LaRouche, Lopez Portillo Address Meeting in Guadalajara To Define Way Out of International Crisis
Historic presentations by the former President of Mexico, Jose Lopez Portillo, and current U.S. Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, keynoted the continental meeting, "Mexico-Brazil-Argentina: The Hour of Integration; March Towards a New Bretton Woods," organized by the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA), and held in Guadalajara, Mexico Aug. 22-23. More than 250 people filled the auditorium where the seminar was held, in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the publication of Operation Juarez, the book-length study written by LaRouche in 1982, after meeting with Lopez Portillo, then President of Mexico.
The meeting, which was transmitted live to all of Guadalajara via Radio Universidad, and worldwide, in both English and Spanish, by internet at www.larouchepub.com, took place in the midst of an ongoing global financial crisis which, if not resolved, LaRouche said, could bring the world into a new Dark Age like that of the 14th century. To solve the crisis, Ibero-America and the United States must form an alliance, such as that forged by Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juarez to defeat both the British monarchy and the Hapsburgs, in the 19th century.
Addressing the seminar, in addition to LaRouche and Lopez Portillowho sent a written speech, as he was unable to attend in person for health reasonswere Col. Mohamed Ali Seineldin, who spoke by telephone from the Campo de Mayo prison in Argentina where he is unjustly imprisoned; retired Brazilian Adm. Sergio Tasso Vasques de Aquino; retired Argentine Major Adrian Romero Mundani, and Marivilia Carrasco, president of the MSIA of Mexico.
LaRouche, who could not travel to Guadalajara because Mexican authorities would not grant the security conditions required for his visit, said that, to understand the situation in the world today, it is necessary to go back 20 years, when the first great crisis in relations between the United States and the other nations of the Americas erupted, with the April-June 1982 Malvinas War, and the subsequent crushing of Mexico, in the period beginning August of that year. The United States, LaRouche said, was founded to foster what is known as the general welfare, or Common Good, but from the outset the oligarchy tried to destroy that, and to keep any other country which reflected the success of the American Republic from emerging elsewhere in the world.
"That changed, with the victory of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's government, in the Civil War within the United States," he said. In Europe, "the British and a fascist ruler, Napoleon III, the Emperor of France, combined forces to invade and crush Mexico, crushing the legitimate President of Mexico, Benito Juarez.
"At the close of that period, after the fascist tyranny of the Emperor Maximilian, who was essentially a Hapsburg puppet, a British puppet, the French were kicked out of the Americas," he said, and "Juarez, after a series of events, reestablished the Republic of Mexico.
"Since that time, the ebb and flow within the United States, has determined U.S. relations with Mexico. They were better under Franklin Roosevelt; terrible under his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt," he said. "But then came 1982: A new monetary system had been put into place, in 1971.... A literally fascist tendency in the United States, of sympathizers of the former Confederacy," took power with Richard Nixon, and set out to eliminate "not only the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, but the legacy of Lincoln and all other great founding figures of the United States.
"Mexico began to feel the pressure. In 1982, at the point that the Brzezinski Administrationthe Brzezinski who actually controlled the Carter Administration, who dictated most of his polices, including those toward MexicoMexico came under tremendous pressure, as did Argentina, and Brazil, and other states. The determination was, then, to destroy the independence of all of the states of Central and South America. That was the intention; I knew it. I was involved, at the point, in mobilizing a defense of Argentina, against British imperialism, in the case of the so-called 'Malvinas War,' " LaRouche said. Although some in the Ronald Reagan Administration were friendly with him, Caspar Weinberger and others "managed to push full U.S. support of the British toward the crushing of Argentina in the Malvinas War."
"In that period, I met briefly with President Lopez Portillo, in his office, and we discussed the matter. And he asked me: What is the fate of Mexico, in this situation? And I said, 'Well, the intention in Washington and New York, is to crush you, with a blow to come down no later than September of this year.'
"And from that discussion, and discussion with others in the Americas, there came my determination to set forth a policy, as an economist, which would be adequate to deal with the crisis, which was then, at that time, coming down on all of the states of the Americas: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, foremost." There was a brief period, said LaRouche, in which it appeared that his proposal, called Operation Juarez, would be adopted. But, pressured by forces within the United States, the President of Brazil and the government of Argentina abandoned Mexico and President Lopez Portillo to their own fate.
Had Operation Juarez been adopted, the Ibero-American countries "would have been able to defend themselves, and also to win the United States government to cooperation with them."
"Unfortunately, that did not occur. Henry Kissinger went to Mexico in October, for example; other pressures came down; U.S. State Department officials, from that point on, said, 'This guy LaRouche will never be allowed in Mexico, again.' I was considered too dangerous to be turned loose. So, that's what it was."
We are now at the tail-end of an international monetary system, and, either we replace it by returning to a system along the lines of the old Bretton Woods system, or the nations will die, LaRouche said.
"Only if we can win that fight, will we have the correlation of forces, to give the Americas as a whole, the justice which they are presently being denied. And thus, the tradition of Lincoln's implicit alliance, with Benito Juarez, and the struggle for the development of a true Mexican Republic, is the precedent to which we must turn today."
We Want A Better World
In his speech, Mexico's former President Lopez Portillo (1976-1982) lamented the fact that LaRouche was not present personally in Guadalajara "to enlighten us with his expert teaching, although, of course, I am happy, and send my greetings, to his worthy spouse, Helga Zepp." Lopez Portillo said that, "If we want a better world, and we do, we must march towards a New International Financial Order which serves the needs of the powerful countries, and of those which, not being so, wish to resolve their national population's social problems." He said that, when he was President of Mexico, "I had to take recourse to nationalization, since I believed that the state, not being able to betray itself, would be the best instrument to manage the savings of the nation, with the intelligence that we did not expropriate the depositors, but only the system itself."
Argentina's Col. Seineldin told the participants in the seminar that "each time that you gather to try to uphold our America, hope blossoms for the Possible America, the dream made mission by the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement, under the strategic conception of the worthy gentleman and Patriarch of humanity, Dr. Lyndon LaRouche." He warned, that "within this chaos, we must face the new threat, which is that of the integration of our nations into the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) project, which would be the final Anglo-American blow to achieve total submission and poverty.
"This situation renews the call to the worthy spirits of the nations of America. There is no time to wait for other considerations; the predator is inside our houses," he warned. "America is of and for the Americans, with our talent to think, and our leaders to do what must be done," he said. "America is Possible."
In her opening speech, Marivilia Carrasco pointed out that this meeting had brought together "the protagonists of a great historical moment, and to build the bridges necessary to emerge victorious from earlier defeats." She added: "The alternatives are clear: Either Ibero-America unites to fight for a global solution to this generalized systemic crisis, and that necessarily implies an alliance with the forces Lyndon H. LaRouche represents in the United States; or, divided, we shall succumb as nations, disintegrated, worn down by internal battles, overrun by violence, drug-trafficking, hunger and disease."
The meeting continued on Aug. 23, with various working sessions, in which other speakers from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru were to speak.
An audio file of Jose Lopez Portillo's and Lyndon LaRouche's speeches can be heard at www.larouchepub.com.
Dominican Paper of Record Runs Major Coverage of LaRouche Policies
Listin Diario, the newspaper of record of the Dominican Republic, ran a nearly-full-page column on Lyndon LaRouche's economic policies in the opinion page of its Sunday edition on Aug. 18. The article, written by Ignacio Nova, illustrated with a large photo cut-in of LaRouche and titled, "Lyndon H. LaRouche, or Humanize the Economy," reflects the huge debate taking place among Dominican policymakers on LaRouche's policies, despite the lies and slanders against him that have abounded there.
Listin Diario, as well as playing a leadership role in the Dominican Republic, circulates in several major U.S. cities with large populations of Dominicans.
Prefacing the article were two quotes. The first, from LaRouche, read: "Not even the two world wars of the 20th century did such net damage to Europe and the Americas as the 'globalizers' and the ideologues of 'free trade' over the last 30 years." The second, from one Silvio Rodriguez, read: "If a man steals food, and after that life, what should be done?"
A translation of the text follows. [All quotations from LaRouche, originally made in English, here are re-translated back from the Spanish published by Listin DiarioEIW Editor].
Necessary Warning
Lindon [sic] H. LaRouche, Jr. is one of the most controversial and active political-economic lecturers of the U.S. Democratic sector, a Presidential pre-candidate for the 2004 elections. No important event occurs, in the U.S. or outside it, without his issuing an opinion.
As an inhabitant of this planet, he is no saint. He has been found guilty of mail and tax fraud in his country, and he was accused of conspiracy. Others, more radical, call him a fascist. Independent of this, together with a large staff, he has elaborated an economic proposal to "reform" the world economic order. Judging by his writings, he is, unquestionably, a man of complex and broad vision. The successive conflicts in which he has been involved could, in the same way they have brought him notoriety, be the obstacle to his current objective. In any case, he is a "case," a "phenomenon" of U.S. politics today. A paradigm breaker. Let's become acquainted with his proposal. - The Triple Curve of the Economic Train-Wreck -
If Al Gore, in his campaign platform, raised the aspect of decadence, of the global economic crisis, with signs of alarm, LaRouche presents it through a quick and synthetic vision made possible by economic science, contributing a graphic, a simple instrument to diagnose, measure, perceive, and express in an immediate form, the grave situation of an economy at a given moment: What is called his "Triple Curve of the Collapse."
With this he illustrates how, at the same time, the financial and monetary aggregates experience intense growth, while the production of inputs and "physical-economic" goods, as he calls them, suffer a progressively more intense growth, of negative value. This is, for him, what characterizes the economic state of the United States and the world today.
Through this and other considerations, LaRouche and his team have formulated a proposal which, if they call it urgent for the United States, they present with dramatic embellishments for the Third World. They urger that "mercifully, the current International Monetary Fund be put through bankruptcy reorganization," without offering an internal analysis of this body to back up the proposal.
Economists know LaRouche's proposal; however, never before had even the theoreticians or leaders of the once active "Non-Aligned Movement," or even the regional federations, resorted to an argument so precise and simple to illustrate a state of global financial disaster which derives from the policies of the IMF, the favorite target of the bulk of LaRouche's missiles. - Missiles Against the IMF; Profile of the Crisis -
It is well known that his reform, applying concepts of mathematical physics, suggests a kind of break-up of the IMF into regional banks; the step to a monetary system based not on gold reserves, but on a "basket of regional currencies" whose values would be based upon the gold reserve and the production of physical goods per capita, per square kilometer.
Through this [reform], he attempts to turn around the current situation in which "the entire monetary and financial system of the world today is caught up in an accelerating growth of financial and monetary hyperinflation of nominal financial assets," the which he characterizes as being at "a critical boundary condition."
Using strong words, LaRouche makes an extremely grave charge against the IMF, which not even the most radical of the leftists of days past dared make. He holds it responsible for a financial policy whose other face is that of a kind of extermination: "We should recognize," he says, "that policy-making trends under the IMF system since the middle of the 1970s, have reversed the sustained tendency for a net increase in population which had been reached by 1966-1971, and which dominated long stretches of European civilization for various centuries." To prove LaRouche is wrong, one would have to provide statistics which prove the contrary.
LaRouche takes seriously the gravity of the world situation which he describes, and, above all, where its continuation would lead. Avoiding pessimism, he mobilizes support for his political project for recovery: "Without carrying out a 180-degree turn in the trends which increasingly prevail in investment and production of tangible goods, the planet will sink very soon into a new worldwide dark age."
As we see, the apparent naiveté of a globalization sold as a panacea of low prices, has been presented falsely, because, by taking down the production of "tangible goods" per capita, per square kilometer, throughout the countries which implemented the "tariff clearing" to open up the custom houses, it fostered a drastic reduction of revenues collected and of employment, drove the quality of life into the ground, weakened governments, stagnated or lowered human growth, and put up a containing wall against population growth.
In this debate, LaRouche sounds like a strange possessed prophet, with his burden of legal sins, whose voice cries out in the wilderness in favor of an economy "at the service of Mankind," in which Man would be valued again as the object and subject of the economic process: "The competent study of economic processes does not begin with the production of goods, but, rather, with the production of people," he says, to then attribute to the increase or diminution of relative population-density per capita per square kilometer, the function that constitutes "the expression of the notion of economic growth."
Fox Tries Again To Privatize Mexico's Energy Industries
Late in the evening of Aug. 16, Mexican President Vicente Fox submitted to Congress another energy-reform bill, to amend the Constitution to permit private companies to invest in both the electricity sector and some refining and dry gas operations. The most rabid of the PAN Party's pro-privatization Senators, Juan Jose Rodriguez Pratts, said he was disappointed with the bill, complaining it reflected a piecemeal approach, rather than reforming the whole sector. Secretary Ernesto Martens, however, made clear on Aug. 17, that these were the first reforms, not the last, and another bill would be sent to Congress soon, which would open up natural gas production to private interests.
Because the bill would change the Constitution, two-thirds of the Congress must vote in its favor, for it to pass. That means Fox will have to win over a good number of PRI Party Congressmen to his position. The last time Fox attempted to privatize Mexico's state-run oil and electricity sector, in April 2002, the relevant Senate committee shot it down before it even got to the floor, passing by a wide margin a measure rejecting any Constitutional reform. The international LaRouche movement played a critical role in the debate leading up to that decision. The New York Times of Aug. 19 correctly identified PRI Sen. Manuel Bartlett Diaz, who presides over the Senate Committee on Constitutional Issues, as continuing to be a fierce opponent of the reforms. The current president of the PRI Party, Roberto Madrazo, elected to that post after the April rejection of Fox's privatization bid, is more open to working with Fox on the sell-out project, however.
One of the changes proposed in the bill would allow private producers access to the national electrical transmission grid to generate, import, conduct, transform, and sell energy to "large users" who consume in excess of 2,500 MW-hours per year.
World Social Forum Meeting in Argentina
Ten thousand people from around the country were expected to attend the Jacobin gathering of the World Social Forum, meeting in Argentina Aug. 22-25, according to the Aug. 19 issue of the Buenos Aires paper Clarin. That was in addition to 500 invited foreign guests, meeting under the banner of "No to the Neo-Liberal Model, and No to the FTAA" (Free Trade Area of the Americas). Among foreign narcoterrorists attending were representatives of Brazil's Landless Movement (MST), and Bolivia's drug legalizer-cocalero leader Evo Morales. Leaders of the Paris-based ATTAC movement were also present.
The meeting of the fraudulent "anti-globalization" forces in Argentina can only further destabilize this nation. It was the extraordinary events of December 2001, which saw the downfall of the de la Rua government, and several more Presidents come and go, that prompted Argentine leaders of Jimmy Goldsmith's WSF/Porto Alegre mob to decide to hold a special summit in Buenos Aires and create the "Argentine branch" of the WSF.
The conference began Aug. 22 with a march of organizers from the Plaza de Mayo, prominently featuring the terrorist Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to the Houssay Plaza where most conference panels and activities were scheduled to occur. Panel topics included "Resistance and Alternatives" (the MST and Evo Morales were speakers here), "the Liberal State and the Crisis of Democracy," and "Capitalism's Crushing of Social Rights."
IMF Imposes Onerous Conditions on Uruguay
According to the Aug. 20 issue of La Republica paper of Montevideo, the IMF letter-of-intent signed with the Batlle government of Uruguay, demands the privatization of the tiny nation's economy, much of which is still run by the state. There will be deregulation of energy, oil, gas and railroads, and public utilities will be auctioned off to the private sector or foreign usurers. The latest version of the letter-of-intent estimates a "savings" of $200 million this year, earned through drastic budget cuts, and reductions of state expenditures, downsizing of government, etc. Emphasis is on "fiscal responsibility," and maintenance of reserves, which now stand at $577 million, down 80% from January of this year. The deficit is to be reduced to 3.5% of GDP by the end of this year, from the current 5% of GDP. The IMF predicts a 40% inflation rate this year, and 50% for 2003.
A central feature of the program is the IMF demand that "not one peso" be allocated to bailing out insolvent banksunless they can be recapitalized through private sources. The state-run bank sector, which employs tens of thousands of people, is slated for drastic reduction. The wages of public-sector employees will also be frozen for next year, and the indexing of private-sector wages to inflation will be eliminated, which will have an immediate effect on real income levels. That will mean a plummeting of purchasing power of 40% this year, as per the predicted 2002 inflation rate.
Brazil Throws Away Future, Pulls Out of Space Station
According to NASA international affairs public information officer Debra Rahn, as reported on space.com Aug. 16, the U.S. space agency in July received a letter from Brazil's Minister of Science and Technology stating that his nation would not be able to meet its commitment to build hardware it had pledged for the International Space Station. In 1997, through a bilateral agreement with the U.S., Brazil became the first, and so far, only, nation not a member of the G-8 to participate in the huge engineering, science, and technology project.
Brazil was to deliver, for an April 2005 Space Shuttle launch, an Express Pallet to be placed on the external frame of the station, in order to house scientific experiments, as its first piece of station equipment. Three years ago, budget crises nearly ended Brazil's participation in the project, but government and industry support kept the project alive. Now, with Brazil on the verge of financially imploding, Minister Sardenberg said that the cost of proceeding with the manufacture of the Pallet would far exceed what Brazil can afford for its entire participation in the ISS program. His letter was a response to NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe's request that Brazil reaffirm its ability to meet the launch date.
Rahn indicated that NASA has tentatively agreed to meet with Brazilian government officials in the fall, in response to Minister Sardenberg's request. The Brazilian Minister said in his letter that his nation wants to stay in the program, and is ready to renegotiate the terms of the arrangement "so that it becomes comparable with our budgetary constraints."
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