This Week You Need To Know
LaRouche to Toledo Town Meeting
'A New Presidency To Save the Nation'
Here are Lyndon LaRouche's opening remarks, made by teleconference and webcast, to a LaRouche PAC town meeting in Toledo, Ohio, Oct. 21, 2004.
Well, thank you. It's good to get the applause at the beginning; then you don't have to worry about getting it at the end.
The question here, is how are we going to, from the standpoint of Plato, for example, save this nation from the worst depression that we've known. Because, if this thing is not stopped, it will be, indeed comparable to, but worse than, that of the 1930s. The reason, of course, is that in the 1930s, when Roosevelt came into office, in March of 1933, much of the infrastructure, in railroads, in power stations, in water systems and so forth remained, that had existed in the early 1920s, and from the period of the aftermath of World War I.
Now, 40 years after the beginning of the Vietnam War, we have destroyed most of the infrastructure of the nation. This includes municipal infrastructure, in the cities, education systems, power systems, health-care systems, all these kinds of things, as well as the generation of power, the management of large-scale water systems, and other things which are essential to our national economy. We've destroyed these over 40 years.
Now, large-scale infrastructure, such as a water systemlet's take the dams and locks along the Ohio River or Mississippi Riverthese systems, together with inland systems, that is, ones in from the rivers, like municipal systems, water systems and so forth, have been there for over 40 years, and they have generally a useful life of 40 to 50 years from the time they're built or freshly maintained. Now, it is 40 years since the change in direction of our economy. These things, which have been wasting away from increasing negligence, over the past four decades, are now coming to the point of rot. This is true of our public water systems, like the rivers and their locks and so forth, our public municipal systems, water systems, our health-care systems which are reduced to maybe half what they were back in the beginning of the 1970s; so these things have wasted away.
So therefore, we have a poorer situation than we had then. Then, in the Depression, people went back to the farms to live, when the cities broke down. We still had farms then. They weren't rich farms, but people were able to get back there, and were able to get a chicken or an egg or two, by going back to the old homestead. Now, that farm, that agriculture system has been largely destroyed.
We look at our industries: Our industries have been destroyed in a way, beyond what we experienced under Hoover, in the years between October of 1929, and March of 1933. We lost half of our basic economy, in that period under Hoover. It was not the 1929 crash that elected Roosevelt. It was Hoover's Administration which cut the incomes of our people, and our economy in general, by about half, by the time Roosevelt got into office.
But, we still had the materials with which to rebuild. And we did rebuild, quite well. It was tough. I lived through it, it was not easy, but we made it. We emerged from that as the most powerful nation on this planet, the most powerful nation that ever existed. We weren't the greatest fighting nation in the world, in terms of combat. Soldiers of other nations were better trained, for that sort of work. But, where other soldiers in other nations, had some hundreds of pounds of materiel with them, in their battlefield endeavors, our typical GI had tons, and tens of tons, of logistical strength. And it was with that tonnage of logistical war, that we were able to win the war, to bring our allies to victory in the war, and to come out of the war as the most powerful nation, in productive power, the world had ever seen.
And despite the mistakes that were made in the late 1950s and the 1960s, by the time that Kennedy was elected President, we were still a great nation, the greatest producer-nation on this planet.
And we are, no more.
'Post-Industrial' Madness
What happened in the middle of the 1960s, for various reasons I've described in other locations on other occasions, in writing and otherwise, in about the middle of the 1960s, at the time we entered the Vietnam War, we began to destroy our economy. We also went to a new philosophy, which is called a "post-industrial" philosophy: We began to tear down high technology; we cut government investments; we cut back on the growth and maintenance of infrastructure. We're now a wasteland in large degree.
We live by exporting our jobs to cheap-labor markets abroad, which in turn ship us cheap goods, produced from abroad. But we can't generally afford even to buy those cheap goods, because we've lost our jobs, our places of employment. We've lost our opportunities.
Therefore, under these circumstances, what is needed, now, as the greatest depression in modern history is coming down on the world now, as we speak, as we meet, as we conduct this election campaignit's happening now. There's no prospect for great jobs in the future under the present policy: none. Everything will become, suddenly, very much worse.
And the looming danger of a dictatorship under a re-elected Bush, is very real; under desperate conditions, desperate and stupid governments will do desperate things. We've seen it with Ashcroft already. We've seen it in many other ways.
Therefore, we have to have a new Presidency to save the nation.
Well, we've got a possible new President, in terms of Senator Kerry, with his running-mate Edwards. These are intelligent gentlemen. They're capable. I may not agree with everything they do. I think they could stand some improvement in education and commitment in some ways. But, I believe if we, the people, visibly select the new President, that President will be beholden to us, the people.
We have, in this country, we have people who know what to do. You have a mayor, for example, in Toledo, who has shown that he does know something about what to do in managing a local community economy, what the problems are. We have people who are formerly in the intelligence services, in the military services, qualified professionals; we have people who are active and retired, in the legislatures, who know these things. If we bring together the resources of the qualified specialists, who know how to deal with problems and have them discuss among themselves, we as a nation can do as Roosevelt did: We can bring ourselves back together, and make good policy, and make a good Presidency. We can educate a President, who is highly intelligent and educable, like Kerry.
That's our best chance.
Now, we're now in the last two weeks of the campaign. We probably have turned out, in the state of Ohio, in particular, the new registrations indicate a potential of a landslide victory for the Kerry-Edwards ticket, in this state; which means also, of course, carrying a number of candidates for the House of Representatives and Senators, also at the same time, in these various states.
So, we have the potential of a landslide victory. We have a question of whether we're going to get it. We have vote fraud en masse, being perpetrated, chiefly by the Republican Party, and by some people in ityou know about it, in this state here. Therefore, we have to fight to get as much of a landslide margin of victory as we can get. The landslide margin will come largely from people who are in the lower 80% of family-income brackets, who have not always voted in recent years, but who have a reason now, to turn out, to register, and to vote, where they may not have bothered in previous elections.
We have also a group of young people, 18 to 25 years of age, in particular, who represent a college-age group of people. Now, they're not all going to college, and most of them don't have a chance of getting there. But they have the intelligence and the spunk and the energy to do what they have to do. And these young people are the future of our society. They're the people who will be running this society 30 to 40 years from now. And therein lies our future.
So, if we can get these people combined to turn out the vote, and vote their conscience in their way, in what they know to be their interest, then we can have a landslide victory, or the possibility of one, and we can have a new President of our choice: a Kerry-Edwards Presidency, with a lot of good elections of some good candidatessome Republicans, too; because Republicans are not a bad species. Many of them are as good as Democrats, and obviously we intend to pull the nation together, not just the party together, in forming a new government and making laws again, in a new way, in our country.
Bush's Lies
What we have to do, though, involves something else. As you all know, in politics, there are two problems, two technical problems: One is defining how the problems of society, or the challenges to society, should be dealt with. We can talk about each of these things, and people who are rational and spend some time at it, can come to rational conclusions. They may not all agree, but they can enter into a process of discussion which leads toward agreement. But, then, when you come to a time like this, how do we take this election campaign, and boil it down into simple conceptions which adequately express what the fight is all about?
Now, the manner of the way things happen, recentlythe incumbent President, George Bush, has handed us the evidence we need, to bring the entire election campaign into focus, the choice of President into focus. The President lied, in his public address in the third so-called Presidential debate. He lied on many things, but he lied in particular, on two things very clearly: He lied about the flu vaccine problem. And he also insulted the people of the United States, in saying "There's nothing you can do about it. We made our decision. That's it! And, if you're healthy, don't go for a shot! We'll do the best we can, but dig in for the worst." That's not a President speaking.
And he lied to them! Because the President of the United States, or the Presidency, which he represents, had been sitting on top of this for years. They knew this was comingyear after year, they did nothing. They willfully did nothing. And when they tried to tell you, as the President tried to tell you, that this was something that took him by surprise, and "we just have to learn to live with it," and don't bother him about this, "or I'll get nasty!" He made himself a liar, the kind of liar we don't want in the Presidency. To spit in the face of the American people, especially in the face of those over 50, especially over 70, and those who are young, who are particularly endangered by a flu epidemicand I'll get back to that and discuss just a bit about that later on.
He lied on a second thing: He lied about the Social Security system. Now, we have known, for some time, that the intention of the Bush Administration was to destroy the Social Security system, as set up under Roosevelt. To break the promise of the Social Security system. The Social Security system is the last relic, the last important relic, of the great welfare reforms by President Roosevelt, the reforms that made us the most powerful nation on this planet, the greatest economic power. And they're about to take away the Social Security rights, of all of the people, in one way or another.
What the President calls thisbecause "privatization" has become a bad wordhe calls this, not "privatization," but "reform". But, the word "reform" means privatization.
Now, Senator Kerry, who is on the inside of the Senate and knows things about this, has said, clearly, that the President has, in a sense, lied about this issue of Social Security: That he does intend to privatize Social Security. That is, take it away from you, and put it on the market where it'll be gobbled up by Wall Street, or similar kinds of things.
Moreover, recently, you had in the New York Times, a reporter, Ron Suskind, who reported on this; the Bush Administration, the Presidency, said this was not true: that, in the private discussion with Republicans and the President, the President had not pushed privatization. The White House said, "no." But, they lied, according to Ron Suskind, who said, not only that he had had evidence, from Republicans who had attended that meetingmore than two. But, he also had a case of a Republican who had taken notes, in writing, during the course of the President's address on the subject of Social Security. And the words that were being used, were "private, private, private."
So, the President has lied to the American people, wittingly, and repeatedly, on the issue of Social Security. He has lied to the American people, and defied the American people, and insulted them, on the question of the flu vaccine.
A Vulnerable Population
Now, let me get back to this flu problem: The flu epidemicI don't know, I'm not an expert in the epidemic as such. But, naturally, in my position, I do a lot of nosing around, and I talk to a lot of people, especially experts, on this matter. The problem is, recently, as all of you know, if you look around you, is that the factors of health, the factors of disease control, quality of nutrition, circumstances of life, and so forth, have become worse. Also, very important: That during the recent administration, this current administration, the process of inoculation, immunization, of pupils in schools, has been cut back, and back, and back, and back. Now, as you know, those of you who are older, know from experience, that the most common way in which infectious diseases are spread, in our societyapart from special circumstancesis through children at school. Children pick up the diseases and transmit them to one another, and so forth.
Now, what we've done, in the recent period, with the cutbacks under the HMO system, with other cutbacks in the medical structure, and the public-health structure, with the loss of immunization in schools, especially under this President Bush, we have now created a "herd potential" of lowered level of immunity, or resistance, tantamount to immunity, in the population. So, a severe epidemic, of a highly infectious type, hitting a population now, will have much greater effect, much more deadly effect, than we know. We don't know how serious the threat will be. We know it's great. We know it's probably much more serious than all the calculations given to us.
And what the President has done, in conniving, with Cheney and so forth, who's run an Enron kind of operation, in terms of flu vaccine production, has created a situation, over years, in which we've destroyed the ability to immunize and to protect our population, or to reduce greatly the risk from infectious disease.
The President has done this, or his administration has done it willfully. The President has defended that policy: a cruel and reckless policy, in bald-faced defiance of the American peoplein their face, on the television tube, in the third debate.
The President has lied, on a related issue, of Social Security: He does intend to eliminate it, in its present form! In effect, to privatize it, by throwing it onto the financial market, where Social Security will receive the same treatment that health care has been given under the HMO system.
So therefore, we have a President who has lied. He has done cruel things to the American people. He's done it in a defiant, lying manner. This is a clear image of what this President, and this Presidency, is.
Now, take all the other things we could discuss, all the other problems we could discuss: When the American people get a full smell, in their nostrils, of what the President has done to them, which he said clearlyindicted himself, in the third debate with Kerry: Do you want this man, to be, again, your President, with a worsening crisis?
This kind of issue, which is being addressed now, by Kerry, by other people in the Democratic Party, is the thematic issue which makes clear to the average voter exactly what the problem is. Yes, there's an issue of this; there's an issue of that; there's an issue of this. But, how do we put it all together, and say, "Taking all the issues together, how do we decide who should be the next President?" Then, you take this, and you say, "Do you want a man, an administration, who represents what this President represented in that debate, on the issue of the flu vaccine, and on the issue of lying about Social Security? Is that the man, you want in the Presidency?"
That becomes the issue.
Return to the American System
Now, what do we do about Kerry?
I have my own reservations about the policies that Kerry is enunciating in areas of foreign policy and so forth. I don't think they're adequate. But, Kerry is hanging out there as a Senator, not without connections, and if we elect him on Nov. 2, he's going to have to pull together an administration, and he's going to have to rethink many of the things he's said on the hustings. Hopefully, we will elect him, on the basis of what he represents, in contrast to what the lying George Bush represents on the flu vaccine and Social Security issues. But, working from there: Is he going to have the right foreign policy? Is he going to deal properly with nations? What's his policy for job creation? Not that he has a "plan" to create jobs. We want to know, and he must know, how we are actually going to do it. And, he's got to work through a lot of things, he has not made clear so far.
Now, I know people who are experts, who should be in the consulting process, presuming he's elected, who will consult with him and circles around him, and help him by supplying information, advice, informing a government, a Presidency, which will be able to take on the kind of problems we face in the coming period.
Therefore, what I'm doing, my personal commitment, is just that: I am supporting Kerry. Supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket. I have certain differences with some of the things he's said. I think they're mistaken. But, essentially, he's the man we need, because he's the man we could elect, whom we need.
Now, my concern is a continuing one: To ensure that, over the coming years, under a Kerry Presidency, that the United States moves in the way it has to move, to solve some of these other problems.
The key thing we have to look at, which Kerry must come to understand, is that the American System of political economy, as defined by our Founders, and as expressed by the achievements of President Roosevelt, is not the capitalist systemas we think of capitalists in terms of Europe. Nor is it a Marxist system, as Marx adopted his views of economy, from his study of the British System. We're not the British System. We're the American System. And the American System is defined, largely, succinctly, by the papers of the Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, under the first George Washington Administration. And the American System works as follows, as Roosevelt understood it: Remember, Roosevelt was a descendant of a fellow called Isaac Roosevelt, who was the founder of the Bank of New York, and was an ally of Alexander Hamilton, against that treasonous skunk Aaron Burr, who ran the Bank of Manhattan. And Roosevelt maintained that tradition as a family, of his tradition to the Founders of the Republic on economic policy.
Now, in our system, today, it's fair to say, that 50% of the total economy of the United States, when it's functioning in a healthy way, is based on public infrastructure, infrastructure at the Federal, state, and local level, including the county level, of course. Infrastructure means things like mass transportation systems, power grids, power systems, large-scale water systems both for transportation and for maintenance of water; it means public educational systems; it means health-care systems; it means other things of that sort. But these are the public works, which are done at the level of the Federal, state, and local government, either as public enterprises, funded by the public, managed by the public; or, as private enterprises, but created by a public authority and regulated by a public authority.
So, to get the economy going, recoveredand we have to create about 10 million jobs in the immediate futurewill mean, creating immediately a large influx into large-scale infrastructure projects, where the infrastructure projects are already engineering-designed. For example, let's take one case: You have, outside of Louisville, you have a lock-and-dam system there. This is about 40-odd years old. It's ready for repairs, and it's about to jam up. If it jams up, it means the entire coal delivery down the Ohio River is jammed upand that's a crisis for the whole economy. If you look around the whole state, and the borders of the state, the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, the Missouri, you see a similar kind of situation.
So therefore, we have things that the Corps of Engineers should be working on, right now. So, the simplest thing is, you fund the Corps of Engineers; the Corps of Engineers undertakes the projects, and brings in the private contractors, which assist it in doing the job: You create jobs.
We need to rebuild our mass-transit system, especially railroads. We need to go to a new type of railroad system, in order to make freight more efficient, and cheaper. We need to go to regulated freight. Take, for example, the case of the airline system, which is in between: The airline system has to be a regulated system. It's largely a private system, chiefly a private system. But, it's now going bankrupt: One airline after the other is going bankrupt. The reason these airlines are going bankrupt, where they weren't bankrupt back at the end of the '70s, is deregulation. Deregulation destroyed the airline system.
Now, petroleum is running at a price of over $55 a barrel, internationallyand that's going to hit the pump pretty soon. It probably will go to $75 a barrel, and could go to $100 a barrel! The reason for this, is not a shortage of petroleum. That is, the rise in the price of petroleum is not due to any shortage of petroleum! As a matter of fact, there's more petroleum being produced than is needed. The reason for it, is a massive speculation in petroleum, and the speculation in petroleum is what's bidding up the price of oil.
But this then comes back: It comes back to the pump. It comes back to the airline, and crashed the airlines! It comes back into the homes in winter heating, which is coming up, I believe, this year, again. This sort of thing.
So therefore, these are the kinds of things that government must deal with. It must deal with regulation, in public affairs and public interest. We must save our airline industry, and keep the airlines from crashing! We must do the same thing with our mass-transportation system, our power systems, our electrical generation and distribution.
Now, these power systems generally have a life-span of 40 to 50 years. Many of them, around the country, are going belly-up, or toes-up. Because, the last time we had a significant investment, an overall investment, in replacing and maintaining power systems, was about 40 to 50 years ago. Now, the time has run out. These systems are collapsing. This is a vast area, for government investment in job creation.
Now, when you have job creation in the public sector, you now create a potential in the private sector, for those firms, which will apply for contracts with government projectsas Roosevelt did, with the TVA, for example. What we need, therefore, is, we have to use the power of the Federal system, under our Constitution, to create the Federal credit, to make the credit available, to supply the needs of infrastructure development; and then, in turn, when private firms, who are qualified for contracts, walk in to take a contract, or to seek a contract, we must provide the credit needed to get those firms into operation. By those means, we can create the 10 million jobs we need to get the country back in shape.
For example, again, to make the thing comprehensible: All 50 states of the United States are now bankrupt, as states. That is, the states can not earn enough tax revenue, or related revenue, to maintain the state and its functions, without having a negative effect, with taxation, upon the state as a whole. Therefore, we must increase the amount of employment and production, in each of the 48-50 states48 continental, and the other two states. We must create that employment, to bring each state above breakeven level. If we have all the states above breakeven level, that is, where the income earned within the state, is enough to support the tax structure to maintain the state in balance, and maintain essential infrastructure, then the Federal system is stable.
The money we are going to lend, will have to be aimed at 40- to 50-year long-term investments. Some shorter, some that long. We will then create facilities, where the Federal government goes into debt, to create the purchasing power for these projects. But then, the Federal government will have as security, for the repayment of the debt, the valuable infrastructure and industries which have been created and funded through this process. This is what Roosevelt did, in principle. We can learn from Roosevelt's experience, and do it perhaps better than he did it, today, because we've learned from that experience. But that's what we have to do.
The Next Generation
We have to see ourselves as the American System. Our object, is, as the Preamble of the Constitution prescribes, the President of the United States must defend the sovereignty of the United States: We're going to end globalization. We're not going to export jobs to cheap-labor markets overseas. The President of the United States, the Congress, are obliged by the Constitution, to defend the general welfare, of all of the people. The Preamble of the Constitution obliges the President of the United States and the Congress, also, to defend the interests of posterity: That means, immediately, those young people, now 18 to 25, who should be leading the society, 25 to 40 years from now.
And that should be the policy.
We have to get this candidate elected. We have to bring together forces which can advise him competently on what is feasible, what is needed. He's intelligent. He's a man of good spirit. I think we can work with him. But then, we have to have a scheme, an idea of what we're going to do. And we have to use the American System. We have to go back to a protectionist model, which was always the American System; we have to protect our jobs. We have to protect the capital investment we want people to make, in job-creating places. We have to have a fair trade, fair price policy. We have to have the investments, which builds up the infrastructure on which the economy as a whole depends, and provides the credit and incentive for technological progress in the private sector.
Under those terms, I think we could take a state like Ohio, which is one of the most prosperous states in the Union, a great agro-industrial state, and I think we can build it back up, again. We can probably do it in 25 years, reversing 40 years of decadence.
Thank you.
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