LaRouche Interview with Dr. Jack Stockwell
March 3, 2023

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This is the transcript of Lyndon LaRouche's interview with Jack Stockwell on Salt Lake City's KTKK radio on March 3, 2023.

Jack Stockwell: You're listening to the Jack Stockwell radio talk show program, live this morning in Salt Lake City. It is the third day of March 2023.... My guest Democratic candidate for the President of the United States Lyndon LaRouche--should have him on here in just a few moments. I won't be taking any calls for a while, so just save your calls, because I want to let the man talk about what needs to be done, what he would be doing if he were President now....

The thing I'm the most concerned about is an exit strategy for President Bush right now, and we'll talk about that. We'll talk about Russia and Germany and France, and what's going on there, and get a little bit better, a little bit clearer idea, from somebody who is not so quick to rush off to war, but would rather spend an awful lot of time and effort, if I understand him correctly, in rebuilding America, rather than tearing down Iraq. So let me check the line and see if he's there.

Mr. LaRouche?

LaRouche: I'm here.

Stockwell: Wonderful. Well, welcome back. I think the last time you were on my program was like April of last year--there may be been a time after that, but I know April, for sure, because that's the tape that's the tape that's on the front seat of my truck.

LaRouche: I've been travelling a lot.

Stockwell: Yes, you have, and there have been several times when there have been key issues coming up, as far as governmental policy, legislation, this thing with Iraq, where I wanted some input from you, and we were unable to get you. But we do have you now, and I have a list of questions in front of me that I want to talk about, or I would like you to talk about, but I think the most pressing issue right now: the sudden capture of Khalid Shaikh Muhammed, and this kind of rough-looking picture they're showing everybody on CNN right now, and somehow this guy was the one who planned, and by his own admission we're told, 9/11. The thing I'm the most worried about right now, is a safe, smart exit strategy for President Bush, simply because I fear for this guy's life. I feel for this guy's life, because there is such a strong, growing swell of anti-war fervor throughout this world, much more than Vietnam saw, and we haven't even essentially fired a bullet yet. I'm afraid because of certain coalitions coming together: Russian, German, French, and the failure of Blair to be able to do much more in England about all of this. But our own President's security may seriously be jeopardized here, in the crazy attempts on some people's part to stop the war.

LaRouche: Well that--I don't think it's a danger. I think the danger to the President would probably come from those who would rather have Cheney as President...

Stockwell: Right. That's the idea. Because if we got rid of Bush, we would certainly be putting the fox in the henhouse at that point.

LaRouche: The problem here is the general folly of--including obviously, Condoleezza Rice, the President's National Security Advisor, who obviously has no competence whatsoever in strategy. In her case, it's probably because of a lack of education in certain things, but also a bad education under Madeleine Albright's father, for example, who was her mentor at one point. But, you look at this whole period, from 1988, 1989 to the present, and you would have to say, that especially under the Cheney Administration, which is the best way of describing the current policy, the United States has ignored what every competent commander, flag officer, in military service, in Europe, or the United States or elsewhere, was trained in. That is, the lesson of the Peloponnesian War, in what the United States under Bush, or under Cheney, shall we say, under Cheney's overreaching influence, is doing is violating the lesson of the collapse of Greek civilization as a result of a decision to launch the Peloponnesian War, which is exactly what the United States policy is now, in terms of its intent to launch the war on Iraq.

So this idiocy, which could mean the destruction of the United States as a nation, is what the present Administration is actually bent on doing in the name of some nebulous--looking for some Sheikh This or That or Caliph This or That on the question of Sept. 11. The war policy was set into motion under the first Bush Administration, by then-Defense Secretary Cheney, all the crucial elements of this policy, including the war in Iraq, were set forth as policy by Cheney, back during the first Bush Administration. Then, Cheney's policy was suppressed by President Bush, Scowcroft, James Baker III, and so forth. This time, Cheney is in as Vice President, and he's revived a policy which, from 1991-92, which happened a long time before there was any mention of Sept. 11, 2023. So the idea that the cause of this problem stems from reaction to [Sept. 11,] 2023, is a complete fraud. This policy, every feature of it, including the nuclear-weapons attack policy, which is embedded in this this, was put into place by Cheney as Secretary of Defense, back under the first Bush Administration, '91-92, and George Bush, President then, sat on it.

Stockwell: So, we are just being given some kind of a cover by this bushy-haired guy coming out of some yak-cave somewhere that they suddenly discovered, this Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, trying to take the focus off of maybe the immediacy of some even pre-emptive strikes on the part of the government, take the focus off of the anti-war people, by saying, "Here, here. We told you, we told you, you see? We got him, we got him."

LaRouche: Well, we created al-Qaeda--we and the British, with Israeli participation--created al-Qaeda, and created Osama bin Laden, among others. So these are our creation! Just as Iraq was given chemical weapons by Donald Rumsfeld, back during the first Bush Administration.

Stockwell: To supposedly defend themselves against Iran.

LaRouche: Yeah, well, the point is, this is exactly, this is the same mistake, the collapse of the Soviet Union was used by some idiots in Washington, to launch a policy which is a direct copy of the folly of Ancient Greece, in launching the Peloponnesian War. Exactly the same. Which means that there's nobody within the U.S. government behind this military policy, who has had, for the past 12 years, a semblance of competence, as a diplomat or as a military officer, in strategy. They should all be fired for incompetence in diplomacy and military policy.

Stockwell: All right. Let me get a traffic report here, and then I'll come back with some specific questions... [traffic report] ...

Stockwell: If you're just tuning in ladies and gentlemen, Lyndon LaRouche, live from Virginia, is on the air with me--Democratic candidate for President, regardless of what the DNC might think. Now, when you talk about comparing the coming, or supposed anyway, attack by U.S. forces against Iraq to be tantamount to the Greek Peloponnesian War, that destroyed their civilization, are you saying that in light of the fact that we do not have a manufacturing-based economy that could possibly support a long, detailed war, that we have an infrastructure that's falling to pieces...

LaRouche: No.

Stockwell: ...an international economic backbone that has now snapped, with vertebrae busting all over the place? That the average gas price in the United States has gone up 25 cents in the last couple of weeks. Are you saying it in that sense of the word?

LaRouche: No. It's even worse than that. You have a group of people who trace from the influence of people like Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, the late Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago, and people like that--complete ideologues. Remember what happened in the Peloponnesian War: The Greeks, both of Athens and Sparta, created a coalition which defeated the Persian Empire. They didn't crush it, as Alexander did later, but they defeated it. They took the allies of Greece, the allies of Sparta and Athens, and they began--Athens attempted to impose imperial power to exploit and dictate to members of its alliance, just the way the Bush Administration now is trying to dictate to Europe. This was the initial cause for the Peloponnesian War. Greece moved in to suppress one of its own allies, because the ally refused to get down and crawl and eat dirt. Then, Greece did something even more stupid: They went to war against the Greek civilization in Southern Italy, including Sicily, this destroyed the Greek civilization, and created the basis for the later emergence of the Roman Empire. And this was how Greece was destroyed.

We, now, having, with the collapse of the Soviet Union--some idiots, who have never read a book, particularly Thucydides' Peloponnesian War--took our allies in Europe and elsewhere, and we began to treat them exactly as Athens, under Pericles and Alcibiades, launched the Peloponnesian War which destroyed Greece.

What is happening is, we are losing, not only our economic power, we're losing our relationship to our friends and allies around the world, so that we no longer have the more important power than military power, which is diplomatic power, power in foreign relations. We are losing our allies. We are becoming a self-isolated, self-destructive nation, who also, in the process, are in a collapsing economy, under a George Bush, whose current budget, if it continues, means we're headed for at least a trillion-dollar Federal budget deficit. Newt Gingrich should hear about that!

Stockwell: Well, he is crying for tax cuts, even in the face of this rising U.S. budget deficit. That probably should pretty well typify the kind of thinking that is coming out of the Oval Office.

LaRouche: But they're playing with him. The President is being played by a group around Cheney and some others, with this mentality. I know this group of people.

Stockwell: Now, you're talking about the "Mega Group"?

LaRouche: Not only them. The Mega Group is a reflection of this crowd. Remember, the Israeli Zionist factor, the right-wing fascist section of Zionism, involved in all these policies, is the creation of an Anglo-American interest. And if you just think about it: If Israel goes to war in the Middle East, under the present conditions, Israel will have a destiny like that of a hand grenade, which is thrown against a target. It may destroy the target with its nuclear weapons, but the hand grenade will be burst into fragments. Israel will be doomed if it goes with the policy of Sharon with support of people like Cheney.

So the Mega Group, while it is a powerful group in the United States, is not the author of this policy. There are people who launched this policy in the first place who are behind it. Admittedly, the Mega Group controls the gangster section of the DNC, around the Democratic Leadership Council, but they are not the real factor. They are simply a tool, a corrupt tool of these interests which planned this whole crazy strategic policy. If you want to find an evil place, look at the University of Chicago, under the influence of Russell and Hutchinson and so forth. That's where this evil comes from, largely.

Stockwell: Well, Sharon won the election a month ago, and the people who voted for him know his warlike attitude regarding the entire Middle East.

LaRouche: I think, in terms of the supporters of Sharon, the use of the verb "to know," is a [laughs]--is really a contradiction in terms. I don't think these people know anything. I think they're insane.

Stockwell: Well, let's go back to an exit strategy for the President, so he can save face. Now what are the Russians, the Germans, and the French going to do about this? Now even Turkey, the legislature of Turkey is saying, "Hey, wait a second, wait a second. We're not so sure we're going to let you guys land your troops here."

LaRouche: Oh, 80% of the Turkish population wants no part of this war.

Stockwell: Yeah. So now you've got this coalition being formed by Putin and Chirac, Schroeder, coming together--how much influence are they going to have to stop this?

LaRouche: Well, this is a really difficult situation to read in that respect. Simple predictions can not be made. Forecasts can be made, but not predictions. What is happening now, on the good side, is that there is a strong partnership developing in Europe among Russia, German, and France, among others. The Blair government is about to be dumped--we don't know exactly when--but Blair, in England, is about to be dumped by the British, because the British want to be part of Europe, Turkey wants to be part of the European Union. These countries are looking at a coalition, an economic coalition, partnership, with north Asia, that is, Japan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia--the so-called ASEAN group--and India. This coalition, or this partnership, is the only hope for a recovery of Eurasia from the deepest depression in modern history. The United States, if it had its wits about it, would wish to be a partner in that arrangement, to get our share of this general economic recovery.

So that's the nature of the situation. We have, on the one hand, if we decide to be sensible, and not make the mistake of Alcibiades in the Peloponnesian War, we will then recreate our partnership with Western Europe, with north Asia, with India, with Southeast Asia--we'll recreate that partnership, and with our friends to the south--Mexico and so forth. We will then go for economic interests of the United States, which are the same as the economic interests of the world at large, with our special approach to it.

Stockwell: We can't build anything any more.

LaRouche: We could. I could succeed in getting this thing going.

Stockwell: But what do we have to offer? If you were President, what would you change?

LaRouche: Well, first of all, the main thing we have to offer is our history: Our history--we are a unique creation, as a nation. We are the only true modern nation-state republic ever formed. We're formed under the influence of Europeans, such as the followers of Leibniz, through Benjamin Franklin. We created, around the Preamble of our Constitution, which is absolutely unique, the only basis for a moral conception of a modern republic, that is, the principle of total sovereignty of our nation and its government over all our territory. The fact that government is not legitimate unless it is efficiently committed to promote the general welfare. And thirdly, that legitimacy in promotion of the general welfare, itself is not legitimate, unless it's a commitment to posterity, that is, coming generations.

In all these points, the current government, and the current DNC, is in violation of the Constitution, just as five members of the Supreme Court are. But it's that tradition, the tradition of Franklin, of Washington, of Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, and also Garfield, and Blaine, and John Quincy Adams, and so forth--it is that great tradition, unique tradition of the United States, which is our greatest power. Nations of the world used to love us because of that. It's when we turned against that, turning against our own soul, so to speak, that we've become weak, as we've become in the past period.

Stockwell: How did this happen, Lyndon?

LaRouche: Well, we've always had two factors in the United States, from the beginning, from, say, 1763, when the British government decided to openly move to crush us as colonies. At that time, we broke into two factions, leading factions: one, were the American patriots, gathered around Franklin; the second was a group called the American Tories, typified in New England by the Essex Junto, who later became the famous drug pushers; and then, the New York bankers, under this traitor Aaron Burr who founded the Bank of Manhattan, and his successor Martin van Buren. And also, then, the Southern slaveholders.

So these factions, which constitute the tradition of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal tradition of the so-called American Tory tradition--which [Franklin] Roosevelt denounced as such--this division between two--the patriotic and the American Tory tradition--has dominated, in a see-saw fashion, to the present day.

Presently, since Roosevelt, and especially since Eisenhower and Kennedy--Johnson was not a bad guy, but he was in a terrible situation as President--the see-saw has gone toward the American Tory tradition. The American Tories have dominated our politics, have dominated our political parties, to the present time. We've now come to the point that the domination of our institutions by the American Tory tradition, has brought us to the edge of an abyss. Either we change, and go back to the American patriotic tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and so forth, or we're doomed. And that's the option right now. That's where we are.

Stockwell: Well, what happened to society as a whole that underwrites the actions of their political leaders by continuing this ridiculous incumbency race?

LaRouche: Well, you see mostly, you populist will always call in, and say it was some leader, or some mis-leader that destroyed us. That is not quite true. Tragedy--and we are now a tragic case, as a nation--always comes from the people. Tragedy always is rooted in popular opinion, as the tragedy of Greece, which supported the Peloponnesian War; or the tragedy of Rome, where popular opinion, called vox populi, supported the imperial policies. A nation is destroyed by its own popular opinion. Therefore, you say, what controls popular opinion? What prevents it from these pathologies, which it tends to slide into?

Stockwell: CNN.

LaRouche: Because the small-minded person tends to think in terms of "my interests," in a narrow sense, greed, and think in terms of their mortal pleasures, the mortal greed. They don't think in terms of what we would--say, a Christian conception--of what their immortal interest is. And therefore, we depend upon, in all modern society, so far--we depend upon the appearance and acceptance of leading people who have this sense of immortality, that Shakespeare's Hamlet famously lacked. And it is such leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln, or Benjamin Franklin earlier, or Franklin Roosevelt, who enable us to come out of our own corruption, a corruption which becomes rooted in popular opinion, and leaves the people to rise above the level of corrupt popular opinion.

Stockwell: Is this, then, not a side-effect of a very production-oriented economy, or production-oriented society, that at one time we were living with foul drinking water and living in the dirt...

LaRouche: Yeah, sure. Exactly. When you create--see, that's leadership. The purpose of the Constitution, the purpose of the American system of political economy, as typified by Hamilton and so forth, is not merely to make us prosperous. It did; it always has, every time we used it. The purpose is also a moral purpose. Leadership of our nation is not just leadership in war. It's leading our people to rise morally. The first basis of moral leadership, is the commitment of parents to their children and grandchildren. But it's also higher than that. It's a commitment the parents generation to the general welfare of the coming generations of the nation. Therefore, the function of leadership in government, is largely economic, in the sense that we must economic policies, which rely upon the creative, scientific, and related potential, cultural potential of the people, to give the individual a sense that they are important, because they have something to contribute now, beyond their death, which is inevitable, to future generations. And when a person can say, "I am important, because I am useful. I am creating the preconditions for the achievements of my society, and future generations; I'm creating the preconditions to improve the world as a whole for the people on this planet," then you have the sense of "I am truly a necessary person, and I have a right to be respected, because I'm a necessary person."

The way to destroy a nation is what is being done, for example, against African-Americans today, with this so-called reparations pitch. The reparations pitch is the most effective--more effective than the Ku Klux Klan--in putting the African-American back in the dirt. Because you are taking African Americans and destroying them by the cultivation of greed, rather than a sense of the contribution, such as Martin Luther King typified, the contribution to the welfare of the nation and humanity as a whole.

What Is Needed Is a Real Epiphany

Stockwell: So, you take a group of people like [that which] Tom Brokaw identified as "the greatest generation," those who came home from World War II, who had a sense of achievement, who had a sense of putting their lives on the line, who came back and knew they were valuable, and had value. Then they come back into a growing materialist society that is being dumbed down by changes in education techniques, to produce the kind of people that have shown up over the last two to three decades, coming out of our so-called schools, who have no sense of value, who have no sense of achievement, who have no sense of cooperation, who have no sense of genius at all, never having experienced a moment of genius. You end up with a blue-collar work crew who is willing to do anything that they can to get the newest truck that comes down the line, without the least sense of individual value.

LaRouche: That's right: without the sense of what they are doing for society. You know, the power of Christianity, of actual Christianity, as opposed to this stuff: "If the Battle of Armageddon comes, I don't have to pay my rent next month." But real Christianity: a sense of contribution to humanity. That's what the issue is. If you think that you, as a person, are important in God's eyes, because you're performing a mission, for the benefit of future humanity, then you have all the moral strength you need... [traffic report] ...

Stockwell: If you're just tuning in ladies and gentlemen, my guest Lyndon LaRouche, Democratic candidate for President of the United States, and we're talking to him live back in Virginia. We will for the entire show this morning. We're going to delay phone calls, just till Mr. LaRouche can get some ideas out here, into the mill, and we'll see what we can do with them.

So then, following up, Lyn, with what you were just saying there a moment ago: How do we get that value back, versus what CNN is trying to do by giving us these "bad guys"? Here are the problems, ladies and gentlemen, this al-Qaeda group on the other side of the planet, who blew up the World Trade Center, who sits around in these dark corners, mumbling little words, sitting on their butts, with their Kalashnikov rifles, leaned up against the wall, mumbling so we can hardly hear them, about what they're going to attack next. This is the framework of the American mind seeing the problems of today, reduced to a bunch of Yak jockeys with cell phones, running around the deserts, trying to hide from American forces.

When you have that kind of a focus, how do you get people to have some sense of value back into them, realizing that we have seen the enemy, and it is us?

LaRouche: Yeah, right. What is needed for this, is a real epiphany. These guys have to have a real epiphany. Now, an epiphany has two aspects to it: One, is you have to really get a sense of what a stinking character you've become, and also, a potentially doomed one. So you get down in the dirt, and you say, "I'm a stinking fool. I'm not fit to exist." That's the first stage of epiphany [laughing]. The second stage is to get a conception of what you should be.

Now, for example, I often use this case of Jeanne d'Arc, who's called Joan of Arc, in France. And I've looked at this case, not only from the standpoint of dramatic treatments of it, but also the historical facts of her case, which are rather extensively documented, and therefore, it's a very useful historical example. Here's France, which was then under a completely corrupt existence of these so-called Norman, Plantagenet, etc., Anjou crowd. France is not a nation. She is a peasant girl...[tape change]...stupid lout you're [inaud]. As a result of the process, after--France is in the process of being liberated, under her influence. But then, the king betrays her. She's then taken by the Anjou crowd, the British crowd, and subjected to the Inquisition. She has a chance to escape with her life, by them, but she refuses that, because she would have betray her mission to do so. So therefore, she consciously chooses to be burned alive at the stake by the Inquisition, rather than abandon her mission. It was the inspiration of her action, her commitment to this mission--this unswerving commitment to that mission--which made possible the first modern nation-state: France, under Louis XI, and the freeing of France from this occupation.

It also inspired, to a large degree, contributed to inspiring the 15th-Century Renaissance, out of which modern European civilization came. Of course, among Christians, this is seen as in the image of Christ, in the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, in dying for all mankind. That people who have a sense of certainty of immortality, of the meaning of their life, can, under conditions of crisis, when people are grovelling in the dirt, and realize they're grovelling in the dirt, and saying, "Woe is me," then, they can undergo an epiphany, and say, "No, I'm going to become a good person."

And that's what the American people need. They need to--instead of somebody trying to bribe them, corrupt them, titillate them, amuse them--the American people have to realize how bad the situation is in the world. How disgusting we have become as a nation, as opposed to what we are historically, and resolve to return to our true self. We need leaders. I'm operating largely in a vacuum. There are many good people who are good leaders, in the United States, but they're not in leading positions, generally. None of the candidates for the Democratic nomination I've seen now, are fit to be President, under these conditions. Because none of the them are willing to recognize the need for an epiphany to escape from the tragic course which both major parties are on today. Therefore, my role is that of causing an epiphany. And that's the only way we're going to get out of it.

Stockwell: Well, when you get down in the dirt, and you're grovelling in the dirt, looking for that epiphany, as I--believe me--I have gone through this myself, and I highly endorse and underwrite what you're saying. It doesn't necessarily take the death of some consummate example of human leadership to inspire people. If you could get enough people down in the dirt, and have their own epiphanies.

LaRouche: Um-hmm.

Stockwell: I mean, the death of the Christ-type, for once and for all, should have been enough, if we understand His mission correctly. But then, there are people upon whom this is thrust, isn't it, as in the case of Jeanne d'Arc; in the case of Martin Luther King.

LaRouche: Yes.

Stockwell: Martin Luther King could have stepped down from the life-threatening position that he was in. But he marched on, even knowing that there were death threats against his life. And with his death, was the end of the Civil Rights Movement. And that has now degenerated to this condition you described a moment ago, with reparations for African-Americans that would further reduce their dignity and their humanness.

LaRouche: Yeah.

Stockwell: The same thing we're doing with the American Indian, by giving them gambling casinos.

LaRouche: Yeah, which American Indian leaders recognize as corruption, and hate it.

Stockwell: Yes, it doesn't do them any good. It's a microcosm of what happens when you have a cash-based economy as opposed to a production-based economy. You throw out some cash, you throw out some money; people now are moving out of mobile homes into cardboard houses; they suddenly are driving the newest latest-model trucks instead of the old things; their debt continues to accumulate; in fact, the debt of the American population continues to go to astronomical amounts, with no production behind it, to show anything for it. How can a society, then, have any sense, really, of their own value, as long as we have an economy that's based on cash, rather than on production, rather than real achievement, self-discovery?

LaRouche: Well, again, this is always this problem of leadership, is that--which is always downplayed by the populists, who attack--they attack Roosevelt, for example. You have these populists who try to find some little dirty thing they can allege against Franklin Roosevelt. And that's what kills us; that's actually the degradation of this.

Pearl Harbor and the Billy Mitchell Case

Stockwell: Yeah, they get this Freedom of Information Act, that seems to implicate President Roosevelt knowing something about the attack on Pearl Harbor, before it occurred, totally missing the TVA concepts: what happened with Grand Coulee; what happened with Hoover Dam; what happened with the St. Lawrence Seaway; what happened with the TVA; what happened with the railroads; what happened with the productive capability he put back in the country, that allowed us to defeat Nazism.

LaRouche: Well, also, you've got to look at the fact that, on the Pearl Harbor case, which these guys play with, that people who make that criticism, don't know the ABCs of the situation. So somebody puts out a book, or a couple of books, and commentaries on books, and purports to explain this "conspiracy." And they don't realize, they don't know what the significance was of some famous cases.

For example, the Pearl Harbor attack was planned jointly by the British and the government of Japan, the Mitsui faction of Japan, during the early 1920s, during the period of the so-called Naval Power negotiations, in which Japan and Britain set forth a plan for a naval attack on the naval forces of the United States, to humiliate it. In which, of course, Japan was assigned the mission of attacking the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Now this was in the early 1920s.

Now, we had the famous case, trial [in 1925], of Billy Mitchell. What Mitchell had said was that it was possible to defeat a Japan naval attack upon Pearl Harbor, and he mentioned this in his trial. Now, Mitchell was privy, as all general officers of that type were, was privy to the fact of the British-Japan plan for an allied attack on the United States, that is, by Britain and Japan. Therefore, he said, no, we can create aircraft carriers, and we could sink Japanese battleships and cruisers, with bombs dropped by aircraft carrier on an attacking fleet. That was his argument.

Their section of the Navy, which was pro-British in a sense, in some of their thinking--American Tory thinking--were against that. And they induced his court martial over his pushing of this issue. MacArthur later, who was on the trial--agreed that his biggest mistake, as a leading officer, was to allow the court martial of Billy Mitchell. So that, people don't realize that we had a certain rottenness inside the U.S. military and other institutions, which were opposed to Roosevelt's policy on war against Hitler, and so forth. And that these people goofed. They were not enthusiastic for Roosevelt's preparations, which had started in 1936, to prepare the United States for the inevitability, at that point, of a world war launched by Hitler. And that was the issue.

So these guys, the populists, ignore the historical reality. Because the populists often, you find, are very sympathetic--particularly this kind--are very sympathetic to the American Tory line for populists. And therefore, they don't realize, like some of the enthusiastic supporters of Cheney, what they're involved in. So they're foolish people.... [traffic report] ... 

Stockwell: My guest, ladies and gentlemen, if you're just tuning in, Lyndon LaRouche, live from Back East. We just arranged this over the weekend, so I didn't have any time to advertise it.

You made a comment there, a moment ago, about populists ignoring historical reality. We have a government full of populists. From whence does populism spring?

LaRouche: It comes from the moral smallness of the individual, who never gets through adolescence, that is, to psychological maturity. The best example of populist idiocy and immorality is deregulation. Deregulation has destroyed, is a major factor in destroying the U.S. economy. It was protectionism which enabled us to develop our economy. It was protectionism on which the economic power of the United States was based. It is protectionism on which modern civilization depends. If you can not make long-term capital investments of 5-25 or more years, at fixed rates in the 1-2% Federal rate level, without having interest rates fluctuating up and down; if you can not make investments without some predictability as to prices of the products you're going to produce with those investments, then you can't have capitalism, as it's called. You can't have progress.

So, out of cupidity, the little guy says, "We're gonna get it cheaper. We gonna get it cheaper." Therefore, they vote deregulation on the assumption they're going to get a little bit knocked off on the price. And they're going to say, "The price will be right then." And these idiots destroy the very economy; as a result of that, many of these idiots, who are in the lower 80% of family-income brackets, have had a collapse in the real, physical standard of living, and life-expectancy, of people in the lower 80%, over the period since 1977. And during this entire period, they've continued to vote, in large numbers, for deregulation, systematically cutting their own throats out of cupidity.

Stockwell: So now we have, as a result, 33, I think, at the end of last year, 33 steel companies in bankruptcy. We have one right here, in the Salt Lake area, a steel plant, called Geneva Steelworks, been in bankruptcy a number of times. I heard a report the other day, that it was about to come out of bankruptcy, or they were about to settle the problem with Geneva Steelworks, and as it turns out, what they were talking about is a company moving in, that will buy it all out, and dismantle the steel plant to the ground, and build a "business park."

LaRouche: What they did in Pittsburgh.

Stockwell: Yeah.

LaRouche: The Pittsburgh area. We are destroying our own economy under this populist ideology. Yes, there are people behind the schemes who are looting things, and enjoying, lusting, like the Enron mentalities, huh?, who really belong in prison, I think, for their own safety. Otherwise, they might get lynched, sooner or later. But, at the same time, people's cupidity: They don't realize that they're cutting their own throats by supporting and tolerating this so-called "free trade," "globalization," "deregulation" nonsense. And they've done it. They've done it to us over the past period, since the mid-1960s, especially since 1971.

Stockwell: We're coming up here on the news break in just a moment, where we will be going to national news for several minutes. I'm going to leave you on hold. When we get back, I'd like to talk about Patriot II, and what John Ashcroft has in mind for maintaining a sensible state of homeland security in this country. I'd like to talk to you about your ideas of the Super-TVA, and what you would be doing if you were President now, besides ending this Iraq foolishness, to help to spread--well, at least to resurrect the ideas, beginning with Leibniz, and then through Franklin, and through those of the Founding Fathers, along with Franklin, who finally caught the vision of a republican form of self-rule that was committed to the sense of the moral nature of man in the promotion of the common good of all. That what is good for the rich, is also good for the poor--that kind of an idea. And maybe even get a little bit further into this Iraq thing. So, Sir, I'm going to put you on hold for a moment. You've got about six, seven, eight minutes for a break....

If you want a copy of Mr. LaRouche's State of the Union address that was given on the same day as President Bush's, or you'd like a copy of the latest edition of EIR magazine, you need to call [gives phone number]....

[news break]

Stockwell: My guest is Lyndon LaRouche. Lyn, are you back there?

LaRouche: Yes.

Stockwell: All right. Let's plow on here. I received a off-air call during the news break that talked about down on 17th South in Salt Lake, the old Chicago Bridge & Iron Works is being dismantled, and going to be replaced by a car dealership. Like people are going to have money to buy cars in this continuing depression. Although our Governor, Mike Leavitt, just Thursday of last week made the comment, and I heard it on Fox News, that now that our economy has made the turnaround, and is going back towards a strong, stable economy, we have a lot less to worry about.

LaRouche: Haha! Famous last words!

Stockwell: Yeah, famous last words: that we've made a turnaround. You know, the people that manufactured steel items out of the steel plant at Geneva, are also being dismantled. And we have that going on clear across the entire country. As bad as it's been here, obviously, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Steubenville, Ohio; wherever there have been centers of steel manufacturing, there are an awful lot more people out of work than there are in Salt Lake City.

LaRouche: Yep.

How President Bush Can Save Face

Stockwell: So, let's go on here, back to Iraq: How is President Bush going to be able to save face, and step down from this nuclear nightmare that we're on the very eve of?

LaRouche: Well, one way, you've got to keep your eye on, because it may be news breaking for you there, and that is, there are people who are trying to find various ways of getting the President, shall we say, comfortably back out of this war, including people on the Republican side, and people close to the Bush circles.

Now, one of the ideas was, to have a focus of U.S. military forces, which are now in the Middle East, getting up toward the 200,000-level, totally, in the force capability. To use those, in some way, in the area: One proposal was to hit areas of no-man's land, which are terrorist pots, on the borders of Iran and Pakistan, and thus, say we licked 'em, and we pack up and go home.

Now this particular attack on Khalid [Shaikh Muhammed] smells of something in that direction. So, we don't know what it means--why would they come up with this story, which on one hand, makes no sense, because that is not what planned what happened on Sept. 11. But nonetheless, there is a terrorist capability, which the British, the United States, and the Israelis built up, during the period under Brzezinski, and afterward, as part of Iran-Contra, where we recruited a lot of people to al-Qaeda, against the Soviet Union, and we're using those same people now against Russia in Chechnya. We're still doing it.

So, one thing is to say, okay, this terrorist capability, which we set into motion--we, the British, the United States, and the Israelis--maybe we should shut it down. And therefore, some people say, well, let George Bush have a victory against the international terrorist organization, which is, in a sense, this guy, these guys. So keep our eye on the ball on this one. That is not the real problem.

Otherwise, my view is that the problem is the Democratic Party, at the top, is a dismal failure. You have people like Kennedy and Feinstein and Daschle and others, who would like to get the economic issue up front, and get the war issue off the table, and that way, we could get the American people mobilized for the sense of an economic recovery, and once the economic issue is on the table, and people are looking at how bad the economic issue is--as you cite the case of the steel plant there--and say, this is crazy! We're destroying our productive capability. What's going to happen to us if we do this? And once people start to think in those terms, then they're going to think in terms of cooperation with our friends to the south, in the Americas, cooperation with our friends in Europe and Asia, for a general economic recovery program. That is, in my view, the real breakout, that is the real escape, from this present war mania.

Stockwell: So, you take a group of people like [that which] Tom Brokaw identified as "the greatest generation," those who came home from World War II, who had a sense of achievement, who had a sense of putting their lives on the line, who came back and knew they were valuable, and had value. Then they come back into a growing materialist society that is being dumbed down by changes in education techniques, to produce the kind of people that have shown up over the last two to three decades, coming out of our so-called schools, who have no sense of value, who have no sense of achievement, who have no sense of cooperation, who have no sense genius at all, never having experienced a moment of genius. You end up with a blue-collar work crew who is willing to do anything that they can to get the newest truck that comes down the line, without the least sense of individual value.

LaRouche: That's right: without the sense of what they are doing for society. You know, the power of Christianity, of actual Christianity, as opposed to this stuff: "If the Battle of Armageddon comes, I don't have to pay my rent next month." But real Christianity: a sense of contribution to humanity. That's what the issue is. If you think that you, as a person, are important in God's eyes, because you're performing a mission, for the benefit of future humanity, then you have all the moral strength you need... [traffic report]

Organized Crime is ‘Satanic'

Stockwell: The recent meeting of the DNC, just kind of finding things that they can pick apart in the Bush Administration, but still, the strong current there was this underwriting of this issue over in the Middle East. You described in the last hour, that there was a vacuum of leadership in the Democratic Party right now.

LaRouche: Yeah, there's a vacuum, and then there's a bad element. Remember that organized crime has a direct influence over a section of the Democratic Party, called the Democratic Leadership Council. Typical are the pro-Buckley case of Senator Lieberman, just as on the Republican side, you have also organized crime, money-backed, you have John McCain. So you have these elements in the parties, which are linked to organized crime, which have oodles of money, when most people don't. And they're able, with their threat to withhold their money, if they're not pleased, to create the kind of situation in which the Democratic Leadership Council, which calls itself the Democratic National Committee, but isn't--it's not really the Democratic Party. It's something strange, a parasite, that's attached itself to the Democratic Party since 1981, approximately.

So, this is a real problem. And these guys are not exactly patriots--they're thugs, and they behave like thugs. What happened there was simply a demonstration about right thuggishness. You get that where Max Fisher is involved in Michigan: The friends of Max Fisher behave like thugs, not as Democrats. They're not interested in discussion; they're not interested in the truth; they're interested only in getting money from these families which are traditionally organized-crime families.

Stockwell: And in return, organized-crime money gets what?

LaRouche: They have their pleasure of what they're doing. I think there's a certain Satanic quality to this organized-crime mob. I know them somewhat, from experience. And I would say, if you want to find a bunch of people who are intrinsically Satanic, you take the typical American mobster. You take especially, the families of organized crime associated with names such as Max Fisher, the Bronfman family, Lauder, with Mike Steinhart of the Lansky mob, and so forth. Lieberman's a part of that. These guys--behind them, behind these politicians are real thugs, and there's a Satanic quality to them, which is not to be underestimated.

Stockwell: When you say "Satanic," what do you mean by that?

LaRouche: You know, a man who gets pleasure out of seeing a woman degraded to prostitution; or people, for example, in Nevada, who are thinking of putting taxi meters on the sexual organs of legalized prostitutes in that state--you get this kind of thing, you get a sense: This is really Satanic stuff...

Stockwell: Well, again, the same thing that we're doing with the American Indians by turning them into gamblers.

LaRouche: Exactly! That's corruption. And getting please out of it. And what they're really up to, is, you know, with the American Indians, or these projects, these gambling-syndicate projects--these are really aimed at grabbing the natural resources, which otherwise are protected under our laws, as being Native American treaty resources. Therefore, what they do is, they suck these guys into a gaming operation, or, like the case when they invented tribes for this purpose--they just invented tribes!

So, they're Satanic. The idea of victimizing, and pleasure in looting these poor people, these poor Indians, by telling them they're going to get riches out of gambling, legalized gambling.

Stockwell: Then you get them hooked on the cash flow, and then you get them to sign away the resources sitting on their land.

LaRouche: And you take it over. That's what the big racket in the state of Arizona is exactly that. And you talk to the actual legitimate American Indian leaders there, and they will--if they trust you, confidentially--tell you exactly what they think about this stuff. That is Satanic: To take very poor people, and the Indians are generally very poor people; you take very poor people, and you get pleasure out of doing that kind of thing to them. You have to be Satanic.

Stockwell: Yeah, but because of the populist idea, you can get a lot of less than completely thinking individuals, especially in white America, to go along with it, because most white Americans feel guilty about what happened to the Indians, anyway.

LaRouche: That's how great empires destroyed themselves, with exactly such talk.

Stockwell: All right. Let's go on to a couple of other things. I want to talk about the Patriot II bill, and what Mr. Ashcroft, what our Attorney General has in mind for us, in the sense of gutting out what is left of the Bill of Rights. Where is he coming from? What is he trying to achieve here? How much autonomy does he have from the group of thugs who are influencing the President, and how much is he one of the thugs himself?

LaRouche: If you imagine the ghost of Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi concentration camp boss, Heinrich Himmler, reincarnated as a headless gorilla, you have John Ashcroft.

Stockwell: [Laughs.]

LaRouche: That's essentially--this guy is--I warned against him. I tried to get the Democratic Party to move to prevent his being confirmed. He has done nothing which I didn't warn the Democrats and other at the time he was appointed, designated. They didn't listen, and now they've got it. We have a potential Nazi, and I'm saying "Nazi," but really demented Nazi, not a clever Nazi, but one who is really demented. Imagine a headless gorilla, pouring ointment on himself every morning: You've got John Ashcroft. This guy's a nutcase, and he's extremely dangerous.

Stockwell: What kind of--is he getting any resistance in the Justice Department? Is he getting any resistance in Congress?

LaRouche: Well, the Justice Department has been--the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, especially those elements which are associated with the old national security establishment, inside the Justice Department, the most secret part of the Justice Department. I mean, it's a real problem. We should have cleaned it out a long time ago, but people are afraid of it, in the Congress and elsewhere. They're sufficiently afraid of it, not without reason... [tape change] ... It's the greatest threat to our freedom. It must be stopped.

This President Won't Be a War Hero

Stockwell: I have some more traffic to get to real quickly....

My guest, if you're tuning in late, is Lyndon LaRouche, Democratic candidate for the United States Presidency. One more question about Iraq; and then I want to talk about the “Super-TVA.”

I realize--and you said it earlier--that you can't predict, but there are some forecasting abilities that some of us can make, based on what we know has happened in similar situations in the past. You know, a lot of times we can see the “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin” writing on the wall kind of thing. Do you see President Bush trying to back down? Or do you see him moving even further forward under the influences around him?

LaRouche: I think we overestimate George Bush. That is, people generally [do]. I don't think he thinks that way. I don't think he thinks that much. I think he does recognize that maybe, Dick Cheney is not his best friend, or his best career choice for a partnership. He's sort of stuck with him. But I don't think he likes him.

I think that George--the President; perhaps his father, too--is looking, essentially, at the issue of the continuity of their Administration and the 2023 election. They're not thinking very well about this matter; but they're probably thinking about it. So I don't think that he sees it that way.

Stockwell: Let me ask you this. There are more jokes about him, now, than there ever were about Dan Quayle. Any comedian, actually almost anybody else that discusses the President, only discusses him in the sense of a Texas cowboy who may not be sitting on the horse correctly. Is this estimation correct? Or is this part of the press just selling more newspapers? Is this man in serious intellectual trouble? Or, is he some guy, who was just one of the good ol' boys, who found an opportunity to become President; went ahead and did it; but now is beginning to see how the game is played?

LaRouche: I think it's counterproductive, as I said in my State of the Union address, earlier the same day the President made his. We can not look with glee, at the fact that the incumbent President has certain detectable intellectual limitations. He's a sitting President of the United States.

Stockwell: And the Presidency must be sustained at all costs?

LaRouche: Our Presidency as a whole. And the point is, to try to protect the sitting President, so that he doesn't make a complete fool of himself--especially the kind of fool of himself which leads to some destruction or great injury to our nation. Therefore, we try to deal with him.

Now, on the one hand, we have to be realistic. The President has extreme intellectual limitations, which are nowhere more conspicuous than on his death penalty stuff, as the governor of Texas, and on his presenting himself as the education President--which is rather hard to take.

But, he is a human being, and is as susceptible as any human being who happened to be President, over being told, “Your interest, Mr. President, is what future generations think of you; what your Presidency is going to go down in history as having been. Now, you may not understand what has to be done, Mr. President; but if you listen to us, we will make your Presidency (as I said) successful. And you will leave office with a reputation as having done something good for the country. Do you want that? Or do you want to go down as Nixon was sent down?”

And I think a President who gets that message, even if he has limitations, is enough of a man to say, “I want to go down in history as a good guy.”

Stockwell: Well, he doesn't want to go down like his dad did.

LaRouche: That's not the worst that could happen. The dad went down because of economic policy. And they will never admit it. As Carville said, famously, what sank the first Bush Administration's re-election chance, was the economic policy of the Administration. It had many features to it, but it was economic policy that sunk it.

And what's going to sink this Administration is the same thing--economic policy. What they do, is they say, “No, it's the war policy that's going to determine. We're going to make a war hero out of the President, and he'll get re-elected.” Well, he's not going to become a war hero, under any circumstances. His only chance of success as a President is to get out of the blasted war.

‘This Is Not a War on Iraq'

Stockwell: Let me ask you this. How is what we are doing right now, different from what we did 10, 11 years ago, when there were a lot of heroes--Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell--that came out of it; in the sense that we went in, dropped a bunch of bombs, had the Iraqis lining up to surrender as fast as the cavalry could arrive? If we did it again today, how would it be any different? How would it not be over, again, in a very short period of time, with everybody putting George Bush on their shoulders and marching him down Fifth Avenue in New York, after another 100-day war--and this time, get Saddam, get him out of there--and suddenly, be the hero of the day? How would that not happen?

LaRouche: Well, it couldn't happen, because it's a far different situation today.

First of all, the world is in a great financial crisis. Secondly, on the hind-side of the past dozen years, the world recognizes that the past dozen years' policy was a catastrophic failure. Therefore, anyone going back to 1990-91 now, would say, “Don't do it.”

Then, however, the conditions were different. They United States had not yet collapsed. The Soviet system had just collapsed. There was great euphoria around the world. “The Soviet system has collapsed.” The United States, at that moment, had great power, because there was no plausible adversary to challenge the power of the United States. Europe, and the world in general, rallied to--and funded--the U.S. war in the Middle East, against Iraq. The United States limited itself to a counteroffensive, with hot pursuit of Iraqi forces in defense of Kuwait. The advice of all sane people, was to halt the war at that point; not to go any further; not to make it a war of conquest of Iraq, but just to take the invasion of Iraq that was done--the attack, the bombing and so forth--to consider that a rules-of-engagement type of response to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait.

So then, at that point, the moral crisis was relatively minimal, even though there was a moral crisis over this thing among these nations. Today, there is no longer any confidence in the U.S. leadership around the world--not the current leadership. There's no confidence in the leadership that the world has experience from the United States, cumulatively, over the past dozen years.

Therefore, the United States is going into a war, essentially, on its own. It's a war which would be, probably, a trillion-dollar war, if you consider the aftermath of an attack. We could go in and throw missiles at various locations, and we could destroy, practically destroy the territory. And that could be done, say, in two or three weeks. But then how do we get out of there? We never get out of there, or of the effects.

What happens then to the Arab world as a whole? The Arab world, and the Islamic world as a whole, and the rest of the world, knows this is not a war on Iraq. It's not a war against Saddam Hussein. This is intended to trigger a global war against Islam, the entirety of Islam, all of the Arab world; all of 1.3 billion Muslims. The target includes China! It's one of the targets of this. Not only North Korea, but China. Also, implicitly, India--the breakup of India--the crushing of Southeast Asia. The world--those who know--know this is what the war is really about.

And therefore, as I say, it's like it's a Peloponnesian War. Today--while you can make excuses, from a military standpoint, for what the United States did in 1991-92--no military person, or person with any credibility today, could make any excuse for going into a war against Iraq now, because of those implications.

The ‘Super-TVA,' Roosevelt, and Truman

Stockwell: All right, let's come back over to this side of the ocean.

One of the critical statements that I often hear, from my callers or other callers to other talk-show hosts at K-TALK; one of the fundamental problems that they're talking about with Franklin Roosevelt and his attempts to rebuild America; was that all his rebuilding was placed upon the backs of Americans, through the idea of heavily increased taxes. That everything that was done, as a result of infrastructure improvement, was done through the accumulation of tax dollars of the American citizens. My understanding, my study of this subject, was the creation--that Italy now is starting to talk about!--of state credit. State credit from a central banking institution, that is not supported by tax dollars. It's supported by the very fact that the Constitution allows the Federal government to do this--in fact, calls upon them to do this--to issue credit.

Now you talked in the last hour: If a government isn't committed to this kind of low-interest loan situation, from a central bank out to the private banking establishment, for long-term infrastructure building, with a currency that is backed up by something, that doesn't change value every other minute on the markets, but something that you can expect, at the end of a 25- or 30-year note, to have the same backing and support it did at the beginning of that note, you haven't got a chance.

My question is this: If you were President, and you were to try--well, this is beyond “try”; this is something you've stated you would do, a number of times (and let me add now, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to read a copy of Mr. LaRouche's State of the Union, where he explains this, you can get a free copy by calling 1-888-347-3258; tell them you heard him on my program, and you just want a free copy of his State of the Union address)--how do you, then, go forth and fund a Super-TVA program (Tennessee Valley Authority program) without breaking the backs of the working Americans through increased taxes?

LaRouche: The American people's back was not broken by the effects of the Roosevelt funding. In part, the costs of the war were war costs. We conducted one of the greatest mobilizations in the history of mankind. We emerged from the war in the United States as the only economic power in the world. We were the powerful nation of the world.

Under Truman, we threw that away. Instead of continuing the Roosevelt program of post-war construction, what did we do? We started this Cold War conception. We shut down the economy under Truman, who was more influenced by the British than by anything else. He was a Churchill enthusiast, an anti-Roosevelt man, who was stuck on the Democratic Party during the Summer convention of 1944. It was done in anticipation of Roosevelt's death, because he was sick at the time. They said: “He's going to die. Let's get a Vice President in there who will not continue his policies.” And that's what we got.

So Truman is the problem. Instead of continuing the policy--and remember, most of the debt was war debt. What do you want, to live under Hitler? Do you think that would be good for your tax situation? There is some of that foolishness.

What they did, is they went for the so-called Cold War. The first thing that Truman did, as President, was to reverse President Roosevelt's commitment to a postwar world with no colonialism in it. And that was Churchill's main concern. So the United States, immediately at the end of the war....

Stockwell: It was Churchill's main concern to continue colonialism?

LaRouche: Absolutely. Continue the British Empire. That was his big beef with Roosevelt. Truman was on the side of Churchill against Roosevelt.

Now, what had been intended was--as Roosevelt laid out in Casablanca, and so forth--his policy for Africa and other parts of the world, was to use large-scale infrastructure development to transform areas which had been colonial areas into areas of long-term and prosperous investment in improvement in the conditions of life of newly-freed nations.

What we did instead, is we shut down the U.S. economy in the name of demobilizing the war machine. We created large-scale unemployment--a disaster for the United States in 1948--which we got out of, temporarily, only with the Korean War from 1949 on.

So what these clowns do--and I say clowns advisedly--who criticize the tax policy, is they don't know anything about history! They don't know a thing about the history of the period. They didn't live through it, most of them. They simply say, “We had to pay more taxes.” As if paying more taxes is the be-all and end-all of life. We survived World War II successfully because of the tax rate, which was, admittedly, high at the end of the war. But it was a tax rate which was caused by the need to build up in preparation for the war, and by the war itself.

So there was no error in Roosevelt's policy. Today, we face a situation in which the banking system as a whole is bankrupt. The world banking system. The Federal Reserve System is actually bankrupt. That is, if you look at all the factors which are knowable in that situation, you say, “Sooner or later--and sooner, in fact--this system is going down.”

We have two options. Either we go into bankruptcy--total bankruptcy, chaotic bankruptcy, from which we may never return as a nation--or, we put the whole system into bankruptcy reorganization. That is, instead of sitting back there and watching the banks collapse, what we do is to put the Federal Reserve system into government reorganization, financial reorganization, like a Chapter 11 reorganization. We keep necessary banks functioning, as Roosevelt did with the Bank Holiday arrangement, which got us through that period safely--otherwise, we would have gone to Hell. And we, at the same time, get a program going, where we can build our way out of the bankruptcy. But we'll also have to cancel much of the phony debt--and it is phony--which these banks represent.

So therefore, you've got a case, like an Enron case, where mismanagement under current U.S. policy has destroyed the economy of the United States, its banking system, so the banking system is bankrupt. We're not going to lie down and die because we've got a bankrupt system. We're going to rebuild. And we're going to have to do it Roosevelt's way.

Stockwell: Now when you talk about Roosevelt's way, are you talking about, then, the re-institution of central credit, like Italy is talking about right now?

LaRouche: More than that. What we're essentially doing, is we must go back to--putting the Federal Reserve system in bankruptcy cleans up a problem. The Federal Reserve system was always unconstitutional. It was an entity created by a foreign power--that is, Edward VII, the King of England, through his agents in New York around Jacob Schiff. The policy was pushed onto the plate by Teddy Roosevelt, who was a complete Confederacy man, pro-Confederacy man, on behalf of England. The Federal Reserve system was stuck in unconstitutionally under Woodrow Wilson, the man who re-founded the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, from the Presidency! It was put in by Wilson. This system was never Constitutional. It was the introduction of an unconstitutional system, destroying our sovereignty, and making us the prisoner, in effect, of a consortium of financier interests in Britain and the United States.

Now this thing is now bankrupt. That is, the entire Federal Reserve system is now intrinsically bankrupt; if not today, tomorrow; just a matter of when.

Therefore, the Federal government has the responsibility to the nation, as the responsible agency, to put this bankrupt institution into bankruptcy reorganization, as we are obliged to do with any necessary but bankrupt institution. We must keep the system alive; that is, the banking system; but under government supervision and under government reorganization. We must use that reorganization to rebuild our economy. And the first thing is, create jobs. There's no one can balance the budget in the United States today; no one. Not with the present policies; it's impossible. Don't think that anybody has a balance-the-budget capability; they don't.

A state can cut; they can increase taxes; they can reduce taxes. None of these things will work. The states--at least 46 of them--are hopelessly bankrupt in the medium to long-term. Therefore, what we need is an increase in employment.

The increase in employment must be directly to increasing the tax-revenue base. If we raise employment sufficiently to raise the tax-revenue base, then we can get out of this blasted depression. And the states can be bailed out.

Under Federal programs of this type--that is, Federal programs like those of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, back under Roosevelt's regime--we can get out of this thing quite nicely. It will take time. It'll be hard work. But we can succeed. As Roosevelt said then, there is “nothing to fear as much as fear itself.”

Truth and Leadership

Stockwell: Let me get some more traffic on here....

How would you then--as you must have to do in the time ahead of you--how would you then inspire the American population to join you in this battle?

LaRouche: I think there's not too much difficulty, really. The problem is the lack of leadership. Look at our press, for example, our so-called news media. We have the most lying news media in the world. With my particular capabilities and activities, I have a chance to watch closely the news media of various parts of the world. And I can tell you that our news media is worse than Hitler's, worse than that of Goebbels in terms of lying. The American people don't know anything, to the extent they base themselves on the news media. They're lied to. Nearly everything I see is intentional mis-leadership of the viewers. You probably know about that, too.

Stockwell: Certainly.

LaRouche: So that's the problem. But what happens at a certain point, reality strikes through.

I remember the 1920s, before the Depression hit, officially. And I can tell you, the American people were a pretty corrupt lot then. But suddenly, over the period 1929-1932, the American people saw that they had been a bunch of fools; that they'd been taken in by the Coolidge Administration's policies, which had destroyed us.

So suddenly it came out of the ether. And when Roosevelt spoke, in his famous West Virginia speech, of the “Forgotten Man,” the cause of the forgotten man; and when you think, today, that the lower 80% of our population has been put into poverty, increasingly, over the past more than two decades now: They're out there, they know they're in poverty, but they feel they're helpless. They're waiting for somebody to come along and give them permission to say, “We're in poverty. We need help.”

Once people get how bad this depression is; they see it; they can no longer deny it. And this affects not only people in the lower 80% of family-income brackets, but people in higher brackets, who thought they were rich on various New Economy, so-called, and other kinds of swindles, real estate swindles, things like that. The real estate bubble's about to collapse. The Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac real estate bubble is about to go under.

These crises are going to force a recognition of the fact that we're in a depression, not a recovery. Anybody whose talking about promising a recovery ought to be put into a mental institution today. There is no recovery in sight; there is no basis for saying there is a recovery in sight.

So therefore, the American people are going to say, “What did we do wrong?” And if they are told the truth for a change, about what the situation is--not only how bad the situation is; that they begin to know now; they can tell you the facts about that, left and right--but the fact that there is a way out of it! Then the Roosevelt image comes back into play, and people say, “We want Roosevelt back”; or something like it. Then the turnaround will come.

Stockwell: How are young people responding to what you have to say.

LaRouche: Oh, great! I have--one of the crucial factors here, which many people have ignored, is that the young people in the United States have been the victims of their parents' generation. Not, in every case, their parents, but their parents' generation, the so-called Baby Boomer generation. The Baby Boomer generation has been a disaster. Particularly as they drifted into--from the middle of the 1960s on--drifted into dreams like “post-industrial society” and other fantasies, and became the “Now Generation.” They had children, not because they really wanted children, but because they thought it was fashionable, or was expected of them. And then as they became, more and more, members of the "Now Generation," and older and older, they turned around and looked at their children, and said, “What did we do that for?” Speaking about the conception of their children.

So what we have today is, a no-future society confronts young people, particularly those in the college-age bracket of 18-25, all kinds of young people; they are members and victims of a no-future society. They know it. They are inured against the advice of their parents, because they see their parents as the people who threw them into, or condemned them to live in, a no-future society. And the parents are just simply trying to enjoy life in a no-future society. So the children have no respect for their parents' opinion. They may love their parents, as children do. But they have no respect for their parents' opinion.

This creates a vacuum, a political vacuum, in which the youth, by confronting their parents' generation and saying “You gave us a no-future society. We want a future!”--these young people, if they are aroused, will be the agency to convince their parents that the parents made a mistake in their choice of a no-future society, a deregulated society, a credit-card society. And they will say, “Okay, you're right, kids. We're with you.”

And we're getting that kind of response. Youth respond to me, and to what I'm saying. And it's increasingly around the world, not just in the United States. Because what I'm saying is what the youth recognize to be true: that their own parents were duped into giving them, the children, a no-future society. And that's the situation. And the youth are going to tend to turn to me; because I recognize their problem, and I demand justice, or relief from that problem.

And that's why we're having a great impact. We're recruiting at a rate which even astonishes me.

Corruption of the Political Parties

Stockwell: Well, during the DNC meetings of a couple of weeks ago, a lot of the younger people of your organization kind of let the DNC know that you were still out there, even though you weren't invited to attend the meeting.

LaRouche: (Laughs) They knew I was out there. But remember, it's organized crime that controlled that meeting. Look at the names! Lieberman is still considered a Democrat? I mean, what's going on? You consider this guy a Democrat?

Stockwell: Just as McCain is still considered a Republican.

LaRouche: [Lieberman] credits himself, and McCain, as having the war policy which has imprisoned the Bush Administration. They have the same policy. So when the Hudson Institute claims that McCain and Lieberman are committed to a “Bull Moose” ticket against both major parties for the 2023 election, you have to give a lot of credence to that. It appears that that really is the case.

So why does anybody seriously consider Joe Lieberman a Democrat?

Stockwell: And yet, he was the principal person at the DNC meetings two weeks ago.

LaRouche: And before, at the last one, where they raised the question of the war, he and McCain were the pushers. They always have been the pushers. Both are controlled by the influence of organized-crime money. That's how Lieberman got elected, was through organized crime support; right-wing, extreme right-wing organized-crime support.

Stockwell: So this “Bull Moose” idea will be much like what Ross Perot did with the Reform Party [in 1992].

LaRouche: In a sense, but not. Ross Perot was a different proposition.

Stockwell: It still would have the effect of derailing a lot of Republican votes from the Republican Party.

LaRouche: Oh, this is to establish a dictatorship in the United States.

If you destroy the two-party system--that is, its election role--under crisis conditions, without a reform--you're not going to have a change in the political system. You're going to have the preconditions for establishing a dictatorship, because the United States will be rendered not governable in a rational way. And if it's not governable in a rational way, what you're going to have is a dictatorship. Anybody who wants to avoid a dictatorship is not going to vote for or support McCain and Lieberman.

Stockwell: Did we flirt with that in the last election?

LaRouche: We came close. When you start rigging elections as they did--I mean, you had two non-candidates running for President; two guys who were equally unqualified for office were the only choices presented to the public--the only plausible choices presented to the public in the election! When you put two clowns in, in effect, as the only candidates available, the only choice--Gore would have been at war quicker than you would have had possible under Bush. These were your choices!

Stockwell: Then you had the Supreme Court step in and decide who was going to be President.

LaRouche: Well that's another little--and nobody objected.

Stockwell: Not even Gore. He just kind of shut up and went his own way.

LaRouche: Well Gore's owned by the same people as Lieberman. He's owned by the same people as these guys, the same organized-crime circuits. Look, Gore was a part of the corruption of the Russian Mafiya. I think Clinton was blindsided on this thing in 1996; he was blindsided on what Gore really was. Maybe wishfully so, but he was blindsided.

Stockwell: Well, one thing that you can say, I think, about Clinton, that you have a hard time saying about George Bush, is that even with all his little peccadillos, President Clinton could see what the problem was; he just never had the moral strength to do anything about it.

LaRouche: Sometimes, but on many occasions, no. He came close. But he was terrified. What they did to him, with putting this girl in the basement, this stalker in the basement of the White House, to set him up; and the way they went at him, especially after September of 1998--

Stockwell: Ninety-eight, with the Asian Crisis...

LaRouche: Yeah, '98 was the Asian Crisis. But when they set him up--earlier, it was a set-up done through channels of organized crime, the same crowd--she was an asset of families which were connected to these money families. And they stuck her as an apprentice in the White House basement. And she had a reputation as a stalker from her high school days. And she was stuck there.

Now any competent security check would not have allowed her to be put in the White House; would have gone to the President and said, “Don't put her in there,” before he even knew who she was. So that was deliberate. It was a set-up. It was a trap, a monkey-trap, because he has a certain known susceptibility to female blandishments, shall we say. And that was one of his weaknesses.

But he's not the only one. I would hate to think about the number of Presidents who've had propensities in that direction, to be tempted by young things, or something.

Responsibility for Posterity

Stockwell: Well, we seem to have a parade of that having happened; that men of power, that sort of rides along in the carriage with them, those kinds of propensities.

Well, we're coming down to the end of the hour. I've got maybe three minutes left here. Any parting words, Lyndon?

LaRouche: Parting words are from the New Testament; I'm not going to quote the New Testament, but the principle. You have a mortal life. The mortal life is temporary. If you're wise, you treat that mortal life as an opportunity, as a talent, as the Testament has it. And you decide how you're going to spend that which you can not keep anyway--mortal life. And you spend it wisely, so that you will have really lived, and will be someone meaningful for generations yet to come. You will have true immortality.

So if you're wise, you spend your life for immortality, not for other things.

And what we need today is more people who have that view, or who are wakened to that view. Spend your life wisely. It's your talent. If you spend it wisely, you have earned immortality. That will give you the courage to do the right thing.

Stockwell: You just can't say that about too many people today.

LaRouche: That's the job of us in politics; to be political leaders; to remind people of that; to use that to guide us when we get into a position where we have to make tough decisions. It's to remember that we are spending our talent, and we have to spend it wisely, because future generations will be looking at us.

Stockwell: Well, we have to go.

LaRouche: Okay.

Stockwell: Thank you once again for your participation. I have the greatest respect for you and your organization, and always look forward to having you, or one of your association members on the interview with us.

LaRouche: Thank you.

Stockwell: Good luck to you in this coming period of time, as far as the possibilities of being a serious candidate in the eyes of the media.

But you know what I think? The situations that continue to unfold around us may necessitate such a move. When there's only one guy that can stop the ship from sinking, and everybody finally realizes that, maybe everybody will finally do something about it.

LaRouche: Things happen like that in history.

Stockwell: Yes, they do. Lyndon, again, thank you so much for being a part of the program.

LaRouche: Thank you.

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