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LaRouche on Philippines Radio:
The U.S. Election Has Settled Nothing

The following interview with former U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche was conducted by Butch Valdes on Angel Radio, Manila, the Philippines, on Nov. 16, 2004.

Valdez: A rare privilege for Filipino radio and Filipino nationwide audiences. Ladies and Gentlemen, the most accurate long-range economic forecaster alive today. Scientist, philosopher, statesman, physical economist, and world leader, and the principal organizer of a worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement [LYM], we welcome Mr. Lyndon H. LaRouche of the United States. How are you this morning, Mr. LaRouche?

LaRouche: Well, I'm feeling fairly good under very chaotic conditions here in the United States. Nothing is very definite yet here since the so-called election. Everything is confused in the world and therefore it is very interesting for me.

Valdez: Well, we will jump right into the relevant topics tonight, sir—the crisis in our economy as well as the world, a crisis in government, crisis in leadership, crisis of escalating wars, crisis from terrorists, skyrocketing prices for fuel, food, medicine, what's happening, Mr. LaRouche? What is this all leading to?

LaRouche: We are in the process of a general breakdown of the present world monetary-financial system, and, of course, this is tied to the economy, world economy, as well as national economies, which are slaves, presently, of the present world monetary-financial system. There will be no solution for these crises until a new system—or if, a new suitable system, is put into effect.

The only thing that would work now—and some economists, for example, in Germany and elsewhere, are talking in this direction: What I propose is the declaration of an emergency, with the existing monetary-financial system of the world put into bankrupcty receivership for re-organization by governments, by each sovereign government, and by these governments, or a lot of them, in concert. That means that the international banking system will be essentially taken over by governments for financial re-organization in order to prevent a collapse.

Payments on certain accounts in the banking system and the financial system, will be suspended. Some, such as financial derivatives, would have to be canceled. Governments would then have do as Franklin Roosevelt did beginning March 1933, to take measures to put the physical economy of nations back into functioning, and to re-design the monetary-financial system and the banking system to be able to continue that recovery. So, therefore, it is up to governments.

The problem now is we do not yet have governments which are willing to even consider that. Governments around the world are afraid of the international financier cartels. These cartels control Europe, for example, the governments of Europe, which are totally intimidated by, and controled by these financial sharks, eating people from behind the scenes, as the case of Argentina is an example of this kind of shark operation, coming through, in that case, the International Monetary Fund [IMF] itself.

Now what is needed, therefore, is we have to go to a system of government credit. That is, governments have to reorganize their credit system to create monetary aggregate for specified kinds of usage. The main thing we are looking for is the increase in employment immediately in the public sector and stabilization of essential industries in the private sector, including agriculture, of course.

Those measures would enable us to start rebuilding the world economy in an orderly way. But that would mean that the dominant force in the world today, the power of these bankers behind the scenes—not really banks so much, as financier oligarchs who control banks—they would have to give up their power, and surrender their power back to the authority of sovereign governments.

That doesn't mean they would be wiped out; it would mean they would be put through bankruptcy re-organization, including their financial interests, by governments. That is the only solution. Up until that point there is going to be chaos. When governments don't function, when economies don't function, then the physical conditions of life don't function, and the political conflicts, such as terrorism and so forth, as in the Middle East situation right now, they are not solvable.

For example, suppose the best. I have proposed, and James Baker III, who is a key member of the Bush 41 group, has proposed, that Bhargouti, who is now in prison, a Palestinian who is the most popular Palestinian leader after the death of Arafat, should be taken out of prison and should be acknowledged as a potential negotiating partner for the Israelis, under the protection and sponsorship of the United States and other countries.

That is to say, "You two guys now negotiate a peace," but this would mean that we, to make it succeed, would have to deal with a lot economic problems in that part of the world. We have Palestinians in camps who have been there for most of, or all of their lifetimes. We have an impossible economic situation in that whole area. Therefore, without giving people the means of life, the economic means of life, no political agreement will be durable, and, therefore, this is one of those cases where we have a terrible problem, which cannot be solved under present conditions without a political agreement to cooperate, but also without reorganization of the monetary-financial system in the same direction as Franklin Delano Roosevelt typifies, back in the 1930s. That's where we are.

So now the world is in chaos because of a head-on conflict between rapacious financier interests, of the same kind of financier interests who were behind Hitler and company back in the 1930s, and the interest of people and nations, and that's why we have chaos.

Valdez: Coming from us here, although we are a country of 80 million people, we are a poor nation with no international influence to change the world financial system. How should we move to make such necesssary changes together with you, or is repudiation the only way out?

LaRouche: No, what we have to do is this. It's obvious. The Philippines is a very special country, because it is a country which, despite the fact of pre-1898 origins and pre-Spanish origins, it has emerged as a country with a culture of its own, but a culture that is very close to European culture, that is, in the generic sense.

It's in the middle of Asia. It is a large country of the secondary rank of countries in Asia, like those of Southeast Asia or Japan or Korea. The Philippines is comparable to that. The Philippines also has a potential, largely from its development since 1898, the development associated for example with the MacArthur period; it has the capability which very few other countries in the region have.

For example, there used to be high tech, modern technology capabilities around the bases—the U.S. military bases—there in the Philippines. So the problem here is that the Philippines has a very important pivotal role, some people would say geo-politically, in the entire region, of trying to bring together on a global scale for the first time, a world system, which is capable of accommodating both the European cultural heritage and Asian cultures.

This is the great barrier, the great frontier , of a hopeful future for this planet, to bring together the cultures of Asia, which are different than those of Western Europe generally, with the European culture, to get a global culture based on a system of sovereign nation-states which understands that this unresolved cultural question has to be addressed, with a long-term view of several generations, of creating an integrated set of sovereign nation-states as the system of the planet. So the Philippines is a very special country, with a unique importance for the people of Asia, in particular, in playing a key role in bringing about this kind of general integration of Asian and European civilizations.

Valdez: A question from the LYM, from Marlou.

Marlou: Hi Lyn, it's nice to hear from you. You were mentioning that the only solution to our crisis is to change the present monetary system and to have bankruptcy re-organization. Now, I want to ask you, who should initiate this? Who? Because we know that Cheney and Bush are back in office.

LaRouche:  Well, maybe they are, and maybe they are not. Maybe it is an unsettled question. I would say that nothing right now is settled. The idea that a report on Nov. 3 settled the election process in the United States, is wrong. Nothing is settled. We are about a day away from the end of the transitional period of the Congress, prior to the beginning of the new year. It looks today as if there are upheavals in Washington, with the announcement, but not yet officially, of the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that has not yet happened. The announcement of the retirement has happened. The announcement of the prospective appointment of Condi Rice to replace him has been announced, but nothing is settled. The Alberto Gonzales case [appointment as U.S. Attorney General] is not settled, and it looks as if it will not be settled.

The score on the elections is not settled. The report of the Electoral College is not complete, and there are important questions, including legal questions involved. There are also potential charges, criminal charges, against Republicans, or some of the Republicans, in connection with the vote suppression, which is unconstitutional and unlawful by specific laws.

So, a lot of things are not settled. Also, the other thing is that nothing coming from the United States is a solution.

Now, those in the Philippines will recall Dien Bien Phu.

In the United States, while this is different than Dien Bien Phu in some respects—that is, the Iraq situation—it has similarities from the standpoint of strategy. It is comparable to the time the French pulled out of Algiers. You have an impossible situation, an impossible war. We have a general destabilization of the entire area of Southwest Asia. We have chain-reaction effects around the world.

Nothing is settled. We are now in a transitional period between now and about the 20th of January, and it will be somewhere in that time that we have some idea of what kind of a government will actually be formed here in the United States as the next government. It is not yet clear. The propaganda says it is clear, but I know from sitting inside the United States and what I am looking at, and the people I am talking to, nothing is settled.

We have a similar situation in Europe. No government of Europe is stable. You have a right-wing trend in the French government, the present French government. You have instability in Germany. You have instability in Italy. You have a general instability throughout Europe. You have the Blair government up for grabs, in a sense, in London.

So, nothing is settled . We are now in a period of transition, a revolutionary period, in one sense or the other. So what we have to do is keep our heads, have a clear perspective of what the long-term issues are, and orient to the long-term and medium-term issues and the key questions, and don't try to assume that anything that appears to be the case now, is the case.

Valdez: We have a caller from Manila, his name is Charlie Chewo, who wants to ask his question, Lyn. Charlie, go ahead.

Charlie: Good evening Ka Butch, good evening, Mr. LaRouche. Mr. LaRouche I am a regular listener of your radio program here in the Philippines for several months, and it is clear to me that you put a lot of importance on history and philosophy. Considering that people have different interpretations of objective facts, how do you think history should be taught, considering that people are different, they come from different nations, they have different cultures?

LaRouche:  Well, there are unresolved cultural questions within cultures. The assumption that an existing culture is in a sense relatively right relative to another culture, is a mistake. What you have to realize, which is the importance of the existence of the sovereign nation-state, is that if you want to make the transition, as we are trying to complete the transition in European civilization, as we are trying to make the same kind of progress in Asian cultures, for most of history the cultures we have are legacies of a time at which a few people, relatively few, held the rest of the population, of their and other nations, in virtual captivity, either as herded cattle or as wild cattle to be hunted down. So the cultures are based—all cultures are corrupted, as in the United States with the legacy of slavery here. All cultures are corrupted by this fact, that in all known history, in most states, with very few temporary exceptions, that most of the people have been treated as cattle by a few of the people who dominate the culture, and therefore the culture represents a corruption of this type inside it.

If we are going to develop a culture of truly free people, in which no people are held as herded cattle to be used by a few ruling circles, then we are going to have to change cultures, they are going to have to undergo a development.

We have in European civilization, a model for doing that—not that we have succeeded entirely, but we have a model. That model is essentially the history of classical Greece, or the classical struggle. It was the defeat of the attempt by the classical movement in Greece to hold power, as the fall of Athens, through its own self-destruction, and the failure to carry forward Plato's Republic and similar works, which is the problem of society in general today.

We have the clue in European civilization for the way in which to transform societies in which most people are human cattle, into societies in which all people are free. The way to do that is by using what is called irony, or the method of Plato's dialogues—to take people with their existing language, existing language cultures, their traditions, and by the aid of methods we call classical drama, classical poetry, classical music, classical science, to use those methods to enable each people, each culture, to go through an internal process of self-development, where it uplifts the members of its own society to eliminate this human cattle factor in society generally.

So, therefore, rather than saying all cultures are equal—they are not all equal; or that all cultures have a right—they don't have an inherent right, in the sense of being truthful; but all people who have a culture, have the right to be sovereign in the process of development and transformation of their existing culture, and that is what we need.

Charlie: Mr. LaRouche, one final question. I understand you refer to yourself as an Augustinian Catholic. Why the term Augustinian Catholic?

LaRouche: Well, I don't say Catholic, but Augustinian in the Catholic tradition of the Church. Because what happened was, you had a problem, which is the famous Council where the Emperor decreed that he was going to appoint the bishops of the Church, and this was a great corruption, under Constantine, of the Christian Church. There was a revolt among Christians of the Apostolic tradition, the tradition of the Apostles John and Paul, for example, against this Constantine corruption, of making the Christian church essentially a part of the Roman official cult collection. Augustine came to represent, as a convert away from what had been gnostic tendencies of that period—he became a leader to restore the tradition of the Christian Church as opposed to a Roman church. This led to a great struggle, where Isidore of Seville became a leader of this movement. It became known as an educational movement, the Augustinians, as also in the Philippines, are known as a teaching order. It moved from Spain into Ireland, of all places, among the Irish monks who Christianized the Saxons, and from this Christianization from Ireland and the British Isles—you wouldn't believe it, but at that time the British Isles were the center of Christianity—they converted people like Alquin, and created what became known as the Charlemagne system, which is the idea of a system of sovereign nation-states according to the principles of the general welfare of apostolic Christianity.

This was opposed by powerful forces who represented the pagan Roman tradition, but who attempted to seize and control Church institutions. Then the thing was complicated more recently, beginning in the course of the 15th Century, as there was an attempt to restore the old system against the great reform, which had re-created the Papacy. The Papacy was actually re-created after the great period of corruption in the 14th Century, during the 15th Century. And the struggle goes on.

The struggle goes on within churches—a struggle between the relics of gnosticism, the relics of specifically the Roman church as such—not in the sense of the church of the Pope. You have it in the Church today. For example, you have Popes such as John XXIII, who was a great Pope, and a true Pope, even though he's been maligned by many in the Church. Paul VI, who was his successor, and his selected successor, who became Pope after a great struggle, and then Pope John Paul II today, who is a great Pope. So there is that tradition.

Charlie: Augustine mentioned that it would be necessary to undergo the pain of penance to attain heaven. With such a statement, do you think that humankind will have to undergo a great catharsis in order to achieve a situation where you have the common good and the general welfare?

LaRouche: That's exactly the crisis we are facing at this moment. The penance is to eliminate the corruption, typified by the rule of the planet by usury—the submission to usury.

Valdez: We have a question from Jehan from the LYM.

Jehan: You mentioned a lot about an impending new Dark Age, in some of your speeches and your articles. I have also read some books about the Dark Ages in Medieval times. What will it be like in this impending Dark Age, and what can we do to prepare ourselves—or rather, to stop this from happening?

LaRouche:  The classical Dark Age came out of the Norman/Venetian system, that is, about the beginning of 1000 AD. The Venetians, who had risen to power as a replacement, essentially, for the power of Byzantium, made an alliance with a Norman chivalry, which itself was a creation of a faction of Byzantium. This was the Normans who deployed first to destroy Charlemagne's system. The Venetians made an alliance with these people, which began with a number of crusades in that century, including, actually, the first major crusade, which was the Norman conquest of England, to eliminate Christianity, which is what the purpose was, by this heathen. This resulted in what became the Venitian system of tyranny, which dominated Europe through this Venetian/Norman alliance during the period deep into the 14th Century. The natural consequence of this from 1339 on, you had the collapse of the financial system, the banking system of Europe. This resulted in the collapse of the population of Europe by a net one-third, and the elimination of one-half of the parishes of Europe.

So, this was the classic Dark Age. It is from this that the 15th Century Renaissance re-created a church out of the massive corruption which had existed in the previous century, during the Dark Age. We launched modern civilization, in which the principle of the general welfare, the common good, was the law of nation-states.

Since that time we have had a struggle by the Venetian system and its legacy, its followers, to maintain the old system. For example, the tendency to go to world government now, or to go to globalization now, are a reflection of the same evil that we experienced back under the Norman/Venetian rule in the Medieval world in Europe.

So that is what our struggle is right now. We now have over 6 billion people on this planet. What has been in progress for the last 40 years in particular has been the attempt to eliminate modern civilization. This is done by attacking modern technology, modern industrial scientific technology, because in the modern system of the nation-state, science and technological progress have been the basis for increasing the population and improving the general welfare of people.

The tendency has been for 40 years now to reverse that process, an anti-technology, anti-science policy. But we still have—with the growth of the population of China, which has undergone a great surge of progress in the past 30 years—we have a situation of over 6 billion people on this planet.

If we continue the present trends of the IMF, the present trends of anti-technology, the so-called "Green movement"; if we continue to move back toward primitivism, which is what some people want—they say if you make people stupid, you can rule the world. This would mean a collapse of the world population level, from the level today of over 6 billion people to a level of far less than 1 billion people, in a period of one to two generations. That is the danger, and that is what we have to fight, that is what we have to overcome.

We must, in a sense, as some of the previous questions asked on this program indicate, we must have an understanding of the nature of the threat to us. This is the nature of the threat, and we must, therefore, mobilize, saying that we will not let this happen to humanity.

Then, once we have decided we will not let this happen to humanity, then we will say, what is the economic policy, in the sense of the physical economic policy, and what are the policies of finance and monetary affairs, which have to go with that, which enable us to maintain and improve the condition of life of a population of over 6 billion today. That is what we have to do.

We have to have a sense of optimism, a sense of immortality. We have to have a sense that we today are responsible for what happens to coming generations of humanity. We must see ourselves as an instrument of immortality by acting now to ensure that future generations have the opportunity for growth.

Valdez: We have a call from Mrs. Lita Ramos. Good evening, Lita.

Lita: One of the LYM had mentioned about the overturning of the election of Bush. Perhaps you could explain it to us. And I would like to express my disappointment that you were not elected as the Democratic candidate. And my last question is, what is the secret of your stamina? I understand you are now more than 80. Thank you very much.

LaRouche:  Well, my enemies are very upset about the fact that I am functioning at the age of 82, and they try to think of ways to get rid of me, but I am becoming much more difficult to get rid of as I have more and more friends around the world, and also because the crisis causes even some people who consider themselves my enemies, see me as a necessary person to have around to get some ideas about what to do with some of the messes they are making of things.

First of all, the election is not decided. There is a report of an estimate of the result of the election. There is no confirmation of that report. There is a strong indication that the report might hold up, but there is no proof of it. The election of the President of the United States depends upon a couple of phases: hurdle number one, is the auditing of the vote; that is now going on, and there are many questions being posed. For example, one question is whether the vote is accurate. And the second question is, if the vote is accurate, was the vote obtained by aid of fraud, including criminal action in suppressing the vote of some people who had the right to vote. And that is a crime. That is a violation of the Constitution. It is a violation of law, and it is a crime under U.S. law, which means that some of the people who may have been responsibile for this may be in prison, or may be faced with those kinds of charges.

Second, if the vote as tallied is validated by the Electoral College, which comes later, then it goes to another procedure. If the Electoral College cannot decide, clearly, then it goes to the Congress, and the Congress elects the next President and Vice President.

Now there is another phase to this, which is all the more subtle, but is actually what the real situation is in case Bush were confirmed by all these obstacles as having been re-elected. You now go to another phase. Will he actually be the President if he is elected? That is, the President has known mental problems . They are very clear. Everyone knows it, including leading members of his own family, and his father's circle, the former President Bush, is in the background.

Now you have noticed recently that James Baker III, who is the key spokesman on legal and related matters and financial matters for the Bush group—the Carlisle Group— that he has said rightly, as I have, that we have to get Barghouti, the Palestinian leader, out of an Israeli prison to become the negotiating partner with the Israeli government for an Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East.

That is a very strong opinion. It is probably shared by [former National Security Adviser Brent] Scowcroft and others in that circle. There are big questions. There is a riot going on inside the present Bush Administration. There is a riot of change of seats. There is a suggestion that if Bush were to remain President, he would be a much more quiet President, much more like he was as the Governor of Texas, less active, and the government would actually be run by other people.

Now, we are in the worst financial crisis in modern world history, that is, in modern civilization. This thing is coming on fast. The international monetary-financial system is collapsing. There is nothing that will stop that collapse under present conditions, which means that there is going to be an upheaval in the establishment and institutions of government in the United States and outside the United States.

So that, even if Bush were confirmed come January 20th next year, as the President, would he actually be the controlling President? Would he be the kind of President he was, or would there be a kind of a certain arrangement under which he would sit as President, but the actual important decisions would be shaped in a different way than they have been shaped in the last four years.

So these are the kinds situations we're looking at. Now as to myself, of course, I was a key primary candidate for the Presidential nomination during the recent primary campaign for the Democratic Party, and in the two months prior to the election, I was an important figure who was brought in on behalf of organizing the attempted election of John Kerry. I was brought in by various people and played a part in that election process, a key part.

I've now emerged from that process as a key part of the Democratic Party's organization for dealing with the present situation.

I am a king-maker in a sense in the Democratic Party. There are many in the Democratic Party who oppose me, but they also oppose the change that Kerry made in the last two months of his campaign. So now there is a fight inside the Democratic Party for a re-organization of the Democratic Party, and I'm part of the fight. Right as we speak there is a meeting going on in Arkansas involving former President Clinton and his circles who are down there on the occasion of bringing into being the inauguration of the Clinton Presidential Library.

There are discussions in other circles of which I am part of, or I know about, in the United States. Nothing is settled, nothing is settled.

We are in a period of transition in which I have to play an important part, both in the United States and outside the United States, in trying to deal with the great crisis which faces us now: the greatest crisis in modern history, really, in a sense the greatest crisis certainly in the past 300 years, a much greater crisis and much more profound than we faced during the 1930s.

Valdez: We have a question from a brand new LYM member, whose name is Eric.

Eric: Morning, sir, I understand you want to promote Classical culture, the world's greatest scientific, moral, and artistic developments, to neutralize the rock, sex, drugs counterculture now dominating the entertainment industry, trying to corrupt the minds of our young. How do you think we can promote Classical culture, such as Classical music, like Bach, Beethoven, here in our country, since classical culture is a Western thing?

LaRouche:  First, on the root of European Classical culture, which is run through the people like the Pythagoreans, Solon, Thales, Plato, and so forth: It is in a sense European Classical culture, but it is also an extension of world Classical culture. You have to remember that the human race has been on this planet for over 2 million years, as humans. There is a fundamental difference between apes and men, and that is the mind . Classical culture is nothing but a culture derived from the properties of the mind.

I can show you, for example, that in a Eurasian culture—such as the Vedic culture, with the Vedic hymns, which contain astronomical facts, which are validated: It is a great culture. Before 20,000 B.C., when the ice was sitting on top of most of Eurasia, except for the south, you had maritime cultures, ocean-going maritime cultures, with advanced knowledge of astronomy and navigation based on astronomy, so that these are the roots of Classical culture. What happened after a series of Dark Ages in various civilizations, there emerged in Europe, around the Greeks in particular,but based on a conduiting of knowledge of ancient culture, ancient world culture, with the aid of Egyptian astronomy, which became the foundations of a method that developed in Europe, which is a part of world culture, a world Classical culture. What we have to do today, is that we have to recognize that in cultures like—look at the great poverty still in China, the great mass of very poor people in China and in India, both of which countries are in a sense Asian powers, emerging Asian powers, yet you have extremely poor people who are living in practically pre-civilized conditions of life in parts of India.

Look at the rest of Asia. Look even at the Philippines, and the terrible conditions of life that some people face. These are pre-Classical conditions. But my contention is, and we have to recognize, that Classical culture, while it developed in its form in Europe, and developed on the basis of principles which have the validity for a culture of scientific principles, like that of Bach for example, that the root of this culture, which we have as Classical culture in Europe, the best of it, is actually a product of world culture, in which Asian cultures have it, as in China, as recognized by Leibniz, which are the foundation of the same culture which we have in Classical European culture.

In India, the same thing. So we have lost civilizations and lost cultures, and lost languages, which have given something to us, reflected in modern civilization.

Classical culture is a commitment to a policy of development of the full potential of the individual human mind, the development of an individual so that they are significant in what they do, as an honor to their ancestors and an ensurance of survival to their descendents.

That is Classical culture, and what we have in Europe is simply that we have the advantage of having developed a powerful culture, a culture which has transformed the planet, has increased the potential population density of the entire planet.

Back, earlier, before modern Europe, the potential population potential of this planet was about a half-billion people. You could not sustain more than that because the culture would not allow it, and what we have today with the vast explosion of population in Asia is a reflection of the impact of the benefits of European culture interacting and absorbed by Asian cultures. Therefore, we have to think not in terms of a proprietory European Classical culture. We have to think of a global Classical culture in which Europe has made a very significant contribution.

Valdez: We have a caller from outside, whose name is Antonio Velazco.

Antonio: Good evening, Mr. LaRouche. I really admire your knowledge. I would like to ask about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. Who really owns that land?

LaRouche:  That should be decided. I don't think anybody owns the land. That is a fact that has to be established. But what you have, if you look at the map, and look at the map of that territory, called Israel and Palestine—because it is one map. Look over the past periods, shall we say the beginning of the 19th Century, when the British first made their intervention into that area during the period of the Napoleonic wars. If you look at the map, everybody lives next to everybody. There is no really contiguous land area, which is owned by anybody in the sense of a national territory. What is needed is to create a definition of what the land area is.

Now that all involves, primarily, most immediately, Palestinians and Israelis. And our view has been—as the view of many Israelis, as well as Jews around the world, has been—either there should be one state responsible for all of the territory inhabited by both Jews and Arabs, and others, without discrimination—just like the United States, for example, which has all kinds of religious groups inside it, including some real nuts, but we have it. Or, therefore, if because of the bloodshed, which has gone on for all these decades, they cannot live at peace with one and another now, let them have two states, and let them divide the territory in some decent form.

The key problem here, once you say that that should be done, the problem is that there is not enough water, in terms of sustainable resources, to meet the requirements of the entire population now living there. Therefore, we need economic development, including large-scale desalination programs to ensure there are the economic conditions of life needed for the people of that area.

It is not a simple question, as to whose property that territory is. We have to decide. We have to recognize it must primarily be Israelis and Palestinians themselves who must make the agreement. We must do what we can to make the agreement work, to make it come into being. But, we also have to recognize that we have a responsibility to ensure there is the physical, economic development, which will make any state, or states so-defined, as viable propositions. Therefore, for example, that's why I find myself, in a sense, in bed with James Baker III, the H.W. Bush Secretary of State, on Barghouti, who is a man who is, like [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and many others, he's a killer; like Arafat, a killer. They've all been killers. They all are killers. They kill each other all the time, so you can't disqualify them because they are killers.

Barghouti was a courageous killer in a civil war between Israelis and Palestinians. Sharon is a killer of known propensities, but Barghouti is the one in prison, held by the Israelis because he is a killer, by the Israelis, who are killers. Therefore, get him out of prison, as James Baker III has said, as I say, and let Sharon, under U.S. and European pressure, negotiate with Barghouti. Because Barghouti has the popularity among the Palestinians now; therefore, he should be negotiated with, and therefore, we should force a peace into being now , to settle what the territory is, who owns what piece of land in terms of national sovereignty.

Velazco: The fear is very strong.

LaRouche: I know, but that's alright, we have to take away the fear factor. We have to say to Sharon and company: "Hey, you bum; hey, you killer, we're going to nail you to the negotiating table, and you are going to negotiate."

But the problem is that the United States, which has the power, with its friends in Europe and others, to bring about a forced negotiation of that type, has not done so. The United States must put its full weight, along with Europe and others, and its friends in the United Nations, to put its full weight to make sure that something beyond the Oslo Accords is agreed to and goes forth now. Not over ten years, but now! And it has to be an economic development proposal.

We have to force it to come about. We have to tilt the balance to make the peace negotiations actually happen.

Valdez: A question from LYM member Ver.

Ver: Hi, Lyn, you've mentioned earlier the financial interest in today's situation and back in Hitler's time. How did the financial oligarchy come into being, to what they are now?

LaRouche:  Well, the financial oligarchy is, as I've written—I've written a paper which I think you younger people in particular, who are going through a university-type education, or self-education as a group, should study, "On Animation and Economy." It is necessary for this period, because we are going into a period where the financial economy, or a finance-run economy, of the sort that is taught in most schools, will no longer work on this planet. We have to go the other way, the American System way. We have to start with a physical economy, as policy, and we have to design a financial system, under regulations which make the financial system work in the way that the physical economy requires.

That means that we have to understand a number of things. We have to understand the history of Europe, especially since about the last 1,000 years, 1,100 years perhaps. We have to understand that Europe was dominated since about 1000 A.D. by a Venetian/Norman chivalry alliance. This was called the Middle Ages. This was called feudalism. This was corrupt. Out of this, the Venetian financier oligarchy, which was the leading force in feudalism, has survived both through the religious wars, which were started by the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Torquemada, through the period of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended religious war in Europe in that form, although some people are trying to bring it back again today. But during this period, even despite what the Cardinal Mazarin did in bringing about the Treaty of Westphalia, and despite what happened in France for a period under Jean Baptist Colbert in terms of scientific and economic development, the Venetians came back to power, reincarnating themselves, so that instead of being Venetians, they now called themselves Dutch or British.

So the world has been dominated since 1763, when, after the Seven Years War—the Anglo-Dutch liberal financier interests have dominated the world since that time. This system, we call the Venetian system—in fact, the British party, the British liberal party of the 18th Century called itself the Venetian Party. It was actually run by Venetians. That Venetian system exists in the world today in the form of a syndicate of financier interests which were known in the period of the Versailles Treaty as the Synarchist International. It was this Synarchist International, including bankers in New York, who created Adolf Hitler, and Mussolini, and Franco, and so forth and so on. Now, this same crowd, which includes banks like—Lazard Frères in France is typical of this.

These people created Nazism. They created that. Now they're back. They never went away. The same financier interests are behind globalization; they are behind the changes which occurred, especially in the past 40 years, in the United States, and in Europe. These are the changes. We are now on the verge of going to a new form of what was called on the books, international fascism, or universal fascism. That is their intention. That is the meaning of the word globalization. So, that's what you are looking at. The same people who control the IMF, who are trying to dictate genocide to the people of Argentina right now.

These are the people. My enemies in the United States are these people. I've been their enemy ever since the end of the war, when I came out of the war and came back and found out that the right wing was taking over more and more of the power in my country away from the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt. These are the people that I have been fighting. These are the people who hate me and fear me. So we have a pretty good fight going on.

But if we don't defeat them, now, there is no chance for civilization, except a dark age. They can not win. They can win over us , and destroy us, but they can not win, because if they win, they will destroy themselves.

Valdez: We have another 25 minutes, if you don't mind.

LaRouche: Okay, let's do it. It's so good to be with the Filipino people now.

Valdez: We're really having fun having you with us, Lyn, you just can't imagine it. We have an American friend who has been living here for some time. He's a writer, whose name is Gary Satre, and he'd like to ask a question.

Gary: Good morning, Mr. LaRouche. How would you describe the mood of the American people in the wake of the election?

LaRouche:  First of all, they are stunned. We are not all stunned. We have two groups that I think are significant, or maybe three.

We've got, in the Democratic Party, around the people I collaborated with closely—not all of them, some of them are stunned—but around that group, which is a leading group, we have an emerging sense of what we have to do, and that spreads. We have also—the key thing to look at is the youth movement, because you would notice in the recent elections, the one factor that stood out, which we knew in advance, but the Democrats had to learn it the hard way, that over 65% of young people who voted, between 18 and 29 years of age, voted for Kerry.

Now, this typifies what we are operating on in terms of my youth movement in the United States. Young people have come to a time around the world, not just the United States, but around the world generally, where they realize that their parents' generation—that is, young people, who are 18 years old or more—realize that their parents' generation by and large is morally dead for the time being. They have fled into an escapist society, an entertainment society, thinking that they don't care if the future comes or not, as long as they can live out their time in a reasonable amount of pleasure and comfort, they are not going to worry.

Their children, their young adult children, don't accept that. They recognize their parents are by and large crazy, because they say we have, if we live, we have 40 years of life ahead of us, what kind of a future have our parents, and their parents, given to us? And therefore, they want a future. They are open to ideas.

What happens is that they are also a catalytic factor, because the parents' generation, which is corrupted by the effect of this cultural change of the recent period, especially in the 30- to 50-year-old age group—they are the worst, but the Baby Boomers are also bad. But when they see their children, their young adult children, moving politically toward a future, the parents are not unaffected. They tend to be remoralized, encouraged, and come back into the fight. So, the youth factor here is crucial. Young people now are still open, and this is also true in Europe, as well as in the United States, are open to the idea of a future.

We have it in Mexico. We have proven in Mexico that there is a youth factor in Mexico just like in the United States, and we are very close to Mexico because we have so many Mexican-Americans that we are more than neighboring states, we are very close neighbors. This exists, but on the one hand there is extreme pessimism, there is a tendency toward fascism in Europe, we see it in trends in Germany, in France, in Italy, and in Spain of course, but there's also hope. We are now in one of those periods of turbulence where history in a sense will decide in which direction we will go, to hell or, maybe not toward paradise, but certainly toward a great improvement.

Valdez: Another question from the LYM, whose name is Neil.

Neil: I have two questions. Now, if Bush is given a fresh mandate, and given the way that George Bush thinks, what is the likelihood that there would be a nuclear conflict, or World War Three? My second question is concerning the fact that several states at several points in history decided to band together to work for mutual benefits, until finally we have the present United States of America. Now, there is a group here in the Philippines pushing for Philippines statehood, because both nations, the United States and the Philippines, will stand to gain by it. What do you think of the Philippines becoming the 51st state of the United States of America?

LaRouche:  Well, I think that the United States—to say this first, if the Philippines were desperate and the United States would improve, then that might tend to happen, because, why not, it could be so. But, I think right now my emphasis would be on the Philippines' sovereignty. I think the Philippines as a sovereign nation-state is actually the immediate most desirable step, with much closer ties than we had recently with the United States, not the wrong kind of ties, but the right kind.

Recognizing that there is a factor in the Philippines—which is historically related to us since 1898, and also the Spanish cultural influence earlier—should recognize that we have a certain moral responsibility, which implicitly was adopted by us toward the Philippines, and, therefore, in any last ditch chance, we have a destiny with the Philippines. But it should be our desire, as it was the desire of Philippines leaders and wise people in the United States, that the Philippines should emerge from the 1940s as a true independent, developing, progressive republic, and a beacon of culture, of specifically European culture primarily, within Asia.

You look at Southeast Asia, for example, where the Philippines' capability would have been extremely important in that period for the development of Southeast Asia, and still is. So I think my first preference is that the Philippines should develop fully as a truly sovereign republic, but a developing nation.

Don't take the George Bush Presidency as a personal thing, as all determining, as I tried to say earlier. Yes, it is a factor, it is a problem, but everybody who's in a position of influence and power in the United States knows it's a problem. We know, contrary to press impressions of people reading from the U.S. press outside the United States, nothing is settled. Even if Bush were to be certified as re-elected, nothing is settled. You look at the upheaval, the changes in personnel now on-rushing within the existing Bush Administration. You look at the struggles, the quarrels in the Congress. We have an explosive situation here, that the name of George W. Bush is not the decisive factor in determining what the United States will be, even come January and February of this coming year. So, it's not a settled question. This is precisely a wide open question. It is a wide open question among Europeans as well as in the United States. Europeans know this. Europeans are looking at the situation here, from Western Europe, in particular.

Russia is looking at this. China is looking at this. Look, for example, I'll give a case: As a result of certain right-wing factions, synarchist factions, not only in the United States, but in Japan, like the case of Ishihara, the Mayor of Tokyo, or in Taiwan, you have now a threat, oh, say, as of December this year or later, a threat of a Straits crisis between mainland China and Taiwan, orchestrated by right-wing factions in the United States, and others. And that is not something that anybody who is sane wants, but there are some people from Japan and the United States, extreme right-wing forces which are pushing it, and it could become a crisis within coming weeks or slightly afterward, or after December. It is there.

Therefore, we have proper concern about the stability of the entire region of Asia, which could be totally destabilized by this. You can imagine what this involves. It already is an issue, say, up to 2005, late 2005-2007. There is now a threat of a continuing problem in the Straits area, in which everybody in Asia will be affected, and this thing has to be settled. So, the question about how the Bush Administration responds—whatever the Bush Administration is—on this question, because there are powerful forces inside the Bush combination which want stability in U.S. relations with China, very strongly. There are those who don't, and also others, as in Europe.

Therefore, the question is, are we going to have a Bush Administration, if it is a Bush Administration, which wants stability in this area, or are we going to have one that wants conflict. And you have some British influences and others, who strongly want conflict in this area.

So, there are a lot of undecided questions here, and one has to accept the tension of not being able to get definite answers to specific questions, because the questions themselves are not yet defined. One has to go into this kind of suspension thing when you have a highly fluid situation. You have to think like a commander in chief in general warfare, where you know what you're fighting for, you know what the opposition is, but your not quite certain what your terrain is going to be on which you are going to have to fight in the morning.

Valdez: Another question from the LYM, young Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Hi, sir. Regarding the recent development of the Scramjet, which I think is a Strategic Defense Initiative proposal, or SDI, what is the benefit of this on the entire nation?

LaRouche:  Look, first of all, it is very important, if we are going to develop the planet, we're going to have to have a general science policy, an economic science policy of a type beyond anything we have had so far. You know the planet is getting kind of crowded, not because there are too many people on it, but it is crowded because the effects which we face in any part of the planet are transmitted so rapidly to other parts of the planet. We've got to have a much more stable planet, and a much more stable economy, and a much clearer conception of where we are going.

For example, to become a qualified professional today, means that the first 25 years of life of a young person—up until the time they have graduated from a professional qualification program, is 25 years. That means that a capital cycle, as I have emphasized in various writings, is 25 years, a quarter-century, and, therefore, society has to make an investment in young people of 25 years before there is, shall we say, a payback on the investment. So, therefore, we have to think in those terms.

We have to think, therefore, in terms of two generations ahead, because when you reach the age of 25, in a decent society, you have an active life, active economic and professional life, past the age of 75. That's two generations.

Now, therefore, we have to equip you today for what you will be doing in terms of your development of society, for 50 years. Now, therefore, we have to look ahead, essentially, 75 years from the birth of a child, starting with the 50 years of the people who are now approaching 25. That means we have to look at our planet and our Solar System in a new way.

We have problems in the Solar System. There are threats to Earth within the realm of the Solar System, that is, long built-in threats—asteroid problems, for example. How about an asteroid hitting the planet Earth, that could make a real mess of things, and that is possible, and other objects of that type.

There are problems in the Solar System that we have to learn how to deal with, and it's going to take time, so we have got to start now.

Also, everything we do in that direction of mastering these scientific questions, will enable us to improve life on Earth by the scientific and related discoveries we make in the process. Therefore, getting into exploring the Solar System, looking at the Solar System from a vantage point outside Earth itself, outside our atmosphere, is extremely important.

Now, the first step to explore the universe is to get up through the atmosphere into a position, which is called the geo-stationary orbiting position around earth, because that's the point from which you pivot in going to explore the system as a whole.

It means we have to get on the Moon—because this involves problems of gravity, for example. Problems of great gravity. To get up to the geo-stationary position through the atmosphere is the biggest cost we have now in getting into exploration of space, because you have to expend all that—you're carrying oxygen now in a vessel, the oxygen you are using to get the plane, or whatever vehicle, up above the atmosphere, to get into space.

Why are you carrying oxygen to get up into the atmosphere? Because the atmosphere is full of oxygen, and that is the concept of the Scramjet, is that we can probably reduce the cost and the effort required to get into orbit, that low-orbiting position, by 90% by using a Scramjet instead of a Shuttle launcher like we are doing now.

So, that is the first step. Now if we do that, it means we have to go into some very interesting areas of exploration, and if we do that, we will be in a position to do exploration we can't do now. We will then have to get to the Moon, because you do not want to build large structures to carry into a Mars orbiting position from Earth. You have to lift these structures up from the Earth. It costs too much.

Why not go to the Moon, which has material there? Why not apply a science to industries on the Moon, automated industries largely, which produce the key elements of things we will put in spaceships and so forth, which will go to a Mars orbit, for example. Therefore, we have to create these industries. We have to know how to do this.

Now putting man into space, we have to think about gravity. It is not necessarily a good idea to have someone running around in space under a low gravity. It may be bad for their biology, so there are a lot of things that we have to do. We have to find out things we don't know now about the Solar System. So, therefore, we are stuck with that, and the Scramjet, the reason I got onto this back in the early 1980s, where I pushed this—as you can see on the website, which you can pull down—I pushed it because this is absolutely necessary for any intelligent approach to space which meets the needs of humanity back here on Earth.

Valdez: We have time for one last question before your parting words, Lyn. We have a question from Zaida.

Zaida: Hello, Mr. LaRouche. If ever Bush and Cheney will serve another term, is it possible that the cases against them may lead to their resignation in the end?

LaRouche:  The likelihood of the elimination of Cheney is much greater now than it was before Nov. 2. What happened is that Karl Rove and company, inside the Republican Party, staged a revolution, which was declared at the famous freemasonic meeting at the Bohemian Grove out there [in California], of absolute support for Cheney as part of the Bush-Cheney re-election team. Therefore, now that Bush has been nominally re-elected, it is now time to get rid of Cheney. That is one of the things that is very much on the table. Cheney recently went into the hospital for a check-up, he has a very unfavorable cardiac condition, and the report was there was a plan to have him be hospitalized and to quit government, because his health requires he be relieved of those stresses.

There is also a significant effort in some quarters to dump the entire neo-con crowd, [Undersecretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, and so forth and so on, also with Cheney.

There is also a very important legal case against Cheney's office, on the illegal exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA undercover operative. That case is now coming to fulfillment. Negotiations of a plea-bargain are being considered in various quarters. There are other issues of that type, like the Halliburton issues, which could lead to criminal charges against Cheney, and Cheney, in order to escape criminal charges, would probably agree instead to quietly depart the scene.

So, we don't know what the situation is going to be. As I said earlier, you have a situation in the United States where absolutely nothing was finally settled by the reported victory of Bush on Nov. 3. There are people who are trying to make that appearance, that it is finally settled, like the Washington Post, but it is not settled, and even if Bush might be President on Jan. 20, it might not be the same Bush Presidency. All kinds of upheavals are in progress inside the institutions of the United States, and internationally also, which can mean that we are in, now, not for a settled consequence of Nov. 2, but we are now for an unsettled consequence. We are entering one of the periods of the most radical, unpredictable change we have known in a long time.

So, nothing is settled. Everything has now become unsettled by the vote, not settled by it.

Valdez: We have a couple of minutes more, Lyn, and we would like to take this opportunity to ask you to address the Filipino people. So, you have the floor Lyn.

LaRouche: Okay, thank you, Butch. I have had a long-standing special attachment to the Philippines, and I am very much concerned for its integrity and sovereignty and well-being today. I would be very happy, and the Philippines would make me very happy, by being truly sovereign, successful, growing, and peaceful again today. And you may expect that wherever I am and whatever I am doing, that commitment is very active within me, for very special reasons that I won't bother going into on this question of the Philippines. I am concerned. I think the sovereignty of the Philippines and the success of the Philippines as a sovereign presidential republic is to me one of the necessary ingredients of a future for the whole Pacific area of the world.

Valdez: Okay, we wish we had more time with you sir. On behalf of the Philippines LaRouche Society, the LaRouche Youth Movement, the Katipunan and Democrats and Filipinos, and thousands of grateful listeners, we wish you all the best and Godspeed.

LaRouche: Thank you. Good night.