From oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!utcsri!utnut!torn!news2.uunet.ca!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ccs!covici Mon Oct 25 09:28:29 PDT 1993 Article: 29812 of alt.activism Path: oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!utcsri!utnut!torn!news2.uunet.ca!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ccs!covici From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com Newsgroups: alt.activism Subject: EIR Talks 10/20/93 Message-ID: <461-PCNews-126beta@ccs.covici.com> Date: 23 Oct 93 9:22:9 GMT Organization: Covici Computer Systems Lines: 641 - ATTENTION FREE LAROUCHE ATTENTION FREE LAROUCHE - The wider LaRouche's presence, the greater the pressure to get him free. Put LaRouche on radio, with a new interview each week. The transcript below is from a weekly hour-long interview formatted with news breaks and commercials. To get LaRouche on radio, calls from people within stations' listening area can be most effective. Program director and general managers are usually the ones to make decisions about programming. Get interested contacts with businesses or products to advertise on the stations during the EIR Talks With LaRouche hour. This provides greater incentive for the stations to carry the program. Any radio station on the planet can air the weekly interviews with LaRouche. The EIR Press Staff can provide weekly tapes for broadcast. Or stations can pull the program down from satellite, using the coordinates below. The interviews are broadcast Fridays on satellite from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Eastern. For More Information: Frank Bell, Press Staff. Satcom C-5, transponder 15,channel 16-0. The LaRouche files are now available by automatic list service. To get an index of the files, you must subscribe to the LaRouche mailing list. To do this, send a message to listserv@ccs.covici.com with a line (not the subject line) saying subscribe lar-lst After that, to get an index, say index lar-lst Interviewer: Mel Klenetsky October 20, 1993 MEL KLENETSKY: Welcome to {Executive Intelligence Review'}s Talks. I'm Mel Klenetsky. We're on the line with Lyndon LaRouche from Rochester, Minnesota. Reaction to U.S. Foreign Policy Triggered by Events in Russia Mr. LaRouche, there's been a virtual revolt in Congress against Clinton's foreign policy. There's been criticism of Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti. Representative McCloskey just returned from Sarajevo and called for [Secrtary of State] Warren Christopher's resignation on the grounds of the inadequacy of the Bosnia policy. You've had calls for the resignation of [Defense Secretary] Les Aspin. How do you rate Clinton's foreign policy at this point, and what do you think of this recent revolt? MR. LAROUCHE: First of all, the revolt itself is a product of the events of October. You will note that, if you go back to September, even though Clinton did have problems in the formulation of his foreign policy, the {reaction} to his foreign policy erupted in October, and came to the surface chiefly around the events in Moscow on the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th and so forth. This is what Clinton's problem has been. This has called into question all of his foreign policy, not necessarily for reasons of which all of the congressmen and others are aware; but it's obvious that the entire policy, especially the policy from George Bush and Margaret Thatcher's reactions to the events of 1989, have been to date a failure. This is not a Clinton failure; this is a failure of U.S. foreign and economic policy over the entire period, from approximately the time of George Bush's inauguration, to the present. The significant thing is that Clinton is now suffering for the effects of his failing to overturn the foreign policy drift which he inherited from the previous president, George Bush. And this has hit precisely because the blowing up of Russia signifies that Russia is {not} a thing of the past. There is not one superpower in the world; there are two superpowers: a Russia which is reawakening in a non-communist form as an imperial dictatorship--at least that's the trend, at present; which has more nuclear warheads than the United States; and the United States which, economically and otherwise--including military capabilities--is on the down side. And all of this comes together as a shock; and under the conditions of this shock, people in Congress and elsewhere are awakening and criticizing, left and right, every aspect of foreign policy. So it's not the result of Somalia or Haiti, etc., etc. The problem is: Russia blew up, which meant that the entire calculation of the Bush administration to date has been a catastrophic failure; and Clinton's failure to address that and to change that, in a demonstrative way, is the root of the criticism he's getting. Q: Recently, in a {Washington Post} interview, Clinton attacked Britain and France, and put the responsibility for the Bosnia policy on {their} shoulders. Is this what has occurred, or does he hold some responsibility for this policy as well? MR. LAROUCHE: That's irrelevant. Of course he holds responsibility for what he has {not} done. When you are the Number 1 superpower, and the world looks to you, your sins of omission--what you don't do that you should do--are just as culpable as any sins of commission. Therefore, Clinton's capitulation to the Anglo-French or the British-created, or the Thatcher-created {Entente Cordiale} between Britain and France against the United States in Serbia; his capitulation to that, as well as George Bush's capitulation to that earlier, is what is hurting him now. He is absolutely correct when he attacks Britain and France in this respect. He would be more correct if he were to attack France for capitulating to an {Entente Cordiale} rather than saying Britain and France are co-equal. Of course, France is responsible for what it does; but historically, we have to see what the problem is, and the problem comes from Britain, as the Thatcher memoirs indicate. Now Clinton has awakened to that in making these criticisms, {in part}; but he has not yet addressed the root of the problem. That's what I think should be said about it. We certainly should welcome the fact that he is publicly stating that his foreign policy in the Balkans failed in part because he did {not} override the resistance from London and Paris; that's good--it doesn't go far enough. Q: Similarly, Clinton has also, along with [National Security Adviser] Tony Lake, been making major statements concerning radical shock therapy--not major statements, but he's expressed concern. Is there a reevaluation of shock therapy economics taking place? MR. LAROUCHE: Sure. There is a response, which you're getting from Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is moving into perhaps a more significant position in the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment at the present. You're also getting, remember, from the other side of the aisle, from Sen. Bob Dole, criticisms which were quite trenchant and quite appropriate on this subject. So it's all very interesting, the fact that he's doing it. [commercial break] Russia Is Drifting into a Third Rome Policy Q: Mr. LaRouche, we were just talking about the possibilities of a reevaluation of shock therapy. Last week we discussed Georgi Arbatov's statements in this regard. You mentioned Zbigniew Brzezinski. What is Zbigniew Brzezinski doing in this regard at this point? MR. LAROUCHE: Well, it's not clear. Brzezinski is using a certain amount of rhetoric. His rhetoric in part is appropriate from an academic standpoint, that is, he has identified, as have a number of others--correctly--the Third Rome impulse. That is, the Russian people, the Muscovite Russians, given no creative leadership in a different direction, will naturally slip into an axiomatic way of thinking which has been prevalent in Muscovite Rus since the middle at least of the fifteenth century, as Russia came out from under the Mongol domination. They came out with this idea, which came to the surface in about 1510, called the ``Third Rome''--that is, the belief that the two Romes, the Rome of the Western Roman Empire and the Rome of the Byzantine Empire, had both failed for moral reasons; and that Russia, led by the Russian Orthodox Church, must become the third and final world empire, to last indefinitely. And the Russian, without any elaborated thoughts (Dostoevsky, of course had a great deal to say about that, and that's reflective of what goes on in Russia); but the Russian naturally goes into this suspicion and moral contempt for the West, in the belief that Russia must be a world empire to bring the world into moral order so that Russians can live in peace. And whenever Russia goes into a crisis, particularly a crisis of contempt for Western Europe, etc., then the Russian people naturally drift into this way of thinking. And that Brzezinski has, in his own terms, correctly identified, as opposed to many of the foreign policy establishment, particularly utopians, or the people who support, say, this free trade democracy nonsense, and shock therapy. Those people have no competence whatsoever in Russian history, Russian {cultural} history; and what they're doing, which is essentially what Brzezinski is saying and a few other critics, is that these nuts, typified by Sachs and the IMF conditionalities-makers, are driving Russia into an imperial Third Rome dictatorship, brimming with hatred against the West, precisely because of the misery brought upon them by shock therapy--not by communists, not by a communist heritage--but by shock therapy and IMF conditionalities. And this hatred against the West, combined with suffering of the Russian people, is activating a Third Rome impulse which {controls} Russian politics to a large degree. Not because anybody in Russia is {conspiring} to do that; but because the axiomatic {cultural} assumptions underlying Russian belief, are, under these conditions, driving the Russian process in that direction, sometimes without regard to the intentions of leading participants in the Russian process. Why Margaret Thatcher Was Horrified by the LaRouche-Reagan SDI Policy Q: We were discussing the Thatcher memoirs last week, and more and more things seem to be coming out about them. One of the things that came out, was that Margaret Thatcher had a tremendous fear about President Reagan's policy on the SDI, the fear of sharing technology with the Russians. Of course, you were very much involved in that process, and this was an aspect of your policy. Can you comment on Thatcher's memoirs in this regard? MR. LAROUCHE: It's very significant. She puts her finger right on the button. First of all, Thatcher doesn't understand anything about technology, despite the fact that she was educated as a chemist. She has no understanding of the technologies, or the military implications of these technologies. It's very obvious. Her memoirs merely make clear what was confided to us by many top-level figures in the British policy-shaping establishment back then, back in the 82-83-84 period: {the woman just does not understand.} But the other side, which she underlines herself, is what shocked her, what frightened her, what appalled her, was that President Reagan was offering not merely to share technologies relevant to SDI with the Russians; what appalled her was the idea that the Russians and the United States, combined, would make their technologies available for not only military but peaceful uses to the people with yellow and brown skins--the so-called developing countries. This is what she makes very explicit and underlines appalled her. This was the feature of my design which Reagan echoed in this respect, which shows how silly people were who used the words ``Star Wars.'' They understood {nothing} about the policy. They're talking about ``Star Wars,'' and were so bemused by their silly little oxymoronic words, they paid no attention. But apparently Mrs. Thatcher, with all her intellectual limitations, did get the point, that what I had designed and what President Reagan had done, was to take the issue of the danger of a thermonuclear first strike, and to combine the technologies needed to stop that first strike with a general peace-building policy based on technological progress. [commercial break] Q: Mr. LaRouche, we were just discussing Margaret Thatcher's memoirs, specifically her disdain for or lack of understanding of the SDI policy and the economic spinoffs of that policy. You were raising some very interesting points. Please continue. MR. LAROUCHE: The issue here was that, first of all, on the one side, the idiots, the McNamara enthusiasts, for example, will say: Well, the Mutual and Assured Destruction policy--deterrence--kept the peace from 1958, when Pugwash first announced it, until the present, until the Wall fell. Therefore, since there was no general thermonuclear war from 1958 on, obvoiusly deterrence worked. Well that is a real piece of idiot's sophistry. The reason that this issue came up in the middle of the 1970s, when I climbed aboard the question then, was that the increase in the targeting accuracy and the close positioning of Soviet nuclear submarines off our coast, as well as our placing strategic nuclear missiles closer to Russia, was that we had reached the point, with such considerations as electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons, that a first strike was becoming possible; and because of the short range of the forward-based missiles which would deliver the electromagnetic pulse pin-down effect, say, to the U.S. continent, the U.S. President or the Russian General Secretary or military, had about two to three minutes maximum, within which to react to a relatively small but significant flotilla of missiles coming from the opposite direction, either from NATO or from Soviet forces. This was the danger; and this forced us to recognize that Mutual and Assured Destruction--that is, reliance upon the deterrent effects of counterstrike--was insanity. True, we never got to a thermonuclear war; but we were headed in that direction from a military standpoint. So that made us look at this question about how do you defeat missiles, a strategically significant number of missiles aimed at your country. Well, you can't do it with rockets; you cannot do it with high-speed rockets, for various reasons, one of which is that the cost of interception by high-speed rockets, is greater than the cost of the assault. So that doesn't work. Therefore we had to look at what the Russians had described in {Soviet Military Strategy,} Sokolovsky's doctrine, back in 1963, that the Soviets were committed to using what are called in the diplomatic language, ``new physical principles''--not the so-called kinetic energy weapons, but new physical principles, to stop these missiles. What I did, was to change all this by putting in an economic consideration. I said, what we have to do, in order to be able to pay for such a deployment, and in order to solve some of the problems that we have ([Dr. Edward] Teller echoed this, for example, in his ``common aims of mankind,'' back in 1982), was to insist that we must launch a science-driver global economic boom, using these same principles that we would use for defense against missiles, by using them in the civilian sector, to make new technologies, technological revolutions, of the type we had begun to make in the 1960s with the Kennedy space program. That was my policy; and that was the thing that got Mrs. Thatcher really up the pipe. This meant overthrowing the entire New Age, post-industrial garbage which has put the world into such poverty and suffering as we find in the United States, for example, or Britain today. That's where she went up the pipe. Russia: We Must Look at the Realities of the Situation Q: We are looking, at this point, at President Yeltsin in Moscow moving on various newspapers, closing down newspapers and opposition parties. I'd like to begin to discuss that aspect of developments at this point. MR. LAROUCHE. One has to look at two things. Of course these things are happening. The country is Russia, it's under terrible conditions right now, largely because of shock therapy and largely because of IMF conditionalities. The military is in charge, together with the security forces; Yeltsin is a figure of questionable durability--how many months he can stay in power, or whether he's purely a figurehead. But the essence of the matter, is that the policies which are ruining Russia, the economic policies, the so-called shock therapy or IMF conditionalities policies-- I'll come back to this. [commercial break] Q: Mr. LaRouche, how can Yeltsin turn the situation in Russia around, or how would you characterize the fact that the West is talking about Yeltsin as a defender of democracy when all he seems to be doing is disbanding democratic institutions, closing down newspapers, closing down opposition parties? Where is this all going to lead? MR. LAROUCHE: What is happening in Russia, is exactly, essentially what Georgi Arbatov described in his address to a major meeting in Germany, a meeting of the German Evangelical Church in Tutzing, Tuesday, the 12th of October. It's interesting, of course, and very significant, that despite the importance of Georgi Arbatov, which every news service in the world recognized earlier; and despite the fact that this was one of the most important meetings which has occurred on policy in the recent period in Europe, there is virtually no coverage of the meeting, of the conference, or of what was said, {anywhere} in the international news media--very significant. As a matter of fact, EIR is {the only news service in the world to give any significant coverage to this major event. Why? Remember that Georgi Arbatov went in there, and submitted an English-language text as a prepared text of his speech to be given to the conference. That was done on Oct. 11. On Oct. 12, he gave a free lecture address in German, which went 180 degrees opposite to the political line on Russia which had been in the English text provided a day earlier, or 24 hours or so earlier. That's the significant point. And the fact is, that Georgi told the truth, said that it is IMF conditionalities and shock therapy which is driving Russia into an imperial dictatorship. And that's what these fellows didn't want to hear, and that's why there was no coverage of the Tutzing conference. {Right at the conference,} Americans who participated were jumping out of their skins. A lot of Germans were going berserk on hearing this unwanted message from Georgi Arbatov. What is happening? First of all, the United States does not, forgive the expression, give a {damn} about democracy in Russia. If you got inside Russia (where I'm relying now on firsthand reports from high levels and high-level observers who know what's going on inside Moscow, as opposed to the garbage which is coming out through the news media, which is highly misleading), the shock therapy policy of Gaidar--remember it was Yeltsin's renomination of Gaidar that set off this crisis. Yeltsin did this under pressure from the West, specifically the United States. What is happening is, that all over Moscow, there are American advisers. It is the American advisers peddling shock therapy and IMF conditionalities, who pushed Yeltsin to make this coup against every elected institution and most newspapers, except the presidency, in Russia. So the United States, in effect, authored the coup. It was done on behalf of the United States, because Yeltsin and company had no practical alternative at that moment, except to submit to U.S. demands that they go ahead with a coup suppressing the elected Russian Parliament. So all this talk about democracy from Washington, is pure garbage. It has nothing to do with anything. Now what democracy means in Washington, is to suppress every Russian institution which will resist shock therapy measures. That's what they mean by democracy. And they're pushing Yeltsin with full desperation. What they're going to get, which everyone who understands the situation knows, is General Winter is going to take command of the military forces, which are the base of the Yeltsin government. And that General Winter, or Field Marshal Winter, is misery--misery caused by a continuation of IMF conditionalities and shock therapy. Which means that either Yeltsin changes, or if he refuses to change in the appropriate direction, come spring, or somewhere in that vicinity--no one can predict {exactly} what will happen, but we can see the direction in which things are moving--down that road, we're going to a very hard dictatorship; and as Georgi Arbatov said, an imperial Russian dictatorship. In other words, a Third Rome dictatorship. Not a communist dictatorship; but a thermonuclear power brim-full of hatred against that United States which imposed shock therapy, and which imposed IMF conditionalities. It should be noted that most of the crooks who are being attacked for corruption, are friends of former ambassador Bob Strauss, in effect. These are former communist officials or high-level nomenklatura figures, who have gone over to this kind of speculation, who are the thieves and robbers looting the Russian economy, and it's against them that the Russian people are directing their hatred. And more and more, that hatred of these speculators, the people who are living richly, buying Mercedes-Benz cars and living in all kinds of luxury while the Russians are living on $5-10 a month, many of them, in terms of purchasing power. The hatred against these speculators, these parasites, is being spun off the parasites, against the people who are authoring and backing the parasites, to a large degree the United States. And that's the truth that must be told. Yes, Yeltsin is doing what he's doing. But we must look at the reality of the situation, as Brzezinski in his own limited way is saying. And Brzezinski is saying, in his own limited way, that the policy of the United States at present, is strategic lunacy. And in effect, that's a fair statement. And that's the point where Brzezinski and I would tend to concur, though we may differ on other aspects of the process. But that's what we must see. When we see a news media report about the defense of democracy in Russia and hear it from the U.S. news media, the first thing we should do, is rush to the bathroom and vomit, if we have any knowledge of what the truth of the situation is. Q: Would you say that, under these circumstances, of Yeltsin capitulating to U.S. demands, he has signed his political death warrant? MR. LAROUCHE: I don't know. I wouldn't put things in such simplistic terms. Yeltsin is a Russian. In the long run, within his abilities, he will be responsive to what he considers pragmatically, perhaps, the vital interests of Russia; and of course his own ambitions. But his own amibitions are couched in Russian terms. He's a special type of personality, and that has to be factored in. The question is: Will he turn, as the Russian institutions demand--military, church, and other institutions--and will he be seen as an {effective} instrument of a turn in policy? If not, then they'll dump him. If he does, he could be around as the author of the next turn in policy. So one should not speculate in soap opera versions of Russian politics. One should look at these things as they are. [commercial break] Robert Fogel Is a Quack Q: Mr. LaRouche, Robert Fogel just won the Nobel Prize in economics, in a new area call cliometrics. His thesis says that slavery was economically efficient, also that slavery was good for the cohesion of the black family. He challenged the theory that railroads are necessary for development. Do you agree with this policy? It seems quite radical. MR. LAROUCHE: The man is an utter quack. There is no basis for anything he says. He obviously has no understanding of economics. He's a part of that Chicago School, the most radical post-Milton Friedman generation in terms of statistics. This is absolute unscientific nonsense. And I think the Nobel Prize Committee that awarded him the prize, knows it. The man is virtually, from the standpoint of any professional economist of a traditional type, would be considered an absolute lunatic. That is not because people disagree with his views, which are certainly objectionable morally, but because he's not only immoral, but he is totally incompetent. This cliometrics is a new, fancy word for statistical jiggery-pokery, doesn't mean anything. It's nonsense. LaRouche Elected to International Ecological Academy Q: You were just elected as an Academician to the International Ecological Academy in Moscow. What does this mean? Why are they electing you? How do they know you in Moscow? MR. LAROUCHE: Well, they know a good deal about me. The election occurred in a meeting in Moscow of the Committee of 100 Academicians which founded the institution. There were reasons for that, but it was actually founded in the Baltic countries about 7-odd years ago. The award was made for, specifically, a book, the {Science of Christian Economy,} which was published a couple of years ago, which sums up a good deal of my work. But those Academicians who supported the award, referred also to another book, which is more available in a Russian translation from some years earlier. It's a college textbook, {So, You Wish To Learn All About Economics?} It was given, not as an honorary award like a Nobel Prize, but they specified it was given as a working award, that is, the equivalent of a professorship. In the European system, this is about two steps above professor, with the idea that I would be working with the Academy as a scientist. The award was given specifically for my original and important discoveries in the field of physical economy; and also for some of the beneficial impact of these discoveries in economics upon the field of physics. The essential thing is in the discovery, which was originally made in 1952. So like many things of that sort, it goes way back in one's life. I was only about 30 years old when I did that, and most of my scientific work since then, has rested upon enhancing what I discovered when I was 30, and I'm now 71. Essentially, what I did, is I reacted against the two central fallacies of the work of Norbert Wiener in information theory, and also against the work of the systems analysts, the operations research people as they were known then, and against the work of Professor John von Neumann in economics and in other fields. So that was what prompted me. First of all, a term, ``negentropy,'' was used by Wiener to describe human communication, communication of human ideas, which is absolutely absurd. Now the first business on which my discovery was based, is the fact that Wiener and Company use negentropy, that is, as they define it, from the statistical work of a fellow called Ludwig Boltzmann back at the turn of the century, who described this from the standpoint of gas theory. And they applied this also to describe living processes. Now there are characteristic features of living processes, as distinct from non-living ones which absolutely cannot be described from this standpoint. That was absurdity number one. Absurdity number two, is the fact that the human species, unlike any other species of animal, actually has the capability of {willfully changing for the better} its mode of existence, through such forms as what we call today technological progress. On that basis, if man were an animal, he would have a baboon-like potential as a species for about not more than 10 million members of his species globally. But man today has over 5 billion people, at a much higher level than would be possible in a primitive man; and all of this has been done, through ideas, through particularly ideas which correspond or are equivalent to, or analogous to, scientific and technological progress. Thus, it is the communication of these revolutionary ideas of practice which distinguishes man and distinguishes human communication from anything which can be approximated by a gas theory, or a non-living process. So those were the two points from which I started. And on this basis, through seeing the significance of the work of a fellow named Georg Cantor, one of the greatest mathematicians of the past 200 years or so, and the impact of Cantor's work on the work of another nineteenth-century scientific giant, Bernhard Riemann, I was able to develop a new conception of how economic processes work, a conception which has been proven valid as against the Brand X theories which are abounding today. In Russia and in Eastern Europe, this has a very specific significance. Remember, in Russian society and Eastern European society, in addition to the military forces and to the other kinds of political forces and so forth, one of the most important parts of the society, is the scientific community. Russia functions only to the extent that its scientific community plays an integral part in shaping the ideas on which the society functions. And sooner or later, the society will tend to turn to its scientists for ideas on how to deal with the great crisis which has arisen, specifically, a crisis which shows that not only was communism a failure economically--at least in the civilian sector--but that the Western version of free trade, or the Adam Smith version, never worked; and there's a recognition, of course, that there was a form of capitalism in the West which {did} work, typified by the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, or Abraham Lincoln, or in the German experience, Friedrich List, who was a follower of Hamilton; and in the Russian experience, Count Sergei Witte, who was largely a follower in economic theory of Germany's Friedrich List. So what is emerging, is the idea of a Third Way in economic, which is related to the forms of capitalism associated with the young United States under the leadership of people like Hamilton and the Careys, and Abraham Lincoln, as an alternative to not only Bolshevism, but as an alternative to this crazy Adam Smith stuff, which poor Mrs. Margaret Thatcher--or Lady Thatcher, as they call her now--propounds. Shock therapy, what [Jeffrey] Sachs propounds. So the significance of this, is that my ideas, my work, represents the best articulation of what some would call the Third Way, something different than the kind of stuff which Harvard preaches today, and also something radically different than Bolshevism. And this is the alternative to the chaos which the world sees. There are other people who have similar ideas; but my ideas are the most articulate and the best scientifically grounded, as well as representing a contribution to scientific thought. So that was why the award was made. The implication of the award, is that this establishes, within the European and other scientific communities, a recognition that my work in economics is the alternative to which the world is going to have to turn to get out of the mess caused by the twin collapse of both Bolshevism and of the free trade model in the West. ``Fogel Is Like a Disease'' Q: Just for a moment, coming back to Robert Fogel and the necessity of railroad development: Can you just give us a sense of how your approach, this approach, is totally opposite to that? MR. LAROUCHE: Take Fogel. I don't sell my stuff as something better than Fogel. I say Fogel is like a disease. It's junk. Throw it away. I wouldn't compare my views with his. His are simply incompetent. Put his views out of the way, then consider mine. But very simply, what's stupid about him? First of all, on railroads. Before railroads, canals. There has been no modern economy which has developed without the development of modes of transportation: canals, ocean travel, of course, and seacoast, ship travel; roads, and railroads. Now, if you take the cost of transport measured in ton-mile-hour dollars, or the equivalent; measure it for seaborne traffic, for coastal navigational traffic; for canal traffic, for highway traffic, and for railroad traffic. Leave air out, that's a special case. You would discover very quickly, that without canal traffic and road traffic and sea traffic, there could be no economic development of a nation. Secondly, rail traffic, {even to this day,} given, say, 300 miles or so distance, is the cheapest and best mode of travel for moving freight in general, available. It's also the best for moving passengers 300-350 mile distances. It is uneconomical to use air transport for transporting passengers between two densely populated centers by means of air transport. Rail is fast and faster than air transport {in effect}--that is, from point of starting to point of destination. The only problem with rail today is that we don't maintain our rail system. It doesn't function because of mismanagement or economic backwardness. We're not using the new technologies we should use. But even today, without a revival of rails, this economy is not going to revive. Without rails, there would have been no great industrial revolution in the United States or in continental Europe. It's just a simple matter of plain fact, and you can measure the calculations in cost of travel and time lapsed, which is the time of inventory buildup, the time of perishability of goods. Without the rail system augmenting the canal system and ocean travel, there could have been no 18th or 19th century development of the economies of North America or Western Europe. Fogel's statistics just show that he does not know how to pull his figures together; his data are completely screwed up. The same thing on slavery. The key thing about slaves, is that the productivity of the slave, was way below that of the non-slave, with the result twofoldly, first, that in the South, the poor white population of the South, was reduced almost to the level of baboonery or almost to the level of slave illiteracy as a result of having to compete with slaves. The entire economy of the United States was being dragged down by the cheap labor policy of slavery, by the undercutting of the educational level, the household income level of most of the population. MEL KLENETSKY: Thank you very much, Mr. LaRouche. We will see you next week. This is EIR Talks. I'm Mel Klenetsky. If people want to send in questions for Mr. LaRouche, write to EIR Talks, c/o EIR News Service, Inc., Attn: Mel Klenetsky, P.O. Box 17390, Washington, D.C., 20041-0390. - 30 - ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com
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