No conscious or conscientious person can ignore the disastrous contemporary state of Western and US economies, and its real financial system structural failure and actual economic bankruptcy.
“Apocalyptic leader of a cultlike political organization”, “grandaddy of conspiracist culture”, “Trotskyite” who turned to the far right, “a case study of paranoia and bigotry”, an ally of “the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents”, and of course, an “anti-Semite”. These are almost direct quotes of some of the wordy labels thrown at LaRouche.
However, no matter the labels that were catapulted upon his character, nothing could cover the correctness of his views of the horrendous historical effect of the British Empire, The United States, or the Western economic model.
The veracity of Lyndon’s long-term economic doomsday predictions for the US economy and the global economy based on the current models, has surpassed all the labels, critics, nay-sayers, detractors, and even outlived LaRouche himself. The man’s views and suggestions for solutions are still sought after to this very day, to solve the structural crisis of a world economy forged by the western hemisphere.
A man who has always predicted that the world economy would certainly collapse if the current policies are not reversed, and geared towards financial and fiscal policies designed to stimulate the construction of technological industrial economies on a global scale. Exterminating all the usury and currency/securities speculations that turned the world economy into a gambling table in a casino, acting as a cancer that mutates the cells and membranes of real economies.
He predicted the financial crises that hit the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the Russia Financial Crisis of 1998, due to the “financial contagion” of the Western and oligarchic economic models. As LaRouche stressed, the world economy, especially in the West has entered a phase of real bankruptcy, due to the complete delinking of the real economy, centered around the production and consumption of goods and services, and the financial and monetary markets.
Bankruptcy of the global financial system
A model that has fictionally pushed the value of the securities traded through the world’s financial markets, and the quantity of currency exchanged in foreign exchange markets, to more than 10 times the total gross domestic product of all nations of planet Earth.
LaRouche advocated that this state of affairs, mandates forcing the entire global financial system into bankruptcy proceedings, coordinated among a group of major world economies. Although seemingly unrealistic, this is actually a constitutional federal policy within the United States of America, as stipulated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 of the US Constitution itself.
LaRouche’s economic forecasts
LaRouche holds a bouquet of copyrights when it comes to economic predictions. In 1959-1960, he predicted that if the economic axioms, principles, and policies of US presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administrations persisted, then the second half of the sixties would witness a series of monetary and financial crises on a global scale, consequently leading into the fall of the Breton-Woods Agreement, which existed at the time as a foundation of the world economic system.
This prediction turned into reality, between November 1967, when the British Sterling Pound started going into the devaluation phase, and the fall of Breton-Woods System in August 1971.
Another forecast was based on LaRouche’s analysis of what would happen after the 1971 Breton-Woods system failure. As he predicted that if the ruling powers resorted to increasingly severe austerity measures, this would render the 1971 crisis a “comprehensive structural crisis”, not just another bust phase of a usual economic boom/bust cycle.
This prediction couldn’t be truer, especially since the US Stock Market Crash of 1987 globally known as the “Black Monday” of 19th October 1987, was another proven-true LaRouche prediction. Since this crisis, the global financial system went through recurring tremors and shocks, passing through the Savings and Loans Crisis 1986-1995, the 1991 Indian Economic Crisis, the 1992 Sterling Crisis (Black Wednesday), the 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 1998 Russian Financial Crisis, The Argentinian Great Depression 1998-2002, and this is just to name a few examples.
18 months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, on the 15th of September 2008, Lyndon LaRouche, as the Founding Editor of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) Magazine, published a summary of his analysis which carried yet another prescient prediction. The cover story of the March 19th, 2007 issue of EIR Magazine, was titled “How U.S. Mortgage Crisis Can Trigger Global Crash”.
Predictably, LaRouche’s prediction has been publicly shrugged upon and dismissed by Congressmen and US politicians, who labeled it “unrealistic” and “impossible”.
Weren’t these same Congressmen who less than a decade earlier, in November 1999, voted to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act?
A banking act sponsored by two Democrat Congressmen, namely, House Representative Henry B. Steagall, and Senator Carter Glass. Signed into law in 1933, to provide the necessary protection of separating commercial and investment banks, to protect the banking system stability, and to avoid bank runs, crashes, and financial crises.
LaRouche et alia, kept the view, that this precarious deregulation caused by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, under the reign of US President Bill Clinton, would bring about a financial crash within a decade, while the people in power and the so-called economists kept on being in denial, or maybe in cahoots.
While Lyndon LaRouche, tried his best to prevent the predictable upcoming crisis, suggesting specific legislation to reinstate the Glass-Stegall Act, and calling for an emergency national moratorium on home foreclosures.
LaRouche’s suggestions had wide popular support, however, Wall Street and K-Street banking lobbyists, made sure that his necessary suggested measures would never be even discussed in Congress.
The protection of commercial bank depositors’ money, from the perils of securities speculation of the US and Western financial “Casinos”, still rings loud, with almost no protection to be provided for bank deposits and the US citizen’s life savings.
So, when would LaRouche’s calls for economic sanity be headed?
Regardless of any distracting labels, no conscious or conscientious person can ignore the disastrous contemporary state of Western and US economies, and its real financial system structural failure and actual economic bankruptcy.
And LaRouche certainly didn’t.
To be continued..
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
