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LaRouche in 2004 Press Release The Rose Garden Games Soon, jokers might predict, that, perhaps, President George W. Bush, Jr. will make another Rose Garden speech, in which he attempts to use the issue of the onrushing collapse of the world economy in an attempt to distract public attention from the disastrous failure of his government's Middle East policies. Especially since Bush's tragic June 24th address, some among us, both Democrats and Republicans, have expressed the suspicion, that the President is the helpless pinball in some nightmarish game, in which the flippers, are, on the one side, his own most lunatic advisors, and, on the other side, his even more rug-chewing adversaries grouped around Senators McCain and Lieberman. Where does he go from here? In the Sunday morning, June 30th internal briefing for our staff, Gerry Rose summed up the week's aftermath of Bush's speech in quotes from our staff briefing lead of Wednesday, June 26th: "In a lengthy discussion of the substance of the Bush speech, and realities in the Middle East, Lyndon LaRouche said he is extremely pessimistic about the Bush ‘folly' surrounding the whole Rose Garden speech of June 25. If President Bush had not been ready to tell Sharon to go halt his attacks now, it were better that the White House had done nothing, because the Bush Rose Garden speech has uncorked a scenario which Bush cannot control...." Rose wrote: "The insane Israeli crowd around Sharon will see themselves given the green light to kill Palestinian President Arafat, while pretending to be ‘happy' with the Bush speech. LaRouche warns that Arafat could be dead within hours, at the hand of the Israelis. It would be parallel to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the subsequent chaos that destroyed the civil rights movement after his murder. All the Israeli maniacs have to do now is create a terrorist atrocity to be blamed on Palestinians, and all the supposed ‘positive impact,' of the Rose Garden speech will go down the tubes." He continued: "The Bush Administration is actually terrified about the economy and financial blowout, and have made a major blunder that can blow up into general war, including with Israel using its nuclear submarines against Iran or Iraq. The Israelis will get rid of Arafat, and put Hamas in control--and then the war will start. LaRouche is determined that this not prevail. The Bush folly happened because they share the same stupidity that comes from small-minded people running virtually all the world today." Rose added: "It is those governments' fear of the onrushing monetary-financial breakdown in progress crisis, and the stupidity and small-mindedness of world leaders, that has defined the late-summer time frame for the outbreak of a war of incalculable implications. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's rewarming of Herbert Hoover reelection-campaign propaganda, shows why the Bush Administration is running out of control. Not surprisingly, the Bush speech is the worst course that could have been taken, because it accelerates that war danger." Two days after Bush's June 24th speech, in the June 26th edition of Israel's Ha'aretz, two Israeli space scientists declared that Israel now has the capability to fire missiles at targets anywhere on Earth, which includes, incidentally, "target U.S.A." At the same time, the Director of the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, was reported as briefing NATO's North Atlantic Council: "Israel can not spare any effort to foil, prevent, or delay the attainment of weapons of mass destruction by countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya." At that point, LaRouche described the June 26 announcement of an Israeli nuclear ICBM capability as a sudden "phase-change" in the global strategic situation, a world already being driven to the brink of war by a combination of an onrushing collapse of the world's present monetary-financial system, and an increasing tendency of some, such as Attorney-General Ashcroft, in the Bush administration toward "Reichstag Fire"-like government by emergency decree, since the Sept. 11, 2023 attacks. Rose concluded, referring to our intelligence and editorial staffs: "Sometimes the news is the fact, that what you forecast is what is continuing to happen." Children Play Games A series of spectacles like the President's orchestrated June 24 Rose Garden performance, prompts quips such as: "Is the President's teleprompter a ventriloquist?" The venom poured into the recitation of that text was obvious, and ominous; but, did the President himself actually have any comprehension of the practical implications of the words he was reciting? Has the President been turned into a programmed drone deployed into his White House sand-box, or, into a virtual Golliwog? For the Classical tragedian, the evidence is clear, and the implications are all ugly ones. Look at some interesting financial facts. During the period since the present collapse of the financial system began to spin out of control, during spring 2000, the very wealthiest "old money" people from around the world have, on the average, significantly increased their holdings. At the same time over the recent two years, not only the "new economy," but that which had once been solid major firms, together with the investors and 401(k) holders, are going belly-up at an accelerating rate. The obvious inference is, that the smartest wealthy people in the world seem to be in agreement with LaRouche's economic forecasts; while the foolishly stubborn folk, who rejected LaRouche's warnings and leadership, are going down the financial drain-pipes. How did this happen? During most of the recent four decades, more and more among the people of Europe and North America, among others, have established, or simply come to accept a new set of rules, by which people are supposed to play. These are different rules than those which Americans, and many others, played by during the times Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy were Presidents. By the time President Carter had installed Alan Greenspan's predecessor, Paul Volcker, as U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman and virtual controller of the President of the U.S., this new set of rules of the monetary-financial game had been set into place. During the 1990s, as the so-called "Golden Generation," those who had entered universities during the 1960s, moved into top positions in government and business, government, business, they, and the people generally, had accepted the Volcker-Greenspan system's rules of the game. The game was, in fact, insane, but government, business, and the people generally came to accept playing according to those house rules. It was called "being practical." Look at another very important fact about the present world economic and strategic situation: the lunatic gladiatorial spectacle of the World Cup games. Win the game, and win the world. Win on the playing field, and win a night with the girls of your dreams. What do you see dominating your television screen? Spectator sports, spectator sex, spectator homicide, spectator gambling orgies such as "the market." Where has reality gone? The majority of the U.S. public, including most of the leading circles in government and major political parties, have their heads stuck inside a mass-spectator form of fantasy-life, all about games of one sort or another, and almost nothing about reality. Think about the way games controlled the silly so-called citizens of ancient imperial Rome, in the time of Nero and those who followed him down the road to that famous Dark Age of Western Europe which Rome, and its culture, brought upon itself. Unless it changed the rules of its game, Rome was already doomed when Nero was Emperor, unless the rules under which the Empire operated were changed. Centuries later, that doom struck down Rome and its citizens alike, destroyed because it, and they had continued to follow those rules which ultimately doomed it. Now, history moves more quickly than it did in Nero's time. For anyone with the knowledge and intelligence to see this, the U.S. was on the skids about the time President Kennedy was assassinated, unless the U.S. stopped playing by the set of a new kind of rules of the game which were "set in political concrete" under Nixon and Carter. Nearly four decades since the death of President Kennedy, the game is played out, nearly to its end. So, the sins of the fathers visit the sons and grandsons. History is like that. The name of the game in which President Bush is trapped, is "games," as in gambling, as in "game theory," as in Alan Greenspan's big financial bubble, as in the lunatic games played by "sand-box" mentalities of the likes of Wolfowitz, Perle, McCain, and Lieberman, and as in killer video games. People who prefer games to reality, are called insane. When games replace reality for a nation, that nation is insane in a way which leads in the direction of its self-destruction. So, under certain conditions of crisis, when survival itself depends upon breaking unbreakable rules of the game, entire nations and their governments may go collectively insane, just as many governments around the world are today. The cause of that mass insanity is the habit of substituting winning a game, for meeting the challenges of real life, in that real world which exists only outside the playground where children, young, middle-aged, and old, act out their ineffable fantasies. The problem is twofold: The rules of the game are insane, but people, including President George W. Bush, Jr., still insist on playing that game. That President's tenacious attachment to one of his policies, therefore, often creates a spectacle like that of the Hollywood cartoon character attempting to run across a bridge that isn't there. The rules of the game by which he is either playing, or being played, are the bridge that isn't there. The President ran on a tax-cut-policy which is now wrecking his administration's ability to govern. The President, like the Democrats, capitulated to Newt Gingrich's 1994-95 "Jacobin" revolution in debt management, which is now wrecking his administration's ability to govern. The President, like others, has committed himself to radical "free trade" doctrines, including such as NAFTA and the WTO, which prohibit any solution for the presently exploding world trade crisis, and is trying to perform a politically impossible tight-rope balancing act between urgently needed protectionist measures and the world's almost psychotic passion for "free trade." The President is committed to a massive military expenditure and build-up, and an ever-increasing list of foreign military adventures, while destroying the economic mechanisms on which any real economic mobilization depends absolutely. Somewhere, deep in the administration, one can imagine there is a robot telling itself "I must now self-destruct," in order to prevent itself from doing anything in its own interests which might conflict with its commitments. One can imagine that it was that robot, which dictated the speech which President Bush recited in the Rose Garden on June 24. There is a way out, a way back to sanity. That way is called, "Stop the games. Get back to reality." Shut down Sharon's insane drive toward nuclear war. -30- |