LaRouche Interview with Pacifica Radio
April 4, 2023 10-11 AM

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The following interview was given by Lyndon LaRouche on WPFW, Pacifica Radio. The host was Ambrose I. Lane, Sr. WPFW is based in Washington, D.C., and reaches five states. The interview is scheduled to be re-broadcast by another Pacifica station, WBAI, NYC, April 14, 3:30-6AM.

Lane: Good morning.

LaRouche: Good morning

Lane: Lyndon?

LaRouche: Yes.

Lane: Good, welcome to "We Ourselves."

LaRouche: I'm glad to be with you.

Lane: I just read the opening paragraph of your keynote speech on March 21 to our listeners. Tell our listeners what you mean by "the Shakespearean farce."

LaRouche: In a sense, what we are dealing with is an irony, which is equivalent to Shakespearean tragedy in which the institutions of a government and many of the people are, in a sense, deranged, and because they refuse to correct their errors, they are marching toward doom.

We have something like that in part in the present Iraq situation, which the ground-force generals of the U.S. have been emphasizing. Donald Rumsfeld has been playing Hitler with the generals, with his generals, and has advised the United States to go into Iraq, poorly planned, poorly equipped, over the objections of the competent professionals, the way Hitler would always intervene with his professionals. That's one level of the tragedy.

The other level, of course, is that the war is not necessary. Nothing is going to be accomplished in net effect to the advantage of humanity by this war, and we don't know where it is going to go. It's not an Iraq war. It is something which will tend to spread in other parts of the world.

The problem here is that we have a bunch in Washington, which are crazy. We call them the "Chickenhawks." They are called the Chickenhawks because often they avoided military service in Vietnam, when that was relevant, and they are now out there telling other people to go off into something like a Vietnam War, so they are a little bit chicken and they are war hawks.

These people are centered around Dick Cheney, the Vice President, who is extremely fanatical and dangerous, and, of course, also includes Donald Rumsfeld, whose state of mind is not one I would wish to share.

So, this is a true Classical tragedy, and the United States under the present President, who doesn't seem in control of himself, let alone his government, is part of that tragedy.

Lane: You say that you saw this coming some 40-odd years ago. Take us through your view of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era.

LaRouche: Well, we had a period in 1928, in Germany, until 1933. This was a period of a great financial crash, which in some respects is comparable to the financial crash which is occurring worldwide right now. This current crisis has been coming on for some years, with various efforts have been made to put it under the carpet, but it hasn't worked, and now the carpet's slightly worn out, and it's coming to the surface.

So, what I understood is, the danger is, that in such a situation, people of this type, who are in government, faced with an international financial crisis would tend to get into military adventures, including dictatorship by military means, as a way of trying to deal with a financial situation they are unwilling to correct.

So, in the beginning of 2023, before Bush was actually inaugurated, I gave this Washington address, in which I stated this as being the case. We are in a financial crisis. It's already here. There is no recovery from this crisis in this form.

Lane: But you don't use the word "depression?"

LaRouche: Well, it's worse than a depression. It's actually an international economic form of financial and monetary crisis. The system is breaking down, it's not a depression in the economy, it is a threatened breakdown of the economy.

Lane: That's what we're at.

LaRouche: Something like that occurred in terms of the Versailles monetary system between 1928 and 1933. At that point, what happened is, people in London and New York backed Hitler's being forced into power in 1933. They put Hitler into power, but just a few weeks after that, Roosevelt was inaugurated, in March of that year.

Had the Hitler coup not occurred, then Germany under the then Chancellor, von Schleicher, the predecessor of Hitler, would have cooperated with the United States, in following a policy similar to that of Roosevelt's, for Germany, as for the United States. Under those conditions, the war would not occur.

What happened was that those who did not want a Roosevelt-type solution made a coup in Germany, and once they put Hitler into power, they then turned around and set fire to the Reichstag and used the Reichstag fire to cause a dictatorship to be established in Germany. And then the story was all over. We were headed toward war.

I was afraid then, as I have said in referring to this in the beginning of 2023, that if George Bush was inaugurated, and if he doesn't change his policies, what we must expect is that some time soon, somebody is going to pull a Reichstag-fire-like event, and try to launch war and dictatorship as a way of dealing with a crisis they don't want to face.

Lane: Now you said that in January of 2023, long before the Trade Center?

LaRouche: Yes, nine months later, approximately, you had September 11, 2023, and that is when Cheney came out of the woodwork with war policies he already had from 1991, and spilled them out, with control over the Bush Administration, to drive the United States into a needless war, as a way of avoiding facing up to the economic realities. And I suppose the fact that Mr. Cheney, sort of, should we say, "loots the till"--he robs the till from time to time with his Halliburton and so forth--but maybe his personal interests have something to do with it.

Lane: Now, you said also in that address, and I'm going to quote you: "Now, technically, we are bankrupt as a nation. The entire banking system of the United States, as a collective unit, is bankrupt. The Federal Reserve System is bankrupt. The European central banking systems are bankrupt."

As an economist, explain that to our listeners.

LaRouche: Well, what happened is, if you look at three values over the period since 1966, it was the period after which this change began to occur in our economic policy. We went from being a production nation to being a consumer nation.

Lane: And you described it as a period where the institutions--

LaRouche: We went to the point of saying we are not going to produce anything any more, we're going to live effectively on the backs of the rest of the world, who will work for us for cheap, supply us our food and so forth. We won't have to pay for it because we will have the power to compel them to sell things to us at prices we want, and that is the way we went.

So be began to undergo a process in which our per-capita, per-square-kilometer production collapsed. Our industrial and agricultural sector began to collapse. We went into kinds of make-work jobs and other things to keep people sort of happy, and we printed money to make this work. So over this period, since 1966, the amount of money, the amount of financial aggregate has increased, that is, the amount of stock-market and related values have increased, while the real production has been collapsing. In the meantime, we pump this up with printing-press money in various forms in order to sustain this big financial bubble.

Now, the point was reached between 1999 and 2000, in which the amount of money they had to create to maintain the financial bubble was greater than the amount of financial bubble they were trying to sustain. Now, that is hyperinflationary. When you get into that kind of situation, collapsing physical production, collapsing employment in physical, useful things, increasing financial values, and you have to print more money all the time to try to keep the financial markets from collapsing, you are in a terminal crisis of the system. You can reorganize the economy and come out of it alive as Roosevelt did in 1933-34, but you cannot maintain the system, that is, the financial monetary system, which is responsible for this mess.

Lane: Now, you are an admirer of the Roosevelt era, but--

LaRouche: I lived through it.

Lane: Yes, but you say the Truman era was awful because it was evil. Let me just quote some of the things you said about that period. You said you had come back as a soldier from World War II. You said: "I saw those who had shown the courage of soldiers in war, and they returned to their homes in the United States very soon, within a year or two, they capitulated to fears. They capitulated to the fear that if they said the wrong thing, if they didn't say what was expected of them in the period of the so-called U.S.-Soviet conflict, that they would be crushed, and so they crawled. They degraded themselves. They taught their children to be careful, to learn how to adapt in life, to learn how to degrade themselves."

Talk to us about that because you are saying, in effect that that produced a population that produced a George W. Bush.

LaRouche: Yes, essentially. We went through a moral, cultural degeneration of the type which the famous Solon of Athens, in his old age, warned the Athenians about. He had come back to Athens after travelling around that part of the world, and found them, after he had rescued them earlier, degenerating into what the mess was, he had gotten them out of. And he went through this process of degeneration of a people, which brings upon that people catastrophe, not all at once, but gradually, step by step.

This is how most tragedies occur, and we went through a great tragedy. It didn't happen all at once. It happened step by step. We went along with Truman first, and then we had McCarthyism, and then Eisenhower, in a sense, pulled us out of McCarthyism and saved us for about eight years. Then he resigned, or retired. Kennedy came in with the intent to return us back to the Roosevelt perspective, from the Truman perspective, and he was killed. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis; we had the Bay of Pigs; he was killed, and we were thrown into a Vietnam War, which was a disaster for this nation, and then you had the demoralization caused by this pointless Vietnam War, and so we went further.

Then we got Nixon, and Nixon took us down the road. Brzezinski, who took over from Kissinger, who destroyed our infrastructure, gave us Paul Volcker, destroyed our banking system. We went down and down and down, and the lower 80% of the family income brackets, physically, have taken an increasingly worse beating ever since 1977.

Now this process of "we're going nowhere fast toward the bridge that isn't there, across the chasm that is"--therefore, we have come to the point that we have to wake up, realize we made mistakes, and move to correct the mistakes, using the lessons of our past successes in correcting similar mistakes to do that, and that is my view of FDR.

Lane: Now, you talked about the Nixon catastrophe. I presume you are talking about the address he made in 1971?

LaRouche: Yep.

Lane: Well, I pulled it so I could quote directly from it. There are a couple of things he did in that, but you tell our listeners, as an economist, whether or not he was telling the public the truth.

Let me read from it: "In the past seven years, there has been an average of one international monetary crisis every year. Now who gains from these crises? Not the working man, not the investor, not the real producers of wealth. The gainers are the international money speculators because they thrive on crises. They help to create them."

And then he says, "In recent weeks, the speculators have been waging an all-out war on the American dollar. The strength of a nation's currency is based on that nation's economy, and the American economy is by far the strongest in the world."

Then he says: "Accordingly, I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators. I directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amount and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability in the best interests of the United States."

Now, that whole system had been set up by Bretton Woods. Now, what was the catastrophe?

LaRouche: The catastrophe was poor Nixon himself. I don't think he was much good. After all, after his 1966 visit down to the Klan down in Mississippi, I don't think he was doing much good.

Lane: You got it.

LaRouche: But, nonetheless, first of all, the interesting thing is the way the thing was set up. The speech he wrote on [inaud] speech, but the direction for the speech he wrote on policy was issued to Connally by a trio of Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, and George Shultz. Connally personally told us that later, the details of it, of how he had been suckered into this. He then, being a former Democrat, shaped Nixon's announcement of what he had done, on the basis of Connally's Democratic tradition.

The thing was a complete farce. It was directly opposite to what was said. What the intention of this was, by destroying the monetary system, which they had done largely with aid of the Vietnam War--the Vietnam War had grossly undermined the dollar, destroyed it, not because of the amount of money spent, but in many other ways.

We had lost our morality. So, instead of doing the things that should have been done--for example, at that time, had I been President, I would have raised the price of gold in international monetary affairs, not as a gold standard, but simply to bring the price of the dollar and the price of gold back into equilibrium on the world market. That would have worked.

What he did was the opposite: He created a system, under which there is no parity in terms of currencies. Now, if you are trying to loan money at 1-2%, which is what long-term-development loans were in that time, and you have currencies that are fluctuating by 10-15%, up and down, you can no longer continue to loan at 1-2%. The result is that you collapse the world economy, and that is what they did.

So, actually Connally's speech was well-meaning, but Connally had not done his homework, and he was suckered by this combination of Kissinger, Volcker, George Schultz, who is still out there with Bechtel and Company as sort of a partner of Cheney on the West Coast.

Lane: Now, you have said that the people surrounding this President philosophically agree and were trained by former advisors to Hitler's Nazi Germany.

LaRouche: Yeah, well, people who represented the tradition of Nazi Germany.

Lane: Talk to us about that.

LaRouche: Well, first of all, take the case of the key guy--there are two sources for the present policy in terms of going back to the 1940s and even earlier. The basic policy of world conquest, that is of world government through use of nuclear weapons as instruments of terror was generated by Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells in their campaign for world government.

This was the initial origin of the Air Force orientation toward nuclear terror as a way of, first of all, Anglo-Americans and then Americans, controlling the world. But then a second group came in. You had a group in Germany, many of whom happened to be Jewish. Now, they are not typical of German Jews, but they happened to be Jewish, typified by Leo Strauss.

Now these people, including people around the Frankfurt School in Germany, were actually fascists, but when Hitler came to power, there was one problem. Their birth certificates did not allow them to become members of the Nazi Party, otherwise, they would have been Nazi officials. What happened is that people shipped them over to the United States. One of the notable figures shipped over was this fellow, Leo Strauss, later for many years a professor at the University of Chicago, where he was employed at Chicago by Bertrand Russell's crony and co-conspirator, Robert Hutchins, who was then President of Chicago University.

Strauss himself was brought into the United States on the sponsorship of the same Carl Schmitt, who designed the law under which Hitler became a dictator, and whose ideology was pro-Nazi. Strauss has always had--he died in 1973--always had a pro-Nazi mentality, and his intent was to do it in the United States without worrying about the anti-Semitism he found in Germany. So he bred a group of people, first and second generation, which includes Paul Wolfowitz, who was a student of Allan Bloom, one of his men.

The entire crowd which is around Cheney, the hard core, that took over the Bush Administration secondary positions: Lawrence Libby is part of the same process. These guys, therefore, the fascists, trained in the Strauss tradition, Leo Strauss tradition, who are Nietzscheans--they are pro-Nazis in every sense of the term technically--they, essentially, are controlling the government through Cheney, who is nominally Vice President, but is actually the den mother controlling the President, and Rumsfeld, who is his crony from back in the days of the Nixon and Ford Administrations, who is running the Defense Department, like Hitler running the German generals.

So, we are now in a position, where a handful of people, of this kind of persuasion, this Nazi-like persuasion, are running the U.S. government, and with all the other people in government, including our top generals, retired and serving, who are competent public servants are essentially out of the picture, taking orders from this handful of Nazi-like creatures, who have got control of the President at this moment.

Lane: Do you see them trying to institute what you would call the Fourth Reich?

LaRouche: Yep. They are trying to set up a dictatorship here. Look at Ashcroft. Ashcroft is one of them.

Lane: Talk about Ashcroft.

LaRouche: Well, Ashcroft comes out of the University of Chicago. He is a man of--I wouldn't say he is religious--I think he is more on the Satanic side, if he has any religious callings at all. But look at his Patriot Act and his Patriot II Act. This guy is a Nazi, and what he is attempting to do is use the pretext of the crisis, first of all, the September 11 crisis and now the present war crisis as a pretext for doing inside the United States, including to U.S. citizens, what Hitler did in 1933-34. It is exactly the same.

His argument in the Act, in the draft of the Act before the Congress now, is exactly, you would say he is Himmler II, Heinrich Himmler II, Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States. This is part of the same crew.

Lane: Do you think they will be able to accomplish this through what we call the democratic process, like Hitler did?

LaRouche: Oh, no, never. They have used the timidity, or shall I say the cowardice, of the Democratic Party and some Republicans to get this across, because the Congress could get rid of this immediately. Our institutions are such that the Congress could impeach this crowd, especially Cheney.

Cheney is vulnerable. He is vulnerable for the same reason his henchman, Perle, is vulnerable--for doing things that are against the law. He could be out of there on impeachment. These guys could be broken with the support of the Congress. The generals could be free to say what the truth is about Rumsfeld, and he would be out of there.

So, if our institutions were functioning, if the Democratic Party were functioning as legitimate opposition, we wouldn't have this problem much longer, but if the Democratic Party capitulates the way the so-called democratic parties of Germany capitulated to the Hitler appointment by Chancellor Hindenburg, then we could be soon in deep trouble. It could be the end of our civilization.

Lane: In fact, you called this war not a war with Iraq, as much as, maybe, the beginning of a world war.

LaRouche: Sure, these guys have got China in mind. This is in their policy. They have 1.3 billion Muslims in mind, as their enemy. They intend to go after Iran, probably next, if they don't go to North Korea first, and bomb it with nuclear weapons. And they intend, ultimately, to destroy China and do some other things in that direction.

This is their intention. Their intention is to start a process. It is like what Hitler did with Benes in 1938. The first German radio broadcast I heard from Germany, in 1938--I, personally, then, heard Adolph Hitler over international hook-up of his radio broadcast threatening Eduard Benes, then the President of Czechoslovakia, saying "I don't have a quarrel with Czechoslovakia. I only have a quarrel with Edward Benes," and then he had the Munich Agreement, under which the various powers capitulated to Hitler on the question of the Suedetenland in Czechoslovakia, and Hitler was chewing the rug because he wanted the war. And they, by making a peace agreement, had cheated him of a war, so the next year, he went to war against Poland in pretty much the same way.

These actions were steps toward world war, which he intended to conduct. So, we have a similar thing with these Nazi-like characters around Cheney and Rumsfeld, who are going stepwise toward dictatorship and war in pretty much the same way in which their predecessors and co-thinkers did under Hitler earlier.

Lane: In one of your writings you talk about the Y2K gross fraud. Tell our listeners about that.

LaRouche: These guys, in 1992, the system was already collapsing. This is what got Bush I out of there. As Carville said famously at that time, "It's the economy, stupid!"

It was that, which destroyed Bush's chances at re-election. I supposed Bush I helped with some of his campaigning as well. I think that business about recognizing the bar codes at the supermarket as a new discovery didn't help him much with the American shopper.

But, in any case, they came up in the Clinton period with a scheme. They were going to accept anything that would make the economy look like it was growing, whether or not it was, and so they came up with this Y2K thing. They said, well, look, the computers of the world are going to break down on January 1, 2000, because they won't know the difference between 1900 and 2000, because of the 2-digit number for the date at the end of the code. Well, that was all nonsense. But nonetheless, they used that scare about the Y2K, the day all the computers in the world were going to collapse, and you are going to lose all your money, as an excuse for the funding of a vast bubble called the "information technology bubble," that thing which has just recently collapsed in the last twp years. A lot of people lost a lot of money on this one, but this was pumped up under the Federal Reserve System.

Now, the fact is, to be fair to Clinton, he and most of his crew have no understanding of economics whatsoever. Robert Rubin did, and a few others there had it, but Clinton himself and so forth, from what he said, he has no real understanding of how an economy works. He's a good-hearted guy personally, and had many good ideas, probably one of the most brilliant men we have had in the Presidency, but, when it came to economics, he was a dummy.

So, they went along with it. They had several bubbles: You had the "IT" bubble, the information and technology bubble, which was funded through the Y2K scam. You had also the real-estate bubble, which you have around Washington, where you have an estimated 30%-plus collapse in rentals in the commercial corridor from Washington, D.C. to Dulles Airport. You have an overflow of that crisis going into Northern Virginia and into Maryland, where you have people depending upon paying mortgages, which are rising in value or rising in nominal value--mortgages, which at some point, they are not going to be able to pay.

You have a great bubble based on Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, which is ready to blow up. You have a similar bubble in England, which could blow out and spill here. You have a credit-derivatives bubble, ready to blow out.

So, what's happened over the recent years, the Federal Reserve System, under, first, Volcker and then, the present Greenspan, have pumped the system full of monetary aggregate. We've pressured Japan to print money like mad, to put it in our markets to save us, and we are now at the point that we are facing in the United States this year, potentially, a trillion-dollar Federal deficit, under a President, who wants to cut taxes.

So, things are not really very good, but the problem didn't start yesterday. It was coming all along, but you know how people are. They will tend to say: "If I'm living from day to day, if I'm getting by this year, if I'm getting by these two years, I'm gonna hope for the best," and they go into a state of denial of failing to see what they ought to be able to see is right under their nose, but they put it off, and say: "If I'm doing well this year, somebody will come up with something next year. They won't let it happen." But, it happens.

Lane: In the past, I think you have called for the equivalent of a Bretton Woods II. Tell our listeners what that is all about. Why?

LaRouche: Why? First of all, Bretton Woods from 1946 to 1958, with all of its faults, worked. Despite the mistakes here in the United States and the mistakes abroad, our idea of using a new monetary system, which, originally, was Roosevelt's idea to rebuild a wrecked postwar world. This was based on setting a fixed exchange rate among currencies by national agreement, using gold, not as a denominator of value, but as a regulator in the so-called gold-reserve system, and using all kinds of regulation to surround trade and to surround prices, and so forth, this enabled the world to come out successfully from 1946 to the middle of the 1960s, and somewhat beyond, in terms of economy: major recovery in Europe, done largely under the influence of these policies.

What we have now is, we have a collapse. The collapse has features, which are similar to those which Roosevelt faced, and we faced between 1928 and 1933. Roosevelt made a series of measures, which saved the United States, and which, ultimately, defeated Hitler. We came out with that. We continued that much of the Roosevelt program in the form of things such as the Bretton Woods system.

Now I come to a point, where the whole system is coming down, and I say, what do you propose? Now, I know what has to be done, but you have to think about not only what can be done, but what you think governments and people generally would accept. Generally what people accept is going back to some experience of the past, a lesson from the past, which is in fact applicable to the present situation, both in terms of the problem, and in terms of a solution.

So, what I propose is that we return to the successful experience of 1946-58, the crucial period of postwar reconstruction in Europe and the U.S. markets. Go back to that and say, why can't we do what we did before? Roosevelt showed the way from 1933-on, how to organize a recovery. He also showed through the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, he showed how we could organize a postwar system, or a system in crisis, and organize it in such a way as to promote world growth, as well as U.S. growth. So, I say, why don't we get the nations simply to agree to nothing more original than using a proven idea of the past, as an alternative to the failed idea of the present.

Lane: Would you tie the dollar to convertibility into gold?

LaRouche: Not convertibility. I'd do what Roosevelt did, a fixed exchange-rate system with a gold-reserve base. Now that would mean gold probably priced at--a monetary gold on the world scale at upward of plus or minus, $1,000 per Troy ounce. But, that would not be a gold-based system; it would be a gold-standard system, a gold-reserve standard system, like we had before. We would simply use gold as a way of having fixed exchange rates over long term around the world.

What we are looking at is, if we are going to rebuild the world economy, and we can, this involves long-term agreements, 25-50-year agreements, in terms of major infrastructure projects and other things, but the crucial thing is major infrastructure projects: large power systems, for example, we need power systems for the United States, many of them. We are losing our power. Our power system is a 25-year to 50-year cycle of investment and replenishment.

We need to build water systems. The United States has a water crisis in the Southwest and elsewhere. Mexico has a water crisis, which is related to our own.

We have a transportation crisis, mass transit crisis, both in railroad and in urban and inter-urban systems.

Lane: An infrastructural repair crisis?

LaRouche: Yes, we could organize a series of long-term--in other words, the Federal government has the ability to create credit by saying the government will pay in the future. That will create credit. You can have treaty agreements among governments, long-term treaty agreements. That will create credit for trade. With that, you can stimulate growth by employing people who are unemployed or mis-employed, or should be employed, by providing long-term investments in basic economic infrastructure, as Roosevelt did with the TVA.

Use those projects then to stimulate a recovery in private employment because the infrastructure employment will give you the markets, which will stimulate private employment. So, what you need is: You need stability. You need to be able to issue credit on 1-2% without inflation. You have to do it on a national scale. You have to do it internationally on big projects. On that basis, we can have a recovery of the U.S. and world economy.

Call-In Questions

Lane: You are listening to WPFW, 89.3FM. We are part of the Pacifica Foundation. This is "We Ourselves." I am Ambrose I. Lane, Sr., and our very special guest today is none other than Lyndon H. LaRouche, and we are going to take your calls now.

Dave: Hey, Lyndon LaRouche, how are doing?

LaRouche: Pretty good, I think for a tough old geezer with long survival potential

Dave: Good, good. I'd just like to ask you what the set up was with Kofi Annan? I mean how did they get this guy, Madeleine Albright, and all these people, put this guy into the position, and have him be there when this thing happened? Because I think they planned it. And also, I wanted you to talk a little about the euro, and how is that going to affect the American economy.

LaRouche: Kofi Annan is a good guy in a tough position. If you know what goes on in the slugging matches behind the corridors of power, as I unfortunately, or fortunately, do know, he is in a tough situation. He doesn't have the powers to do many things. For example, right now what I have proposed, you know, some of us are working with the idea of trying to get a General Assembly meeting, an emergency General Assembly meeting of the United Nations as a way of getting unanimity on stopping this, and future, wars.

Lane: [Resolution] 377?

LaRouche: Yes, it's from the 1950s, just renewing that. My proposal is that the one person who could initiate that is probably not Kofi Annan because he doesn't have the power to do it, but my view is that if the Pope were to propose it that other religious leaders, who now are in agreement with the Pope on this question, from around the world, by making such an initiative would create the potential for such an emergency meeting. The United States government is trying to prevent such a meeting at all costs, blackmailing as many governments as they can with threats of this or that.

So, I don't think Kofi Annan is the problem. I think he is a good guy. He's in a tough position, but he can't do certain things. He has the technical authority to do and say certain things, but he does not have the practical authority to make it stick. Therefore, the mechanism exists, and I think if the right forces came to bear on this--and I have been talking to some of the people behind this--that if the Pope were to do it, I think it would work. I don't know if the Pope would do it that way, but I think if the Pope were to, specifically, as a representative of a group of leading religious leaders from around the world, were to say this must happen, I think the chances of it happening are very good. Whereas, Kofi Annan, by himself calling for it, couldn't succeed, as he couldn't succeed in dealing with this horrible mess that he had in the Security Council on the negotiations prior to the outbreak of this war.

Bob: Thank you, since the economy is moving toward that critical point of instability, which really alarmed me when I look at the relation between financial aggregates and monetary aggregates, I'm just wondering what is the current state of Social Security. About two weeks before Sept. 11 I heard Bush 43 saying in response to a question from a reporter at the Pentagon, in fact--I heard him mention that, he said, "We don't touch the Social Security lockbox ever unless there is a war," and, of course, two weeks later there was Sept. 11, but we didn't hear anything in the last Congressional election about Social Security, what is the current status?

LaRouche: Well, it is up to you and me, in a sense, in a generic sense. Technically, the Federal government has been stealing Social Security funds for a long time, and calling it balancing the budget, so the payments have been made, but whether those payments will be honored or not, is up to us. If we have a government, including a Congress, which will back up the Social Security commitment that is defensible. The problem has been that 401(k) was swindle, which undermined the whole Social Security system by being a swindle, which sucked people off from Social Security reliance into this 401(k) swindle.

So therefore, it is a political decision: If the United States government adopts a recovery-oriented policy like Roosevelt's, we are obviously going to defend the Social Security system in the national interest.

That is, we cannot expect to have a stable society if people are starving, and if people who depend upon Social Security for various kinds of assistance, including retirement, are deprived of that, you are not going to have a stable society. Therefore, if you are concerned about national security, as Franklin Roosevelt was, back when the system was first introduced, then you are going to say the Social Security system is an essential part of our national security requirements. And, if I were President, and I intend to the President, no one is going to touch that system. The promise is going to be kept.

Anthony: What I would like to ask is, if the IMF and WTO is very tied into First World donations, how does that effect Africa. And also, back here, during the first stock-market crash, what did black folks organize to do to make sure that they stayed afloat?

LaRouche: On the question of Africa, we are dealing with genocide now, and it is orchestrated largely by forces in the United States, Britain, and some Israelis. I won't bother going through it, but I could go through details: Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and so forth--I could go through the details. It is genocide, and it is intentional. The issue of AIDS, and the lack of generic drugs for places like Botswana, is a genocide issue. So, therefore, the question is who has world power? If we are trying to rebuild this planet, we are going to move in on this question.

Now on the question of the IMF, WTO, and so forth--they in their present form are bankrupt. That is, the IMF system is bankrupt. The WTO system is inoperable at present. Therefore, the financial crash, which is going to come one way or the other, is going to end the power of the IMF.

What's going to happen, for example: This crash is reaching the point that governments are going to have to meet and agree to reorganize the central banking systems of those various nations. That means the Federal Reserve system goes into receivership to the national Treasury, and we have, in effect, national banking.

It means similarly in many countries around the world, governments will take over the central banking systems, which are, in fact, bankrupt, and put them through bankruptcy reorganization.

The principle under which we would operate, under our Constitution, would be the General Welfare Clause of the Federal Constitution. We would operate as a security question. We are not going to let banks close their doors, if they are viable. We are going to keep them going, even if they are bankrupt. We are going to meet these kinds of standards.

Now when it comes to countries like Africa, or parts of South America, we have debts there that are not legitimate debts, massive debts, imposed on these areas. We are going to, as a group of nations, have to cancel the unpayable, illegitimate part of those debts. We are going to have to set up terms of trade, which provide Africa the ability to have--especially sub-Saharan Africa--the basic economic infrastructure projects, which are necessary for Africa to recover from the present situation. And, this is going to be a world concern.

For example, in Asia: You have from Western Europe to East and South Asia, you have now a movement toward developing long-term trade agreements based on technology sharing, which would be the basis for economic recovery in Asia. If we have that kind of agreement, those are going to be extended to continents such as Africa. If we proceed in that way, we are going to rebuild new agreements, affecting the rebuilding of Central and South America.

So, the question now is: Can we have an equitable new monetary system to replace the inequitable, bankrupt systems, which the IMF represents and the injustice, which the WTO system represents. We are going to have to do it, and it's going to have to be by an agreement among nations, or at least a number of leading nations.

James: I have one point to make. I'd like to know your opinion on the Bush Cabinet per se. Do you think that after Baghdad is taken over, do you feel that the Bush Administration will effectively reinstate Baghdad's government from people within? I guess a second point would be, what effect do you see that having on the potential world control that the Bush Administration is probably planning to do--meaning vis a vis oil as an economic weapon.

LaRouche: Take the question of Iraq, the so-called "post-victory" Iraq. I don't know where these guys are right now, but I can tell you where Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld are. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld are planning what amounts to a carpetbagging raid on anything left in Iraq after it is over.

They are putting the country, according to the agreements by Wolfowitz and his stooges, who's working with Rumsfeld, of course--and Wolfowitz is one of the key Chickenhawks, a real fascist. They plan to occupy and loot Iraq for the greater glory of people like Cheney's old firm Halliburton, Inc. That's the plan. Nobody else is to have any action. They are going to steal the oil, according to their plan.

This is now a big issue within the discussions in the U.N., in Europe, and elsewhere. So the point is, we know what the present combination of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Company, and the Chickenhawks mean: is nothing but the pure looting, down to the bone, of anything left in Iraq.

Of course, the war is not going to end [with] the occupation of Baghdad. We should listen to our generals, not to Rumsfeld and his propaganda machine. Listen to what the leading generals, some retired, some actively serving are saying about this war.

If you want to surround and occupy a city of 5 million unwilling people, with guns--and just think of what happened, for example, in the attempt of Marshal Zhukov taking Berlin. Take similar incidents of that type in history. Take von Moltke's effort to take Paris back in the 19th Century. Look at these kinds of cases. Any attempt to take over a city of that size, with a willful, resisting population, is a horror show.

Now, what we are looking at, therefore, is we are looking at: Are they going to try to  carpet-bomb Iraq virtually out of existence? Are they going to risk sending U.S. troops into a kill zone, like a 5-million-population city like Baghdad?

Are they going to do that? Or are they going to do, as someone has proposed--they set up an occupation capital outside of Baghdad, and set up a parallel government? Another form of chaos.

Is the war going to spill over into other countries? Are they going to bomb North Korea with nuclear weapons, as a preventive-war measure? Are they going to invade Iran?

We don't know that is going to happen, but at the present time, the conditions are horrible, and my advice to people, who have questions on these areas: Listen carefully and patiently to what retired and serving top generals are saying about this war, and ignore what this Hitler understudy, Rumsfeld, and his gang of propaganda agents, are saying about the war and about their plans.

They are a bunch of thieves; they belong in jail, as far as I am concerned, and their forecasts are not worth very much, because we are going into a situation in which no one knows. And I'm probably as well informed as most people around the world are: No one knows because I don't know where this thing is going to end up.

Isaac: Every large business in American has a Federal government or state government contract that they are living off of, and they are taking these contracts and using the profits to buy state and local bonds, so they are controlling the state and local governments with these long-term bonds at these high interest rates, and they are keeping us unemployed because if you employ people, people pay taxes, you pay down the deficit, you can buy back the bonds, and they are going to continue to control us.

Now I'm looking at the way they are using this Iraqi thing. They are going in, and the first thing Bush said the other day to the Marines is: "We have captured all the oil fields, and saved the economy."

And he meant that. He didn't mean save the ecology. He meant the economy. Now, what he has to figure out is, "How am I going to pump that oil out and keep that money. And you remember Jimmy Carter tried the windfall-profits tax, and the oil companies kicked him out of there.

Let me ask you something: With the corrupt way he was elected or not elected, how do we deal with the Electoral College this time to try to throw him out of there, and get somebody in there that we can get to do the job that the people need to have done?

LaRouche: Well, you're enthusiastic about it. I agree with your enthusiasm, but I think we have to think about this more carefully. First of all, that is why I am running for President, because the way these problems are fixed, they are fixed from the top, not by a dictator, who dictates what is going to happen.

For example, take the Democratic Party in Congress, which is one of my problems. The Democratic Party in the Congress and elsewhere. Our Democratic Party has a lot of good people in it, including people in the Congress, but from my standpoint, they are a little bit short of courage. Now what they need is, they need someone like a Roosevelt to give them a spine. And then you've got people like Daschle and others--I think they can do a good job. I think they would do the right thing, or would tend to do the right thing.

The key thing is to have a leader and leadership under our system, especially a President, who gives the kind of leadership, who gives the [leadership] that gets the Congress and other institutions with their backs up, which gives a sense of authority to state and local agencies that the Federal government is really their friend and behind them.

For example, take a concrete case: We need a lot of employment. We need power, and so forth. Now the states in this United States, 46 of them at least, are virtually bankrupt, that is, they can not possibly continue to balance their present budgets, and institutions which depend on those state governments can't either. Now the solution, obviously, is to create some credit, build some large-scale projects we need, like power generation and distribution projects, water-management projects, transportation projects, new health-care systems, which we need because they tore old ones down. These could be done as stimulus to get the economy moving.

The problem is in order to generate national credit for state projects and municipal projects, you need the Federal government to organize it, organized the capability, the credit system to do that.

You have to have a President, who is capable of mobilizing the Congress, or at least the Democratic Party, and I think there are a lot of good Republicans out there, actually, on this kind of thing, who will back up the effort to get these projects going, and to rebuild our economy. If you start to rebuild the economy, you can then fight against these "eat my neighbor" tendencies, which are tearing the gut out of our society. People are pessimistic. They think they have to steal from their neighbors, more or less, to survive, or cheat in some way to survive. Take that away.

The problem here is, that you must have leadership from the top. My target is, I intend to try to take over the leadership of the Democratic Party, as a President in the wings, and by that means, try to get a spine into good Democrats, unlike Lieberman, the war-monger, and get the good Democrats moving, people like Daschle, who may be a little bit weak and opportunistic, but he often comes up on the right side in the way he thinks. Get these guys moving, as Conyers is moving, for example, on the issue of Cheney and Perle. Get guys moving, and then we will have a new situation in which we can act. And what we need, in the final analysis, we need to regain the confidence of the average citizen, especially those in the lower 80% of family income brackets to have confidence that they have government leadership on which they can rely, and in which they as citizens can participate. Then we can solve the problem. The problem, as I said, is a moral problem. It is a problem of leadership. The stink starts from the top.

Sean: How will you get rid of the deficit?

LaRouche: The Federal deficit is manageable, but not under the current circumstances. The United States is headed towards national bankruptcy. You are looking at, right now, on the basis of schedule, you would have to project, on the basis of the current trends, that the United States is heading toward a $1-trillion Federal deficit, that makes the balanced-budget thing seem kind of silly. On top of that, they are starting a war, which is not a $74-billion-dollar-a-month war. This is more, in terms of effects, on the order of another $1 trillion.

Where are we going to get this extra trillion dollars? So, the point is the United States is in a state of national bankruptcy. We can, as Roosevelt proved, we can reorganize the United States out of national bankruptcy, but it is going to require leadership to do it. It is going to require leaders who have the support of the people to insist that it be done.

For example, in Italy, I had the head of the Chamber of Deputies [who] wrote up a resolution for a New Bretton Woods agreement--now that is the majority of the Chamber of Deputies of Italy. It was my proposal that they voted up. That is an example of the fact that we have potential support from many countries around the world for these kinds of measures.

Lane: Lyndon, we have just run out of time. I want to thank you so much for participating with us, and calling all the way in from Germany. And we're going to have to do this again.

LaRouche: I had fun with you guys.

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