Electronic Intelligence Weekly
Online Almanac
From Volume 3, Issue Number 2 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Jan. 13, 2004
This Week You Need To Know
In the Vol. I, No. 1 issue of MSIa Pagina Iberoamericana (MSIa Ibero-American Page), dated November 2003 and now being circulated in Mexico, a small group of former associates of U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche have repeated their earlier lies regarding the nature of their August 2003 break with LaRouche. Their new publication insists that their split with LaRouche "was not the result of disagreements regarding international Synarchism," and that they "still today support the ideas of Lyndon H. LaRouche on matters" of the International Monetary Fund, free trade, and so on.
They are lying on both points.
As the Editors of EIR stated at the time, in an Aug. 5 note, Marivilia Carrasco and Angel Palacios in Mexico, Lorenzo Carrasco and Silvia Palacios in Brazil, and Gerardo Teran and Diana Olaya de Teran in Argentina broke with LaRouche "politically and philosophically over the substantive issue of LaRouche's continuing public exposure, since 1984, of Synarchism, the formal name for universal fascism."
Their continuing cover-up of the true nature of those disagreementsand the fact that they have associated themselves with the views expressed by a Synarchist cabal gathered around the person of the Spanish fascist Blas Piñar and an Argentine Carlist magazine called Maritornespoints to an issue which may be a significant international security problem within the Americas.
Normally, when groups or factions leave an organization, they state the reasons for their departureand often loudly so. But in the case at hand, the anti-LaRouche Carrasco grouplet is denying and lying about the actual reason for the splitwhich they themselves had previously stated was their support for Synarchism. The obvious immediate questions are: Why are they running under cover? Why don't they admit the real reasons for the split? Who or what is trying to conceal a behind-the-scenes role in this operation? And, given the documented terrorist connections of the Synarchist networks in question, and the fact that terrorism is being cranked up internationally, what is the game being played here?
EIR is now investigating the answers to these and related questions, for which the following update is urgently relevant.
On Aug. 22, 2003, EIR published a feature headlined "LaRouche Warns: Cheney Gang Needs Another 9/11." In his introductory piece for that package, LaRouche stated: "Think of the effect of a terrorist attack on the U.S.A., comparable in psychological effect to 9/11, but blamed this time on Hispanic, rather than Arab populations!" Another article in that package documented that a revamped fascist international apparatus in continental Europewith prominent extensions into Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela, as beachheads for the Americashad been set into motion at a Nov. 16-17, 2002 meeting in Madrid. That meeting was hosted by Blas Pinar, Spain's leading fascist figure today, and also prominently featured the Italian neo-fascist Roberto Fiore, of Forza Nuova.
And a third article reported that the Argentine magazine Maritornes had been founded in November 2001 as an ideological vehicle to promote that same fascist international apparatus in Spain and the Spanish-speaking Americas.
The LaRouche blast worked: It forced the enemy out into the open, just at the time that the politically wounded Dick Cheney is most urgently seeking another 9/11 terror incident.
In the closing weeks of 2003, the named guilty parties began howling in protest against LaRouche and his associates. On Dec. 10, Maritornes founding director Víctor Eduardo Ordóñez wrote that it was "a lie and a slander" to call him a fascist, since he is a "Roman Catholic who in no way could commune with a totalitarian philosophy such as the system and doctrine elaborated by Mussolini." (See EIR, Jan. 16 for the full text of the Ordóñez letter, and LaRouche's personal response.)
But Ordóñez is a fascist. Like the individuals of the recent anti-LaRouche Carrasco split, he is trying to cover up what he himself has otherwise made evident. For example, as Managing Editor of the Argentine magazine Cabildo, Ordóñez prominently featured on the publication's masthead citations from Corneliu Codreanu, the pro-Nazi founder in 1927 of Romania's notorious Iron Guard, which fought alongside Hitler's troops in World War II. Significantly, Codreanu is also intensely worshipped by the Mexican Synarchist organizations that the Carrasco group explicitly defended against LaRouche's attacks. Fascism, anyone?
Then on Dec. 17, 2003, Maritornes editorial board member Antonio Caponnetto also weighed in, with a semi-psychotic, rambling diatribe against LaRouche and Gretchen Small, the author of the Aug. 22, 2003 EIR article on Maritornes that so offended him. Refusing directly to answer the evidence presented about the November 2002 fascist international meeting in Madrid, Caponnetto tried to hide behind sarcasm: The author calls "all those who don't agree with her ideological swindles, Nazi-fascists. So Nazi-fascists are we all, from Blas Piñar and Lefebvre, to Chesterton ('British fascist', sic) and Don Sixto, without forgetting Widow, and Wilhelmsen's daughteraccused of bearing a surname."
Caponnettowho is the editor of the same Cabildo magazine which features quotes from the Nazi Codreanuwas reduced to spewing revealing venom: "It's pitiful to see her [Gretchen Small] flap her little gringa hands trying to harm the honor of Hispanidad; or to babble Anglo-Saxon resentments against Catholicism; or to scrub her brain to argue mistreatments against the worthy Middle Ages; or to immodestly assert the 'non-existent glories of the Spanish Empire.' It's pitiful, but not surprising.... Here lies the greatest sin of small Gretchen: her crude, uncouth, Calvinist, grotesquely North American prosaism."
Caponnetto's rant against LaRouche was published in the most recent edition (#76) of Arbil magazine, a Spanish publication whose ideological bent is best shown by its regular promotion of the work of the 19th-Century Spanish Catholic counter-revolutionary ideologue, Juan Donoso Cortés. Donoso Cortés, whose work was revived and used extensively by Carl Schmitt, the Crown Jurist of the Nazi regime, argued that "the institution of bloody sacrifices" is "the most universal" of all human dogmas and institutions. The most civilized nations and the most savage tribes, he wrote, believe in "a pure victim offered as a perfect holocaust." Fascism, anyone?
And in mid-December in Italy, Roberto Fiore, a prominent figure in the new fascist international being organized out of Madrid, showed his true colors as well. He announced that his Forza Nuova grouping had joined two other splinter groups to form an electoral alliance for the upcoming European elections, with none other than Alessandra Mussolini, the grand-daughter of Il Duce. Ms. Mussolini will be the lead candidate for the slate, and the coalition's poster portrays her alongside Fiore and the two other neo-Fascist leaders, under the slogan: "Together for a Social Movement." In Italy, the name "Social Movement" clearly brings to mind the old Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), founded by former members of Mussolini's separatist Salò Republic.
When Ms. Mussolini, who is a member of Parliament, ran into internal opposition to this alliance from within her current party, she reportedly was supported by Princess Pallavicini, representing Italy's and Europe's old Black Nobility. Fascism, anyone?
Mussolini, Fiore, Caponnetto, and Ordóñez are all part of a broader Synarchist operation now under way, and which LaRouche has begun to smoke out. It is Spanish Carlist in roots, fascist in outlook, and terrorist-linked in current political strategic deployment. It is usefully viewed by looking into the case of the Argentine magazine Maritornes.
The tavern wench Maritornes, from which the Argentine magazine takes its name, is a character in Miguel de Cervantes' great book, Don Quixote de la Mancha. But even a whore has a lineageand in this case it is quite revealing.
Maritornes magazine was founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 2001 as a direct project of Spanish Carlist networks dedicated, explicitly, to reversing the independence of the Ibero-American nations and restoring the Spanish Empire there. It is more than likely that Spanish money also playedand probably still playsa central role in this operation.
Spain's National Monarchical Brotherhood of the Maestrazgo, one of that country's significant Carlist redoubts, begat a branch in Argentina in 1996, which they called the Charles VII Traditionalist Brotherhoodnamed after the Venetian-based Spanish pretender to the throne who headed up the third Carlist war in the 1870s.
The Argentine Brotherhood's raison d'etre is to "study and promote Carlist thought"; and their motto is that of the Spanish Carlists that begat them: "God, Fatherland, Fueros (feudal privileges), and King!" They frequently describe themselves as "Catholic knights," defending Tradition against "Jewish Revolutionary masonry"; they hold up the Carlist "martyrs" of the 1800s, Mexico's Synarchist-run Cristeros of the late 1920s, and Franco's fascist "Crusade" in Spain, as the highpoints of defense of their "Tradition."
Within five years of the Argentine Brotherhood's formation, its top leaders had deployed to establish Maritornes, which it begat in 2001:
* Ruben Calderón Bouchet, the Honorary President of the Brotherhood's board of directors, is on the editorial board of Maritornes.
* Elena Maria Calderón de Cuervo, the daughter of Ruben Calderón Bouchet and member of the Brotherhood's board of directors, is the current editor-in-chief of Maritornes.
* Rafael Gambra, a Spaniard who is intensely involved with the Spanish branch of the Brotherhood, and who is the personal secretary of H.R.H. Don Sixto de Borbón, the current Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, is also on the editorial board of Maritornes.
* Miguel Ayuso, also a Spaniard and one of the "great thinkers" behind the Spanish Brotherhood, is likewise on the editorial board of Maritornes.
* Victor Eduardo Ordóñez, the founding editor-in-chief of Maritornes who rushed to the magazine's defense against LaRouche, was a prominent contributor to the Argentine Brotherhood's publications.
There are, of course, other members of the Maritornes board who may not be card-carrying members of the aforesaid Carlist Brotherhoods of Spain and Argentina, but who share their fascist outlook, and bring an important international dimension to the operation. There is the case of the notorious Blas Piñar, the Franco protégé who hosted the November 2002 international fascist meeting in Madrid, mentioned above. Also crucial is the case of the American board member Alexandra Wilhelmsen, daughter and political heir of Frederick Wilhelmsen, the founder of Northern Virginia's Christendom College, a William Buckley-linked center of Carlism and Catholic Synarchism. And the Italian Francesco Maurizio Di Giovine, also on the Maritornes board, was a black-shirt neo-fascist militant in his youth, and was arrested in the 1970s as part of a judicial investigation into a wave of right-wing terror massacres. Di Giovine today is an historian and leading promoter of a paradigmatic counter-revolutionary event for Italy's fascist and traditionalist swamp: the "Sanfedista" restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1799 through Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo.
The broader Synarchist terrorist potential that was already represented at the Madrid gathering, comes into sharper focus with these new elements of EIR's ongoing investigation. In this light, consider the significance of an article published in the bulletin of the Argentine Charles VII Traditionalist Brotherhood, on Oct. 26, 2001barely six weeks after 9/11which chillingly celebrates that terror attack.
The article, written by the Uruguayan Alvaro Pacheco Sere, who is President of the Uruguayan branch of the Brotherhood and also sits on the advisory board of the Argentine Brotherhood's publishing house, cites Juan Donoso Cortés' infamous 1849 speech calling for dictatorship, as a leading example of how the Carlists have been the force which has stood firm for centuries against "the Enemy," and which recognizes that this is a continuous religious war, against the "anti-natural and anti-legal world system ... based on the Satanic substitution of God by an unrepentant 'Man.' "
He then continues: "The historic 11th of September of 2001 altered the march of world events." The United Stateswhich "never was a Nation in the classic sense. They were children of an idea: Liberty, as conceived by the Revolution"felt the blows of the revolutionary groups which it itself had fomented against others. Citing some Spaniard's assertion, back in 1981, that the building of the World Trade Center towers represented the re-establishment of the columns of the Masonic temples, Pacheco proclaimed: "Seen from traditionalist thought, Sept. 11, 2001 appears as 'The Day that the Columns Were Brought Down.'... The destruction of the columns and the wounding of the ... Pentagon appear to mean that some high-level circles, secret and irreconcilable, decided that, there, the Revolution would now be disowned."
"Anarchy reigns," Pacheco goes on, which is a situation positive law cannot resolve. "The anguishing generalized disorientation raises the appearance and the desire for the fulfillment of the supranatural promises, made by Our Lady of Fatima on the conversion of Russia, and by St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans on the conversion of the Jewish people," he feverishly continues. "The false premises of pacificism, ecumenicism, and the civilization of love preached by the modern masonized world, and with it, by the Church since Vatican II, have been questioned. Of course, theological studies on the Apocalypse and the Marian messages will intensify. God has His Designs. They must be adhered to, and we ask Him humbly for Faith, Hope and Charity."
As chilling as this "right-wing" Synarchist endorsement of 9/11 is, its strategic significance only comes into focus when set next to a "left-wing" Synarchist celebration of the same, which came from Argentina's most notorious "human rights leader" and terrorist proponent, Hebe de Bonafini, the head of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Bonafini et al. and the Maritornes Carlist crowd each continue to promote bloody religious warfare against the otheras they did throughout the 1970s "Dirty War" in Argentina. And yet they couldn't agree more about 9/11.
Asked about 9/11 terror attacks in an Oct. 9, 2001 interview with Radio 10 in Argentina, Bonafini answered: "What should I say: that I am not going to be happy because, for once, blood is going to be avenged? Yes, it made me happy, and I will repeat it again. For the first time, the United States was made to pay for what it has done for all its existence.... It made me happy that, for once, the barrier of the world, this filthy barrier, full of food, this barrier of gold, of wealth, fell down upon them."
Fascism, anyone?
Lyndon LaRouche gave the following presentation to an international webcast on Jan. 10. The entire three-hour event, including an lengthy question-and-answer session is archived on LaRouche's website, larouchein2004.com
What I shall address today, before you get at me, which will come in due course, and also people out there, through the media, who will be calling in, as usualincluding my wife, who will be watching very closely, and supervising me implicitly, from a distance: three themes.
First of all, the crisis, in the formal sense, which the Democratic National Committee leadership is facing. And also the nine othersI wouldn't call them "candidates"; I'll call them "the others."
And secondly, the nature of the crisis, which is going to be a crisis for them, all of them, including "the others."
And then, to get also a tougher point, for the audience: Is, what is wrong with the people of the United States, and also the people of Europe, particularly Western Europe, that this that has happened to us, could have happened? What must they do, not merely to change their preference in voting, but to change their way of thinking? Because, despite the fact, that most of our political leaders, in Europe and in the United States, have been incompetent over the past 40 years, have failed, miserably; yet, those were the people who were chosen to be leaders, implicitly, by the voters, either by voting or by not voting. So therefore, the American people, in particular, have to look inside themselves. It was their negligence, which created the monster which I shall describe to you, today. And, unless the American people are willing to change the way they think, the United States is not going to survive. Make that clear.
All right, now, what we have is, to start with, we have the case of a gentleman whom I'll come to in a moment: Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National misleaderofficial misleader. McAuliffe typifies a problem of both himself, the Democratic National leadership at present, and "the others." Common problem.
First of all, Terry McAuliffe knows he's a liar. He sent out letters all over the place, messages all over the place, saying I'm an anti-Semite and a racist. He's a liar. The man is morally unfit to hold any public office in the United States. He's a public liar, on an issue as important as the selection of the President. He is not fit to be seen in public. He should wear a mask, from henceforth.
Now, all of those "others," who have consented to go along with him, also know that he's a liar. And yet, their behavior toward me and toward my campaign, is based on what they know to be a lie! They are unfit to be candidates for the President of the United States. We can't have a man, who's soft on lying, as a President of the United States; nor a candidate of the Democratic Party. They should resign, in shame, and purge themselves of this guilt. Because none of them are morally fit, to be President of the United States at this time. Particularly on the question of their behavior toward me. That is, they have adopted a lie, as a basis for their behavior.
The whole campaign, as run by "the others," is one vast lie. They have said absolutely nothing, of any substantive relevance, to the issues that face the nation now. And they have talked at some length, in many fora, and over many mediaand they have said less than nothing, about the reality of the situation.
So, that's the creature.
Now, there's a story, which my wife likes very much. It's a story which is written out, by one of the greatest poets and playwrights of human existence: Friedrich Schiller. It's a poem, which has been referenced often by us, at her instigation, in organizational forums: Ibykus. Now, Ibykus was a real-life character, of ancient Greece. He was a famous poet. He was not a great poet, but he was a famous and popular poet. And the story about him goes essentially as follows, as it's relevant to the case of the Degenerating National Committee, as it's called, today.
He was on the way to participate in a conference at Corinth, where he was to be featured as a poet. And on the way, he was overtaken by two robbers, who robbed him, and murdered him. And, dying of the wounds inflicted upon him, in his death agony, he looked up, and there were two cranes flying overhead. And he cried out, "Let these two cranes be witness to the murder which is being done to me here!" And he died.
And, then events proceeded, including the two murderers, who went to Corinth, and sat in the crowd. In the course of this event, the Erinyesthe monsters who take vengeance on the wrongdoers, sort of a spiritual force who suddenly appear, as apparitions, and destroy and tear apart those who have been the wrongdoersappeared. And the appearance of these monsters was so frightening to the guilt-ridden criminals, the murderers, that they revealed their identityand were so judged, because they exposed themselves for the murderers, the criminals, they were.
And that is thiswe have a picture of him: Terry McAuliffe [displayed on video screen]. He sees them coming! They're coming to get him! He's about to confess!
In any case. So, what is going to happen is this, in the election campaign: Right now, the important thing for me, and for my campaign, is to get as many votes as possible, as many delegates as possible, as much impact as possible, and to build a larger and larger movement, centered on a youth movement. That's the mission-orientation of the moment. Because, we're marching toward a point of crisis, which will settle accounts with the "murderers," in a sensethe "others" and Terry McAuliffeand their crimes will be called to account, rather soon. The date on which this will occur is not yet certain. But, the arrival of that date, is inevitable.
Whatever happens, in terms of scores and reports, about progress in the election, during the interval until this moment arrives, is essentially irrelevant, except as we do our job. Except as I do my job, except as we build the movement, except as we win delegates wherever possible, get as much of the vote as possible. And mobilize especially among the "forgotten man and woman" of the nation. Because those are the ones, who can be called upon to make the change. That when they stand up on their hind legs and say, "We're no longer going to be treated the way we're being treated, we're going to demand our rights," that's going to be the crucial thing that decides the future of this nation. As it did in the time that the Democratic National Committee, in 1931 and 1932, did everything possible, to prevent the winning candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, from winning. Just as Beast-Man McAuliffe is trying to stop me from winning. There is going to come a time, soon, in which all the good that we do in the meantime, is going to come to a point of crisis, for those who are committing the abuse.
What is in process now, which is merely typified by the collapse of the value of the dollar, relative to the euroI guess, the last I heard, the euro was worth $1.28; not so long ago, a euro was worth 83 to 84 cents. What this represents is a collapse of the U.S. dollar. It's a collapse, relative, now, by one-third. You measure it the other way, in terms of the 83 to 84 cents, it's a collapse by one-half, since that time.
If you look at the prices of groceries in the store over the past six months or so, you see a similar thing. The United States is going through a vast, accelerating rate of inflation. The inflation is being driven, partly by the collapse of the value of the dollar. It's being driven by the fact that a great amount of money, is being poured in, to keep the Wall Street figures upthe official ones. The ones that don't look so good, they don't report. In other words, the figures that get into the averages, which are reported on the day's results, on betting on the Wall Street lottery, only the good cases are reported. The majority of cases, that are moribund and are dying firms, are not reported.
They don't report unemployment! They only report employment, while the unemployment increases more rapidly than the gains of employment. And they call it "a growth of employment."
These are the things that are happening!
Now, in the meantime, the current account deficit of the United States is piling up. The United States as a nation is bankrupt. Ah! But, that's not the story. The world output is now estimated at $40-plus trillion a year. Of which the United States' output has been reported in the range of $11 trillion a year. But, the medium- to short-term debt of the world is measured in hundreds of trillions of dollars. Now, how do you pay those figures off? You don't. You don't.
So therefore, what happens at the point that the breaking point, in the U.S. dollar, means a general collapse of the system? This general collapse can come from any number of sources: It can come from a collapse of the mortgage-based securities bubble, the favorite bubble of "Bubbles" Alan Greenspan. The man who could never become clean, no matter how many years he sat in his bathtub. But he should try: He should get out of politics, and get into his bathtub. And hope that grace will strike him, and get him clean, again.
So, we're on the verge of something. And this something, whatever it is, is going to happen soon. It's going to happen this year. So, soon, you're going to see a crisis hitting the United States, and the world, much bigger than anything from the 1928-1933 interval. It's going to be an existential crisis. Not a crisis of, "I'm poor," or "I've lost my job." An existential crisis. That's the time, that the Erinyes appear in the arena. That's the time, that every delegate, and every vote, and every word of praise that one of the "others" has accrued, becomes worthless currency, becomes trash.
So therefore, you're in a period of crisis. A period in whichit is in the short term aheadthis system is dead, without any way of escaping in its own terms.
So therefore, we're marching, to create a force to deal with this crisis, which the Democratic National Committee leadership, and the "others," pretend not to exist. Every word coming out of the mouths of these "others," is an exercise in futility!
What are they talking about? They're talking about essentially nothing. One says, "I am going to have a plan." Let me give you one of the worst ones; I heard it about three days ago. Gen. "Screwup" Wesley Clark: He was being interviewedI don't know what day the interview was; it appeared on the television set, about three days ago (four days ago, perhaps, nowyes). And he was asked how he stands on this and that. And, he said, "Well," he said, "we've got to get more money to the lower income brackets." Fine. Noble sentiment? Not at all! Hear the words that followed! You see, his argument was as follows: That people spend money; they have to have it to spend it. Now, the reason we've got to increase their income, is because our economy needs people to spend more money! For, the strength of our economy depends upon their ability to buy! Not on their ability to consume what they needbut their ability to spend money, to buy! That's the strength of our economy.
I mean, the man is a blasted fool! No wonder they didn't give him that other star. They should have deducted about three or four! On the basis of his performance in the Balkans.
Now, KerryKucinich does say a few things once in a while which are right. But that'she doesn't have much impact. Kerry, who is probably the only one of the "others" who has much substance to him, as a candidate, has carefully concealed that substance, as much as possible. I passed a piece of property in Boston just the other day, on Beacon Hill, where he has a house, which I understand has been mortgaged out for about $7 million. I mean, that probably puts him in a lower income bracket up there.
But, in any case, he's said nothing, about anything, of any importance. He said a little bit about this; a little bit about this. He refuses to get off the edge, on the question of his being sucked in, to support the Iraq War! He ducks the issue! He's now got questions about it. He did say something, once, in the Congress about this thing. He knows that this was a fraud! He knows he was taken in! He is not man enough, to say he was taken in, even though the evidence has been presented.
This is the case, with all of them! They double-talk. They have a "plan" for this, a "plan" for that, a "plan" for this. All these "plans" mean nothing! The question is, where's the money going to come from? There is no source of money for this thing.
Now, this is typicaland this is where I get to the hard part: It's typical of Americans, and not only Americans, but also Europeans. Very few people have much acquaintance with reality. Very few people know the difference between man and a monkey: That's why we vote for some of the candidates we vote for.
Now, what does it mean? Concentratesome of you have been concentrating on this subject, some notbut, concentrate: What's wrong? We, in the post-war period, came out, under Roosevelt, and despite that fascist Trumanand I say that advisedly, I can prove it if contesteddespite that, we still represented, into the middle of the 1960s, a producer society, which is the world's leading productive economy. Then, that changed, about 40 years ago. It changed after the Missile Crisis. It changed after the assassination of Kennedy. It changed as we entered the Indo-China War.
People went crazy. The Baby Boomers went crazy. They were then in their late teens, or entering university. They went crazy. They were frightened. They were frightened, because they'd been raised by their parents, of my generation, who had become cowards, when the right-wing turn came, under Truman; who raised their children not to tell the truth, but to be careful about what they said, where they might be overheard by the FBI, or something like that. So, the parents of the Baby Boomers taught their children, the Baby Boomers, to lie. "Don't get caught looking as if you might be FBI bait." The great right-wing turn, which later became known as McCarthyism.
So then, when these children had been told never to quite tell the truth, because it might get their parents into trouble, with the FBIhmm?we were faced with a crisis. The crisis was, no longer [was there] the charmit was no longer Dr. Spock, and I don't mean that creep in outer space. I mean the one who was in the nursery, back here on Earth. No longer, this Howdy Doody culture! Now, things began to get nasty.
Eisenhower, who had been their blessing and protector from the evil worms of Trumanismand he did, he did a good job of that. But he brought in Arthur Burns, and that was bad. But then, when he left, and Kennedy was elected, Kennedy was not yet prepared, intellectually or otherwise, to deal with what was hitting him. Nor did he have the influence and understanding of the U.S. military which he needed to have, in that situation.
And so therefore, the funny-funny people, whom Truman had brought into powerthe fascists, the nuclear war freaks, "preventive nuclear war," that Truman representedthese freaks came out of the woodwork, and they launched the Bay of Pigs; and they and their types internationally launched the 1962 Missile Crisis, where everyone was running into a bar, calling for God. They were scared, for several days.
Then, Kennedy was shot. And other things like that happened. They were terrified. And they said, "I'm getting off this planet, now! I've got a ticket. It's called LSD."
So, the world shifted, with orchestration, into a counterculture, the rock-drug-sex counterculture; which became the keystone for the culture as a whole of the Baby Boomers. Now, some people said, "Well, I never took LSD." What's the matteryou couldn't find it? But, whether they took LSD, whether they had sex with five rabbits or notto the degree they were gregarious, they learned to fit in with their generation. Which, for some people, was called, their degeneration. And therefore, they became responsive to what their neighbors thought. And the standard of culture, within the entire generation, the standard of being accepted, if you were applying for promotion in a firm: You had to say the right things, or you didn't get there. So, even if you weren't an LSD freak, you had to be careful about the sensitivity of the LSD freak next to you.
So, the whole generation became, in the main, corrupted. Running from reality, into learning "to go along, to get along." And this was as much true in Europe, as in the United States. So we have a generation, now in their fifties and in their sixties, who culturally, as a generation, were sucked into "going along to get along." If you want to survive, if you don't want your relative to send poison to you, or something. "Go along to get along." Listen to what the press says, what the news media tells you, what the mass media tells you. These are the things"If you're not accepted by the mass media, nobody is going to accept you!" Whether you like it or not, you have to learn "to go along and get along and adapt to the mass media." That's the culture! So, everybody is corrupt! Or, nearly everybody, in that generation, in Europe and in the United States. They are equally corrupt, in that way.
Because, a society is not just a collection of individuals. It's a social process. If you don't resist the social process which is corrupt, you become part of the corruption. If you are a typical citizen, who looks like a typical citizen in everything you do, you are as corrupt as the restbecause you went along with the operation.
Just like these nine "others," who went along, with what the DNC said. They didn't care if it was a lie! They went along, with economic policies, which are a lie. "To go along, to get along." The motto hanging over the U.S. Congress is: "Go along, to get along." The first thing they tell you, when you go into the Congress, you're newly elected: You learn "to go along, to get along"! When you go into a corporation, for employment: "Go along, to get along"! When you're walking down the street, "Go along to get alongwho knows what else will happen to you? Be careful how you look." "You're walking in that neighborhood! Go along, to get along!" Don't tell me you were individually different, when you "go along to get along." You're not differentyou're just as corrupt as the guy walking down there, wandering through Never-Neverland on LSD, because you decided "to go along, to get along."
Now, what happens? I means that what you do, strictly for your own self-defense, you don't raise certain questions. You don't pose certain doubts. You don't resist certain things.
Give an example: When I was 12 years old, I was exposed to a high school course in mathematics. And, in this period, I made a remark about geometry. And, I was told this was silly. But, I happened to be right. Because, what they were teaching, they were teaching a geometry, with these so-called, basic definitions, axioms, and postulates, which is based on arbitrary assumptions, called a priori assumptions. And, in this, they try to fit everything, and explain everything, that is deductively consistent with this geometry. And say, "That is reality. That is geometry."
Now, you have, particularly, since the introduction of the New Math, especially, in every mathematics course, and in all teachingabout economics, about statistics, and so forththe same nonsense is there! You're told that if you believe this, if you believe in these definitions, axioms, and postulates, you can prove something is true or not, by using that kind of mathematicsif it's deductively consistent!
But, it's always wrong.
The same thing has happened in society. You're told that free trade is good. You told that this practice is good. That we're moving away from industry, into post-industrial society. "We're into the information age!" You're told these things! And, someone gives you a mathematical proof, or statistics to prove that that's the way things are going. But, it is that, which is destroying this country, its economy. The submission the submission to arbitrary doctrine, arbitrary definitions, axioms, and postulates of behavior. And, I described this, the other day in Germany, at a cadre school.
The result is, mentally, because the population accepts ideas like this elementary notion of geometrydefinitions, axioms, and postulates, based on pure deductionthat the population becomes like a bunch of goldfish, in a bowl. And the bowl is the axioms, definitions, and postulates. And, the bowl is being carried to dump the fish in the toilet. But, the fish, swimming in the bowl, decide that the future of their civilization, depends upon staying in the bowl. That's what's happened to this society: We have accepted assumptions about economy, about behavior, about policy, which are assumptions like those made by a goldfish, being carried to the toilet where he's about to be dumped.
That's what the situation of humanity is: We assume, that certain thing work. They don't work. But, time catches up with us. We've reached the point that they cease to work, as they always will.
Now, you look at this process, in the history of mankindwe've referred to things like the Peloponnesian War. We've referred to other crises of that type, where societies have gone along for an extended periodmultiple generations. And a once-successful society adopts certain policies, and, two or three generations later, it's collapsedas ancient Greece.
Ancient Greek society, which was a product largely of Egyptin point of fact, the best features of it came in the shadows of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. And this is the birth of modern European civilization, or European civilization in general. So, this civilization rose, as the most successful civilization of its time, from that time to the presentmodern European civilization. But then, with the Peloponnesian War, it destroyed itself.
Then, after that, came a lower form of society than Classical Greek culture, called Roman society, Italian societywhich was inferior to Greek, morally and otherwise. And mankind did not recover, from the effect of the degeneration that Roman imperial culture represented, until the 15th-Century Renaissance, when, for the first time, Europe returned to Classical Greek culture, and, created the modern nation-state. All during this period, the assumptions of law, the assumptions of behavior, of all of humanity up to the present, up until the 15th Century, was that some peoplewho are beaststreat the rest of the people, as beasts. Beasts that rule, rule by subjecting other beasts to the status of hunted, or herded beasts. Most of humanity is treated, most of the time, like animals, like cattle, like human cattle!
This is what we mean, in the United States, today, when we talk about the lower 80% of the family-income brackets. In an earlier time, prior to the change, especially prior to the change that occurred from the middle of the 1960s on, we still believed in the notion that the development of the individual, to their fuller potential as a thinking human being, was a goal, even if it weren't reached in practice. That was the obligation, to get to the point that all human beings were treated as truly human beings, not as cattle. That they developed around ideasdiscoveries of principle; science was an idea; Classical culture was an idea, because it represented the achievement of the recognition of the difference between man and a beast, in the development of the individual.
They stopped that.
What has happened is, we are beasts, ruled over by people who have become beasts. The people who run the society, run it in a beastly way.
Look at HMO, for example1973: The Nixon Administration destroyed the Hill-Burton policy, which was the health-care policy of the nation; and the security policy, the health security policy of the nation. What have we done? We've said, "Well, some lives are not worthy to be lived." Just like slaughtering the old cow! And we do that, by pulling the plug, in a hospital. We do that, by denying care that would keep people alive, because we say, "Their lives are not really that worth living. They've had their run. It's time for them to go." "Look, they're too sick. They're suffering. We should relieve their suffering. Let them go!" "Deprive them of care. They're not worth it any more. It's not economically sound!"
"Don't educate people above their class!" For example, go back in the history of the United States, in terms of the post-Civil War period, in Reconstruction. Prior to the end of the Civil War, the leading edge of U.S. policy, against slavery, was that the first step toward freedom was to elevate the mind. The policy of Frederick Douglasswhose homestead is not far from here. That a person who is free in their mind, who knows the culture of the human race, who knows the bestthe best in music, the best in thatthat this person is free, in their own mind. And people who are free, in their own mind, in that sense, can be made free, as people.
The first step to freedom is knowledge, the power of knowledge. And knowing what the difference is, between a human being, and a beast.
We took that away! We took it away, right after, even under the period of Reconstruction. We said, of the slaves, "Are we going to educate these slaves in schools, with our knowledge? No!! We are not going to make them dissatisfied, by educating them to the point, that they will be dissatisfied with lives of menial labor. Therefore, we will create an educational system, which will keep them in their place. We will tell them it's their culture, that it's good for them." Telling a person, that it's good to be a cow. To be milked as a cow.
The same thing happened in health policy, under the HMO system. We no longer have a health policy based on the assumption that a human being is a human being, and that that life is sacred and important. We now say, "Well, the private corporations, that invested, yesterday, in taking over a health plan, have a right to their share of profit. And, if they're not getting enough profit, then they're going to have to cut down on the care given to the patients, the recipients." Which is what they do! Look at the increase in the cost of health care, under all kinds of plans, now. Look at the cuts in health care. Look at the number of hospitals that are closed. Look at all these things that we go through here.
Human beings are being treated as human cattle. And they're told, that that's the best they can get, if they're in the lower 80% of the family-income brackets. They vote that way! Citizens don't vote for what's good for the nation. They vote, for a little thing they think they can get. They say, "Well, this candidate's going to give us this. And we think we ought to unite, and get it." They don't say, "What's good for the country?" They say, "Well, maybe, this guy will give us this." So, they sell themselves; they sell their birthright for a piece of pottage. And turn themselves, thus, into virtual slaves again.
This is what has happened to us, this kind of thing. We have people who think of themselves as people in power. And we think of ourselves as people who are under the thumb of those in power. We think of ourselves as predatory animals, who are the guys on top, and the victims, the animals on the bottom. And we begin to think like animals. We begin to react like animals. And, out of that, you get some fascists, and things like that.
So, what's happened is this, is, when you discuss issues, in campaigns, what do you get? Look at what "the others" are doing? Are they talking about the great crisis, the worst crisis, in modern history, coming down, now? Are they talking about the changes in policy needed? The changes in axioms and definitions and postulates, needed to get this nation through the crisis? No. They're talking a "plan," within the framework of existing policies, and doctrines, to make a slight adjustment in the coefficients. A little more for this bracket of income. A little less for this one. You'll have to sacrifice for this. Fiscal austerity.
Now, let's look at the economics of this, just to make this clear: There is a Washington Post. And if there's one this worse than the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., it's the Washington Post. Their capacity for telling the truth is at a minimum. Today, they demonstrated how bad they are, by an attack on the President, of all people: You would think he's bad enough, that they would approve him. But, they attacked him on his proposal to do something about space exploration. Hmm?
Now, the argument, of course, is the following. Let's look at the history of the space program; this gives you a typical idea, of what the Post thinks they can sell, demonstrates what they think the state of mind of the population of their readers is. And, the state of mind of their readers, if it's what the Post estimates, is very, very low. I'll explain to you.
What about the space program? What about Bush'she says we're going to have a space program. Well, Bush, in his own stumbling way, has done one thing right. It must come as a sweet relief to all of us, that this President, so ill-chosen, could do one thing right. Maybe he might even be able to do two things right! Like walking the dog, or something.
All right, what's the point? We had a space program, which was announced by President Kennedy, who was not exactly a dummy. Now, what did this space program do? This space program unleashed a technological revolution in the United States, such that for every penny we spent on the space program, we got at least a dime back, in terms of benefits. Benefits, which were produced by scientific discoveries and technological progress, generated within the space program, which then spilled over into other parts of the economy, to increase the quality of life and the productive power of our people.
So, the space program was not money thrown into outer space. The space program was money invested, in increasing the productive powers of the American people by a factor of up to 10! For every bit spent on it. The same thing would be true, now.
Now, here's where Bush, of course, fails. I've been at the space program, and I've been attacked for it, over a long period of time. What's the point of the space program? We go into outer space, because we're in search of something, called "power." We on Earth, are searching for power, on Earth, through space exploration! Why? This comes to the hard part I promised you.
In ancient Greece, and before ancient Greece, a concept existed, called "spherics." Now, spherics is rather elementary. If you don't have any definitions, axioms, and postulates, or other such trash hanging around, and you look up to try to understand what's going in the nighttime sky, or by special methods, by looking at the nighttime sky in daylight, then you realize that you're looking out, and you're seeing these objects, these illuminated objects in spacestars and planets. And there's a process of motion going on, in the whole system, and there's motion within the system of motion. Now, you don't know how far these objects are away from Earth. You just know the angular distance between them, as you observe them; and the changes in angular distance. This was called spherics.
And all mathematics, and all mathematical physics, of the early Greeks, was based on the Egyptian conception of spherics, which you can find expressed in the Pyramids of Giza, about 2700 B.C. The Pyramids contain exhibitions of elementary principles of spherics. This was the work of Thales, of Ionia. This was the work of the Pythagoreans. This was the basis for the mathematics of people such as Plato.
So therefore, looking up, you find these anomalies. And you could come up with a definition, when you discover certain physical principles by making these kinds of observations. First of all, you say, "How is the universe run?" The universe. We are here, in the universe; how is this universe run, from the standpoint of spherics? There are certain principles we call "universal physical principles."
From that beginning in ancient Egypt and Greece, through the Platonic process, the pathway charted by Plato, we came to a more general understanding, of universal physical principles, including microphysicsnuclear physics, and below. So, we discovered these universal physical principles. What are we looking for? We're always going back to this standpoint of spherics, of looking at the universe, in which we're located, and trying to discover what principles are universal, in all parts of the universe.
How do we do that? We do that, by astronomy. We do that the way Kepler discovered the principle of gravity, uniquely. We do it by taking the same approach to microphysics. We find a relationship between the microphysical and the astrophysicalthese kinds of things: universal physical principles. What happens in space exploration? We are looking out to the universe! To do what? To discover new physical principles. Universal physical principles, which, once discovered, will be applicable to our life on Earth. And that's exactly what the Kennedy space program demonstrated.
If you look out, at the challenge of exploring space, you're forcing yourself to see problems and opportunities, which show you principles you otherwise would not discover.
Now, let's take where Bush missed the point; where the space program now misses the point. Mars-Moon exploration: Von Braun earlier, back in the 1950s, said that if we're going to send someone to Mars in the future, we would never send one ship. And, he used, as his example, the fact that Columbus had three ships, when he crossed the Atlantic. Why? Because, you're going into the unknown. And you can never build into an exploration of the unknown, a pre-certainty of what you're going to find. Therefore, when you go to the unknown, you are going into the area of the unexpected. And, what is going to happen, if it's important, is going to be unexpected. You're not going to prove something you already know. You're going to find something you didn't know! And you're going to run into an encounter with it. And your life may depend upon your ability to deal with that encounter. So, you don't send one lonely ship out there.
You don't take a model of the shuttle, and send it on a trip to Mars! That would be idiocy! You wouldn't even send a shuttle-type model to the Moon, regularly. We did it once. We did it to demonstrate a point. But there is a larger risk involved. Going to Mars is a tremendous risk. Now, travelling that distance, as a human being, over the months it would take over a gravity inertial flight, or a low-powered flight, is also a high risk. You're going out, and subjecting human bodies into conditions which are unknown. You don't know what the effect of this kind of environment is, on the human body. You're taking a very long trip, if you're using an inertial flight, or a low-power flight. When you get there, you don't know what you're going to be running into, for human beings.
Therefore, what you do, is you have to carry a logistical capability, for adapting to problemsfirst beforehand: We need a more powerful form of flight. We need a higher order of power. We need at least nuclear propulsion. You would never send anybody to Mars, that's a human being, with any less capable system, than nuclear propulsion. What is recommended, is thermonuclear fusion propulsion. Which has already been worked on, that problem. Because, if you had a 1g rate of acceleration, by propulsion, guess how long it would take you to get to Mars? You go up to mid-point at a certain speed; then you decelerate down into Mars. How about a weekend flight? Or, how about a few days' flight, or a week flight?
So therefore, what you require, then, is a logistical system, extending from Earth, by way of the Moon, into space, to make these kinds of explorations, into the known, into the unexpected! What's the result? What do we discover? We discover new things about the Solar System we didn't know. And these things will reflect our understanding of what is going on on the planet Earth itself.
This will give us new technologies, for example, for developing the Sahara Desert; for managing this planet. So, this is not some kind of a joy-ride. It is not a weekend excursion, to an entertainment park. This is very serious business. And, it's from this sort of thing, that we get the scientific technology, which enables man to increase the productive power of mankind on this planet; to find better ways of managing relatively scarce natural resources, and things of that sort.
So, what Kennedy had in mind, or what he proposed, was not some joy-ride into space. What he proposed was a thrust into the unknown, which would open up to us new knowledge of what goes on in the universe, including what goes on on Earth itself. And what we can do on Earth.
So, just as in the first phase of the Kennedy space program, crash program, so now, a space program would function as a science-driver, to give us the new technologies, the new principles, to increase the productive powers of man on Earth.
Look at what we have in China, for example: We have a country of over 1.3 billion people. It's crowded largely into a coastal region, and they're very poor people, for the most part. Some are fairly rich, but most are very, very poor. The inland regions are poorly developed. Therefore, for the future of a Chinese population, which is growing, you need to build vast infrastructural systems in China: water systems, of the type that are being developed; power systems, especially nuclear power, absolutely indispensable; large-scale mass transit systems, like rail systems and magnetic levitation; new urban centers; the transformation of land, of relatively arid, poor land, into richer land, by these kinds of processes. These things are all necessary, for humanity.
But, we have limited resources on this planet. To the north of China, in Central Asia and North Asia, you have vast resources under desert and under tundra. But, these minerals themselves, which were deposited largely by living processes, billions of years agoa chalk cliff: how many trillion dead bodies of animals are in a chalk cliff? We find minerals. We find them, how? They're deposited by the bodies of animals, or plants, in the Earth, in the fossil areas of the Earth. We go down there; we dig them out. How do we replace them, if we use them up? These are the kinds of questions that have to be faced, if we're looking at two or three generations ahead.
We're trying to give an orientation to the meaning of life, if we care, not about just going along to get along, in our generation, but we think about the future of humanity. These are also morally important. Because we're all going to die. But, what assures us of immortality? Certainly not Tom DeLay. Certainly not John Ashcroft. What assures us of a sense of immortality, is a demonstration that we, as human beings, do have, in practice, an immortality, which we express by scientific and other progress: When we transmit cultural knowledge and so forth, and scientific knowledge, from the work of our generation into future generations, we are expressing the immortality of human beings. An immortality which does not exist in animals. The immortality of those ideas, which represent these discoveries.
So, when you look back, today, toward Archimedes, or Eratosthenes, or other great names known to us from science, we are reliving what went on in their minds, to make these original discoveries, on which we continue to depend today. We see that kind of connection of ourselves, to those who went before us. And we wish that we would be that kind of people, who had a similar relationship to those who come after us. The idea that our dying is not for nothing. That our dying is a point at which we cease to be living people, but what we have represented lives on, after us, as a benefit and improvement for coming generations. That is our sense of immortality, in our practice in life.
When we go into space, to explore space, to make discoveries, which will improve the condition of life of future generations of humanity, we know that our coming and going, between birth and death, is not a mere existentialist exercise of being thrown on a mud-heap. That life means something. That life is a mission. And for people to sense themselves as human, and to treat others among them as human, they must have some sense of mission in life. You must have a mission in life, a purpose for living! Something that is counterposed to the rate of adolescent and older generations' suicides, which is increasing in the world today.
What will save this planet, what gives you the courage to face whatever you have to face, for humanity, is a sense of mission: That your life is a penny, and that you're spending it wisely. And that expenditure of your penny, means something which honors your ancestors and is a benefit to those who come after you.
This sense is lost, in the population, today. It's lost, especially with the Baby-Boomer generation. And you have this conflict, between the youth generation, the young people, the 18 to 25 group; and their parents' generation. The parents' generation have no sense of immortality. They seek it in places like Tom DeLay's barroom (or whatever else he has there, in place of the barroom he used to attend). They don't seek it, within the meaning and practice of their own lives. They don't see society as having a mission. They think of what they're getting out of life. They're like Hamlets, who was willing to go out and die, and be killed; but he lacked the courage to save his nation, because he had no faith in there being a meaning for his having lived, after he's dead.
And that's the typical problem of politicians today. What you're looking at with this group, of "others," at their very best, they are Hamlets. They are futile existence, with no sense of the future, with no mission, no purpose. And, because they have no sense of mission themselves, when a nation like our own needs a missionit is not from them, you'll get one!
My job is to give the people of the United States, in particular, a sense of mission, our mission, as a nation in the world. What we have to do, among nations, to lead other nationsby leadership, not by rule; not by domination; not by giving orders. But, by being a factor of leadership on this planet, which gets this planet out of this horrible danger before us now.
And those who don't have that, shouldn't be President. Roosevelt had something of that. Lincoln certainly did. Franklin certainly did. All of our best national leaders had a sense of mission, of their life, as a penny spent for the advantage of coming humanity, and for honor of previous generations. That is lacking in our politics today.
And my job, above all else, above what I must do as President: My job is to bring that sense of mission, and that sense of immortality, of each individual back into our politics again.
Thank you.
Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche gave the following speech on Jan. 6, 2004, at the New Hampshire Historical Society's Tuck Memorial Library.
What I have to say is colored by implications of the fact, that I'm still, at last report from the Federal Election Commission, rated second in number of financial supporters among Democratic contenders. And therefore, I'm not delivering a message, I'm presenting a programmatic view, for the government.
We have two major problems, and one correlated problem:
The first is, we're in a depression. Since the recent period, at the high point of the dollar, the euro would get 83 cents; today, a dollar is worth, that is, a euro will buy $1.25. It went from 84 cents, as of today, $1.26. We're on the way down. The gold price is zooming; the platinum price is zooming. We are a bankrupt nation. Our current account deficit is calamitous.
At the same time, we have a war policy by Cheney, of preventive nuclear warfare, which is not limited to the issue of Afghanistan and Iraq. If he had his way, we'd be at more wars. This policy has to be uprooted from our government. Our relations with foreign countries has to be improved. We've have the worst situation since 2002, January, that I've seen in this history of the United States, in terms of our relations with foreign countries.
Thirdly, the reason for this, is that we have gone, from the middle of the 1960s, from what had been, with all its faults, the world's most successful producer society, into a post-industrial society which is living on virtual slave labor from other parts of the world, and we are bankrupt.
So, we've had the wrong philosophy of government. We must go back to becoming a producer society. That means, in American terms, the Franklin Roosevelt precedent. That doesn't mean we do everything exactly as Franklin did it. It means, we have to have the same attitude. We have to have the same attitude toward the lower 80% of our family-income brackets. We've got to have the same attitude about our institutions, our infrastructure, the things we used to consider. We've got to cooperate with other nations to restore the kind of monetary system, which Roosevelt bequeathed to us, in terms of a fixed-exchange-rate system. We can rebuild. We can get out of the mess. We need a fundamental change in government. But it's a change back to the philosophy expressed by Franklin Roosevelt.
That's my message.
Moderator: Let's go to the first question, with Mr. Richard Asher [ph].
Q: Welcome, Mr. LaRouche.
LaRouche: Thank you.
Q: On the subject of foreign relations, which you mentioned in your remarks, the U.S. has had a tenuous relationship with China, oftentimes a particularly tense one with respect to Taiwan. How do you view the situation with Taiwan, what the U.S. position should be?
LaRouche: First of all, no one in the United States should be involved with trying to support an independent Taiwan against China. That would be absolute folly.
What I propose is this, which is in process, actually, now: I proposed some years ago, that the United States should support a policy of a strategic triangle. That is, that Russia, China, and India, which are entirely different cultures, if they could come to some cooperation over the development of Asia, in support with Europe, and if we could be involved in that, this would be an ideal solution for many problems. What we need is to get away from the conflict, into an energetic policy of reconstruction and building. And that should be the basis for foreign policy.
I've been discussing this with leading people in Japan, certain people in Germany, Italy, and elsewhereand Russia: That if I were President today, I could institute that policy, right now. I can say that, on an informed basis, from my discussion with people in those countries. And that's my policy.
In economic policy, a positive economic policy of rebuilding has to be the basis for foreign policy.
Moderator: Mr. O'Keane [ph].
Q: Mr. LaRouche, welcome. By my count, this is your eighth attempt at the New Hampshire primaries. Is that correct?
LaRouche: Precisely, something to that effect.
Q: Can you go back, I think 1976 was the first time in which you ran: Can you compare and contrast yourself today, to 1976? and how has your candidacy evolved over those years?
LaRouche: Well, I've always been concerned, ever since 1963, actually, with the changes that were occurring in the country at that time. And my policies have always been based on that question. My concern was, apart from the many other errors we were makingand governments will always make errors; and you can't make, shall we say, a "Federal case," about a mere errorbut a fundamental shift in policy, from a right direction to a wrong direction, is something that has to be fixed. The rest can be debated. What we did, is, we went from being a producer society, after the effects of the Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, Indo-China War, into a post-industrial, consumer society, living on the rest of the world. This has always been my issue. This is why I was against Volcker. This is why I was against Brzezinski. I was right. That's why I was against many of the other things, that Carter's re-election in 1980 was the wrong policy. Carter wasn't a bad person, but Brzezinski was. And Brzezinski was controlling Carter.
The same thing, again, with BushBush, Sr. I thought he was not competent, but I think his son is much worse. Sometimes, changes. Clinton, I liked. I thought he was the brightest President we had, in recent years. But unfortunately, he has certain tendencies not to live up to the fine principles he's capable of seeing better than some other candidates could.
And that's been the case. I've been fighting on this same issue, all along.
Now, we've come to the point that the system is crashing. It's a system which has begun to crash in the middle of the 1960s. It's crashing now. Now, the time of reckoning has come. Those who made the mistake of not voting for me in the past, are dealing with the reality, now. And, that's the way politics is. Politics comes in long swings, not necessarily in the next election. And, if you're in politics, you have to be in for the long haul.
Moderator: Ambassador Schumaker?
Q: Yes. Good afternoon, Mr. LaRouche. Can you tell us, as an economist, if you support free trade, NAFTA, and the WTO?
LaRouche: No. None of the above.
Q: Would you care to elaborate?
LaRouche: Yes. The American System of political economy, which is identified with our great economistFranklin, actually; but specifically, Alexander Hamilton, the Careys, especially Henry C. Careyour policy was always a protectionist policy.
The point is, we must protect capital. If we're going to ask somebody to invest money in a firm, we've got to give them a fair chance to recover that capital. Therefore, if we think that industry is important to our nation, we have to give it protection. For example, we're going to ask people today, if we do the right thing, we're going to have to spend about $6 trillion, of newly created credit, in large-scale infrastructure in the United States simply to repair the damage we've suffered in the past 25 years. This is necessary to start the economy. Therefore, we've got to ensure, that when you use Federal credit, to build up private utilities, or state-controlled private utilities, we've got to make sure that those utilities are able to turn over the capital investment, and maintain the industry. We must protect them.
Therefore, I believe in a protectionist policy, not as an adversarial policy against other countries, but as a way of protecting capital investment, and encouraging it.
Moderator: Secretary Gardner, very quickly.
Q: Many young people are not participating in the political process any more. It's the chicken or the egg: Some say the candidates don't talk about issues that they care about; candidates say that they don't talk about the issues, because the young people don't vote. [timer goes off] What are you doing in your campaign to address that?
LaRouche: I would simply say, I've got a youth movement. And the youth movement is proving that that'll work. Young people, 18 to 25, can get the old folks of 50, and get them back in the process. That's what we need right now.
Moderator: Thank you, Mr. LaRouche.
Here are Lyndon LaRouche's opening remarks at the New Hampshire College Convention 2004, at New England College in Manchester, on Jan. 8. The candidates' event, held every Presidential election year, just ahead of the New Hampshire primary, which this year takes place on Jan. 27, invites all the Presidential candidates, and students from colleges throughout New England. LaRouche's remarks were preceded by an introduction by the student moderator, and followed by a question-and-answer period.
MODERATOR: Good afternoon, my name is Brian Soames [ph] and I'm a senior from New England College. I'm here to introduce Lyndon LaRouche, who is a Democrat on the ballot in 16 states and the District of Columbia. He is a native of New Hampshire, and currently resides in Virginia. He is number two in total contributions, and number six in total money raised among Democrats. He will be on WMUR-TV in Manchester, this Saturday, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, at 2:30 p.m. His website is larouchein2004.com. He also has the largest youth movement in the campaign.
So, please help me welcome Lyndon LaRouche.
LYNDON LAROUCHE: We were going to have a press conference here earlier, but you know what happened with the schedule, with Lieberman's late arrival. So, we are now going to do the two thingsthe general open event, which was intended for, largely the 18 to 25 generation, which is currently my favorite political generation, for reasons I shall explain. But, we'll blend it in, in the question period, I presume, with the press, and the other people here.
What I shall do, is just briefly indicate something, since the highlights of my qualifications are well-knownthey've been listed by our hostis to give you a picture of what my function is, as a President. Because I expect to be President, to the astonishment perhaps, of some of you. But things are going to happen in this year, which will change the parameters by which voters, or citizens, will wish to vote. And to give you a picture of what that means, I just summarize the history of two Presidencies: President Franklin Roosevelt's and my own. And to show you what the connection is, and hope that it will help you understand what the implications of this election are, this year.
Go back to the time of Franklin Roosevelt running for office, and becoming President, in 1932 and 1933. Roosevelt ran as a candidate, over the strongest opposition of the Democratic National Committee, under John Raskob, at that time. I'm running for President, under strong opposition, from the Democratic National Committee, as Franklin Roosevelt was, in 1932.
At that time, Roosevelt had inherited a United States, and a world, but the United States in particular, which had gone through a process of leading into a Great Depression, a depression which was organized under Coolidge, and which was made a period of misery under Hoover. Roosevelt saved the United States, in many ways. He brought hope to people who had become despairing, because the income of the people of the United States had dropped by half, from the time of 1928 to 1932-33. He lifted the people of the United States upslowly, but it progressed. We rebuilt. We emerged from the end of the war, as the most powerful nation on this planet, probably the only world power on this planet, at that moment. And we were the great producer nation of the world. We were a model of a producer nation.
Despite certain problems, in the world at largeRoosevelt died in 1945, April '45and things weren't as good after that. But still, what he had accomplished, benefitted the entire world. We created a model of construction, of reconstruction. We launched a new monetary system, or we led in launching it, which pulled up many parts of the world. And into the middle of the 1960s, we continued to prosper as the leading producer nation in this world.
Now, you can look down the street of Elm Street, on the side along the Merrimack, and you can see the difference: You look at buildings that used to be factoriessome, back in the 1920s, when the Amoskeag was running up and down the river, from the time it used the water power of the Merrimack to power the mills. And that continued, beyond that age, beyond 1932, beyond the bankruptcy of Amoskeag. There was some form of industry and development. Agriculture still flourished in New Hampshire.
What's happened now? It's gone. It's essentially gone. And now, you have "lifestyle industries," not goods producers. The goods are produced, not in the United States. They're produced by cheap labor in other parts of the world. From the middle of the 1960s, we began to become, no more a producer society; step by step, we became a consumer society, a "lifestyle" society, living on the back of the rest of the world, particularly the world's cheap labor, as we do today.
And finally, it led to a great bankruptcy of the world. Most of the world is bankrupt. The United States is bankrupt. Most of Western Europe is bankrupt. The United Kingdom is totally bankrupt. But, we are worse off than Europe. For example, in the recent period, the value of the euro, which is the currency of united continental Europe, started at a low pointthat is, its low point relative to the Bush Administrationof between 83 and 84 cents. A euro was worth 83 to 84 cents, somewhere in between there. Today, a euro is worth $1.26 or $1.27. In other words, a third. The United States dollar is collapsing worldwide.
The United States is bankrupt. Our banks are bankrupt. If you read a statement, recently issued by former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, he gives a warning in that direction, the same kind of warning I've been giving. But, up to now, he's always spoken optimistically, never pessimisticallythough he was pessimistic; but he spoke optimistically. Now, he's speaking pessimistically. And he's right. Anyone who's speaking optimistically about this economy does not know what's going on.
Now, in the middle of all this, there were two changes that occurred: One, at the end of the war, the United States, under Truman, chose to drop two experimental nuclear weapons on the civilian populations of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan. There was no military reason for doing so. No necessity. There was a reason, for doing so, but not a military one: A certain faction in the United States, the so-called right wing, of which President Truman, a nominal Democrat, was a part, had adopted a policy, which was called "preventive nuclear war." That is, the concept was, that nuclear weapons were so terrible, that nations faced with being attacked by nuclear weapons would surrender, rather than fight. And some people, like Bertrand Russell, who was the author of this policy, proposed to establish world governmenti.e., another name for empire, English-speaking empireon the basis of the use of the threat, or actual use, of nuclear weapons. And the primary target at the time, was the Soviet Union.
So therefore, we didn't have nuclear weapons. The two bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were experimental weapons. They were not production weapons. We did not have a production system for producing nuclear weapons at that time. But nonetheless, our policy was to bluff the world, with the threat of using nuclear weapons. And, counting on that bluff, the foolish Truman Administration played games in the Orient, believing that China and Russia would accept the bluff, and submit. But they didn't. The Soviet Union sent the North Korean army down. U.S. troops were sitting, surrounded in the Pusan perimeter on the southern tip of Korea, until General MacArthur organized the Inchon landing.
But then, very soon after that, in the '50s, it was discovered that the Soviet Union had been the first to develop a thermonuclear weapon. And so, temporarily, the age of preventive nuclear warfare was over: You don't use nuclear weapons against a nation that has thermonuclear weapons. So, as the United States developed thermonuclear weapons, we went to a new phaseof thinking about warfare as threatening to use nuclear weapons, in order to use that as a weapon, the threat as a weapon to control world politics. And the United States, on the one side, and France and England, on the other side, then got into this process, of using nuclear weapons as a balance of terror!
Now, when the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1989 through 1992, then, some people in the Bush Administration, got the bright idea, of going back to preventive nuclear warfare. The spokesman for this policy was Vice President Dick Cheney. At that time, Bush "41," the father of the present President, advised by Gen. Brent Scowcroft, advised by James Baker III who was his Secretary of State, and others, sat on Cheney; and sat on the policy. But, Cheney proceeded, nonetheless.
Then, Clinton was elected. Cheney sat back, and still worked on the same policy, built up his network to prepare for the same policy. Then, after Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney pushed his policy again. And since some time prior to the January 2002 State of the Union address by President George W. Bush, Jr., the United States has been committed to a policy of preventive nuclear war. That's what the meaning of Iraq is. That's what the meaning of the threatened attack on Syria, the threatened attack on Tehran, the threat to drop nuclear missiles on North Korea, and so forth and so on.
If we were to get into such a war, what would happen is, again, the fools who think they can play this game of preventive nuclear war, or preventive thermonuclear war, fail to realize the nature of man: that man will find a way to fight, against a tyrant who tries to use any kind of terror to dominate the world. And this is particularly true in Asia. Asia is quickest to do that.
For example: What happened in the case of the Korean War? People thought they had the thing under control. But China, who was committed to defeat this operation, launched human wave tactics in North Korea. And the war in Korea has never been resolved since. There's been a peace, a truce. But, the war, a true peace agreement, has never been reached.
In the case of the Indo-China War: Once Kennedy had been safely murdered, McNamara and Co. went ahead with the idea of the Vietnam War, the Indo-China War. The idea at that time was, you can attack North Vietnam, because China, they understood, would not respond to an attack on North Vietnam, by the United States. They were wrongthey were right, but they were wrong. China did not react, but the Soviet Union did. And the Soviet Union launched support for asymmetric warfare against the U.S. forces in Indo-China. And Indo-China became a quagmire for the U.S.
So, these fellows, like Cheney and Co., have never learned that lesson. Today, with someone to carry out that policy, again, in the form that Cheney pushes it, the nations of Asia would respond with nuclear-armed asymmetric warfare, or so-called "people's war." What you're seeing in Iraq, is the eruption of so-called "people's war," or asymmetric warfare. And all the excuses you're getting from the government about what's going on there, are false.
Now, at the same time, because of the policy changes which were made during the 1960s, the middle of the 1960s, you remember the effect: We talked about nuclear weapons. The American public was terrified by nuclear weapons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki struck terror into the people of the United States! I know. I was there. I was a veteran at the time. And returning from Asia, I saw my old my buddies from the wartime, afterward, in the middle to late 1940s. They were terrified! The population was terrified. The parents of the generation which is now dominating government, people in their 50s and early 60sthe parents of that generation were terrified. The terror was transmitted to that generation by their parents, for the large partI was there, I saw it.
Then Eisenhower was in. Eisenhower was a rational person, who saved the United States from a lot of nonsense of the Truman type for about eight years. But, then, in the course of time, he retired, having been President.
Then we had the Bay of Pigs. Then we had the Missile Crisis. Then we had the assassination of Kennedy. Then we had the next phase: the launching of the Indo-China War.
People gave up. They gave up. And we went into a post-industrial orientation, away from producer society, away from scientific progress. And we became a nation, which, more and more, depended upon looting the slave labor, or virtual slave labor, of poor countries in the Americas, and elsewhere. We've come to the point, where ancient Rome did something like that, after the Second Punic War. Ancient Rome changed its policy, from a policy of being a productive Italy, to depending upon looting the countries it had conquered. The people at Rome, at home, began to lose their role as productive farmers and others. Slavery was introduced into Rome itself. And Rome degenerated into a society of a people, who were kept quiet by "bread and circuses," very much like the lifestyle culture, the mass-entertainment culture of today.
As a result of these policies, we've now come to the point, that the U.S. economy has disintegrated. It will collapse very soon. You can not predict the day that the financial collapse will come. But you can locate the interval, in which the crisis that will bring about the collapse will occur. Some time during this year, that collapse will have occurred. We will now face a crisis as bad, or worse, than what was faced by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932-33.
But, in this situation, we have to be optimisticnot just to be optimistic for the sake of being optimisticbut we have to find the optimistic view. We solved the problem that Roosevelt faced, and the nation faced, in 1932-33. We've done it once. We can do it again. But we need to think in a way that Roosevelt thought. We must have a President who thinks in the way that Roosevelt thought. Not necessarily doing exactly the same thing, but the same kind of approach. And the approach is, a dedication, which is written in the Preamble of our Constitution, a dedication to three principles: First, the principles of the sovereignty of our nation, and respect for the sovereignty of other nations. Second, the commitment of government to serve the common general welfare, the common good. That government is incompetent, unless it serves the general welfare of all of the people. That government must not merely deal with the people of the present generation; government must be dedicated to the benefit of posterityof our own nation, and other nations, as we are to the present.
That was the essential policy that Roosevelt fought for, against the right wing. We now have a government policy, which is trying to say, there is no crisis. Look at these so-called "nine candidates." I'm probably more major than most of them, right now. But look at them: Kerry's not a bad guy. He's a very capable politician. Kucinich is a young guy, he's very talented. He's done a lot of good work. But, what's wrong? Look at the so-called debates! They're horrible! Once in a while, one of the candidates says somethingusually Kerry or Kucinich says something sensible. But, in general, they're babbling: They're saying nothing about the real issues that face humanity.
For example, they talk about fixing health care. Well, they're not going to fix health care! The problem with the health-care system is our financial system. If you don't fix the policy, you're not going to fix the problem. We should go back to Hill-Burton. We had a health-care policy before 1973 that workedgo back to it! This idea of trying to take HMO and re-jiggle it, to make it work. HMO is bad! Get rid of it! Replace it with a competent policy. Which means you've got to change the financial policy. These guys are talking about playing with a numbers game. Taxes: What're you going to do about juggling taxes and tax revenue, and so forth, if the whole shebang is coming down?
You have to get growth, large-scale economic growth of the type that Roosevelt aimed for.
So that, in the short, just giving a few highlights of the system, is the nature of the situation: A tale of two Presidents. We had a President, Roosevelt, who led the United States, as a President, using the institution of the Presidency, to save this nation, and actually to save civilization, from what Hitler represented abroad. We're now at this point, where all the things that have happened in between, have brought us again, to a point that we have living under economic policies, recently, which are as bad, or worse, than those of Coolidge and Hoover, back in their time.
The time for a change has come; and it must be a change back to the methods we used to recover from the last depression. There must be a mobilization of the nation, to bring this nation back to being something again. It must be a new kind of collaboration with the nations, in particular, of EurasiaEurope and Asia. And this is possible: These people in these countries are friends of mine, or they know me. I know them. If I were President, they would come to the United States. They would collaborate. Our big problems in our relations with Europe would end. These problems can be solved.
So, the time has come to change our ways, to recognize the foolishness of two generations of misdirection of our policy. And to go back to the lessons of the past, and under the leadership of a choice of President, who is committed to that kind of change, do it. And we can make it, both for the present generations, and for the future.
And the important, final thing to say about this is: In this country, there has been a great cleavage, during especially the past half-decade. A cleavage between young people, who are young adults, of 18 to 25 years of age, the university-age eligible generation; and their parents' generation. A generational conflict, which has arisen, because the Baby-Boomer generation, as it's sometimes called, has gotten itself into a "lifestyle culture"-oriented politics and way of life. Their sons and daughters, of university age, are saying, "Hey, Mom! Hey, Dad! This is a no-future society, you've dumped us into." And therefore, young people today, of that age-interval, between 18 and 25not as street rioters, but as thinking citizensmust kick the older generation into motion, to bring about the change in general policy, which we need, if this nation is going to make it. We can make it.
And the generation, of the university-age eligible generation, is the key generation which has a crucial mission, which we demonstrated in a number of locations in the past year, on the streets: In California, fighting against Schwarzenegger; fighting against Ashcroft, in defense of Mayor Street, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and elsewhere. That, youth of that generation, have the greatest potential per capita, for influencing the population as a whole. Not as ignorant people screaming on the street, but as thinking young people, who are treating the experience of that process itself, as the great university of our timethe university of knowledge, but also the university of practice.
And, that's my message.
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Pamphlet Exposes Synarchist Subversion of Both Parties
by Jeffrey Steinberg
The first 200,000 copies of the LaRouche in 2004 campaign report, Children of Satan IIThe Beast-Men, hit the streets of cities all across America on Jan. 5. The report, among other things, provides American voters with an in-depth bill of indictment against Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of his neo-conservative cabal inside the Bush Administration, who used fraud and disinformation to launch the March 2003 Iraq war, and who intend, if not stopped, to stage similar unjust and needless wars all across Eurasia.
Mannikin: The Making of Tom DeLay
by Tony Papert
The snakelike cast of Tom DeLay's eyes can be disconcerting, can't it?Somewhat as though you had pulled open a long- hidden door, only to start at finding a pair of lidless eyes staring directly back into your own. Intently,but with just what intent? 'Close that door,' you say? 'Enough for now.'
Dope Czar Soros Bids To Buy Up Democratic Party
by Michele Steinberg and Scott Thompson
George Soros is using his ill-gotten billions to cast himself as the 'saviour of the Western World,' claiming to be in a fight against the 'preemptive war doctrine' crafted by Beast-man Dick Cheney. The vehicle he has selected for the campaign is the Democratic Party in the United States, buying it up with tens of millions of dope dollars, to turn it into a toothless tool of the 'Billionaires' Club,' which will posture as the 'anti- Empire' party, but will in reality be a 'protection racket' for Cheney.
LaRouche Campaign Tour Points to NH Primary
by Bonnie James
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche's second swing through his native New Hampshire, in advance of the early primaries this month, began with a smashing success in the state capital, Concord, on Jan. 6.
New Year Deepens Dollar Crisis
At the middle of the ninth week of consecutive losses against all other leading currencies, on Jan. 5 the U.S. dollar tumbled to a new historic low against the euro ($1.277), having fallen through the $1.25 level without stopping or looking around. Statements by American currency 'experts' and by Treasury Secretary John Snow, that the dollar fall is being slowed and will not go below $1.35, look panicky.
Pay Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain
by John Hoefle
Any good illusionist knows the trick: You provide a distraction for your audience, keeping their eyes away from that which you do not want them to see. Such is the case with the Parmalat investigation now playing out in the press, just as it was in the Enron, WorldCom, and other cases over the recent period.
The Story Behind Parmalat's Bankruptcy
by Claudio Celani
The bankruptcy of the giant food company Parmalat, warned Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti on Dec. 22, runs the risk of leading to 'general corporate insolvency' in Italy, if there is a run on corporate bonds. Throughout Europe, financial operators are nervous about the enormous sums of fraudulent financial paper that went up in smokeand about where the trail of criminal investigation will lead.
Archbishop Endorses New BrettonWoods
by Liliana Gorini
Does morality have anything to do with economics and the financial system? Should financial institutions orient toward profit, or the Common Good? Should Italy, as a Catholic country, promote a New Bretton Woods? These questions were answered with a resolute 'Yes,' by Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, Archbishop of Milan, at a conference on 'Moral Orientation in Credit and Finance,' held at the Cariplo Foundation in Milan on Nov. 24.
Spirit Rover Makes Successful Mars Landing
by Marsha Freeman
Seven months of nervous waiting and 'six minutes of hell' ended well for more than 200 scientists and engineers late evening on Saturday, Jan. 3, when the first of two identical exploration rovers safely landed on Mars. The roversthe Spirit and Opportunity mobile geologists will explore different sites on opposite sides of the red planet, as the next step in NASA's research effort to 'follow the water' on Mars.
For Peace in Korea, Put 'Economy First'
by Kathy Wolfe
The Eurasian Land-Bridge, also known as the 'New Silk Road' concept of infrastructure 'great projects,' should be used in a specific way to ensure against military conflict in Korea, and promote the success of the Six-Power Talks, U.S. Presidential candidate and EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche advised recently. LaRouche is the conceptual 'grandfather' of the New Silk Road.
Fighting the Red-Hunters at The Dawn of the Atomic Age
After the unnecessary atomic bombing of Japan by Harry Truman, Trumanism as 'McCarthyism' also hit the atomic scientists and engineers. From a new book by veteran Oak Ridge nuclear engineer Ted Rockwell.
Has the Narco-Terrorism Lobby Been Stymied in Colombia?
by Valerie Rush
Ecuadoran law enforcement officials moved in and arrested Ricardo Palmera on the streets of Quito on Jan. 2, after video surveillance tapes sent to their Colombian counterparts had confirmed that their quarry was indeed the infamous Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) commander 'Simo´n Trinidad,' wanted in Colombia on multiple charges of murder and terrorism.
SAARC Summit:
South Asia Wants To Get Its House in Order
by Ramtanu Maitra
Exhibiting a fresh attitude to cooperate for mutual benefit, the South Asian nations held what observers described as a 'landmark' summit in Islamabad, Pakistan on Jan. 4-5. The summit shows the potential to pave the way for developing a regional common market and to bring peace among the South Asian nations.
In Memoriam: K.R. Ganesh
LaRouches Lose a Friend; I've Lost an Advisor
by Ramtanu Maitra
On Jan. 2, 2004, Shri K.R. Ganesh, former Minister of State for Finance in the late Indira Gandhi's 1972 Cabinet, passed into history. Suffering for years with complications of the lungs, he embraced death quietly in the early hours of the day, at 81.
IDF Shootings Spark Resistance in Israel
by Dean Andromidas
Soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) fired on Israeli demonstrators on Dec. 27 during a protest at the 'separation fence' on the West Bank, better known as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new Berlin Wall.
Why the Washington Post Hates Thailand's Thaksin
by Mike Billington
A Washington Post editorial on Dec. 26, 2003, titled 'Our Man in Bangkok,' denounced Thailand's popularly elected and widely supported Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, as a 'populist' who is moving Thailand away from 'democracy,' implying that he had obtained his office through corruption.
Report From Germany
by Rainer Apel
Elites Begin New Year in Denial .Claims about an inevitable 'upswing' in Germany's economic situation will be dashed by a reality shock.
'Leak-Gate' Escalates: All Roads Lead to Cheney
by Edward Spannaus
By all indications, recent developments in the Justice Department's investigation into the illegal disclosure of the identity of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame, are very bad news for Dick Cheney.
Campaign 2004: Where They Stand
The third in a series. Ten Democratic candidates compared on "Military Policy: Defense of the Nation in a Time of Global Economic Crisis."
The Puzzle of Wesley Clark
by Tony Papert
Winning Modern Wars and Waging Modern War, by Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
General Clark's first book, Waging Modern War, was written when he was fresh from military service and still free from the distraction of contemplating an election campaign. It reveals much more of his thinking than his more recent Winning Modern Wars.
U.S. Economic/Financial News
Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin warned of "sudden financial and fiscal disarray" from ongoing U.S. budget deficits. Rubin made the warning in a paper presented Jan. 4 at the American Economics Association conference, a meeting addressed by Fed Chairman Alan "Dracula" Greenspan and Fed governor Ben "Bubbles" Bernanke. The paper was co-authored by economists Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution, and Allen Sinai of Decision Economics, Inc.
Rubin et al. warned that, "The U.S. federal budget is on an unsustainable path.... [T]he scale of the nation's projected budgetary imbalances is now so large, that the risk of severe adverse consequences must be taken very seriously." Moreover, these adverse consequences "may well be far larger and occur more suddenly" than forecast by conventional analysisthe risk of what Rubin calls a "financial and fiscal disarray."
U.S. and foreign investors would shift away from dollar-denominated assets, limiting the ability of the U.S. to finance its current account deficit, and triggering a "potentially sharp" drop in the dollar's value. Stock prices would fall.
The effects could then spread from financial markets to the real economy: jobs losses, losses by banks and financial institutions, and a "wave of bankruptcies."
The International Monetary Fund released a report Jan. 7 warning that the massive and growing U.S. budget and current account deficits, by leading to unprecedented foreign debts, threaten disastrous impact on the global financial system and economy. U.S. budget deficits "pose significant risks for the rest of the world.... Against the background of a record-high U.S. current account deficit and a ballooning U.S. net foreign liability position, the emergence of twin fiscal and current account deficits has given rise to renewed concern," the report declared. "The United States is on course to increase its net external liabilities to around 40% of [GDP] within the next few yearsan unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country."
This situation could cause an abrupt drop in the dollar's value, as foreign investors dump U.S. assets, the IMF warnedblowing out the global financial system. "Although the dollar's adjustment could occur gradually over an extended period, the possible global risks of a disorderly exchange-rate adjustment, especially to financial markets, cannot be ignored," the report said. With U.S. net external debt at record levels, the IMF cautioned, such a dollar crash "could possibly lead to adverse consequences both domestically and abroad."
Elaborated Charles Collyns, Deputy Director of the IMF's Western Hemisphere Department: "I think the risk is substantial," of a "rapid movement in exchange rates that could have an impact on asset prices and equity prices in the United States and equity prices abroad," worsening the economic problems also in the euro area and Japan.
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow and Under Secretary John Taylor dismissed the IMF's warning. Taylor claimed the tax cuts gave America its shortest "recession." Snow insisted that there is no problem, that every country has deficits, and that the U.S. economy is "sound."
Echoing the IMF, on the other hand, Federal Reserve governor Donald Kohn warned that the rising large U.S. budget deficit "looks worrisome."
In a paper presented to the American Economic Association in San Diego on Jan. 3, Federal Reserve governor Ben Bernanke and Fed director Vincent R. Reinhart (Division of Monetary Affairs) again tried to reassure markets that there are no limits to the amount of paper the Fed can print, if needed. Even at a point where "the short-term policy rate is at or near zero," and therefore, "conventional means of effecting monetary ease," that is, lowering the target for the policy rate, is no longer feasible, "monetary policy is not impotent." The authors emphasize that the Fed, under such circumstances, could still enact certain "alternative monetary strategies," specifically the following three:
1. "Providing assurance to financial investors that short rates will be lower in the future than they currently expect,
2. "changing the relative supplies of securities [such as Treasury notes and bonds] in the marketplace by shifting the composition of the central bank's balance sheet, and,
3. "increasing the size of the central bank's balance sheet beyond the level needed to set the short-term policy rate at zero ('quantitative easing')."
Concerning the second and third alternative strategy, the authors explain that the Fed, which currently holds about $670 billion of U.S. Treasuries, could, as an example, decide to shift from short-term to longer-term Treasuries. In "perhaps the most extreme example," the Fed could declare its "unlimited commitment to purchase the targeted security at the announced price." This strategy, they admit, is a bit risky, because if investors don't play along, the Fed "would end up owning all or most of those securities." The Fed could also "consider purchasing assets other than Treasury securities, such as corporate bonds or stocks or foreign government bonds. The Federal Reserve is currently authorized to purchase some foreign government bonds, but not most private-sector assets, such as corporate bonds or stocks."
Another argument for engaging in alternative monetary policies, even before the overnight rate has gone down "all the way to zero," is that the public might think that the central bank has "run out of ammunition," giving rise to some "uncertainty" in the markets. The authors, in their concluding remarks, therefore stress that "policymakers are well advised to act preemptively and aggressively to avoid facing the complications raised by the zero lower bound."
As we are already close to the "zero lower bound" in the U.S. (as well as in Japan and Switzerland), the Fed officials obviously want to imply that such extraordinary actions could now be implemented any moment.
Addressing the annual meeting of the American Economic Association Jan. 3, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that he and his monetarist policy-makers could have stopped the stock-price bubble by raising interest rates, "but it would [have brought] the whole economy down with it." He claimed that "our strategy of addressing the bubble's consequences rather than the bubble itself has been successful." He alleged there has been a successful emergence from an eight-month, exceptionally mild recession in 2001.
Speaking at the same meeting Jan. 4, Fed governor Ben Bernanke, said the fact that 2.5 million factory workers have lost their jobs in the past three years, was helping keep prices under control. "On that basis I think that inflation is going to remain contained for some time," Bernanke said.
Steve Kandarian said he was stepping down as director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the Federal agency that takes over bankrupt pension plans terminated by companies, Reuters reported Jan. 7. Although he said he was stepping down for family reasons, his resignation letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao also cautioned that the underfunded pension system needed quick action to fix it; otherwise, a taxpayer bailout may be necessary.
"We have learned these past two years that current pension funding rules are inadequate to ensure sound funding in plans at the greatest risk of termination," Kandarian wrote. Workers and retirees have lost promised benefits, while the PBGC had suffered multibillion-dollar losses, he said.
"If we do not take action soon, these consequences will repeat themselves, or, worse, U.S. taxpayers may find themselves called upon to bail out the pension insurance system," he warned. PBGC, which insures traditional retirement plans for 44 million current workers and retirees, had as of August a record deficit of $8.8 billion in its single-employer program.
U.S. companies announced 1.24 million layoffs in 2003, down 16% from the level in 2002; but, the pace of job cuts increased during October-December, compared to the previous three-month period, Reuters reported Jan. 6. Planned layoffs at U.S. companies fell to 93,020 in December, job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in its monthly report. However, employers slashed 364,346 jobs in the fourth quarter, up from 241,548 in the third quarter. For 2003, companies announced 1,236,426 job cuts; layoffs in the government and non-profit sectors, for the first time in three years, exceeded job cuts in the telecom sector.
Over the last nine years, the number of annual job cuts has risen, the report said, due in part to more and more outsourcing overseas.
World Economic News
A senior European financial insider, briefed on Lyndon LaRouche's release of Jan. 3, entitled, "Parmalat: Pricking the big, big, big bubble," pointed to the huge number of deals by top international banks running through offshore centers like the Cayman Islands, in a discussion on Jan. 7. These deals are often used to finance political, illegal, or high-risk speculative efforts, unnoticed by any government supervision. The source in particular mentioned Bank of America, Citicorp, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley in this respect. The Parmalat collapse could potentially expose and threaten this dirty substructure of the global financial system, with unforeseeable financial as well as political consequences.
In its latest quarterly review, released in late December, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) devoted a special chapter to the theme "Offshore centres, the U.S. dollar and the yen." What the BIS knows about these activities is at least the volume of cross-border transactions which the banks report to their respective central banks and the central banks report to the BIS on a country-by-country basis.
The BIS notes: "Following a two-year period of sluggish claim growth after the LTCM crisis in 1998, claims on offshore centres have rebounded in recent quarters. Banks in the United States accounted for much of the rise. Total claims on offshore centres by BIS reporting banks totalled $1.8 trillion in the second quarter of 2003, more than double the stock in 1990.
"Three consecutive quarters of relatively large increases in claims on offshore centres by banks in the United States, primarily vis-a-vis the Cayman Islands and Jersey, have been largely responsible for the overall rise in offshore centre activity. These recent moves have further established the US banking sector as the biggest user of offshore centres, a position it has held since the fourth quarter of 2000. Total claims of banks in the United States on offshore centres totalled $601 billion in the second quarter of 2003, accounting for roughly one third of all claims on offshore centres." In the second quarter of 2003, 42% of all lendings by US banks to banks abroad passed through offshore centers, the highest percentage of all BIS reporting countries and sharply up from the 34% level of one year earlier.
The bigger part of offshore activities by banks is taking place with banks, often direct affiliates of the same bank, in the offshore center. However, as the BIS emphasizes: "An increasingly large portion of offshore business is vis-a-vis non-bank counterparties such as hedge funds, insurance companies, and securities firms." One quarter of these worldwide cross-border lendings to non-bank entities ($101 billion) ended up in offshore centres.
The capital which arrives in the offshore centers is then being re-channeled throughout the globe. In the BIS list of outstanding amounts of cross-border lendings (June 2003), the Cayman Islands ($1.02 trillion) ranks No. 5, just behind Britain ($2.86 trillion), Germany ($1.64 trillion), the US (1.45 trillion), and Japan ($1.27 trillion). The Cayman Islands cross-border lendings are higher than those of France ($943 billion) and Switzerland ($832 billion), and are almost four times as large as those of Italy ($273 billion).
Unemployment in Germany is the highest in six years; and the rate of new jobless has soared to a 12-year height. According to the report of the national unemployment office issued Jan. 8, joblessness reached a six-year high, with 4.316 million in December, or 10.4 percent.
An independent survey published by the econometric staff at the Berlin-based DIW, reviewing the development of the labor market in the years 2002 and 2003, reports that with 392,000 jobs eliminated from the total workforce in 2003, Germany had the highest net loss of jobs since 1991. With the jobs lost in 2002, the national employed workforce shrunk by 630,000, to 38.3 million citizens.
The shrinkage of productive jobs is continuing unabated: in 2003, 70% of Germans employed worked in the service sector, but only 21.2% in the productive sector. In 1991, the comparison was 59.2%, against 29.3%. By that time, most of the shock wave of eliminating almost 3 million industrial jobs in former East Germany through German reunification and "marketization," had already occurred.
United States News Digest
The gang of neo-conservative ideologues that Lyndon LaRouche has identified as the "Children of Satan: The Ignoble Liars Behind Bush's No-End Iraq War" (the title of a mass-circulation LaRouche in 2004 campaign pamphlet) has launched a massive propaganda campaign to attempt to regain the policy "upper hand" in the aftermath of the Iraq War quagmire, and in the midst of continuing investigations of Vice President Dick Cheney (see this week's InDepth).
Carrying the ball for this operation, are Richard Perle and David Frum, using the vehicle of a new book called An End of Evil, in which they lay out a "recipe" for winning the war on terrorism: use of military force for regime change in Iran, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and North Korea, among others. Inside the U.S., they suggest the institution of national identity cards.
As part of the whirlwind tour promoting their book, Perle and Frum co-authored a ranting attack in the Jan. 7 Wall Street Journal on U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (a decorated Vietnam War veteran), Gen. Anthony Zinni (USMC-Ret.), and Gen. Brent Scowcroft (USA-Ret.) as ideological "soft-liners," who live in a fantasy world that believes in diplomacy and war-avoidance.
Colin Powell was asked by Ted Koppel about the piece on the Jan. 7 ABC Nightline program. Powell said he had read it, and responded: "What I'm trying to do for the President ... and the American people, is to help the President conduct a foreign policy that is consistent with our values and consistent with the need for us to have partners and friends around the world. Not every problem lends itself to a hard-edged solution."
Pushed on the "softie" label, Powell continued: "The State Departmentgood heavens! They're diplomats over there. Good heavens! They reach out and talk to people. Good heavens! They try to prevent wars. Yes, guilty. We do that. But what we really do is serve the President. And, yes, there are occasionally very sharp differences within our team." He then listed the Subcontinent (India/Pakistan), Sudan, Libya, and North Korea as examples of successes for diplomacy.
Travis County, Texas District Attorney Ronnie Earle has initiated a criminal investigation into whether corporate money, raised by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's machine, illegally financed state legislators' electoral campaigns. The GOP victories directly attributable to these funds gave Republicans control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time in 130 years, allowing the party to rig the Texas Congressional redistricting.
The money being probed went through 1) Texans for a Republican Majority, a sub-project of the Americans for a Republican Majority which DeLay set up in 1994 with seed money from Enron; and 2) TABan Austin-based funding mechanism, coordinating directly with the personnel of DeLay's group.
The DeLay men funnelled corporate donations into support for individual GOP candidates, whereas state law only allows indirect corporate support for political parties.
Among millions in payments being probed, Philip Morris donated $20,000. The company's chief lobbyist is the wife of Roy Blunt, DeLay's Republican Whip.
At its annual meeting at the end of December, the National League of Cities passed a resolution declaring that sections of the USA/Patriot Act "compromise the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights," and calling on Congress to amend it "to restore protections of the fundamental civil liberties of Americans."
The NLC resolution specifically cited, as threats to civil liberties, provisions of the Patriot Act which:
permit searches with no one present, and with delayed notification;
permit the FBI to obtain access to records from bookstores and libraries, and give law enforcement officials access to sensitive mental-health, library, business, financial, and educational records;
give to the Secretary of State broad powers to designate domestic groups as "terrorist," and give to the Attorney General powers to detain indefinitely or deport immigrants even if no crime has been committed.
Leon Fuerth, formerly National Security Advisor to Al Gore during the Clinton-Gore Administration, is now becoming the chief national security and foreign policy adviser to Democratic candidate Howard Dean, the Washington Times reported Jan. 8.
Fuerthan ardent supporter of "regime change" in Iraqplayed a particularly rotten role in many respects during the Clinton years. He was a key figure in both the "Principals Committee" (made up otherwise of the President's Cabinet-level advisers) and also the "Deputies Committee." The Principals Committee was notorious for going behind President Clinton's back to launch air strikes against Iraq in late 1998.
Fuerth was also described as the "virtual day-to-day manager of U.S. relations with Russia"implementing the corrupt arrangements growing out of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, and Gore's dirty ties to Russian organized-crime networks typified by his links to the Golden ADA diamond-smuggling operation. Fuerth was personally instrumental in covering the organized-crime connections of former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and of free-market "reformer" Anatoli Chubais.
The New York Times reported that during Al Gore's bid for the Presidential nomination in 1988, that "Mr. Fuerth helped him formulate an uncritical pro-Israeli line." At one point, Fuerth was even suspected of being Israel's "Mega" mole within the Clinton Administration. A June 16, 1998 Washington Post profile of Fuerth reported, "He sputtered with anger upon being told that some officials in the State Department believe he is the conduit by which inside information is passed to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu."
At a State Department press conference on Jan. 8, EIR's Bill Jones asked Secretary of State Colin Powell about Asia scholar Kenneth Lieberthal's warnings that Taiwanese President Chen Shui-Bian is bringing the world closer to war than most are willing to acknowledge. Powell answered that the President had been very clear in rejecting the concept of a referendum on Taiwanese independence, and that Chen had definitely heard the message, and that we must see what he doesa clear renewal of President Bush's warning.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Jan. 8, China expert Lieberthal, who was the National Security Council director for Asia under President Clinton, wrote that "Chen is both reflecting and creating facts on the ground that have profound implications for the US, China, and Taiwan itself," and that "the stakes could not be higher." He warns that, while Korea and other issues may be moving toward a peaceful solution, "developments in Taiwan could drag the US and China into armed conflict. That outcome is so horrendous as to be almost unthinkable, but it is also increasingly likely unless serious steps are taken soon. One tail is, it seems, wagging two dogs."
Lieberthal says Bush was right to bluntly warn Chen to drop his plan for a referendum, but that Chen has gone forward anyway. The lack of a follow-up from Washington, Lieberthal fears, is destroying U.S. credibility, encouraging Chen to proceed not only with the referendum on China's missiles (a symbolic provocation), but with the more serious threat to move for a referendum on a new constitution by 2008, if he were to win the March election. This would be a clear tripwire for China to move militarily to prevent the independence of Taiwan. In that case, if Beijing believed the U.S. were not stopping Chen's reckless moves, they would likely move militarily, sooner rather than later.
Ibero-American News Digest
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega provoked a diplomatic incident with Argentina, with his charges Jan. 5, that President Nestor Kirchner's foreign policy has "apparently taken a turn to the left." In the same speech before the Council of the Americas in New York, in which he attacked Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez for destabilizing other Ibero-American countries, Noriega said he was "worried and disappointed" with Kirchner's foreign policy, as it had established a too-cozy relationship with Cuba. When Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa visited Cuba recently, Noriega said, he failed to meet with Cuban dissidents, and that was a mistake.
In a press conference following his speech, Noriega added that President George Bush would be discussing U.S. "concerns" when he meets with Kirchner, on the sidelines of the Americas Summit taking place in Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 12-13. The White House requested the meeting Jan. 2, for the purpose of discussing Argentina's debt restructuring plan and its foreign policy.
Simultaneous with Noriega's offensive against Argentina, neo-conservative networks within the Bush Administration (of which right-wing Cuban emigre Noriega is a part) leaked to various news outlets, Robert Novak and Associated Press, among them, that the Administration is concerned about a Cuban-Chavez "axis" in the region. The word "evil" in the "axis of evil" propaganda being churned out for a year by the Hudson Institute, was left implicit.
Foreign Minister Bielsa, meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Lino Gutierrez, (another right-wing Cuban emigre), that same day to work out the details of the Bush-Kirchner meeting, told Gutierrez that he was "affected and offended" by Noriega's "biased" statements. "I find it striking, that in a democracy like the United States, which respects international law, an official such as Noriega so flagrantly attacks Argentina's right to self-determination." That evening, the Foreign Ministry formally communicated to the U.S. Ambassador the government's "profound displeasure" with Noriega's remarks.
President Kirchner personally responded, "No one need chastise Argentina, and much less challenge it," adding with bravado, that he would "win by a knockout" in his meeting with Bush, because Argentina is an "independent and dignified country." He added: "We're finished being a doormat." Cabinet Chief of Staff Alberto Fernandez added that the era of "carnal relations and automatic alignment"a reference to former President Carlos Menem's self-proclaimed foreign policyis over. Noriega's statements "strike me as frankly impertinent toward the President," he said. Fernandez told Radio Mitre that diplomatic ties with the U.S. "will only be strengthened through mutual respect, and the highest-level dialogue between the countries, but not through statements of this kind [made by Noriega]."
As neo-conservative loonies in the Bush Administration paint the Kirchner government in Argentina as leftist and anti-American, networks of the Argentine fascist Maritornes magazine, whose ties to European terrorist networks Lyndon LaRouche has exposed, are mobilizing for a military rebellion against the Kirchner government, charging it is allegedly full of Marxists and terrorists.
The broader threat of which the Maritornes synarchists are a part, is addressed in this week's EIW Editorial, and the InDepth section of last week's issue (Jan. 5, No. 1). Additional coverage can be found in the Aug. 22, 2003 EIR.
The pretext for the campaign, is that the Kirchner government has, indeed, adopted the human rights and anti-military agenda of drug-legalizer and speculator George Soros and the globalization hit-squad, Transparency International. President Nestor Kirchner has named several prominent Transparency and Soros operatives to his government, and to the Supreme Court, purged military officers who opposed these policies, and, in a real provocation, declared in his speech before the United Nations last September, that "we are all children of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo," the latter a reference to the overtly-terrorist group of that name.
The two Maritornes figures leading the campaign for a coup, are Victor Eduardo Ordonez and his buddy, Antonio Caponnetto. Ordonez issued an open letter in December, circulated through his internet bulletin, "OtroSi," in which he accused President Kirchner with being an "apologist for organized crime," adding that groups "close to Kirchner" were responsible for the leftist terrorist assassinations of the 1970s. Ordonez also rhetorically asked the President: "Are you taking responsibility for what happened" at that time? If so, Ordonez warns, "you will lose the legitimacy of your mandate." Can you command the Armed Forces? He threatens: No one would feel any obligation to support the government of someone like Kirchner, who openly expresses solidarity with terrorists.
Likewise, on Jan. 6, Antonio Caponnetto issued a call to arms "in defense of God and the Fatherland" against the Kirchner government, allegedly for having nominated a Marxist to the Supreme Court, one Carmen Argibay. The nomination is "a new provocation by President Kirchner; an open and repeated offense against those of us who believe that this land of ours is not a dung heap which can be governed by the partisans of Bolshevism." Only the true "Soldiers of Christ," he says, who possess "the sufficient and irrevocable authority of those grafted onto the living branch of the Church from the baptismal font," are qualified to wage this battle. "Those of us who know that militant atheism must be confronted by militant Catholicism, and that intrinsic Marxist perversity cannot be combatted by the bureaucrats of clerical progressivism, but by heroes and saints. We repudiate the entirety of this government, with its mendacious and insidious nominee to the Court, its constant trampling on the rights of God..."
Ominously, Caponnetto's letter is being circulated among the Venezuelan opposition, by circles around opposition leader Alejandro Pena, who publicly associated himself a year ago with the new fascist international project of Spanish Francoite Blas Piñar, who also sits on the board of Maritornes. Pena is on the executive committee of the Democratic Block, which is organizing for a military coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The drumbeat against Brazil's commercial-scale uranium enrichment plant, set to go on-line in May 2004, is getting louder. It is now clear that Brazil is being singled out as a test case for a new drive to place the world's nuclear-energy industry under supranational control, by prohibiting all but a few privileged nations from building their own uranium-enrichment and fuel-reprocessing facilities.
We reported in last week's EIW Ibero-American Digest, that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is pressing Brazil to sign the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which would permit unannounced inspections, virtually anywhere. Some 40 foreign inspections, announced and not, already take place each year, under the terms of the two international treaties they have signed. Brazil fears accepting the new demands would open the door to "technological piracy," as their program employs a new centrifuge technology, developed in Brazil, which separates the uranium-235 isotope by spinning around a magnetic axis, rather than the mechanical axis used in other enrichment centrifuges, thus lowering wear and tear on the machine.
More than Brazil is at stake in this battle, however. IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei proposed, in The Economist magazine on Oct. 16, 2003, that all production of fuels through reprocessing and enrichment, worldwide, be restricted "exclusively to facilities under multinational control." Another proposal is being circulated by U.S. interests, which agrees that all but a few nations be prohibited from making their own fuel, but proposes instead that private cartels control production. The liberal imperialists at the New York Times weighed in on Jan. 4, with an editorial raving that "there is no legitimate reason for countries to develop such capacities.... Reactor fuel production should be limited to the few advanced countries that already have fully transparent nuclear-technology industries."
Now threats are being floated against Brazil. On Dec. 31, two U.S. thinktankers, former Clinton non-proliferation official James Goodby and the Atlantic Council's Kenneth Weisbrode, asked in the International Herald Tribune, "Should Brazil be on the short list for an updated axis of evil?" They proposed Brazil's enrichment program be made a test case for ElBaradei's "multilateralization" proposal, since "preventive war is not an option in this case."
Maybe not yet, but the neo-conservatives tied to the Cheney crowd are laying the groundwork for just such a disaster. On Jan. 5, Frank Gaffney's neo-con Center for Security Policy issued a release raving about the imminent danger of Brazil leading a nuclear-armed "axis of evil" in the Americas, and insisting "U.S. leaders should treat the recent development as a threat to national security."
In its first year in office, Brazil's Lula government cut its spending on investments to less than a third of that invested by the Cardoso government in 2002, Floha de Sao Paulo reported Dec. 31. That is: in 2002, whereas the Cardoso government invested 10.1 billion reals in infrastructure and social programs, the Lula government invested only R$3 billion, an infinitesimal amount for a country the size of Brazil. The Planning Ministry has said it plans to increase investment in infrastructure and social areas to R$8 billion in 2004still less than 2002 levels.
The cuts were made, so that the government could generate a sufficiently high primary budget surplus, to make debt payments.
Western European News Digest
On Jan. 5, a letter bomb detonated in the Brussels office of Hans-Gerd Poettering, chairman of the Conservative Party bloc in the European Parliament, when his secretary opened it. No one was injured and damage was minimal. This bomb, like four others sent to EU figures, was mailed from Bologna, Italy, on Dec. 22, and it contained a book, as did the bomb mailed to EU Commission President Romano Prodi, which exploded when opened on Dec. 27. Another letter bomb, mailed to Jose Ignacio Sanchez, head of the Spanish group of conservatives in the European Parliament, was defused by security personnel before it reached his office.
The so-called "Informal Anarchist Federation," which claimed credit for the letter-bomb campaign, was previously unknown. What is clear is, is that an intense anti-EU black-propaganda campaign, targetting the Franco-German alliance, has been launched in recent weeks, by both radical left-wing and right-wing groups.
A senior European security source pointed to fascist-synarchist elements, behind the recent rash of letter bombs to leading figures in the European Union, in a discussion with this news service Jan. 5. He agreed with the assessment of Italian Judge Carlo Mastelloni, who dismissed the idea that anarchists were responsible, and noted that the fact that the bombs were sent from Bologna, among other evidence, as pointing to extreme right-wing type networks.
This source views these attacksboth the recent attacks on EU figures, and others over the last six monthsas not being centrally coordinated, but of a "copy-cat" nature, perpetrated by like-minded, yet organizationally distinct, cells throughout Europe. The source noted the connections into Switzerland and to organized crime, because whenever one looks at right-wing extremists, it is always organized crime elements who supply the infrastructure. From organized crime, it will phase into higher levels such as P-2 in Italy, Gladio, and intelligence services.
Prime Minister Tony Blair made a surprise visit to the southern city of Basra, Iraq, Jan. 4. He flew in from Sharm el-Sheikh, where he was vacationing with his family, and where he met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Jan. 3. In his one-day visit to Iraq, he met military commanders and addressed some of the 10,000 British troops stationed in and around Basra.
Blair told the troops: "We're facing not only terrorism," but also "brutal and repressive states who because of their brutality, because they don't actually have the support or consent of their people, are developing weapons that can cause distraction [sic] and destruction on a massive scale, and are a huge, huge liability for the whole security of the world.... Iraq was the test case.... If we had backed away from that, we would never have been able to confront this threat in the other countries where it exists."
He called the soldiers "the new pioneers of soldiering in the 21st Century," but then reminded anyone old enough to remember of the very old soldiering in Vietnam, by calling for "winning the hearts and minds of people."
Lord Hutton's delayed release of his report on the suspicious death of weapons expert David Kelly last July could spell big trouble for Prime Minister Tony Blair, fresh from his surprise Jan. 4 New Year's trip to Basra, Iraq, which was panned in much of the press.
The Guardian reported Lord Hutton is intending to delay publication of his report, originally targeted to be released the week of Jan. 12, because "he has yet to apportion final blame" for the death Kelly. The Guardian asserts the delay "will pile further pressure on Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon, his Defence Secretary," especially as the delay will possibly mean that the report will be issued just around the time that the government is facing a revolt among Members of Parliament over planned imposition of tuition fees.
The Jan. 3 Daily Mail called Blair's Basra trip "a coldly calculated stunt from a Prime Minister who has made them his specialty," suggesting he really went to "save his political reputation," by "reinvent[ing] the reasons for the war in Iraq," and diverting attention from the issue of the never-discovered "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs).
The Independent attacked Blair for the "cynicism" of his Basra visit, saying it will be "self-defeating," because it reveals his obsession with scoring "political points," while the Daily Mirror wrote that a preferred message would be to say when troops would be coming home. The same day's Daily Express warned Blair "cannot ignore" the flap over WMD.
The Glasgow Herald said the Basra visit, as the Blair's first New Year's visit, rather than to a domestic site, underscores how much Iraq will dominate British politics in 2004, especially as his "heavily guarded 'surprise' visit,... demonstrates how dangerous the country [Iraq] remains."
Princess Diana named her ex-husband, the Prince of Wales, as the person plotting her death by car accident, in the letter she gave to her butler, Paul Burrell, as "insurance," 10 months before she died in a fatal car crash in Paris, Aug. 31, 1997, the Daily Mirror wrote Jan. 6.
Burrell had kept back the name Diana wrote in her note of October 1996, when he first revealed its contents, in his book in the fall of 2002. Royal Coroner Michael Burgess, who is holding the inquest into Diana's death, has requested the full letter from Burrell. Since this means that the name, censored in Burrell's book, would enter the public domain, the Mirror decided to publish it, the paper announced. This was not Burrell's decision.
The full sentence in her letter reads: "This particular phase of my life is the most dangerousmy husband is planning 'an accident' in my car, brake failure & serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry."
Britain's most senior police officer is investigating whether Princess Diana's death was more than an accident, Coroner Michael Burgess announced Jan. 6. Burgess opened, and then adjourned, the inquest into Diana's death, until 2005, announcing that Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, would examine the various reports about the 1997 crash, including the 6,000-page French report on the disaster, which took the lives of Diana, her companion Dodi al Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul, in Paris.
Burgess said that the inquest was adjourned until next year, to allow investigation of the complex case. This is the first formal British investigation of the deaths. A separate inquest is being held into Dodi al Fayed's death.
Burgess said: "I am aware that there is speculation that these deaths were not the result of the sad, but relatively straightforward, road traffic accident in Paris. I have asked the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to make inquiries.
The lead article in the London Times Jan. 7 reports that "senior members of the Royal Family reacted with incredulity," to the surprise announcement by Michael Burgess, Coroner of the Queen's Household, that he has called in Scotland Yard, to investigate her death.
The royals had hoped all speculation, rumors, and "conspiracy theories" had been put to rest, with the publication of the report by French Judge Stephan, but this is not the case. They had assumed, that the Coroner would engage in brief formalities. Prince Charles and other royals are reported to be "devastated."
French energy firms like EDF and Areva are negotiating with German firms in the same sector, about joint investments in the construction of new power plants in France, based on the EPR technology. The renewal of the 59 French reactors, most of which are more than 20 years old, has to occur between 2010 and 2030, which means that the procedure to launch new projects has to begin soon.
France is thinking of a standard new reactor type of 1,600 megawatts, and their call on the Germans to co-invest, reflects the fact that, for the time being, no new nuclear-power plants can be built in Germany, because of red-green sabotage. At the same time, German imports of electricity generated in power plants from France, will remain high, or even increase, over the coming years.
The EPR, a joint development of Germany's Siemens and France's Framatome firms, is also offered to other countries: Finland is the first to sign a contract for an EPR project, to be completed by 2009.
A half-page article in the Jan. 4 issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, focusses on the role of Serbia's OTPOR (Resistance) in Georgia and other countries. It mentions that among the most important financial sources of that group are the United States Institute of Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy, the latter of which has a Republican branch, the International Republican Institute, and a Democratic branch, the National Democratic Institute." Both are Congressionally chartered "quangos" (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations), and receive government funding; the article especially highlights the NED, as a leading neo-con organization.
Russia and the CIS News Digest
Amid continuing high publicity for the Rodina (Homeland) electoral bloc, in connection with its leader Sergei Glazyev and leading member Victor Gerashchenko both filing to run for President of Russia, one widely reported item was a Jan. 5 NewsInfo.ru interview with leading Rodina figure Gen. (ret.) Nikolai Leonov, formerly deputy chief of the First Main Directorate (foreign intelligence) of the Soviet KGB. He emphasized that Rodina is committed to shifting the economic policy of Russia, from within the Duma and also through the Presidency, including while Vladimir Putin is President.
Asked to compare the Rodina candidacies with previous campaigns of the "left-patriotic camp" or the Communist Party to "overthrow the 'anti-people regime,'" Leonov replied, "We do not use the word 'regime.' In our view, Russia does not have some 'regime' that would need to be fought. What there is in Russia, is state power. It must be respected, strengthened, and helped to improve." But if Glazyev and Gerashchenko are not running to "torpedo Putin," NewsInfo.ru asked, "whom will they criticize?" Leonov: "Those who hinder the President's carrying out a policy in the people's interest.... Our Presidential candidates will speak against the forces that control the country's finances and media, and use them to distort the President's policy. Our main enemy is the handful of oligarchs, who are robbing the Russian people.... Ultimately, the President himself is also combatting the oligarchs.... So one cannot equate the President and the Government. While Vladimir Putin is strictly against the oligarchs, our government has repeatedly supported them." (See EIW #52 Dec. 30, 2003 for in-depth coverage of the Russian elections.)
By the Jan. 6 deadline, four party-nominated candidates and six individuals had filed to run for President of Russia. The individuals are President Vladimir Putin, Rodina leader Sergei Glazyev, neo-liberal Union of Right Forces (SPS) figure Irina Khakamada, former Speaker of the Duma Ivan Rybkin, and two lesser-known men. Except Putin, each must present 2 million valid petition signatures before Jan. 28, in order to stay in the race. The nominees of the Communist Party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia do not have to petition, having been nominated by parties elected to the Duma.
On Jan. 5, Central Electoral Commission head Alexander Veshnyakov announced that the other candidate from Rodina, Victor Gerashchenko, would also have to petition, even though Rodina is in the Duma, because he was formally nominated by the Party of Russia's Regions, rather than by Rodina itself (which would have required several other conventions to be held). Rodina leader Sergei Glazyev told press that Gerashchenko would not petition and shouldn't have to, insofar as Russia's Regions is a major constituent of Rodina. (Rodina itself, is not a party, but an electoral bloc, and therefore is required to submit petitions, even though it is in the Duma.) Veshnyakov himself stated that nobody has ever successfully gathered 2 million valid petition signatures in post-Soviet Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin held a ceremony at the Kremlin Jan. 5 to present awards to members of a military intelligence (GRU) special forces unit that smashed a group of Chechen guerrillas, who infiltrated Dagestan on Dec. 15. Fierce fighting was reported at the time, ending with many casualties among the guerrillas. Putin made a special point about the successful coordinated operation of Russian armed forces, special services and law enforcement, as contributing to the fight against international terrorism, and his remarks were featured on national TV. RIA-Novosti quoted an unnamed GRU officer, who said that "a major group of rebels led by a serious field commander ceased to exist," as a result of the operation. Russian media is rife with speculation that the killed field commander might have been the Chechen Ruslan Gelayev or the Arab-origin Abu al-Walid, but neither version has been confirmed. The anonymous GRU man said more information would be forthcoming.
Hours after polls closed in the Georgian Presidential election, held Jan. 4, an NGO called Global Strategy Group published the results of exit polls done "with assistance from Georgian activists." According to its calculations, 86% of Georgian voters took part in the elections and 85.8% of them chose Michael Saakashvili, leader of the National Movement and graduate of Columbia University Law School in New York. None of the other candidates garnered more than 2%. Thus, Saakashvili is set to assume the Presidency of Georgia, just one month after leading the overthrow of President Eduard Shevardnadze by storming a session of Parliament and shouting him down.
The turnout and vote figures had an "Albanian-style" unanimity to them, many observed, whichhad it been announced for elections in, say, Belaruswould have occasioned furious denunciations in the international media, for vote fraud achieved by totalitarian methods of managing the electoral process.
Inside Georgia, political figures opposed to Saakashvili's George Soros-financed sweep to power, dispute the turnout figures. During voting on Jan. 4, Central Electoral Commission (CEC) head Zurab Chiaberashvili had said that the turnout was so low, that the 50% required minimum might not be reached. (Aslan Abashidze, Governor of the Ajaria region, cancelled his earlier call to boycott the elections, but the turnout may have been as low as 24%, according to Georgian press monitored by RFE/RL Newsline.) After Saakashvili declared that the turnout was high, Chiaberashvili announced that the 50% level had been reached after all; later the CEC announced it was 83% nationwide. Akaki Asatiani, head of the Union of Traditionalists, said Jan. 6 that other exit polls showed it was less than 50%. Shalva Natelashvili, head of the Labor Party, announced he will challenge the election's validity by appealing to an international court.
A Dec. 31 report by the Moscow correspondent of the Indian daily The Hindu shed light once again on the role of George Soros's Open Society Foundation and related organizations, not only in promoting the recent "democratic" coup d'etat in Georgia, but also in fanning unrest in Moldova (where Russia maintains military bases in the Transdniestr area), Ukraine, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The report said that Russian foreign intelligence has traced the activation of students in these developments, back to OTPOR, a group of Serbian students that played a catalytic role in the 2000 "democratic" coup in Belgrade. Many students in other countries of the East have received training by OTPOR, according to Russian investigations.
Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in a lengthy Jan. 4 article, also focussed on the role of Serbia's OTPOR (Resistance) in Georgia and other countries. It mentioned that among the most important financial sources for OTPOR are the United States Institute of Peace and the National Endowment for Democracythe original "Project Democracy." Both are Congressionally chartered "quangos" ("quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations") and receive government funding.
The Hindu pointed to the activity of Soros-linked organizations also in Central Asia, especially Kazakstan, Tajikistan (where a manual on "how to build a velvet revolution," modelled on the recent coup in Georgia, is being circulated), and Turkmenistan.
RFE/RL Newsline, a U.S. Government-funded project with its roots in "Radio Free Europe," is playing up the prospect of heightened U.S.-Russian tensions in Eurasia, over the extent of both Russian influence and U.S. penetration in the former Soviet republics. RFE/RL Newsline highlighted these analysts' commentaries:
Sergei Markov, director of the Institute for Political Research, said in a Dec. 30 interview that Russia, in asserting its influence within the CIS, will collide with the United States and the European Union. This has already happened in Georgia and Moldova, Markov said, and could erupt in Ukraine and Kazakstan.
Fyodor Lyukanov, editor of Russia in Global Policy, opined to a RosBalt interviewer on Dec. 25, that Russian-EU cooperation will be challenged when 10 new members join the EU in May, because most of them are former Soviet republics or Comecon countries, whose trading preference for Russia will be undercut by their EU membership.
Mideast News Digest
In the run-up to an important United Nations meeting on Jan. 19, the leading Shi'ite authority in Iraq, Ayatollah Al Sistani, has appealed to UN General Secretary Kofi Annan to intervene to organize elections in Iraq. This appeal is in direct opposition to the plan for "transition to Iraqi rule" hastily concocted by U.S. viceroy, Paul Bremer.
Reports are that Annan will try to convince the Ayatollah Al Sistani, who has significant support on the Iraqi Governing Council, that the demands for real elections before a government is formed, are not possible.
According to Al Watan in Saudi Arabia Jan. 10, Annan will send a special delegate to Al Sistani, to explain that elections would require a census of the population and the issuance of ID cards, or some form of voter registration, which would take too much time. The paper says that Annan wants to convince Al Sistani and his followers, therefore, to accept the deal worked out by Bremer and the IGC, for a transitional government. That Nov. 15 agreement calls for a legislature elected through caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces and a handover of power by June 30. It is utterly illegal by international law.
Annan is to meet with Iraqi and coalition leaders to discuss Iraq 's future, on Jan. 19. He was to talk with U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte and British Ambassador Emyr Jones-Parry on Jan. 9 to lay the groundwork for the meeting with Iraq's Governing Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority to clarify the world body's role in postwar Iraq. "Everyone wants to see a successful transition to sovereignty in Iraq," Eckhard said. "We are maintaining an open mind while we listen to whatever the Brits and Americans put forward to us and we're also listening to what the Iraqis are saying."
And while this political turmoil continues, the military situation is even worse, evidenced by the Jan. 8 downing of a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter which killed nine U.S. soldiers, and mortar attack on a U.S. barracks, which killed one U.S. soldier and wounded 34.
In a Jan. 8 interview with Reuters, following meetings with top U.S. and UN officials, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia warned that Palestinians may be forced to seek only a "bi-national" state, because of Israel's unilateral seizures of Palestinian land in building the apartheid wall, and complete failure to implement any provisions of the "Road Map."
The Palestine Press Center reported on Jan. 8 that Qureia told the officials that the UN and the Quartet are "standing deaf," as the Israelis implement their apartheid wall, carry out widespread killings of Palestinians, and seize Palestinian lands. Qureia called on UN envoy Terry Larsen to expedite the implementation of the UN Security Council decision adopting the Road Map as its policy.
Reuters has not made the full interview with Qureia available, but quotes him on the wall, "This is an apartheid solution to put the Palestinians in cantons. Who can accept this? We will go for a one-state solution. There's no other solution. We will not hesitate to defend the right of our people when we feel the very serious intention to destroy these rights." In earlier statements, Qureia said the wall is a way to "put Palestinians in cages like chickens."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell rejected the idea of "one bi-national state" at his press briefing on Jan. 8, and said that the only solution that will work is "a two-state solution ... a state for the Palestinian people called Palestine, and a Jewish state, state of Israel."
Powell added, "I don't believe we can accept a situation that results in anything that one might characterize as apartheid or bantuism."
But, Powell fell back on the same old useless formulation, that the Palestinian Authority has to "wrest authority away from Arafat that will allow [Qureia] to start taking action with respect to terror and violence." This "end of Palestinian violence" is Sharon's "code" for stalling all peace talks.
Palestinian officials note that giving up on the two-state solution is a "last resort," but reflects the tremendous, growing lack of trust in the Road Map process.
The situation in the Occupied Territories has become one of daily multiple murders of young Palestinian men. The Egyptian publication Al Ahram Weekly reported on Jan. 8 that: On Jan. 1, outside Nablus, a 16-year-old boy was killed; a 13-year-old was badly wounded by the IDF in clashes over stone throwing incidents; on Jan. 3, the IDF killed five Palestinians, including two boys, 14 and 17; on Jan. 5, a 16-year-old youth was shot dead by IDF, and a 14-year-old wounded in Nablus, while they were attending the funeral of the three Palestinians killed earlier.
Associated Press on Jan. 6 quoted Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's comments on Sharon's Jan. 5 speech to the Likud Party. Arafat said, "Sharon does not want peace. He only wants to continue building settlements and the racist separation security fence ... around Jerusalem. What the Israelis are saying and doing is just to deceive the public by removing one caravan [for Jewish settlers] and putting 10 others in another place."
Radical Likudniks at the convention openly spoke of suggestions for "ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinians from all areas east of the Jordan River.
President Hosni Mubarak announced that his son will not automatically succeed him in the Presidency, according to reports appearing in the Egyptian press Jan. 4. The comment surprised everyone, and opened a debate on why he chose to make such an announcement. The scenario being discussed in high-level circles in Cairo, is that Mubarak plans to orchestrate handing over power to his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, through orderly elections, in which Mubarak would not run for re-election. Suleiman would then have Gamal Mubarak, the son, as his Vice President, and, in a short time, Gamal would be President.
One reason for this course of action might be that the same neo-cons in Washington who are calling for regime change in Syria, Iran, etc., are also pursuing it in Egypt. For example, neo-con chieftain, Richard Perle, a top Pentagon adviser, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Jan. 9, that the U.S. should cut off the $2 billion in annual funding to the government of Egypt, which he called "a dictatorship."
A well-informed Cairo source told EIRNS that another reflection of heavy U.S. pressure on Mubarak, is seen in the Egypt's do-nothing posture in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Whereas traditionally, Egypt had upheld the Palestinian position, recently Cairo's stance has become: "We want the Palestinians and Israelis to sit down and negotiate," said this source, "as if negotiations per se were the solution." He summed it up: "Mubarak has moved very far away from his position."
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made a three-day visit to Turkey, beginning Jan. 5, the first such visit by a Syrian President to Ankara. He and Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer are emphasizing the importance of bringing peace to the Middle East as a whole. Assad addressed the official welcoming ceremony: "My visit comes at a time when Turkish-Syrian relations are reaching towards a peak, but our region is going through a bad period. We have moved together from an atmosphere of distrust to one of trust. We now have to change the atmosphere of instability in the region to one of stability."
President Sezer said their talks would focus on improving bilateral relations, but also regional issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq.
The two leaders oppose any moves by the Iraqi Kurds to break away from Iraq. Assad told CNN-Turk Jan. 5, "We are opposed, not only to a Kurdish state, but also to any action against the territorial integrity of Iraq. Iraq's future is bound to the future of all of us.... the break-up of Iraq would be a red line," not only for Syria and Turkey, but for all the countries in the region."
Senior Israeli military commentator Ze'ev Schiff, writing in the Jan. 7 Ha'aretz daily, said that while that both Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz refuse to respond to Syrian President Bashir Assad's overtures to reopen peace negotiations, "most senior officials in the security communityin intelligence, the Israeli Defense Forces, and the defense establishmentfeel that we must not reject the Syrian advances, even if they are no more than a tactical step."
The U.S. "has told Israel explicitly that it ought to check into the Syrian offer for negotiations," Schiff revealed, while stressing the U.S. has no intention of easing "its pressure on Damascus. He also reported that during the recent meeting between Syrian President Bashar Assad and Egyptian President Hosni Muburak, it was decided Mubarak, during his upcoming visit to Washington, will ask President George Bush to spearhead and sponsor negotiations between Israel and Syria.
On Jan. 7, Ha'aretz reported that the top leaders of Israel's Defense Forces (IDF) want Sharon to pursue Syria's overtures on peace negotiations. This is the position of Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, his deputy, General Gabi Ashkenazi, the Head of Military Intelligence, General Aharon Ze'evi, and the outgoing director of the Army's Plans and Policy Directorate, General Giora Eiland, who is expected to be appointed as the head of the Israeli National Security Council.
Baring his fangs, Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called for talks with Syriain the event U.S. pressure forces the issue. He said that Syria is a "despotic regime, which is trying to survive in the face of an historic wave that is removing such tyrants. They need peace with us like they need air to breathe. They need peace much more than we do. So the advantage has now moved completely to our side." He went on to say that Israel "must demand substantial concessions from Syria on the Golan Heights."
Syrian President Bashar Assad told London's Daily Telegraph on Jan. 6, that Syria will not give up weapons of mass destruction unless Israel does.
"We are a country which is [partly] occupied and from time to time we are exposed to Israeli aggression," Assad told the Telegraph. "It is natural for us to look for means to defend ourselves. It is not difficult to get most of these weapons anywhere in the world and they can be obtained at any time."
Assad said Libya's renouncing of its WMD was a "correct step" but added, in a reference to Israel, "Unless this applies to all countries, we are wasting our time." As reported in last week's EIW, in December, Syria introduced a UN Security Council resolution calling for Israel to abandon its nuclear weapons as part of a "nuclear-free" Middle East.
Speaking at a White House press conference Jan. 9, National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice denied there was any evidence of Syria hiding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Rice was responding to a reporter's question about statements covered in the British press alleging that Iraqi WMD were transferred to Syria.
"Any indication that something like that happened would be a very serious matter," Rice said. "But I want to be perfectly clear: We don't, at this point have any indications that I would consider credible and firm that that has taken place, but we will tie down every lead." She added, "I don't think we are at the point that we can make a judgment on this issue. There hasn't been any hard evidence that such a thing happened."
Asia News Digest
India's National Security Advisor and Special Representative Brajesh Mishra, will be in Beijing on Jan. 12, to meet his counterpart Dai Bingguo, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan, to work out a framework to resolve the decades-long border dispute with China, it was announced on Jan. 7.
"The special representative of India will come to China this month. The two countries will, proceding on the basis of the consensus reached by the two leaders on the overall development of bilateral relations, seek to explore new ways to solve the border issue," Kong said. "This is not only the second meeting of the special representatives of the two countries, but a 'new meeting of the two special representatives in the new year.' As to the specific agenda of the meeting, the two sides are finalizing it."
Mishra was in Islamabad on Jan. 1 to carry out talks with the Pakistani authorities on the necessity to set up a framework, similar to the one set up between India and China, based on which the Kashmir dispute can be resolved.
Myanmar's military ruler Senior General Than Shwe on Jan.5 called for country's various ethnic groups to support the junta's "road map" to democracy as the country commemorated its 56th Independence Day.
In an anniversary speech, Than Shwe urged citizens to "strive for the emergence of an enduring state constitution," due to be completed this year. It is the first of seven points outlined in the political plan revealed by the rulers last August. Than Shwe also maintained that "peace and stability" were the paramount need of the hour, and he stressed that Myanmar was proceding along its development path.
Than Shwe's speech, which was read by Maj. Gen. Myint Swe, largely steered clear of sensitive political subjects, leaving his Prime Minister Khin Nyunt to offer a blunt warning against outside interference in Myanmar's political process.
Following arms heists and arson attacks in Narathiwat and Yala provinces, Thailand's Interior Minister Wan Muhamad Nor Mata, the leading Muslim political figure from the south, has imposed martial law. The Interior Minister, concerned about the security situation in the Muslim-majority southern provinces, reported that more than 100 assault rifles were stolen in a pre-dawn raid on Jan. 4, carried out by dozens of assailants, who killed four soldiers and torched 18 schools.
Both Yala and Narthiwat provinces border Malaysia, and the recent incident is the worst act of violence in southern Thailand since July 2003.
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra blamed the assault on "professionals with experience in this kind of violence," and maintained his line that bandits involved in arms smuggling were behind violence. The Prime Minister also warned that "outside influences" are at work, pointing at the conflicts in Indonesia's northern Aceh province, where separatists, who demand independence of Aceh from Indonesia, have been engaged in violent movements for decades.
According to one Filipino official, the Philippines, with a $53 billion in international debt, is incapable of paying it back. The only reason the nation has not been officially declared bankrupt is the annual $12 billion in remittances that are sent back to the country from overseas Filipino workers, based mostly in Canada and the United States.
"The United States has taken our doctors, our nurses, our teachers," the official told the EIR, "while our medical and education systems are in disarray." Even the military officers who come to the U.S for training, learn nursing on the side, so they can find work in the United States after they leave the military, he pointed out.
The official concurred with Lyndon LaRouche's often-stated view that the Marcos years, despite abundance of corruption, placed the Philippines at the forefront of Southeast Asian development. But since that time, total liberalization of the economy has left the nation destitute.
Former Pakistani Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Mohammad Aslam Beg, told EIR that the just-concluded Loya Jirga in Afghanistan, under immense pressure, especially from the United States, voted up a constitution for Afghanistan. General Beg said it could be a good development, if it is actually implemented, that is, if free and fair elections are actually held.
Earlier, in the days prior to the war against Afghanistan and Iraq, Beg had told EIR that any military intervention by the United States would unleash massive resistance, which would not only grow, but generate pools of "jihadis" willing to go anywhere to join the fight against the invaders. In the case of Afghanistan, he had said that "no one believed the U.S. could be defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is a fact of life. I said so," he recalled, referring to his forecast that, "a line of resistance from Jalalabad to Kandahar would be built up, and that is precisely what happened."
In Iraq, the same is true, he believes. He said that the United States and others fear that, in the event of a real election, the Shi'ite majority would emerge and establish an Iranian-type regime, were unfounded. "What Mr. LaRouche says about the 1958 Constitution is right," he said, adding that the only means to rebuild the institutions which the war has destroyed, is through participation of the Iraqi population, on the basis of a constitution.
Sri Lankan President Mrs. Chandrika Kumaratunga, attending the SAARC summit in Islamabad, told reporters on Jan. 7 that "defense co-operation between India and Sri Lanka is on the increase," The President added, "India is training our army personnel. A defense cooperation agreement will be discussed shortly."
Describing a definite change in India's policies vis-a-vis Sri Lanka in recent years, President Kumaratunga said: "There is a gradual change in policy in Delhi. It is coming up slowly after India very justifiably approached its relations with Colombo with caution, after the IPKF experience. Now, in the last 10 years, they were moving towards pro-active position. India always supported our peace processes, our efforts towards negotiated settlement. They are still holding the same position, perhaps more pro-actively," Mrs. Kumaratunga said.
The IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force) that the Sri Lankan President mentioned, refers to the Indian troops stationed in the mid-1980s to disarm the Tamil secessionists for the purpose of bringing about an end to ethnic violence. The troops were stationed as part of an agreement reached between former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and former Sri Lankan President Julius Jayewardene. The Indian troops failed in their mission for a number of reasons, including open betrayal by Sri Lankan President R. Premadasa, creating an anti-India backlash among the Sinhalas, as well as among the Tamils of Sri Lanka.
"Our peace process," mentioned by President Kumaratunga, refers to the peace process between Colombo and the Tamil Tigers, ostensibly representing the Tamils of Sri Lanka, initiated by Norway in 2002. That peace process has been stalled due to the intervention by President Kumaratunga late last year, in light of a series of absurd demands made by the Tamil Tigers as a part of settling the dispute.
According to Indian Planning Commission Chairman K.C. Pant, India is poised to achieve 9% growth in the second half of fiscal year 2003-2004, outdoing the 7.4% it had achieved in the first half. Pant believes that the overall growth for this fiscal year will reach 8%.
Addressing an international conference in Hyderabad, Pant said India is expected to achieve 8%t annual growth rate throughout the five-year period of the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002-2006), aided by a revival of India's manufacturing industries.
Pant presided over the Tenth Five-Year Plan under directions from Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The Indian Premier had told the Planning Commission to calculate the growth rate that would be necessary to absorb the 10 million youth who would be joining the workforce every year of the Tenth Five-Year Plan. The Planning Commission anticipated it would need an 8% growth rate to provide those additional jobs.
In a report to the UN Security Council on Jan. 6, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said continued violence in Afghanistan could jeopardize the national elections scheduled for June 2004. He pointed out that more than 400 people have been killed in the last six months.
Expressing concerns over continuing violence, Kofi Annan said in his report: "The peace process in Afghanistan has reached a critical juncture. Critical challenges now face the process, and Afghanistan and the international community will need to take further steps, expeditiously, if the process is to be successfully concluded." The Secretary General made public the report one day after two bombs had exploded near a military base and two schools in southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Jan. 5, killing 15 people and wounding 60 others.
On Jan. 7, UN spokesman Manuel Almeida e Silva told the press that the rising violence in southern and eastern Afghanistan has slowed voter registration signficantly, and it is highly unlikely that Presidential elections could be held in June. "The current rate of registration is far below the rate necessary to complete registration for election this year," Almeida e Silva said.
So far, about 274,000 of the 10 million eligible Afghan voters have been registered. In order to hold Presidential elections in June, as demanded by Washington, the number of registered voters would have to be close to 2 million by mid-January.
Africa News Digest
The Nairobi, Kenya daily The Nation Dec. 30 focussed on the inability of the Bush government "to appreciate the role of nationalism in other societies." The daily noted that the current Kenyan government came to power on American values, but that "the U.S. government now seems bent on taking away citizens' liberties." America is now "obsessed with fighting terrorism, instead of rectifying the environment that breeds terrorists."
An editorial in South Africa's Mail & Guardian, Jan. 2, characterizes 2003 as "hope deferred," and concludes with the wish that Americans will choose, in the next election, "to begin reintegrating their country into the family of nations," as "the world needs a different kind of America." It describes a "liberated Iraq" as an "armed garrison that shows no signs of transition to meaningful civilian rule." It adds that "the puppet ruling council would not last a day without the shield of U.S. firepower.... Far from rolling back terrorism, the war has made Iraq a new terrorist cockpit. To avoid the obvious inference that it is facing a people's war, the U.S. continues to characterize the attacks as the work of Ba'ath party remnants. Yet although 42 of those on the original list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis have been killed or captured, the insurgency continues to escalate." The American leadership must change, because "with its material and human riches, it has so much capacity for good."
A leading papal nuncio, Michael Courtney, was assassinated in Burundi Dec. 29, after he was reported ambushed by Hutu members of the National Liberation Front (FNL). He was shot in the head, thorax, and leg, despite the fact that his diplomatic car was clearly identified, flying the Vatican flag. The 58-year-old Irishman, considered one of the Vatican's most valued diplomats, died during surgery. The FNL immediately denied any role in the shooting and condemned it, although the assassination occurred in an area known as an FNL stronghold.
An amendment to the Land Restitution Act of 1994, which will allow for land expropriation, has been passed by the South African parliament and is to be signed into law by President Mbeki in January, the Sunday Independent reported Dec. 28. The amendment, according to Tozi Gwanya, the chief land-claims commissioner, will allow the minister "to expropriate without a court order and without farmers' agreement." Land owners would then be paid market-related prices for their properties. "Our view is that we would use expropriation as a last resort when negotiations are not yielding results.... We will not use it arbitrarily," the commissioner said.
Lourie Bosman, the vice president of the Agri-SA farmers' union, said his organization objected strongly to the expropriation amendment. Bosman said that the timing was particularly bad, coming on the back of land grabs in Zimbabwe.
The voluntary system, by itself, has produced only a trickle of results.
The Mugabe government has repossessed about 400 farms from black owners who occupied more than one property, the Zimbabwean daily, The Herald reported Dec. 31. The farms, covering at least 480,000 acres, will now be redistributed to people still waiting for land, according to John Nkomo, Minister of Special Affairs in President Robert Mugabe's office.
President Robert Mugabe paid a courtesy call on President Megawati Sukarnoputri on Jan. 7 while on a private visit to Indonesia. According to Agence France Presse, he "received a warm welcome from Megawati." She is considering sending a team to Zimbabwe to improve relations, especially trade relations, her Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda said afterwards. She also invited Mugabe to pay an official visit to Indonesia. "As a country that has also experienced land reform and a colonial past, we understand.... We have empathy toward the problems that Zimbabwe is facing," Wirajuda said.
Mugabe invited Megawati to pay an official visit to Zimbabwe and to attend the G-15 meeting. Mugabe is to open an embassy in Jakarta. (Indonesia already has an embassy in Harare.)
The talks were attended by Wirajuda, Megawati's husband Taufik Kiemas, and Environment Minister Nabiel Makarim.
The Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry hosted a dinner for Mugabe on Jan. 7 to introduce to him Indonesian business people. According to a Zimbabwe Department of Information statement, "The Indonesians are also proposing that a bilateral agreement be arranged to enable the two countries to barter their products as a way of going round the problem of foreign currency shortages facing both countries."
Mugabe met Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on Jan. 6 at the end of a week spent in Malaysia. The discussion included Zimbabwe's request for technical assistance from Malaysia's central bank, Bank Negara, for the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, during its currently planned restructuring. According to the Zimbabwe Department of Information statement, Badawi's response was very positive.
In a shift for Nigeria's pro-privatization Obasanjo government, the government bowed to pressure from oil workers, and announced it has dropped the plan to sell off the nation's four refineries. It was not a complete labor victory, as the agreement reached now involves seeking a strategic partnership allowing for the acquisition of a 51% equity while government retains only 49%, but nevertheless, the government did back down.
The ultimatum by unions, given some six months ago, followed a declaration by the pro-privatization government that the refineries would be sold by March 2004 at latest, and that more government funds would not be committed to their repair. But, bowing to worker pressurein the form of a Dec. 31 deadline for the government to put the refineries back in shape or face a strikethe government promised that by the beginning of May, the refineries "would operate at optimal level and could produce up to 18 million liters of petrol per day once the fluid catalytic cracking units are on stream."
The Nigerian daily the Daily Champion Dec. 31, noted these were "major fall-outs" from a crucial meeting between government and leaders of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) in Abuja on Dec. 30.
The grim picture reported by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (www.fews.net) is filled out by an AFP story in Business Day Jan. 6. "A South African weather specialist says there is just three months' supply of water for human consumption and irrigation left in the country's 'critically empty' dams," but South Africa does not need food aid at present, according to the story. It continues with the following roundup of the other countries.
Zimbabwe: Food security will remain precarious until April. The number of people needing food aid in rural areas is expected to increase from 4.8 to 5.1 million.
Botswana: Total production is enough to meet only 13% of national cereal requirements. Drought "has seriously affected the animals' birth rate and worsened their mortality rate," said Musa Fanakiso, deputy director of animal health and production.
Lesotho: The UN World Food Program warns that Lesotho is "heading for its worst drought in memory." "People are already talking total crop failure," said WFP spokesman Michael Huggins.
Namibia and Swaziland: In these countries, about one-third of the people will need food assistance in 2004. "The situation is so bad ... [that] people are now losing hope, since their livestock are dying in numbers," said Nathi Vilakazi, a spokesman for Save the Children Fund in Swaziland.
Malawi: Meteorologists see hope for "good rains" soon.
Zambia: In recent months, Zambian farmers have produced enough to feed the country and export maize to Zimbabwe, but "areas of chronic food insecurity" remain, and about 500,000 people, including farmers and their dependents, as well as AIDS orphans, still require assistance, WFP says.
AFP does not mention parts of Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Tanzania, and Somalia where similar drought conditions prevail.
Zambia has shifted from a food deficit to food surplus in one agricultural season, and, as the second agricultural season under the new government begins, is now exporting grain into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe, according to The Times Dec. 19. The crop was so big that the army was called on to help get it harvested. Government is subsidizing fertilizer at 50%.
Zambian authorities have not relented in their continued supplies of subsidized farm inputs to peasant farmers in the country. Launching the second agricultural season on Dec. 18, the country's farmer-President, Levy Mwanawasa, used the occasion to call for a change in thinking on the part of commercial banks and lending institutions: "We have in our midst chief executives of banks. I do not intend to embarrass them, but I am just calling upon them to be more considerate in their financing activities, like farming, which leads to new capital formation."
Mwanawasa said the government would continue to offer farmers the proficiency of Zambia National Services (ZNA), which he said he wants to become more involved in providing farmers with services of tractor hire, bush clearing, improvement of access roads and haulage of farm produce.
An agreement on wealth sharing has been worked out by the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army. Under the agreement, signed on Jan. 7, half of non-oil revenue from southern Sudan will go to the central government during a six-and-a-half year interim period. A central bank with two branches will be established; one in the North, serving the Islamic banking system and using the Sudanese dinar, and the other in the South, operating on the basis of the Western system and using the Sudanese pound, SPLM/A spokesman Samson Kwaje told IRIN.
In late December, the government and the SPLM/A agreed to split the revenue from oil production equally, after 2% is given to the oil-producing states themselves.
EIR notes that the North has much more of the population and infrastructure than the South. Without a national agro-industrial development plan, the disproportionate income going to the South scarcely has anywhere to go, other than into the pockets of a few.
This Week in History
Although we celebrate Benjamin Franklin's 298th birthday on Jan. 17, he may not be quite so old as we think. He has had a lot of time to go in the opposite direction, as he demonstrates in his letter to Dr. Thomas Bond in 1780: "For my own part, I do not find that I grow any older. Being arrived at seventy, and considering that by traveling further in the same road I should probably be led to the grave, I stopped short, turned about, and walked back again; which having done these four years, you may now call me sixty-six. Advise those old friends of ours to follow my example; keep up your spirits, and that will keep up your bodies; you will no more stoop under the weight of age, than if you had swallowed a hand-spike."
Franklin and the recipient of the above letter had been friends from at least 1751, when they collaborated on an important infrastructure projectbuilding a Pennsylvania hospital where the poor would receive excellent medical care. Dr. Bond had conceived of the idea for a hospital serving both Philadelphia and the growing agricultural counties to the west. But when he attempted to raise funds, everyone asked him if he had asked for Ben Franklin's advice. When he answered "no," they said they would think about it. So, Dr. Bond went to Franklin and enlisted his help.
In his Autobiography, Franklin says that he "engag'd heartily in the Design of Procuring Subscriptions from others. Previous however to the Solicitation, I endeavoured to prepare the Minds of the People by writing on the Subject in the Newspapers, which was my usual custom in such Cases, but which he [Bond] had omitted." Donations at first were generous, but when they began to flag, Franklin realized the hospital would also need help from the Pennsylvania Assembly. When he introduced a bill, members from outside Philadelphia objected on the grounds that it would only serve the city, and said that they doubted that the citizens themselves actually approved of the project. Franklin responded that, on the contrary, the citizens approved so heartily that they would gladly contribute 2,000 pounds.
The legislators considered this statement a most extravagant claim, and utterly impossible, and this is where Franklin had them in his snare. He brought in a new bill which stipulated that if a capital stock of 2,000 pounds were raised, then the Assembly would match it with 2,000 pounds paid over two years. Said Franklin, "This Condition carried the Bill through; for the Members who had oppos'd the Grant, and now conceiv'd they might have the Credit of being charitable without the Expence, agreed to its Passage; and then in soliciting Subscriptions among the People we urg'd the conditional Promise of the Law as an additional Motive to give, since every Man's Donation would be doubled. Thus the Clause work'd both ways."
The required sum was raised very quickly, the money from the Assembly followed, and "a convenient and handsome Building was soon erected, the Institution has by constant Experience been found useful, and flourishes to this Day." But in this day of shrinking medical facilities, mismanaged care, and the security threat to even our nation's capital from the closing of its high-level trauma center, D.C. General Hospital, it is useful to look at Franklin's 1751 articles in "The Pennsylvania Gazette" which laid out the reasons for founding a hospital, especially one which would serve the poor.
"But the Good particular Men may do separately, in relieving the Sick, is small, compared with what they may do collectively or by a joint Endeavour and Interest. Hence the Erecting of Hospitals or Infirmaries by Subscription, for the Reception, Entertainment, and Cure of the Sick Poor, has been found by Experience exceedingly beneficial, as they turn out annually great Numbers of Patients perfectly cured, who might otherwise been lost to their Families, and to Society. Hence Infirmaries spread more and more in Europe, new Ones being continually erected in large Cities and populous Towns where generally the most skilful Physicians and Surgeons inhabit. And the Subscribers have had the Satisfaction in a few Years of seeing the Good they proposed to do, become much more extensive than was at first expected; for the Multitude and Variety of Cases continually treated in those Infirmaries, not only render the Physicians and Surgeons who attend them, still more expert and skilful, for the Benefit of others, but afford such speedy and effectual Instruction to the young Students of both Professions, who come from different and remote Parts of the Country for Improvement, that they return with a more ample Stock of Knowledge in their Art, and become Blessings to the Neighbourhoods in which they fix their Residence....
"But the Difference with Regard to the unhappy Sufferer is still greater. In an Hospital his Case will be treated according to the best Rules of Art, by Men of Experience and known Abilities in their Profession. His Lodgings will be commodious, clean and neat, in an healthy and open Situation, his Diet will be well chosen, and properly administred: He will have many other necessary Conveniencies for his Relief, such as hot and cold Baths, sweating Rooms, chirurgic Machines, Bandage, &c. which can rarely be procured in the best private Lodgings, much less in those miserable loathsome Holes, which are the common Receptacles of the diseas'd Poor that are brought to this City.-In short a Beggar in a well regulated Hospital, stands an equal Chance with a Prince in his Palace, for a comfortable Subsistence, and an expeditious and effectual Cure of his Diseases."
"It is hoped therefore, that whoever will maturely consider the inestimable Blessings that are connected to a proper Execution of the present Hospital Scheme in this City, can never be so void of Humanity and the essential Duties of Religion, as to turn a deaf Ear to the numberless Cries of the Poor and Needy, and refuse for their Assistance, a little of that Superfluity, which a bountiful Providence has too liberally bestowed on them."
Happy Birthday, Benjamin Franklin!
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