Well, I should start with telling people, we had an occasion for grief here today. A long-standing associate of about a quarter-century died very unexpectedly and suddenly, and so that has caused a certain amount of shock here. But the reason I mention it -- this was Romie Schauerhammer -- the reason I mention it is because it's relevant, I think, under these circumstances, which affect many of us, directly or indirectly, to reflect on immortality and politics.

The thing I remember most about Romie, most recently, one incident, was, she participated in a Schiller Institute Dichterpflaenzchen event here in Germany, in Wiesbaden, and she played a very special role in presenting the case of Lessing. Now, the significance of that is, that actually in life, we seldom really know people. Oh, I think I have more fortune than most in that, but generally, people really don't know other people. They know their opinions, they know their faces, they know events and incidents, but they really don't know the inside of the other person's mind.

And in this case, what I remember of Romie -- she died this morning, shortly after 9 our time here -- is that one incident, which came immediately to my mind: That is her. That incident, which was, actually she was being creative to present a role in the presentation of Lessing, and that thing that she presented, just stuck immediately in my mind. That was her personality.

That's what we sort of cling to, don't we? If we have decent relations. Also, if we study the work of great minds before, great leaders in society. This is something which is extremely important. It's the issue raised by Shakespeare in defining Hamlet's failure as being a fear of immortality. Which is, he fled to death, like a death wish, because he could not face the idea of immortality -- which is what Shakespeare details through Hamlet, in the famous Third Act soliloquy.

But anyway, so, what we have now as a problem in the United States, in particular -- also in Europe -- we have a generational conflict, between the so-called Baby Boomer generation, people who entered adulthood, oh, about 1963-64, or later, into 1972, who became, partly directly through the rock-drug-sex counterculture, but others as just part of the same generation, became influenced by what became known as the "now generation." The "me generation," and so forth.

And this went together with a change of society from a producer society, to a consumer society. So, we have in the "now generation" are people who in their adult lives, have lived -- lived in Europe or the Americas, or the United States, in particular -- as part of a "now society," or consumer society culture. Therefore, their sense of connection to reality is very shallow. And they think as consumers. And they think even emotionally as consumers, which is why their marriages are so unstable. Their interpersonal relations generally are so unstable. Because they're in mood swings, as they age. And the mood swings involve me, me, me, me, me.

Now, these people, who are now approaching 60, or slightly less or more, had children. Some of you are, as young adults, children of people of that "now generation." You find yourself in a "no future" generation, a society which, on the surface, has no future. Things are going down. Conditions are becoming worse. Illusions are being popped. We're getting into the threatened death of society, with crazy wars, a government that people are afraid of. Political parties whose leaders are really not leaders -- they're a mess. There are some decent people out there, but on the general impression of the young person today, it's a dismal society. And they sense a no-future.

Now, this question of "no future" brings up the issue of, what is the future? We're all going to die, sooner or later. We don't know when. So therefore, what is our interest? Our interest is what we do with the life we have. And that generally means not only benefits of our life to people who live with us, live around us, but to coming generations. And also, looking backward, to thinking about parents, and grandparents, and so forth, who may have gone through difficult times. And thinking about what they wished for their children and grandchildren. And wondering, perhaps, maybe you can make real what some of your forebears wished. It's a sense of immortality. It's a very practical of immortality, but it's very meaningful.

So, in approaching a crisis -- and we're in an existential crisis, internationally -- we have to think in such serious terms. Think not superficially, but we have to plunge deeply into ourselves, to find out what are we really committed to. What is really important to us? What would we not be ashamed of discovering, was important to us, when we look at the world around us.

With that, let me proceed.

Now, there's a couple of things I want to mention before getting into the main theme of my presentation today.

First of all, as you probably know, because I think that Harley's the kind of person who would confide this secret to you, that we have done a re-examination of the FEC figures on the relative standing of candidates. And we have produced a report, which will be widely circulated in the coming days, as a mass leaflet, reporting the fact. The fact is, that, in terms of support, in terms of numbers of Americans who have contributed to my campaign, I am the number-one candidate for the Democratic nomination, perhaps for any President today.

We're not number one in money, but that's because some of the candidates had money from their previous campaigns they dumped into this one.

So, the situation is such that, at the time when the Democratic Party leadership, especially the fascists of organized-crime related types in the Democratic Party, are trying to squeeze us out, and squeeze me out, the fact is, the brutal fact is, I'm the number one candidate for President in terms of popularity, as measured by financial supporters -- sometimes very small financial support, but supporters -- in the United States. And I have that significance also as an international figure, in which I'm more significant as an international figure than any of the other candidates in the United States, except perhaps the current President. He's significant only because he is President.

That's a strategic phase-shift, for us to have this fact, and to be able to report this fact. This means that, as we organize, we organize around this fact. We're organizing around a candidacy, which is the number-one candidacy in terms of financial supporters, numbers of financial supporters, in the United States today. And that is a very important fact.

Now, we've also had recently an interesting and disgusting case: It's called the Gingrich case. I sometimes call him Congressman Gangrene. Armitage of the State Department has had something else to say about him, which is also quotable, but I'll leave it up to him, to say that.

Now, Gingrich was a big mistake, in a sense. Gingrich is a fascist. Literally. Not, in the sense of a descriptive terms, or an opinion: This Man is a fascist by profession. He's a fascist of the Leo Strauss type, Professor Leo Strauss type. He's of that school. He is a long-standing associate of "Bugsy" Rumsfeld, the current Secretary of Defense of the United States. They're associated since the 1970s, in a project called the "Revolution in Military Affairs," which the four-star generals call the Revulsion in Military Affairs.

Now he was run out of government, essentially, partly by us. We were a key factor in getting him kicked out as the Speaker of the House. He did the rest for himself. He made an ass of himself, and was kicked out, as Speaker of the House. Somebody decided to bring him back. Obviously, the way it happened: Rumsfeld brought him back, with the idea of trying to drive Colin Powell out of the position of Secretary of State, and possibly even making Gingrich the Secretary of State.

It didn't work too well. It was a very bad idea, of the people behind Gingrich, but it's blown apart, and it's blown the politics wide open. Gingrich is not that important, but the significance of the scandal around Gingrich being blown up now, is one of the circumstances in which we will be living in the coming days and weeks.

Axioms of the Pantheo-cons

Now, the main subject I want to take up is, something that's related to a paper I wrote on the subject of the "Pantheo-cons." Pantheo-cons are people who come from various professed religious denominations, often would be considered total competitors of each other, but they've come together as an association, of a kind of right-wing association, of right-wing pseudo-Catholics, some of whom, many of whom, hate the Pope; violent Ku Klux Klan types of Protestants, the so-called fundamentalists; and Jews, who are fascists by profession. And they're all joined in a kind of unity, around the policies which are pushed by people like Vice President Cheney, the war policies of Cheney and people like that, who are out to build a world imperial fascist system. That's simple fact.

So, what has happened is, you have a political movement, not in the parties as such -- it's across the parties -- which have a quasi-religious/political movement of different religious groupings: The Southern Protestants are usually anti-Semites, so what are traditional anti-Semites doing in affiliation with Jewish fascists? That sort of thing. So, what we have is a kind of pantheon, a retooling of religions, or a group of religions, around a common theme, very much as was the case with the Roman Empire, in which the Roman Emperor was actually the dictator of religions. And the religions of the Roman Empire, was called a pantheon.

You had different strange-looking objects sitting in the building called the Pantheon. Each one represented a different religion, but all the religions were under the supervision of the Emperor, who made the rules as to what the religions could profess, believe, and practice.

What we have now, as you see the conflict between these Pantheonic fascists, around the Bush policy, especially around Cheney, and the so-called traditional religions -- the Pope, most of the traditional Protestant churches, and also, honest, ordinary Jews, religious Jews -- will have nothing of this kind of policy. And yet, this is a religious movement, which is the religious movement considered the underpinning of the current Bush Administration -- better called the Cheney Administration -- which is, in a sense, running the policy, driving the United States into one war after the other, and destroying the U.S. economy in the process.

So, this is the problem.

Now, the question is, what does this mean? The existence of this kind of pantheism -- and I call it a pantheo-con. Not a neo-con, but a pantheo-con.

What this reflects is the way in which the mind of populations is controlled, en masse, by some kind of Big Brother operation. Now, the way this works, is not by getting people to adopt opinions, but to adopt certain axiomatic assumptions, like the definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Euclidean geometry.

Now, if you believe in a Euclidean geometry, which doesn't happen to be a very good geometry -- it's false -- but if you believe in it, the way it's presented, then your mind -- as long as you are playing the game of geometry -- will always be governed by these sets of assumptions called definitions, axioms, and postulates.

The same way in politics. If we accept certain assumptions, what are called common beliefs, or generally accepted beliefs, which lurk in the back of our mind, we will find that we will form our opinions, and make our decisions on action, under the control of these axiom-like assumptions. Therefore, in dealing with mass behavior, we have to study, first of all, the underlying deep assumptions which determine, the way people form their opinions, and form their behavior.

For example, let's take the case of the Constitution of the United States. Look at the Preamble.

The Preamble contains three principles. The first principle is that the government of the United States, and its people, are sovereign in every matter within the boundaries of the United States. We are a sovereign nation, and the government is responsible for, in a sense, everything. It's accountable for everything.

But the government is not considered legitimate, according to the second principle, unless the government is efficiently committed, to what is called the "general welfare." Which is called in Greek, agape, or in ancient Classical Greek, in Plato's Republic. Or, it's known as the common good, as it was understood by the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and by Benjamin Franklin. The principle of the general welfare: the government of the United States is responsible to efficiently promote and defend the general welfare of all people, of all its people.

Third, the Preamble of the Constitution. The government is responsible to serve the interest of posterity, as much or more than the presently existing population. That is, the future generations. Again, coming back to this generational thing. Good government, principled government, depends upon the commitment of an existing generation, to its role as a sovereign people, to its role in ensuring the promotion of the general welfare of all of the people, and also, above all, to ensure the well-being of posterity of the yet-unborn. Right?

In our system of law, when the Revolution is accepted for what it was, under our system of law, there is no part of the U.S. Federal Constitution, nor can there be any Federal law enacted, or any amendment made, which conflicts with the implications of these three principles: sovereignty, general welfare, and posterity.

The problem we have today, in government, is that we have, since Franklin Roosevelt in particular, and since Kennedy tried to revive the general welfare, before he was killed, we have turned away from the Constitutional principle of both sovereignty, and the general welfare, and with the change that occurred in our society with the Baby Boomer generation's entering adulthood, in the late 1960s, since that time, we've turned away from posterity. We no longer accept what we're giving to posterity, as a standard of performance of government, or ourselves, today. And that's where the problem lies.

So, therefore, these ideas, these general ideas, which are analogous in law, and in opinion-making generally, to the definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Euclidean geometry, these kinds of ideas, called general principles, are the key to understanding politics.

Take for an example, empiricism.

Now, empiricism is a system which was invented by a very evil gentleman, called Paolo Sarpi, who was the tyrant of Venice for some decades. And he had a house servant who was called Galileo Galilei. And the house servant was really -- he was a pig, essentially, and Paolo Sarpi instructed his house servant, Galileo, to promote a system of thought called empiricism. This was the system of thought, which was, under Paolo Sarpi's and Galileo's influence, was taught to Francis Bacon, in the early part of the 17th Century, in England. Thomas Hobbes was personally a student of Galileo. This was the system of John Locke. This is the doctrine of Mandeville, the doctrine of Adam Smith. It is also the doctrine of Quesnay, the putative founder of Physiocratic dogma. It is the doctrine of free trade today -- is a product of that.

How does it work?

The argument which is made, also by Hobbes, and also by Francis Bacon, implicitly, but most specifically, by Locke, by Mandeville, by Adam Smith, and by Quesnay: The argument is, in effect, that there are little green men -- in effect -- under the floorboards of reality, who are controlling the throw of the dice, so that some people become rich, and some people are destitute. This is called free trade. That there's a principle, a hidden principle, called the Invisible Hand, the little green men under the floorboard, which is determining the future of mankind. The argument is, that you must not interfere with that Invisible Hand.

Now, Mandeville, Bernard Mandeville, who was one of the predecessors of Adam Smith, and who is essentially the founder of the American Enterprise Institute today, argued that, the way that you get good in society, through free trade, is by promoting, and allowing, evil. His argument was, that private vices promote public good. By letting any practice occur, without intervention, you will get automatically, by the intervention of the Invisible Hand, this little god under the floorboards of reality, will automatically produce the best good. Therefore, you must not interfere with it.

So, the modern economic systems of free trade are based on that. The so-called Anglo-Dutch liberalism, and parliamentary democracy of that form, are based on this assumption. That government must not try to interfere with evil, in the form of free will. Let people do anything they want to. Don't interfere. Let prices be managed anyway the people want to manage them. Let competition settle everything. This is free trade. And it's a form of insanity. As long as people believe that free trade is good, then, as we've seen over the recent years, the population will allow itself to be self-destroyed.

Now, another word for this is, "the price is right." "The price is right" means you can get what you want, at the cheapest price. Even if you had to steal to get it.

So, therefore, we no longer have protectionism, the thing that got us out of the Great Depression, the thing that got us through World War II. The thing that got us through recovery of the U.S. economy, and the European economy, during the immediate postwar period, was regulation. It was a regulated stability among currencies, a fixed-exchange rate system. It was regulation of trade and tariffs. It was regulation of fair prices, in terms of goods: that is, to guarantee to a person who produced, the right to be able to sell their goods at a price which is a fair price, the price at which they can continue to produce those goods.

This was all thrown away, in the late 1960s and after that, after 1971. So, this is the way in which the belief in free trade, causes people to accept ideas which cut their own throats.

You have a similar thing, related thing, on empiricism, in the difference between physical economy, and accounting. Some people think that financial accounting is the standard of economics. Well, it's not!

If you look at the Triples Curves, which I've used as pedagogical examples for education, you see there are three curves, which go from 1966, approximately, to the present. One is, you have a rising curve of so-called financial market values, all kinds of financial markets. This has been galloping ahead.

You have also an increase of the amount of money being created, and this money is being used to pump up the financial markets, to drive up the so-called financial market values. As by Volcker, and Greenspan, and so forth.

But, if you look at the third curve, you find that the actual per-capita output in the United States, the consumption of people in especially the lower 80% of family-income brackets, has been collapsing. That infrastructure's been collapsing. The production and generation and distribution of power has been collapsing. Water management is collapsing. The railroad system is going out of existence. The airlines are now crashing -- not necessarily the planes yet, but the airlines as such are crashing. All kinds of things are crashing.

The health-care system is crashing. The cities are crashing. The budgets are crashing. Forty-six of the 50 states are bankrupt, as a result of this kind of policy. So, obviously, it is not financial values, as a financial accounting reports them, which determines reality. It is physical values. It is food on the table. It is health care. It's improvement in the productive powers of labor, partly through education, through investment. It's management of our water system. It's management of the environment. It's management of the production of energy, and its distribution. These are the kinds of things that determine physical values, and physical profitability.

But, instead, people say, "No, financial accounting, financial accounting." You have people in the Congress -- idiots! Imagine, idiots in the Congress -- you talk about the economy, and they say, "How's the market doing today?" The market? The market is fake, and it's about to collapse anyway. The IT bubble collapse. The threatened, now, real estate bubble collapse in California, and on the East Coast, around Washington, and elsewhere. These bubbles are about to collapse. Truth is the physical values.

Now, what is productive, then?  Some people say, productive is that which makes money. Not necessarily so. We're not a very productive economy. Look at the physical condition of life, of our environment, our power systems, our water systems, our transportation systems, our educational systems, our health-care systems. No, we're not a productive society -- we're a collapsing society.

But what is product? Productive is the development of the mind of the individual, and the development of the opportunity for that individual to use that mind, to make a physical improvement in the quality of a product, the way it's produced, or just a physical improvement in the environment which helps society. That's productive.

But this concept of productive, is gone. Because you have axiomatic assumptions -- definitions, axioms, and postulates which are absurd. These axioms act as a kind of religion, and the ideas that you get with the combination of right-wing Catholics, who are generally against the Pope, as the American Enterprise Institute illustrates the point; racist, traditionally Ku Klux Klan-type Protestants, and Jews who are fascists, as fascist as Hitler. The common features, the common beliefs, the common standards, as typified by Wolfowitz, by Dick Cheney and his crowd, by Bolton in the State Department, Wurmser in the State Department, Wolfowitz in the Defense Department, and Bugsy Rumsfeld -- these kinds of values are now dictated, as by Ashcroft, the Attorney General, to be axiomatic values.

Policies on foreign policy, preventive war, the use of nuclear weapons, preventive nuclear war as a policy of Dick Cheney, and therefore of the current Administration -- these have become definitions, axioms, and postulates of the system. People are saying, "You have to go along with the system. You have to go along to get along." Going along to get along means, don't fight any of that current of popular opinion, which is represented by these kinds of assumptions, these kinds of definitions, axioms, and postulates.

So, we've come to the question of how we conduct the campaign. Some people say, you have to address "the issues." "The issues." And they have a list of issues. People go to school, secondary teachers give children lists of issues, and the children are supposed to harass the candidates, any kind of candidate, with these lists of issues. "Where do you stand on the list of issues? Of each of the so-called issues of the campaign?"

Who says they're the issues of the campaign? Most of them are totally idiotic, and have no relevance to anything of importance to the United States or its people.

Well, then, what should a campaign be based on? Should not a campaign be based on principles which the United States Constitution was founded upon, as its Preamble expresses it? Do we not wish to have a world, which is safe for our nation to live in, hoping that others in the world would share the same principles? The idea of the sovereignty of each nation? The sovereign responsibility of government, to provide for the general welfare of the people of its nation? The sovereign responsibility of government to provide for posterity? And do not we desire a world in which nations -- each independent, each sovereign -- cooperate, in order to promote mutual benefits, consistent with those principles for each of them.

To me, that's real politics.

Now, the question of what the issues are, to me, are: what you have to do, now, in the current situation, to ensure the sovereignty of the United States, and its people; to ensure the general welfare of its people; to ensure the welfare of the posterity of the people, and of the nation. Whatever that takes, is what the issue should be. Whether somebody wants to park on the left side of the street, or the right side of the street, or so forth, these things are distractions from reality.

Then, the question is, what about this issue about "public," or "private"? What about so-called free enterprise?

Well, the President is not exactly -- our President is not a genius, as many of you may have observed. He doesn't understand these things. He honestly, the one thing that I know about him that's honest, he honestly does not understand any of it. He's honestly not qualified to be a President, but neither was Al Gore, so what about the dumb people who reduced the candidates to that selection, between those two?

Well, the issue is, there are, under our Constitution, there are certain things which we must take care of under government: Federal, state, local government. These are matters which pertain to all the people, and all the territory. This includes the responsibility of government to make sure there's health care for all the people. That doesn't mean the government has to provide it, but it has to make sure that arrangements have been made under which everybody will be covered.

Sanitation, education. We don't have to always provide all the education ourselves. Certainly, we don't want the Federal government running every school. But we have to be sure that education is provided -- the necessary education is provided.

Health care, disease control, all these kinds of things. Power: the generation and distribution of power. The regulation of prices, so that everyone has a fair access to power, a fair access to transportation, and that sort of thing. This is the responsibility of government.

But then, there's another question. What's the difference between man and a beast? We are not simply animals, who are taking care of our interests. We are human beings, unlike the beasts, who each have within us, the capability of discovering and applying universal principles; to learn them by re-enacting the discovery of other people's discoveries. By transmitting these discoveries. By applying these discoveries.

So, therefore, we want in society a certain kind of general private entrepreneurship, typified by the independent family farmer, the independent manufacturer, the independent professional. We want a person who is using his or her brain, and his or her ability to generate and apply principles that advance the general condition of mankind, increase our productivity, and help solve our problems.

Therefore, we have to have a form of government, as Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary outlined some of these things: a form of government which is committed, first of all, to public responsibility for basic economic infrastructure. Either the government provides it, on the Federal, state or local level, or the government charters private utilities to do it, and makes laws governing that, to ensure that the general welfare, in terms of this, is taken care of.

We also must promote, and protect, individuals who are, as entrepreneurs, are developing our farms, developing our machine tool plants, and so forth, and our professions, our learned professions.

So, we don't need a so-called free enterprise society, one in which you minimize the role of government. We need a rational division, between the responsibilities of government, and the opportunities of the entrepreneur, and the individual in general.

So, that's what we stand for, I think, today. That's where I stand, and we therefore have to resist -- recognize and resist -- the way in which the American people have been largely brainwashed, by being conditioned to accept the equivalent of definitions, axioms, and postulates which are false, and limiting their opinions to things which conform to those assumptions. And the case, when you see the pantheo-cons, this bunch of fools, who are the main constituency of Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft, you see them running the country, you see the policies on warfare, and so forth, being run by our government now, you must recognize, that a mental illness is controlling the country. That mental illness is a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, which is causing the generality of the population to behave in a way which conforms to, and tolerates, this kind of misgovernment.

That is what I have to say at this point.

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