November 19, 2007 (LPAC)--Venezuelan and Iranian Presidents Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for OPEC countries to break with the dollar, ignores reality: the world is not facing a dollar collapse, but a collapse of the system as a whole, Lyndon LaRouche warned today. The entire system is going down--theirs included! A common problem, requires a common solution, rather than political exploitation of the dollar problem. Either you propose a workable replacement for the collapsed system, or you are being "reckless," he said.

President Chavez, in particular, was on a manic macho binge at the OPEC meeting, and in his subsequent visit to Iran, praising God that "the value of the dollar on the global market is declining, and we will witness the fall of the dollar in the future." In his ideological fit, he celebrated the fall of the dollar as "the fall of the U.S. empire," suggesting the euro could somehow survive the global disintegration which the collapse of the dollar system would produce, should no alternative system be established.

Even Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, who has a far more realistic understanding of economics than Chavez, was sucked into this conceptual mud at the OPEC meeting, where he threw his support behind the idea that de-pegging oil prices from the dollar somehow represents a solution.

LaRouche, who, since 1994 has been organizing for a New Bretton Woods agreement to replace the doomed floating rate system, with a fixed-rate, physical economy-based monetary system, pointed out today that the primary center of the crisis, in fact, is the Bank of England, and people ought to talk about that, if solutions are to be found. If you're not talking about Britain's Royal Bank of Scotland and its Spanish associates, Santander Bank and BBVA, you're not talking about the problem, LaRouche said.