LaRouche on Mexican Radio:
`This Will Be A Time for Ingenuity'

On Nov. 25, former U.S. Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed live for 40 minutes on Radio Mujer station, in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, which covers much of the northwest of Mexico. The interview was conducted by journalists Aracely Martínez and Francisco Pérez Díaz, and by two invited guests: Jaime Miranda, of the Permanent Forum of Agricultural Producers, and Alberto Vizcarra, northwest coordinator of the LaRouche-associated Ibero-American Solidarity Movement of Mexico. The full text of the exchange follows:

Q: Good afternoon. Our first question for you, Mr. LaRouche, is: What is your view of the current lack of definition of the electoral process in the United States, the battle that's going on in the courts, and what are the conditions that have led to this? There has always been the great myth of United States being a bastion of democracy, but now it seems to have collapsed. What is your view of this situation?

LaRouche: First of all, you can say in general, the truth has begun to become apparent to people around the world. When you look at the election, and the campaign which preceded it, especially since about early March of this year, this is a political and strategic catastrophe for the United States. Neither of the candidates is fit to be President. Neither was chosen on the basis of their ideas. They were chosen almost by appointment, and there was the greatest amount of money, mass media orchestration, and other technical manipulation of the election that we've seen in modern history in a Presidential campaign.

The voters who turned out were not voting for either candidate. They were voting against the other candidate. And so, what happened was that the machinery of money and electro-technology among equally strong forces, resulted in a really zero result.

For example, if you look at the Florida election count, the amount of vote being contested there is very small, compared to the vote that Al Gore stole from me, openly and directly, in one state, in Arkansas, in the primary campaign. And what makes it worse, is the present effort to try to determine the outcome of the election in the courts. This simply makes everything worse. The intelligent thing would be to simply let it go to the so-called Electoral College, which is the constitutional solution in the United States, and then solve any final problems in the Congress, which is what the Constitution provides for.

The problem here is worse than that. The problem is that we're in the worst financial collapse in all modern history. It's now over: The game is finished. The United States dollar will soon go through a terrible crisis. One can not say when or how, but it's going to be soon, and it's inevitable. The only way to avoid a catastrophe for the planet, is to re-create, that is reinvent, the world monetary system. This means that the leading governments, including that of the United States, hopefully, would meet in an emergency conference, to take over and reorganize the world monetary system. This means returning to the kind of international monetary agreements we had between 1945 and 1958, approximately.

It would also mean, that every central banking system in the world today is hopelessly bankrupt. Two things are essential. First of all, the governments must put the central banking systems through bankruptcy reorganization. Second, there must be agreements among nation-states, to set up a stable arrangement for dealing with the effects of this in international trade. Now this, of course, means a complete reversal of the trends of the past 35 years. This means the death of neo-liberalism, and going back to the ideas of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

So, this is a very difficult change, but if we don't make the change, then there's no hope for anything but the worst financial and economic catastrophe imaginable. And we have two Presidential candidates who couldn't even write a letter, and worse, wouldn't even know how to put a stamp on the letter. This is the crisis. The election crisis is not the real crisis; it's what stands behind the election crisis.

And the world should hope that the crisis hits before President Clinton leaves office, because he's the only person in sight who has the qualification of being a President under these circumstances. Actually, President Clinton is not qualified; I'm the only one who is qualified. As an American citizen, my job is to make sure that the President has access to my capabilities.

So, that's the situation as I see it.

Q: People are saying that the United States is a country in decadence. Why is that? You've addressed some of this, but I'd like to hear more of what you have to say on the subject.

LaRouche: Well, we've had many problems over the course of this century, since the assassination of President McKinley at the beginning of the last century. But the worst problem has developed in the period since the middle of the 1960s. What has happened, is that the political system of the United States has been taken over by a combination of the tradition of the Confederacy, in cooperation with, or in alliance with, New York bankers and the law firms associated with them. This is what Nixon called the "Southern Strategy." It dates from meetings that Nixon had in 1966 in the state of Mississippi, when Nixon met with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan.

And then, the Carter campaign carried this same policy, of an alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, in effect, into the Democratic Party machine. The result was, in 1982, the establishment of what was called "Project Democracy." So today, a combination of racism and bankers' dictatorship, is called "democracy," which has now become one of the chief political export products of the United States.

The important thing to remember, is that the United States is not this bunch of clowns. The United States, as it was founded by the American War of Independence, has, in all its good periods, been the natural ally of the emerging independent republics of Central and South America. The job of the United States is to be the bulwark of help and protection for the independence and sovereignty of these republics. That is the historic and immediate interest of the people and the nation of the United States. When the United States acts under Wall Street influence"like that crowd of filibusterers, from Polk through Buchanan, which has been a terror for our friends in the hemisphere"the United States is in the long run destroying its own strength.

So we've come to a great crisis, in which my object is to revive the kind of change in policy which Franklin Roosevelt conducted against the legacy of Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and so forth.

Q: Returning to the issue of the elections in the United States and the very, very close outcome: If President Clinton supposedly presided over such a long period of economic growth, wouldn't the Vice President have won the race easily? Perhaps there's a lack of real leadership in the U.S. The candidates don't seem to be liked by the population. What's happening? What is your forecast as to what the outcome of all this is going to be?

LaRouche: Well, there never has been prosperity in the United States since Nixon was President. You can juggle figures, and you know how this is done in every country. If you go back to 1982, and you look throughout the entire hemisphere, the conditions of the physical economy, the conditions of life of the population from the North Pole to the South Pole in this hemisphere, is worse than it was 20 years ago.

And the pressures on President Clinton, as some may have observed, have been horrible, and they've been getting worse as the years passed. The President has been crippled in his ability to make policy since 1994, at least. And since 1996, he's been totally enslaved to this idea of Gore running in 2000. So it's a mess; it has been a mess. This is not suddenly a mess, it has been a mess for some time.

The way I recommend to look at this problem, is not from inside the United States, but from the outside. The world has gone through a great, worsening crisis for 35 years. Nothing fundamental has been done to stop this degeneration. Now we face the greatest crisis in more than three centuries. The question is: Will we be shocked by the terrible conditions which are now erupting, and come back to our senses, to do the right thing?

Franklin Roosevelt dealt with a depression which was a result of the policies of his predecessors, all the way since 1901. From the time he became President in 1933, until he died in 1945, and until after the assassination of President Kennedy, the United States enjoyed a long wave"together with Western Europe"of recovery from the effects of the previous decade. Thirty-five years ago, there began a movement to wreck everything that Franklin Roosevelt had done. This, not just in the United States, but throughout most of the world.

The question is: Does the political consciousness and the political will exist, to go back to the lessons of Roosevelt's success from 1933 on? Yes, admittedly, this was not perfect, and people in Mexico will remember that this period was not perfect; but it was better than it is now, and we just have to go back to there, as a starting point for the improvements to be made down the line. Generally, in politics, you have to use known precedents that work, to achieve the necessary changes.

So, that's my estimate of the situation. I hope the crisis will wipe the slate clean of this catastrophe, and we can get something moving again.

Q: You've spoken about the repercussions there could be around the world, of developments in very powerful nations such as the United States, and its electoral crisis. Concretely, what might the consequences be for us, here in Mexico?

LaRouche: It would be a nightmare, an absolute Dark Age for Mexico, unless we can reverse this process. How much more can the people and territory of Mexico suffer, beyond what they have already suffered? Look at Mexico in 1982, at the time that De la Madrid was being elected President. Look at what has been done to Mexico by foreign powers since that time. What has been done to Mexico is a crime against humanity, and we just have to get a sense of that, because you have the same thing in Asia.

There was a meeting in Singapore in the past days, which is intending to break out of control of the dollar-denominated international system. The leading press of Germany, France, and England, have been describing the two candidates of the United States, accurately, as like comic-opera dictators of a banana republic. Look at South America, look at Africa. The world is aching to get rid of this oppression.

Very soon, you're going to have a crash of the U.S. dollar. The dollar could very rapidly drop to about 60%, or less, of its current international price. That would mean a run of financial assets out of the United States, into other parts of the world. This would mean that the United States would be cut off from outsourcing, from many parts of the world. It would mean a terrible crisis inside the United States, a social crisis.

This, in a sense, would cry for a change, and neither of the clowns who are supposedly candidates for President, has any qualification whatsoever for dealing with this problem. And countries in Europe and elsewhere are saying that about these two clowns, and they're right!

So, the time has come, when the United States is going to have to face reality, and go to its friends and neighbors around the world, to cooperate to get this planet out of this terrible crisis. The same thing that Franklin Roosevelt tried to do when he became President; the only difference today, is that it's more urgent now. So, in this sense, I'm somewhat optimistic, but I have no illusions about the situation. It's a very dangerous situation.

Q: Were Gore to win, would Mexico win or lose? What about with Bush? Or is it just going to be the same old policy?"although to some degree you've already answered that question.

LaRouche: Well, there is a slight difference, but it's very slight. Mexico is one of the few countries in the world that Bush knows exists, and of course, the Bush family is close to the [former President Carlos] Salinas crowd. But these are merely incidental differences. In the final analysis, one is as bad as the other.

So, the only hope we have, is that the crisis will cause a fundamental shift in U.S. policy, away from the policies of both of these guys. We have the preconditions for that. In the Senate, for example, the number of Democrats and Republicans is even. We're going into a bipartisan period right now, where neither one of these candidates is going to control the United States. Reality is advancing and will change the policies of the United States, in one way or the other. I don't know what way it will be. I can only try to see that it goes the way I think it should.

Q: Since 1982, Ibero-America seems to have run up a string of defeats in the face of IMF [International Monetary Fund] colonialist policies. The most recent of these, perhaps, was that of the [President Alberto] Fujimori government being overthrown in Peru, which had resisted many of these globalist policies. In the face of these defeats, how do we pull together a winning strategy? How do we go about doing this?

LaRouche: In this case, what you have to realize is that the system is coming down. And the system is not accurately characterized as neo-colonialist, although this term is popular. The Anglo-American policy since the beginning of the postwar period, since the British got Truman to drop the two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is to use the power of nuclear weapons to force nations to accept the idea of world government. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they've been running wild with that idea.

So what we're faced with today is, in a sense, a revival of an Anglo-American world empire, on the Roman Empire model. But the unfortunate thing for the Anglo-Americans is, that this empire has now reached the point that it's ready for a global collapse like Babylon, or the Persian Empire, or the Roman Empire before it.

This leads to two considerations: First of all, this is what is called a really revolutionary period, like we've never seen before. This is not a Romantic revolutionary period; this is the real ugly one. Second, it is impossible to save any economy unless we eliminate globalization and free trade. In a time when all money is essentially worthless, which is the condition we're converging on right now, only the modern form of sovereign nation-state can create the credit and the projects which will enable an economy to recover from the depths of depression.

So, the issue today is, can we reestablish the authority of the idea of the sovereign nation-state republic, and can we establish a system based on the mutual sovereignty of cooperating such republics? This is what John Quincy Adams, as U.S. Secretary of State, prescribed for the Americas"that is, a community of principle among the republics of the Americas. We need that on a global scale, as well as in the Americas. That is the revolution we must make, in any way we can. Otherwise, there are no solutions.

Q: Agricultural producers have been hurt very badly in Mexico, from years of criminal policies. We're perishing, the farms are disappearing, the producers have no profits. It's not only the economic policies which have been a disaster, but our governments have been a disaster. We, too, have had clowns here. What we need are patriots and patriotic governments. My question to you is, how do we save the Mexican economy, and Mexican producers?

And second, regarding the recent elections in Mexico: Vicente Fox was elected President, and he is naming his new cabinet. Some people have Satanized them, attacked them, for their links to the IMF and World Bank. How does this affect the economic situation under discussion?

LaRouche: Well, obviously, we're going to have to have a protectionist model in all countries, including in Mexico, which means that Mexico must have its own food supply. We have the experience to know how that can be done, but it requires state credit and state protection in order to do it. This means that a lot of the projects which have been planned years ago"just put them into effect and that can stabilize that.

I worry about present governments, including recently elected ones, because the world has been going in the wrong direction for a long time. But I smile, because anyone who thinks that what he thinks will happen now, will happen, is fooling himself. As the present world financial collapse hits with greater force, the most stubborn will of governments will bend, or will be forced to bend, to the reality of the world situation.

So what governments think they are going to do, and what they will be doing two months from now, are far different things. When they brag about what they're going to do, particularly when they are depending on a World Bank and IMF which are about to be bankrupted, I tell those governments to go back into the backrooms, discuss the matter, and prepare to change their policies. So, what most governments think they are going to do in the next six months, they will not be doing. They will be doing something very different.

There is no fixed policy that will work. Every policy will be crushed, as by an earthquake that is going to hit now. This will be a time for ingenuity, to invent entirely new policies opposite to many of those, which people are dedicated to at this time. If the bamboo does not bend, it will break.

Q: Thank you very much, and we hope to have another opportunity to interview you soon.