Question: I've been working with this question: how do you know what you know? How do you know something to be true? And, um, my idea is that you have to make a discovery to know truth. Right now, I don't really know that the economy is collapsing. I want to discover, I want to prove to myself that our service economy cannot maintain itself. This is what I've been hearing, what I've been learning, but I have not obtained this knowledge yet, and I'd like to be able to prove this in my organizing. Because I see our service economy, and I see that it's in a recession, but I don't know that it's not just a cyclical up-and-down. So, I'd like to be able to prove that. And why do we need a new monetary system?

LaRouche: First of all, a service economy includes such things as artificial insemination. What happens essentially is this. People think of an economy in terms of money. That is lie number 1. Money is an idiot. Try to conduct a composition with a dollar bill. It will rattle a bit, maybe, but it will not give you any ideas. So why do we put any value in money? Why do we measure economic performance in money? Obviously, you shouldn't measure economic performance in money. For example, you look at the charts that we've drawn, pedagogically, and the actually figures on these charts, and you'll find that since 1966, the nominal value of financial output per capita in the United States has been rising hyperbolically, on the average. Until recently, the rate of monetary emission to pump the financial markets into rising, was going at a slower rate than the expansion of financial values. In the 1999-2000 period, the amount of money required to be pumped into the economy, the world and US economy, to keep the financial markets from collapsing, exceeded the amount of financial values which were being rescued by monetary pumping.

In the meantime, over the same period, the per capita output in physical terms, per capita and per square kilometer of the US population, the US nation, has been collapsing. So the assumption that the economy has been growing, is obviously false, because if we measure economy in terms of the general welfare of the population of the nation. And look at another thing, capital factors. What has happened? We have an energy collapse in the United States. The production and distribution of energy is insufficient to meet the present needs. We have a collapse of water resources. The fresh water resources, the potable water resources in the United States are collapsing, per capita and per square kilometer, as part of the infrastructure. We have lost our transportation system. We no longer have a transcontinental railway system, and the rest of it stinks. All the transportation system is useful for is collecting tolls on highways. You drive 10 miles, click, click, pay a toll! And the toll booths cause traffic jams, terrible traffic jams. Actually, the US economy loses money on toll booths, because the cost to the US population of traffic jams caused by toll booths exceeds the income from toll booths. Besides, the highways aren't being maintained to relieve them, with all that toll booth money being collected. And people probably want to kill each other because of the toll booth factor. They hate each other. They drive down the highway. Toll booth coming. I hate you! Not good.

Now, what's happened to the United States? The fascists took over, in a sense, by killing Kennedy and launching the Indo-China war in 1994. Not that Johnson was a bad guy, but he was afraid they were going to shoot him too. Therefore, he didn't do anything to make them shoot him! So we had the war. What happened at the same time? You had the rock-drug-sex counterculture. What you do is have sex with the nearest person next to you. Don't worry about the species. You'll find out about that later. You want to "improve your mind"? Drug it to death! You lack emotions? We've got the right pill for you! Everything's a fake, you don't want anything, it's all bad! What you have to do is choose a new lifestyle. We need to invent a fifth of sixth sex, because we're getting bored with the old ones!

This happened. This happened. We destroyed our industry, we destroyed our educational system, from 1973 on we destroyed our health care system with the so-called HMO bill passed by the Nixon administration, and pushed through by Monkeyglands, otherwise known as Moynihan, one of the right-wing creeps of the Democratic Party who was working for the Nixon administration at the time. So, we became a parasite on the world. We destroyed our industries, we don't have industries anymore. We have cheap labor. We have services. What are services? Prostitution, for example. That's a service. Various forms of surrogates for prostitution, also a service. You don't cook at home, you go out and have somebody service you at McDonalds, and you don't know who you're eating. You have so-called entertainment. You have rock singers who are dying of drug addictions-that's called entertainment. You have a new kind of entertainment, a service called a wave concept. That's a service. Our degeneracy and decadence are services. You have financial services, which is called stealing from the public.

Take one example of this service economy. What is happening to the economy right now? What happened this past week? The discount rate dropped another 25%. What is happening? What is happening is that dear old Alan Greenspoon, the sort of Witch of Endor's kid-sister. This guy dropped the discount rate. Why? To pump more money into the financial markets. What's he pumping into. Take Freddie Mac for example, which is about to blow up. Or Fannie Mae, or Fannie May Not, for that matter. What's happening. People are cashing out on their mortgages. Because of a fake, a fraud, the estimated value of real estate properties is rising. There's no improvement in them, they're just rising. So therefore, people are invited to come to the bank, to rewrite their mortgages, and to cash out. They're paying their food bill by cashing out on increasing their mortgages. This is being pumped by Alan Greenspan, the Witch of Endor's sister.

What is going to happen? We're now near the zero-percent level of discount rate. This is hyperinflationary. What is going to happen? The whole financial system is about to blow. We don't know what date it will blow, but it's about to blow. What will happen on the day it blows? Well, before it blows, all the suckers of the world saying that the financial market is going up, that you can cash out on your mortgages now and get some more cash to eat by taking out a larger mortgage which the banks will now go along with because Alan Greenspan is fixing it, you're going to go more deeply into debt. What will happen? The interest rate will go from near to zero percent, suddenly to 7 or 10 percent. What then happens to all the suckers who invested in this economy? We know what will happen? People will die. Banks will close. Firms will close. Government institutions will close. People will sit starving in the streets who thought they had an income and savings the week before, all wiped out because Alan Greenspan jacked the interest rate up from near zero percent to 7-10 percent.

And that is about to happen! That's the world situation-a service economy. What's the problem? The problem is, we don't have infrastructure, we don't have a transport system, we don't have a health care system, or not much of one, we don't have an education system, we don't have a power generation and distribution system, we don't have a water management system, we don't have industries-they're being closed down. The machine tool industry is being closed down. Automobile companies are selling cars below cost and giving cash back premiums to purchasers, and they're going bankrupt. And the industries that are tied to the automobile industry, are going bankrupt. What happens then without industries, without farms, without these institutions, on the day the Great Crash occurs because Alan Greenspan jacks the interest rate up to 7-10 percent? What happens then? We're finished.

That's the contingency I'm worried about dealing with. That's one of the problems I have to deal with. I know exactly what to do about that. No one else who is even thinking about running for president has the guts to do it. I'll do it. And therefore, the point is to go back to recognizing that monetary values and paying people for prostitution and the moral equivalence of prostitution at McDonalds, or on stockmarkets-stock brokers are all parasites, that's your service economy. All of your financial advisors are parasites. No use, no need for them in the economy. We don't need them, and they'll be on the streets soon anyone, all of them, or nearly all of them. So, therefore, you come back and say, what's an economy. An economy is food, it's the production of food, it's the production of essential services, of essential infrastructure, it's capital investment and improvement in productive facilities and public works. It's health care, it's education; it's physical values.

And when you say a service economy, this is what happened in Ancient Rome. Slavery was introduced on a large scale following the Second Punic War. The parasites of Rome were developing imperial power to loot the entire region of adjoining nations. Shut down production of food and production inside Italy. The people of Italy were supported by services, at the Coliseum, watching the gladiators kill each other, or the lions trying to eat Christians, or some kind of entertainment like that. What happened to Rome? What's happening to us? We became a service economy, we became a parasite sucking the blood of the world. We have been living on and regulating the prices of other currencies. We have been looting our neighbors to the south, in Central and South America. We have been looting Africa. We have been looting Asia by our power of control over finance through the IMF and World Bank system, and through banking generally. Now that is coming to an end, and the 40-year fraud of a shift from the most productive economy on the planet, to a services economy which is a predator sucking the blood of other nations, at a time when the other nations aren't going to put up with the sucking, we're finished.

I know how to fix the problem, but I have to recognize the problem, and you do too, because we're going to have to fix it. This thing is coming. It's here. The system is finished, and the question is do we know what to do about it on the day the Great Crash comes? I do, that's my job. And because of the kinds of figures I've described, which we've got on my campaign site-the tables, the figures, the charts, and so forth which indicate this problem, how to measure it. But always think not of money. Think about physical values. Think about the things that serve human life, that increase the productive powers of labor that enables us to produce wealth, to satisfy human essential needs, think about that. And treat money as the idiot it is. Especially when George Bush signed the paper.

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