LaRouche Is the 'Unnamed Candidate' Who Can Beat Bush

LaRouche: To Win the Election, You Must Mobilize a Movement

LaRouche on New Hampshire Radio: 'Open Mike' Show with Dan Mitchell, Nov. 5, 2003

From Volume 2, Issue Number 45 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Nov. 11, 2003

Latest From LaRouche

LaRouche in 2004 released the following statement on Nov. 8.

LaRouche Is the 'Unnamed Candidate' Who Can Beat Bush

Speaking on a Missouri radio talk show Nov. 7, Lyndon LaRouche declared that he is the "unnamed" Democrat who can beat President Bush in 2004. LaRouche was referring to a recent poll showing that all of his so-called rivals for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, running against Bush would lose, but that an "unnamed" Democrat could beat Bush. LaRouche dismissed speculation that Hillary Clinton was the "unnamed candidate," pointing out that her ambitions extend no further than becoming a Vice Presidential candidate in a hung Democratic Party nominating convention, a strategy which assumes a Democratic defeat in November.

LaRouche's remarks capped a week in which his campaign moved from strength to strength, beginning with the Nov. 3 decision by the Secretary of State of California to place LaRouche's name on the California ballot. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley selected LaRouche as a nationally "generally recognized" candidate. LaRouche had previously been certified for the Feb. 3 Democratic primary ballot in Missouri, despite a last minute DNC-directed effort to refuse his submission.

The California certification was followed by a smashing victory in the Nov. 4 Philadelphia Mayoral race, where the deployment of the LaRouche Youth Movement secured a massive margin for incumbent Mayor John Street, who was under attack from the Attorney General John Ashcroft's gestapo Justice Department. Then, on Nov. 7, LaRouche was certified for Jan. 13 primary ballot in Washington, D.C., by the D.C. Board of Elections. Washington, D.C. is a hotbed of organizing by the LaRouche Youth Movement, which has carried the campaign to unseat war-mongering Vice President Dick Cheney into the streets, as well as into the halls of the U.S. Congress. The LaRouche campaign has been running ads indicting Cheney on D.C.'s largest news-radio station WTOP for months.

Overall, it was a very bad week for the Democratic National Committee faction, which has been leading the Democrats into oblivion, and has been desperate to contain LaRouche, who has the only campaign with a significant youth movement, and with demonstrated broad support among the lower 80% of income brackets in the American population.

In Washington, D.C., five of the so-called major Democratic candidates promptly withdrew their names from the ballot, on the pretext that the D.C. primary violates Party rules, a move which was denounced as "gutless" by D.C. Councilman Jack Evans, the author of the D.C. primary legislation. Meanwhile, nominal frontrunner Harold Dean remains on the D.C. ballot, where he will go up against LaRouche, who is known as the champion of the fight to save D.C. General Hospital, and to end the murderous HMO system.

Indicative of the broad support for LaRouche's "unnamed" candidacy, his campaign continues to have the second-largest number of individual itemized contributions of any of the 10 Democratic Presidential candidates, according to the October Quarterly reports made available by the Federal Election Commission.

The LaRouche campaign has announced that the candidate will be touring New England, with appearances in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, the week of Nov. 9, and the Midwest, with appearances in Michigan and Missouri, the week of Nov. 16.

LaRouche: To Win the Election, You Must Mobilize a Movement

In response to a question asked at his Nov. 1 cadre school, about how to win the 2004 election, Lyndon LaRouche gave the following perspective:

I would say, first of all, if you want to get 50% of the vote, try to get 70%. If you try to get 70%, you probably will get 50%. In other words, you have to go at this in a certain way: You have to mobilize, not voters, you have to mobilize a movement.

See, people often ask the question, how can we get a certain percentile of the vote? What is the way to get a certain number of individual voters, in various categories, which will add up to a certain percentile? It doesn't work that way. That's the way you said it works; it doesn't work that way. Because the factor is, people walk into the polls, and most people, on the day they're going to vote, don't know who they're going to vote for. Because they change their minds! They will change their minds, after months of reflection, they'll change their minds, certainly on the day they go into the polls. And they'll tell you that. They do! "I was going in. I decided I was going to vote for so-and-so, but I got there; I'd made a promise and so forth, but I just couldn't do it."

So, what controls the vote? Yes, obviously, the result will be a number of votes cast. But what will determine the votes cast? Well, in anything but an irrational thing, it'll be a movement among people to bring about that effect. So, what you're out to do, is not to try to recruit individual voters, as such. Your object is to create a movement for that result, and the movement will recruit the voters.

Your problem is, most recent campaigns have involved no significant movement. For example, we have one—Philadelphia, right now. You have a case of a movement, which our intervention intersected. The last time you had a mobilization of so-called African-American voters, politically, that meant anything in Philadelphia, was against Frank Rizzo, the Police Chief and Mayor. This is the first time you've had a similar movement. But, it's more; because, it's labor, and it's other sections of the population, who are now in a revolt against John Ashcroft and what he represents. And, you have suddenly, a movement in Philadelphia. If this "Katzenjammer" is defeated, it will be the movement that causes his defeat, not the number of voters that turn out. The movement.

So therefore, if you have a general movement within the population, where people are interacting and saying, "We, as a movement, have to bring about this effect," it generally can happen. It's when it's other than a movement, the vote is unreliable, and manipulable; and most votes recently have been manipulated votes. They are not really movements. They were anti-Bush movements, which got Clinton into office. And also, remember, it was Ross Perot, actually, played a big part in electing Bill Clinton, and didn't get much gratitude from Clinton for that—it was a big mistake on Clinton's part, on NAFTA. But, it's the movement.

The Lower 80%

So, the way to control this process, is to create a mass movement. I have these things which I present, which are necessary, but I always think about how do we get those concepts into the minds of people who are influential within the ranks of the lower 80% of family-income brackets. That's why I did what I did on Oct. 22, on health care. Take a very simple, clear-cut case: The first hour I'm President, in the office, I will issue a Presidential order, setting into motion, the immediate re-establishment of D.C. General Hospital, in the following conditions. At the same time, I will issue, to Congress, a Presidential directive, requesting the Congress to repeal HMO, and restore the Hill-Burton law.

Now, this is something which, in terms of its implications, most people out there, in the lower 80%, who are influentials—that is, thinking citizens among the lower 80%—understand immediately. The big problem, for most people in this country, especially people who are poor, people who are senior citizens, or affected with sickness—and that's over 50; if you're over 50, you are subject to this problem. Disease can hit you, in various sudden ways—normal part of the process. And, if you don't have adequate health care, or a health-care system, you can be dead, or several crippled. Therefore, do we have a system, which is able at delivering a response by society to those threats to our citizens. And people in the categories in the lower 80%, or people who have serious health-care problems, people who are over 50, especially people over 60, or 70, these people become increasingly aware of this problem.

Therefore, if you want to go to the majority of people, you mention health care in the proper way—not just "well, I got a plan for health care, you know; you can buy this cheaply, I can give you a good plan": Garbage! Are you going to deliver? You are government: Are you going to do what is necessary, to make a sudden change in the situation? Yes! What is it? Put D.C. General back into place; slap these guys in the face. Put Hill-Burton into place; cancel HMO. And take other actions of a similar nature, immediately, in the first hours I'm in office: No big plans. Very simple—broad, and sudden.

And that's what people want to hear. And that's the only kind of action that will solve the problem.

You have the same thing on employment. People talk: "What're we going to do about the jo-o-bs pro-o-blem?"

All right, look: We've got a lot people who are not qualified to work! Like the President of the United States, for example. So, what do we do with these bums? Well, if they're young, we'll put them in something like the CCCs. Or, we'll open up the military service ranks, for real training, of an engineering-oriented training; rebuild the Corps of Engineers. We're going to get the jobs immediately into works. For what? For things that are necessary: We've got water problems; we've got power problems; we've got all kinds of problems. We have them, right now. If we can create enough jobs of this quality, fast enough, we can bring the national income, in the states, on the state level and on the national level, up to above breakeven, immediately: Depression is over! The effects of the depression linger on, but the depression, as a process, is ended!

So, jobs. What kind of jobs? How is the government going to provide jobs? Well, the government has to provide jobs. How about power and distribution systems? How about large-scale water systems? How about rebuilding the railroads? How about mass transit? You've got all these people spending their lifetimes, wasting them on the highways, in parking lots called "superhighways." Why not put in some more mass transit? Use monorail, other kinds of things that are mass transit, to enable people to move from the places they work, to where they live and so forth, without having to sit in a traffic jam, and spend their life in a traffic jam, breathing other people's auto fumes! And getting angry and wanting to kill the driver in front of you. Bad passions. Bad passions.

So that's the way in which you can influence the voters, is, by stop the crap; stop the nonsense about these elaborate algebraic schemes: "I'm going to make a compromise with this guy, and this guy, and this guy. We're going to make this compromise, and we're going to come up with this bill."

And I think the American people, generally, are sick and tired of these damned bills! They don't mean anything. They're simply ways of saying, "Look, I did this! I gave you this bill! I helped you! You owe me, I helped you. I voted for this bill." And, what'd the bill do for you? Nothing. "But it was a good intention! I was warm-hearted! You gotta give me credit for that." So, that's the problem. - Organizing and History -

If we organize, as a movement, the other thing, the most important thing, which you can do, which you do with yourselves, which you do with others, is: You have to make the person you're talking to, a better person. If you can make them a better person, or help to make them a better person, they will be part of your movement. Because that's what people want. That's what makes them happy, is to think of becoming a better person....

To have an understanding, as a human being, of a sense of immortality, is to have a sense that there's a sweep of human history; that European history, in particular, modern European history, is perfectly comprehensible, in general terms. And if you understand it, and you understand what the experience is, of whole generations, over successive periods, you have some understanding of what hit you. As I tell people: I'm 200 years old. Because my culture, even in my family culture, at the family dinner-table, goes back 200 years to a great-great-grandfather, who was born about the same time as Abraham Lincoln. And who was a rather notable figure, in his place and time. So, that's part of your culture.

Now, you go from the family culture, the family/history culture, to the broader environment. Like people in the United States, for example: People, I think some still today—more, say 20, 30 years ago—would trace their ancestry back; Americans of African origin, would trace their ancestry back, consciously, to an ancestor they either knew, or knew about, who had been a slave; and knew the place, where this slavery had occurred. They knew it! They knew what the transitions were. How it was fought. What was the movement like, before then? Isn't that something worth knowing? Because that's part of your identity, is to find out what happened! Because, things came down, in your own family, the family circles, from one generation to the other, which have an effect on you, today! Are you able to understand those things, which have an effect upon you, today, from that experience? Can you understand other parts of society, in the same way?

So, when you're looking at the face of somebody, do you realize that what you're doing, face to face? You are representing a confluence of two completely different histories, which have certain points of overlap. And that's all inside you, as transmitted from great-grandfather, to grandfather, to grandmother, to father, to son, and so forth. It's all transmitted. Cultures are not things that simply repeat, according to mechanical laws: Cultures are processes of development, which go through successive generations....

If you understand history, then you begin to understand yourself: Because, if you understand the history that we came from, then, you're able to understand why you react the way you do. And why other people react the way they do. You see yourself, not as an individual, like a blob on a page of history; but as an individual, who embodies a cultural process. You embody history.

If you know that, you have a sense of power. You have a sense of being somebody. And you can act. And you can act, for society. You can say, "Look, what we did, in our history, we struggled to bring something into being, something better. We struggled to overcome bad things. We struggled to make things better. That's us! We're not going to betray that! We're going to continue the process, of struggling to make things better, for future generations, with a sensibility of what we went through to get here, so far! And all the struggles and setbacks we experienced."

When you convey that, to a population which is confused and frightened, befogged by circumstance, you create a movement, because, when people have a sense of that kind of immortality, that they're an expression of the immortality which is conveyed by this cultural transmission, they have a sense of power; they have a sense that what they do, is important for future generations. And they have a sense of pride, in looking back in memory at their ancestors. "Hey! You over there! Look at what I just did." And, it's that sense of pride that gives people a sense of power. And you have to take poor people, who think they have nothing, and give them the sense that they are something.

And that's the way you create a movement. That's the way you win elections—really win them.

LaRouche on New Hampshire Radio: 'Open Mike' Show with Dan Mitchell, Nov. 5, 2003

MITCHELL: Well, good morning, neighbors. How are you? Welcome to your open mike program. It is Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003. We have a great program for you today. It's great, in part, because of you—your contributions made to our phone lines, and our e-mail are a huge part of this local talk-radio program. I'll be letting you comment on anything you wish, in just a little bit. We will talk a little bit about last night's election results, and what it means for the city of Keene, particularly the school board.

First, though, it is back to the stump. The Presidential election is less than a year away; the primary in less than three months, here in the state of New Hampshire, and we continue our commitment to bring you the candidates who desire your vote.

This morning, we welcome back to the program, as he has appeared on it many times in the past, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche. He's a Democratic candidate for President. He emerged over the course of the '70s and '80s, to rank among the most controversial international political figures of his time. This controversy, which also featured such related issues as his efforts to destroy the international drug traffic, and his initiating role in formulating what President Ronald Reagan announced on March 23, 1983, as the Strategic Defense Initiative—you know it as SDI. He's principally rooted in not only domestic U.S., but also global political-economic issues. Lyndon LaRouche, joining us on our program today.

He is familiar to the New Hampshire primary. He's campaigned repeatedly for the office of U.S. President, beginning in 1976, six times for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination. He's presently a candidate for the party's nomination in 2004. In each of the '76, '80, and '94 campaigns, the leading motive was the same: the virtual inevitability of a long-term downward slide into a global, systemic, financial and monetary crisis, unless certain specific types of changes, in economic, financial, monetary, and social policies were introduced.

In 1988, the theme of the campaign was the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, and a perspective of early reunification of Germany, beginning in eastern Europe, as early as 1989. And then in '92, the theme was the fact that a financial-monetary mudslide was already in progress. Many of these things, of course, have come to fruition.

We remind you, that you can join us on the program, toll-free, if you have a question.

Lyndon LaRouche, welcome back to WKBK's Open Mike program. Good morning.

LAROUCHE: Good Morning.

MITCHELL: Glad that you could be with us this morning. Obviously a long history, quite a bit of involvement with the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination process, running in '76, '80, '84, and so on and so forth, all the way up to 2004. And I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but I'm curious just like everybody else. And that is, why do you keep running? Why do you keep throwing your hat in the ring, to try to become President?

LAROUCHE: Well, because I've known what is happening, I knew what the changes were. I had as much as 25% of voting support in the population at various times during the 1980s. So, it wasn't a lost cause, but nonetheless, for various reasons, including machinations of some interest, it didn't work out. But, nonetheless, what I said is on the record. People who voted for the other guy, made a mistake.

And now the time, with the lower 80% of family-income brackets going into a disaster—a loss of employment, a crisis of the economy, in general, the war dangers—these conditions now exist, and the time has come when people will have to reflect, and reconsider, the decisions they made at earlier times. The fact that I ran before, doesn't really mean too much, from the standpoint of the negative side. History works in multiples of generations, and if you're inside a generation, or two generations, as I sort of have been, then you're working within those generations, to change the thinking of the generation. The time has come when events have confronted these generations, both the people who were, shall we say, Baby Boomers back in the 1960s, and their children, who are now mostly university age, they are now confronted with a terrible threat. And the question is: Can we solve it? Yes, we can, and therefore my having been around, means that I have a proven, and that is precisely what people need today.

For example, many people look back to Franklin Roosevelt, as an example of how a nation, driven into a crisis by the misleadership of Coolidge and Hoover, was saved by Franklin Roosevelt's leadership. Now, that's the way history works, and I'm part of history, and I have a mission.

MITCHELL: As far as that mission, and your platform, and what you bring to the table, and your background, and history, relative to economics, and foreign policy: Has your platform changed very much? Or is it more of an evolution in the last 30 years?

LAROUCHE: No, the conditions have changed, but essentially the characteristic feature—. First of all, this thing started with me, really, in Rochester, New Hampshire, where this evolution began, when I was a youngster. But it started essentially in the postwar period, where I saw successive changes, which, in my view, were a violation of the implicit commitment, which our government had made under Roosevelt, to the postwar world—what his intention had been.

Then, while I liked Eisenhower, because he was sweet relief from Truman, who was a disaster for us, we began to go in a direction economically, which I saw as a disaster. Then, with the missile crisis, the assassination of Kennedy, the entry into the Indo-China war, officially, I saw that we were in trouble, long-term trouble. And therefore, I found myself being pulled into serious politics, knowing that the alternative to this track we were going on, a track toward a financial collapse, economic catastrophe, and potential wars, that this had to be addressed, and so I've devoted most of my life to that.

Conditions have changed somewhat, but the basic characteristic of the long spin, of the past 40-odd years, has not changed. We've been going down that road, the same road, all the time.

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche is with us in our first hour of our open mike program. You're welcome to join us.

Taking a look at some of the plans, ideas that you have for this country, some are perhaps viewed as being a bridge forward, others certainly, to use a term that was used before, a bridge back in time, you desire a return to the best features of the 1950s Bretton Woods system. Hopefully some folks are aware of what Bretton Woods means, seeing it's here in New Hampshire, and the meetings that took place. But can you explain how this would work for America, and what the intentions would be in borrowing from the meetings of Bretton Woods, back in the '50s?

LAROUCHE: Well, the mistake was to abandon it. Remember that in the end of the war, the United States was practically the only world economic power, and we used the power which we had developed, largely under Roosevelt's leadership, to carry through a reform of the internatinal monetary system, which Roosevelt had prescribed. This was known as the Bretton Woods system, so-called because of the 1944 conference up there, under Mt. Washington. This system worked. The U.S. dollar was used to provide the strength for a new monetary system, under which Europe recovered—there was prosperity to some degree in various parts of the Americas, and we recovered and prospered.

This continued, essentially, with some fits and starts, until after the wake of the Kennedy assassination. We began to drift in a change from being a producer society—you can count the number of lost farms and factories in New Hampshire, or across the border in Massachusetts, just as an example of that. We have ceased to be a producer society. We are now like ancient, decadent Rome, under the Caesars; we are a consumer society, and becoming a pleasure-seeking society, rather than a productive one.

As a result of this change in our own policies, and those of other countries, and the system, we went into a 1971-72 change, to what's called a floating exchange-rate system. This is intrinsically an inflationary system. We have destroyed industry around the world, except for countries we use for virtual slave-labor, like China, countries in South America, like Mexico, and so forth—we used them for virtual slave labor. We unemploy our own people. The standard of living collapses, physically; for the lower 80% of family-income brackets, this has been a catastrophe, an accelerated catastrophe, since about 1977.

So, we've come to the time that we have to say, we made mistakes under Coolidge and Hoover. We corrected the mistake under Roosevelt. We've committed terrible mistakes during the past 40 years, in terms of trend of policy-making, both internationally and nationally. The only solution for the world is to go back to a fixed exchange-rate system, with a high degree of regulation—you need regulation to do long-term investment. And therefore, the model, which has been successful in the past, was the Roosevelt/Bretton Woods model, and I simply propose that we have to go back to that, because people can understand it, because it happened.

MITCHELL: What changes would have to be implemented, and what impact would it have on the American people? If I'm sitting at home right now, sipping coffee, listening to Open Mike, how would that affect a 25-year-old, just getting started in business, or out there in the working world? How would it affect somebody middle-aged, 45-50? How would it affect retirees? What would the impact be on America if we went backward to readopt the plans from the 50s?

LAROUCHE: Well, there's no place in the world, actually, that can do what we can do for the world. Remember, our Constitutional system—our Presidential system, with the checks and balances built into the lawmaking process the Congress—is the finest institution the world has ever known, in terms of a political institution. No other country in the world, has had a constitution which has survived as ours has.

Now, this is not accidental. But under our Presidential system, as distinct from the so-called Anglo-Dutch Parliamentary model you run into in Europe, in a crisis, the President of the United States can act on the basis of the Preamble of the Federal Constitution, to defend the general welfare, our national sovereignty, and the welfare of our posterity. Under that authority, the President of the United States can go to other countries, in a crisis like the present one, and say, "We're putting the international bankrupt monetary-financial system into receivership by governments. We'll do it for our government, you guys do it for yours. We are then going to use our common authority, as governments, to establish a new monetary system—that is, to take over the present IMF, and reform it, and switch it back to becoming the kind of system it was before."

Now, we have a lot of bankruptcy. The general-welfare principle means that the U.S. government must act, to make sure we do not have a social catastrophe: that businesses do not shut down; that banks do not close their doors; that states do not go bankrupt; and that we have a program of growth, stimulated by the U.S. government, starting with heavy investment in much-needed basic economic infrastructure—power generation and distribution, water management, mass transit, urban renewal, health care, education. These are great needs of the nation right now, physical needs. We should invest in these things for the future. Increase our employment, to bring the economy up to breakeven, and then build our way out of it, using the power of the Federal government, to create long-term credit, to enable us to go along with these projects.

This means a bankruptcy reorganization of the United States, and of most of the world, but, as in any private bankruptcy, the object should be, if possible, to save the entity that's bankrupt; don't close it down. You can not close down a government, you can not close down a nation. You can not destroy the people. You must save the entity, and the entity is our economy, our government.

MITCHELL: Again, though, having to convince not only the United States, but you'd have to convince the rest of the world to go along with this as well, obviously not a small task.

LAROUCHE: That's why I spend about half my time outside the United States, and not only in other countries, but in communication with leading circles in other countries. Right now, I happen to be a significant factor, as a Presidential candidate, and a personality, in international affairs. There are no important governments around the world that don't know me, and do not follow my ideas very closely. Many of them tend to agree with it.

For most governments in Europe, for example, or Eurasia, many parts of South and Central America, my becoming President would be something they would pray for. And therefore, given the fact that they know there's a crisis, under conditions of crisis, and with leadership by the moral authority, the historically-determined moral authority of the United States, the President of the United States, if he is trusted by these people, as I am, for what I am, will tend to act in concert with the United States, for a common solution, for a common problem.

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche is with us on our Open Mike program. Good morning, you're on Open Mike with Lyndon LaRouche.

QUESTIONER: Good morning. I'm listening to you talk, and I'm wondering, you sound vaguely like a Socialist to me. Is that what you are? Would you say you're a socialist?

LAROUCHE: Pardon me?

MITCHELL: He wants to know, he says that you sound like a socialist. He wants to know, are you a socialist?

LAROUCHE: Well, socialist is a funny thing. No, I'm strictly, as anyone who follows me knows, who reads what I write and sees what I do, sees the fights I get into, no, essentially, I'm a Democrat in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition.

QUESTIONER: That means you're a socialist.

LAROUCHE: What?

QUESTIONER: That means you're a socialist.

LAROUCHE: Well, that's a funny definition of a socialist.

QUESTIONER: You want more big government. You think Roosevelt was a great President, when he gave us the New Deal, which is nothing but Socialism, and you want more regulation? You're absolutely out of your mind, if you want more regulation. That's my comment to you.

LAROUCHE: (chuckles) Okay, you've made your comment.

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche is on the program. I'm guessing that's not the first time you've been referred to as a socialist, though, is it, Mr. LaRouche? I'm going out on maybe a small limb, there, to guess that.

LAROUCHE: Generally, you find the John Birch Society is somewhere in the woodwork when that thing comes up.

MITCHELL: As an economist, you've long touted a new world economic order. You've already started to explain it to us, and what it's impact would, or could be, on the United States. Something that's very important to a lot of Americans is, having good jobs, good paying jobs, jobs with benefits. Job security is part of it too. There are a lot of people in a lot of places where there are good jobs, well-paying jobs with benefits, but people always seem to be a little bit nervous about those jobs going overseas. It's one thing to prevent jobs from going over seas; it's another to try to get more jobs back here. How would your plan assist the workers, the laborers, in the United States?

LAROUCHE: I'm taking on a monster—it's called Wal-Mart. Now the problem of Wal-Mart is, that when it goes into an area, it goes to the businesses which seek to become vendors to Wal-Mart, and tells them, recently, that they will shut off their account, if those vendors do not shift the production of what they sell, to cheap-labor markets overseas.

So, therefore, when Wal-Mart moves into an area, or similar firms do the same—but Wal-Mart is the biggest and most notorious at this internationally—it means a shutdown of employment, in the area wherever Wal-Mart moves in. It's a catastrophe. People have sometimes brought in Wal-Mart with state, local subsidies, and they found out that the subsidy that they gave to bring Wal-Mart in, has cost them more in lost tax revenue, than anything else. So, there was no benefit to it.

Now, the problem is, we have a mentality in the United States, that says, "Let's ship our jobs out to cheap-labor markets, especially in China." And that's what's happening. We have, systemically, destroyed our basic economic infrastructure. We have destroyed our production and distribution of power. We have destroyed our mass-transit system. We have destroyed our water-management system—it used to be fine. We have destroyed many of our urban areas. So, we've come to a point, that Americans no longer have many skilled jobs. Many of these industries have been wiped out. Many areas don't even have a memory of the kind of high-tech competence we used to have, say, in the New England area, back 20-30 years ago. It's gone, since the 1966-67 downturn in the space project, when Route 128 and so forth, was a big booming area of science. So, we've lost it.

Forget this free trade system. Forget it. Go back to a protectionist system of the type we used to have, and promote high-tech employment. Promote it in terms of educational programs which produce young people who are capable of entering the market. Stimulate the creation of industries. Help the industries to develop, which will provide the employment, and you should have a target area.

For example, on the Hill-Burton Act that we adopted at the end of war, the health-care act, before this HMO nonsense. We used to say, that we have to look at every county in the United States, on health care. We have to look at the beds, and the capacity of hospitals, and so forth, in each county. We have to set a target for what we're going to achieve in standards of health care, in each county. We will now operate with private health care system, with public hospitals, and forth, to create that system.

We have to do the same thing with the economy generally—like the state of New Hampshire. You have to have targets. What are you going to do for the state? How are you going to provide the employment? How are you going to meet the needs? So, therefore, you bring the people together in the state, and other interests involved, and you work together to work out a general plan, of how to stimulate the growth of industries you want, agriculture you want, and help to make it happen.

Government has often as much a steering responsibility, as an actual direct action.

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche, is with us on the program this morning. You've heard parts of his economic changes and plans. What would the cost of this be? We're also going to talk about the war on terrorism. So stay with us.

[Station break]

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche, a Democratic Presidential candidate, is with us once again. If you have a question about his policies, you can give a call....

Some of the changes you were just talking about relative to the economy—restoring jobs to this country, making sure that we're not losing labor to outside entities, whether they're foreign-owned companies or American companies that are operating abroad. What would the cost of implementing some of these plans be? Would it be a matter of giving tax incentives, which perhaps means taking money out of this Federal government's hands? How do you decide what locations, and what areas, would get aid before others? What would the cost of implementing some of these plans be, to restore these jobs, and to increase research and development, and to help stimulate job growth, as you put it, in this country?

LAROUCHE: Well, first you start, in economics, not with just the current cost. You take capital factors, physical capital factors, as distinct from money capital factors. And, for example, if you're building a power plant—and we need a lot of power generation, distribution, say, in the New England area now—for security reasons, among other purposes. Now, what's that mean? We're going to have to invest in multi-billion-dollar enterprises. These enterprises will have a capital life cycle of 25 to 50 years. That is, they may require improvements, and maintenance, and so forth, of the process, but a capital life-cycle of one to two generations.

Now, what you do is, you have to create the credit, to create the capital. The government will have to get into that, in a big way, at the beginning. As you develop utilities, for example, you will then try to go back to the old utility system we used to have—as we developed it in the 1930s. That is, you will hive off government investments, which started as government investments, you'll hive them off by selling the bonds, stocks, and so forth in these utilities, to private interests. So gradually, the government is recycling its credit in that form.

You regulate the system, to ensure fair prices for these utilities. You do the same thing with mass transit. For example, take the rail transit. Look at how many hours people spend on the highway, commuting, because the highways are overjammed, because our mass-transit system is lacking. Look what happened to the railway system in New England, for example. I used to travel on it a lot, and it just doesn't exist, virtually, any more.

Water management—it doesn't exist. So these things have to be done.

We have a great shortage of adequate hospital facilities in the country, largely a result of the recent developments around HMO. We're going to have to put that back. We're going to provide affordable health care to our citizens. This is a national security question, as well as it is another question.

But the basic thing here, is to bring the level of productive employment up above breakeven for the state economy, and the national economy. That is, by increasing the number of people employed, rather than cutting employment to try to save on costs, increase employment in order to raise the tax-revenue base.

Now, one area I would actually increase tax rates: in the purely financial capital gains area. I would repeal Kemp-Roth, or get the Congress to do it. And repeal similar legislation. I would go back to the philosophy of President Kennedy on the investment tax credit. If an investor will invest in building a firm—capital investment—we will give him a credit, as Kennedy proposed, a credit for investing in the firm, rather than taking the income out of the firm for spending otherwise.

So, therefore, the thing is, to direct the flow of capital, and savings, into directions which sustain investment in these directions, and to give government protection for those who are doing it. And give benefits, in terms of tax benefits, especially in the lower-income brackets—that's where you get the biggest benefit. And to those who have swindled us, in a sense, on Wall Street, by these big swindles, which are based on things like Kemp-Roth—this kind of swindle will end. That area will be heavily taxed. Whereas on the lower end, where we need the improvement, where we need the savings retained to maintain life, or to invest, there we should be lighter on the taxation.

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche is with us on the program, a Democratic Presidential candidate. Has been, really, since 1976. If you have a question, or a comment... Talking about taxes, and talking about the economy of the United States, it was announced last week that America's GDP had increased over 7.1%. This is the largest span of growth in some 19 years. The White House took some credit, crediting their tax cuts and rebates for the economic stimulus. Are they accurate? Was it because of this plan? How long will it last? Is it a quick fix? Or is it something that will be a legitimate stimulus to our economy, so that we can go through some more boom years?

LAROUCHE: That report is a complete fraud, largely by the Federal Reserve system, and the relevant parts of the Federal government. It's a politically motivated fraud.

You look at the collapse of employment, you look at the auto industry, for example. The United States economy is collapsing, and all these figures that show growth, are a bunch of fakery. They go in the same class with the Enron accounting system, and you might say the Federal government, under Bush, is now operating under the method of Enron accounting systems. That is a swindle.

We're in the process of collapse. All it would take is one prick in the international mortgage-based securities market, to set forth a chain reaction. If the interest rates are raised, as they were in Australia today, if that process goes on, you're going to find a sudden pricking of the bubble, and you're going to find a chain-reaction, catastrophic financial collapse, which will hit fast. That is looming right there. And what we're getting from Washington, from the Enron mentalities in Washington, like Halliburton and so forth, we're getting fraud. There was no increase in growth in the real economy. It was all fiction.

MITCHELL: Let's take a look at some other issues outside of economics, although economics is definitely related. I want to know your impression of the effect this long war in Iraq will have on the United States, and, in part, obviously the economy.

LAROUCHE: It's a disaster. What happened is, at a certain point in the process of the attack, the Iraqi military vanished. One day, it just vanished. It didn't vanish, but it appeared to vanish. They quit.

Now, what they did was something like what happened in Vietnam. There are still the military-trained people in Iraq—they're there. They are fiercely patriotic. Whether it's Saddam Hussein or not, they're patriotic; they're Iraqis. Therefore, what's happened is, you find that the people who had this military training—and there are several million of them—who went into the landscape, have now come back, realizing that they have to fight asymmetric warfare in dealing with a power like the United States. Don't try to compete with it in terms of big weapons. Compete with it, man to man.

Now, this becomes the kind of resistance warfare, or guerrilla warfare as we used to call it, or it's called irregular warfare. the United States does not have the means, or the manpower, to sustain an occupation of Iraq under these conditions. However, for purely political reasons, reasons of the election campaign, on the Republican side, the war is kept going. We should be out of there. We don't have the means to deal with the situation. The casualty rate will increase. We don't have the money to pay for it. We should enter into an agreement with countries, especially in Europe, on an agreement where we can get out of there, and put something else in there, with the consent of the Iraqi people. They are going to have to rebuild the place, not us, but we can provide the environment under which this occurs. We've got to get out of there. We've got to get rid of the people in our govenrment who got us in there—a totally unnecessary war. We have to change our relations, back to good relations, with our European friends, and we can handle the problem.

But if we try to stick it out, and try to pretend we won the war, and to say there are nothing but terrorists there, we continue that foolishness—yes, we will get out, under Bush, probably four months before the election, 2004 election. But they don't want to get out now, while the hot phase of the primary campaign is on. So, there's going to stick in there, keep the war going, eat up more and more casualties, in what is a losing war, something comparable in its foolishness to the Indo-China war back in the 1960s.

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche, your guest on the Open Mike program. When it comes to the war on terrorism, if you were President, how would you fight the war on terrorism, and also explain, if you will, your opinions as to why America is under such attack from radical Muslim factions. How do we stop it? How would you fight the war on terrorism, and why are we being attacked in the first place?

LAROUCHE: Well, what the problem is, is the way the war on terrorism is described by the Bush Administration, is a fraud.

Now, there are organizations which exist, of which al-Qaeda is one, which do operate in a mode which is called terrorist. But terrorism generally comes under the heading of irregular warfare. The capabilities of al-Qaeda is not what was represented by Cheney and Co., from Sept. 11 of 2001. So, the problem is: The general picture of a war against terrorism, by the Bush Administration, is a fraud. There is terrorism, but the way you deal with this is, you cooperate with other countries to create an environment in which you can isolate the terrorist phenomenon.

The problem is, that what we're going—and remember, we did this with the Iran-Contra operation. We actually built up the terrorists. Osama bin Laden is a creation of Iran-Contra. He's still running loose, that section of al-Qaeda. They went into the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a well-known organization, and they recruited people from the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood participated in recruiting Islamic religious people to fight this war against Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

We also, at the same time, ran a drug-financed war through Iran-Contra, in Central and South America. So, we, the United States, and the British, chiefly, created much of the stuff we call terrorism today, international terrorism today. That is a problem, it's a real problem especially in the Americas, especially around drugs. Drugs are the biggest security threat to the United States. George Soros, who supports legalization of drugs, is one of the worst security threats to the United States we have, and he's trying to take over the Democratic Party.

So, we have a terrorism problem, which I'm sort of expert at dealing with, politically. I know how to deal with it. But we do not have the terrorism problem, as represented by the Bush Adminstration, and its propaganda.

We do have a problem of lack of national security, and the present policies of the Bush Administration create that problem.

So, therefore, the time has come for a change. If you want to call yourself a Republican, think back to Eisenhower, that kind of change. We have to go back to some kind of sanity in world affairs.

The United States has great power, not so much its physical power, but moral authority because of our history. If we have a Presidency, that uses that moral authority, and uses our actual influence, we can handle most of these problems without getting into war. I think there is no reason why we should expect a war in the future, if we do that. However, if we continue with the policies which are pushed by Cheney, we will be in asymmetric nuclear warfare, around this planet, coming a few years down the road.

MITCHELL: Well, that brings up the issue of North Korea. They're separated in many respects, obviously, from the radical Muslim factions that are creating terror in this country, and for Americans in other nations, friendly to America abroad. How would you deal with North Korea? And the situation where everything from selling arms to our enemies in the Middle East, to threats of nuclear war, if not on our shores, than with some of our allies and friends in their area of the Asian-Pacific. How would you deal with North Korea?

LAROUCHE: We don't have to do much dealing with them. Actually, Clinton was doing a fair job with this. The Sunshine policy of the former government of South Korea, and of the present government, are policies that will work. The policy—the North Korea problem, as it exists now, is chiefly a creation of the Bush Administration. What we have going, which I've been involved in with various people, is to get Russia and China to play a key role, with a group of other countries, in dealing with North Korea—that is, to cut the deal that will ensure these problems are fixed.

Now, North Korea does sell things all over the world. It's a poor country. Many of its people are in miserable condition. They sell what they have, to whomever they can sell it to, for money, for income. They do that. They also have a crazy idea, that if they develop nuclear weapons, they can blackmail the United States into giving them favorable conditions—which I think is nuts. The Russians have told them it's nuts. The Chinese have cooperated.

So, the United States is not in real trouble. If I'm President of the United States, I don't have a problem with North Korea. I have a North Korean problem, but I don't have a problem of dealing with it. I have South Korea. I have Japan. I have Russia. I have China. I have other relevant countries, who have influence in that area, and we can work out a package, which the best people under Clinton tried to do, we can work out a package which will stabilize that area—there will be no problem.

MITCHELL: In the next couple of minutes, I wanted you to address two other issues that I know are important to our listeners here in Keene, New Hampshire. Your thoughts about reforming our public-school system.

LAROUCHE: Oh, the public school system is an absolute disaster.

I've organized a youth movement around this Gauss 1799 Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, as a way of trying to focus upon the way ideas have to be communicated. Now, that's on the upper, or secondary-school level, or university level, but that method has to be brought down. What we're doing now in our education, is a disaster. The changes in educational policy, in the United States, from about the middle of the 1960s on, has all been for the bad. We are producing—on top of everything else—don't forget the drug problem. Don't forget Ritalin problem. Don't forget Prozac problems. We are drugging our children in the schools, to the point that they become dumb. They become crippled. We are spreading a drug problem, by our Ritalin and Prozac policies in the school system. That's only typical—the books we're giving them is about the same thing. We've got to change that thing. We've got to mobilize the people in the country, to say we're going to change the system. This is not just a Federal government responsibility; this is state and local government: We've got to get the relevant people together and say, "We're going to make a change in educational policy."

MITCHELL: The other issue I wanted to ask you about, Lyndon LaRouche, how would you want to change, or improve, or reform, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

LAROUCHE: Well, I would stop stealing from Social Security. Remember, we loot the Social Security fund, in order to balance the Federal budget. And then, we turn around to the people who paid in the funds, or their employers have paid in the funds, and we tell them there's not enough money to meet the needs of Social Security requirements. So, this is a fraud. We simply have to restore the Social Security system, with its original intent.

Now, on the health care: We have to repeal the HMO law, which was put in by Nixon in 1973. We have to go back to the Hill-Burton law, in which the Federal government participates as a partner with state and local governments, and private interests, in creating a hospital-based system, under which we can care economically for everyone. The idea that everyone's bill should be paid by directly by insurance, that that's the way the cost of health care should be met: No. Wrong! What you do is you provide a system which can take care of the health-care needs. You estimate what the sources of funds are, for paid-in plans, like Blue-Cross/Blue Shield, from the old days, or other health care—what can they pay in to cover the costs of maintaining the system in that county?

[But, we] have to raise some more money, because this does not cover all the costs we have to cover, because we have people who don't have any more money at all. We've got to take care of them. A man drops in the street; he's got to go to the emergency ward, he's got to be cared for. You'll find out two days later where the money is. Maybe he has none, we're still going to care for him. So, we've got to build that kind of Hill-Burton system. And rather than putting the load on these funny plans, this funny accounting system—forget it. Go back to what worked before. Hill-Burton worked, and the kind of paid-in systems, and other kinds of systems we used to sustain the system, worked fine. Go back, and put it back again. Put back what we destroyed.

MITCHELL: Lyndon LaRouche, we appreciate your time this morning in answering our questions. Back in the political scene, running for President, seeking the Democratic nomination, and a goal that you've had since at least 1976. If people want to learn more about your campaign, about who you are, and about some of your beliefs, how do people get in touch with you? How do they learn more about the Lyndon LaRouche Campaign?

LAROUCHE: Well, of course I have a website, as anyone who's fashionable does. It's www.larouchein2004.com. Otherwise they can write or call toll-free an 800 number, 1-800-929-7566. Or they can write at P.O. 730, Leesburg, Va., 20178.

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