One Small Step for Congress, One Giant Leap for Mankind

by Dennis Speed

Now that the American people have successfully mobilized their representatives in the United States Congress to override President Barack Obama’s “Nero veto” against the families of 9/11 victims, as seen in the Congress’s September 28th vote for the Justice Against the Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA)—including a near-unanimous repudiation of Obama’s wishes in the United States Senate—the urgent and available political antidote to the impending “new meltdown” of the whole international monetary system has been demonstrated. Obama’s humiliation was total, particularly in the United States Senate, where Senator Harry Reid changed his original vote against Obama to one supporting Obama, solely so that the Senate vote against Obama would not read 98-0-2, and be the first time in American history that a President had been unanimously rejected through the override process. This is the major defeat of Obama’s eight-year Presidency; the stage for Obama’s impeachment is now set.

There was an equally embarrassing, if not so overwhelmingly lopsided 348-77-6 loss by Obama in the House of Representatives. Terry Strada, head of 9/11 Families and Survivors United For Justice Against Terrorism, said of the victory, “this is only the beginning. We have to continue to win. After the Saudis spent over $5 million, they lost in disgrace. $5 million in Saudi money is not worth anything anymore.” She was referring to the over $5 million known to have been spent by the Saudi government and its associates, who tried to lobby Congress to buy a different vote outcome. They abjectly failed in that effort. The Saudis spent an average of $64,102—and, perhaps, much more—for every vote they ultimately got in the loss. Strada, who had virtually lived on Capitol Hill for two weeks, together with other relatives and friends of those killed in the attacks, with virtually no financial resources, spearheaded the national mobilization that defeated the JASTA’s heavily-monied opponents.

Politics as Art

Though the 9/11 families and their Congressional collaborators had worked for well over a decade to secure the release of the infamous “28 pages,” and to make the Saudi Arabian government accountable, if found guilty in a court of law, those efforts had not succeeded. Something else was added, two years ago, to this fight. The factor that was added was “the Alexander Hamilton principle.”

During October of 2014, Lyndon LaRouche initiated what he termed “The Manhattan Project.” An October meeting sponsored by Executive Intelligence Review in Harlem that month had focused on the need to release the “28 pages.” LaRouche at that time proposed the resurrecting of the George Washington/Alexander Hamilton Presidency, which Presidential system had first been created in Manhattan. It was here that the practice of the United States Constitution had first been established. It was here that Hamilton’s reports on the national bank, on the bank’s constitutionality, on credit, and manufactures, were not merely debated, but in large part implemented. LaRouche successfully reestablished this Hamiltonian idea of the Presidency through a series of weekly Saturday Manhattan dialogues that began the last week of June 2015 and have continued up to now.

Hamilton’s economics policies, it should be remembered, were devised to give the new United States economic independence from the British. LaRouche’s economic policies, called “The Four New Laws,” are the method to end international debt slavery as practiced by the City of London and its Wall Street offshoot today. This very broadsheet, {The Hamiltonian}, is the flagship New York City publication of Larouche’s revolution in economic science and technology that continues and advances Alexander Hamilton’s work, exemplified today by the economic/scientific powerhouse that China has become.

LaRouche’s Voice-Placement

The activist core of the Manhattan Project, besides distributing literature, holding forums to advocate the United States joining the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in a shared mission to eradicate poverty, war and want on the planet, and campaigning for the exposure of the crimes of the Obama Administration, have taken a step further. In the spirit of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s insistence that the work of Friedrich Schiller should become the basis for a new world Renaissance, the Manhattan Project decided to commit its members to the creation of a chorus, and to the recruitment of musicians to defend and advocate Classical culture. LaRouche called for a chorus of 1500 persons, trained in Italian bel canto singing, a goal which became the creative focus of the past ten months of the Manhattan project’s existence.

This was neither a populist trick, nor an eccentric tangent. LaRouche emphasized that teaching the American citizen how to place his/her voice, to properly sing and speak, was perhaps the only means to defeat the mentality of cowardice and failure that has been the daily fare of the American political process. It was LaRouche’s contention, that it was within the capacity of the New York City population to respond in the most profound way to the most profound ideas, if they were directly engaged in reproducing the music of Bach, Handel, Mozart and the African-American Spiritual. Applying the deeper implications behind this properly voiced choral approach to “political organizing” could, and did, provide the basis to secure the Congressional victory that occurred on September 28th. That is the secret.

Proper voice placement allows an idea that is not practical, but is true, to be heard, and even understood despite the mental opposition to that idea by the vast majority of people. Here is an example.

In January of 2001, LaRouche had stated in a now-famous webcast that there was no way for the incoming Cheney-Bush Administration to competently rule the United States. LaRouche then forecast that a “Reichstag Fire,” a catastrophic incident contrived to rip up the Constitution and then restructure the U.S. government, would be committed in order to cover up the true crime of a national coup. Again, on September 11, 2001, on the Utah-based “Jack Stockwell” radio show, LaRouche was the first to state, literally within the first hour of the attack on the Twin Towers, that there would be an attempt to blame it all on Osama bin Laden, i.e. to misdirect the investigation and allow the true perpetrators to remain unidentified. On those two separate occasions LaRouche had placed his voice in such a way as to cause the truth of what he said to become even more resonant later, than it was at the time he made the original utterance.

The Choral Principle

Hundreds of LaRouche activists nationwide participated in deploying tens of thousands of persons through phone calls and emails to effect this JASTA victory. This was not their work alone; many other organizations played essential roles as well. The LaRouche activists, however, were part of the extended influence of the Manhattan Project, deployed with an idea of “unity of effect” that had been qualitatively strengthened by their performance, over the four days of September 9–12, of the Mozart Requiem, under the direction of John Sigerson. Sigerson, co-author of the book {A Manual on Tuning And Registration}, had for nearly 30 years participated in groundbreaking work to returning the nation’s and world’s concert stages to what is called scientific tuning, Verdi pitch, and proper tuning. Sigerson used his work to tune the voices of the non-professional chorus in such a way as to cause the ensemble to perform and to sound far better than many professional choruses.

It was precisely this choral principle that was also in evidence in the mobilization of the Congress. A unity of effect was created in that body, not merely through citizen pressure, but through assisting the families of the victims of 9/11, and the courageous few Congressmen that supported them, in their voice-placement. The families and Congressmen were always saying the right thing; the problem was to project their message in such a way that an irresistible shock wave-like resonance was established that could penetrate even the usually morally opaque Congress.

Traveling to Washington and making phone calls would not be enough. The September 12th Morristown performance of the Requiem, the final of the four, briefly addressed by Terry Strada, allowed the participant to hear the idea of Justice as vocalized by Mozart. His treatment of the idea of immortality uplifted the audience to see the deeper implications of what they were about to do.

The effect of the performance on those in attendance, in a New Jersey community that had lost scores of people in the World Trade Center, was directly transmitted to the Congress, when people traveled there or spoke to the Congressional offices by phone. The Requiem performances allowed mobilization organizers, many of whom performed in those four concerts, to place, so far as the Congress was concerned, the voices of the dead thousands of the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Pennsylvania into the mouths of persons like Terry Strada. Congress was caused to hear, not the individual voices of wronged people, and not a mere “lobbying group,” but a chorus of Justice, like the Erinyes of Schiller’s poem “The Cranes of Ibykus.” It was an irresistible force that brooked no objection. Only the callously inhuman, like Obama, and those intimidated or deluded by him, continue to pretend, unsuccessfully, to resist it.

In the discussion of the victory on a Thursday night conference call of about 400 persons, Manhattan Project mobilization coordinator Elliot Greenspan recounted how, “North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones… cited the role played by LaRouche organizers… What is clear is that Prince Bandar of the Saudi Royal family funneled money for the hijackers. Now, with the passage of JASTA, the families will be able to sue the Saudis in an American court. The moment that the vote in the House passed with the two-thirds for override, Congressman Jones, along with Congressman Steve Lynch of Massachusetts, began to applaud the families. Leaders of the families said to our organizers, ‘Without you guys, we know that we could not have done this.’ And they also emphasized the power of the concerts. As one of them said, ‘This music is still ringing in our ears.’”