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Published: Monday, April. 14, 2003
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2004 Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche spoke at an event held in Rome April 8 to present the latest book of Italian economist Nino Galloni. We reproduce LaRouche's opening remarks here.
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Well, I will say what I've said a number of other times, today and before: The world is faced with two leading problems, which are distinct, but interactive. On one side, we have the final collapse of the present international financial-monetary system. It's over. At the same time, we have a literally fascist, small group in the United States, which is in the process of launching world war. For the economic-financial crisis, there are remedies. The fascist coup attempt, typified by the ongoing war in the Middle East, is an attempt to prevent solutions for the financial-economic crisis. Fascist regimes can come into being, only under certain conditions of crisis: If the crisis is solved, the fascist regime can not come into existence. So, in a crisis, there is always a threat that a fascist or similar regime will try to take power, to prevent a solution to the crisis. That happened in Germany in 1933; it's happening now.
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The highlight of this week, during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Hundred Days" of emergency action to save the nation, occurred on April 19. It was on that day that the President made the formal announcement taking the U.S. dollar permanently off the gold standard.
There are several contexts in which to see FDR's move, including the massive political pressure which was being applied to him by citizens and Congressmen who were unable to get credit, and the ongoing raid on the nation's gold supply which was being carried out by major European banks, especially in Amsterdam. But its primary significance is succinctly presented by author Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his The Coming of the New Deal. Schlesinger wrote this about the shift away from the gold standard:
"It meant that American monetary policy was no longer to be the quasi-automatic function of an international gold standard; that it was to become instead the instrument of conscious national purpose."
To put it in the language of today's analysis by Lyndon LaRouche, what Roosevelt did was to assert the sovereign right of the nation to control its credit, rather than permit the "international marketplace" to determine what credit would be available. And he did it because the General Welfare of the population depended upon it.
Gold Standard vs. Gold Reserve
Before we get more into the story, it's important to clarify the issue of two ways of looking at the gold standard: the "British" gold standard, whereby every piece of currency is convertible, and the gold-reserve standard, which permits gold to be used as a standard for international valuation, but at a ratio to the currency emitted. In the first, gold basically limits the credit which can be issued; in the second, gold works as a stabilizer, but the fundamental reality of the fact that it is production, not precious metal, which comprises wealth, is made clear.
What FDR did with his moves on gold, which were followed up in international conferences, up to the New Bretton Woods Conference itself, was to move the U.S. from the gold standard—which had been imposed with the Specie Resumption Act back in the 1870s, as a reaction against U.S. sovereign control of currency through the greenbacks—to the gold-reserve standard.
The Gold Question
President Roosevelt had, of course, dealt with the gold question earlier on, at the same time that he instituted his banking reform. On March 5, he had suspended all transactions in gold, and given authority over any such matters to the Secretary of the Treasury. On April 5, he had gone further, issuing an executive order against hoarding of gold.
But in the ensuing weeks, pressure had been building up on the dollar from the European bankers, who were allied with the virulently anti-Roosevelt Wall Street forces here in the United States. Acting through Morgan interests in Europe and the private U.S. banks, including Brown Brothers Harriman, the Bank of England launched an all-out assault on the dollar. Since the break with gold now appeared inevitable, the plan was to do it with the maximum amount of chaos and to organize a counterreaction that could ultimately reverse the policy, and hand Roosevelt a defeat.
On April 11, the first waves of the attack broke against the dollar. They grew in intensity over the next three days. The New York bankers asked through the Fed to lift the gold embargo and be allowed to ship $10,000,000 to Europe, to Holland and England. The New York agents of the British upped the ante: They asked for an additional $15,000,000 in gold shipment licenses. Roosevelt ordered part of the request granted. But the requests kept escalating in an almost geometric ratio. And tons of gold were being shipped out of the country.
Political Pressures
At the same time, the political heat was increasing on the President to provide credit for bankrupt industries and farms. Powerful Congressmen and Senators were beginning to agitate for a loosening of credit, either through the adoption of the William Jennings Bryan-style monetization of silver, or other means. One of those other means was raised by Oklahoma Senator Elmer Thomas, who, in an amendment, raised the option of using greenbacks, not used since the time of Abraham Lincoln, to generate cheap credit for the economy.
In addition, as we have been referencing, the President knew he had to move rapidly to a jobs-creation program, something which a regime of constricted credit, based on the gold standard, would not permit.
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Lyndon LaRouche, candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2004, was interviewed on April 4 on WPFW, Pacifica Radio, by host Ambrose I. Lane, Sr. WPFW is based in Washington, D.C., and reaches five states. The interview is scheduled to be re-broadcast by another Pacifica station, WBAI in New York City, on April 14, 3:30-6:00 a.m.
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Links to articles from Executive Intelligence Review*.
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Investigation:
The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss
by Tony Papert
Just a decade ago, a friend and I first read through Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and were quite attracted to him. Why? For one thing, his opposition to the counterculture seemed to come from the heart...On the other hand, I also saw that I had disagreements with Bloom, but I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt: Maybe they would just turn out to be misunderstandings..
(Chronology of Bloom's life in box within article.)
Documentation
Straussian Allan Bloom 'Interprets' Plato
These excerpts are taken from The Republic of Plato, an 'interpretive essay' by Leo Strauss' student and Paul Wolfowitz' teacher Allan Bloom, published in 1968 and 1991.
The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's 'No Exit' War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On Sunday, March 16, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney emerged from his cave to appear on the NBC News 'Meet the Press' show, for a one-hour interview with Tim Russert. In the course of the hour, Cheney all-but-announced that there was nothing that Saddam Hussein could do to avert an unprovoked and unjustifiable American military invasion of Iraq. Cheney repeatedly referred to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as the 'historic watershed' that, for the first time, justified an American unilateral preventive war.
Why the Democratic Party Failed To Function in This Crisis
by Anton Chaitkin
In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the world's governments and millions in the streets spoke out against the impending disaster. Demonstrators protested within the United States as well. But except for the LaRouche wing and scattered individual politicians, the Democratic Party—the putative opposition—was frozen, intimidated. Its new controllers had locked the former party of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy into complicity.
Feature:
New Bretton Woods:
Development Perspectives and a New Start
The Schiller Institute met in Bad Schwalbach, Germany on March 21-23...on the theme of 'How To Reconstruct a Bankrupt World.' ...highlighting the urgent need for the development of Africa, as a case study demonstrating the genocidal effects of the current system of globalization under the dictates of the International Monetary Fund.
Hartmut Cramer:
Wilhelm Lautenbach's Concept Of Productive Credit Creation
Yesterday we got a very impressive overview of the fantastic chances of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, in general, and its various infrastructural projects, in particular. This brings us to the question: 'Who is going to pay for all this?' We are going to deal exactly with the answer to that simple, but absolutely crucial question this morning.
Prof. Sam Aluko:
Conflicts and Economic Development in Africa
Professor Aluko is a retired economics professor, and former economics advisor for various Nigerian governments for more than 30 years. He lives in the country's major city, Lagos. He addressed the New Bretton Woods panel of the Bad Schwalbach conference on March 23.
Dr. Nino Galloni:
Great Projects, Growth: 'Margins of Possibility'
The war is not a solution, nor a way to achieve dignity or freedom. But peace is not the goal; the goal is the promotion of human dignity and freedom. Peace is a means to achieve human dignity and freedom, but the world is facing a war because the international financial, economic, and political system does not work at all.
Dr. Eneas Ndinkabandi:
Avoiding War in Rwanda By Battle for Ideas
Dr. Ndinkabandi spoke to the New Bretton Woods panel on March 23, representing the President of the Republican Rally for Democracy in Rwanda (RDR), Mrs. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, who could not attend. Dr. Ndinkabandi's presentation has been translated from the French.
Economics:
Japanese Look for an FDR To Replace 'Koizumi Hoover'
by Kathy Wolfe
'Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is the next Herbert Hoover of Japan,' a Tokyo insider told EIR recently. 'People are tired of his insistence, like Herbert Hoover in 1930, that there is simply nothing the government can do about the collapsing Japanese economy.
SARS:
- Infrastructure Is Front Line Against SARS
by Linda Everett
On March 18, as the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report ('Microbial Threats to Health: Emergency, Detection, and Response') warning that the U.S. public health system is in a state of disrepair and vulnerable to what it called a potentially 'catastrophic storm of microbial threats,' hundreds of people around the globe were already battling a deadly new 'mystery' epidemic, now known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.
- Is a New Virus Causing SARS?
by Colin Lowry
The Centers for Disease Control is cautiously reporting that it believes the current SARS outbreak is caused by a previously unknown type of coronavirus. This surprised many scientists, because the two types of coronavirus that are known to infect humans are not deadly, and include the virus responsible for many of the infections known as the 'common cold.'
- Sanitation As National Defense
During the anthrax-letter episodes of Fall 2001, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. released an Oct. 28 policy document, 'National Defense Against Germ Warfare,' through his Presidential campaign, LaRouche in 2004. (full text at www.larouchein2004.com)
Venezuela Is Disintegrating
by David Ramonet in Caracas
All the conditions now exist in Venezuela for a textbook military insurrection—and the 'chicken-hawks' in Washington and Wall Street know it well. After all, they are the architects of the national disintegration into which Venezuela is sinking, and they already have their 'Pinochet solution' prepared for the mentally unbalanced President, Hugo Cha´vez Frias, whom they installed in office in the first place.
Israel:
Of War And Economic Collapse
by Dean Andromidas
Israelis' support for the U.S. war on Iraq has taken a back seat to the population's rage over their collapsing living standards. While Sharon's government was running a campaign of hysteria for weeks about possible Iraqi Scud missile attacks, distributing gas masks and duct tape for sealed rooms, thousands of Israelis took to the streets protesting the economic plan.
Iraq War Drastically Distorts World Food Aid
by Paul Gallagher
World media in late March and early April created the image of American and British invading military forces generously bringing food aid to Iraqi civilians urgently in need of it. But notably, some towns in southern Iraq reportedly told their British conquerors that they didn't need food, having weeks of food supplies already; they desperately needed back the water and electricity supplies the American and British bombing and shelling had shut off.
German Industry Has Eurasian Perspective
by Rainer Apel
The frictions between the anti-war alliance of France, Germany, Russia, and China and the Washington war party of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, are only the beginning of a much bigger confrontation—and the national economies play a central role in it.
International:
Chicken-Hawks Are Pushing To Spread 'Perpetual War'
by Edward Spannaus and Jeffrey Steinberg
While some deluded souls may wish to believe that the war in Iraq is over, the reality is that from the standpoint of the neo-conservative fanatics who have seized control of Bush Administration policy, the conflict with Iraq is only the opening phase in a drive for U.S. global domination, in which any and all challengers will be swept aside.
Specter of More War Shows in Iraq
After the much-celebrated fall of Baghdad, the continuing conflict inside the country threatens to assume a new character, with the involvement of forces from neighboring countries.
Israelis Justify War Crimes, Point to U.S.
by Michele Steinberg
'We would have no problem occupying or conquering all of the Palestinian cities by tomorrow morning. We could take Ramallah . . . without losing one reservist,' boasted a 'senior Israeli army commander,' quoted by reporter Peter Hermann, in the April 6 Baltimore Sun.
Interview: Dr. Imad Moustapha
'They Are Trying To Link The Iraq War to Syria'
Dr. Moustapha is the Deputy Ambassador of Syria to the United States. He was interviewed by Jeffrey Steinberg on April 7.
All of Diverse Indonesia Unites Against the U.S. War Party
by Mike Billington
...Indonesia has united domestically, virtually without exception—Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, secular, religious, Javanese, Acehan, Balinese, etc.—in opposition to the U.S. aggression against Iraq, and the 'abnormal' leadership of George Bush.
National:
Ashcroft, DeLay Thumb Noses at 'Road Map'
by William Jones
Attorney General John Ashcroft has introduced major changes in the U.S. Justice system since he took-office in early 2001. Sept. 11, 2001, in particular, gave Ashcroft an ideal pretext for putting to one side some of the protective mechanisms assured the individual under the U.S. Constitution.
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