Schlanger: Who wants to start? Come on up here. Okay, speak loudly--bel canto.

LaRouche: Not belly canto!

Question: Good morning, Mr. LaRouche. Thank you so much for addressing us. I'm an organizer in the L.A. office. Well, it seems like we've really messed up our chances, as a nation, of disarming North Korea's nuclear weapons peacefully. As a Korean, the son of Korean immigrants, I don't exactly want to see the Korean Peninsula go up in flames; but, you've done a lot of work, trying to bring about a different political environment, in which the various countries in Northeast Asia could cooperate, and get a peaceful resolution to the North Korean nuclear standoff, I guess, if you will. Can you give me your thoughts on that, and how we can move forward, even in the kind of Iraq mess period, to fix the situation?

LaRouche: We've got a very interesting situation. You know, this government may be largely insane, but it's not entirely insane. Even President George Bush, the incumbent President, did reject Gingrich, definitely--and in no uncertain terms--whether it's because Gingrich stepped into an area he's not supposed to. But, what Gingrich did: Gingrich went after the Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Now, if Colin Powell were to be run out of the government, or forced to resign, the Bush Administration would disintegrate. And people in the White House know that.

Therefore, when Gingrich, on behalf of his buddy, "Bugsy" Rumsfeld, moved in to attack Powell, on Middle East policy and other policies, the White House, in its own self-defense, had to react--and kick Gingrich in the face. They didn't kick Cheney in the face; and they haven't kicked Rumsfeld in the face, yet. They should have. But so, it's not an entirely hopeless situation. Sometimes you can deal with the situation, even when don't have a "good guy" in the picture, you can sometimes operate on circumstances, to move things in a useful direction.

Now, no one with any brains, wants to force North Korea into a confrontation with its limited number of nuclear weapons. Nobody wishes to do that. The majority of people in Asia, and in Europe, do not want a heated-up conflict between North and South Korea. They don't want it. Apart from--in Japan--I don't know where the Prime Minister stands; he's rather a funny fellow--but other Japanese do not want that kind of conflict.

So therefore, there are people from the old Bush crowd, typified by Scowcroft or Donald Gregg, or so forth, in the situation, who would agree with me, on the importance of an open-door approach to discussions with the government of North Korea.

Evidently, something has occurred to that effect this past week. There were discussions in China. One should not look for remarkable results from the discussions themselves. The most important thing, is that the discussions have occurred--and they did not involve Bolton from the State Department. If Bolton from the State Department had been involved in those discussions, he would have blown them up! So, he's one of these Cheney types. He shouldn't be in government at all; but, he's there.

So, anyway: So far we've covered that hurdle. It's still dangerous. But, my view is this. You have two ways to look at this: You have a defensive position, by some people in government--including inside the Bush camp--who are simply saying--and I think people like former President Carter, former President Clinton, and many other Democrats, who've come into this on that side; the question is, what's the bottom-line real solution for the problem. Now, my view, the only way we're going to avoid war--and we're stumbling into it--is, we're going to have to do that by putting the economic questions first.

First, the economic issue: North Korea is a very poor country. It has, within it, a relatively small portion of privileged people, associated with the government, with the military. So therefore, you have, in a sense, a conflict on the ground, between very poor people, and a government by a group of people who are trying to retain their relative privileges. There is no hope for this situation, if you leave it that way. So therefore, what we have to do this, is, do this: We have the Sunshine Policy, put forth by the people in South Korea--some of whom I've talked with, and whom we've been in touch with directly or indirectly over some time.

Now the policy here, the Sunshine Policy, starts on two railroad systems which used to be in the united Korea. One branch of the system goes into China. The other branch goes north towards Siberia, toward the Trans-Siberian Railroad route. Now, if these railroad systems are repaired and restored, brought up to snuff, then we have, from Pusan at the tip of Korea, to Rotterdam and so forth in Europe, we have continuous lines of transportation of goods, by either the Siberian route, which goes through Russia, Kazakhstan and so forth; and through China, which is called the "Silk Road" route.  So therefore, we have a revolution in the trade relations, between North Asia and Europe.

At this time, Europe is bankrupt, like the 46 or more Federal states in the United States are bankrupt, now--hopelessly so. So therefore, Europe needs new markets. The great new markets are in Asia, which going through a large-scale development program, as in China. But, Japan is bankrupt, financially. It's banking system is hopelessly bankrupt. But Japan still has a core industrial economy. That industrial economy is marketable, in terms of long-term contracts for industrial technology, into the countries of North Asia and Asia generally.

So therefore, China, the Koreas, Japan, Russia, and so forth, have a common interest in peaceful economic cooperation, there. Western Europe has a vital interest, in that cooperation, in the Koreas.  My view is, in this case, as many other cases, the overriding approach must be an approach toward economic reconstruction of a planet, which is now in the midst of a general collapse of the existing monetary-financial system. Therefore, I'd start from the standpoint of the fight for the reform, of the present international monetary-financial system, around a set of recovery agreements--long-term treaty agreements on trade and development. And these kinds of things present fundamental solutions for problems, which otherwise may lead to conflict.

In other words, if you let--take the case of the Middle East: There's not enough water, presently in area around Israel and Palestine, to meet the needs of all the people in that area. So obviously, if you don't have water development, you're going to  have conflict. No military or other agreement is going to eliminate that conflict, if you don't have water. That means, we have to have power, too. We have to have enough water, enough power, to meet the needs of all of the population, and their development opportunities. Therefore, we need a generalized Middle East economic approach to providing a peace policy, in the Middle East. The road map thing is coming up now.

Similarly in other areas, such as North Korea. The real solution will come through the application of a general economic recovery to each of these areas, as the basis of building the conditions of life and opportunities, which people would rather fight to defend, than fight over. And, that's the basic approach.

Question: Hi, Mr. LaRouche; I'm from San Leandro. I was wondering exactly how issue-based politics has been destructive. I mean, is it just that people aren't taking the right approach to the right issues? Is it enough to have just kind of an over-arching, epistemological philosophy in tackling the Presidency?

LaRouche: Yeah, it is, partly that. The problem is, issue-oriented policy in the United States is disgusting. It's immoral. What it means, it's actually, it works like single issues: You take some beef, by some group in the population, and you say, that group in the population will support a certain candidate, who supports that beef. Another may be in a community; it may be in a local area; it may be in a category of sexual preferences, or whatever.

Therefore, what happens is, you divide the population into a zoo, of different kinds of animals. Each animal has its own cage, its own single issue, or two or three single issues. Some animals have related issues; they gang up. So, you no longer have a national policy. What you have is, people squabbling over scraps, instead of solving the problem.

For example: The general problem in the United States is, what? General health care: In 1973, the Nixon Administration, under the influence of a Democrat who was a pig--Moynihan--introduced what was called the HMO Bill. The HMO Bill, which has killed probably more people than AIDS, was a replacement for the Hill-Burton legislation, which had worked in the postwar period, and had served us well.

So then, you had this crazy thing of Hillary Clinton, who, in an absolute act of mass idiocy, produced a health-care bill which is a monument to insanity, in terms of legislation--thousands of features, and it all must be voted up without amendment. A piece of insanity! All we have to do, is go back and look at the Hill-Burton legislation, which is a few pages, which set forth the principal policy of the United States on health care. It worked! The monster that Hillary Clinton passed, almost destroyed the Clinton Administration. It was just too much to swallow.

So, these attempts to deal with health-care issues, and other issues, on a single-issue basis, is insanity. What we have to have is, number one, a policy, on any area of problem: a policy. Then, you have to elect people, and employ people to implement that policy. Then you have a monitoring device, to determine how well the policy is being conducted. Now, in our system, the Federal government, this works generally in two ways: You have the agencies of the Executive branch of government (or, we used to have them). Those agencies were supposed to implement the law. In other words, as the law went down--say, health care: So, you would have a department of government, which was responsible for health care. The Hill-Burton legislation would be the basic law. In that department, you would also have a monitoring capability, which would go out to the people in society, different parts of society, and determine how the law was being implemented; how efficiently, or effectively it was being implemented.

So, you had a Federal government responsibility. You then had a Congressional responsibility: permanent standing Congressional committees, with oversight over these areas, assigned oversight, would also investigate, to see how well the law was working: Was it enough? Was it too much? Whatever. Or, if it was failing.

You would then have, also, on the state level, and on the local level, you would have corresponding agencies, who would be participating in the implementation of this law, and they, too, would be involved implementing the law, and also in determining how well the implementation was performing.

So, that generally is the approach to sound government. You make broad definitions of law, clearly understandable--not too many pages--four, five, twenty pages. Remember some of the greatest, important scientific papers or discovery ever produced, consisted of only a few pages, or a couple dozen pages of writing. So, you make the basic statement, not simple, but concise, short, to the point. Everyone should understand it. Now, you put it into departments of government, or private sector, if that's the agency involved. You then follow up on that, in administration, both in positive administration, regulatory administration, and also in auditing. And that's the way good law works.

For example, we have homeless people in the United States. In my impute, the law should be, there should be no homeless people in the United States. You do not require a whole bunch of single issues, on that issue. We know what it means to have people have homes. Therefore, we say, we're not going to have homeless people. We say that nobody's going to be denied necessary health care.  It will happen. And people are going to be assigned to carry that out. We're going to make broad guidelines on how it's going to be carried out.

So, if you go through all the things that government should be responsible for, and you find that you can reduce that--and I've been doing this for a long time, in terms of proposals, and looking at other people's work at the same time. You make a few broad things, which affect everybody in a whole area of concern, and that is sufficient. Because you're not trying to write a recipe, a mechanical recipe for reinventing the wheel. What you're trying to do, is simply assign people, responsible people, or authorize responsible people, to do something, and authorizing the follow-up on that proposal to make sure it's being competently implemented, or discover if changes are needed.

And, that's the way politics should be made. We should not have these single issues. They're simply ways of dividing people, of confusing them, of setting one group of people against another. Whereas, if we design legislation the way we used, in the best times in the past, we find that relatively simple Federal legislation--simple in terms of number of pages--administered by good Congressional committees, by well-staffed agencies of government, can do the job. And, don't make too many "'causes," and "whereas," and "whereats," because you'll just make a mess of it. And, keep the single issues out.

Question: Lyn, I'm from the San Leandro office. The question is, what is the mission for the youth? As a member of the youth movement, I've heard different answers from different people, as far as this question goes. It's primarily been to build the Renaissance, which I imagine, to take no less than 25 to 50 years, or more. And, secondly, the answer that I get is, "to get Lyn in the White House." But, I also hear that, this isn't really necessarily the focus. And thirdly, from reading speeches which you gave for cadre schools like this one, I've gotten the notion that it is to inspire the older generation to change their thinking, for the best of their and our future, which, again, I would think would make the focus: to organize the people in public office, and portend a better future relatively soon--more or less, five to ten years, or something like that. But, the reason why I ask this question, is to have more of a clear idea of what I'm actually doing politically, when I'm out in the streets, and to get a sense of what are the actual means to fulfill this end?

LaRouche: [chuckling] Okay, good! I got you.

Well, first of all, running for President generally means, these days, some guy running around in a mental clown suit, saying, "I want to be President. And, I'll make everything funny." Or, we get Bozos, the other type of guy in the clown suit.

And, I'm not running for President in the year 2023. I expect to be President in the year 2023--that's different. I'm running to be, effectively, the President, actively in the wings, the shadow President now. You see, President Bush has a shadow, right now: It's called Dick Cheney, otherwise known as "Dirty Dick" Cheney. He and "Bugsy" Rumsfeld are pretty much running the government. And Bush doesn't know what government is, yet. He knows he's in it, and he thinks he's boss, but he doesn't know what that means.

All right. Now, I'm running as a shadow President. That means that I'm doing the things--I have no powers of the Presidency; I have no particular powers--but I'm moving--you see, I'm travelling in Europe, right now. I'm moving in world affairs, as well as our national affairs, to give direction in the way, by policy enunciation and presenting ideas, to people who are in government, or who have been in government, or who are important political institutions, in various parts of the world. I'm providing leadership, of the type that a President should be providing, for the role of the United States as a nation, and the role of the United States in the world. So, I'm running as President, not just for becoming President.

Also, there are some characteristics of the youth movement, which are quite important for this. Now, the new characteristic of this youth movement, as opposed to those I've known of from before--except the original American Revolution was a youth movement. You look at the age of Alexander Hamilton, at the time he was a leader at Valley Forge and other things--that was a youth movement! This is your age group. They made the American Revolution. Oh, a few older guys, like Benjamin Franklin and so forth, played a role. But it was a youth movement, under the direction of what's called a Junto, led by Benjamin Franklin, which wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson actually did the handwriting, but the Declaration of Independence was authored by Benjamin Franklin, not Jefferson. Jefferson was his clerk. Similarly, it was not John Hancock that actually wrote the Federal Constitution, or the Preamble. Again, this was under the leadership of Benjamin Franklin, who represented some of the finest thinking of Europe.

So, you are a youth movement, in that sense, to me. Now, the difference is--as then: You look at some of Franklin's European sources of ideas of the things he was involved in, he was doing something analogous to what I'm doing. He was the leading scientist of the world, at that time. He played a very important part in the development of the science of electricity, and chemistry! Together with his friends, Priestley, in England, and Lavoisier, in France. He was associated with leading scientists in Sweden, in Germany, and elsewhere. And, the way the American Revolution developed, during the middle of the 18th Century, was around this body of scientific idea, for which he had a whole network of newspapers and other publications, and other devices, for mobilizing the population. So, the population of the United States, at the time of the formation of our nation, had a degree of literacy in the order of 90-plus percent! Whereas, in the United Kingdom, or Britain of that time, the literacy rate was 40%, and it was a very poor 40%. So, we were a  morally, intellectually superior people,  because of the organization of the movement led by Benjamin Franklin, with much help from Europe, from his friends in Europe.

Now, my view today, is today, unlike youth movements I've known historically, in recent times, in the 20th Century, we are different. Because we started from a principle of truth, which is why I emphasize this issue of the Gauss 1799 paper. To make the difference between scientific thinking, actual scientific thinking and truth-seeking, and empiricism, because the people that Gauss attacked--Euler and Lagrange, among others in that paper--were people who were empiricists. And, the greatest cultural and intellectual affliction, of modern European civilization, that is, European extended civilization, is the influence of empiricism and related diseases, like existentialism. And therefore, the important thing, is to have a movement based, not on empiricism, or not on opinions, or reactions to  gut feelings, but a movement of young people, who know that they are committed to truth. That doesn't mean they know all truth, it means they're committed to it.

And therefore, by being committed to truth, they can trust themselves. Because we're in a situation of special quality, in which the preceding generation, the so-called "Now Generation" or Baby-Boomer generation, has lost its historical connection. It gave up, by becoming a "Now Generation," by  becoming a consumer society generation, it gave up its moral connection to earlier and later generations. This is why there's such a conflict, within the Baby-Boomer generation, why they can't seem to find a stable form of marriage. It's why so many young people are not quite sure who their half-brothers and half-sisters are; who have a very poor sense of identity; who have a terrible education in public schools; and very little sense of real opportunity in life any more, especially after the recent years' economic collapse.

So therefore, because of the break in generations, you can not trust the older, Now Generation, as a source of tradition  to guide us in dealing with the present problems. However, if we have an effective youth movement, and that youth movement is committed to the idea of truth, of becoming masters of truth--not knowing everything, but committed to truth, then they will inspire their parents' generation into coming back and rejoining the human race--picking up their abandoned membership card from the human race.

And we see that happen: When youth move, as some of you guys move, you have changed the United States significantly. One of the reasons I'm a leading candidate, and the leading candidate in terms of financial support, popular support, in the United States today, is largely because of you! Yes, it's because of what I've done over years. I used to have as high as 25% voting support, from within the population, back in the 1980s. I'm not exactly a stumble-bum, when it comes to politics; I'm fairly good at it. Better than most of the ones I'm up against, I'm sure of that. But, you guys have changed society, in a certain degree, already, because you, as a youth movement, have stunned the attention of politicians of the older generation. They realize you represent something. And, you have demonstrated to yourselves, in that way, that you can change society, by getting the older generation, in part, to come over to our side, and to get their optimism back. And that's the whole purpose. That's really what we're up to.

Otherwise, consider us an educational movement, and educational movement of truth-seekers. We're just trying to find the truth, and we're talking about the truth with everyone, just like Socrates. We're out on the streets, like Socrates, talking about the truth. And we're talking to everyone. And we're sharing opinions with everyone--always looking for truth. And that's a very healthy way to be; it's a very happy way to be.

I know, a lot of you guys, because of your generation, you have problems. I run into them. They're reported to me. Young people bring them up to me, a lot of them; I understand. But, I understand, that your strength lies, when you are in motion. If you're sitting, one by one, or two by two, on the sidelines of the current politics, you feel impotent, and all the problems inside you, come to the fore. When you find yourself out there, organizing, mobilizing, or in discussion groups, discussing truth, you're a force! You're effective! You're good! And you know it. And, that's what we're about, isn't it?

Question: Hello,  I'm a finance student at Caltech Pomona. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how far into this recession we're currently in, and how much worse it could get, or much more there is ahead of us?

LaRouche: Oh! This is not a recession! Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho! This is the end. This is the bottom, that's dropping out. This is the bottom that's dropping out of the Doctor Dentons.

There is no possibility of the present world monetary-financial system, continuing much longer. Now, if you look at the history of these kinds of problems, and you look at how long this thing has been dying--and it has been dying--you realize that you can not predict exactly when something's going to happen. I'm the best forecaster in the world, on performance, in the past 40 years, but I would never try to predict exactly when something's going to happen. I've come close a couple of times, but I was right, when I did it, because I saw what was going to happen. And I always dictate, in forecasting, exactly what the choices are. Because, there's always a choice. There's never a simple, predetermined result: There's always a choice. That's the nature of mankind: We always have choices.

Now, the choice is this: We now have ended, as we've documented, about the year 2000, certainly--it started in 1999. Let me just go back on this, because it is a technical question, and probably requires a technical answer: In the middle of the 1990s, I was concerned about the way the Clinton Administration was going to go. We had, at that point, we had a very destructive force of the Newt Gingrich rampage, the fascist. And, he came in, as Speaker of the House in January of 1995, where he made the famous French Revolution speech, advertising himself, by description, as a fascist. He set out to destroy the U.S. government, using the ideas of Prof. Leo Strauss, of whom he is follower.

So, we got into this fight, and Clinton was on the fence. We had people in the Clinton Administration, who were defending the General Welfare, as Clinton had done, up to that point, against Gingrich's Conservative Revolution. But, at that point, Clinton capitulated. He capitulated largely under pressure from Dick Morris, and Al Gore, and people like that. It was a terrible mistake. And, he enthusiastically endorsed Gore for Vice President--it was a mistake. He should have thrown the thing open, as President.

But, I saw, and I warned at the time, that we were headed for an immediate crisis, as a result of this change in policy, which had been forced through under pressure from Gingrich. In 1997, we had what was called the "Asia crisis." It was not an Asia crisis; it was a crisis of the system, which happened to hit hard, because the speculators tried to defend the system in Europe and in the United States, by looting Asia--that's why it was called an Asia crisis. It was not that something happened in Asia, it happened that powers, centered in Europe and in the United States, especially Anglo-American power, moved in to loot Asia, as a way of trying to bail out the United States and Great Britain and so forth, from what was threatened to be a collapse crisis.

The following year, 1998, you had the GKO crisis, the Russian bond crisis. Now, the Russian bond GKOs were a fake, set up by British and American speculators, hedge funds, largely; just like the hedge funds that had set up the Asia crisis the year before. At that point, in August of 1998, when the hedge fund collapse came, the GKO bond collapse came, Clinton was convinced that I was right on the crisis, and he and his Secretary of the Treasury, and others, were moving--as he announced in New York in September--to consider some reform of the monetary system.

However, they had the Lewinsky scandal thrown at them, by Gingrich and others--Lewinsky was not the reason for the impeachment: It was Clinton's threat to move toward monetary reform, that turns all the cats and dogs against him. We, at that time, acted, with some marginal value, to stop the impeachment, or to defeat the impeachment, which succeeded. We mobilized people to mobilize some other people, and we turned the corner, and the impeachment was defeated.

But then, in October of 1998, after Clinton had backed down from the monetary reform, the problem they faced was something I had warned about, that we would face a Brazil crisis, which was due for approximately February of 1999. So, the Administration went to various people and said, "What do we do about this? How do we stop the Brazil crisis?" And George Soros and company said, "Wall of money. Print money like mad. Create money by all kinds of electronic and other means. Flood the market with money, to keep the system from collapsing, to keep the financial markets from collapsing." And that's what they did.

The result was, that in the course of 1999, we began to pick up the fact, that the rate at which money was being generated, was faster than the financial system was growing. Which meant that the stabilizing of the financial markets, depended upon a hyperinflationary printing of money--electronically, or otherwise.

In the year 2000, it became obvious to us, that this was not merely a short-term trend, because of the "wall of money" policy, but this had become a long-term, integral feature of the system. So, this was a case, as of Spring of the year 2000--election year 2000. At the time that the nominations were locked up for Bush and Gore, as the only two contending candidates for that year, the depression was already inevitable.

So, when Bush came in, after this confused mess, after this crisis in the election, I made a forecast, in January, saying what was going to happen to the Bush Administration. And I forecast two things: The aggravation of the economic crisis, which has accelerated, as I warned, since that time. Secondly, under these conditions, as it happened in Germany in 1933, the attempt of some forces to prevent a Franklin Roosevelt-type of action against the Depression, would tempt them, as the former head of the Bank of England had done in 1933, to raise the money from New York to keep Hitler's party alive, and to put Hitler into power in Germany, in January of 1933, in time to have Hitler in power, before Roosevelt would be actually inaugurated.

So, then they had the Reichstag Fire, which was organized by Goering, in Feb. 27 of 1933; on Feb. 28, 1933, a dictatorship was established in Germany, which never quit until the end of the war. And therefore, we had World War II, as a result of a coup, organized to prevent Germany from being under a government which would cooperate with Franklin Roosevelt, with Roosevelt's recovery program. Because Germany had, under Dr. Wilhelm Lautenbach, had a policy which was comparable to Roosevelt's policy, for German recovery, for dealing with the Depression. And, Lautenbach, later, as I've learned, praised Roosevelt--that is, as an economist--praised Roosevelt's program as contrasted with the failure of Hoover's program.

So, there's no question that, with the Lautenbach factor, and with von Schleicher as Chancellor, instead of Hitler, in March of 1933, that Germany and the United States would be on parallel tracks on international policy. And, under those conditions World War II would have never happened.

What I warned against, in January, was such a thing happening in the United States. It happened, on Sept. 11, 2023. And, out of the woodwork came Cheney, with a Nazi-like program, which Cheney had already had in 1991, when he was Secretary of Defense. And, that's what we're living under.

So, we're now living under a condition, where you have a President who is not competent mentally; under a world financial system, which is disintegrating by the day; you have 46 states, at least, in the United States, which could not possibly balance their budgets, their state budgets--can't do it; no way to do it. Nothing will work, except a Roosevelt-type approach. Which means we have to put the international financial system into reorganization, through receivership; bankruptcy receivership of the IMF system. That, governments can agree to do, and we must do it. It's analogous to what Roosevelt did with the bank holiday: We must do that, or we'll not get out of the mess, hmm?

And, we must also move toward measures of economic recovery, which are largely in large-scale infrastructure project stimulus, in rails, power generation and distribution, water management; keep the airline system alive, don't let it sink; rebuild the health-care system; rebuild the educational system, and a few things like that.

And, give the credit, in many cases, not just as Federal projects--there are some cases where Federal projects are needed--but also to the states. The states need credit. For example, the state of California: The state of California has an energy crisis, which was caused, largely, as a result of the crazy deregulation law. Now, what is needed, to reverse that crime, called the deregulation law (which I think more and more people in California are inclined to, right now); but the state of California requires the source of credit, given its present financial condition, which has been aggravated, precisely by deregulation. It needs the credit, which must come largely from the Federal government, directly or indirectly, for the large-scale investment in rebuilding both the generating and distribution capacity of the power industry.  You have, also, for example in California/Arizona: We have a disaster in some of the aquifers, in water management system. We need large-scale investment there.

So, necessary investments of that type, in public utility areas, can provide the stimulant, of employment and to business, which are needed to get a recovery going. If we don't do that, which is the other--that's the choice--if we don't do that, we're going to Hell.

Schlanger: Fine, Lyn. I think you answered that one! Next.

Question: Hey Lyn, I am from L.A. I'm curious as to when I'm out in the field, talking to these people that have read some of your literature, they seem to get a little bit afraid, that what we're talking about is communism or socialism, and like globalization. And, I'm not really sure how I can address them, as to correct their mistaken thinking.

LaRouche: Don't worry--that's spread, that's gossip. That's spread. You have right-wing stuff, and you have a lot of gossips out there. You get in the street, and you find--Look: If you look carefully, you go out with about five or ten of you. Now, you have a couple of people that are not only identified with me, they're really yours. Now, you go along, say five or six of you are going along the street area--you're organizing. Now, you have a couple of guys who are dressed, say, in suits and so forth, you know?--on the other side of the street, as if they're watching you, hmm? Now, these guys should be watching, who's coming toward you. And, you'll find out, that in many of these of cases, that the people who are coming toward you, with this kind of chatter, are people who are being deployed, to try to confuse you, by asking you and making these silly statements. They may be John Birchers, or similar guys, or maybe Republicans, or crazy Democrats.

But, what we have, is a pattern, and it's more conspicuous in the Washington, D.C. area than anywhere else, of the deployment of operatives--people are being deployed, because they're afraid of you. And what they're trying to do, is fix your heads, by coming around and nagging you, with crazy chatter.

Now, there are very few people in the United States today, except a few Gingrich types, huh?, who are actually concerned about communism and socialism. You have a number of John Birch Society fanatics out there, wandering around loose without their keepers. They may raise these questions. But, in general, in the United States today, people are not afraid of the bogeyman of communism or socialism. If you tried to sell them socialism, they may not agree with you. If you preach communism, they would reject you. But, they don't think it's a big bogeyman that's about to eat them. They think that George Bush is the thing that's about to eat them!

So, a lot of that stuff is phony, and brush that aside. But, as I say, if you want to have some fun, you get a couple of guys dressed in suits, looking like so-called "straight" Baby-Boomer citizens, or something (or maybe they're not so straight, but anyway), following you around or at a distance, as if they had nothing to do with you. And have them watch, what is coming at you. And, you'll often find that you've got a bunch of things that are "stuck on" you; and that's where you get that kind of conversation from.

Question: Good morning,  I am from the Houston, Texas office.

LaRouche: Aha!

Question: In the book Bridge Across Jordan, you write of the Garden of Gethsemane. My question is, where was your inspiration taken from, in this writing, and at what point to you know that you have come to that point in time of your life, that you have done all that you can, to contribute to the existence of mankind, before you depart from this Earth?

LaRouche: Well, as Christ says in there: The cup. If the cup is presented, accept it. You don't choose a time of departure. I have no plans to choose a time of departure. But, I am concerned with what I do in the meantime! And, that's the way I look at it.

But, for us, you know, we're looking at cases, like the case of Christ, or the case of Jeanne d'Arc, for example, another case of that type; you look at people, who, unlike Hamlet, when faced with sticking to their mission, or betraying it, or running away from it, decide that they would rather die, then, than lose the significance of their life for time to come.

That's the true sense of immortality. It's the sense, you have a mortal life; it has a beginning and an end, and there is no open-ended clause on permanent life. Therefore, if you understand your own self-interest, what you have to worry about, is what you choose to spend your life on. Because, it's the permanent effect of that expenditure, which is the meaning of your life for all humanity. That is your identity. That's an adult sense of identity, and people who have not yet reached that sense of identity simply have not yet reached full adulthood--at least moral and intellectual adulthood.

So, it's a "real big deal," as they say. It's simply sense. But, if people don't have that sense, then that sense of self is something outside them, and they look at somebody who has that sense of identity, and they say, "I see what they're saying. I hear what they're saying. But, I don't feel that myself, inside myself." So, it's a feeling of being outside that sense of identity. And, this is really, what is called "alienation."

Now, my concern is, is that you shouldn't feel alienated! Enjoy life. I enjoy life richly. I have no intention of parting from it. I enjoy it immensely, and I want you to enjoy it, too!

Question: Good day, Mr. LaRouche, I'm from Los Angeles. My question is, there's a lot of activity in Latin America, right now, with regard to economic policies. What do you see--how do you analyze Toledo's government in Peru? What intentions he might have? And would it be a good idea to "clone" Operation Juarez, and how can this help your campaign, and save the U.S. economy?

LaRouche: First of all, Operation Juarez never stopped! We have our dear friend, the former President of Mexico, Lopez Portillo, and we're still committed to it. [laughing]

So, it never stopped! He made an important speech in the United Nations on that subject-area. It's an historic speech by him, and it's a speech which is still alive--and he's still alive. And, I'm still alive.

In the case of Toledo: Toledo's a disaster. He's a U.S.--a coup was run against the Fujimori government. Now, the coup was run for two reasons: The coup against Fujimori was run by the United States government, during Clinton's second term of office. It was run, for two reasons. First of all, the backer of the coup, was George Soros, and George Soros is involved in drug trafficking. He's a backer of drug trafficking. And the Fujimori government, the Peruvian government, was the most efficient opponent and resister of drug trafficking in all of the Americas. More effective than the United States! Secondly, that Fujimori had made a speech in Brazil, not in the context of the Mercosur [the Common Market of the South] exactly, but in spirit. And that speech, which involved the proposal of cooperation between Peru and Brazil, and adjoining nations, was the reason--political reason, general reason--why the coup was put through, and Fujimori was thrown out; and Toledo, who is nothing, but a totally owned U.S. political figure, was put in.

Now, the institutions of Peru are still there, in [name inaud], and Peru has a very strong tradition. It's like Mexico: Mexico has a very strong tradition, the patriotic tradition of Mexico, which is what the PRI used to represent, and still does in some large degree. There are other elements, of course, as opposed to the Maximilian, which is the other faction; or the so-called "synarchists" in Central and South America.

We have problems throughout the hemisphere, in that part of the hemisphere. Colombia: the drug wars, the FARC wars; Venezuela is in a crisis; Argentina is being ground up and destroyed, by the international bankers--mass murder, by the IMF and World Bank. The IMF and World Bank are committing genocide against the people of Argentina. Brazil is interesting, and Lula is an interesting person. I'm not one of his supporters, but he's acting somewhat like the President of Brazil, as opposed to what some thought he might do, and he's done a few useful things.

So, I'm hopeful about the Americas, but I'm also have a sense of my own personal responsibility, because of my influence in various ways, in various parts of the world, including the United States, that I take it as my personal responsibility, to try to save the states of Central and South America. And I don't think it will happen, unless I do it. They need help. And I'm the one that has to provide a key margin of help, and I'm doing it.

Question: Hello Lyn, and thank you. I'm from L.A. I've been with the organization for about two years. I haven't been full-time, so I have a pretty personal question, regarding my own psychological impotence. [general laughter]

LaRouche: Oh, my God!

Q: Well, I kind of see myself as a type of Iranian Hamlet, without the nobility--[more laughter]. People here might call me a "Persian prince," because of how I act, but that doesn't really count. I can see how people, a thousand years from now, depend on us and your youth movement today, to get your ideas passed into U.S. policy, as official U.S. policy. But, I fear death, because I haven't acted selflessly in the sublime, by examples set forth by yourself, Amelia, Joan of Arc, and so forth. So, more often than not, I've chosen to put on my own shackles, you know, as a slave, and they consist largely of escaping reality, pessimism, and, to be honest, mother-dominance in my own head. [Lyn chuckles] I usually don't have a problem, helping out, writing a check, organizing here and there. But, when it comes to my own personal "me time," when after work I can be myself--and I've even read Freud or Jung!--I might have said, escape to a virtual computer world, or go hang out with a degenerate friend.

Now, these things are honestly making me crazy! What advice can you give to me, and other people like myself? And please don't pull any punches.

Thank you.

LaRouche: Well, I don't have to do much punching: You've done a good job, yourself! But, the thing is, there's a sensuous crossover, from a sense of impotence to a sense of potency. And, people have to make that decision themselves. They can be helped by example; they can be helped by discussing it; they can be helped by situation.

You know, you go through an experience, where you make a real commitment, a commitment which involves your sense of identity, and you say, "I am going to accomplish this." It doesn't have to be a big thing. It just have to be a crossover, from the sense of--do you ever find yourself feeling like you're walking through a shadow world? Where you are walking in a shadow, on the one side, and sometimes you walk into reality? Then, you walk back into the shadows? And, you wonder whether you're living in the shadows, or the reality? You wonder where the real you is living: into a kind of fantasy or a life which is organized by fantasy, and life which is real.

For example: Concern for saving a life of someone in danger. Concern for helping someone, who's in jeopardy. Putting yourself at risk for doing something you know you should do. These kinds of things give you a commitment to yourself, as an important person. Not important, because you've got the press following you around, praising you. But important, because you know that you are a needed person in society. That you do the kinds of things, and are the kind of person, who will do the kinds of things that will meet needs. That you have a sense of what is important in society; that is, what is an important need, as opposed to something which is marginal. And you're committed primarily to trying to fulfill an important need, of some kind.

When you make that attachment, which is sometimes called in psychology, "cathexis," that attachment to a sense that you are an important person, because you  have a commitment to some sense of mission, as opposed to being a person wandering in the shadows, and looking at missions, as if as a spectator from the land of shadows.

This problem is aggravated today, by television. Because people find themselves living in a television world, as a spectator of a television screen. Or, with a computer, playing games with a computer--a spectator of that. Your identity is not there. You have an identity, but you have, at the same time, this sense of lack--and this is the Hamlet sense. Hamlet, of course, flees into action--that is the other way of doing it. By killing people: That's his recreation. He enjoys doing that--he hates it, but he enjoys it. It's like an alcoholic: He finds that compulsion to take that next drink of blood. But, he has no sense of immortality, so he goes out and gets drunk, on blood. That's another kind.

But, there's also the kind, of the passive, the spectator sense. You sense yourself as a spectator of reality, and you sometimes intervene in reality. But then you leave, and you feel that, [voice dropping to whisper] "Basically, I'm a spectator!"

That's just something you have to work out with yourself. The only thing that I can do, or anybody else can do, is to help you see that, and see your way to, what is called in psycho-medical literature, cathexis.

Schlanger: I think there are a lot of people here who are willing to help him with that...

LaRouche: Okay.

Schlanger: Including himself.

LaRouche: A willing volunteer, huh?

Question: Hey, Lyn. So, looking at back at how the youth movement originally got created, which was you, about 60-70 years ago, that was based on, you had read Leibniz, and you, as a young man, attacking Kant based on Leibniz. Now I don't really know exactly what the intention was, what the center was, when the Boomers were being organized, back a number of years ago, but now we've got Gauss, and this constructive siege on the Ivory Tower, I was kind of wondering, how we did we get here? How did we wind up, how did you, how did this become the center of things, how did you get here?

LaRouche: It's very simple. It really is awfully simple when you look at it, as I can look at it from the inside.

Very early, I knew that my parents lied. And everybody else lied. It was obvious, you know. You have, company comes -- I don't know if you ever had an experience like this, but company comes to visit the parental household. And everybody is very lovey-dovey, a nice conservation -- "Oh, we must do this again." And the minute the guests are out of the house, the parents start to gossip about the guests who just left.

You said, "Uh-uh. I got honest parents, huh? Very sincere people."

Then you get into school, you get into class-mates, and even as a young child, or playmates, as a young child, and you find they're all lying. Most of the time, they're lying. They're not telling the truth. They're trying to cultivate, they're trying to project other people's opinion of them. They don't care what they are. They're most of the time concerned about what other people, they think, other people think about them. So, they have a very weak sense of inner identity.

Well, I resented that. I didn't like any part of that, and I always got into a lot of trouble. I got whopped on the side of the head frequently on this issue, but I decided I would stick to it. Better to get whopped in the head, than be a person who depends upon reflection as a spectator of himself. Don't make a spectator of yourself, huh?

So, anyway, so I just got into one thing after the other. And when I would get run into something I didn't agree with, didn't believe, I didn't have to disagree with it. If I didn't believe it myself, if I didn't know it myself, I refused to believe it. So I had great troubles with schools, because they kept telling me things I knew were not true, and in later life, I realized I was right most of the time.

But that was easy, because, as I later discovered, they lied most of the time, so it was not difficult for me to make that kind of judgment.

So, I just took a sense of mission, and had that kind of sense.

So, coming into the wartime period, I was in India, in service, coming out of Burma. I sense a mission. I became involved in the cause of Indian independence. It was a mission. I came back. I found that my fellow soldiers were morally degenerating, under the influence of Trumanism, which was later called McCarthyism. So I first put my bets on Dwight Eisenhower, who I encouraged to run for President. He sent me a nice letter saying why he wouldn't, at that time. But, then I got involved with socialists, because they were the only ones who were fighting McCarthy.

And then, after McCarthy was defeated by Eisenhower, I looked at the socialists, and I said, "What a bunch of dummies! What am I doing here?" And got out of there.

Then came the 1960s, the Missile crisis, the assassination of Kennedy, and the rock-drug-sex counterculture began to run amok, and I decided I had to do something about it. I'd been a management consultant, which I liked doing, because I'm an economist. So, therefore, naturally I liked this stuff. And the clinical aspect of the reality of what goes on in a firm. When people tell me about business, they say they took a course in business, I say, "You don't know anything about it. I was there. And what they tell you about business, is all a big lie. It's much simpler than that. It's more complicated, but it's also simpler."

So then, I decided I had to do something. So, I ended up teaching a course at one location, a one-semester course, and I began doing it elsewhere. In the middle of things that were happening. I knew where the world economy was headed, the U.S. economy was headed. I was right. And I became more and more involved. And one day, I found, gradually, that what I had started to do, was not something I had taken over, but it had taken over me. And I've been at it ever since.

So, I've had many missions along the way, but it's that simple. I wander through life with a certain, shall we say, tropism, a certain disposition, which I can trace back to childhood, early childhood, even pre-school childhood. A stubborn cuss, who would never accept what I didn't believe, and could not be beaten into believing it, or appearing to believe it. They tried to beat me into believing it, I would disbelieve it all the more violently, and all the stronger. Because if they were beating me, they were wrong.

So, I just ... that's the way it happened. And it was very fortunate, because by having this kind of attitude, I missed a lot of the mistakes that other people make, who try to adapt too easily to the garbage that's floating around them.

I think that's --- Jason, what else can I say? I mean, that's me, in a nutshell, that's the whole. I just keep getting grabbed up by missions, and the mission grabs me, and I'm not running the mission, the mission's running me. I'm not running for President. Working as a shadow President of the United States has taken me over; I haven't taken it over.

Harley: There are about four or five more questions, Lyn. Is that all right?

LaRouche: Okay.

Question: I actually asked you a question from UCLA a couple days ago, but I accidentally hung up, so I couldn't ask a follow-up question. So, I'll try to sneak an extra one in right now.

My question was, involving the Arab Renaissance, which came up with a lot of good conclusions, and discovered some truths, but it was based largely on a translation of Euclid. So, my first question, I guess, was how does starting from a point where you say it's basically asinine, how do you start from that point and arrive at some beautiful conclusions? And, the second one, I guess... well, actually, that's it. Just go ahead.

LaRouche: Well, first of all, well, it wasn't quite so simple as Euclid. By the Arab Renaissance, we usually mean, at the beginning, we mean the Abassid dynasty, the Abassid Caliphate, which was located in the area which is now called Iraq. This was in a period in which the collapse of Rome, and the progressive degeneration of the Roman Empire of the East, Byzantium, had created a situation in which -- and also with developments in India in the same period, positive developments, radiating from there, culturally -- had produced this Arab Renaissance, and the Arab Renaissance was based on getting every bit of available knowledge from every part of the world that could be gathered, into a great library center, in Baghdad. Right? The Baghdad caliphate.

Then you had the continuation of that, as the Turks moved in. The Turks were taken in first, as enforcers for landlords, which is how the culture was destroyed. But in the process, you had al-Farabi, who was a leading thinker -- very important. And who actually worked on some of the ideas of music which came from the Pythagorean tradition, which is the famous Plato tradition. You had also the great Iranian figure, a physician and philosopher, ibn Sina, otherwise known in Spain as Avicenna, who was a great thinker, and was largely in the Platonic tradition, particularly on the ideas of the soul, things of that sort, very much that.

So, at that point, you had in this part of the world, you had this fusion of the Mosaic tradition, which was then being traced largely from Philo of Alexandria, who was a great influence on the Hebrew tradition, and of course, the Hebrew tradition and the Platonic tradition were actually fused in Christianity in the form of John, the Apostles John and Paul, in particular.

So, all of these forces were playing there, and this continued to radiate around the world, as it did through St. Augustine and his circles in Italy, which then moved into Isidor of Seville, which then moved into the Irish monks. The Irish monks Christianized the Saxons, which was a very difficult thing to do, and then established Charlemagne's system, which was a great reform. And then the Normans killed the Saxons, and there hasn't been a Christian seen in England since.

But in any case... So, this is a long process, in which humanity is humanity, and actually, this is an example of the reason why you have to be optimistic, to be right. Because, humanity is a wonderful thing. Humanity is good, intrinsically good -- if it ever grows up. Or if it ever gets a chance to grow up. The human being is naturally good; not bad, naturally good. But they have growing pains, and if they get through the growing pains successfully, and don't get bad parents, and bad education, they do pretty well. And so this optimistic goodness, of the human spirit, will tend to break free, and express itself in society, wherever the opportunities arise. It's like flowers arising out of the lava, from the volcanic eruption beforehand. Humanity keeps effervescing.

And humanity always goes back, as much as possible, and seeks from the past, the best from the past, and uses it to build the future. That's the character of man.

Now, Euclid is a mixed bag. Euclid was a systematization, an attempt to systematize, and actually castrate -- it's called the eunuch principle. You have a very good geometry by the Pythagoreans, and Thales, and Plato, and so forth, and his collaborators, an excellent geometry, which is a physical geometry, a constructive geometry, with none of this Euclidean nonsense. Along came the castrators, and they removed the testicles from geometry, and they called it Euclid.

Now, in Euclid, in the Heath presentation of the 13 books of Euclid, it's a volume which evolved over a period of time, from some guy, originally Euclid, but it was to systematize, to codify, what had been accomplished in geometry. Now, if you go into the Euclid, and you look at the 10th through 13th books of the Euclid Elements, you find that many people who are strict Aristoteleans, could not understand these last three books, of the elements. And even denounced them, and thought they were false. Whereas the smart ones, the smart people, as I do, will always tell you, start from the 10th through 13th book, on the question of spherical functions, and work backwards, and that is exactly how the original geometry was developed. It was developed from astronomy, and astronomy is what? Astronomy is essentially -- it's not exactly spherical, but as Gauss's principles of curvature, you can compare the tendency of an actual curvature of a system, with a spherical curvature, and that is a typical measure of curvature.

So, the actual ancient people -- remember, for example, Pythagoras referred to Sphaerics, which was actually a name for spherical geometry, which was a name for astronomy. So, actually, the original ideas of geometry came from astronomy, from astronomical calendars, and study of astronomical calendars. This was the idea of universal principle. It came, if you could look up at the sky, and study the behavior of the stellar system, you would derive principles you called universal. You assumed that man somehow was affected by these universal principles which could be seen in the sky. And this developed the original kind of geometry.

So, that in, even the transmission of what's called Euclid's geometry, as treated by people like al-Farabi, in the case of the Abassid heritage, that even there, the elements of the original intention, the original discoveries, are reflected. As we saw in the case of the 15th-Century Renaissance, where a few teachers, young teachers from a center there, educating, started a Renaissance, in terms of ideas. By taking the material from the ancients, the ancient texts, as from, then, they got them mostly from Greece: With the Greek texts, reworking these, were able by constructive approaches to understanding them, to reconstruct much of the knowledge which had been buried over centuries, in these lost works.

And that has happened again and again.

Look, what I'm doing, what you guys are doing, with Gauss, is exactly that. We had a great scientific revolution, called the Renaissance: This was typified by Brunelleschi; typified by Nicholas of Cusa, who was the great theoretician of this experimental measurement in modern science; and by explicit followers of Cusa's, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz in particular, and Gauss.

So, despite the destruction of modern science, by the introduction of empiricism, or what is called generically, "reductionism," despite that, that by studying Gauss today--which is why I laid the program out the way I did--by studying Gauss today, you can, now, re-create knowledge, which was essentially the lost knowledge for most people who thought they were scientists, over the recent several centuries, since the introduction of empiricism.

So, that's the way it works. One should be optimistic about this. My view is, that if you gain a sense of personal identity, in the sense that you are mastering something, which opens to you, the minds of some of the greatest thinkers before your time; and find yourself, in a sense, in harmony with them, and find yourself as a person who is continuing that knowledge, to the future, that you're not going to leave people in the abyss of empiricism--their minds in the abyss of empiricism--but, you're going to free their minds to be able to know the truth, and be able to construct the proof, to prove it for themselves, and build a generation of people who are really well-educated: that's, I think, the lesson to be learned from the Arab Renaissance.

Question: Hello, Lyn. I'm from San Leandro. After the Iraq War started, you said that we were experiencing a Riemannian phase-shift, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that? And how can we be the most efficient organizers, right now? Because, I have seen among members, I've seen a change in the way they react to the situation, and I've seen some, a little escapism, in terms of--.

LaRouche: Well, you'll see that. That happens you know. People sometimes slip on the sidewalk.

Riemannian: very simple. By Riemannian phase-shift, I mean exactly what I said. I think it's fairly clear--clear, at least from the standpoint of description. It's a question of how good is the grasp, of what I've said.

By Riemannian, we simply mean that there are no definitions, axioms, or postulates in the universe. We don't accept any of them, as Riemann said himself. We recognize only those ideas, which are experimentally validated as universal principles. And we replace the idea of dimensions, by these concepts.

Now, a Riemannian universe is not simply a fixed universe, at least not for man.  Every time we discover a new universal principle, we change the geometry of our universe, in terms of the way we act within the universe. And, the universe changes for us, because we're acting differently. These changes mean downshifts and upshifts: If you have a loss of principles in practice, your society will decay. Then, if you have an addition of valid discoveries of principles, or rediscovery of principles, and you practice them, the power of man per capita in the universe, will tend to increase.  Society will improve.

So, a Riemannian phase-shift, to me, is: I'm always focussed on these questions of how we discover, and apply, or lose, ideas of principle, which man should have. And therefore, whenever you have one of these changes, a shift, I refer to this as a Riemannian phase-shift: That is, it's not a change within a fixed set of definitions, axioms, and postulates; but it's a change in the axioms, and a change in the axioms underlying a system, is what we mean by a Riemannian phase-shift.

It also involves a notion of a change in curvature, of the universe; at least the universe of our action on the universe. Hmm?

Question: Mr. LaRouche, I think your political [ideas] are incredible, and I look for that. But, a question: In the past, no revolution has really worked, basically because once they get in power, they kind of discover a reality, and they kind of change everything, the economy, and anyway. Are you a revolutionary? And, when you get in office (which I hope you do, actually), will reality hit you? Because I mean, you are actually kind of close, but when you get in office and reality hits you, are you sure you're going to be able to actually carry this out?

LaRouche: To do what?

Question: Because the ideas, seem sometimes to be too good to be true! So, I'm thinking: When you get in office, are you going to be able to actually carry some of these principles out?

LaRouche: Oh, absolutely! I intend to do it, before I get into office.

We are doing it, now. Look, society is a process, it's not just a fixed thing. Look, there are people who are, in a sense, collaborating with me, directly or indirectly, who collectively represent a considerable amount of power in the world. We're acting. We are acting, we did act to try to jam up the war. We didn't stop it, but we jammed it up, for some time. And jamming it up was a good thing, because it gave us the opportunity to change a few things, and we're in a better position now, than we were when this process started, back in, say, January of 2023. We're in a much better position. From the time when the President announced the "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address in January 2023, we were in real trouble. And over the summer months, it was getting more dangerous. We managed to jam it. And we jammed it up internationally, largely from people inside the United States. But others also played their part. And we were able to do that, because I had the trust and confidence of a lot of groups of people, who understood what I was doing. I was exerting leadership.

Now, I can assure you, that if I were President of the United States today, we would have tremendous fun. Why? Because here we are in a financial crisis -- nobody in the world has the guts yet, to propose actually doing what has to be done.

What has to be done? Very simply. If I'm the President of the United States, I call these guys together, or a number of them. From Russia, from Germany, and from France, from China and from other countries, and I say,

"Gentlemen, Ladies, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put this system, this bankrupt system, into governmental receivership by joint action of nations, and by each nation. We're going to put it into receivership the way you put anything into bankruptcy. We're going to protect the people, and protect the economy, from the collapse. We're going to get ... Necessary financial institutions will function under our direction. We will create credit so they can function. We're going to cause growth of the economy. We're going to fix what needs fixing as fast as we can. We're going to go back to some of the ideas that worked in the past, and use them as a model of reference, to convince people that they will work in the present."

Such as: Roosevelt's actions of the 1930s -- they worked. Now we're not going to copy them exactly, but they show how to do it.

The question of a new monetary system. We created a fairly good one, designed in 1944, and carried into the 1960s. It worked. We built a United States which had the highest rate of productivity in history, per capita. We continued to improve in the post-war period. It worked! It wasn't perfect, but it worked. So, therefore, these ideas, used more effectively now, perhaps, than in the past, will work again. And on that basis, I tell you, with the fear of war, with the fear of what the Bush Administration has come to represent, especially since January of 2023, the world is aching for escape from the terror, and the fear.

The people of the United States would like to have health care again. We can organize it. We're going to have to put a lot of physicians back to work, but we can organize it. We can reorganize the system again. We knew how to build it before; we know how to rebuild it. It's going to take time, but we're going to rebuild it.

We know how to repair the educational system. It'll take time, but we're going to do it.

My objectives are of that nature. A number of things that I think have to be done. That somebody in a powerful position must bring other people in relatively powerful positions together, to agree to do. And I think I could get things done, at least probably better than anyone else right now. Because I know clearly what the problem is, and therefore I have confidence in proceeding on how to settle it. Other people may be less confident in a solution. I'm not. I don't lack that confidence.

So, I think I can promise you, that if I live, and I get there, you're going to see a lot of fun. It may not be perfect, but it's going to be a lot of fun. And, after all, I have to leave something for somebody else to do, don't I?

Question: Hello, Lyn, I'm from Los Angeles. My question is about culture. Now, you've written in some of your papers that, in a Classical work of composition, -- actually I have two parts.

In a Classical work of composition, [you've written] that the composer's communicating ideas about how you communicate ideas. So I was wondering if you would elaborate on that, number one.

And number two, from the standpoint of what you've discussed in terms of the generation of a singularity, from the point of generation, to the point of impact, is an unmediated relationship. Now, from, say, the point of generation of a singularity by a Beethoven, or Shakespeare, or something, to the point that you want it to impact the mind of an audience, it has to be performed by someone, but yet, how do you make that performance an actual unmediated relationship between the composer and the audience?

LaRouche: Let's take the second one first. It works better that way. Because the answer to the second question illustrates what the meaning of the first question is.

Now, take the case of a composer. A Classical composer -- and I have in mind, just to have a specific focus -- I have in mind a performance that was done in my birthday celebration, by a leading string quartet in the world today, and it was the Opus 131 of Beethoven, late string quartet. This is an excellent performance. They may, when they issue the things themselves, they may touch up a few spots here and there, but, to my standpoint, it's a very good performance. And in those of good musicians who've heard it. It's an excellent performance.

All right, now, this work, this late work of Beethoven, and these late compositions -- the 127, 131, 132, and so forth, 135 -- they're very intense compositions. The Great Fugue, the 133, is an example of that. They are a new kind of composition. It's a revolution in composition. It's an evolving development concept, as opposed to the structures which Beethoven inherited for the string quartet, and so forth, earlier.

But when these compositions, which actually follow a line of principle, defined by Bach, which is accessible to many people in terms of the preludes and fugues, first and second book, these contain the germ of many things. For example, you take the second fugue, the C minor, from the first book of Preludes and Fugues, contains in germ the same principle which is elaborated in the later Musical Offering by Bach, and also is a subject implicitly in the Art of the Fugue of Bach. So, these principles are all the way through.

Now, how does it work? The fugal counterpoint makes the point clear. The composer starts from a single idea -- that's your singularity.

Now the composer wants to convey that idea, which, to that composer, that single idea elaborates to a large concept. The composer is now then going to work out the composition, from the standpoint of that generating point. And he's going to perfect, he's going to pare it, he's going to improve it, and so forth, but to make it coherent with this generating point, the single idea. And the Beethoven, say, the 131, is an example of that. It's a perfect example of a single idea, as a germ, elaborated through successive phases, seven successive primary phases of development, from beginning to end. It's a unit idea.

And that's the general nature of all artistic composition.

Now, the conductor. the composer, and the performer.

The problem of performance is that the performer must never play notes. The performer must never play different notes than are specified, but the performer must never play notes. He must never interpret the notes -- that's romanticism. He must perform the unit idea, the germ idea. He must first adduce what that germ idea is, that principle of development, which is single idea, and he must present that in the following way.

Take, now shift to the Classical in general. Let's take a drama, let's take a Shakespeare drama. Now, look at Hamlet of Shakespeare from the standpoint of the opening of Shakespeare's King Henry V, in which he has a character come on stage, before the stage, of the Shakespearean stage, who's speaking a soliloquy to the audience. And he's telling the audience that they're not going to see the drama on stage, -- they're going to see this, and they're going to see that, the actors and so forth -- but they're not going to see the horses, they're not going to see all the things that are being... the events that are occurring in the drama. They have to see them on the plane of the imagination.

So, in a great drama, the test of a great dramatic performance, of a great drama, you get in the theater, and very soon, in the beginning of the performance, you no longer see the actors. The actors have disappeared. You now actually are thinking, and following, a drama which is going on on the stage of your imagination. And when the play is finished, and your eyes are opened to the actors coming forth on stage, you see the actors again, as opposed to the characters of the drama. And you have this experience that they're somehow, they're not the same, but they are the same. They are the same actors who played the characters. They're costumed as the characters were costumed, in your imagination. But they're not the same people. If you talk to one of the actors afterward, you're convinced they're not the same people -- it's not the character in your imagination.

Or, go back to the ancient Greek theater, in which a few people, wearing masks, maybe two people wearing masks, would present a Classical drama. And they would convince the audience in the amphitheater, that the audience was seeing what they were seeing in the imagination. The actors on stage were simply holding masks, and they were playing different characters from behind the masks, but just holding masks.

So, in musical composition, the same thing is true. The performer, must, from the first note, must capture the imagination of the audience. Because everything must be heard in the imagination, not just as heard sounds. You see this in Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn. He describes some of the figures painted on this urn, and he says something which is very true, and uses that poem as a way of saying it: "For Truth is Beauty, and Beauty is Truth." He's speaking of the permanence of those figures. That those figures on that vase have been proportioned in such a way, they do not represent still life. They represent life in motion.

For example, take the case of Rembrandt's Aristotle, or shall we say, Homer Contemplating the Stupid Aristotle. You see the bust of Homer, and the figure portrayed by Aristotle, putting his hand on the head of the bust of Homer. Aristotle is looking straight ahead. Homer is looking up at this stupid Aristotle.

So, therefore, in the imagination, the characters come to life. Homer comes to life. The point is made.

The great performer -- take a conductor such as Furtwaengler. Now, Furtwaengler would sometimes play a trick which we call the lunge. He would rehearse the orchestra, chorus or orchestra, thoroughly. Then he would come on stage. The orchestra is alert. They're tense. They're waiting for the first stroke. And it comes to them as a surprise. And by that method of conducting, Furtwaengler often is able to achieve the instant capture of the attention of the audience to the domain of the imagination, rather than the sound of a note. And that's what all great drama does, what all great art does. It captures the imagination, and it takes the mind beyond the domain of sense perception, into the sense of real relations beyond sense perception. Just as good science does.

And Classical art, and Classical science, all have that quality. It is that quality, the quality which is against everything Ernst Mach ever stood for, against everything empiricism ever represented, against every idea that Bertrand Russell ever had, which are the ideas also of Plato. To look,... our senses are imperfect. Our senses do not show us the real world. The senses show us the reaction of them, to the real world. Our problem as human beings is to discover what the real world is, what the real relations are in the world. That's a practical question, but the question is, how can we change our experience in a way which we could acquire knowledge. Therefore, we have to go beyond sense perception, into the world beyond senses, and find principles out there, which we can now command.

Take, for example, microphysics. Think of nuclear microphysics. Think of the power of man which is lodged in control of the principles of nuclear microphysics. Tell me when the senses have ever seen a principle of nuclear microphysics. No human sense could ever see such a principle. Yet we as man, by discovering those principles, are able to discover those principles, and discover how to control them.

The same thing is true in art. The same thing is true in all science. That we're trying to get beyond the feeling, by finding the paradoxes, the ambiguities, in sense perception. We're trying to find the cracks in sense perception, which give us a clue, as to what is really out there, beyond our sense.

All great Classical art, Classical drama, tries to do. All great science tries to do that. And that's the unifying principle of the two. The problem often is, that people don't know those principles; they don't understand that concept. What we try to do in art, and great artists do this, they do this in the great performance of the Classical stage, they do it in great musical performances. A great musical performance, a great Classical drama, performed in a language that people understood, will be a powerful thing, which will open the minds of people to things about themselves that they didn't know existed earlier. It's called insight, insight into one's self. You go out of the theater, after a musical performance, or a drama, as Schiller said, and you go out a better person than you walked in. Not because you've been taught some precept, but because you've had an insight into what it is to be human. And you go out feeling better about yourself, because now you know you're human. You feel stronger about being human, and you feel less attached to the infirmities of the flesh.

Question: Hi, I'm from L.A. This might be kind of a continuation, but I'm going to go for it anyway. There's two. First, why did God design the voice with register shifts? Why does the voice have them? Why do we need the shift?

And then, we have a program; it's called Operation Revive Plato, out here. And people are a little bit freaked out about Plato. We've been reading it for months, some people only a couple weeks, some people a couple years, and it seems that we get easily freaked out about the slanders. He's a fascist -- things like that. And you mentioned in this Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss memo, that the constructive geometry is the method to actually know Plato. And then, the mapping of the mind. And so, how do we do this? How do we come to know the real mind of Plato?

LaRouche: Well, it takes a lot of work. Plato's a very big mind, and there's a lot to explore.

But, essentially, the constructive geometry is simple, because, you remember... Let's take the two cases which are the most crucial, for the simple part of the thing. The doubling of the square, which is a simple mean problem, but then the doubling of the cube, which is a double mean problem. And look at that, realize that Plato's understanding of that, as in his understanding of the Theatetus construction of the proof of the Platonic solids, that these kinds of proof -- or that, say, the proof of the Pythagorean principle. What Pythagoras gives us, for example, which is really a Platonic principle, is only a description. We only have a description of what Pythagoras did. We don't have a writing by Pythagoras in which he says how he defined the comma. His students tell us. And his students say, you compare the human singing voice, with a monochord, and by intervals sung by a human singing voice, as opposed to a monochord, the same proportions by a monochord.

Now, if you have a trained human singing voice, you see that there is a difference. And this difference defines the comma. So now the comma is not a mathematical magnitude, of an algebraic or mathematic type, but is a physical phenomenon, so therefore, we know that Pythagoras was right. Or at least he was right because his students, who had to be honest people because they made an honest report, report an experiment that works. And all the other things, the same thing.

So, therefore, you say, "All right." Now the method by which Plato in his dialogues, Socratic dialogues, demonstrates principles like this, in respect to geometry, which is constructive principles -- it all involves construction, not deduction, but construction -- is a standard of truth in Plato. So, Plato is based on truth. Now, we look at the other aspects of Plato, where the same method is applied to other subjects, such as social subjects. We see the same thing.

Then you look at it as against the background of Classical tragedy, which Plato was a critic of. The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus. You get the same thing. Ah! Then you look at Solon, who's a hero for Plato, and look at Solon's poem. Oh, that's the truth too, isn't it? Of how a society degenerated. Going back to their old Baby Boomer ways. Again, it's an example.

So, therefore, it's this sense -- that's why I did this work with the Gauss. One has to start with the sense of a standard of truth. We're living in a society in which the Baby Boomer generation, in particular, has lost its connection to a relationship to truth, and has become a generation of opinions, based on pleasure, in experiencing what is associated with expressing such and such an opinion, or following it. So, therefore, we're in a decadent society, which is based on opinions, not on truth. Therefore, my concern was, get us back to truth, and give young people a standard for knowing what the truth is.

Now, the question of God is -- I've dealt a great deal with it. It's really quite simple, isn't it?

If you look at the question of discovery, of principle, the discovery of universal principle... Discovery of a principle is never a result of a sharing of opinions. If it's an opinion, it's not a principle. The discovery of a principle is always done by an individual mind, by a capability which exists only in the personality of individual minds.

Now, what is the universe composed of? Well, the universe is composed of principles, the kind of principles we discover. They were always there. They're interrelated. Well, where did the universe begin? It has no beginning. It has no end. It has no outside. It is the universe. Where did the principles come from? Principles are determined only by a personality, a human-type of personality. So, there is a personality behind the universe. The universe has a personality, a willful personality, of which man's personality, as a creative personality, is a copy. And by knowing ourselves as a copy, we know the Creator.

Question: Hi, Lyn. I'm Muslim, and I follow my religion very closely, not as closely as the FBI follows it.

I wanted your intake on the fact that, after the regime change in Iraq, the Iraqi people are demanding the system of God, and not any man-made system. They want to establish caliphate, or falafeh, and not any man-made system like capitalism, socialism, democracy, or communism.

Lyn: I don't think that that's clear. What you have is several things going on.

What you have is a situation of chaos, which was produced by this intervention, and by other factors. Iraq has been divided, essentially, into three principal states, or maybe more, but essentially it's Kurdish, it's Shi'ite, and it's Central Iraq, which is identified by the Ba'ath.

Now the Shi'ites are not so simple, because there are two major groups of Shi'ites, that is, in terms of nationality. You have Arab Shi'ites, and you have Iranian Shi'ites. And not all -- and some of the Shi'ites in Iran are Arab Shi'ites, because the southern part of Iran contains an Arab population as part of Iran, even though they speak Iranian. And so forth. There's still that culture left in the Bakhtiar part.

All right, so, now what's happened is, that with the disintegration of Iraq, what has happened is, you have different factions in Iran, Shi'ite factions in Iran, and different Shi'ite factions in Iraq, are all contending for power. There's a state of chaos, which threatens to involve the neighboring countries, in chaos spilling over from there.

At the same time, you have the Kurdish section, with two major Kurdish sections, among which many are essentially warlords. The characteristic of the mountain areas of many of the Kurds, are, they tend to be warlord families. And the quarrels among them are traditional. Now the Kurdish population intersects not only Northern Iraq, it also includes part of Iran, it also includes extensive parts of Turkey, and goes into the Transcaucasus area generally, which is part of the same mountain system. There's an impulse among the Kurds to set up Kurdistan: the idea of taking all the areas which are Kurdish in ethnic background, and in the majority of the population, from Iran, from Iraq, from Transcaucasia, and from Turkey, and establishing Kurdistan.

Now, there's not agreement among the forces, among the Kurds, on what kind of a government they'd form. Because they have traditional conflicts. And various agencies, including U.S. agencies, have been playing games out there.

The Iranians, apart from having their own internal differences on these things, and the Arab Shi'ites, who include things like the biggest turnout there was essentially the flagellant Shi'ites, who were one of the biggest contingents that turned out at Kerbala. So, there is no clear understanding of what kind of a state to create, in former Iraq. There's a conflict, among Shi'ites, and with other groups, on what to do.

What's required is simply this: the United States has made a mess of the situation. The Israelis now want the United States to get out quickly, because the Israelis see that what was happening in terms of the religious conflicts which have been engendered, and set into motion, and including religious warfare, among various religious factions, this becomes an impossible situation, and becomes a source of threat to Israel itself. Therefore, the Israelis are pushing their stooges in Cheney's part of the U.S. government, to pull the U.S. forces out of there quickly, by forming a quick government and leaving. Which would be an absolute disaster.

The condition of Iraq now is in a state of disaster. U.S. forces are in there, the country doesn't function, disease is spreading, life in general is endangered, therefore the United States has responsibility, in a sense, to stay there, but with the approval of the United Nations, to at least build up the infrastructure of the country, so that, in a quiet and peaceful way, some kind of unified government can emerge from among the Iraqi people in general. And therefore, the religious conflicts have to be kept quiet now. And let them settle down. And let people peacefully resolve on what they want to do with their own future. Not be stampeded into struggles among different factions, including struggles among different Shi'ite factions, some of whom have been killing each other, already.

So, this is not a unified Shi'ite movement, which is trying to take over Iraq. No. It's a movement already... grand ayatollahs have been slaughtered, as part of the religious warfare which has broken out among different factions in that areas.

So, what's needed now is a process of pacification, in the sense of positive construction effort, to bring stability to that part of the world, and the United States has the leading responsibility.

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