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Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
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Press Release
China in a Changing World, Eurasian Land-Bridge As an Alternative Reflections On a New Basis
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Lyndon LaRouche at the Institute for Sino Strategic Studies |
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Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. was the keynote speaker at a conference on China on August 17, 2002, sponsored by the Institute of Sino Strategic Studies (ISSS) in Whittier, California, and extensively covered in the Chinese press. The "Seventh Annual Conference on the Re-emergence of China" was attended by scholars, intellectuals, and political activists from the United States, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China, many of whom were happy for the opportunity to hear directly from LaRouche, whose ideas are widely known in these circles. We will soon post all three of these addresses to this landmark conference. Wide Coverage in Chinese Press The Institute held a well-attended special press conference prior to the opening of the conference, to introduce LaRouche and the other speakers to the Chinese-language press. More than ten news services with correspondents in California attended. The introduction of LaRouche, and statements from the other participants, showed the high esteem in which he is held among the conference organizers and other scholars and political activists present. Dr. Tie Lin Yin, for example, a leading advocate of peaceful Chinese reunification, referred to LaRouche as "the distinguished thinker," adding that, to him, there is no higher designation than that. 'We Must Make a Revolution in Thinking' Among the participants in this major conference were officials from the All-China Federation of Taiwan Compatriots; the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits; the China Association for the Promotion of Culture; the Institute of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; and the Alliance for the Reunification of China. LaRouche and the Presidency LaRouche also was asked, by the owner of a local radio station, if he had presented this speech to Bush, and if he can win the nomination for President. He answered by saying that there is no one, other than himself, who is presently qualified to be President in the economic and strategic crisis which this President must face. Since there are some talented people in the United States, he can move things so that the United States can solve these problems. To do this, however, "We've got to make a revolution in thinking." LaRouche's campaign has been engaged for a month in an intense, 5 million-leaflet campaign precisely to enable the President to act seriously in this crisis, in the one way possible: by making LaRouche himself the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for 2004. |
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China in a Changing World
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From left to right, the chart represents the interval from 1966 to approximately 2000.
The lower, downward-sweeping curve, represents a net decline in per-capita rates of physical output of the combined economies. The upper of the three curves, represents increase of nominal valuation of financial aggregates. The middle curve represents the infusion of sundry varieties of monetary aggregates used to facilitate the inflation of the financial bubble.
Figure 2 is also pedagogical. However, it reflects a change, estimated to have occurred during the Spring of 2000, in the relations between rates of growth of monetary and financial aggregates. From that point on, to the present, the amount of monetary aggregate supplied to support financial assets, must exceed the valuation of the financial assets subsidized in this way. This cross-over is of the same type as that which occurred in Weimar Germany during the interval of approximately June-July 1923. This cross-over was the launching of the hyper-inflationary skyrocket which destroyed the reichsmark in October-November of that same year.
Figure 3, represents actual data for a period corresponding to the portrait given in the second chart.
Figure 4 shows, simply the curve of hyperinflation in 1923 Germany. Figure 5 compares 1923 Germany with trends in the U.S. dollar today.
That illustrates the core of the causes for the world's presently exploding monetary-financial and economic crises. The present crisis is not conjunctural; it is systemic. It is the present system itself which has created this world crisis, over a period of about thirty-five years. There is no solution for this crisis without replacing that system. So, similarly, empires and dynasties have fallen in the past, and entire cultures have even disappeared.
To Avert Threat of a New Dark Age
If the system is not changed, the following world scenario is virtually inevitable.
When we consider the ratio of combined regular and irregular financial indebtedness, including all categories of financial derivatives and so-called "junk bonds" built into world finances as a whole, the ratio of financial debt to real value added in the world today is comparable to the debt-ratios which collapsed the Lombard banking system during the middle of Europe's Fourteenth Century. The effort of financiers then, to collect the full value of the financial debt, plunged Europe into what historians study as a "New Dark Age," during which an estimated one-third of Europe's population was wiped out. When that comparison to today's world is made, two facts should be clearly seen. First, that only a change from the world's present monetary-financial system would save civilization. Second, why some powerful financial special interests are desperate in their determination to resist establishing a new monetary-financial system.
There is a solution for this crisis. In my view, there are three steps which must be taken to find a way out of the presently deepening, combined, monetary-financial, economic, and strategic world crisis.
Step Number One: Use the relatively successful experience of the 1945-1964 Bretton Woods system as a model of reference for establishing a new world monetary system. This means a fixed-exchange-rate system, operating among economic-protectionist policies adopted as treaty-agreements between and among nations.
Such a proposal has been endorsed by groups of leading parliamentarians in Italy and elsewhere.
My personal estimate is that this might price monetary-reserve gold at somewhere between $800 and $1,000 a troy ounce; I may be underestimating the price, but the estimate illustrates the point. This means reorganizing the world's trade and physical economy around long-term credit in the order of a quarter-century in maturity and at borrowing costs not in excess of 1-2% simple-interest rate, for development of basic economic infrastructure and special-priority other projects.
Establishing such a new system would require intervention by, and cooperation among perfectly sovereign national governments, to put the existing monetary-financial system through government-directed bankruptcy-reorganization. This action would be governed, from the outset, as it was in President Franklin Roosevelt's measures, by the constitutional principle of natural law called variously "the general welfare" or "the common good." All essential employment and production, and payment of pensions, must continue in a customary form. Levels of production and distribution of physical goods and professional services must be sustained. Immediate measures to increase employment must be launched, with state-backed credit, especially in areas of basic economic infrastructure important for the present and future national interest.
Step Number Two. Technological measures must be taken as cooperation among nations, to raise the general net level of the physical-productive powers of labor globally, through flows of technology from technology-exporting localities to technology-deficit localities. Typical of such needed measures, is the proposal for a Eurasian Land-Bridge, proposed by my associates over the course of the recent ten years. Eurasian cooperation, probably pivotted on Europe's cooperation with a group of nations brought together by aid of strategic-economic cooperation among Russia, China, and India, is typical of the economic-growth programs which are required to match a return to something equivalent to the 1945-1964 Bretton Woods system.
Step Number Three. The time has been reached, at which we must surpass those relatively primitive levels of cooperation, in which peaceful cooperation has been treated merely as a form of mere negation of conflict. We must move toward the kind of policy which then-U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams proposed for the future of the Americas: a community of principle among perfectly sovereign nation-states. Sovereignty requires that states be self-governed according to those national cultures by means of which the members of the nation are able to communicate ideas pertaining to what England's poet Shelley described as "profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature." However, among such nations, our common purpose must be the same: the general welfare of each nation, and the general welfare which is positively promoted through cooperation among nations. Those nations which are prepared to adopt such a policy toward humanity should do so now. We should not seek to impose our will to that effect on other nations, but we should set the example we would hope they would come to admire.
The General Welfare of Humanity
All nations are, in fact, in one boat, a boat which is now sinking. We shall not save the boat without an energetic promotion of fundamental scientific and derived technological progress in the physical productive powers of labor. That means that that science and technology must be shared with those who have need of it. Without the adopted motive to benefit one's neighbor, for no different reason than the sake of the general welfare of humanity, we should probably not find the will needed to overcome the threats to the general welfare which now proliferate among the populations of the world.
Situate China in respect to that third consideration. See China through my eyes as an economist. See the crucial matters of the world's reciprocal relations with the nation of China, in the terms of my work as a long-range economic forecaster.
Progress is the fruit of the combination of a scientifically progressive culture, with the evolving cultural tradition through which a people chooses and implements its policies of practice. The fruit of such combined development of the culture, is to be estimated as the benefits which a present generation's work contributes to two, three, and four generations ahead. Since approximately a quarter-century is required, in technologically modern culture, to educate a newborn child to young-adult maturity as a working professional, we must judge the long-term effects of the present generation's decisions over a period of not less than fifty years ahead. What do we intend the condition of China and neighboring Asia to be fifty years from now? That should be the agenda for policy deliberation of the Americas and Europe with China today.
To motivate progress, we must provide the living individual with a sense of the meaning of his or her individual life and its outcome two or more generations ahead. An animal lives for today; a human being lives for that for which he or she should be remembered, and thanked, generations yet to come. If peoples of nations would think of themselves, their nation, and other nations, in that way, relations among peoples will have positive motives, the sense that we need one another to succeed, rather than merely negative desires to escape the penalties of conflict.
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