Larouche Online Almanac

Published: Monday, August 19, 2002
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Volume 1, No.24
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LaRouche Responds to Waco Fantasy Forum:

On the Urgent Revival of Infrastructure — Through Large-Scale Public Works Projects

On Wednesday, August 14, EIW founder and 2004 U.S. Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, told associates in Los Angeles, California, that the recent ecoonomic fantasy-forum held in Waco, Texas, requires LaRouche's personal leadership in steps toward launching a desperately needed fight for economic recovery.




LaRouche proposed that the first step, at this moment, should be immediate Federal action to protect the functioning of the air-transportation and railway systems from further collapse, placing both under Federal protection measures, including a restoration of regulatory measures, and using Federally guaranteed credit for renewal, modernization, and expansion of track and essential rolling stock. This action must be taken now, in recognition of the fact that both these elements of basic national economic infrastructure are indispensable to maintain even a minimally acceptable level of U.S. national security.
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Middle-East

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FDRthis week in history

August 19-25, 410 A. D.

This week we take our readers way back, for a very good purpose. One of the leading assertions of the Clash of Civilizations crowd today, is that the United States of America must abandon its republican tradition, and become the "new empire," policing the world, and suppressing economic development wherever someone might suspect a future "challenge" to the United States.

Empires, however, are well-known for their propensity to destroy themselves, and their populations. One need only look at history.

Which brings us to our event of the week, the fall of the Roman Empire. Historians date the collapse of the Western part of the Empire from the moment at which the Visigoth tribes (from Northern Europe) overran Rome on Aug. 24, 410.

This denouement was the result of a long process, through which the Roman Emperors had created the conditions for their own destruction. According to the imperial principle, the Romans had not only conquered as much of the world as they could, they had concentrated on looting the areas which they had taken over, of whatever wealth existed. They took slaves, raw materials, and everything of value they could find, demanding endless tax and tribute.

Thus, instead of building up, or even maintaining, agricultural production in Italy, for example, they imported grain from the hinterlands. Rather than educating their own citizens to become skilled craftsmen, and to come up with inventions and improvements, they suppressed technological innovation, and thus suffered from extremely low productivity, in agriculture, in particular. Indeed, the agriculture estates around Rome were terrible places where slaves were worked to death, only to be replaced by the ceaseless flow of new slaves. In such a slave-based society, there was no need for technological advance or skilled labor.

Thus Rome created a culture by which its citizens destroyed themselves —and it became rotten-ripe for takeover.

In effect, Imperial Rome was the ultimate "consumer" society. Its population was largely unemployed, except for those who fought its wars and policed its far-flung borders, and that vast unemployed population depended upon the state for survival. The idea of people being satisfied with "bread and circuses," the very phrase, comes from the heyday of the Roman Empire, when the Empire sustained the population of Rome on the public dole, and kept them amused with grand, bloody spectacles, provided at the expense of the state. By 354 A.D., shortly before the end, there were 200 official holidays a year in Rome at which the mob was treated to such monstrous "entertainment," and the circuses and arenas were expanded to hold hundreds of thousands of people.

With the population so degraded, is it any wonder they did not rally against the invading "barbarians"?

The modern-day apologists for an "American Empire" may hope that they can avoid Rome's fate, but in fact, the postwar United States, especially from 1964 to the present, has increasingly followed both the ideology and the physical economy of the Roman Empire. The United States has shut down its own production, and brought in tribute from the rest of the world. We have increasingly taken up military "police actions," rather than developing collaborative relations with other sovereign states.
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Flash!:

Lyndon LaRouche Interview Is — Main Feature in New Macedonian Magazine

The main feature in the first issue of the new Macedonian magazine Manifest is an exclusive interview with Lyndon LaRouche, which we reproduce here in full. Manifest, which hit the streets and newspaper

stands of Macedonia on Aug. 15, also elaborates the main issues associated with LaRouche, from the New Bretton Woods to the Eurasian Land-Bridge to his intervention on Middle East. The magazine also reprints lengthy quotes from Helga Zepp LaRouche on Friedrich Schiller in her text, "Why Are We Still Barbarians?" The interview we reproduce here, was given by LaRouche from Wiesbaden, Germany on July 25. The interviewer was Umberto Pascali.
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SocratesIn Depth Coverage
Links to articles from Executive Intelligence Review*.
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Feature:
'Man Improves the Universe,' U.A.E. Conference Affirms
Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum and Dino de Paoli, associates of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., spoke at a conference in the United Arab Emirates on Aug. 4, called to discuss the broad and fascinating subject of 'Man's Role in Developing the Universe.'
  • Relationship of Ecology And Economics: Can Man Improve the Planet?
    With the dramatic growth in the scale and intensity of human activity on this planet since the industrial revolution, the rapid expansion in world-wide consumption of energy and raw materials, and the growth of the world population from approximately 2.5 billion to 6 billion over the last 50 years alone, man's impact on the Earth's environment has unquestionably taken on unprecedented proportions.
  • Man: A Unique Guarantor For the Earth's Future
    The international press has extensively reported, that on June 14 of this year, we survived a 'near miss': A small asteroid missed the Earth by only 100,000 kilometers (a small distance from the planetary perspective), and the object was only detected three days after its close approach.

Economics:

Global Crisis Heats Up Russia's Policy Fights
Turmoil continues around the reportedly pending plan of Russian Presidential Administration official Dmitri Kozak, to change ownership and/or taxation policies for the country's natural resources.

Airlines Bankrupt: When Will Government Step In?
Two leading United States airlines announced sweeping changes in air travel Aug. 11 and 13—route cutbacks, flight cutbacks, replacing large jumbo jets with the modern equivalent of prop planes, cancellation of all new orders for large planes. The shrinkage called up visions of air travel from the 1950s—waiting in a deserted airport for a prop plane's one flight out and back per day.

Why Otto Reich Rushed Down to Rio
The spectacular failure of the International Monetary Fund bailout for Brazil, to stem the collapse of Brazil's financial system, dramatically confirmed Lyndon LaRouche's assessment (EIR, Aug. 16) that it was no bailout of Brazil, but rather the Bush Administration's panicked bailout of Brazil's international bank creditors, only.

Italy To 'Nationalize' EU Economic Policy
A debate on urgently rejecting the current European economic policy has broken out in Italy, prompted by figures showing the worsening of public accounts as a result of a serious slump in production.

International:

Perle War Party Reeling From Murawiec Exposé
The Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz 'cabal' inside the Bush Administration, which has been pressing for war against Iraq and other imperialist adventures, is reeling from a torrent of international reactions against the July 10, 2002 Defense Policy Board (DPB) session, where Rand Corporation 'senior analyst' Laurent Murawiec delivered a lunatic diatribe, calling for the United States to place Saudi Arabia atop the list of 'axis of evil' states targetted for American aggression.

Saudi Diplomat Rejects Iraq War, Ridicules Rand Corp. Provocation
It is widely known that extensive plans are on the drawing boards of geopolitical strategists in Washington, for redrawing the map of the Persian Gulf and Middle East.

Major Saudi Coverage Shows LaRouche Role
In the week following the Aug. 5 Washington Post expose´ of secret Washington briefings in which Richard Perle's war faction targetted Saudi Arabia as an 'enemy of the United States,' Saudi press carried much coverage of the 'other American leadership,' Lyndon LaRouche.

New Rabin Option For Israel, or Another War?
Haifa mayor Amram Mitzna's newly-announced challenge for the leadership of Israel's Labor Party represents a desperate attempt to bring together a pro-peace opposition to head off Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new Middle East war.

Uribe Attacks Terror, But Must Move Economy
Colombia's newly inaugurated head of state, Alvaro Uribe Ve´lez, has moved quickly to draw on the national mandate that overwhelmingly elected him to the Presidency in May.

National:

Iraq 'Opposition' Is Full of Minuses for War
To beat the drums for a war against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the Pentagon warhawks around Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle laid out the red carpet for a semi-official visit of the 'Iraqi opposition.'

John McCain: Are His Backers Out of Prison?
On Oct. 15, 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, otherwise known as 'Garn-St Germain,' after the principal Congressional sponsors...

Bush Administration Readies Detention Camps
The Bush Administration is preparing to expand its policy of indefinite detentions of persons labelled 'enemy combatants' in military jails, the Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 8—which report has not been denied by the administration or the Justice Department.

View This week's Almanac Section*, as a long .pdf file.


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