[Mrs. LaRouche has some good points, but colonizing the moon and Mars might be getting ahead of ourselves a bit, at least until the ravages of the never-ending war are repaired and ways are found to end hunger and extend basic human rights to every person. LaRouche is trying to ride the wave of American discontent to power (as always), to implant his new super-capitalism, if he (or she) ever succeeds. My impression of the man has always been that he is just another tool, one to hype the fear and claim credit for every arousal of American righteous indignation.]
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Aug. 24—In her Aug. 21 webcast, German Chancellor candidate Helga Zepp-LaRouche exposed the fascist thinking behind the health-care policy of the Obama Administration, and contrasted it with the perspective of development through technological progress. In this, her second webcast of the Chancellor campaign, which concludes with national elections on Sept. 27, Zepp-LaRouche provided an inspiring point of optimism, especially with her concluding call for the urgent adoption of a Moon-Mars Project, as a mission for international cooperation to bring mankind into a new era of prosperity.
Since she is a long-time political figure in German politics, as well as a spokesperson for her husband Lyndon LaRouche’s political movement internationally through the Schiller Institute, Zepp-LaRouche’s policy intervention can be expected to have strong reverberations, throughout Europe and Eurasia. As the economic breakdown crisis picks up speed, the impact of her electoral campaign, which is supported by candidacies of members of her Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo) in seven Federal states, will be one of the poles of sanity for all of Europe.
Zepp-LaRouche organized her presentation, which was entitled “Will the Threat of Ungovernability in the U.S. Spread to Germany?”, around two major themes. The first was the nature of the civilizational breakdown crisis, in which the financial oligarchy, once again, is threatening to impose fascist mass murder on the world, and against which the United States population has risen up in a mass strike revolt against the Obama Administration. The second was the alternative, presented with many colorful graphics, and a film clip on the Moon-Mars project, of the program for worldwide reconstruction that must be adopted immediately.
The Crisis We Face
After being introduced by Karsten Werner, head of the Saxony branch of the BüSo, Zepp-LaRouche began with Lyndon LaRouche’s forecast of the meltdown of the world financial system, which will occur, at the latest, in mid-October, barring changes in policy. There are a few people who take pleasure in the impending collapse of the United States, she said, but we should be clear: “A collapse of the United States would not leave any country unscathed; worldwide chaos would result.”
Nor should anyone take the fall in prices as a positive sign, she added. This reflects the collapse of the real economy, and is proceeding simultaneously with the threat of a hyperinflationary explosion. The cause of this explosion is, not least, the gargantuan rescue packages for the U.S. banks’ toxic waste. “The U.S.A. has a budget deficit of $13 trillion, but altogether, an indebtedness of $56 trillion.”
Even the Bundesbank president, Axel Weber, has warned about a “second round” of the financial crisis, she said.
The Revolt of the U.S. Population
But there’s been a dramatic change in the strategic situation, Zepp-LaRouche said, with the revolt in the United States. And this revolt is totally different than what you hear about in the media. The U.S. population has realized that what President Obama says, and what he means to do to the citizens, are two entirely different things. Obama says he wants to provide health insurance for 50 million uninsured Americans. “But what does that mean, when at the same time, health-care costs are supposed to be cut by 30%?”
Americans have begun to realize that such a “reform” is a threat to their very existence, and they are confronting their Congressmen and Senators with rage, at one town meeting after another, during the August recess.
There is a fundamental difference between this American unrest, and what we have seen over the past months in Europe—for example, in Greece or the Baltics. “The difference lies in the fact that the United States had a successful revolution, in which the population won a Constitution which guarantees the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And this idea, which is expressed in the Declaration of the Independence, as well as in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, is effectively the thread running through American history.” The fate of Germany and Europe depend upon the outcome of this confrontation in the United States.
Zepp-LaRouche then elaborated on the actual nature of the Obama Administration’s health program. The Obama “reform” is a copy of the rationing system in Great Britian, she said, where a board of experts decides who get treated, and who does not. And “that is exactly the same thing which was agreed on, in Hitler’s Tiergarten-4 policy of the National Socialists in 1939, namely that there was ‘life unworthy of life,’ and which established that the denial of medical care for the old and handicapped would be legitimate.”
To dramatize this point, Zepp-LaRouche showed a video of a father in Romulus, Mich., who pushed his son, who has cerebral palsy, in his wheelchair, up to the podium, in the town meeting being held by Rep. John Dingell (D), demanding to know what would happen to his son under Obama’s cost-cutting health “reform.”
In Europe, there’s a campaign of lies about the nature of the mass revolt against the Obama’s health program, she said. They say it is being organized by the Republican Party and by the right wing, and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. “The truth is that all parts of the population have broken with the Administration, but especially pensioners and seniors.”
Ezekiel Emanuel, the Face of Fascism
Zepp-LaRouche then focussed on the person of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health-care advisor to the Office of Management and Budget in the United States, as providing the key to understanding the Obama Administration’s health-care policy. She reviewed a number of his articles, beginning with that in the Huffington Post of October 2008, where he wrote that economic depression and bank bailouts might now make it possible to panic Americans into permitting his Nazi-style in health-care “reform.”
“The dean of health-care economists [and co-author, with Emanuel—ed.] Victor Fuchs of Stanford, has long maintained that we will get health-care reform only when there is a war, a depression or some other major civil unrest,” Emanuel wrote. “It’s beginning to look like we might just have all three.” “The huge increase in the federal debt that these bailouts will entail intensifies the pressure to rein in health-care costs,” he added.
Zepp-LaRouche reviewed a number of articles which Emanuel, a so-called bio-ethicist, has co-authored, on the explicit subject of saving money through limiting health care for the old, including through euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide.
From this, she continued, it’s easy to see the parallel to the euthanasia program of the Nazis. At first, the American public was shocked when LaRouche in April asserted the Nazi model for the Obama health program, but now, increasing numbers of people see that the comparison was absolutely correct. She then recalled for her audience the warnings of Dr. Leo Alexander, a U.S. medical advisor at the Nuremberg Doctors’ trials after World War II, who pointed to the utilitarianism of Hegel and Jeremy Bentham as the source of the corruption which led to sections of the population being treated like cattle, because they were consuming “too many resources,” or were, for other reasons, unwanted.
This is exactly the reasoning which is being used in the United States today.
Nor is Germany exempt, Zepp-LaRouche went on. Over the last 16 years, the German health-care system has been gradually destroyed, with 100,000 health-care jobs eliminated, and more and more dominance of a policy of triage. Zepp-LaRouche said:
The reason I’ve dealt with this so extensively, is that this man, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, is the idea-man for this health-care reform. And one would think that in Germany, where this same policy occasioned such a huge catastrophe, this theme would be taken up. But in no single article or report up until now [in Germany], has the name Ezekiel Emanuel even been mentioned, although in America it is a matter of the hottest debate, which is occurring at the town meetings, that he is the author of the reform. If I’ve ever seen an example of media control—and I have seen many—this is really it.
The Alternative: Worldwide Reconstruction
Zepp-LaRouche then picked up her second major theme, the program for overcoming the crisis. The basis for ideas such as those of Ezekiel Emanuel is false, she argued. People have accepted the idea of an entropic world view, which says there are “limited resources,” “limited space [Lebensraum],” “overpopulation,” and the need for rationing of health care. “All of this is the essence of fascist ideology,” she said. “The real laws of the universe are anti-entropic.”
We are holding an election amidst the greatest economic breakdown in the history of mankind, she said, and with a revolt in the United States of which my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, is the intellectual leader. Europeans must realize that there are two diametrically opposed traditions in America: one of the Anglo-American special relationship, as expressed by the cooperation between Britain’s Tony Blair and George W. Bush on the Iraq War; and the other, the revolutionary tradition against the British Empire. It is this second tradition which is coming to the fore, and which gives us a chance to get out of this crisis, she said.
Zepp-LaRouche then outlined LaRouche’s proposals for a four-power agreement among the United States, Russia, China, and India, to put together a new world credit system, on the American constitutional model. She used many graphics to illustrate the great infrastructure projects which such a new system would fund—including the Eurasian Land-Bridge, maglev train technologies, a worldwide transportation network, and more. Such a program could bring 10 million new productive jobs to Germany in the short term.
She devoted special attention to the situation in Africa, which she characterized as the test of morality for Europe. If we can’t overturn the injustice of 100 years of the slave trade and colonialism, to develop Africa, then our moral indifference means we can do nothing.
The ‘Extraterrestrial Imperative’
The radical change in thinking required today, Zepp-LaRouche continued, is expressed in the vision of the great German scientist Krafft Ehricke (1917-1984), who developed what he called the “extraterrestrial imperative.” For Ehricke, she said, the “extraterrestrial imperative” was a natural expansion of the evolutionary process of the Biosphere itself, in which existing physical limits are overcome, and also the so-called limited resources, and scarcities.
If we want to bring mankind out of his linear and monetarist thinking, there is no better way than manned space flight, because it inspires the spirit and the imagination. This program would have gone forward if President Kennedy had not been assassinated, and the world today would have been a totally different place, if we were advancing on this program. We would have long ago solved all the problems of this Earth, because the spinoffs of this fundamental research would be enormous. Thus it was that for every penny invested in the U.S. space program, 14 cents was gained in the civilian economy. It was therefore not the case that it was an extravagance, but, to the contrary, through the stimulation of these new revolutionary technologies, productivity in all sectors would increase enormously.
Zepp-LaRouche then presented Ehricke’s plan for the construction of a city on the Moon, which would become a launching pad and resource base for the exploration of Mars and beyond. To accomplish this, however, we have to develop nuclear-powered transport, so that the journey to Mars takes not 200 days, as it would with present technologies, but only four or five. This means developing nuclear fusion, and the isotope economy—which naturally goes against the idea of limited resources and scarcity that are traded on the financial markets.
“This extraterrestrial imperative is the essential next step in the coming-of-age of mankind,” she said. “Of that I am absolutely convinced. And as Krafft Ehricke told me, shortly before his death: ‘The problem is not the technology. The problem is, that man has not adequately developed.’ ” Ehricke himself had outlined three fundamental laws of aeronautics, which apply to man’s nature as a whole:
1. Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe imposes any limitations on man, except man himself.
2. Not only the Earth, but the entire Solar System, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are man’s rightful domain of activity.
3. By expanding throughout the universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself.
Zepp-LaRouche concluded her presentation thus:
Therefore, in this, the greatest crisis in the history of mankind, I think that we cannot come out of the crisis with some kind of pragmatic short-term solutions, but that we must—and that is in the tradition of Nicolas of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, and other great humanists of European intellectual history: We must bestir ourselves with the highest ideals. And only thus can we gain the strength, to be ready to deal with the current situation, and to usher in a positive era in history.
The Next Step
Zepp-LaRouche’s presentation was followed by almost two hours of discussion, much of it about the economic crisis and her proposed solutions.
She will give her final webcast for the election season on Sept. 22, five days before the election.
The archive video recording of the Aug. 21 webcast, in German and in English simultaneous translation, can be found here, and on the BüSo website, http://.bueso.de.
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