This Week You Need To Know
LAROUCHE: WE HAVE TO AGAIN BECOME A TRUE REPUBLIC
Here is Lyndon LaRouche's keynote, via video teleconference, to a LaRouche PAC town meeting in Cleveland, Ohio on Oct. 27, 2004. The event was also broadcast over the Internet, and linked to a satellite event in Washington, D.C.
Just to set the stage, I am asking our people to put on a short video, which I think you will find stimulating, and enlightening. [Video begins with a picture of Bush and Cheney, captioned: "Would You Buy a Used Car from These Men?," and moves through the political and economic failures of their Administration to the overture of Rossini's "Barber of Seville."]
The subject tonight is to deal with something that most people don't understand, and to begin to let the American population and politicians understand this thing, they must understand now: We are in the worst financial collapse in world history, that is, in modern, known history. Very soon, a matter of weeks or, at most, a couple of months, this entire system will collapse. For example, the U.S. dollar will probably fall to about $1.50 cost per euro.
We're going to the bottom. We're facing a general collapse of the housing market, which means that the so-called nominal value of housing will drop to a fraction of what it is presently. The tendency is to lose jobs more rapidly than ever before. This is happening.
Now, how do we deal with this? In general, the rule is, as Kerry said in a Wilkes-Barre, Penna., address some time ago, we have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt's approach to deal with a depression. That means that the U.S. government will have to step in, as Franklin Roosevelt did, and put the banking systemwhich now. the U.S. banking system, and most of the rest of the worldis hopelessly bankrupt. Don't kid yourself. But the President of the United States, implicitly, following the principle of the Constitution, which Roosevelt usedthe President of the United States, with the support of Congress, can put through emergency provisions to take the Federal Reserve system into receivership, under control, and organize it to make sure that bank doors don't close; to make sure that things that have to be funded, with credit, are still funded; to keep the economy going.
But that's only for the immediate term. Of course, the first question is, as we see in Europe today, as the European economies are collapsing, we're seeing in Germany, and France, and elsewhere, the spread of what are actually the measures used first by the predecessors of the fascists, and the fascists. The same kinds of methods which were used by Herbert Hoover. You know, Roosevelt was not elected because of Herbert Hoover's 1929 crash. Roosevelt was elected because of popular reaction to the disastrous effects of Hoover's austerity policies, which sank the U.S. economy and the incomes of people in the United States by about one-half.
So, the problem is, how do we reorganize, having taken those measures? First, the United States government takes responsibility, for putting a sick, bankrupt, international financial-monetary system into bankruptcy. And believe me, if the U.S. government does it, if the President of the United States does it, the rest of the world will just have to go alongsome willingly, some not willingly. But they will go along. We are not going to kill people in order to pay usurious debts.
The FDR Recovery Program
Now, beyond that, how do we recover? Roosevelt had a program which worked. The program was basic economic infrastructure: Things that are within the public domain, the public responsibility, as opposed to private responsibility. This includes schools, of course, which is usually a municipal responsibility. This includes hospitals, and related health-care institutions, which is partly private, but is regulated by city, state, and Federal law. It involves large-scale transportation systems, including mass transportation for cities. It includes water systems, which are breaking down. It includes power generation and distribution, these kinds of things.
It includes, say, from here in the city of Cleveland, you go down to the Ohio River, and you take all that coal that is moved down the Ohio River, on which much of the nation's energy depends; and this coal delivery depends upon a system of locks and dams, which was set up last, about 40 years ago. If those locks and dams start to collapse, or go out of maintenance, then the coal barges on the Ohio River stop flowing. And then, we have a crisis. So, we have to fix those kinds of water systems.
We have to take care of municipal water systems, and county water systems, for drinking water and so forth, for people; public sanitation, these measures.
What Roosevelt did, is, he took the obvious needs of the nation, and put people to work doing things that were obviously needed, within the government purview; that is, Federal, state, and local purview. He also did big projects, like completing the Hoover Dam, which is a great power project and water project for a whole region of the United States. He built the TVA. The TVA transformed an area of dead life, Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley, transformed it into a wealthy area, a productive area, through power and water management, things like that. We couldn't have developed the nuclear weapons for World War II, without the TVA: It was the power of the TVA that made that possible, at Oak Ridge. If you go down to Tennessee today, or go down into northern Alabama, for example, you see the large works that were done, essentially then, and improved on, which [led to] the well-being of what was once a good industrial area of the nation, industrial and agricultural, until we began to shut it down about 40 years ago. This was a rich area of prosperity, and Roosevelt created it.
The other thing that he did, of course, was to stimulate the private sector, by credit for loans through banks, under government sponsorship and supervision, to ensure that worthy investors had the credit available to employ people and do things. The employment of a lot of people in infrastructure, created the market in which these private firms could prosper. And we have to do the same thing today. But it's not quite enough. And that comes to this.
...the entire presentation in pdf format
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