The Infrastructure Principle:
NAWAPA; Developing the Planet
[PDF version of this interview]
July 28—Lyndon LaRouche was the featured guest on LPAC-TV's Weekly Report today, hosted by John Hoefle; they were joined by EIR Counterintelligence Director Jeffrey Steinberg. A video of the dialogue can be found at: http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/15335
John Hoefle: Welcome to the LaRouche PAC Weekly Report for July 28, 2010.
Today's subject is infrastructure: the need for it, why it's important, and specifically, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA).
Lyndon LaRouche: The first thing you have got to do, is to drop the ordinary use of the term "infrastructure." Infrastructure, as used generally by economists and others, is not a competent term; it's diversionary.
For example, if you take the history of European civilization—European civilization began, essentially, as European civilization, even though forms existed before then, in the Mediterranean region, with the fall of the Persian Empire. At that point, the leading maritime power, took over from the land-based Persian Empire. And this created a new kind of system, in terms of power.
Because, what had happened is, that, while sea people are an old story in the history and pre-history of mankind, especially during the periods of the great glaciations, particularly the one that ended about 17,000 B.C., and gradually got down to about 400 feet higher water in about 4000-3000 B.C. And, during this period of glaciation, what had developed around the world—we are talking about hundreds of thousands of years—had been the development of interoceanic maritime systems, where people lived by virtue of flotillas of boats, which would fly, in a sense, together, across the oceans, according to the seasons and according to their inclinations.
And they would guide themselves from their point of origin, to their destination at long distance, by the stars. And these were the original mariners, the people who understood that the stars up there were not sprinklings on the heavens, not an accident, but a system. And the star system was the map, which you would use to go by sea long distances from one place to the other, by chosen destination.
These maritime people invaded the Mediterranean significantly, at the time that the oceans had risen up to about the present level. And they came in through the Strait of Gibraltar, and somewhat through crossing what we call the Suez area, but mainly there, and, since about 8000 B.C., had moved into what became the salt lake, which was the Black Sea.
So, these people then became supreme, in a sense, as controllers over the territory.
Now, there had been people living there, before, despite the glaciation, but they had been people who were not seagoers; therefore, they were ignorant of maritime culture, though there were some maritime cultures which had moved in already in different parts of the world, as in Central Asia.
These maritime people, in taking over this area of the Mediterranean, generally became what we would call today pirates, like the "Pirates of the Caribbean"—such as the Russian banks that operate out of the Caribbean! Right? So these pirate-type people, had established a domination, as a maritime culture, over the people who lived more inland. And, as a result of the Peloponnesian War, the pirates essentially took over.
A Maritime/Monetary Empire
And the pirates formed a group which became known eventually as an empire. And the first empire that was actually established after the death of Alexander the Great, which composed the Near East, Egypt, and Rome—these were the imperial powers, which fought each other, but dominated. They would establish a maritime system, which was essentially a monetary system: They would develop a control of prices of goods, by use of pirate power, or maritime power, to determine prices, what the exchange rate would be among the peoples who lived there, and among the maritime colonies themselves.
So that became the dominant system from that time on, about 400-500 B.C., and settled into the dominant system of what became known as an "empire." This empire was then consolidated in the time of the Roman emperors after the death of Caesar; it was consolidated as the Roman Empire.
Now, the Roman Empire did form what we call a "government," but it was really an empire. It was not a kingdom, it was not a government of a people, of a language-group, and so forth. They had an artificial language which they invented, called Latin, and some Greek was allowed, because they could not get rid of the Greeks that fast. They tried, and they did not quite succeed.
In any case, since that time we have had an empire. And therefore, economy, as it developed from that point on—there were similar phenomena in other parts of the world, but this is the one that is dominant today. The one we are considering, is the European, or the Mediterranean model, which became known as the European model of economy. And this is imperialism.
Now, we had the emergence against empires, such as the effort of Charlemagne, and so forth, at various times, to form nations, which were kingdoms, which would be independent of the overrule by an empire. But the characteristic of this system, up to the time of Charlemagne, was the maritime economy as such, the control of all economy by maritime power, by these pirates who became the rulers—that is, like the Venetians later. From about 1000 A.D., the Venetians did the same thing.
And the Venetian system actually rules the world today, even though the Venetians are not as prominent as they once were, but what we talk about as the British Empire is actually a Venetian empire. You have a difference between the United Kingdom, as a kingdom, which is essentially a nation-state, but that is not the empire; the empire happens to be headquartered in London, but it is the empire, not the kingdom, that reigns. I do not think the poor British people know what is happening to them.
But the point is, we are dealing with that kind of system.
Therefore, as a result of this, the systems of economy that have evolved around the world were based on monetary systems. Monetary systems do not define economic value: Quite the contrary. They tend to oppose economic value, that is, physical economic value. And so, what happened with Charlemagne was a step against this direction. Charlemagne made a change in the definition of the basis on which society is organized, from a maritime control, as such, where going inland was not efficient, so that the maritime areas dominated the world. Charlemagne erected a system of canals, which connected the great rivers, from the Spanish border, eastward. This became a new system, and you had an explosion in the potential population with Charlemagne. This was set back by the counterrevolution against Charlemagne afterward, but the system was started, and still exists today in Europe.
The Fight in the United States
Even when we founded what became the United States, our internal commerce and our development as a nation was based as a quasi-maritime state, based on the development of inland canals, using the rivers and supplementary canals. So we did the same thing that Charlemagne had pioneered in his time: We built a canal system.
Later, from about the 1820s on, we made a change in our system: We introduced the railroad. Now the prototypical railroad was the Reading Railroad, and this was to get coal, which was now a preferred fuel over charcoal, to get coal from the northern Pennsylvania areas, down the Reading Railroad, into Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia area. This resulted in the development of railroads, which were generally like the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which were oriented to getting the Ohio territory more fully developed and going in that direction.
But then, with these railroad systems, under the planned conception of the organization of the United States, under Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, we then moved to form a nation-state, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the Canadian to the Mexican borders. As a part of this process, we began to move railroads, even independently of river or canal-based systems, toward the result, which was launched under Lincoln, with the Transcontinental Railway system.
Our introduction of a Transcontinental Railway system changed the world economy. It changed the United States itself, very rapidly, over the latter part of the 19th Century. This was then imitated, beginning 1877, by Bismarck in Germany, and similarly, in Russia, with the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
This then, became a threat to the empire, the old Venetian empire, which was called the British Empire, by this time. So it was a fight, because the British Empire—it's not the English, it's the British Empire—knew that the development of a revolution in the German economy, which is what Bismarck did—Bismarck reformed the German economy, rapidly, to conform to the revolution which had been made in the United States. And that was too much for the British!
So, what they did, is, they moved to prepare to destroy the United States, Germany, and Russia, which they regarded as the major problems. And by killing a patriotic President, William McKinley, they brought in a skunk who had been Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, a completely British puppet. And Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were the worst fascists this nation had ever seen. And their tradition is still that today. You want a Republican fascist, you go to Teddy Roosevelt. You want a Democratic fascist, you go to Woodrow Wilson. There's your model.
And this continued until Franklin Roosevelt was elected President!
So, you had a period, from the assassination of McKinley, in 1901, and the inauguration of Roosevelt in 1933, which is almost a terra incognita for our republic.
So, Roosevelt made a revolution. And among the most significant parts of the revolution he made, was the TVA. The TVA took a virtual swampland, of poor folk, and transformed it into one of the greatest engineering miracles on this planet. This is where we relied for some of our nuclear capabilities in World War II, so you can see, this is no slouch: Here we are, within less than a decade, we have transformed a part of the United States! We also did something on the West Coast, the Northwest, and so forth.
So, now we had the American economy. Truman was not happy. Because, his friend Churchill was very unhappy: They were not going to tolerate what Roosevelt was going to continue.
In the meantime, we, in the United States, with the Parsons Engineering Company on the West Coast [in 1964], developed what they considered a model for the United States, and for Canada, and Mexico: And that was, to organize a territory which Teddy Roosevelt had banned from development: the area from the 20-inch rainfall line, across the prairies, up to the coastal mountain ranges on the Pacific—which is very much like this present bum we call President—to keep the United States backward: "You do not develop this territory. You do not develop this area."
Today, for example, we drain the water underneath the sands. We do not get surface water development; we are gradually destroying the Western agricultural lands. There is no development.
The Parsons Company had an idea, which was very well developed, which was this idea of NAWAPA: the North American Water and Power Alliance. This was fully developed, but then, the Truman types, and similar mentalities, said, "No." This remained an active proposal up into the 1970s, still, but they said, "No."
As a result of that, we have now reached a situation, where, under Obama, who is a product of what happened to the United States, especially once Kennedy was successfully assassinated, which eliminated his policy. And the United States, which was never really successful after World War II, because the programs that were in place under Wall Street control never let us really—what we did is, we used up a lot of our potential. Just used it up, and we called that "prosperity." It's like the sultan who got down to the last wife. And now we are at the point where the sultan has lost the last wife, in economic terms. So now there's nothing left underneath us.
But at this point, we can do this.
The Principle of Infrastructure
Now, there is a principle involved here. It is a principle which very few economists living today, have ever begun to understand. I know some very intelligent economists will understand this immediately, but most people called accountants, particularly, accountants, have no understanding of this, whatsoever, because the accountants were created—the accounting profession of the United States, remember, was created by the Federal Reserve Act. Otherwise, it would not have existed. And the Federal income tax was created to fund the Federal Reserve Act.
Jeffrey Steinberg: Woodrow Wilson.
LaRouche: Learn your lesson, buddy! Go back to Hamilton's national banking, get rid of this Federal Reserve System.
The problem here, is, people think of industry as being based on some ingenuity of some entrepreneur. Bunk! It can't happen! Because the ability of mankind, to develop technologies, what we call productive technologies, agriculture and industry, depends upon the development of infrastructure, as properly defined. And infrastructure is typified by a shift from a maritime system, where the internal land area is poorly developed, and not developable, because of its poor development, mainly because of water, or similar kinds of things; so we go from a maritime system, which is the dominant system of the world up until Charlemagne. Charlemagne introduces a revolution: He introduces the first nation-state in France, under him. After his death, that collapsed. It collapsed partly because Byzantium did it—they were out to kill him all the way around. So that lagged on.
We finally completed Charlemagne's design for a system, in Germany, in the 1990s!
Steinberg: A thousand years!
LaRouche: All right, so then, you have the system of development of riparian systems, based on canal systems. This meant that the population could now live inland, because you had efficient means of communication and transport of freight along the water systems, the canals and river systems, which meant there was an explosion in population, because of the ability to increase the productive powers of labor.
The next stage really came with the railroad. The development of the railroad was a revolution in economy, and required a lot of other developments, of industries and so forth, which were necessary. This is the platform on which the development of the United States, from 1861 on, depended.
So, it was not the invention of industry, it was not "Yankee ingenuity," as such, individualism, that did it. It was government! When the national government, or international governments agree on developing a certain kind of infrastructure, typified by a maritime system, a riparian system, a railway system, and now, what we are moving into with a nuclear power—nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion system. These are the platforms on which the possibility of increasing the productive powers of labor, rest. It is not the ingenuity of the entrepreneur. Yes, the ingenuity of the entrepreneur is possible. But you can not grow seed without soil: And the infrastructure has always been the soil.
Where are we headed now? Mankind, by mankind's natural instinct, is looking toward Mars. Anybody who is sentient, and really alive, is thinking about, how do we colonize Mars?
Now, there are a lot of problems there. For example, Mars has one-third the size of Earth. The gravitational field is shocking, it is a disgrace; and other problems exist there. Gravity is very poor, and you would kill people just trying to live on Mars, by virtue of loss of gravitation. Unless we can create artificial gravity.
That means we have to go from what we now know as an economic system, to a system which is based on the ability to develop Mars, as humanly habitable: an infrastructure question! To do that, we have to develop the Moon, because of the cost of getting there, by gravitational costs, getting from Earth to the Moon, is such, you have to develop industries on the Moon, in order to build the apparatus that allows you to go back and forth to Mars.
So the science, the engineering design, we transport to the Moon. We build large automatic factories on the Moon, which we can control now, by more and more of what we call automation. But we have to have some people go up there. We have a problem of an exposure to the loss of gravity. We still do not know how to effectively control that, especially for long-term purposes. For astronauts and other people, we make short-term efforts experimentally and otherwise to do this.
We are now going to a new platform, even if we are not going to get there in this century, or until the end of this century, even at the best. But we are going to have to have a platform, which says we can actually go to Mars and produce something there. Whether we are all going to go there, I doubt that—there is not room for us. It's only one-third the size of Earth anyway. But we have to create a platform, on which some people can operate for some time, in that area, and build largely automated systems for humanity's use.
And that is going to be a precedent for a later stage. These all depend upon the organization—all the way through this system, the fundamental vector of organization is increase of energy-flux density, as power available to people. It is not the number of calories you have.
For example, anyone who has any brains in science, would say, "cancel all these solar panels." They are a waste. They are worse than a waste, they are negative! Because, every area you cover with solar panels, is area you have cheated of chlorophyll. The great advantage of solar radiation, which is a very poor power source, very inefficient: It can not develop a modern society. Get rid of the solar panels! They cost too much, they never pay for themselves! Stop the windmills! You know, get Don Quixote to work on doing something useful: Stop the windmills!
Energy-Flux Density
Because what we need—power to produce, is expressed not in terms of calories. It is expressed in terms of what is called "energy-flux density," that is, the amount of power concentrated in a certain cross-sectional area of power transmission. Therefore, in order to go to develop, to take dirt and make dirt a usable material, you have to apply power. We are now past the point that we can maintain this planet on the basis of anything less than nuclear power. We can not go to space, and move people around beyond the Moon, and even that is difficult. You could not move many people there for a very long time. You have to get to thermonuclear power, to get to Mars. Otherwise, you can not really do it.
So therefore, we are going through stages. Start with the maritime system, the riparian system, and the agro-industrial system, successively, the nation-state system, where these depend, can only progress, by increasing the energy-flux density, whatever you use as the equivalent of fuel. And that is the only way we can survive.
So therefore, what we are doing, essentially, in the case of proposing NAWAPA, which was a program promoted largely by the Parsons Company, a construction firm, which is perfectly feasible. The design is complete: It covers Alaska, a certain part of Canada, and goes across the United States, down into northern Mexico. It will save us, save our lands—which are sinking, in the Western states, from the drainage of deep wells, exhaustion of the water table—by not only conserving the water, but, if you apply the water to trees, especially trees, and leafy vegetables, in those areas, you have a high absorption—up to 10% of the solar radiation is captured by the trees, and converted into green!
So, when you turn these desert-like areas, or arid areas, or perennially arid, into areas which are growing green, especially trees, and leafy vegetables, and things like that, then, what you are doing is, you are creating a new water system, a new vapor system, atmospheric water system. So, you are going to get rains, rains, rains: It is going to be the same water, lifted up by exhalation from plants, and then it comes down as rain. Then it fertilizes, as it waters more plants, which goes down as a rain.
So now, you have increased the rainfall rate across the mainland of North America, without actually increasing equally the amount of water we require. Because you are getting the water used a number of times by the weather system which you have created by growing trees and so forth; to do this process, you have to organize the process to happen: You have to have the irrigation systems, the other kinds of systems which will allow you to use the water you are saving to pump into this system, this weather system, and that is the way we can improve.
This same thing will have to be done by mankind, throughout Eurasia. The same thing will have to be done in Africa. The same kind of approach. What Africa needs, is, largely, not industries: Africa needs, first of all, infrastructure. It needs high-speed railway systems. It needs high energy-flux density power systems. With these weapons of infrastructure, and the organization of the water system in Africa, you can solve the problem of Africa. Similarly, in Asia.
So therefore, our job is to change the planetary system, in ways which coincide with this ingenious scheme, which is modeled on the TVA: The TVA risen to a higher order of magnitude is the NAWAPA. And NAWAPA is the model which connects us to a Bering Strait railroad, to Asia, and through a Darien Gap connection into South America, we unite the continents of South America, North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa, into one system of transportation, based on nuclear and thermonuclear power development, and based on turning the deserts of the world into green! Which means, we are cycling the water of the Pacific and Atlantic and other oceans, back into the land, and back into the sea, in the way it should be done.
So, one has to look at this thing, in these terms.
Obama Out; Glass-Steagall In!
Everything this current President is doing, is wrong, it is criminally wrong! So therefore, nothing is going to happen to save the United States from a long Dark Age, or Europe either, or the world at large, unless this President is removed! Now!! Because, the zero-point of chain-reaction collapse is approaching during the mid-Summer into the Fall. The exact dates are not sure, but it's there, it's coming. The storm is here, the conditions exist, the explosion will occur
Get this guy out. Once you get this guy out, the first thing you do is Glass-Steagall. With Glass-Steagall, we cancel all obligations to these crazy banks. We have a system of banks we protect, which are the sovereign banks, essentially, of the mercantile banks, under Glass-Steagall. Now the government is free to utter credit, against its own future ability to pay. We utter that credit; we use our mercantile banking system, which we are supporting, as reformed; we use that to fund large-scale projects of the infrastructure type, which will lead to the rebirth of industry and agriculture.
We have hundreds of thousands of people with engineering and related skills, who are now unemployed, largely to the credit of George W. Bush and, worst of all, this stinking President! If you do not get this guy out of the Presidency, kiss the United States good-bye, because you will not have much time to do it in! This is your last chance, if you don't want to kiss the nation good-bye.
So, this is what has to be our conception. We have to go back to the conception of the United States.
What was the idea on which we were built? We were built because Europe had failed. And people came from Europe, and came to this territory, the United States, where they had a harbor in which to show what they could do. And we developed a system of government, which has no equal in the world, in terms of the Constitutional design of our system of government, when it functions. And we have seen that every decent President we have had, has caused it to function, and every bum we have elected, has ruined us! And the worst of all the bums of the United States, and the outright traitors, the worst of them all, is Barack Obama. And 80% of the population wants him out—if not 90%.
So, let's throw him out. And in the process of throwing him out, we launch Glass-Steagall again, the original Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law, exactly! Just re-launch it. None of this funny stuff, these adjustments and that stuff, put that aside.
That will enable us, under a decent Federal government which thinks like, well, even Kennedy, and thinks like Lincoln did, and thinks like John Quincy Adams did, thinks like Hamilton did; we have the ability, the knowledge, built into our system of government, our Constitutional system, which has no equal in the world. You just have to learn: You have got to get a President, and a Congress, to match that quality of that Constitution! Or, at least come up close to it, proximate to it, so it's on a kissing basis, you know.
And that is what this is about. It is not about some scheme, some gimmick, a little thing we are going to do: It means we are going to take the vast legions of unemployed, skilled people, from places like the state of Washington, California, and so forth, and we are going to take those people who are highly skilled, who have engineering skills and related skills, scientific skills, who are now unemployed, and we are going to take some hundreds of thousands of those people, and we are going to employ them, in building up this system, in one of the large territorial areas of the world, which is largely, more or less, unused land, or wasteland. We are going to take that, and transform that part of the world! And it's going to be the TVA, with its miraculous effects within a decade, all over again, but on a grand scale.
And it is going to mean that, with an international agreement with Russia, China, India, and other countries, and hopefully, Germany very soon, will join together, with Japan, South Korea, and so forth, in doing the same thing, extending this on a global scale; and the thing that will define that, is our commitment to doing this in the United States, with Canada's cooperation and with Mexico's cooperation—they need it, as much as we do! With that, we can then extend this to Asia, as a direct system, and we can extend it to Africa. And those objectives will be sufficient, to give humanity something good, in the good news, for the rest of this century.
And by the end of this century, we should have reached Mars, with all the problems that have to be solved in between: Three generations, plus, between now and then, to reach Mars, and perhaps a bit earlier, and then go on to the next big chore. This means, essentially, three generations of those about to be born in this century, who are going to come out of the status of being dumped as bums, or worse than bums, and educated and inspired, that their children will not be bums. Their children will be something they can be proud of. And their grandchildren will be something better! And by the time those grandchildren are properly trained, and come along to maturity, we will then have the capability to complete this job, for this century!
And I will leave what we should do with the next century, to the people who are in the last generation of this century.
That is the concept, not some gimmicky thing. Yes, there are gimmicks, there are details and so forth. But you can not understand the program, or the mission, or why it is absolutely necessary, unless you get to the historical concept, a rethinking, redefining the meaning of mankind. Mankind is the great blessing of all known Creation, but it has to be used properly. It has to be given the mission for its time, for its generations, a span of at least four generations, maybe eight, looking ahead, a mission which accords with man's given nature.
It is not a gimmick: It is doing what our Constitution implies, what the intention behind our Constitution implies, and we should become something that we can once again be proud of.
A National Mission
Hoefle: We have vast areas of the world, that are really undeveloped at this point, and this is the way in which we can open them up for development. And then you increase the productivity of the whole world. You raise the standards of living, you get humanity back on a growth pattern, instead of this pattern of collapse that we are in right now. So it is absolutely essential: You provide the water, the power, the transportation grids, and you just open the whole thing up.
LaRouche: One other thing has to be considered. The important thing now, is to get this message clearly delivered to the people, and there are some facts which should be asserted here, for people to reflect upon in this connection:
To those people who have scientific or related technological skills, who are out there, unemployed, and their families, we can give them what they want! What they need! To those who have lesser skills, but who depend upon those with more skills to help create the jobs, and the incomes, and the support they need, we have to get the population mobilized now, in the conception that it is a mission for this nation, a mission which should be shared by the world, each for its own part, and that our cooperation around this mission, can get us out of this mess.
And the point is, that 80% of our adult population recognizes this President is no damn good, and the Congress is mainly expendable, because of the treasonous role they played, under, first the two Bush administrations, and now this, this tragedy. The main thing is, you have got people who are scared and demoralized, terrified and demoralized, full of hatefulness, wondering who did this to them. How could this happen to them? How could this monster, this evil creature, this Obama, have come into the Presidency? And why do we still have him there?
These American people who are enraged against these members of Congress who are complicit with Obama; who are enraged, and appalled, by the very fact that this thing could exist, this Presidency, this Hitler-like Presidency—has Hitler's policies, mass murder! The death care, these kinds of things! Throw this guy out!
And throw him out on a positive basis: Put him in a place where he is protected, and he is protected against himself, above all. And let us turn the American people loose, with a job which is well-defined, was well-defined in principle by the Parsons company, and by the people who supported that policy. It is implicitly the policy behind the TVA, but in an expanded way. And it is a policy which, in an aching world today, if the United States initiates it, will be easily grabbed up as a shared policy of other nations.
The main thing is to mobilize the awareness of the American people, that there is a solution, there is positive action, which they can participate in taking, that fits with the design of our Constitution, and get it going now, before more people die of Obamaism.
Steinberg: There are 33 states that would immediately be put back to work with this NAWAPA project. It is the kind of thing, where, as you say, the engineering design has been developed, updated, and there is work that could be going on simultaneously, and it obviously intersects the situation both in northern Mexico, where you have had the spread of the Great Desert, a loss of agricultural production; you have got people being kicked out of the United States, back across the border into Mexico, where there's now a crying need for this kind of project to create jobs. It has obvious implications, because we are talking about work being done in Alaska, in the northwest of Canada, to develop dams and channels, and canals, to capture this water flow; new energy systems.
It obviously also poses a great opportunity for a young generation, kids in their teens and in their early 20s, who have been deprived of any participation in a growing real economy, to educate them, and prepare them to take leadership, when, right now, they have got none of the skills required to take charge, mid-way through this coming century.
LaRouche: You know what it would take? Glass-Steagall: Cancel the bailout! And take the money, the obligations we have cancelled as illegitimate because they are part of the bailout, that same amount of credit recaptured under the control of the U.S. government will be enough to finance the entire launching of the recovery.
Steinberg: I think Neil Barofsky, in testimony last year at the Senate, said that the commitments that have been made, plus the money already doled out, to bail out these banks that engaged in criminal conspiracy, reached $23.7 trillion. So even that is orders of magnitude beyond what you would need to get this NAWAPA project going.
LaRouche: Well, it is not just the NAWAPA project: You are going to have to do a lot of supplementary work. The NAWAPA project will be the keystone.
For example: We lost the engineering capability of the auto industry; we are losing the capability of the aircraft industry. And we are losing the capabilities which are represented by NASA, which has been drained down over decades already. Now, we want science-drivers of all kinds. The NAWAPA project itself requires additional science-drivers. We will have to take care of people who are shattered; we have to repair a health-care system to make it correspond to the Glass-Steagall system. We have to cancel all the changes from Glass-Steagall, which were done before then, because they are just bloodsucking by insurance companies, or so-called insurance companies. AIG is a perfect example of the typical bloodsucker.
And the British monarchy is not going to be happy—so, who cares? It's their time to take it in the barrel, right?
Steinberg: Right, the shrinking Queen.
LaRouche: Right, the shrinking Queen.
So therefore, you need a shock-effect: You have got to put people back to work! You have got to get the communities functioning. You have got to get the municipalities functioning. And they can not do it. Our Constitution does not let them do that. We have to give them aid. And only the Federal government has the lawful authority to give them the aid. So we have to restore our state and municipal systems! Which means that even if the area is not really a great bonanza for the future, we have got to maintain it. And only by maintaining people who do not really have the opportunity of more useful occupations, in those communities, we are creating the foundation, the platform, in which something like the NAWAPA project and its implications can take off.
And the way you have to build up, you have to build up the science-driver, and we have, in NASA, we have the core of the science-driver we need. Everything is there, and the most advanced research we need to get to the next century is all there. So this amount—we wasted, since Sept. 1, of 2007, when I had put up the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of that year: That act would have saved us all this nonsense.
Steinberg: Right. That $23.7 trillion in bailout of the banks and these other entities all occurred as the alternative to your HBPA, in that two- to three-year period.
LaRouche: Right, and Barney Frank is the chief culprit. I mean, he is sort of the Artful Dodger of that particular crime syndicate.
Steinberg: Right, right, exactly. He bragged at the time, he was the guy who killed the HBPA in the House of Representatives.
LaRouche: And then denied he did it!
The Apollo Program
Steinberg: Lyn, you have talked a number of times about the turning-point factor: first, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and the advent of Truman, but also the assassination of John Kennedy. And you have talked about his confrontation with the steel barons and Wall Street, and his decision not to go into a prolonged war in Indo-China, no ground war in Asia. But it strikes me that the third factor, was his commitment to the Apollo program, to the science-driver to lead the entire U.S. economy, into this extraterrestrial mission.
LaRouche: If you are older, as I am, you remember the run-up to the election of Kennedy. And the run-up, which I had a little participation in, at one time, was Eleanor Roosevelt: Eleanor Roosevelt's backing, and sort of retooling of the mind of the future President, was a key factor in this.
So, you have to take the various sides of Kennedy, and whatever was wrong with his father and so forth—that, no, he actually did serve a purpose. Now, you do not have to ask deep questions about what was going on in his sex life, or things like that. Just forget that question. Some of these guys from Boston do have certain ideas about "entertainment," which I do not share!
But his commitment, and his performance in commitment as President, was increasingly improved, as he approached the time when these swine killed him—and it was not Lee Harvey Oswald, it was some other guys, who came from Spain. And came over to do the job, across the border from Mexico, and they walked over the border the other way, once he was dead, while people were still trying to pick up the pieces. But he was killed because he was in the way.
He was in the way of this policy, which we have been drifting into ever since. The first step was the Vietnam War. That is what he tried to prevent, and Douglas MacArthur tried to prevent, among others. And he was right! And he was stubborn! And they hated him—so they killed him! And it was not Lee Harvey Oswald.
So, to assess that, you have to take the good side of what he did do as President, in a commitment which he expressed by his association with Eleanor Roosevelt at that time: that he was going to continue the image of her husband. And he did! I mean, to every outstanding fact we know, whatever private indiscretions he may have been involved in otherwise. And I think private indiscretions are pretty much run amok today.
Therefore, that is the way to look at it. Because you had Presidents who were not the greatest geniuses we ever had, but who were, nonetheless, honest Presidents, and had a commitment to the benefit of the nation; and you had real bums, who, suddenly, would get money from Wall Street for their elections campaigns. Or from Britain; same thing.
And that is where the problem lies. And what happens is, our people, at the same time, were conditioned, particularly by the reign of terror which Truman unleashed on behalf of Churchill, you know, what we called the Red Scare, the rage, that was unleashed then, the terror. And it took the stuffing out of our people. It took the stuffing out of most of my own generation, who had been one thing, or had become one thing, in the course of fighting the war, and when I got back from service in 1946, Spring of '46, from overseas, the country had changed. The morals and morale of our people had, by and large, changed, and we no longer had the "get up and go" that we had had under Roosevelt.
And the problem today, is, we have a population which, because they despise what has happened to them, and what has happened to this country, they have the right instinct. They want Obama out! They want his policies out more than him! They hate his policies! Eighty percent of the population hates the President's policies! Eighty percent of the population wants Glass-Steagall in! Eighty percent of the population wants everything that Obama has proposed thrown out! On health care and everything else. So throw the bum out! It's easy to throw the bum out, if you know how to do it. You do not have to kill him. It's much more effective to throw him out, Nixon-style, and this guy is worse than Nixon, by far. And the hostility against what he represents is far worse than anything that Nixon ever experienced.
Throw him out! Why? Well, because he is a criminal. His policies are immoral. These are anti-Constitutional: Throw him out!
Steinberg: You know, as bad as the Congress has been, worse and worse over the last years, the only instance that I have seen, where you have had actual bipartisan consensus in both the House and the Senate, was to oppose Obama's efforts to completely dismantle NASA. It is the one area, where it was just so egregiously a crime against the nation, and against future generations, that you got some degree of sanity out of this bunch of cowards in Washington.
And you know, you take the Kennedy policy on infrastructure, and particularly, the Apollo program, and you look at Obama, and you see that he is basically out to systematically dismantle everything that was represented by the best of our handful of Presidents who were great.
LaRouche: He does not have the intention. He just takes the intention the British give him.
Failed Personalities
Steinberg: Yes, exactly. Whose desire is to destroy the U.S.
LaRouche: You have to understand—you take the comparable cases. I should say, again, and it is no exaggeration in what I am saying, that to understand Obama, as I exposed him on April 11 of 2009, as I exposed him! This guy is in the footsteps of the Emperor Nero; he has exactly the psychological profile of the Emperor Nero. He also has the exact profile of Adolf Hitler. Hitler, Obama, and Nero, are classed psychologically as "failed personalities." That is, they have no moral structure of the type you would expect of a sane, healthy human being. They are just completely opportunists. And all of them came into power, not because they had talent, but because they were put in power. And when they were put in power, they had no understanding, no mission-orientation for the good of their people of their nation. Therefore, they degenerated, because everything they did, was, by instinct, an egoistical affront to reality.
In other words, the inferior person, the failed personality, hates everything in society that works. The very fact that there is something that will work, he will try to destroy it, to build up his own ego, because his basic emotion is that he has a sense of worthlessness in himself. And in Obama's case it's obvious: If you know his family history, his relationship to his father and mother, you see all these kinds of preconditions for a failed personality!
He has no sense of inner worth! He desires to have a feeling, an optimistic feeling or an egoistic feeling, which compensates for his lack of sense of worth. Therefore, something that is good, is considered as a threat to his reputation in his own mind. Therefore, he must knock down the people he hates, who are the people who are not worthless, the people who are not failed. And that is what Nero did. And Nero, by doing this, destroyed Rome, the greatest mass killing of a population in Rome of any emperor.
And then you take Hitler: Hitler was picked and trained by the British, a total failed personality. A mentally deranged Austrian painter, with delusions of grandeur. And with all these people in Germany who were suffering this sense of failure, under the occupation power of the Versailles conditionalities, this mood of a sense of personal and national failure, was used by the British—and it was the British, including the Wall Street gang who is part of the same thing—who put him into power. This animal did exactly what Nero had done before him! He reacted to everything in society that was good, by degrading it, and proclaiming himself to be the alternative.
These mass rallies, these Nuremberg rallies, a perfect example of that. You should see these things! Just look at them in the films, look at the evidence! And you have got the same thing with Obama. Obama is not only a failure. He is a failure because systemically, he is a failed personality, and anything that seems to be good, anything that is appreciated, anything that is considered successful, is his rival, whom he must destroy! The health-care system, kill old people! Accelerate deaths! Create vast machines for putting people to die, systematically, because you consider them too old, or vulnerable!
And this guy is a monster! There is nothing in his character that is any better than the character, as a psychological characteristic, of Adolf Hitler and Nero.
Now, there are lots of other people loose in the world, who still have this same kind of problem, what you call a failure, or a failed personality. But when you put one of these guys into a great position of power, under conditions of crisis, you are inviting trouble of this type.
We have to recognize, and you know, you had some people who are psychologists who have talked about this failed personality problem going into the Presidency, and they were afraid to touch it. That was a mistake: This failed personality problem has to be recognized in the process of selection of high-ranking officials, especially Presidents. You can not have a failed personality in the U.S. Presidency. And this guy has to be thrown out, because not only is he a failed personality—you have to say that, because it is a fact—but you have to say: "The problem of this failed personality is that he has done the following, the following, the following, the following, the following criminal acts, which violate our Constitution! So, throw him out!" Nixon was a genius and a charmer, compared to this bum! And he should be thrown out quicker and further!
Steinberg: It does not require a prolonged process.
LaRouche: I think we should stock him in the basement of Buckingham Palace. Where he can be under his overlord!
Hoefle: You know, you described this Hitler-like personality, and people look at this, and they say, "Okay, we have not really gone quite that far."
Well, do you really want to wait, for the proof? Because that is where we are headed!
LaRouche: Look at the health-care policy. And look at the addition, now. Look at what this bum has done: This bum is exactly that. You know, when you have a failed personality of that type, you can map, even years in advance, where he is going to go under conditions of crisis around him.
Steinberg: Well, it's no secret: He's got this "Catfood Commission" whose findings are going to come out in November. If he is still in office, they are going to go for imposing worse-than-Schachtian economics, murderous policies on the U.S. When a member of the House, [Rep. David] Obey, tried to introduce into the supplemental budget for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a measure to re-hire teachers, the White House response was, "We are going to remove that, and we are going to take money away from the food stamps program," which is the last, desperate gasp that some people have to keep food on their plates, because there's no jobs! That is typical!
LaRouche: That is your failed personality.
Steinberg: Exactly.
LaRouche: The guy has to be thrown out.
We Are at a Breaking Point
Now, look: There is no time: We are at a break point. And I am not sure that this nation would survive past November, with this guy as President. He has got to go, this month. Or the determination has to be made to get him on the way out, this month! And make it clear, he is on the way out! The first thing is to make it clear openly! And any Democratic official, who does not say that he is prepared to throw the bum out, has got something wrong with him! Maybe he's got a morals problem, or a brain problem.
But, no: He has got to be out! Because, I know that, as of this point, you throw this bum out, with this Geithner, who is this thieving Geithner—you throw him out! And you just keep the people in the Presidency who are there now, in the institution of the Presidency, who are the normal people, the types who have been there before.
You can reasonably get, with the support of the American people, with an election campaign, a Fall election campaign coming up, and the primaries already coming up—under those conditions you can get a turn-about in policy, of the kind needed. Because the clamor for jobs out there, and the clamor against the collapse of the states of the United States, is such, that immediate action is needed. None of that action will ever occur, as long as Obama remains President! Unless he is being carried out the door.
So therefore, we must do that now! And any candidate for office, who is not prepared to throw Obama out now!—not next November-now!—has betrayed this nation, and should not be elected. Should not be elected as a candidate, to be a candidate, should not be elected at all. Any politician, who will not meet that standard, should not be supported under any condition! And should be encouraged to be thrown out!
Hoefle: You have, if you look at the history of the United States, every time we adopt the American System, we have this great spurt of programs which carry us for generations. And then you have a counterattack by the Brutish Empire, and we sort of put the American System on hold, go with these British types, and we immediately start to collapse. You know, it's like putting the accelerator down, and then suddenly slamming on the brakes.
And now we have reached a period where we are under British control, where the economy is collapsing—the whole country is falling apart! It is disintegrating! And all the things that you just described are going on.
LaRouche: And the thing that causes these cycles is that, as our economy has progressed as a nation, the mean lifespan of capital improvements has increased. So now, you are talking about a 30-, 50-year lifespan for capital improvements, major ones. So therefore, what happens when you have a good President, for one or two terms? He will generally, with the aid of the Congress, will engender measures which are capital improvements. Now, capital improvements have a lifespan of, mean, 25, 50 years, somewhere in there. So therefore, you have a period of benefit.
But then, when the benefit wears out, and you got a bum who comes in, like this one, and the bum that preceded him, the Bush Leaguer—that is when you get this kind of problem. The economy collapses. Why? Because the long-term investments, are worn out, or wearing out, and therefore, you are not replacing them. And that is what happened.
Clinton was put through the wringer, and from 1998 on, he was put through the wringer. And therefore, his administration became less effective, because he was rendered less effective.
Then you have disaster: You have the most ignorant, least-qualified people imaginable—until Obama came on, that is the most unqualified, or something like that!
So that we are now in a cycle which is a long-term cycle caused by the Truman succession, where the general impetus for real progress, global progress, was gone. And now you went into a period, with the Kennedy assassination, with a ten-year war in Indo-China, drained us down, as a result of that. Then you had the destruction of the United States by the Carter Administration, which was actually—
Steinberg: Trilateral/CFR "controlled disintegration" policy.
LaRouche: Yes, exactly. And then you had, what happened to Clinton: Clinton got his popularity out of the failure of the George H.W. Bush Administration, I mean this guy was a real wimp—he was a nasty wimp, but in terms of accomplishments—
Steinberg: Son of Hitler's banker!
LaRouche: Yes, sure, that is why he was a wimp.
Then you get Clinton, who is enthusiastically received by the population, because he is probably the most intelligent person in the Presidency since Roosevelt, and the only rival he has for intelligence was John F. Kennedy, as President. All the others were weak characters. Of course, Eisenhower was what he was. But he was handicapped by what had happened before him. But Kennedy was an exceptionally good President, if they hadn't killed him, and Clinton was a good President, under terrible conditions.
But this past period, the past ten years—this is unbelievable incompetence! And this disease, this man who is President is not a person, he's a disease! His character as a human being is obscured by the fact that he's predominantly the disease! He is sort of the person who has infected the disease.
Steinberg: One of the most stunning pieces of evidence of that, plus this failed personality factor, is, here you have somebody touted as the first African-American President, reconstituting Jim Crow out of the White House, with this Shirley Sherrod affair, with the targetting of Charlie Rangel, one of the last FDR Democrats in the House, and people are absolutely stunned, that they were so bamboozled by this guy through the media machinery behind him and everything else!
LaRouche: They made the mistake of looking at so-called issues. And they took the issues which were largely dealt with by the press, the public press and media and so forth, and they were not thinking about the nation. They were thinking about appearances, they were thinking about gossip. They were thinking in terms of gossip, and they just did not pay attention. They did not pay attention.
They had no mission, they had no sense of mission. And the whole bunch of the Congress, with a few exceptions, are a really shameless bunch in performance. There was some good in the fight against the first administration of George W. Bush. It tailed off in the second administration—the guts were not there any more, from the beginning of it. And now, we have got this bum in there.
If we do not get him out, by some time very soon, kiss the world good-bye.
Mass Strike Phenomenon
Hoefle: But then, when we do, once we get him out, then that opens to door to go back to the American System, to go back to this infrastructure in the way that you have described it.
LaRouche: Not just that—you have got better! You have got the invisible factor: You have something which I understand, which very few people do understand, which is the mass-strike phenomenon. You have a mood, within the great majority of the adult citizens of this nation, who want this to happen! And only by desperate actions by this filthy President and his accomplices, is that President still in power!
You take this guy out, and what he represents, and the garbage will go with him! Like Larry Summers, the garbage will go! Geithner will go!
Hoefle: The whole behaviorist crowd.
LaRouche: Right! They are all gone! Because, then, when the conscience of the nation is aroused, with these 80% of the population: The adult population wants a change! Once they get rid of this guy, they are going to say, "We made a mistake, and they made a mistake." And they will now demand the policies they want to solve their problem, and the problem of the nation that they see with it!
What about the skilled engineers and scientists in California alone? Look at them in terms of the project, the NAWAPA project: Aren't they the people who are capable of being involved in setting that thing into motion?
Steinberg: Sure.
LaRouche: They are qualified. We have qualified people all over the country. We have the most qualified layer, which is a minority of the labor force, when they are put into motion, then a large part of the rest of the labor force gets a job, and gets a future! And you are going to have an explosion: If you get one step, on the damned brakes, when the damned President goes out, at that point, you will find that this nation will function in a revolutionary way: It will go back to being itself.
Hoefle: Well, the pendulum has been swinging back from this parasitic extreme, back towards the American System, and the Obama Administration is doing all it can do—you get this image of these idiots standing there, trying to hold the pendulum from swinging back as much as they can, but once they are gone—
LaRouche: See, the problem is, what I have to do, at my age, is not only because I have unique competence in this area, but because of the gutlessness of people, also combined with a lack of knowledge. So you have two problems out there, with people who wish to do good: They do not have the guts to do it, and they do not have the position from which to use those guts, and the people need them. And that is why it has to happen.
Those of us who do understand, who do have the guts to fight this thing—they are absolutely indispensable, not to become President, but to make this happen. There is a difference: John Quincy Adams was President for a short period of time, one term. But he was a Congressman for a long time after that. And what he did, as Secretary of State, as President, and as a Congressman afterward, until 1848—he transformed this nation, through his living initiative which was the flag-staff, which people surrounded and saluted. He got the thing in motion: He was the one who did the most, to craft the creation of this nation in its present form.
So it is not always the President that does these things. It is the citizen who does these things; and the citizen may be President, or not be President: But the citizen has the duty, if they have the guts and the knowledge to do it, to make sure that the things that must happen, do happen.
