July 29, 2008 (LPAC)--"Yes, there is total bankruptcy. But you brought the representative of a billionaire speculator here, to say we should privatize social security and crush medical care! That's what's wrong with the Democratic Party. I work with Lyndon LaRouche, and in the next four weeks before the Democratic Convention, we are leading a revolt in the party to get back to the FDR economic policy and system." This was Anton Chaitkin, as the first questioner from the floor following a speech by David Walker in a town meeting of Alexandria, Virginia Democratic Congressman Jim Moran. The former U.S. Comptroller, Walker is now the spokesman for Peter Peterson, chairman of the notorious bottom-feeder Wall Street equity fund Blackstone Group. Peterson founded the pro-austerity Concord Coalition.
Chaitkin continued, "Peter Peterson was assigned by George Shultz to write the brief for the Nixon Administration, on why we had to end Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system and go into floating exchange rates, speculation, globalism, destroy our manufacturing, get cheap labor - this is the catastrophe we're in now...."
Walker, now CEO of the Peter Peterson Foundation, conceded in response, "Yes, Mr. Peterson is a billionaire, but he is giving back to the community, and he never did the things you say he did."
The Moran meeting, taped by C-span for nationwide broadcast, was shaped around a movie put out by Peterson, "IOUSA", which claims that the United States is going bankrupt unless Medicare is drastically cut, health care cut back across the board, and people stop retiring with pensions. Walker's presentation, and a trailer for the forthcoming movie, pitched to the hysteria of a middle class staring into the economic abyss and susceptible to Hitlerite calls for "sacrifice" of workers' living standards.
Walker said the movie will be in special "film festivals" at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, will arrive in theaters August 21, and will be shown on nationwide TV. The stated goal for IOUSA is for it to be "as influential" as Al Gore's travesty, "An Inconvenent Truth."
Under President Richard Nixon, Director of the Office of Management and Budget George Shultz assigned economist Peter Peterson to write the public justification -- a briefing paper entitled "The United States in the Changing World Economy" (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971) -- for the August 15, 1971 junking of FDR's Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate monetary system. Peterson's own private fortune was then being managed by Felix Rohatyn, boss of the Lazard Freres investment bank.
Peterson, chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, went on to amass billions under the ensuing post-industrial disaster. The New York Times reported (July 17, 2002) that Peterson and his partner Stephen A. Schwarzman had set up the largest private equity fund ever raised, Blackstone Capital Partners IV, using "the market's collapse [as] an opportunity ... to acquire companies and business divisions at fire-sale prices.... `This should be a good cycle for people who have money,'" Schwarzman was quoted.
Most of the 250 participants received and were reading LaRouche PAC leaflets and pamphlets, including photocopies of Lyndon LaRouche's article, "David Walker's Sleight of Hand" (EIR, March 16, 2007) during the Moran-Walker town meeting. LPAC representative Stanley Ezrol spoke from the floor, outlining LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Act and challenging Rep. Moran to support LaRouche's proposed rescue and revival of the physical economy rather than give up to the financiers.
In his speech, David Walker called for mandatory deductions from workers' pay, to be called "savings," that would go into a fund to be "invested" -- i.e. given over to predators such as Peterson. He called on the audience and TV viewers to "reject people who pander to you" by taking your side in economic policy.
