The Lead

Not Only Feet of Clay, but Brains of Silly Putty

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Aug. 15, 2026

It is 55 years to the day since Lyndon LaRouche issued his famous warning about the implications of the Aug. 15, 1971 Nixon administration decision to deliver the coup de grace to the post-war fixed exchange rate international financial system, and replace it with a speculation-friendly floating rate system, including the decoupling of the dollar from gold. LaRouche warned that it would be extremely difficult to reestablish any kind of fixed exchange rate system, and that a floating rate system among currencies would open the door to waves of new speculation that would end up destroying the value of both the dollar and of other “competing” currencies.

Worse still, LaRouche warned, the overall shift into a speculative financial system coupled with Schachtian looting would hollow out and then destroy the physical economies of Western nations, and eventually lead to wars of conquest similar to those of Nazi Germany. The only systemically viable alternative, he wrote, would require a thorough bankruptcy reorganization of the trans-Atlantic financial system, and its replacement with a new, technology-friendly one modeled on the design of Alexander Hamilton.

LaRouche, we must restate, was right.

The speculative cancer that 55 years ago was beginning to wreak havoc on developing sector nations, has today swelled to a $2.4 quadrillion behemoth – and it has now metastasized into the very bedrock of the Western financial system, the U.S. Treasury market itself.

Today the United States cannot even produce the weapons it is consuming in its various wars of aggression around the world. It can’t produce ships, so they are sub-contracting them elsewhere. Since 2001, the U.S. has lost more than 147,000 veterans to suicide—more than the total American combat deaths in every war since Vietnam combined.

And we have a President who alternately announces that he is successfully negotiating with Iran; that he will wipe the country off the face of the earth; and most recently proclaimed that he intends to make the Strait of Hormuz U.S. territory. The Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran had to remind Trump that “the Strait of Hormuz cannot be seized by a tweet.”

And so, 55 years after LaRouche’s grave warning, the United States and NATO, operating under British colonial policies, now find themselves in a quagmire in Iran and Ukraine that make the Vietnam War look trivial in comparison. And the British are making sure that Trump isn’t able to beat an honorable retreat in either of those unwinnable wars. The only option, they whisper loudly in his ear, is nuclear warfare – “tactical” nuclear warfare, for starters.

And easier victories are still to be had, they argue, in the Western Hemisphere, by launching deadly financial and military interventions of the sort they did in Venezuela. The next major target is Brazil, and its upcoming Oct. 4 presidential election, where they are hell-bent on stopping the reelection of President Lula.

The clock cannot be turned back on 55 years of wars, financial speculation, looting and cultural decay. But it is still possible to go back to that Aug. 15, 1971 branching point, and take up the policies that LaRouche spoke for then, and ensure that they are implemented today. As Lyndon LaRouche himself put it in a June 11, 2002 address in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:

“We are in a decadent culture, a decadent system, which is destroying us! And you’re not going to find solutions in a system, which has shown that the definitions, axioms, and postulates of the system ensure destruction! But people say, ‘But you’ve got to go by the rules!’ What are the rules? The rules are precisely the axioms, the definitions, the postulates which have destroyed us!

“Why can’t we change the rules? Aren’t we human beings? Don’t we represent nations which have the — Read, you get this out of the first chapter of Genesis: Are man and woman not made equally in the image of the Creator of the Universe, and endowed with these powers? Do not we have the authority, above anything on this planet, to change the rules? We have the power. That’s what sovereignty means. Sovereignty means the power to make the rules by means of which we can survive. That doesn’t mean we can make any rules we want to. It means we have to have responsibility and competence; but we have the right to deliberate.”