March 27, 2015 – Friday Webcast with Jeff Steinberg

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening, my name is Matthew Ogden, and I would like to welcome all of you to our LaRouche PAC webcast for March 27th, 2015. We’re holding this broadcast tonight on the eve of the upcoming Schiller Institute conference tomorrow, in New York City, which will be live covered on LaRouche PAC, so we ask you to tune in again at 2 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. So our webcast here tonight is intended to be sort of a prelude to that event which is coming tomorrow in New York City.

Now, I’m joined in the studio here tonight by Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review and Megan Beets of the LaRouche PAC Basement Scientific Team. And the three of us did have a chance to confer with Mr. LaRouche earlier this afternoon, so the discussion that you hear tonight will be informed by that discussion.

I’d like to start our broadcast tonight by posing the institutional question for this week to Jeff, who will deliver Mr. LaRouche’s response. The question reads as follows:

“Mr. LaRouche, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or the AIIB, is to have an initial capitalization of $50 billion, which may be doubled in the future. It will finance development projects such as roads and railways in the developing countries of Asia. China is to be the biggest shareholder with many other Asian countries joining, while non-Asian members have also been invited to be founding members, but will be restricted to 25% of the shares. Several European countries, including Germany and Italy, have decided to apply. The Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said that he supports a Chinese-led Asian regional bank, as long as it is transparent and not run by a single country. However, here in Washington, the AIIB, which is expected to be fully established by the end of 2015 has raised concerns that it would compete with the dominant, established international lenders, such as the World Bank.

“What is your view of the Obama Administration’s opposition to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank?”

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Well, first of all, since the question was first presented yesterday, there’s been quite a lot of movement. March 31st is the deadline that’s been established by the AIIB for initial charter members, and over the last several days, on Thursday alone, South Korea and Turkey both made official announcements of their intent to be founding charter members of the AIIB. Even the head of the Asian Development Bank, a Japanese banker, indicated that he’s enthusiastic about the AIIB, and the prospect of collaboration.

So, in effect, the Obama Administration’s opposition is nothing short of a clinical evidence of insanity, and in fact, criminal insanity on the part of this President and if this administration. Now, Mr. LaRouche was very explicit: He said, in a certain sense, the question itself is a diversion from the much more fundamental issue, which is that the very survival of the United States as we know it is not a very likely proposition if the Obama Presidency is not brought to screeching halt, very, very soon. The President is guilty of a laundry list of impeachable crimes, high crimes and misdemeanors against the American republic, so there is no shortage of bases for his removal from office. If that action is not taken, then the future prospects of the institution of the U.S. Presidency are, in fact, very poor, indeed.

Now, from the discussion with Mr. LaRouche, he had a number of very sharp and very precise things to say, and so I’d actually like to read the contemporaneous notes. This is not a verbatim transcript but fairly close to it, of what Mr. LaRouche has to say in answer to this question. He began, he said:

“To restore the mission of the U.S. Presidency—without which the United States cannot survive—President Obama must be forced out of office, and all vestiges of the Bush family must be removed. After the experience of eight years of Bush-Cheney, following the earlier 12 years of George H.W. Bush, occupying the posts of Vice President and President, it is an abomination beyond belief that yet another Bush name has reappeared, as a potential Republican Party Presidential candidate.

“Until such time as Obama is removed from office, and the other legacies of the Bush name are removed, the U.S. Presidency will be crippled. Only after such a cleansing can the mission of the Presidency be restored. The Bush family disease did not start with George W. Bush or even with George H.W. Bush. It began with Prescott Bush and his Nazi collusion before and during World War II. That Nazi collusion persists to this day, within the Obama Presidency, in the form of former Dick Cheney national security aide Victoria Nuland, who is the Obama Administration’s liaison to the Ukrainian neo-Nazis of today, as well as the criminal oligarchs.

“The Bush problem was persistent in the Reagan Administration, from the moment that Bush was chosen as Vice President. His influence, in fact, became all-the-more dominant over time, following the attempted assassination of President Reagan, early in his first year in office.

“It is this Bush disease, and the shadow of this disease that hangs all over the Obama White House, that is on the edge of causing a war against Russia and in the Persian Gulf.

“The deeper truth that cannot be ignored is that the entire trans-Atlantic financial system is hopelessly bankrupt. The U.S. and Western Europe are bankrupt, and the surrounding areas are mush, as the result of that reality.

“The United States is facing an existential decision: Either a qualified U.S. President is elected, after the early ouster of President Obama from office by Constitutional means, or the only hope for U.S. survival is to cut some kind of a deal with Russia and China, both to avoid war, and to enter into the Eurasian BRICS process.

“All of Hillary Clinton’s problems stem from the fact that she made a bad choice, accepting Obama’s poison pill offer to join the administration as Secretary of State. Had she stayed in the U.S. Senate, with the backing of 16 million Democratic voters who had cast votes for her in the primary elections, she would have retained her independence, deepened her experience, and avoided the trap that she was drawn into by associating with the Obama Administration.

“Fortunately, we now have a pre-candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination—former Maryland Governor and former Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley—who is doing the right thing, putting policy above personality, and setting the basis for the United States to enter the new global paradigm, being set in place by the BRICS, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the growing array of nations entering into that new ‘win-win’ arrangement. This is the rejection of geopolitics and the rejection of war. This is the proper basis for creating a new U.S. government and putting the United States back on the course of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, to name the two leading figures.

“To restore a genuine American Presidency, the Obama-Bush League must be removed, before they start yet another insane war. The recent actions of Bibi Netanyahu have opened the gates for the Republican yahoos to start a new war in the Persian Gulf.

“So, the time has come to get rid of Obama. He should be forced to resign tomorrow. The cheerful effect, of such an action, would both guarantee war prevention, and set the basis for restoring the historic mission of the U.S. Presidency, as envisioned by Franklin and Hamilton, and enshrined in our Federal Constitution.”

So that was Mr. LaRouche’s comment in answer to the question. So, of course the United States should be dropping its opposition to the AIIB. Yesterday, two of the major voices of the Chinese government, the China television [cctv] and Xinhua, the state news agency, both published editorials from their editors, reiterating President Xi Jinping’s invitation to President Obama for the United States to fully participate in the new BRICS process and to directly join the AIIB. The statements that were issued yesterday made the point very clear: These are not geopolitical games. This is a full, alternative system aimed at developing a system of cooperation, among sovereign nation-states for the development of Eurasia and every other part of this planet.

But it would be a fool’s errand to simply go off and say, “yes, of course the United States should join,” without facing the harsh reality that so long as Obama is in office, not only will the United States remain outside of the AIIB and the other BRICS developments, but the United States will be increasingly isolated and cast aside, and furthermore, in response to that, the Obama Presidency will become one of the key instruments for pushing major war confrontation, as we’re seeing both on the Ukrainian front against Russia, and now, with growing intensity, literally hour by hour, in the Persian Gulf.

OGDEN: Thank you, Jeff. As you just heard, the major emphasis that Mr. LaRouche had in our discussion with him, and has had over the course of this entire week, beginning with our Monday discussion with the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee, is the theme of what the mission of the United States Presidency must be. And what the proper standard must be, to qualify an individual to become a qualified candidate for the office of the United States Presidency at this moment in history.

And, as Jeff said, as of now, there is only one individual, among the otherwise sordid array of prospective candidates for President in various stages of declaration or non-declaration of their official or non-official candidacies. There’s only one individual who has distinguished himself as rising to that standard, that is, Martin O’Malley.

As Jeff highlighted, Martin O’Malley is running a campaign right now, based not on ego, not based on personality, but based on defining a necessary program, for saving the United States, starting with the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, and shutting down, explicitly, the criminal activities of Wall Street. As O’Malley said in an op-editorial that was published on the eve of his recent campaign trip to Iowa in the Des Moines Register, “It’s time to put the national interest before the interests of Wall Street.” Which is precisely the point.

He also showed that he’s ready for the right which this entails, by starting his stump speeches in Iowa by saying that there are many defining moments in the history of the United States, which seem at which point the continued existence of the country itself hangs by a very slender thread, and he cited, one such moment during the War of 1812, when the invading British armies which had just burned Washington, D.C., were preparing to invade the city of Baltimore. And he said that, these invading British armies were met by the people of his city, the city of Baltimore, who said, when they saw the British coming, “instead of digging graves, let us dig trenches,” and prepared to fight.

So that’s precisely the spirit that is going to be required from a candidate for President, if we’re going to win the war today, to save the people of the United States from the criminal policies of Wall Street.

Now, what’s key to recognize here, and I think, to premise my question, is that O’Malley’s campaign for Glass-Steagall did not come out of nowhere. This is not just one among a laundry list of single issues. This is a central question that he’s taking up and it’s not just an isolated phenomenon disconnected from a process of history; but rather, what O’Malley has done here, reflects precisely the program that Lyndon LaRouche has defined as the necessary first step for a program to save the United States and a platform for a new Presidency, which really goes all the way back to when Mr. LaRouche launched what became the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee, with the campaigns for the United States Congress, first with Rachel Brown all the way back in 2010 against Barney Frank in Massachusetts, which was based on Glass-Steagall; she debated Barney Frank on live statewide television on precisely this issue, and really showed what a disgrace he was. And this was long before Glass-Steagall became a household word.

This continued through Kesha Rogers’ campaigns for both U.S. Congress and for United States Senate down in Texas; along with all of the other members of the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee, all of whom has been candidate for Federal office, which was created by Mr. LaRouche. The LPAC Policy Committee specifically, as a unified, national leadership cadre organization, which was intended to set precisely this standard, for what the platform for a new Presidency must be, and what qualifies an individual to run as a candidate for that office. And the Policy Committee continues to serve that function.

Now, as you can see, in a very real way, LaRouche PAC is an integral part of what has happened in this process, which is being reflected in what Martin O’Malley is doing with his campaign, and we continue to play that. And I think this is the point that I want to emphasize, and I’ll ask Jeff to elaborate on: Any successful Presidency of the United States is not based merely on a single individual. It represents a top-down national institution which is comprised of an array of highly qualified persons, both with and without official positions. And Lyndon LaRouche himself is exemplary of precisely the type of person, which plays an integral part in shaping the policy, of the institution of the United States Presidency, despite never having served in any official position in that regard, at least publicly.

Ever since Mr. LaRouche’s first campaign, as a U.S. Presidential candidate back in 1976, he has played a critical role, in this institution in a very real way. And I think perhaps the clearest example of this is the SDI, or the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was adopted by President Ronald Reagan as the official policy of the United States, which was announced for all the world to hear on March 23, 1983, on a national television broadcast. And we just observed the 32 anniversary of that speech this past Monday.

But the true story of the shaping and the adoption of this policy of the SDI by President Reagan at that time, and really, the subsequent history of the entirety of the past 30-plus years since that time, cannot be understood, without understanding the role that Lyndon LaRouche has played in his capacity as a member of this extended network, of Americans, known as the institution of the U.S. Presidency; which is a role that he continues to play up to the present moment, which we’re seeing at this time.

So this role, of defining the mission of the United States Presidency and setting the standard which must be met by any qualified candidate for that office, is the mission of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, and by extension is the mission of each of you, who are watching this broadcast tonight, in your capacity as LPAC activists and members.

So I think it’s in our viewers’ interest to understand precisely how this works. So, I’d like to ask you, Jeff, to elaborate a little bit on Mr. LaRouche’s role, so that we can understand this, as an institution, and, the existence of this as a unique institution in the United States of America. And I know this is something you’ve had a unique perspective on, Jeff, from your experience, working very closely with Mr. LaRouche, in this capacity over this entire period, from his first campaign for President, all the way up to the present day.

STEINBERG: Thanks Matt. I can tell you, you don’t go to the post office to pick up a membership application. It’s not that kind of thing. And Mr. LaRouche was basically approached by a number of leading government figures, mostly from the Second World War generation, some of whom were military veterans, others of whom were particularly veterans of the OSS.

It began really in 1976, with Mr. LaRouche’s Presidential campaign, where he stood out from everyone else, by being willing to say the unpopular, but devastatingly truthful things that needed to be said, if you’re actually committed to the survival and prosperity of the United States, and by extension, the rest of the world. During the 1976 Presidential campaign, Mr. LaRouche made it a point, that if the Jimmy Carter/Trilateral Commission administration were to be elected, that the United States would be immediately thrust into a situation of provoking a thermonuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and it would jeopardize the survival of mankind. This came down to the Election Eve of the November 1976 elections, when Mr. LaRouche delivered a half-hour, prime-time nationwide TV address and spelled out in very precise terms, the dangers represented by the Trilateral Commission government that would basically come into power, if people actually foolishly went ahead and voted for Jimmy Carter for President.

He said what had to be said, with no expectation whatsoever, other than that his words would be part of an effort to prevent the United States from being drawn into a war that could be the last war of mankind. And in response to that, there was a series of approaches to Mr. LaRouche, by people with long backgrounds in government service, in some cases in private sector service, but with affiliations with this institution of the Presidency. And LaRouche was basically tapped, and told, what you did was outstanding, and we want to work together.

There was no official contract, there was no security clearances; but it was made very clear that he was considered to be part of an institution that was, in effect, the guardians of the republic. Very soon after that, after studying some published documentation, of breakthroughs that Soviet scientists had made in the area of particle beams that had applications for defensive weapons systems, LaRouche commissioned, and we published a pamphlet called Sputnik of the Seventies: The Science behind the Soviets’ Beam Weapon, that discussed the widening gap between the Soviet Union’s advances in developing the potential for defensive weapons system that could kill income ballistic missiles, and on the basis of that, Mr. LaRouche continued his Presidential campaigns, going into 1980 with that as a major theme.

And the SDI issue, what then referred to as the missile defense cooperation between the United States and United States and the Soviet Union, not only became a core issue of the 1980 Presidential campaign, by which time Mr. LaRouche was running as a Democratic candidate, but it became a basis for a dialogue between Mr. LaRouche and President Ronald Reagan, when Reagan was elected as President.

Now, as I said earlier, as Mr. LaRouche actually said, the flaw in the Reagan Presidency was the fact that, for no particularly good reason, Ronald Reagan chose George H.W. Bush as his Vice Presidential running mate. And as the result of that, we came to know intimately, when President Reagan fully agreed with LaRouche’s proposal for joint Strategic Defense Initiative with the Soviet Union, to bring an end to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and to replace it with an alternative policy of scientific collaboration for Mutually Assured Survival. So that program was endorsed by President Reagan, as Matt just said, on March 23rd, 1983, President Regan gave a nationwide television address, in which he announced that initiative, and made very clear that he was inviting the Soviet Union to fully participate.

Now, by the time that President Reagan gave that speech, Mr. LaRouche had been engaged in a back-channel negotiation with representatives of the Soviet government, on behalf of the Reagan White House and National Security Council. And so, there had been a two-year process of discussion, back and forth, between American and Soviet officials at a very high level, at the level of the American Presidency and the top levels of the Soviet leadership. So there was no confusion that what Reagan was proposing was a process of joint development, in effect, an end of the Cold War and an end of the scourge of the danger of thermonuclear holocaust.

There was a very intensive countermove against Reagan, against LaRouche, and against the SDI policy, which unfortunately at that time, did succeed. The British pulled out all of the stops. They used assets in the United States; they used assets that they had in the new Soviet leadership under Yuri Andropov.

The policy was killed, but Mr. LaRouche’s relationship with the institution of the Presidency was never broken, even after there were criminal assaults, raids, illegal prosecutions, jailings and all of the rest.

When Bill Clinton was elected as President of the United States in 1992, bringing a sudden end to the George H.W. Bush Presidency, that effectively opened the jail doors for Mr. LaRouche’s freedom and the beginning of a participation, once again, in a direct dialogue, with representatives of the Presidency of the United States. In that case, again, one of the crucial topics of cooperation was the now U.S.-Russia relationship, and the prospects of building an alternative framework of cooperation, from the two nations that still possessed the greatest offensive arsenals of nuclear weapons on the planet, more than enough to wipe out all of humanity.

So the issue of the Presidency, as Matt said, goes far beyond the simple residence of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the man or woman sitting in the Oval Office. It’s an Executive branch function, with many auxiliary people, who are in the private sector or who are in and out of government, depending on different administrations and different policy requirements, but Mr. LaRouche has been a fixture within that institution. And very often, as we’ve seen for the last 14 years, and this is something that people should try to grasp the implications of, you’ve had a friction between the outlook and intensions of the institution of the Presidency, and the policies coming out of the White House, out of the President himself. You had strong institutional opposition, to the war that was launched in Iraq, following the 9/11 attacks, the 2003 March invasion, of Iraq, based on fabricated intelligence, coming from a neo-conservative apparatus that was not generally representative of the intelligence community.

Under President Obama, you’ve had a similar situation: Where the Presidency has repeatedly stomped on the principles of the Constitution and where the larger institution, of the Executive branch, of the Presidency, has actually at times been in a direct, head-on conflict with the occupant of the Oval Office.

So, this is one of the resilient institutions, and you really have to go back, to fully appreciate and understand this, to the ideas that were put together by our Founding Fathers, and I think you’ve got a particularly, as Mr. LaRouche emphasized in our discussions earlier today, you’ve got a particularly consider the genius of Benjamin Franklin, and of Franklin’s key protégé Alexander Hamilton. And you’ve got to dig a little bit further back in history, to understand that Franklin himself, was a product, of a Leibnizian system in Europe, a scientific revolution and a political revolution, that was carried out, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, by a critical political figured named Gottfried Leibniz.

Franklin was a student of Leibniz, although Leibniz died before Franklin’s political career really got seriously off the ground. But he went to Europe; he sought out people who were students of Leibniz; he read and obtained copies of key writings of Leibniz back in the 1750s. And, some of the core concepts on which the American Republic was founded, the notion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as distinct from John Locke’s perverse idea of “life, liberty, and property,” all were an outgrowth of the Leibnizian revolution in natural law, of the period that immediately preceded the American Revolution.

So, it’s critical, in looking at where the United States stands right at this moment, to know that we’re a nation of institutions, and that we’ve gone through a horrible period of the last 14 years—since the end of the Clinton Presidency—we have been on a downward trajectory to Hell, as the result of the policies that came out of the Bush-Cheney administration, and subsequently out of the current Obama administration.

But, that does not mean that there’s been a complete collapse and disintegration of the institutions. You have the opportunity, now—and this is, I think, really the basis for understanding what the initiatives coming out of Martin O’Malley represent. He’s not a “Lone Ranger,” he’s not just “an individual,” a “gifted person,” who’s come up with these ideas, or has even simply absorbed these ideas from the interventions of the last decade by the LaRouche Political Action Committee and by Mr. LaRouche. There is a grouping within the Democratic Party that sees the danger. If you look at the Republican list of candidates, these are truly the “Seven Dwarfs.” Donald Trump could do the world a favor, by just simply buying toupees for himself and the other six wannabe Republican candidates, and send them off, because none of them, remotely, have the qualifications to be President of the United States.

But, O’Malley is working with a grouping within the Democratic Party who themselves have certain important institutional ties. Some of this goes back to the former Presidency of Bill Clinton. Some of it involves other individuals who had critical cabinet positions during the Clinton administration. You’ve got [New York] Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was [Housing and Urban Development] HUD Secretary under Clinton. You’ve got Robert Reich, who was Labor Secretary under Clinton. You’ve got Eliot Spitzer, who was a leading official of the New York State government; he was a State Attorney General and Governor. So, you’ve got people who themselves are part of both a political party and a larger national institutional framework, who are moving, in response to the fact that we are facing the gravest crisis perhaps in the entire history of our nation.

Under those kinds of circumstances, there is no basis for holding back. Back in 1976, Lyndon LaRouche was the prominent voice that refused to hold back, and told the “truth to power,” by warning that the world was on the brink of thermonuclear destruction if the Carter administration was allowed to come in unchecked. As the result of that, and actions of others, that administration was put in check, and after four years, it was replaced by the Reagan Presidency, which, even with the Bush flaw, represented a significant turnaround, and made possible LaRouche’s deeper engagement, around the SDI.

So, it’s a bit of a background history that must be understood and absorbed. Without that, you are really clueless about what’s been the actual dynamic of American policymaking for the last quarter century.

MEGAN BEETS: So, as you just mentioned, toward the end of your remarks, Jeff, when we discuss the unique leadership role of the institution of the U.S. Presidency, in carrying out the mission of the United States, we’re obviously hitting upon something which goes much deeper than solving an immediate crisis, or addressing the short-term survival of the American people. The more profound issue at hand, is the principle of the United States Constitution itself, which recognized a mission, not only for the United States, but for all of mankind, into the future. And, that was based explicitly upon a principle of natural law, which, as you mentioned, was the genius of the insight of Hamilton, and especially, Benjamin Franklin.

Now, a few weeks ago in this broadcast, we took up the issue of the genius of insight of somebody else: Joan of Arc, and the crucial role that her intervention played in securing that principle of natural law, as an active factor in society. The way that Mr. LaRouche expressed that a few days ago, is, he said, “The Joan of Arc case is an example of exactly how the history of mankind produces a kind of mankind, which is never simply a copy of the predecessor, or the predecessor species. Mankind develops to a higher level.”

This is absolutely true of Joan. She was not a product of her time. She lived during one of the deepest dark ages in man’s history, and she was born into a completely collapsed society. And yet, she showed the spark of inspiration of a future, which was “impossible,” or seemingly impossible, under the current circumstances, but which was absolutely necessary, and by her actions, she set that future into motion.

Now, as we discussed, the goodness of her mission, and the evil of what was done to her, sparked people like Nicholas of Cusa, the father of the 15th Century Renaissance, to fight to establish, in mankind, a completely new type of organization of society, a completely new type of government, which was based on a conception of the immortal nature of man, as against the image of man that came from the system of oligarchy.

Cusa authored a document two years after the murder of Joan of Arc, which was called Concordantia Catholica, where he states:

“Therefore, since all are by nature free, every governance—whether it consists in a written law, or in living law in the person of a prince … can only come from the agreement and consent of the subjects. For, if men are by nature equal in power and equally free, the true, properly ordered authority of one common ruler, who is their equal in power, can only be constituted by the election and consent of the others, and law is also established by consent.”

So, I think people should hear in that an echo of our later founding documents, very clearly.

This principle expressed by Cusa—natural law—this reappeared in the government of France’s King Louis XI, who was the son of the King Charles VII, whom Joan of Arc led to victory. During the reign of Louis XI, which was from 1461 to 1483, Louis implemented revolutionary reforms in France, based upon the mission of shifting the system away from the arbitrary power of feudal lords, and toward that of the development of the common good.

Exemplary of this were some of his economic reforms. For example, he implemented a tax policy, where he taxed the population inversely to their productivity, thus bankrupting much of the feudal oligarchy, taking away their power to run private wars, and uplifting the power and the skills and the education-level of the population.

Toward the end of his reign, Louis wrote a treatise called The Rosebush of War, which was written to teach his son, the future king, about the true nature of government. In this treatise, Louis wrote, “None should fear death, having defended the common good, for therein is merit.”

From that first establishment of the modern nation-state government, under Louis XI, and the later echo of that in England, under Henry VII, following on this, we have the emergence of the same principle, in a much more developed expression, about a century later, in the person of Gottfried Leibniz, who you just brought up.

Leibniz not only defended modern science, in the form of defending the follower of Cusa, Johannes Kepler, against the fraud of Isaac Newton, but he also vehemently asserted the principle of “life, liberty, and happiness,” against Locke’s “life, liberty, and property,” which clearly expresses the same idea of man that was fought for by Joan and Cusa. And it was exactly this principle which was chosen by Benjamin Franklin to be inserted into our Declaration of Independence.

So, with that background, I think it’s clear that our republic is the outcome of an historic struggle to bring about a form of government which is based on enabling man to fulfill a higher mission. So, Jeff, I’d like to give you a chance to elaborate on that more in depth, specifically with reference to what you brought up about Franklin and Hamilton, but also to address the role of the U.S. Presidency against that background.

STEINBERG: I think it’s important to bear in mind that that period of the 17th Century that you were referring to—the period that, in effect, begins with Kepler’s contributions, and then really ends and goes into the beginning of the 18th Century with Leibniz and the impact that he in particular had on the American Revolution—after the period of the Renaissance, you had a dramatic counterattack by the European oligarchy, the forces that were being routed by the principles of the Renaissance and the emergence of the system of the nation-state. So, when Kepler was doing his most important scientific work, the backdrop was the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, which came actually slightly after a prolonged period of almost a century of continuous religious war.

You get a kind of a snapshot if you look forward, and see what the British, in particular, are attempting to instigate with their Saudi allies right now in the Middle East: the prospect of literally a multi-generational Hundred Years’ War in that part of the world, within the Islamic world, between Sunnis and Shi’ites, Persians and Turks and Arabs. It’s typical of the mode of the oligarchy.

Leibniz was born just at the very end of the Thirty Years’ War, and frankly, by that point, many sane leading forces in Europe, particularly in England and in the Low Countries, and Germany, had packed up and gone off to North America, because they saw that the predominant power of the oligarchy in Europe was so overwhelming that the prospects of some kind of revolutionary, republican change in Europe was very, very remote.

So, Leibniz, as a great scientist, as a great natural-law philosopher, and as a great political organizer, not only was looking to basically secure the very fragile Westphalian agreements that had brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end; he did some amazing things: He entered into a long-running, 40-year dialogue with China. He was in contact with many of the Catholic missionaries, who, from a century earlier, had gone to China and were involved in the Chinese court. And Leibniz published extensively, and began a dialogue between the western Catholic Church and the Chinese, over the question of whether or not there was a compatibility between western Christianity and the Confucian system in China. And his conclusion, in a major paper called A Treatise on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, was: Yes, there is a core commonality. And on the basis of this, he developed not just simply the idea of natural law as applied to an individual nation, but he began looking at the foundations for launching a dialogue of civilization, and seeing in the diversity of different cultures certain universal principles that were actually common to the nature of mankind when mankind is thinking creatively and being truly human.

As I said, Franklin was a product of Leibniz’s activities and intervention. As a leading advisor to the Hanoverian court, Leibniz was one of the most important and active diplomats in Europe, and orchestrated the overthrow, the end of the Glorious Revolution in England, and brought the Hanoverians onto the English throne at the very beginning of the 18th Century. Our dear colleague Graham Lowry wrote an epic book called How the Nation Was Won, and basically drew a lot of the elements together of how this Leibniz and Leibnizian faction, had actually been instrumental in creating the potentialities for the American republic. During the brief period—and it was a period of intensive factional warfare—but during the brief period that Leibniz was a prominent figure in shaping the English throne, a number of critical governors—Spotswood and Hunter—were sent by the British crown to North America.

And so, you had individuals who came out of that Leibnizian tradition, and were able to play an important role in allowing the nurturing of some of these republican ideas on the soil of North America, a generation before the American Revolution.

This was the experience that Benjamin Franklin had. He was a product of the New England element of this process, under Cotton Mather and the whole Mather family, that brought some of these core ideas of humanist natural law into the prospects of governance. And the Massachusetts Bay Colony, before it was broken up by the British crown during the Glorious Revolution period, had developed certain principles—core principles—of physical economy: the notion of investment in infrastructure; how you actually, in scientific terms, implement the idea of promotion of the general welfare.

So, not only was Franklin a leading, world-class scientist, but he was one of the people who went back and forth to Europe and was emblematic of the legacy of the great Renaissance traditions of Europe and how they were brought in to help form and shape the American Revolution. So, in a very real sense, Franklin was the genius of the American Revolution, and created the possibilities for what emerged as our Constitutional republic after the victory in the American Revolution.

Hamilton was a key leading protégé of Franklin who understood, probably better than any of the other Founding Fathers outside of Franklin himself, these core scientific principles of physical economy.

So, when the Founders gathered in Philadelphia to deal with the crisis that had come about as the result of the lack of an effective structure of government—a system of checks and balances, a national identity—with the Articles of Confederation, right embedded in the core of the American Constitution, in the Preamble, which was something that all of the participants agreed on as core concepts, right at the beginning, the very first words: “We, the people of these United States.”

The Articles of Confederation listed out all of the original states as if they were quasi-sovereign entities that had some kind of loose affiliation. The Preamble to the Constitution established right up-front, that the United States as a single nation had primacy over the identity of the states. Secondly, that the obligations of government was to promote the general welfare—and that was not merely to satisfy the greed of current generations, but it was to consider the obligations to future generations, to conceptualize physical economy such that you would guarantee a principle of scientific and technological progress for the entire population.

Hamilton was put in the unique position, as Secretary of Treasury, the first Secretary of Treasury, to put those core concepts into implementation, and in a series of Reports to the Congress, he laid out core concepts that are as valid today, as they were in the late 1700s when he put pen to paper and presented those reports to Congress. The Report on Manufacturing, the Report on Credit, the Report on the National Bank, laid out core concepts that elaborated what was already there in the Constitution, both in the Preamble, with the emphasis on the nation as a whole and the emphasis on the promotion of the general welfare and the common defense, and additionally in the actual Articles of the Constitution, which set forward a system of checks and balances, but where all branches of government were committed to the implementation of that principle of the general welfare.

So, although Franklin was quite clearly the scientific genius and architect who synthesized all of these European ideas, all of the American experience, and helped frame the Constitution itself, Hamilton was a crucial follower, a crucial ally and protégé of Franklin in setting forth the course of our republic.

We had other leading figures, and others who were not particularly constructive after the death of Franklin, and particularly after the death of George Washington.

John Quincy Adams was an outstanding representative, of not only this U.S. outlook, but the idea of how to spread this vision in a completely non-imperial fashion, around the world. Lead by example: John Quincy Adams developed the concept, of a community of principles of perfectly sovereign nation-states.

We had many failed Presidencies. A majority of Presidencies of the United States in our several hundred years of history have been profoundly flawed, and, in many instances, failed Presidencies—in some cases treasonous Presidencies. But the durability of this system of checks and balances, and the period development of geniuses who were passionately committed to the survival of the nation, has carried us forward to this point.

Now, the Constitution also makes it very clear that there are obligations for every citizen. We have a system of representative self-government, and the sovereignty of the governing comes from the will of the people.

Now, if you want to put it in fairly blunt terms: In our country, under our constitutional system, it is unconstitutional to be stupid. There is an obligation of every citizen to have to actually understand the issues: to at least be informed enough to be able to actually select those representatives, who will not just serve local constituent demands, but will serve the interests of the nation as a whole for the time being, and into the future.

So, I think this is a much larger issue that we will be probably spending a great deal of time in these Friday night webcasts discussing, going into the Presidential campaign and into the future more generally.

But Mr. LaRouche is absolutely focused at this point on the fact that Obama’s got to go. Every vestige of the Bush apparatus—meaning virtually the entirety of the Republican Party, with individual exceptions—has to go, and we’ve got to go back to core concepts and core principles. And in this upcoming Presidential election, the first step is to define the policies that establish the qualifications of any individual to serve as President. If you’re not committed to the policies of Glass-Steagall; of restoring a Hamiltonian credit system; of massive capital investment in rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, and of going back to our once-excellent space program; work in frontier areas of science; job creation for a viable condition of life for all of our population—if you’re not committed to these principles, particularly if you’re committed to Wall Street money, which you think is the recipe for winning the Presidency, then get out of Dodge, because you don’t belong here in this critical moment.

And above all else, this is not about 2016. This is about right now, and again, the criterion for anybody who’s serious about being President of the United States, you’ve got to realize that Obama’s got to go, and the Bush League’s got to be ended. Otherwise, we will not be a nation, we will not be a republic by the time of those supposed November 2016 elections.

OGDEN: Well, thank you very much, Jeff. Let me just say in conclusion to our broadcast tonight, that again, this was a prelude to the events are that are happening up in Alexander Hamilton’s home town New York City tomorrow. This is the Schiller Institute conference, the latest in a series of conferences. This one is titled “New Dark Age or Renaissance: The BRICS Option, the Only Sure Way Out of World War III.” And again, there will be live coverage of this event streamed on larouchepac.com from 2:00 to 5:00 tomorrow, Saturday, Eastern Time.

So, please be sure to tune in, and do everything you can between now and then to help us build the audience to this event. Get all of your networks involved, all of your family members, everybody you know. Get them to tune in to the live coverage of this critical conference in New York.

So, I’m going to bring a conclusion to our broadcast here tonight. Thank you very much, Megan, and thank you, Jeff, and thank you all for tuning in, and we’ll be looking forward to seeing you again tomorrow.