Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in EIR Vol. 36, No. 12, March 27, 2009, pp. 52-57.
Lyndon LaRouche made the following opening remarks to a private diplomatic luncheon in Washington, D.C. on March 19, 2009.
As many of you know, on the 25th of July in the year 2007, I delivered an international webcast in which I warned that we were on the verge of the beginning of a general breakdown crisis of the financial systems of the entire world. And in three days after that, the process which I had forecast, began to occur.
Now, the problem is, that this is not a recent development; it’s not a recent mistake. There have been recent mistakes, but they’re piled upon many mistakes over decades. As a matter of fact, I could trace the mistake to the day that Franklin Roosevelt died, and that was the first mistake—he died. He shouldn’t have done that! Because he gave us a terrible successor, Truman, who did much to ruin everything that Roosevelt had intended.
It’s important to look back at that now, because Roosevelt’s intention—
Remember what we had done: We turned the tide, because the financial establishment in the United States, as in Britain, were fascists. The British actually created Hitler, as they created Mussolini. And they had an intention: The intention of course, was to, among other things, develop a capability in Germany to have Germany organized to attack and destroy the Soviet Union. That was one of their plans.
Fascism and Empire
Now what happened, of course, as I think some of you know, is that something else happened. The French fascist government, at the time, struck an agreement with the Nazis. But initially, the Germans themselves had said they were not going to attack the Soviet Union until the problem of France, at the background, was eliminated; because France was still a major military power on the continent; and the Germans didn’t trust the French. So, therefore, they had an agreement with the fascist government in France. And therefore, even though the French forces were superior in military capability to the Germans of that time, what happened is, the fascists in the French government maneuvered the generals and maneuvered the troops so that the Wehrmacht was able to make an obvious breakthrough, and the country fell apart. And it fell apart, because a country that would elect a fascist government under those circumstances, will probably fall apart.
So at that point, the British had done all the work in creating Adolf Hitler, and Mussolini, beforehand. And we had in the United States at the same time, our financial establishment, under President Wilson, under President Coolidge, and so forth; and our financial establishment was just as Nazi, as the British, who were supporting the Nazis.
But, then Pearl Harbor happened, Japan’s attack, which had been something originally planned by the British in the 1920s, because the British were afraid of the United States developing a naval capability they couldn’t control. So therefore, they agreed, at the arms negotiations of the 1920s, to have the Japanese take the assignment of taking on and destroying Pearl Harbor. And the Japanese were happy to do that, for two reasons: First of all, Japan had been convinced by the British Prince of Wales to make a war on China, which continued, as you know, from 1894 to 1945, off-and-on warfare. So, the Japanese, who were already conducting this war against China, looked at the U.S. as an enemy who might interfere with their war on China.
So: the Pearl Harbor attack. But, the Pearl Harbor attack mobilized the American people, in a way which is somewhat similar to what happened recently in the United States, by the swindles, by these gigantic swindles which are stirring up the American people toward hatred against the financial community, because of these swindles.
So, at that point, Roosevelt had political control of the situation, because of the hatred against this process, and many of the fascists went underground and changed their names and went into new organizations to come up later; and, it is that element which dominates the United States today, from the top down, especially under three Bush Administrations. And the Bush family was one of these pro-Nazi families. And it’s still one of those pro-Nazi families!
So therefore, we have this crisis now, which was created by this kind of mess. We have, with the British financial establishment, the British Empire—it’s not the British people, it’s the British Empire—and this imperial force which is running most of the terrorism in the world today, and most of the drug-trafficking in the world today, has now made itself extremely unpopular. In the meantime, because of the way they ran the operation. The United States, economically, has been systemically destroyed in its physical-economic capability, since the day that Roosevelt died; Truman began to do that, immediately. Because, you have to understand, that the British Empire is not a friend of the United States; and the United States as a nation, is not a friend of the British Empire. Those of us who are patriots know, the British Empire is our enemy. And the British know, that we, the United States, are their most deadly enemy, if we ever get organized to do something about it, as Franklin Roosevelt was prepared to do.
An Inevitable Breakdown of the System
Now, we’ve come to a point where the world economy has been ruined; it’s been destroyed. It’s been destroyed especially since 1968, but the process didn’t start there.
We’ve reached a point, where the attempt to keep this system going resulted in a hyper-inflationary development, a great hyper-inflationary bubble was generated. What I was forecasting on the 25th of July of 2007, was simply that the point had come that it was impossible to prevent this bubble from popping under the existing system! Now, the problem is, that most governments in the world, practically every government in the world, does not yet understand that, has not yet accepted that reality: that this is an inevitable breakdown crisis of the present monetary-financial system of the entire planet.
You see the chain-reaction that happens: You see what happened to China, what happened to Russia, as a result of these developments. They thought they were out of it. They thought this was going to hit the United States and not elsewhere. Then it hit Russia, it hit China, in a big way. It will hit all countries. We’re going toward chaos.
We’re going toward the point, the hypothetical point that if we don’t stop this, you will have thermonuclear war. Not because there’s a motive for war, but because in a breakdown crisis, military action will be inevitable. And in that case, the nuclear weapons will be used: for no purpose! For no real purpose, no strategic objective—out of sheer insanity, because we’re going into that kind of condition.
The problem I see, the big problem I’m concerned about, is getting nations to come to their senses, and recognize there is a solution for this process. All we really have to do, is to create a credit system to replace the existing monetary system.
We can not, under any conditions, survive under the present world monetary system. We can not survive under the agreements which are implicit in the present monetary system. We have to put the monetary system into bankruptcy, bankruptcy reorganization, and then reorganize that with major countries and others joining it, to reorganize the system as a credit system, not a monetary system.
We have an imperialist condition—and most people don’t know what imperialism is; they think the United States is imperialist. The United States is not imperialist. The British Empire is imperialist, it’s a real empire. If you want to understand what an empire is, look at the Middle East. The Middle East is a creation of Sykes-Picot by the British Empire. The British play Arab against Israeli in the Middle East—they set that up! It’s run by the British! The British run all sides. Except when countries come to their senses and don’t play the game. And that’s the situation in most of the world today.
So, what is needed is, to realize that the empire is the existing monetary-financial system, and the bankers and banking interests, the financial interests which control that. This is what the problem is.
The solution to the problem is like cutting the dagger: If you put the system—recognize that it is bankrupt. That is, the total amount of debt outstanding, of governments, outstanding, in the world today, is far in excess of any value, real economic value; there’s no way that you could reorganize the debts of the present monetary system on some kind of reorganization of the ordinary type, and come out of this successfully.
As long as we do not eliminate the present monetary system, there’s no hope for humanity. We’ll go into a dark age, like the 14th Century in Europe. That’s where we’re heading.
Now, the problem of governments: They don’t understand this.
They don’t understand that you have to change the nature of the system. They’re all committed to the idea of financial systems, or monetary systems. And they don’t work, under these conditions. If you try to defend and maintain and reorganize the monetary system, you are going to go into the pit: No chance for you.
Steps Toward Solution
The only solution is, and what I’ve proposed, is this, and I’ve proposed it generally: The step toward solution is, in Western and Central Europe, there’s nothing; there’s nothing you can do. There are some people there who are interesting and who might do something. But as long as the present European Monetary System exists, there’s nothing that any country in Western and Central Europe can do. Because they’ve all bought themselves into this system! The Maastricht system, the British system. So therefore, you can’t go to them. You go to these governments, you talk to them, but they’re not going to do anything.
Germany’s not going to do anything. You have some people in Italy, who are interesting people. They will think about doing something, but they won’t be able to. France is probably the country most likely to break out, in terms of the Western European/continental European situation. But it won’t do anything either—not to change the system. They will resist. They will come up with “good ideas.” But they will not go to the core of the problem.
There are four nations on this planet which could lead, together, in forcing the change which must be made: They are the United States, Russia, China, and India. They represent a sufficient strength, combined, to force through the reorganization. And the reorganization would be to go back to a page out of Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt’s intention had been, in the Bretton Woods conference of 1944—that is, not to go to Keynes. Roosevelt was an enemy of Keynes. Truman was a friend of Keynes. Roosevelt was an enemy of colonization and imperialism. Truman was a friend of British imperialism. And he started a war, unnecessarily, with the Soviet Union—or semi-war—as a way of trying to control this process.
How FDR’s Intention Was Sabotaged
We go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s intention in 1944. He died, of course, in April of 1945; but, go back to his Bretton Woods conference. What was his intention? His intention, as he said, on a number of occasions, as he said to Winston Churchill: “Winston, when this war is over, there is not going to be any more British Empire! The empire is going to end. We’re going to take this vast machine, war machine that we built up, for the war, and we’re going to production of wealth. And we’re going to use that production of wealth by this conversion of our war machine, our economic war machine, to develop the reconstruction of countries which are war-torn, and countries which have been colonies, or semi-colonies. And we’re going to free these nations from semi-colonial conditions, with the great power we have in our war machine, if we convert it to necessary forms of industrial development.”
That was Roosevelt’s policy: Roosevelt fought against Keynes, because he knew that Keynes was a fascist. John Maynard Keynes was a fascist; he was called a liberal—he’s liberally fascist! He’s dead now, but he still stinks even though he’s dead.
So what happened was, we went into this system, this monetary system which was actually steered by the British, at a time that the United States had superior power in the world! So the United States, in a sense, under Truman, made a kind of revolution, with the help of the British, like Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell’s idea of a preventive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, was a key part of this operation.
So, we went into a system, step by step: The assassination of Kennedy, for example. Who do you think assassinated Kennedy? You think it was some lone assassin? No! It was some people from Spain, of French patronage, who were working against de Gaulle; and the same people that killed Kennedy were people who had been assigned to kill de Gaulle! And they came in from Mexico, and they came into Texas and they killed the President of the United States. And that was a change in the policy of the United States, because Johnson was terrified they were going to get him next.
So then we went through a change: We went through change of the Vietnam War, the Indochina War. The Indochina War was an act of insanity, cooked up by fraud. And so, we sank into it. We began to degenerate. Our economy began to degenerate. By ’68, we no longer had a breakeven in terms of maintaining basic economic infrastructure: That is, we were losing more infrastructure by attrition, than we were creating new. So, from ’68, we went into crisis. The British ran an operation in ’67: They sank the pound, and they used the sinking of the pound, to bring down a crisis for the dollar.
From ’68, we went crazy. Went crazy against de Gaulle, crazy against every institution; insane policies were introduced. And then, the same fascist element, the same elements, the same families, the same interest groups, which had been the backers of Mussolini and Hitler, in the United States, during the 1920s and 1930s, took over. And they imposed a policy by which we wrecked the U.S. economy. We wrecked it in the latter part of the 1970s. We stumbled along until 1987: We had a collapse of Wall Street which was as big as the collapse of Wall Street in 1929.
They didn’t quit: They went with an even crazier system, under Alan Greenspan. We went on and on and on, destroying our economy, destroying the economy of the world. And now we’ve come to the point that it’s ended up, with a great hyper-inflationary explosion, which is building up now, throughout the world. And what you see with these figures of bailouts, you’re looking at a hyper-inflationary explosion already in process.
A Global Credit System
Now, what do we do? The United States must go to Russia, and I know there are circles in Russia who don’t really understand this fully, but they’re open to discussing it. We have a problem with China. China needs an agreement, under which China can stabilize itself. If the United States and Russia can agree on a policy, that policy can go into effect. India—if China, and Russia, and the United States come together, India will join. If they join, countries in Asia will join.
What we’ll do, simply, is this: We’ll go to a system of state credit, which is embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
In the U.S. Constitution, you can not legally issue currency, except by the approval of the Congress, the House of Representatives, and the Presidency. You can not conduct a treaty agreement with the United States with any other country, except by the same kind of arrangement. You make a treaty negotiation, you go to the Congress to get approval, the House of Representatives in particular. If that is approved, then it happens. You do the same thing on issuing currency, or issuing credit for currency.
Now that means state credit: a credit system which is controlled by the government, of the national government. What you have to do is what Roosevelt did, specify a fixed-exchange-rate system. You must freeze the relative values of currencies of various countries, so that you don’t have fluctuating interest rates, fluctuations that cause inflationary tendencies. Then you have to agree, by treaty agreement, on long-term development projects which are necessary for humanity, and you have to go to Roosevelt’s intention to convert what he intended to become the United Nations, as a group of sovereign nation-states, independently sovereign nation-states, united together by a credit system—not a monetary system—in which the governments will vote their own support for their participation; and in which governments will meet together to balance off the credit creation, so that you don’t have a runaway debt develop in this situation.
It means we will go—to build this planet again, we can’t just build industry, we have to build a lot of infrastructure. For example, a modern rail system, as opposed to what we have now. This means also magnetic levitation systems. It means power systems, it means lots of nuclear power, because you can not solve many problems of this planet, without nuclear power. Because other forms of power are not adequate for our needs. And you will also build water-management systems, as well as mass-transit systems. We must link up the continents: Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas must be linked up by rail-type connections which will be a major link in the thing, so we can develop each part of this world in this way. And if we decide to do that, and we decided to do that today, for example, we would be in a sense, coming out of this mess that threatens the existence of nations today.
And what we need to do, is to reach that kind of agreement, in good faith. If it’s initiated by the four powers I’ve indicated—the United States, Russia, China, and India—in an equitable agreement, other nations will automatically join. They’d be willing to join. The African nations will say, “Kick the British out”—the Africans will cheer. Because all Africa needs is an infrastructural project which enables Africa to begin to develop itself. China’s made a step in that direction with some of these contracts, of putting infrastructure in, in return for raw materials. That’s a sane, fair policy. We can go further with that, but the main thing Africa requires, is infrastructure: It requires power.
Take one of these helicopter studies of the African continent. This has been mapped section by section of Africa, by a special study which is available to people today: Look from the sky at helicopter level, and look at Africa! How many railway systems do you see? How many high-technology systems do you see? Africa is being exploited and looted and it has no means by which to defend itself! It has farmers and a large agricultural area. But it has no means to protect the farmer against bugs, against diseases, and against other things. So if we assist Africa, in a system of mass transportation and power, then Africa will have the means by which to develop itself.
And that’s the typical kind of mission. We need to go at the infrastructural side of this matter, and build the kind of infrastructure which is the basis for what Roosevelt intended: a planet which has no colonies, a planet which is based on sovereign nation-states, as Roosevelt intended the United Nations to become; a planet which uses high technology, in order to enable nations to develop the territory which they have, and the populations which they have; to build basic economic infrastructure, from which we will develop the technologies of the local industries and agriculture. We can do that. And if we decide to do that, then the crisis which threatens the planet now, will, in a sense, come to an end. It will not remove all problems, but it will stop the degeneration, and put us on the road back to growth.
And Roosevelt had the right intention, the right vision. Unfortunately, he made a big mistake—he died. And Truman took over, and Truman was a British agent. And what you see in the United States now, what you see of these vast bailouts, these swindles—you see the same organizations, which we know, from the 1920s and 1930s, the organizations in the United States, the big-money organizations that supported Mussolini and then Hitler, as the British supported Mussolini and Hitler, this organization is running the United States right now, has been running it under the Bush Administration.
And the American people are becoming very angry: They want to kill these guys, who took these bailouts! When a people is aroused, as these American people are becoming aroused, and people around the world are aroused, those who are optimistic are becoming more aroused quickly.
We’re now in a situation where the time for a change has come: I can’t tell you what date the change should come on, but I think that we, as nations, as representatives of nations, as patriots of nations, if we agree, that this is the step we must take, the kind of step we must make, then I think it will happen. But we have to have the keystone nations which represent combined great power, agree on a policy, of going to the intention outlined beforehand by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, especially in 1944. That intention, is something which people had agreed to at the time, in spirit. And if we start that going, I don’t think we can be stopped.
Thank you.
