March 13 (LPAC) - Lyndon LaRouche, in the context of his opening presentation of his March 12 international webcast, laid out the three fundamental measures after 1969 which turned the dollar into an international currency controlled by the British, and destroyed the United States. This portion of his presentation follows.

LAROUCHE: Now, there are three key steps in the destruction of the United States, between 1969 and 1991: The first, was Aug. 15, 1971, the fixed-exchange-rate system of the world was taken down. By Nixon, nominally, under the direction of a fascist who's known as George Shultz, who orchestrated this as part of a process. The second phase, was, once the U.S. dollar was no longer a Bretton Woods dollar, but was condemned to float on the international market, the second shoe was dropped, under Nixon. And this is the reason why, when the Saudis today pay $3 a barrel for crude, load it onto tankers in the Gulf, you pay $4 a gallon for gasoline in the United States. We don't have a U.S. dollar any more! We have a Eurodollar, which is controlled by the oil spot market, based in Amsterdam. It's a part of the British system.

There is an empire, an empire based on this use of petroleum as a controlling device, to control the world economy. The United States dollar is not owned by the United States, it is controlled by this combination--the same thing as the BAE, the British BAE Systems. There is an empire, an empire which is not controlled by oil, but is pivoted on oil speculation, which was launched with the great petroleum hoax, the oil shortage hoax of the 1970s. There was never a shortage of petroleum at that time. Tankers were kept away from ports! Or stuck in harbors, moored off the coast, at that time. The world was flooded with petroleum--"We had an oil shortage."

The effect of the oil shortage was to create the spot market, and under the spot market, the U.S. dollar became a creature of petroleum: of European petroleum, of Anglo-Dutch Liberal petroleum! And the British enemy became openly the enemy of the United States. Not all at once, because they work from stabbing you in the back, not the front--that's British methods, backstabbing; or, getting somebody else to do it for them. Hmm? They orchestrate the politics.

So as a result of that, we lost control of our economy. And what did they do?

Well, the second phase was the Brzezinski phase, the Carter Administration. Now, they had wrecked the U.S. dollar. They had wrecked the position of the United States in terms of world affairs. They had done that within the period, especially from the assassination of Kennedy, through 1971 and the oil-price crisis.

Now, what was their second move? The Trilateral Commission, under Carter, under Brzezinski, and the whole crowd from Wall Street: this crowd, the Council on Foreign Relations crowd. They put through a program, the Trilateral Commission program, which systematically destroyed the United States. It destroyed every element of the Franklin Roosevelt structure of the U.S. economy, with massive deregulation. Not only the destruction, the purging and halting of nuclear power--remember, with nuclear power, we would not have been prisoner to the spot market! And think of all the idiots who are against nuclear power! They don't intend to be traitors to the United States, but they are, in effect. Because only by not breaking the power of this oil monopoly in controlling the dollar on the world market, could these things have happened. They destroyed our physical economy! They destroyed our farmers! They destroyed our farms. They destroyed our industries. They destroyed our protected, mortgage-based security power--they destroyed the right of people to have homes. They destroyed those parts of the banking system. They drove the prime interest rate up to above 20%, under Carter.

And they made a cultural change in the United States. No longer were we the world's leading agro-industrial power. No longer were we the leading power in technology. Suddenly we were half-destroyed--not fully destroyed, but half-destroyed. And the measures which would have corrected this were prevented. We went into a recession, a deep one, in 1987, October of '87. That so-called "recession" was a depression! It was comparable in its immediate effects to what Hoover experienced! It was a Hoover depression!

And what happened then? Alan Greenspan came in! And what did Alan Greenspan do? Hmm? Alan Greenspan used fake money. In other words, we had a system before, under Roosevelt, which was consistent with the American tradition from the time of Alexander Hamilton, and even earlier. Our system was based on governmental control of our own currency, and a defense of that control, to give us a stable currency, and to give us an accountable one. What they did, by destroying the Bretton Woods system in the way they did, and going to a funny-money system, and then going to a hyperinflationary system, like that under Alan Greenspan, we now have obligations in the world in order of magnitude of hundreds of quadrillions of dollars of nominal claims. These claims will never be repaid! They could never be repaid.

Now, under the Alan Greenspan system, we destroyed the United States and destroyed the morals of people: You have whole parts of the labor force, who don't know what work is! They may have jobs, but they don't know what actual productive work is. They couldn't farm; they're no good in industry; they have no skills, no knowledge. People graduating with scientific degrees from universities who don't know what science is--but they get a degree in it, even an advanced degree in it. Such is the nature of things.

We have been destroyed.