Sept. 16, 2005

The webcast was moderated by Debra Hanania Freeman. A video archive of the webcast is also available.

Debra Freeman: On behalf of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, I'd like to welcome all of you to today's event. I think without question, you'll agree with me, that the nature of our gathering today will prove to be historic in nature. Because, in fact, with the rising waters of Hurricane Katrina, the final threds of credibility and legitimacy of the Bush-Cheney Administration were washed away. [applause] And in fact, it is actually in the midst of that storm surge, that Mr. LaRouche once again emerged as the key figure in the United States, who was prepared in the face of the complete paralysis and uncaring of an incompetent, insane administration, to step to the fore, and to give direction, not only to the party whose Presidential nomination he sought, but also to give direction to our elected leaders.

Thankfully, members of the Congress responded, and in fact, acted when the administration failed to act. Last night, all of us were witness to the Idiot-in-Chief's attempt to try to run damage-control for what he did not do, when the crisis emerged, both prior to and after its immediate manifestation. But the fact of the matter, is that his legitimacy has already been so damaged and so threatened, that a national address and a sympathetic glance, along with an 800 number, is not sufficient to regain the legitimacy of his office.

For the first time, people in Washington realize, that there is no way around an incompetent, insane White House. The question now, though, is what direction the nation will take. And what direction the world will take. And I think, again, we can all agree, the direction of the world will very much be determined by the direction of the United States.

There are many things that I can say. There are things that I will refer to, during the course of today's event. But, ladies and gentlemen, without any further introduction, please join me in welcoming Mr. Lyndon LaRouche. [applause]

Lyndon LaRouche: Thank you. Thank you, Debra. Thank you, very much.

To start with, my function here, which is international as you know, is to set the pace for where this nation goes: because, where this nation goes now, the world goes. There's no other part of this planet in trouble, which is capable of making certain initiatives, certain decisions, which must be made for the world. Many parts of the world would welcome what I propose the United States must do in providing leadership, but they won't start it themselves. We in the United States must start it.

Because we have a Constitution, and a tradition that goes with that, which gives us a capability, that no other nation on this planet has ever achieved. We look like sour eggs right now, or something. But that's not our character. Because the character of a people is not defined by what it is at a moment. The character of a people is embodied in its living history.

Now, for example, in my family, I am personally acquainted, actively, with someone who was born more than 200 years ago. I never met this gentleman, a great-great-grandfather. But he was a dominant personality, back in the 1920s, at the dinner table of family gatherings. He was a legend, he was a leader in the civil rights struggle, coming out of the Carolinas during the early part of the last [19th] century. He was chased out of Carolina, and had to go to Ohio, where he became a leader of the civil rights struggle there, the struggle against slavery there. And ran the Underground station north of Columbus, Ohio, of escaped slaves being shipped up to Canada to get some kind of freedom.

So this, in a sense, typifies my experience, my family experience in the United States, from the first people here—apart from an Algonquin Indian who was in there earlier, and is part of the ancestry; you may not note it now, but it's there—came into North America in the latter part of the 17th Century, from France into Quebec, and into Pennsylvania from England. And we have some Scottish immigrants from the 1860s—one came over as a sword-wielding dragoon, who joined the First Rhode Island Cavalry for the Civil War.

So, we have embedded in us, in our family connections, in other connections, in the transmission of ideas, of our nation to us, which reaches back deep into the founding of this nation, before it became a republic, in places such as the Plymouth Brethren settlement in Plymouth, Mass., or the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We represent those from Europe, who came here with a very clear idea, about establishing a bastion for freedom, here, that was not available in Europe, with the intention of bringing the establishment of freedom here, as a force, back into Europe to reform it.

Out of that, we created the best Constitution that the world has ever seen: our Federal Constitution, our Declaration of Independence. These are standards of constitutional law which no other part of the world has ever approached! And this is an integral part of our tradition.

We are not a perfect nation. There are no perfect nations, and never will be. There are nations in the process of development. And the development is represented by those, who, in a tradition , a national tradition—also the tradition of European civilization in its best aspects—are in the process of trying to build forms of society which will make the human race a better place in which to live, for our descendants, than we have today.

The common idea, which came out of Greece, actually, as far as we know, as it is expressed by Solon of Athens, on which our Constitution was modeled in a sense—the ideas of our Constitution were modelled upon the reference to Solon of Athens, the first kind of free state in all European civilization. It didn't work out too well. It failed. But then, came along the work of Plato, who represented Socrates. And in Plato's Republic was founded the idea on which this nation was founded, the idea of a republic, of a people dedicated to what we call the General Welfare: that the purpose of a nation is to provide for the General Welfare, of all of its people, and especially even more than the living, those who come after them.

It was that sense of a republic, that sense of the immortality, the immortal purpose of a nation, which is its character. And we in the United States have been given, a constitutional tradition. Despite all the evils we've had to fight against within our republic, the best in the world, with all its present, most noticeable, imperfections.

So therefore, what I have to do, is, being an older person—older, not so much in years, because there are people who are much older, at least, a few of them, and they're valuable—but, old in the sense of my thoughts, go back not less than 3,000 years. And therefore, the ideas I carry within, the ideas which represent the policies on which I speak, are at least several thousand years old, and date from the ideas of European civilization, since ancient Greece: the Greece of the Pythagoreans, of Solon, and Plato. Therefore, it's from that standpoint, of recognizing that I must speak to that, to the inner Constitution within our Constitution, the intention on which this nation was founded, that we must now bring a remedy for the ills of the entire planet.

We now face the worst financial crisis in all modern history. This is not a depression. The equivalent of the 1929 Depression happened in October 1987—and we've been going downhill since then. The condition of the lower 80% of our family-income brackets, has been deteriorating in the United States, and as I shall deal with this with some indications today, it's been getting worse, and worse, and worse. There are whole sections of the United States, such as the states of the Central States—Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois—which were once powerful states—western Pennsylvania—once powerful, in terms of industrial and agricultural progress: Been destroyed! It's a wasteland! The entire great farm belt, the grain belt, which was a power of this nation, has been largely destroyed! It's been destroyed by the policies of government, over a period of about 40 years.

We had many mistakes we made in the post-war period. We didn't continue the Roosevelt direction fully. It became worse and worse. And after the assassination of Kennedy, and about the time we plunged into the war in Indo-China, we began to go worse. Under Nixon, we became much worse, and we've been going downhill, at an accelerating rate, ever since.

We're in a condition today, in the United States, as increasingly now in Europe, too, in which the infrastructure, and the industries on which this nation depended for its riches, have been destroyed. Now, infrastructure, for example, water systems have a life-expectancy of 30-odd to 50 years. Power systems have an immediate approximate life-expectancy of a quarter-century or more. Highway systems; railway systems, which have disappeared; and so forth—factory systems, industrial systems. More important: the skills of labor! We do not have a labor force that has the skills, even approximately the skills, of production that it had three decades ago. We have become a post-industrial nation; some call it a "services economy." It's an economy waiting to be served—at lunch!

So therefore, we are a ruined nation. But we still have, in the immortal aspect of ourselves, in the memory of what we were, in the evidence of what we were, we have the keys to success, the keys to rebuilding.

Now, very few politicians in Washington have that view. Very few so-called leaders today, have that view. We're like a nation in Purgatory, waiting to be delivered into Hell! We live. But we live in the end-phase of history, where history has come to an end, and we're living in Purgatory, in the end of history, waiting to be dropped into Hell. And that's considered popular opinion, conventional opinion, today.

But now, all these people who have been sleeping in Purgatory, the Purgatory of Baby-Boomerism in particular, are now faced with destruction. They've assumed that they could live on, in the end of history, and silently pass into death without pain. And having a sort of a comfort zone to live in, in the meantime, to live in, until they were delivered to a more ugly destination.

That's ended: There is no comfort zone! There's no safe place to which to flee. There's no hiding place. You can't shrug it off. It's you . It's your situation. It's the situation of the nation as a whole. There's no place to run. There's no place to hide: You have to get up and fight, whether you like it or not. Not because you like to fight, but because you have no alternative.

That pretty much is the actual situation of the world today. It's become worse and worse over the past two, three decades. But now, we've come to the end of the game. We are minutes, in the sense of history, minutes away from the destruction of world civilization. We're minutes away from a process that could lead to a collapse of the world population from over 6 billion today, to about the population size of the 14th Century before. The very means of existence are being destroyed.

What you saw, in the effects of Katrina, are two things: You saw the effects of a part of the economy, which is in much worse condition than it was 30, 40 years ago. We see the effects of a lot of poor people, who didn't even have the money to get out of town, who were hit by poverty, the poverty which was imposed upon them as a condition. But we saw, also, we saw the poverty of government, the insanity of government. The virtually criminal negligence on the part of the President and Vice President, and their institutions. They were on a vacation—they should have stayed there, and left the office to somebody else to take over.

So, we're in two kinds of crisis: We're in an economic crisis, a moral crisis, a social crisis, which have been building up over decades: decades of error, decades of negligence, decades of carelessness, decades of corruption! But we also find ourselves in a desperate situation, in which the leading institutions of the Executive branch of government are a catastrophic failure—and worse than a failure; you almost wish they weren't there. But we need those institutions, but under better management, to get us out of this mess.

And that's the situation around the world. Germany is operating below breakeven. Germany, under the present policies, hasn't a chance. My wife, who's running for Chancellor in Germany, is the best chance Germany has! Because at least she represents the ideas. And there are some people around Chancellor Schröder who recognize the importance of these kinds of ideas, and some people in parts of Europe recognize it. But Europe could not save itself on its own. It could not take on the challenge of the changes in policy which have to be made on a global scale.

Now, in such times of crisis as this, when the world is decaying because of bad policy and its economic effects, you come into a very dangerous time, in which Hell may break out in the form of certain kinds of wars.

Now, the principal subject, among the several I want to deal with summarily and in succession today, is, first of all, the greatest immediate danger of all: the danger of permanent war.

Now, I'd like to have you start with this by looking at the cover of the next issue of EIR . [Headline reads on each of three decks, "Dick Cheney: Permanent Revolution, Permanent War" with photos of Cheney in the center, flanked by Trotsky and Parvus] And I'll explain what this is. And I'll explain why it's important to do that, today.

Now, one of the things I have to do today, and in the days following, is to make clear to people in the Senate and other parts of our government, in influential institutions, exactly what the problem is: the problem typified by Cheney, a Cheney, who in a sense, in his own way, is far worse and more dangerous than Adolf Hitler. And if you don't stop him now, you may have nothing worth stopping.

What the danger is, is this: In a time of crisis, when things can no longer go on the way they have been going on, you come to a point, where somebody decides to push through dictatorship. And that is exactly what the Cheney-Bush Administration (in that order), and what the British government of Tony Blair, are doing. There's an Anglo-American alliance to bring Hell on this planet.

Now, many people object to the specific things that they recognize that Cheney and Blair are doing, in their alliance—which is made through his wife, Lynne Cheney, who actually runs the family. He used to be a performing stud service in the family, and when that was over, they gave him another assignment, as Vice President. But, look—we've got the cover (keep it on there for a minute, because I want to get this theme thoroughly impacted). Now, we know that Cheney and Company—and Cheney's the leader of this in the government, because Bush doesn't know which end is up and which end is down—but Cheney, since he was Secretary of Defense, under Bush #1, or they call him "41," had a plan for a war. At that time, the first Bush Administration, which was advised by various people who were saner and more intelligent than George H.W. Bush, said, "Don't continue a war in Iraq. Don't try to occupy it. Get out of it! Make the agreement, and leave." Which was done.

Cheney's policy, at that time, was to continue with the war and the occupation, with the kind of thing which did happen, recently under his direction as Vice President. Some people think that was a bad idea—they don't understand what the idea was .

Now remember, that when Cheney was going to war, with that stooge, a President, doing the spade-work for him, he was warned by the military, that without an exit strategy, without a plan for an exit strategy, this would become a mess—with no satisfactory conclusion. Now, that warning has been borne out. Iraq is a mess. There is no solution. There will never be a stable state, under this condition, today. People would say, "But doesn't that prove that Cheney failed?" No, it does not prove that Cheney failed. Cheney did not fail. He succeeded. Because, what was his purpose? See, naive people think, that when the United States goes to war, it's going to war to win war. War means, you defeat an opponent, you readjust the country, and leave, having declared victory. Well, Bush declared victory, but he didn't have a victory, and Cheney never intended a victory! Rumsfeld never intended a victory in Iraq! They intended this continue, the way it is! They intend, now, to do the same thing with Iran. They intend to do this in North Korea. They intend to do this in other parts of the world.

Now, we've reached the point, that we no longer have a military capability for conducting wars. What we have is a military capability, for destruction. Largely from the air, by missile or aircraft. With nuclear weapons—mini-nuclear weapons, but it won't stop there.

Their plan for permanent war : Again, the cover. (Keep it on for a while.)

Now, where did this idea come from? The idea is very old. Let's take the idea as it existed in European civilization: The first case of this kind of warfare, in European civilization was the Peloponnesian War, which destroyed the power of Greece. Greece was destroyed internally, by the Peloponnesian War. The end-game of the Peloponnesian War, was to eliminate Greece as a major factor—it was a dominant factor in the Mediterranean, at that time—in order to make way for a new empire. The empire was intended to be formed by an alliance of Macedon, with the Persian Emperor, the Achemaenid Empire, and to create an empire of the entire Mediterranean region, which would be divided into two parts, with a shared empire by the King of Macedon, and the Emperor of Persia. To divide, to take the Halys line and the line in the Middle East, divide the world at that point: to the East, all the way to Pacific Coast, would be one half of the empire; and to West, from this line, such as the Halys River in Anatolia, would be the other part of the empire.

Now, that didn't work, because the Academy at Athens backed up Alexander, who hated his father (justly so), and who broke the deal, and destroyed the Persian Empire. So, for that moment, the empire was off. But then, Alexander was poisoned, he was killed by poisoning, and therefore, a certain amount of chaos went on in this period, the Ptolemy period.

But then, it came back: About 200 B.C., you had the emergence of Rome as an imperial force. It was not yet an empire. It was still called a Republic, but the intention was empire. And the transition occurred to empire, through civil wars and various kinds of wars in the Mediterranean, to settle which of three powers would be the head of the empire: Would it be Egypt? Would it be the Middle East? Or, would it be Rome itself? At first, there was supposed to be a compromise between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, but that didn't work out, because Julius got himself killed. Then the heirs of Julius Caesar began to quarrel among themselves. And there were various deals: Marc Anthony tried to marry Cleopatra again—she was apparently the trading merchandise of the day. And they got defeated, because the legal heir of Julius Caesar, who changed his name, made a deal with the forces in the Middle East, and they defeated the forces of Marc Anthony/Cleopatra, and he became, of course, the Emperor Augustus.

They had an imperial system. The imperial system decayed internally, and the Emperor Diocletian divided the Empire into two parts, an Eastern and Western division of the Empire, just as had been planned at the time of Philip of Macedon, and the Persian Empire. A two-empire system. So, you had the Empire of the West and the Empire of the East, divided in the middle of what is now Yugoslavia. That didn't work out too well.

Then you had the emergence of the medieval period, about 1000 A.D., in which the Venetian financier-oligarchy emerged as the successor to Byzantium, and made an alliance with the Norman Chivalry. And the two of them ran the world in that area, in a form which was called Crusades, which started with the Albigensian Crusade, the Norman Conquest, and a series of official Crusades, all the way until the verge of the collapse of that empire, in the 14th Century in a new Dark Age—the financial system collapsed.

But then, we had the emergence, in the Golden Renaissance, of a new kind of society: a true nation-state society, which was formed out of the Council of Florence, with the establishment of the first modern nation-state, based on the principle of the General Welfare—Louis XI's France. Now, you had a fellow at Louis XI of France's court, by the name of Richmond. He was Englishman. And he went up to England, and he overthrew the bastard, Richard III, and established England as the second modern nation-state, that is, committed to the principle of the General Welfare.

At that point, a struggle broke out between the vestiges of the old imperial interests, and a new kind of state, the modern nation-state. They tried to break it up with religious war, from 1492, with the Expulsion of the Jews—by Spain, by the Grand Inquisitor—until 1648, when religious peace was established in Europe with the treaty of 1648, the Peace of Westphalia.

In this period, however, a new imperial force came up—no longer the Habsburgs, but the Anglo-Dutch Liberals, initially the Anglo-Dutch Liberal India Companies. And they set forth to establish an empire. And through a war, which they organized on the Continent of Europe, called the Seven Years' War, they became an imperial power, the British East India Company, in February 1763 at the Treaty of Paris. And this became the beginning of the British Empire, which initially was an empire of the British East India Company.

Now, at that point, the oppression occurred against the American colonies. And as well, against the people of Europe. So an international alliance developed, among leading intellectual and moral forces inside Europe, and the forces inside North America, led by Benjamin Franklin. Which resulted in the formation of this republic, with the support of most of Europe, of most of the people of Europe. But then, the French Revolution, which the British orchestrated, the unleashing of Napoleon to destroy much of Europe with his wars, created the situation which led into all kinds of Hell, for us and others, until Abraham Lincoln led in victory, against a British puppet called the Confederacy, the British slave-holder faction.

Then, the United States emerged as a great influential power on the planet. The ideas of the United States, the U.S. economy, spread into Germany, in 1877-78, with the Bismarck reforms which were modelled upon the U.S.; in Japan, in the same period, with the Japan reforms, which started Japan as an industrial society, as a modern society; with a development in Russia under Alexander III in particular, the development of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the industrialization of Russia. And similar things in other parts of the world.

So, at this point, the British Empire, which had seemed to dominate the world in the period of the early 19th Century, was suddenly placed in jeopardy, not because there was an imperial power threatening them, but because the nations of Eurasia, as well as the Americas, were in revolt against empire. They were for development, agro-industrial development; for the freeing of people from conditions of serfdom and slavery and other kinds of impoverishment.

Again, the imperial forces, led by Britain, organized a war, called World War I—with the help of the assassination of a President in 1901. And so forth. It led to the second war, planned by the same people. But then, we had a President, Franklin Roosevelt, who knew what the game was, and who represented the American tradition, of his ancestors. Who led, not only in rebuilding this nation out of the Depression, where, under Hoover the economy collapsed by one-half. But Franklin Roosevelt made us the greatest economic power the world had ever seen, from under depression conditions. And because of our existence, Hitler, who would have been successful, was defeated. Without the power of the United States, and the commitment of the United States, we would have been living, saying " Heil Hitler! " today.

Roosevelt saved us.

But then, again, the same crowd , which had backed Hitler—including Americans, including the grandfather of the present President of the United States, Prescott Bush, who is the guy who organized the funds to save the Nazi Party from bankruptcy, in time to make Hitler dictator of Germany! This crowd, once Roosevelt was dead, began to go back to the same, old business. They couldn't do it immediately. They could do it by pieces. Most of you here, don't know what we lived through under Truman. Truman was the most evil President that I can think of: He did more, by intention, to destroy the United States. He was the one who threatened to put us into preemptive nuclear war ! It was Truman, who stopped the peace treaty, which had been negotiated with Japan, so that we could drop the only two nuclear weapons we had as prototypes, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intention was to create a nuclear arsenal and conduct a preemptive war against the Soviet Union—which was called off, only when the Soviet Union developed some nuclear weapons, and developed priority in a thermonuclear weapon.

At that point, they called the show off. They told Harry go "go git!" "Git back home, there, Harry! Your time is over!" And we brought in Eisenhower, who kept us from going to war, during the time he was President. Otherwise, we would have been in nuclear war.

But then, Eisenhower was out of office. Kennedy did not know what the score was. His father had been on the wrong side, anyway. And therefore, they killed him—and we went through a change.

This is what we're up against, this crowd.

Now, what's the point? The financial interests, the same financial interests of the United States and Britain, and other countries, which brought Hitler and what he represented to power in Europe, during the 1920s and 1930s—these same financier interests, which, through people like George Shultz, use stooges like Cheney, are determined to get us into a special kind of war, which we should understand from the history of European experience with imperialism, beginning from the time of the Peloponnesian War. The purpose of Cheney's operation, is not to fight a war to win it against an adversary, and bring peace, by winning war. The purpose of empire, as the Roman Empire, as the British Empire, as other empires, is to use war, as a means of government . To kill off, by war, forces which are independent. And to get wars going on religious bases, and other bases, among peoples, and by playing people against each other, national groups against each other, national areas against each other, to rule the world, the way Rome, under the Roman legions, ruled its empire. The way that medieval Europe, under Venetian-Norman chivalry control, used war , like Crusades and other wars, as a means of controlling Europe, in an imperial way. That's the method used by the British Empire: war as a method of government .

Now, the problem we have—and I'll get back to this in this cover picture again (the cover story, shall we say?): Now, you got three characters there. You've got in the middle, Cheney. I think you recognize the bum. With all his glory, his beauty, hmm? And you've got over on the side, on our left, Leon Trotsky. On the right, a fellow, Alexander Helphand, otherwise known as Parvus. These are the people, who conveyed into Europe, in their time, a doctrine called permanent revolution . Which is a doctrine, which by name, is associated by the cognoscenti with Trotskyism. Trotskyists have the theory of permanent revolution.

But, this is tied to a doctrine of permanent war. Who gave Trotsky, the idea of permanent revolution? Parvus. Alexander Helphand. What was Helphand? Helphand was a British agent, of Russian extraction, tied to a famous character, Colonel Zubatov, in Russia—the chief of the Okhrana, the secret police. And with Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky. And they, and other people: These were the people who set up fascism in Europe, for example, Italy, was set up as part of this crowd. And Parvus died in the 1920s, organizing what became the Nazi movement—then under the movement under Coudenhove-Kalergi, which he was working at the time he died of natural or unnatural causes.

During the period, he was a gun-runner, a grain trader, and so forth—everything. He was trained in Britain, recruited in Britain, and deployed as a Russian operative in British operations around the world: organizing wars, organizing weapons trade, organizing so forth.

In 1905, he had Trotsky in tow, and took him into Petersburg, where the Okhrana chief, Zubatov, was organizing a revolution against the Czar—from inside the Czar's government. And he gave Trotsky a paper, which he, Parvus, had written, on permanent revolution. He left Trotsky with the paper. Trotsky got into trouble. He had left the scene, and Trotsky thereafterward defended this doctrine of permanent revolution. So, what it is, is a kind of a left-right operation, of organizing instability, riots, insurrections, so forth, various means of creating Hell. It's otherwise called "regime change"! In other words, what we did in Iraq. We go through regime change, and the place is turned into a hellhole—from which it will never recover, under the present trends. It's not intended to recover—ever. They intend to spread it to Syria, to Iran, and so forth. Permanent regime change: permanent revolution. And part of that is permanent war .

That's what we in the United States face, within and without.

The problem, the challenge before us, today, in the middle of what is a great depression, great suffering, great problems among us, and in the world at large: The chief challenge is, that the government, the Executive branch of our government, is in the control of a few people, typified merely by Cheney, who are for permanent regime change, permanent revolution. And the irony of the thing, is of course, they've recruited a lot of Trotskyists, who are called neo-cons, neo-conservatives—or, chicken-hawks, because they ducked service in Vietnam, and went on to wars in other places, where other people are fighting the wars—and permanent war.

Not war to win , in the sense of nation-state wars. But war as a method of government, to destroy the planet, so that a handful of people, relatively speaking, control the entire planet, as an empire. These people are financier interests, of the type that are looting our government—like Halliburton and Bechtel, for example, today. This crowd. And that's what we're up against.

So our people in the Senate and elsewhere do not yet understand this! And their failure to understand this, to understand what we're really up against, means they do not take the appropriate response. They may take an honest response, they may do useful things—but they're going on to bigger and better things than they have faced right now, or recognized so far: They're facing something much more deadly, than they imagine. And my job is to make those facts clear to them. And we will be doing that, which is why I refer to the cover of EIR —this thing—to document exactly what this is. And to put forth, internationally, documentation of the nature of the danger we face : What is the danger of war ? What does it mean? What is the policy? Where does it come from? How is it organized? And, how do we defeat it?

If we don't understand that, we will lose. And therefore, understanding what is behind the idea of permanent revolution, and permanent warfare, is crucial to saving this nation, and saving civilization. And unfortunately, only relatively few people understand that, today.

All right, now, when you're dealing with something ugly, my view is, that you start, as did my great friend Francois Rabelais of France, who faced terrible conditions; and the case of Don Quixote , of our dear friend Miguel Cervantes: When you face a terrible situation, and Spain was a terrible place at the time; there was nothing good in Spain. There's nothing good in Don Quixote : Everybody is nuts. Greedy and nuts: There aren't any good Spaniards in Don Quixote . They're all nuts. So but, Miguel Cervantes used humor, great humor, as a way of trying to mobilize people in Spain to an awareness of what their problem was. To desire to rise above being either Sancho Panza—you know, belly, that's what it is—or, this crazy old knight, with a bucket on his head. To become real. To enter modern civilization.

Francois Rabelais faced a similar situation. He was a great thinker. He joined many religious orders. He was a power in his time. He was a great physician, among other things (which is where he got some of his vocabulary from), but he dealt—with his Pantagruel and his Gargantua—dealt with the situation with humor. Because, when people can laugh, and laugh about terrible problems, to see the irony of the situation, then, instead of being gripped by fear and terror, they can clear their heads and think seriously, about what're we going to do about this problem? And put it in perspective. Not be in awe of the problem—but be the intellectual master of the problem. And being the intellectual master of the situation, is key to being the physical master of yourself.

So, let's look at some of these things. They're something from the Addams cartoon series—[modified Charles Addams cartoon, showing a little boy, with Bush's face, filling a bathtub with a toy village in the tub]. This, of course, is one way of looking at what happened in Louisiana.

Next one [another Addams cartoon] Now, there's three characters you'll recognize, with George Shultz up there, in a portrait on the wall, while they're preparing a torture rack. The shoe-shopper, Rice, and the President, and his boss, Cheney.

And then the third one, Franklin Roosevelt [driving a car], and these two [Bush and Cheney about to roll a rock down the hill on top of his car].

All right, now. Let's start, then, by looking at the Mississippi situation, and what that involves, and the adjoining states, of course first; and then, come to the general problem of the economy as a whole. Take first, of all just a picture of this Katrina, what that looked like on a map [weather map showing Katrina shortly before landfall]. This is what you're looking at. You recognize the area; you recognize the temperature concentration there [darker colors show the cooler, and therefore higher, cloud tops].

Now, let's go on to the next one, on the levee system itself [cross-section of waterways, levees, New Orleans]: This is what the structure was. You have the Mississippi River, which is a much higher level than New Orleans itself; then Lake Pontchartrain, and you have a system, a damming system, levee system, which keeps the water out of the New Orleans area.

Next: This indicates some of the canals, levees, which were in trouble, and were part of the problem.

But, get on to the next issue. Now, this is the area that was immediately affected by this storm. Now, let's get on to the next picture—let's take "J" first. We're looking at the Mississippi, look at the dates. We'll go through this twice, "Change in the percentile of manufacturing workers in the workforce" [county by county]. The red ones are the more dense, the blue ones, the light blue ones, the less dense. You see, there are changes going on, there are interchanges—not constantly. But you see, overall, a general collapse of the workforce in that entire area. So you're going through this entire period, since the end of the 1970s, into increasing impoverishment, intrinsic impoverishment of this area. And you see, the crucial thing you'll find, is, 1990 is a very crucial point in this whole process.

Again, we go on—go on to the next, the "L." Okay, now, this is service workers, where you're going from an industrial society, an agro-industrial society to a service worker economy, and you see what's happening here, the opposite effect: that you're getting an increase in service workers, which are low-paid, unskilled, no guarantees, no nothing to speak of—hamburger flippers—as opposed to productive jobs, which represent more stability, more wealth produced.

Then go on to "K." All right. This combines the two, "service workers as a percentage of the total workforce" [county by county], and you see what's happening. It's spreading, weakening, character is destroyed, from 2000, especially, on. And this is what hit this area.

Now, look at the farmers. Look at the farmers as a total. There's no animation here. But, this is 2002. Now look at the next one, old farmers, "65 years and older." Again: We're depending upon old farmers, who are therefore going out of business; there are not young farmers to replace them. Our food supply is in jeopardy.

Now, look at the poverty issue. Poverty issue in this area, which was hit by this.

Now, look at the adjacent area, which is significant, the Tenn-Tom [Tennessee-Tombigbee]. Now, what this involves is this, you've got two ways down: Remember, the greatest part of our food and export supply comes from an area which is between the two mountain ranges, the Rocky Mountains and the Allegheny Mountains. And you have river systems which flow down there. These river systems are not only water systems, they're also transportation systems. The greatest amount of our exports comes down from these areas, western Pennsylvania on down on one side, and so forth on the other. They come down. They come down toward the Mississippi, the mouth of the Mississippi, into the Gulf area. And there, they are exported around the world. And then, of course, you have some transport goes up the river in reverse, but more comes down.

So this area, the whole area, has been in a process of economic collapse, from western Pennsylvania—the whole area, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, the grain states in general, and so forth. They're in a process of collapse, and have been in a process of collapse, over a period of more than 30 years. It's actually industrial collapse. Whole communities have vanished, or virtually vanished. It's like East Germany, in a sense, in that area.

All of this involves these rivers, which are main arteries of transport. Now, go back to this Tenn-Tom thing, back to "Q." Now, what's the significance here? We created, some years ago, we used a river system which cut into the Tennessee Valley area, system; you see places like Florence, Decatur, Clarksfield, this is the Tennessee Valley area. We create a link to the Tennessee-Tombigbee River, which would be a parallel to the Mississippi, as an additional way of transport down to the Gulf. And we lost economy in this area, so that at the time this route was built, was completed, we had lost the purpose for the route, in the sense, we'd lost the agriculture, we'd lost the industry and so forth, which would have been served by this.

You get up there around Cairo, you come into a jam-up, where the system there, the management of the river system, is breaking down now. This is a log-jam. Even if you had the product to ship, you would have troubles, because this system is old and needs repair.

All right now, then look at the New Orleans port from this standpoint. [R] What this just simply shows, is that this port was key to our relations to the world. You take this area of the United States, the interior, between the Rocky Mountains and from western Pennsylvania, the Alleghenies, down: the flow along these river systems into our exports. This was the internal central power of the United States. And that is what's being destroyed.

Now, look at the railroad system, "S." This is clear—you can get more of this, we've got copies, you can access. But this just indicates, this is the network we're dealing with in rails. This, also, is collapsing! Look at New England! In terms of freight, there's nothing. It used to be the prime driver of the nation in terms of technology. Nothing!

Look at the Railroad Mileage in Operation. Look at this area, down around the Mississippi. The collapse! The collapse of not only water transport, the collapse of rail transport, which are the two primary transports. We have trucks running all over the highways—which is not efficient. It's very expensive, and it's not efficient. Rail and water transport are the most efficient, cheapest way per ton-mile. And certain kinds of freight go better by water, because their aging factor per ton is not as crucial. High premium value product, you tend to ship it by higher speed modes. But lower value per ton product, you prefer water or rail.

Now, let's look at the financial system, and let's start with general derivatives view. ["Derivatives vs GDP vs Debt"] This, again, it is an animation, it's a time-scale in the upper left-hand corner. You see what's happening? That the ratio of debt to gross product. Now, derivatives comes in, especially after '87—this is Greenspan. And the derivatives are taking over. Ready to eat up everybody else. Hmm?

Now, look at the U.S. commercial bank situation ("W"). [Commercial Banks: Capital vs Loans vs Derivatives]. That's your reserves, hmm? Bank capital, the loans and leases, that's the business of the bank; total assets; now, look here—derivatives. That's the nature of our financial crisis: This.

That's self-explanatory at this point.

And now, more or less to conclude, we'll get to the next. Let's look at the Federal derivatives ("V"). ["From Bank to Casino"] Yeah—Greenspan; or "Greenspin." [as derivatives bubble grows] Remorseless.

And one final touch, which some of you will appreciate ("X") [photo of Bush holding up a fish he caught]. The motto is, "Fish stinks from the head." You may recognize the characters.

Now, to return to the strategic question that all this involves. People say, "Is this a depression?" You know, there're some people who are really idiots. You tell them there's a depression going on, and they say, "Yeah, but how's the market doing today?" "Yeah, the markets doing fine, look at those derivatives." What you're seeing as market expansion, is entirely financial derivatives. Now, financial derivatives are the equivalent to an economy, of cancer to a human being. "I'm better than ever. The doctor says the cancer is growing!" That's what it is.

But what this also means, is that the ratio of financial obligations outstanding, is so great, there is no possibility of an ordinary solution in bankruptcy court. Take, for example, right now: Let's take the case of the airlines. What we have, for example, in the oil price scandal: probably $40 out of the going toward $80, now, of oil, is pure swindle. It's speculation, and it's run on behalf of the financial interests in the South, which concentrated the oil traffic in the Gulf area, to be near to George Bush, and the Carlyle Group. So, the United States' economic operations, in respect to petroleum, has been concentrated to the advantage of the Bush family and related interests. That's where the speculation is.

There was no shortage of petroleum! There was a superabundance of petroleum! The ports were clogged with petroleum. There is no oil shortage! And producing more oil from the reserves, is not going to solve the oil price crisis: It's purely speculative! It's speculators out manipulating the market, to rip people off at the pump, by more than $40 a barrel.

What is this being done for? For two reasons: First of all, because George Bush's friends love to steal. For example, it didn't occur to them that what they could do, in the case of New Orleans, for example, until they discovered how to steal! And the way to steal, is to send Halliburton in there. Which is what they're doing. The same Halliburton, the same Bechtel crowd which pulled the swindle in Iraq! They fire the military engineers, fire the capabilities that we used to have, to deal with these situations; you bring in a private company, which boondoggles. Charges all prices, off record, unregulated. The Congress is not allowed to have hearings, which actually get into who's doing what for whom, in terms of these areas.

They do the same thing with the oil price scandal: Someone says, "Let's regulate it. This is out of control, this is not justified by supply and demand or any such consideration." Schröder, the Chancellor of Germany, said in Gleneagles, "Let's regulate it." Who turned it down? The British and the United States. Why? To steal! What were they doing? Well, they were not just stealing: You recall the derivatives crisis which hit in the spring. You will find that a lot of hedge funds went belly-up, as a result of that struggle. The whole system is ready to blow. So, bailing out their system, the hedge-fund system, is crucial for the people who run the system. How are they going to bail the system out? They're going to have to steal. Well, $40 a barrel rip-off, off the top of the price, on oil, is a very good rip-off , for people who desperately need profit to keep from going bankrupt.

Look at the effect of this, look at airline industry: We've got two new, major airlines are going bankrupt. The entire pension system of the United States is now in jeopardy, because these two airlines are about to dump their pension responsibilities, which they had not been maintaining, to dump them on the Federal government! Now, this dilutes the ability of the Federal government to maintain the pension guarantee system. But, why do we have the problem? Because: Some people decided to rip-off the airline industry. The danger is, if Northwest and Delta and a few others go, what've we got? We no longer have a way of transporting people from coast to coast, inside the United States!

You want a national security problem? We're on the edge of that, right now.

So, the other side of this, is, we're in a crisis. There's no possible way of getting out of this by normal management methods. There's only one way this can work: The Federal government has to put the whole shebang into bankruptcy. It has to put the Federal Reserve System into bankruptcy, into receivership. Which is a way of putting the banking system into receivership. Then the Federal government must act, to prevent the banks from closing their doors. To make sure they continue their normal business, because that affects the life of communities—it affects industry, everything. We must have a flow of credit. We must have financial security of a type which is needed to maintain communities and industries.

We must also act in terms of defending the General Welfare. We need airlines! We're going to have to put the thing into government receivership, and reorganize the system, recognizing it has been torn down by speculation. By looting! We've got to put the thing back. We've got to rebuild the rail transport system. We've got to have a rational relationship between high-speed rail transport, and air transport. We've got to do a lot of things in this direction.

We've got to go into a large investment, Roosevelt-style, but larger, into recreating industries that're lost! But the problem in trying to re-create industries that are lost, is that we don't have the skilled labor force we have lost !—through government and related policies—over the period since the 1970s, especially 1977. Under Carter, which is really under Brzezinski, we went into deregulation. We used to have a policy in the United States, even in the post-Roosevelt period, initially, a policy—a "fair trade" policy.

A fair trade policy meant, that you would arrange all the mechanisms of government, tariff regulations, all kinds of regulations, in order to ensure that if somebody is doing something, in the private sector, which is useful to the United States, useful to the people of the United States, we want them to stay in business. We don't want to go around the world, trying to find some cheap labor to replace them! We want to keep the farms, the industries, and so forth, here . We want our basic economic infrastructure solid.

So therefore, what we do, is, we set up a system of tariffs, and similar kinds of devices, to ensure that an honest industry, which is producing an honest product, is going to have the fair costs of its production paid . By setting the prices at that level. And it's going to be able to get credit, to be able to meet those obligations of production and so forth. To improve itself, to be more productive and so forth.

So, we had a protectionist policy—which is called a "fair trade" policy! We wanted to have, not big corporations gobbling people up, not stockholders who are fleeing from one corporate stock to the other every day! But, people who are committed in the long-term to building an industry in a community ! Within a state! People who are building for the future. We wanted private entrepreneurs, closely held companies, people who were production oriented: The machine-tool end of the thing, especially. This was our strength. This was the strength that Roosevelt used to make us the greatest economic power the world had ever seen! As we entered into World War II.

We have to do it again. We can do it, again!

But, we have to recognize, that that's the problem! We have to recognize that the switch to a service economy was a piece of clinical insanity! We have to recognize that free trade is a piece of clinical insanity! We have to recognize that globalization is imperialism. We have to say, "These things come to an end!"

We have a primary obligation, which I don't think the nominee for Chief Justice understands. I don't think he wishes to understand it. I want to know who his cosmetician is! If you've seen him on television, you'd say, "Who's pasting him up every day?"

The Constitution of the United States is , in his terms, political ! It is in his terms, ideological! Patriotism in the United States is ideological! It is political! The politics of the United States, the existence of a republic, is a commitment to the General Welfare . General Welfare means, "living people, and their descendants." The defense of them. The promotion of the improvement of our territory. The promotion of our industries, of our agriculture: I want to be able to get apples! I don't want to get Australian strawberries! I want American strawberries! Nothing wrong with Australian strawberries—we should get some of them. But we should also grow our own! [applause]

Now, these ideas that I just listed, are ideas which were the standard belief of people coming out of World War II, after the Roosevelt experience and the preceding Hoover experience. We had Coolidge and Hoover! We didn't need it again! We thought Coolidge and Hoover were bad—we hadn't seen Bush! Hmm?

So, the point is, we have to realize, that we're in a point where the existence of the system of the nation-state, the sovereign nation-state, internationally, is in jeopardy. Our own state is in jeopardy. But we have, because we were summoned to war, to defeat Hitler—many of us didn't understand what it was all about, but we defended the country, and we fought. We didn't fight well. We weren't well trained, we weren't military people. We had a few people in the military, called "USA—Useless Sons Accommodated." People who couldn't get jobs, would go into the military. Nobody wanted to use them for anything, they kept them around to have the numbers in there.

The best military went into the WPA, under Hopkins. Not as WPA workers, but as people who set up the program, of economic development, of turning useless workers into useful workers; and setting up the industrial program, which made us the greatest economic power on this planet: about 100 military people, typified by Lucius Clay, went in under Harry Hopkins on that program, and built this nation. We've got to do it again! The same kind of thing again. It's going to be hard work, but we can do it! And if we are future-oriented, if we are not people who are depending upon what we can get today, and if we know our life is limited, and we're not going to be here forever, we're going to go on: We're concerned about what we leave behind. And therefore, we're concerned about what we leave to our children and grandchildren, and those generations.

We now have a Baby-Boomer generation, which is now getting into 60 and beyond, and they're about to go—one way or the other, I think. I've not much hope for them, their survival capability, their intellectual survival capability—not much commitment to life. There's more commitment to enjoying Purgatory as sort of a comfort zone.

But we have coming up now, a generation which has entered adulthood, which is now considered 18 to 22, 25, as entering adulthood—and the future belongs to them. Not right away. It'll take a little time before they're ready to take over the industries and similar kinds of positions. But it won't have to take too much time. And therefore, our future depends upon them. And getting the old folks, those who are about 60 years of age, who are considered—I'm considered the antiques of society, today—to do their job, and to be mustered to find their souls again, and do their job to rebuild this nation, which they have done so much to destroy by their ideology, by their service economy ideology. And to give the future, which many of us will not see—to give the future, a future. To give our people, the young people who are now entering their twenties, a future, and to give their children a future. And, we should take pleasure in doing that.

Many people came from various parts of Europe into the United States. They came from poor parts of Europe, because they found an opportunity here, not a rich opportunity, but an opportunity to seek an opportunity. They came into our country, as poor immigrants, mostly; became farmers and workers and so forth, and they worked hard. They worked hard to give something to their children, a better life than they had had, an education. In about two or three generations, they became sort of a solid part of the regular population of the United States as a whole. They built a future. They had the confidence and courage to come here, to build a future. They found here the opportunity—not an easy one! but an opportunity nonetheless, to build a future. And they worked to build a future! They worked, and they suffered, and they sacrificed, for the sake of their children: especially to get their children education, and things of that type, to get things that they needed for the next generation. And as they grew older, they took delight in their grandchildren, and said, "It's been worth it all." That is the American Dream. That is what we represent.

We now come to a time, a difficult time, a hard time. We don't have many of the things we need to rebuild this country. We're going to have to work hard to rebuild it. But, if we have our morality with us, we're going to think of the future.

I'm not going to have much of a future—oh, 10 years, or maybe 20 years, if Amelia lets me. But: I'm thinking ahead: I've got 3,000 years, approximately, of history in me already; and I'll think ahead about a hundred. And I'm counting on what's going to happen in the next hundred years. And that turning the corner, from going down, where we are now, to going up! And I have to try to get, with my limited powers and influence in the world, to get some other people—who are a little bit younger than I am—to take up the challenge, and to recognize what the danger is. And to recognize, that they're our soldiers.

Thank you.

Dialogue

Freeman: Thank you, Lyn. Okay, for people who have attended these things before, you have some sense of how we proceed. We have the ability to take questions from the audience gathered here in Washington; we have the ability to take questions via the internet; and some people have submitted questions by telephone during the course of Mr. LaRouche's remarks....

Lyn, the first question comes from actually a national political operative, who has a fairly large stake in what is going on right now, in the Gulf area, and the Delta in general. And he wanted to ask you, very specifically, a question, since he's also responsible for advising many Democratic members of the Congress.

He says, "Lyn, there are a lot of people, now, who are arguing that Katrina may very well have closed the case, on the failure of the whole post-industrial globalization culture. The fact is, though, that right now, we are not the same nation that we were when John F. Kennedy mobilized us to put a man on the Moon. On the one hand, there isn't a single member of the Senate who's stupid enough not to attach his name to Mary Landrieu's Operation Pelican legislation."

This is, for people who don't know, this is one big piece of legislation, that was authored by Mary Landrieu, who's the Democratic Senator from the state of Louisiana, and by Senator Vitter, who's the freshman Republican from that state. This is a bill that actually seeks to put the reconstruction effort in one big package, so as to not hold it up. And it actually provides funding in the area of about $183 billion. By the time that bill actually reaches the Senate floor, it will be co-sponsored by, I think, every single member of the Senate—with the exception of the acting president of the Senate, Mr. Cheney. Who has not been invited to attach his name to it.

But, what the question is, is—he says, "There isn't a single member of the Senate who's stupid enough not to attach his name to this legislation. But the problem that we face is that right now, money and good intentions simply are not going to be enough. We made a commitment here, but the question is, how do we honor it? Again, we aren't the same nation we were, when Kennedy mobilized us: So, how do we proceed? Do we legislate it? Do we just appoint people to do it? It still is not clear to me, how to take on a task of this magnitude."

LaRouche: Well, the problem is, we don't have a President. We have something occupying the place where a President should be, when he's not on vacation.

Therefore, you have an institution which we're depending upon, now, for much of the leadership. We have certain committees in the House, which have capabilities, and which are very important politically, in the picture, in many other ways. But the hard core of the decisions that have to be made, is the Legislative branch of government, which is the opposite number, the primary opposite number, to the President: And that is, the U.S. Senate.

Now, so far, we have a situation, in which the Democratic leadership of the Senate, is by and large pretty much together, on the right side of the angels.

We have, on the Republican side, a growing number of Republicans, who wonder what's happened to the Republican Party. They come in all shades and colors, so to speak. But they are patriots, generally, in a certain deep-down sense, particularly when challenged on things which get their gumption up on defending the nation.

So, we have in effect a potential bipartisan coalition, of overwhelming potential, in the Senate. And you've got a former boxer as the leader of the Democrats, which does help him to understand how to deal with certain issues—that's—he's got the instinct. He doesn't go out punching people up, but he does have the instinct of how to think, if you're in the ring.

The problem for the Republicans, by and large, there are several problems here to consider: The problems with the Republicans is, this means a break with the party, in a sense. Or, not a break—it means they've got to decide to break the party free from the grip of Bush-Cheney. Now, that's a tough fight for them, with an election year coming up. They're being asked to do to Bush and Cheney, what they did to Nixon. And that's the jam-up for them. It doesn't mean they're not capable of doing that. It means that they're not coming up to speed fast enough so that we worry, "Will they be willing to act fast enough to prevent a war in Iran? A war against Iran?"

Because if they don't, we now go into a new dimension, that I referred to, of permanent war. Permanent revolution/permanent war. That's the danger.

So therefore, the issue here, is to get—in the long term, if we're left alone, with a bipartisan coalition forming in the Senate, certain aspects of government could move in the right direction. The problem we have now, is, will that come fast enough? Right now, it is not coming fast enough.

There are a couple of issues, where it is coming up fast enough. The Mary Landrieu motion has got a lot of wet legs to it. But they're going to do everything possible to sabotage it, because, from the standpoint of Dick Cheney, reporting to his boss, George Shultz, Halliburton needs the money. And you're not going to get any benefit, for the people of Louisiana, to speak of, if Halliburton gets in there. You want to look at what they did in Iraq, to get a pretty good idea, what they're going to do. So, that's one of the problems.

But, to come back to the other problem: Is, the Senate is not an efficient institution to replace the Presidency. It's the relative institution in the Legislative branch to control the Presidency, on everything except money, which is the responsibility, essentially, of the House of Representatives. But they are not up to it. Because, they are not institutionally up to it.

Now, what I'm trying to do, is understanding this thing, in understanding the Senators—as I think I do understand them—is, to provide myself, not to pretend to be President, but to provide them, and to provide people abroad as well, a sense that there is someone who thinks like a President acting in the United States. And right now, it's a vacuum. Nobody else but me, is thinking like a President, at least, not like a President required for this time of crisis. Therefore, my function is to fill that void.

Now, the enemies I have, who are largely in the financial sector—whose reputations are made in their support for Hitler, back in the early 1930s—don't like me. Wall Street finance hates my guts. And many politicians, including leading Democrats, are afraid of Wall Street. Therefore, when my name comes up, you want to see people's eyeballs go into spin! Even people who agree with what I'm saying—saying about meeting with me, "Wh-ha-t're you suggesting?!" "You suggesting we commit mass suicide, on a Wall Street account?"

So therefore, despite the fact that this situation exists, that I'm acting as a President should. I hoped that the former President would play that role, but recently he's been reluctant to do so. He's trying to play a somewhat different role.

So, what I've done today, for example, in raising this question of permanent war; what I did in raising the question of the neo-cons; what I did in raising the question of these crazy "Children of Satan." I'm doing this, because these ideas have to get out , and they have to get out as if from a President of the United States who is providing a focal point of leadership.

I'm saying things, which many people in the Senate and elsewhere agree with. But they're not prepared to do it! They'll say, "it's not time"; "it doesn't work that way"—but I'm saying, "The clock is running out!" Someone has to say, "The clock is running out!" You can't set the agenda and the time scale based on your comfort zone! You've got to operate on the basis of —[applause]. You've got to think like a commander in war! Because we're in war! We're in the war I described. We're in permanent warfare! Permanent revolution! Permanent regime change!

The United States is faced with destruction! We're faced with the choice of being an empire, under the people who own Cheney, like George Shultz's bosses, or being a republic! We have to make that decision soon . Are we going to? If we tolerate, if we try to accommodate, to Cheney, if we try to "deal" with George Bush, if we try to concede to those sentiments! If we try to concede to Wall Street—we're lost! We no longer have a nation. We're like the people who said, "Hitler is going to go away"—until Goering set fire to the Reichstag, and then he became a permanent dictator.

That's the situation we're in. And you have to think like a commander in warfare, to lead this nation now: Not to fight war, but to prevent it !

And nobody's prepared to do it! Therefore, I'm put in the funny position with my—. You know what my circumstances are. You know what my political circumstances are. But I have to do it! Because there's nobody else, who so far has stepped forward to do that! [applause]

And that, my questioner knows. And he knows what the answer is. He knows what my answer is. And if he wants to save this country, and I know he does, he knows what he's got to do. [applause]

Freeman: He does know!

Lyn, This question comes from the Democratic leadership of the Senate. It's on the question of the price of oil. The question is as follows:

"Mr. LaRouche, on the one hand, we're always told that the price of oil is largely determined by some peculiar combination of the gods of OPEC and the gods of supply and demand. With the refining capacity of the United States almost completely concentrated in the area that got hit by Hurricane Katrina, it did seem obvious that we were going to suffer some temporary disruption, without outside help. And indeed, it was the case that overnight, the price of gasoline, for instance, shot up by almost $1 in most places. By and large, people accepted it as a result of what had happened down in the Gulf. Some state governments tried to alleviate the crisis by temporarily repealing gasoline taxes, but we all know that they can't afford to do that. And the fact is, that as policy makers here in Washington, we decided that we needed to take a closer look.

"Every member of Congress is well aware of the fact that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and several other countries as well, offered the United States refined oil if we needed it. Additionally, in a world that is presumably ruled by supply and demand, we know that demand is largely down. A service economy just doesn't use as much energy. At the same time, supply is way up. So up, in fact, that some people say that we are literally drowning in oil. Now, I know that this sharply challenges the assertions of some environmentalists, who say that we're facing a big shortage, but I'm going by what the numbers I'm given tell me. Okay, with all of this said, what exactly is going on? Who or what is actually controlling the price of oil, and how specifically should the Senate respond to it?"

LaRouche: Supply and demand is something for sick children to believe in. It does not exist. It's a theory which applies on planets that don't exist, but not this planet.

What is going on, essentially, is stealing. and the stealing is being done by the friends of George Shultz, who created the Bush Administration. He begat George, Jr. According to the story, he had him out there and said, "I think you've the making of a president." And then George, Jr went out—and he was a drunk and a drug user and whatnot, a no-brainer all the way—and he went back to a religious fellow who told him, "Ah, you're a Christian!" and he had an instant conversion! He took a bath in no water, and suddenly he became a Christian! Why? Because somebody told him he's going to be President, and you've got to now pretend you're a Christian. And we see by his behavior, he's no Christian. He thinks he's talking to God. That's somebody else he's talking to! It's the other guy.

The point is, what's the practical situation here? Again, we're in a wartime situation, tantamount to war. Now, we don't want to kill somebody. We want to do precisely the opposite, but we're in a situation tantamount to war. What do we do?

We know that the price of oil is rigged. If the President of the United States — put me in the presidency of the United States for two days, or three days—I'll meet with the governments of the world, I'll meet with the oil-producing nations, I'll meet with the government of Germany, other governments. I guarantee you, I'll have an agreement on control of the price of oil, overnight! Because we have the oil. We have the petroleum. We control it, this consort of governments. We have the supply, and if we're determined to have the supply delivered at a fair price, it will be delivered at a fair price. It's a political question! It's not an economic question. The effects are economic, but it's political. These guys are stealing! And they're stealing with the aid, the accomplice is the President and Vice-President of the United States. The Carlyle Group has got its pockets deep in this stealing.

Look, you had a switch in the country, in terms of banking, which occurred over a period of time, the Southern Strategy, the Southern Orientation, which became big around Nixon. And the Southern Orientation was to move finances—and look at the structure of banking in the United States, banking and related finances. It shifted from the northern states, from a New York-centered basis, into a Southern orientation. Initially it started with the cheap labor markets of the south. They began moving industries down to the south, to cheap labor markets in the woods. Run-away shops, they were called then, back in the 1940s and 50s. Run-away shops.

Then, they began to move in other directions. Now Carlyle Group was a part of the creation of this, of the moving of a concentration of banks from the New York-centered banking system to a Gulf-centered orientation.

Why? Because there's not as much cold weather there. People work cheaper. They virtually shut down the state of Michigan. They shut down western Ohio, they shut down Ohio. They shut western Pennsylvania. They shut down Indiana. They're shutting down Illinois. Look around the country. It's being shut down. I could show you, we have charts on this, county by county in the United States, which we're developing animations of, to show you exactly how the United States has been destroyed, and is being destroyed, by these policy decisions of these financial interests, with the complicity of people in government such as the Bush Administration.

Therefore, this is our problem. And we've set the taxes wrong. We've set interstate regulation wrong. We've done things wrong, and we have to restore them now. And that's the power of government, but it takes guts to do it! Internationally, the oil price, we could control it. I guarantee you, we have the access to governments abroad, who as a concert of governments would agree in a flash, to join the United States in regulation of oil in terms of supply, as if on a war-time basis, to make sure that everybody gets it at a fair price. And the speculators will just have to take a bath. We may find some water for them.

Now, another thing we've got, which is a similar situation, which is not as obvious yet but we're on the verge of it—it's happening right now—is food! Its supply and its price. Food! Now some people around the Congress have said this, and asked about this, as on the [Sept.] 3rd. Food!

The United States government has to guarantee, use its power, to ensure that the food supplies of the American people are maintained at a fair price. Adequate supply and fair price. That is in jeopardy now. It's already in jeopardy on price. Look at the changes in food prices. Look at the incomes of people. Our problem is not poverty. Our problem is that people are being ruined, starved to death, crushed. We've got to save the airline system. We've going to have to put the airline system under regulation, to save it. because we need it. All these kinds of things. This is where the problem lies.

Don't get taken in by the so-called financial advisors, by these spin sessions that they go through. It's all garbage! There is no such thing as supply and demand. We know this doesn't work. Somebody says it and makes it a token of religious belief. Well, give that to our friend down here in Virginia, down below here. He sells that kind of stuff, including assassinations on demand. But that's the problem. We don't have a supply-and-demand problem. We have a stealing problem, and we have to protect the vital interests of the United States and other nations from that, and if I were President, I guarantee you, in about three days, I could get this thing through.

Freeman: Lyn, I'm going to ask you another question from the Senate, and then I'll start alternating with some of those kinds of questions and questions from people here. This is also from the Democratic leadership. It says,

"Mr. LaRouche, we right now are faced with a number of very large costs. First and foremost, the cost of the war in Iraq. We have that cost, and we have to consider it. We have now the cost of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. On top of that, this week also brought along the bankruptcy of Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines, presenting us with a whole new problem. Of immediate concern in the Delta/Northwest situation, which is a question that we first had to address a few months into the late winter, we have to deal with the question of the pensions that are owed those workers. The fact is that the pension funds of these two corporations are grossly underfunded. Some people believe that now is the time to turn to the PBGC, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, but their mandate was never to be the piggy bank of last resort, and it itself is right now grossly underfunded. These are the problems we have to contend with.

"Now, right now, there is no question about what is the right thing to do. We have men and women concentrated in Iraq. We have to pay for that. We can't leave them there without what they need. Similarly, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there is no question as to what the United States should do, there is no question as to what's right. On the question of these bankruptcies, certainly the pensions should be honored. These workers deserve to be paid. So we know what's right, but it's not at all clear to me how the hell we are supposed to do all of this. Where's the money supposed to come from, at a time when the deficit is already way beyond what any of us are comfortable with?"

LaRouche: Well, we're going to have to take a page out of the book of Franklin Roosevelt. You cannot deal with this issue one by one. That's the problem. When you try to deal with each one, then you find the other problems eat you. So, what you're going to have to do is this. You're going to have to recognize that the present banking system of the United States, and of the world is hopelessly bankrupt. That's a fact! Don't wait for it to happen. That is the condition that exists right now! There is not a major bank in the United States which is not actually bankrupt, and I can prove it. Get me into the bank and I'll show it to you. It's hopelessly bankrupt. You don't need me! Bob Rubin will show it to you, if you give him the power. He knows it. There are other people, economists in the United States, who know that! This system is totally bankrupt.

I'll give you one example. The housing bubble! The mortgage-based securities bubble can blow out the entire US system, right now. So, we have to say, instead of "When is the bankruptcy coming? Is it going to come?"—IT'S HERE! It's being papered over by fakery. I've seen this before in my days as a consultant. I used to get called into these situations of virtually bankrupt firms, and they had been bankrupt for a long time, and they were postponing it by various methods, and they were getting themselves at the point where the word was jail, jail, jail! Doing all kinds of tricks to avoid the inevitable. They were bankrupt, and the best thing when you're bankrupt is to go bankrupt! At least you get honest and legal, if you haven't stolen anything. Eh?

Now, the banks are bankrupt. Fact! Not debateable really people who know. And if you know Bob Rubin, he might tell you. He's a very cautious guy, but he probably knows it pretty well. I know it, so he must know it. We know that, so therefore, what do we have to do? Because other countries are bankrupt too. Italy is bankrupt, France is bankrupt, Germany is bankrupt. Who isn't? Japan is bankrupt, hopelessly bankrupt! What are you going to do? The system is bankrupt! The International Monetary Fund system is bankrupt. Why? For the reasons we indicated. Financial derivatives. We're talking about financial derivatives on the order of magnitude of uncounted quadrillions! We're talking about a world economy on the basis of less than a hundred trillion, with obligations in the order of quadrillions and many of these are short-term obligations! The system is bankrupt!

Now, what we're going to do, what we have to do, is we're going to have to declare that all financial derivatives are nullified, because they're side-bets; they're gamblers' side bets. They're not an investment in production. They're not an investment in producing anything, they're gamblers' side-bets. So, we put the gamblers out of business. Okay, you guys settle your own accounts among yourselves. You're side-bets, you sidebetters go off and settle your own with one another. We have nothing to do with it. We're going to have to put the whole thing into bankruptcy. We're going to have to put the IMF into bankruptcy. We're going to have to put the Federal Reserve system into bankruptcy. Why? Because, what we have to do, we have to put the entire banking system into reorganization, under federal reorganization.

Now, this means in our history something very simple. It means we're going to some form of national banking, in which the power of the federal government, under the Constitution, to create credit, through the consent of the House of Representatives, the power to create credit will be used, as Roosevelt used it. We'll put the whole thing into bankruptcy, where the first purpose is to make sure of the continuity of essential operations, and the continuity of the functioning of the insttitution. The banker is going to sit there, he's going to still do what he does, because we've got to keep the flow of things going.

Now, our basic problem, from the standpoint of reorganizing in bankruptcy, is, we've got to start creating more production than we have costs. That is, we've got to bring the level of productive employment up to the point that we are operating on a current basis above breakeven. Now, when you're operating above breakeven, you can get by with a lot of things and manage a lot of things, especially if you're government. But if you're not operating above breakeven, sooner or later, the whole things going to crash. So the federal government is going to have to put this system into bankruptcy reorganization, revise immediately emergency bankruptcy legislation, covering bankruptcy, because we are not going to lose essential productive facilities, or essential things. We must have them. So therefore, we put them into bankruptcy reorganization. We may force suspension of payment of many accounts, but it will be in a regulated way. We've done it before. We do it again.

Then we're going to have to do this. Since we don't have the amount of skilled labor for industry and agriculture we require, we're going to have to do what was done by Roosevelt with things like the CCC, WPA, and so forth. We're going to have to take people who do not have genuine production skills, and we're going to have to find forms of employment which are productive, intrinsically, in which they can be assimilated into a role as productive parts of society, and by doing that, we will then get the economy growing.

Now, the place we can do that, which is the place where government can competently do the job, is basic economic infrastructure. Let's take the case of the airlines. We need an air transport system. We need an air transport system, we need a rail transport system for passengers and freight both. We need a national system, so why not build it? We intervene immediately to make sure there is no dislocation of the airlines. We can help that greatly by putting a cap on the petroleum prices, which we can do by agreement with other governments. We can put a firm cap on it.

We can, if the Congress has a clear perspective, we can create programs of public works, or investment in basic economic infrastructure. The reason for this is, in many states and localities, you have state agencies, local agencies, which have on the drawing boards, proved worked-out plans for infrastructure. For example, you cannot get safe drinking water out of a faucet west of the Mississippi, virtually. You have to pay for it in terms of little bottles or something like that, at high prices. One of the big industries is making fresh water out of cesspools and what not. Well, they call it purified water, we don't know what it was before it was purified.

All right, we don't have that. Our sewer systems are breaking down. Our power systems are breaking down. We have a shortage of power. The power systems we have are breaking down ,of old age and similar kinds of things. We don't have a mass transit system that works. So we can start to build these things that we need, with large-scale projects which do normally fit in with government operations on the city, state, county, and local level.

We can organize the funding mechanisms to do it. We're familiar with this, we know how to do this. So, take things that have to be done, make a package of enough of the things that have to be done, so that we're bringing the work activity of the population above current operating breakeven levels. Now we have a prospect for the future.

Now we attack these problems from that standpoint. All right, I support Charlie Rangel on the question of a draft. It makes sense. There are many reasons for it, and he knows them all. Katrina—we're going to have to do it. We don't want Halliburton or that crowd in there, because we know they'll just steal. What I want is a Corps of Engineers program. Put it back under the Corps of Engineers. Use the military Corps of Engineers, as we used to, for these kinds of projects; that any contracting that is done will be contracted through the Corps of Engineers, under proper approval. We'll get some people employed, back to work, building institutions, Corps-style. Their priorities are the right ones, the emergency priorities.

On the airlines, we have to put them under protection, and we have to say the pensions are going to be paid by the airlines. We're going to make sure that happens. Well, if you get the oil price down, you have a fighting chance of doing it. We're going to orient away from a highway-based system, because I don't think there's any sense in building highways to use them as parking lots, which is what we're doing at rush hours these days. The rush hours get longer and longer. We need a high-speed rail transport system back for the United States. We need a reliable air transport system. We need a rational relationship between rail transport for inter-city—high-speed rail transport as inter-city travel, by having the high-speed rail travel integrated with air travel. Longer-range travel by air should be air. Shorter-range travel, medium range, should be inter-city. We have to build a national transport system of the type we used to think about.

So, if we do that, then we have a solution. If we try to go at this piecemeal— we may have to in the short term— but it's not going to work in the short-term. Short-term measures are not going to solve the problem. It's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, because the problem is getting bigger and bigger all the time, at geometric rates. Therefore, what we need to do is understand we have to go back, go into a general reorganization at a time that the entire planet has to go into a general reorganization, a general financial reorganization of bankruptcy. And we can build our way out of it. We can use—I mean, this is bigger than Roosevelt faced. The problems are much more severe than Roosevelt faced, but we can do it! And we need to start recognizing that now, and get started.

The key thing in this is, get some momentum going, of political support and popular support for going in this direction. If you get the political and popular support for going in this direction, you will find that it will take off. We have a population whose lower 80%—in the United States—has been demoralized by what has happened to them in the past period. Look at the turning away from political parties. Why? The lower 80% is disgusted and demoralized. They don't believe it. The poor, especially, don't believe it at all! The poor say, just drop me some money, don't bother bothering me with politics. I just want your money. So therefore, we have to go through a process of spiritual regeneration of the nation, by moving in a certain direction which we advertise clearly, taking the emergency measures up front that we have to take, and can take, and use that momentum to go on to the other things that have to be done. It'll work! It has to work, because we have no other choice.

Freeman: There's a quick question that was submitted by someone via the internet, which I'm going to answer, because it allows me to also say something else I wanted to say.

This is from someone called Tracy Cummins, who says, "My question is this: Why is it that no one in the Senate or House of Representatives or anyplace else on Capitol Hill, will go against Bush and Cheney? Are they all that stupid and evil, or are they just afraid to rock the boat? I get very frustrated by the inaction of this government."

Well Tracy, if you've been listening, and if you have a subscription to EIR, you will know that, in fact, that is not true. And in fact there are members, and a growing number of members of both the House and the Senate, who are going against George Bush and Dick Cheney. So you shouldn't be frustrated by their inaction.

However, I can understand that, because I sometimes get frustrated by the inaction of the American people. [applause] And therefore, what I would propose, Tracy, is that if you do subscribe to EIR, you should read it more closely, and if you don't, you should! What you also should do is mobilize your friends and neighbors to participate in the distribution of the latest pamphlet that we have published, specifically on this question. Because the question of mobilizing the American population to support the opposition to Bush and Cheney, is really the critical ingredient that is lacking right now.

[returning to moderating] Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to start alternating between the questions that we have from various institutions here in Washington, and from some of the people who are here in the audience, many of whom are labor officials and elected leaders themselves.

I have a note here from Mark Sweazy, who's from the UAW out of Ohio. He says, "Lyn, I begin by thanking you for your unwavering efforts to help the ailing auto industry." He notes that the t-shirt that you were given, also was given to the presidents and chairs of the UAW Delphi subcouncils that recently met in Chicago. He says, "Happy Birthday and thank you from all of the United Auto Workers. We must continue and we will continue to support your efforts and to wake up our Congress."

I understand Mark also has a question. Why don't you come up to the mike? [applause] How come you're not wearing one of those t-shirts?

Mark Sweazy: Well I should be. This t-shirt, Lyn, did not get to you yet, but this t-shirt was made and states, "The United Auto Workers Proposing a Workable Solution to Congress in Defense of General Motors," and on the back is the resolution passed by the City Council of Columbus, Ohio.

Freeman: Hey! That's great! [applause]

Sweazy: My only question would be probably the same question that everybody in this room may have, or everybody listening to this webcast may have, is that, Lyn, your direction is superb. You're keyed, you're focussed, you're definitely headed in the right direction. There's so many people in this country that are not, it's amazing. But my question would be, what can we honestly do, to wake up a comatose government? What can we honestly do to wake up a Congress that apparently doesn't see the same need? What can we do, as sons and daughters of this nation, less than a Boston Tea Party, that will open the eyes of those that control our destiny? And I thank you again. God bless.

LaRouche: What we need, you see, and any politician who thinks about it and whose experience will tell you that, we need a movement. You need more than just a grass-roots movement. They tend to be protest movements. But as you understand from your experience, that an effective popular-based movement is a movement of ideas, like the movement which built this country, and led the American Revolution. Of a people, from all walks of life, who were organized around ideas, not protests as such. Yes protests, you can protest all you want. But if you've got an idea that people can work with, that you can organize around. So it's an organizing process that's needed.

The problem we have is we have so many demoralized people. My experience is that—and probably yours too, because you're younger, but of similar experience—is the demoralization of the American people from what they were, say, in the 1950s and 1960s, and what they are today. The lower 80% of family-income brackets are politically demoralized in a way beyond belief.

And the demoralization comes in several forms. It comes in forms of mass media influence. You look at the so-called entertainment. All you have to do is look at a sampling of television or similar kinds of entertainment. You can't find a drama which is a drama! You can't find anything that is intellectually stimulating, that suggests a population which believes in ideas. They believe in slogans, but they don't understand ideas. They don't debate ideas. They don't think through and discuss ideas. They don't ask questions: how does this work? how are we going to work this out? They don't get into those kinds of arguments.

You know, in the old days, in the trade unions, they used to get into those kinds of arguments, particularly when it came to contract negotiation time. People talked about—how is it going to work? How is it going to work? How's the industry going to work, because they were just thinking about what they as employees, union employees, were doing. They were thinking about what the industry's going to do? What's good for the industry. This is our bread-and-butter! This is our community! What are we going to do? And they would debate these ideas. "No, that's no damn good!"—this kind of thing was going on, but it was a discussion of ideas!

And people have given up essentially on ideas. We've become like ancient Greece at its worst, ancient Athens at its worst. We've become total Sophists. We think about slogans, bite-sized slogans, words, this kind of thing. We don't think about ideas. And when somebody comes up with an idea, they're buffaloed. They don't know what it means!

So what we have to do, is try to get ideas across. I concentrate on this stuff all the time, trying to get people to come up, get up, get up, raise your intellectual level, get up! And they could do it. We're doing it. We're going it. The problem is, how do we get it going fast enough. We're in a period where people are changing.

Look, the contempt for George Bush—George Bush is an object of pity. People don't know if they pity him or hate him the more, because he's obviously stupid and psychotic. And I'm not saying psychotic loosely. I'm saying, look at this guy: This guy has got a real brain problem! You look at his eyes, you look at his body language, look at the way he speaks. He doesn't even know what the words mean that are coming out of his mouth! He's living in a completely different universe than the rest of the human race is. Cheney is a complete sociopath. Pathological guy, you wouldn't want in your neighborhood!

But the people are afraid. And they're gradually coming out of the ether, slowly coming out of the ether. The problem is, it's slow getting people in the population to move again, to move around ideas. That's what our problem is. But that's what we're doing. That's what you're doing! That's our instinct. That's the only thing that's going to work, because you can't depend upon the politicians if they don't have a base. If they don't think the people behind them are going to support them. They run in an election with a good idea, and they get slaughtered in the next election. Why? Because the people aren't paying attention to reality.

Freeman: [station id] Again, I would urge people to do whatever it is they can, to make sure that, literally, millions of copies of these two latest pamphlets that have been put out by LaRouche PAC are distributed in every area of the United States, including the areas where we do not physically have offices. If you're not in touch with a local office, you'll find phone numbers on the website that you can call, and we will make sure that you are well-supplied with both of these critical pamphlets: One has a very flattering picture of the Vice President of the United States, and bears the title "The Soldiers of Satan"; it is the sequel to the Children of Satan series and an invaluable tool for people who are fighting to save this republic. And of course, the other, is "Pulling This Nation Together Now," which has the initial statements that Mr. LaRouche put in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I think that you can also expect that the transcript of today's proceedings will soon be available as well, in a mass pamphlet.

I'm going to take another question from the Senate, and then we're going to come back to the audience here....

Lyn, this is a question from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. "Mr. LaRouche, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the fact that we deal with two different worlds, one inside the Beltway and one out. Candidly speaking, I can say that a growing number of us here on Capitol Hill agree that Bush and Cheney may simply have to go. Mike Brown, the head of FEMA, may have found that this head was the first to roll. But the fact of the matter is that what he recounted in an interview that ran in yesterday's New York Times makes clear that although he was unquestionably unsuited and unqualified for the position he held, he knew enough to know that he needed help. He recounts in that interview a series of phone calls made, to Chertoff, to Andy Card, and finally, because he is an old crony of Bush's, to the President himself. Whether Brown intended to or not, his statements remove any remaining doubt that the President of the United States knew what was about to happen, knew what was happening, and did not care.

"But it's also the case that the removal of a President is a very serious proposition. And it's my view that organizing and educating the American citizen is as important as the specific articles in any bill of impeachment. Now, there are Republicans as well as Democrats, who think that this Administration may have to step aside. In fact, for many of them, even more than for we Democrats, it's an existential issue. But it still is the case that the Democrats would have to take the lead.

"We right now have a national party chair, who conned some people into believing that he was the grass-roots guy, but he's doing a very bad job of mobilizing the grass roots. More than that, when I was back in my state, I realized that even our elected officials back home have very little comprehension of the mood or of the situation here in Washington, D.C. If we're going to do what has to be done in Washington, we really do need some division of labor. When we are tied up trying to make policy, it seems reasonable to me that we should be able to depend and expect the national party to organize and educate, and not simply to raise money, which is all they seem to be doing these days.

"My question to you is: What do you think about this? Do we require a shakeup in the national party apparatus? Do we require the same kind of reorganization that you are proposing for the financial system?"

LaRouche: Remember, Howard was a compromise for the appointment to the national chair of the Democratic Party. He was not a choice, he was a compromise. And he was a compromise, which was made at a time where the party organization was running way behind some of the people in the Congress.

The Congress was coming more and more to recognize, especially from the 7th of November on, what the problem was. When we got the Congress up off the floor, the Democrats off the floor on the 7th and thereafter, and by the time we had the actual inauguration process for the second term of Bush, we had Bush as a lame duck. We had established that.

But the positive program required, was not yet on the agenda of the Democrats. It should have been, but it got jammed up with the usual kind of party financial this and financial that, and so forth, where people were trying to say, "Where's the money first, and then we develop the politics." Whereas in a time of crisis, you have to develop the politics first, and then you may get the money. Because when times are easy, people give easily. When times are hard, they give only when it's important for them. And therefore, to raise money sufficient to—I think people waste money in most of the party organizing, from my experience, because of what our experience is. We get a lot done with very little money. They get very little done with a lot of money. It just shows that there's something wrong in their operation.

So, we have a situation where, as you would express this, when you get into Washington now, in the Senate, around key committees in the House, they're very clear in terms of a general sense of direction. And also, it's true, we see very clear signs of a bipartisan tendency in the Senate, and things in that direction also in the House. But you don't see that clearly understood out in the boondocks.

And you're right: The problem is the lack of coordination between the leadership which is emerging in the national center around these issues, and what is not happening out in the boondocks. And that's because the Democratic Party doesn't function. It's non-functioning.

Of course, the Republican Party is jammed up by an internal quarrel about this thing, because most of the serious Republicans more and more, know that Bush and Cheney are disasters, and know that they're being pushed to the edge of a Watergate proceeding, as they were against Nixon. Because we have to get rid of this problem, in order to have a government again. And the reason we got rid of Nixon was not because he committed crimes, but because we had to get rid of him to have a government! Even Gerry Ford, who was not the fastest car on the block, you know, actually held the country together, because he wasn't Nixon. It was that simple. He was looked at as Mr. Nice Guy. So, we're in a similar situation.

Now, the problem here, is one of organizing. I think, however, that you'll find the organizing potential is tremendous. There's a certain amount of intimidation when a thug, Dick Cheney, and his apparatus, resort to active measures and dirty tricks, as they're doing now, to try to discourage people from doing things they would otherwise tend to do. The dirty tricks operation is not only national. The dirty tricks by the Bush/Cheney Administration—especially Cheney—is now overt and it's international. The government of India has been targetted with dirty tricks by this administration. Other governments around the world are targetted by dirty tricks from the United States government, all as a part of this operation. And people are frightened.

It's a question of leadership. We do have to get more leadership. And I think that the very fact you asked the question and you asked it here, and it's here, will help the process. We do have to have party organization.

You don't have to go through the national chair. If you want party organization, and the national chair is jammed up with a guy who's a fundraiser, period, you don't sit back and complain about it, and cry about it. You want to replace him? Replace him! If you don't want to replace him, okay. Then find and build another channel. It's easy.

We've had in the Democratic Party—we have campaign committees, all kinds of committees, many times before. We often bypass the national chair, in terms of organizing. Don't sit back and complain that the national chair is a dead end. It is! So what? That's no excuse. You're going to sit down and die? You're going to blame Howard Dean for it? The point is, decide you're not going to sit down and die.

And we have all kinds of committee organizing. We could organize. I'm doing some of it. Others are doing some of it. You put together some of the capabilities we have out there, and put them together, and you have a campaign team , which can run under various kinds of colors, which we can throw together overnight. You don't need a lot of money, at this point. You need some, but you don't need money to try to buy ideas, buy influence, with people who need help. You have to give them the ideas and the sense of organization, the sense that they're not alone, and they'll respond to it.

This is a time for organizing, like in the old days of labor organizing, when it is was tough, and you got your head bashed in, as a labor organizer. And, people sent you out, as a new organizer, out to the worst place to organize, and you got your head bashed in, because they'd had their head bashed in, and you had to learn the lesson.

So we're in that kind of situation, where you have to organize that way, the way the trade union movement organized in the better days. It's get out there and organize. Organize the local politicians, get 'em on! Educate them! Give them a sense that there's a national organization shaping up around what is coming out of the Democratic leadership and, to some degree, bipartisan leadership, in the Congress. They'll respond. But don't sit back and cry: Organize.

Freeman: We have a proposal from someone named Jim Salazar, that we resolve to make clear that GOP stands for Godless Oppressive Pricks. But in the spirit of bipartisanship, I'm tabling that motion.

And with that introduction, Rep. Perry Clark from Kentucky has a question. [applause]

Perry Clark: Good afternoon. Good to see you.

I really have a couple of comments more than a question. My questions have really been answered. I appreciate the history lesson you gave this morning here, Lyn. It's better than I got in high school and it's better than I got in college. And, I'm sure it's better than most of the kids get nowadays.

This week, I happen to be at Kentucky Dam Village, which was part of the Franklin Roosevelt TVA program. And, you know, hardly anybody younger than I, understood that that was a Franklin Roosevelt project? And that was project done by the Federal government that made that area of the country a wonderful place to live and to be. They tamed it for nature and they tamed it for humans. And it made rural electrification. It was a wonderful thing and they didn't even understand this any more.

I went to a union meeting. There were more people than there are here. In Kentucky. There were more people than there were here: There was speaker after speaker, and top leaders of the Democratic Party in the state. And they said the same trite garbage, and people just applauded! "We're for good jobs. We're going to get health care under control. We want to get living wages." No details! No subjects.

Well, they had Perry to speak last. [laughter] The man who spoke before me, there were about six or eight, probably. Several of them were very long, some very short. I tend to be very short, most of the time. I got up and I said, " I don't believe everything's been said. We do have real problems." And I addressed the same thing that you said this morning. I had two questions and I think I actually know the answer, but I brought them up there. "Where do the dollars come from, for reconstruction of the infrastructure? In the United States it is failing tremendously, throughout most Kentucky, throughout California, throughout the whole Midwest—we see this. I want to hear more and more talk about the infrastructure, because Katrina has put a focus on that."

And my other thing was, where do we really get the machine-tool capability, and the workers, to do the reconstruction that we need to do? Because I understand that we better save the auto industry right now, because they are the largest machine capabilities left in the United States.

With that, that's more of a comment than a question. I appreciate what you do. We're trying to organize in Kentucky. We're getting better and better, and I thank you, very much, for having me here.

LaRouche: I'll just take the opportunity to make two brief comments. First on infrastructure. We could do that. This is the Federal program. We have to do also, remember two things you have to do: You have to organize on two levels. You have to have an overall Federal program, which ensures that the United States is operating above breakeven, in terms of counter-to-counter operations. Secondly, you have to apportion this, in such a way that you ensure that the states are each solvent. Remember, the states can not go into debt. Therefore your program has to be to allocate programs in such a way, that you bring the states into a state of balance, and so forth.

On the question of the machine tool, you've got Mark here, who just spoke. And what we can so, we can—see machine-tool capability is a funny thing. Now, I know what they do generally in the auto industry and the aircraft industry. But the power of the machine-tool sector, remember, it's a relatively small number of people, on whom the jobs of many people depend. In other words, you may have a handful of machine-tool workers who actually are the key to thousands of jobs in that industry: Because, they are the ones that give the technology, which enables those industries to compete in the marketplace, in terms of product quality, not just price.

So therefore, the machine-tool industry is crucial. How good the machine-tool industry is, depends upon how advanced the technologies are that you're putting into it. Now, you can take any people who are machine-tool skilled operators, in terms of developers, and they can generally learn very quickly to do almost anything that you bring into the shop as technology. The higher the level, and the higher the rate of introduction of technologies, through the machine-tool sector medium, the greater the rate of gain in productivity at the point of production, in general.

So, therefore, high gain machine-tool operations, as opposed to one of a lower gain, are the key. We have to rapidly transform, as Roosevelt did in some cases, is: taking masses of people, who have limited skills for the job; breaking them in for the job, by machine-tool design of the crafting of the job, the way the job is broken down, the production job is broken down, so that people with relatively little skills, can be transformed into people who produce a product which contains a high level of technology and skill into it. And, that's what we need.

You need those two things: You need to apportion across the states, to make sure that we are not only getting breakeven for the nation as a whole; you have to think, crucially, of breakeven for the states, because a state can not go into debt—it has to operate on a budget.

Secondly, we must think of it in terms of high-gain machine-tool operations, not routine machine-tool operations. We've got to bring new technologies into play, rapidly , at a high rate, with the notion that we have to train people who have very low skill levels, to actually produce the products which go with a high-gain machine-tool product.

Freeman: The next question is from a Democratic member of the House of Representatives.

"Mr. LaRouche, just prior to the crisis caused by Hurricane Katrina, you had issued a statement that was very well received all over the country, called 'The Guns of August.' The fact of the matter, is that Hurricane Katrina may have bought us a little bit of time, but the saber-rattling against Iran and the renewed threat of domestic terrorism seems to be back on the agenda. In the build-up to increased hostility toward the nation of Iran, I think the least we can expect is a massive increase in the price of oil, and perhaps, that is something that this administration desires. My question to you is in two parts:

Number 1, do you think that the administration does in fact desire an increase in the price of oil, to help their friends in the oil industry? And, number 2, what are your thoughts now, in middle September, on the Guns of August?

LaRouche: Well, first of all, "The Guns of August" is what I talked about here. The August was the opening of the window of opportunity for launching the war which Cheney had called for in his instructions to STRATCOM. So, it's there. It was there, from that time on. And, August has a peculiarity, in terms of the way the world is organized in launching wars.

It's still on the table. We jammed it up, in some degree by advertising this. Because, what I was saying, was known to be true, in some significant quarters. Just—nobody was going to say it. I verified the fact that this was on, with qualified people. But, no one was going to say it. So, I looked at myself, and I said, "You just got elected to say it." So, I said it. It still stands. It was not a prediction of an August thing, it was saying, "As of August, we have to expect this danger." It's still active.

Look, the discussion of Sharon, in the United Nations meeting in New York, this was raised. Israel is prepared to go to war against Iran, under pressure from the United States government to do so. That's the current situation. We have jammed it up, but, it is still there. The monster is still there. It hasn't been turned loose. We may have delayed it somewhat. But, the monster is still there.

Now, on this question of oil, I covered that before. The oil price is not the oil multis, as such. The oil multis are a financial vehicle: That, every barrel of oil that goes on paper as being sold, is sold many times before it actually gets to an end-product deliver.

What is involved here, is not oil. It's the use of petroleum, as a medium of emptying your pocket. In other words, the oil multis don't benefit from this. The oil multis are astonished at what is happening on the markets. They are not running it! The bankers are running it! The credit derivatives people are running it! The hedge funds are running it! It's being run by George Bush's cronies; his father's cronies. You don't have a problem with the oil multis: You have a problem with Wall Street! You have a problem with the guys, who shudder when my name is mentioned, because they know that Wall Street hates me more than anyone else.

That's what the problem is. And, I think very simply—don't say "oil multis." Number one: never say "oil multis." Because, you've got the wrong target. Protesting against oil multis will get you noplace. It will get you a higher price of oil.

If you want to get a lower price of oil, say what I say. That is, Bush's financial friends in Wall Street, who took a bath on their gamble in hedge funds in the spring, and are still trying to bail out. And they found out this rip-off is the way in which to rip off the American people, and other people in Europe and so forth, to get some money to cover the fact that they're about to go into bankruptcy! That's what's going on. It's pure stealing of you, from your pocket, by the banking interests, the financial interests associated with the Bush Administration.

It's just like the same thing with Halliburton. Here you have Katrina, a disaster in Louisiana—Bush and Cheney are willing to do nothing about it. They knew about it, days before it happened! Bush was informed—Cheney was informed three days before it happened, what was going to happen! Explicitly! The knowledge of what was going to happen, was there on Aug. 2! There are outstanding reports, which gave you the basis for knowing it. This is no surprise. We're expecting three more hurricanes of that quality, of Force 3 or above, between now and November! This is no surprise. What it was going to do was no surprise. Everyone knew. The President was briefed! Two to three days before it happened, he was briefed, personally! And, he went off on his tricycle race. Cheney was on vacation, to be away when the crap struck, hoping that it would go away. And when they returned, surfaced after it had struck, nobody would pay any attention to it.

Then, what do they do? Cheney and Company go around to George Shultz's friends and say, "Halliburton must steal!" So, what they planned for New Orleans area, for Louisiana in general, is a rip-off by Halliburton! Of the type of rip-off that is occurring in Iraq, through the Iraq War, the same thing.

So, if you say the right magic words, that "Cheney and his friends at Wall Street are doing the stealing, that the people in the Gulf area, associated with Bush, are stealing, that the hedge fund people are stealing, that it's the friends of Alan Greenspan who are stealing": Now—those magic words may get you some results.

Freeman: Okay, now a question from the audience. Former Sen. Joe Neal of Nevada. [applause]

Joe Neal: If I look kind of groggy, it's because of that Red Ey