the same process. So, this is an attempt by the people close to the British monarchy, particularly the Duke of Edinburgh, who is a sponsor of these things, to destabilize a whole series of countries.

Now, this must stop. Spain is targetted, obviously, as we see in recent developments, and Garzón is part of it. Spain is targetted for being destroyed, literally destroyed. Italy is targetted for being destroyed. Chile is a target of the same thing. This operation in Argentina, to try these former generals, part of the same thing.

This kind of operation, this Transparency International operation, should be shut down. It has to be shut down. And as President, despite Vice President Al Gore now, that Transparency operation will be kicked out of the U.S. government, out of U.S. policy and State Department policy.

Q: I have another question. How would you work with Mexico, Colombia, to reduce the drug trafficking? Let me tell you, 40% of the marijuana which is consumed here inside the country, is grown in the U.S.A.

LaRouche: Well, first of all, what I would do immediately, and I would encourage President Clinton to do it, though I think he's disposed in that direction--General McCaffrey is right, and those who oppose General McCaffrey are wrong. Now, I would do some things which go beyond what General McCaffrey has proposed, but I think he probably would be sympathetic to those things, too.

That the stability of the nation-state of Colombia, its integrity as a sovereign nation-state, its economic development--it has great riches, natural riches which can be developed to the benefit of people. It has one of the sites which might be the second Panama Canal site, linking the Caribbean to the Pacific in a sea level-type canal, which is needed by our West Coast ports, in order to enable our West Coast manufacturers to trade across the Pacific efficiently.

So that the general policy is, I want a partnership with the sovereign nation-states with these parts of the world. I believe the United States therefore has to act to protect their sovereignty. The drug problem can be eliminated. We dealt with it in Peru. I was privy to what was done in Peru. I know how it can be handled. It can be handled in Colombia, and it has to be handled.

Drug-trafficking is an international crime. And this criminality can not be condoned, it has to be shut down. And I think McCaffrey represents the right first step.

Q: This is Hrant Khachatrian, from the Armenian Parliament [and a weekly newspaper of Armenia]. Mr. LaRouche, you know that there is a cease-fire between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 1994, without any peacekeeping forces from outside. But we guess that NATO's goal is to use the situation, to put its military troops into the Transcaucasus. Hrant Khachatrian What's your point of view on this situation?

LaRouche: Well obviously, this has to stop. Under no circumstances should NATO forces be put into Transcaucasia. They can accomplish no good, and they can only make an explosive situation. There is no need to have them there, they can accomplish no good, they shouldn't be there.

This--the agreement, which would involve the understanding between Azerbaijan and Armenia on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, was a working issue, a working factor in stability, and what I'm concerned about, is to get a Middle East peace generally, to hope to link that Middle East peace up to an Iran agreement, and to establish agreements also affecting Iran and Azerbaijan, and to try to create, in that set-up, a context in which we can increase the degree of stabilization in the entire area extending around the Caspian Sea.

That's my policy. Other people on the scene have more understanding of this than I do, but that's my general policy on this issue.

Q: Gladstone Holder from Barbados. Mr. LaRouche, how can you overcome the stranglehold of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and the media on the U.S. Presidential elections?

LaRouche: Well, very simply. It's not me that can do it--only in a catalytic way. My function right now, apart from stating policies, is to catalyze into being, the kind of coalition Gladstone Holder among the voters themselves, which can change this.

That when I look at the United States, and see that 80% of the population, the lower-income brackets, are virtually unrepresented in government, or in the political parties, my advice to them is get together, shake the hand of your neighbor, whether you're African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, labor, senior citizens and farmers, or so on; shake the hand of your neighbor, and agree that you have a common interest which overrides any passion about a special interest.

So put the common interest first, and find the special interests--the solution--within the common interest. If you do that, then the voters of the United States can overwhelm, under our system of government, any combination of press or Wall Street power, which may be presently dominant. And that's the only way to do it. Otherwise, you're going to have a bloody revolution, or worse. Who knows?

But my view is, if the American people will realize, when they see the crisis the way it's coming down, that they've got to put aside their little, special petty interests--and I'm talking about petty personal interests--and even special interests which are legitimate, and subordinate them to the fact that we must have unity among the majority of the citizens, on the primary issues of the general welfare.

If we have that, those citizens can march into the polls, and they can do what they have to do. If that citizenry is aroused, as it's been aroused before in our national history, first to establish our republic, and to defend it, if that's aroused, nothing can control this--the United States, from outside.

We have the power. We have no need to submit. And if we get that kind of conception back into government--of the general welfare--our relations with other countries will be what will make other countries happy.

Q: Mr. LaRouche, even if that 80% unites, why should they unite and vote for you?

LaRouche: Because they have no other choice right now, that's why. They have nothing--They have two dummies as front-runners. I mean, even Detroit's auto-testing program wouldn't take such dummies in. And we're running 'em for President! You have Bradley, who I think is a decent guy, and I'm very glad that he's in the race, because he at least enables people to escape from the embraces of Al Gore. But so far, he's presented a minestrone of particular issues, and has not addressed any of the fundamental issues which will deal with the policy.

Looking around the spectrum, from Buchanan and others outside this--the independent candidates--I see nothing. There's nothing. There's no one who is running for President, who has an understanding of the problems, and who is prepared to address them. Most of the issues which are going to decide the fate of humanity during the year 2000, they haven't even addressed.

Q: [Question submitted by Hardev Kaur, Editor-at-Large for Malaysia's leading press conglomerate, New Straits Times Press, Inc.] Mr. LaRouche, how can the United States set conditions that its agricultural subsidies should not be questioned at the World Trade Organization, and yet ask to raise the European Union agricultural policy issues? Isn't this a double standard?

LaRouche: Of course it is. And it doesn't help the American farmers, either. If you want to find out what the American interests are in agriculture, one should interview the independent American farmer, who is being rendered biologically extinct, by the present agricultural policies of the U.S. government, particularly since the Carter administration, when things really began to get bad.

So the first thing to do on U.S. agricultural policy, is to restore a protectionist policy on U.S. agriculture, and encourage other countries to do the same. And then meet, in order to discover the ways we can cooperate, which enhance those protectionist policies of both of us, to our mutual advantage.

Q: From Sarajevo. My name is Stonyanov. I would like to ask Mr. LaRouche how he views the future of Bosnia. Today in daily newspapers in Bosnia, we are reading every day about the so-called stability pact. We are confused. My question is, what is the future of Bosnia and the future for the Balkan region?

LaRouche: What I would say, refer back to what President Clinton said, at the beginning, in San Francisco, during the course of the war in Yugoslavia. He presented a policy, which is not inconsistent with what I would consider the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. That there should be a non-recrimination, a general reconstruction of the entire area, the entire Balkan area.

Now, as we know, . . . a totally inadequate job was done, which I think is the President's opinion, also in the case of Bosnia. That what we have to do, is say, "All right, the entire area, which might be called the `economic underbelly of Europe,' this entire area has to be opened up for a general economic reconstruction--shall we call it, a New Marshall Plan for the entire region." Which was, I think, the tendency, the argument of President Clinton, prior to the very ending of the war with Yugoslavia.

Then, after he visited Albania, in a special visit there, he changed his policy, and then accepted the British policy, which is a policy of recrimination. As a result of that, the entire area has been plunged--with some modest exceptions, perhaps, in Croatia--into a disaster, an economic disaster.

The jamming-up of the Danube River is a threat to the entire area, including Romania, Slovakia, Austria. The entire potential for the dvelopment of Europe with the Rhine-Main-Danbue Canal connection, and the river connections reaching down into the former Yugoslavia, this entire area is being plunged into a disaster. This is a strategic disaster for this planet and for Europe as a whole.

And the United States should go back, in my view, pick up, re-adopt, what Clinton had proposed at San Francisco and immediately afterward, and say that that has to be the policy. My view, in my experience with people in Austria, Switzerland, elsewhere, is that they would endorse and welcome that new policy. The United States should do that.

Q: [Question submitted by Ramon Navaratnam, Malaysia.] Why has the United States government been dragging its feet in initiating countries' action for reforming the international financial architecture?

LaRouche: ...The problem here is that you have to understand the situation of President Clinton, and who he is. President Clinton is not me, and you Ramon Navaratnam may know something about--more likely to take action on the issue of principle, than on an issue of tactical judgment of the situation. The President--our President, is a great compromiser. He's faced with terrible pressures, he's isolated, largely isolated in his own administration by people who have turned against him and knifed him in the back. He's in a very weak and vulnerable position as President. He's still fighting for Middle East peace, for which I give him great credit. I think that's a good place for him to put his priority right at the moment.

But the man is not an economist. He does not really understand economics, I do. And therefore, if I'm stronger in the United States, through the course of this election campaign, then the President becomes automatically stronger politically in the United States, even though he may not fully agree with me, by virtue of the fact that his policies and mine are not incompatible.

And therefore, I think the practical answer is the more support I can get, the more I can help to cause my sitting President, now, to consider acting in ways he otherwise might not be courageous or willing enough to do. And I think that's the answer to the problem.

We know what happened--what Gore did in Malaysia. There's a big part of the apparatus in the State Department which has that policy, the same policy that Gore had in his spitting contest, like a spitting cobra against the Prime Minister of the country, one of the most indecent, stupid, thuggish acts I've ever seen in diplomacy. He makes even Hitler's ambassadors look like almost civilized people, compared.

This is the problem. And to face that problem in his own government, typified by Al Gore, and other pressures from England and elsewhere, the President has shown weakness. I would hope that by my adding my strength to tilt the balance in U.S. politics, that I would encourage the President of the United States to find more strength.