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This article appears in the July 20, 2012 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
THE DOOM OF THE LIBOR RATE:

The End of an Imperial System

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[PDF version of this article]

July 12, 2012


A one-time, virtual British puppet, France's late President Mitterrand, played a crucial role in destroying the economy of more than western and central Europe from a certain date, through to, in effect, the present time. The evidence continues to turn up. The original decision was made when Mitterrand, expressing a certain likeness to the intentions of Napoleon III, implicitly threatened all-out war against Germany, should Germany not submit to the status of becoming a puppet of what would become known as a "Euro" system under British supervision. The change which came to western and central continental Europe, occurred at a moment when the Soviet Union had entered a state of its collapse, during which what had been once East Germany was about to be unified with what was then "West Germany." France's President Mitterrand virtually threatened warfare against Germany, lest a free Germany be reunited.

The condition for peace set by a pack composed of Mitterrand, Britain's Margaret Thatcher, and U.S. President George H.W. Bush, was the elimination of Germany's sovereignty under what was thence to be known as "The Euro System:" the end of the sovereignty of the respective nations of continental western Europe. The present threat of the disintegration of Western and Central continental Europe, and, also, the British Isles, had actually begun in those moments.

Now, suddenly, the direction of events is changing again, at the present moment for the very much worse. An insightful, important current in the leadership of Britain, has proposed that Britain join together with the United States in a new, Glass-Steagall orientation of the trans-Atlantic region—and, clearly, much more besides. It was almost inevitable that many would react suspiciously to this news, as some of my own associates had done—temporarily, of course. Nonetheless, the general breakdown-crisis, as a spawn of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the trans-Atlantic fraud which is termed "The LIBOR rate," has lately been caught out by circles in both the United States, and Britain itself, and that by the tail at this moment. There are many uncertainties afoot at the moment; but, whatever happens, the present form of trans-Atlantic financial machinations, is at its present, actually mass murderous, and utterly very dirty end. All this was set into motion in about 2001: following the decadence introduced as the U.S. Gramm-Leach-Bliley hoax of November 12, 1999, the swindle which set the great trans-Atlantic LIBOR hoax into motion for its effort to destroy, among other targets, the United States of America.

The target-in-fact of Gramm-Leach-Bliley had already been the destruction of the United States; now, some leading circles in Britain have recognized that the destruction intended for the United States, was directed against Britain, too. The rush for remedies must now proceed accordingly.

I, for one, foresee the prospect of the turn to a "classical" Franklin Roosevelt remedy, that same original Glass Steagall law, which the Gramm-Leach-Bliley swindle had been created to destroy. This alternative is now the only sane alternative to the virtually utter doom of trans-Atlantic civilization as we have ever known it. Similarly, some leading circles in Britain now share the concern which I and others here have expressed.

At the best, or worst of the matter, the net effect of a successful rescue from the current swindle of U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, President Barack Obama, et al., will also be a sudden, and deep shrinkage in the surviving portion of that which passes for money in circulation. However, in fact, there is no necessity for increasing the suffering of the population; exactly the contrary. The needed credit for prosperity will be forthcoming

I explain.

Much too much of what has come to pass as nominally "money in circulation," has been turned into worse than worthless trash at a presently accelerating, hyper-inflationary rate. The hope of a happy alternative for such a situation, is to be located in what is to become recognized as a credit-system, rather than the intrinsic suffering of the many under a present continuation of a monetarist system.

Lest the discussion be entangled in exchanges of conflicting choices of the monetarist double-talk, better identified as "usury," let us examine the actual remedy for the monetarists' mess which our immediate opportunity has dumped upon us now. When you think about all that, the result may be a fear concerning what we might think, temporarily, will have become a loss; but, then, look back to the method by means of which President Franklin D. Roosevelt saved the United States from President Herbert Hoover's threat of an even worse depression than Hoover's victims had already suffered. The threat to the U.S. and Europe now, is far worse than anything which even Hoover's victims might have expected.


I.The Notion of Economic Value

To come directly to the point, the prevalent, might we say, "traditionally popular" notion of money, is associated with the widespread, misleading belief that money has an intrinsic value, in and of itself, as distinct from the value of use-in-process of currency by society. In reality: the required value is not that of money, but of its use as credit invested in the increase of the effectively physical wealth of society. Since the founding of the U.S. Federal Constitution, value must be defined, as our first U.S. Treasury Secretary demonstrated the point, in a productive process of change, change essentially in the physically-efficient increase of the per-capita, physical value, of what is produced in net excess of that which had been consumed by production. This indicates a necessarily short passage in time, as time is to be expressed in the process leading from the start of the cycle, towards some subsequent outcome which might be of usefulness to mankind. That function, expressed as a process, is the notion of credit.

Granted, the fact is that that principle of credit was violated, as under the two terms in office of the swindler and U.S. President Andrew Jackson, two terms which, inevitably, were concluded, necessarily, with a massive U.S. bankruptcy known as "the Panic of 1837," a "Panic" which had been organized by such as the agent and assassin Aaron Burr, and by Martin Van Buren, et al.

Hence, we speak of a credit-system as to be distinguished from a monetarist system. Essentially, we must recognize the systemic quality of that distinction of a monetarist system, from a credit system, as this was defined as a distinction of the American system which is to be recognized in the relatively successful role of the Pine Tree Shilling in use during the high-point of the economy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for as long it enjoyed sovereignty. Those citizens of Massachusetts had understood the meaning of their policy correctly; unfortunately, they lacked the degree of political authority to defend the truth of their cause, when faced with the ferociously hostile military force of a New Venetian Party commanded by William of Orange.

However, as true as those categories of observations would be, as a truthful argument to be made for the Massachusetts cause, while the argument is describable as "fair" and not untruthful, it does not go to the depth of simply defining an actually physically efficient principle. Truthful, is not necessarily "proven." Relevant currents of modern science, when properly applied, should do better.

The known history of living processes on record, since long before the times of human life, demonstrates, clearly, that the processes of life known to us from evidence gathered within this Solar system, are governed, in long-term direction, by a requirement that living processes are governed by a required increase of the relative energy-flux density given to the selections from among living processes generally, that done in terms of the leading extant species, such as mankind in man's role, a role which is to be defined characteristically in the use of fire as a standard measurement of the progress of our species' successful existence.

In other words, the standard for survival of a particular species from among all considered species, can be based usefully on a rule-of-thumb standard of increase of the rate of increase of energy-flux density of the leading species, and of the equivalent of cultures among species. This coincides exactly with the absolute distinction of the human species, as being, characteristically, and uniquely, a "fire-bringer."

This fact would have been readily triumphant in mankind's opinion-shaping, except for a factor identifiable as "the oligarchical principle." It has been the general rule among well-known levels of development of cultures, that the usually reigning human power known to us presently, this far, has been the so-called "oligarchical" stratum among individuals and parties, which has customarily considered itself to have been the ruling social categories' existential interest, a view intended to prevent any continued policy of practice among so-called "lower classes," which would promote the equivalent of increase in relative energy-flux density of a nation, or set of nations among what are broadly designated as "the lower social classes." Stupidity among the relatively poor and poorly educated, as the case of U.S. President Andrew Jackson's popularity, illustrates the point, is a standard objective of the reigning oligarchical classes and their "herders" of the "poorly bred."

That oligarchical principle, so broadly described, has the perhaps not so curious consequence, that the success of the reigning oligarchy in "putting down the poor or simply illiterate," has the lawful consequence of generating the recurring general collapses of what had once seemed to be the powerful and rich, as the case of the Roman Empire and its successors, each, illustrate the case.

To restate the crucial point to be made and emphasized: In the end of matters at hand, it is the universal self-interest of the members of the human species, to base the evolutionary development of society to promote the equivalent of the highest possible development of the noëtic potential of the virtual entirety of the human species, a standard which coincides with the relatively greatest rate of increase of effective energy-flux-density of society's direction of changes in practice, accordingly.

To restate the same point for special emphasis: it is not that the creative powers expressed by some persons in society, may, as in the exemplary case of Max Planck and Albert Einstein, be far ahead in cultural development with respect to other members of the same society. The problem associated with oligarchical rule, is that the practice of oligarchy makes even the entire society tend to become stupefied, culturally, from the top ranks, on down. It is relative stupidity, so regarded, which is the essential origin of the failures of oligarchical forms of social organization, whether the desired relative stupidity is induced by lack of education, fraudulent "sophisticated" education, or by relatively brutish or similarly backward forms of popular and other belief.

Thus, often, even usually, a nominally superior class, is also a version of some relatively more brutish class of a self-ruined society. In other words: "a society of the practical," rather than the thinkers.

Yet, we must not end the argument at this point. We must shift the emphasis of our attention to a higher level, in not only our Solar system, but within the domain of our galaxy. The folly to be corrected on this account, is demonstrated to leading members of modern society by the evidence that assemblies such as our Solar system, never constituted a fixed system, but, rather, a reflection of the origins and subsequent evolutionary development of what we regard as our galaxy and its included Solar system. This must be considered in not merely a fairly estimated span of a few millions years of life of mankind's existence on Earth, but over a term of evolutionary development in a presently fairly known direction, as if in terms of billions of years.

What this means for mankind, above all else, is that it is worse than merely childish, to measure the destiny of our human species in the mere terms of a kind of arithmetic unfolding of a sequence of generations of living individual personalities. To put the necessary emphasis where this discussion belongs, the essence of the matter is shown by an ordered sequence in the evolutionary emergence, development, and termination of entire species. In other words, any actually scientific regard for our own species' actual existence, will locate that existence not within the bounds of any particular individual person, but what the effect is of the succession of individuals out of which the meaning of the existence of any mortal individual must absolutely depend. "Practical people," who believe and act in their particular fashions, tend to be worse than merely ignorant people, probably as people of deeply impaired species' intentions.

Those among us, who have absorbed the qualities of "lessons of experience" as I have indicated immediately above, must think in a direction which is typified by the work of such exemplary scientists as Max Planck and Albert Einstein (going into the Twentieth Century) as before and also beyond, who could not be considered truthfully as scientists if they had not rejected the notion of pre-determined limits on mankind's origins and destinations. If any person lies in the future of mankind beyond our ken, and if we reject our responsibility for promoting that future prospect for mankind, we incur tendencies toward a certain criminality of negligence respecting our duty to that which must come after us. What happens to the universe as we know its possible future, is our presently implicit responsibility in the end.

Mankind, for example, has entered a period within our Solar system (and beyond), which already indicates certain various nearby, types and degrees of hazard confronting the nearby-future generations. It is our ability, intellectually, and morally, to orient ourselves to meeting the challenge of a foreseeable aspect of our species' future within the cognizable bounds of our Solar system and beyond. Such are the proper obligations of self-development for those truly qualified to be trusted with the foreseeable future of mankind. That, precisely that, is the proper standard for leadership within the nations of our society now. Admittedly, presently, that standard is barely acknowledged at all; the time is growing late, when the leading edge of our nations' culture, can avoid that span of a practicable sense of mission for the future.

That is, defined top-down, what must be the standard for the education of the coming, presently younger generations. That is not a matter of privileges; it is a matter of enjoying a true sense of being efficiently human slightly beyond, at least, the future ahead of us now.

II.The New Era In Progress

In the course of those decades during which I had often made reference to the works of such highlighted topics of my personal special interest as Filippo Brunelleschi, Nicholas of Cusa, Shakespeare, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, the Ecole Polytechnique, Lejeune Dirichlet, Bernhard Riemann, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein, the latter five are of continuing, outstanding modern relevance bearing on subject-matters which are specific to this presently immediate subject-matter.

There have been many notable scientists, as also personalities in the domain of Classical artistic composition, such as Wolfgang Köhler, Johann Sebastian Bach, Arthur Nikisch, and Wilhelm Furtwängler, and the profoundly revolutionary V.I. Vernadsky, whose work has had distinctive features of extraordinary relevance for my own in matters reaching beyond the ordinary estimation of so-called "sense-perception."

It can be said fairly, that the great impediment to the successful treatment of so-called "physical-scientific" work, has been excessive emphasis on what may be fairly condemned as an emphasis on a formal mathematics associated within the ontological bounds of mathematical physics. For reason of the special emphasis required in approaching the subject matter specified for this report, I must emphasize that what is often considered the conventional view of mathematical physics contains a grave error of universal principle, a view which is condoned on the basis of a small-minded outlook on the problems of understanding which are inherent in reliance on sense-perception as treated in some degree as "self-evident." The most convenient of the appropriate names for this commonplace mistake, is indicated by pointing toward the ontological implications for physical science of the notion of metaphor. The work of Nicholas of Cusa, and, with some emphasis on Cusa's follower Johannes Kepler, is notable on this account.

Stubborn habits of popularly ingrained belief usually block the pathway to insight into what I had just indicated as this problem. That obstacle is the literal, reductionist's belief in that which is customarily classified as "sense certainty." This striking, but nonetheless elementary fact, was made clear to his collaborator, Max Planck, by Wolfgang Köhler, respecting the ontological principle of the human mind (as distinct from a "brain" per se).

The "fatal flaw" which Köhler pointed out to his collaborator Max Planck, is the mathematician's deductive presumption that the universe is built up from discrete elements, whereas Köhler had discovered and demonstrated the opposite to be true. The mind is not composed of "words," but, for the best thinkers, metaphor, instead of the commonplace attempts to fulfill the more appropriately intended meaning of what were merely individualized words and phrases. The function of true metaphor as the essential meaning of thoughts, is crafted by the wholeness of the development of a particular human mind. It is the universal which generates what is to be recognized as superseding the particular. In other words, the principle of metaphor, as the cases of Bach, Nikisch, and Furtwängler demonstrate the underlying principle which is rooted in the principle of J.S. Bach's Preludes and Fugues.

It is only when scientific method is grounded in the principle of metaphor, that the member of the human species rises categorically above the beasts, by building the notion of the future as ruling over the experience of the past and present, just as that is done in great Classical poetry, such as John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," or the concluding paragraph of Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry.

A related case is to be recognized in Johannes Kepler's crucial employment of the notion of "vicarious hypothesis." Reality is not expressed naively in deduction from the nitty-gritty of so-called "facts," but as by Nicholas of Cusa in his De Docta Ignorantia, on which true modern science was based, and as Brunelleschi crafted his miraculous chapel. It is only in the unification of Classical artistic composition's foresight into the future, as ironically juxtaposed with notions of sense-certainty, that the work of true genius in science and Classical artistic composition finds a common resolution in escape from reductionism.

I should restate here, for the purposes of emphasizing the underlying point which I have just presented, that there is a monstrous error implicitly embedded is the reductionist notions of sense-certainty, or its like. The virtually "measured difference" resides in the notion of the future per se. This fact was efficiently presented by Albert Einstein, in particular, in the elimination of the futile sorts of ontological presumptions associated with the virtually pagan-religious worship of space-in-itself and time-in-itself, as in the discoveries upon which certain of the most fundamental notions of modern physical science have depended.

The crucial point situated in those considerations, involves the inclusion of the conception of life-as-such within the domain of physical space-time. There are precisely two leading aspects to this subject-matter: the existence of life as such, for one; and, the existence of an efficient comprehension of the actual experiencing of a future, as by mankind. The profound, ruinous notion to be defeated for the sake of a competent approach to the general subject of a body of physical science, requires destroying dependency on the crutches of unfounded presumptions inhering in the attempted ontological distinctions of time and space. The proximate demonstration of travel from Moon to Mars within the span of approximately a week, by future means of thermonuclear fusion, points directly toward the folly of popular traditions respecting the relevant ontological characteristics of physical space-time.

That quality of evidence, once considered, has the promise of the cardinal effect which impels the human mind to consider physical space and time, and creativity per se, as mankind mastering the future as our subject, rather than theirs. That brings some crucially important facts into play, for the sake of seeing what, why, and who we are in the unfolding scheme of our creative role in reshaping the meaning of our existence in our universe.

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