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This transcript appears in the November 13, 2015 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
NOVEMBER 6 LAROUCHE PAC WEBCAST:
How Obama Has Destroyed
This Country
[PDF version of this article]
The following is the transcript of the Nov. 6, 2015 LaRouche PAC webcast.
Matthew Ogden:
Good evening. It’s Nov. 6, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and you’re
watching our weekly broadcast here from larouchepac.com of our
international Friday night webcast. I’m joined in the studio tonight by
Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review, as well as Megan Beets of the LaRouche PAC Science and Research Team.
Now,
the three of us did have a chance to meet with Helga and Lyndon
LaRouche just a few hours ago; so that has definitely informed the
content of the broadcast that you’ll hear tonight. What you will hear
tonight is a thorough exposition of the continually building case for
immediate legal action to be taken against the murderous policies of the
Barack Obama Presidency. The case against him continues to snowball.
You’ll
hear about the media censorship that was ordered directly from the
Obama White House to eliminate any coverage in the leading newspapers of
record of the United States, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, of the damning story that was broken by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill in The Intercept,
of the so-called “Drone Papers,”—which expose the lurid details of
Obama’s weekly kill sessions, which have routinely resulted in
innumerable innocent civilian deaths.
You’ll
hear about the most recent revelations in the case of the bombardment
of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, by which
it is now revealed that doctors and other medical personnel who were
fleeing the hospital, fleeing the bombardment of this medical facility,
were systematically gunned down by U.S. military gunships. This is
further building the case that this is indeed an intentional targeting
of a medical facility, and amounts to nothing less than a war crime.
You’ll
hear about the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been fleeing
the illegal wars that have been perpetrated by the Obama Administration
in the Middle East and northern Africa, resulting in the massive social
displacement of entire portions of these populations as well as
widespread death and destruction, as Obama continues to lend his support
to the overthrow by radical jihadists of sitting sovereign governments
in this region.
You’ll
hear about the shocking statistics of the rise in the death rates,
rising dramatically throughout the United States, particularly among the
former skilled, industrial and manufacturing labor force, who were
sacrificed at the altar of the bail-out of the bankrupt Wall Street
banks by first, the Bush, and now the Obama Administrations. One of the
leading causes of this increase in death rates across the United States,
and especially in this formerly productive sector of the American labor
force, is an unbelievable surge in deaths from heroin and related drug
overdoses. This is occurring not only among the inner city minority
populations, but also now among suburban middle and upper class white
populations, surpassing automobile and firearms rates of mortality and
now reaching an epidemic level as characterized by the Centers of
Disease Control.
Capitol Hill Forum Hears Warnings of Nuclear War
And
finally, you’ll hear about the continuing mounting danger of global
extinction warfare as the Obama Administration continues to attempt to
provoke World War III confrontations with both Russia and China.
Now,
this final item was the explicit discussion at a landmark event that
occurred this past Wednesday (Nov. 4) on Capitol Hill, which I
personally had the opportunity to attend and to be an eyewitness to.
This extraordinary event was set up as an informal hearing by Rep. John
Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and the
dean of the House of Representatives—the longest-serving member of
Congress on the House side.
Creative Commons/Shelley Moskowitz
Hearing convenor Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), dean of the U.S.
House of Representatives, speaking at a reception by the Haiti Advocacy
Working Group at the Capitol in January 2012.
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Also
in attendance were a number of other Congressmen, including Reps.
Barbara Lee, Alan Grayson, Charlie Rangel, Sheila Jackson Lee, and
Congressman Walter Jones, among others. The distinguished members of the
panel at this informal hearing were all founders of the recently
re-established American Committee for East-West Accord, including:
former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock, who was ambassador to the Soviet
Union under President Ronald Reagan; NYU Professor Stephen Cohen; and
John Pepper, a leading businessman and former CEO of Proctor &
Gamble.
youtube
Reagan’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock, speaking
in Sept. 2014 to the Robert S. Strauss Center for International
Security and Law.
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The
subject of this hearing was none other than the fact that the Obama
policies are on the verge of provoking a thermonuclear confrontation
with Russia—a subject which was explicitly presented in those terms—and
the fact that without a drastic change in U.S.-Russian relations which
must be induced, there is no way that this World War III confrontation
can be avoided.
The
invitation to this event, which was published by the Committee on
East-West Accord and was circulated by the office of Congressman John
Conyers, read in part as follows:
The
Ukrainian crisis represents a low in U.S.-Russia relations not seen
since the fall of the Soviet Union. And the recent Russian involvement
in the Syrian situation is now making the danger even worse. American
and Russian jets flying bombing missions in close proximity to one
another, raises the possibility of a military accident between two
nuclear-armed powers.
As the New York Times
warned, the complicated and shifting landscape of alliances leaves us
“edging closer to an all-out proxy war between the United States and
Russia.”
The
majority of Americans never lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis of
1962 or the darkest days of the Cold War. They have led lives without
the looming specter of nuclear war, but the areas of conflict between
our nations are growing. The conflict in Ukraine, the expansion of NATO,
Russia’s involvement in Syria, and other lesser issues are driving a
new wedge between the US and Russia.
While
most would agree that conflict between the United States and Russia
benefits no one, the likelihood of such a conflict, as well as the
serious consequences that it would bring, is not being discussed on
Capitol Hill.
Worse Than the Cuban Missile Crisis
Now
each member of this panel, and a number of the Congressmen each in
their own way, referred to the darkest days of the Cold War, which they
all remembered, being senior statesmen of this country. John Conyers and
Jack Matlock, who was an ambassador and a close collaborator of
President Ronald Reagan, both referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis. They
recalled the experience of “duck and cover,” hiding under one’s desk,
nuclear air raid drills, underground bomb shelters, nuclear bunkers, and
stated that although the situation at that time seemed bad, the
situation today is as bad, or worse. They added that unless the direct
provocations against Russia are halted, there is very real possibility
which exists of open nuclear warfare breaking out, and exterminating the
human race.
Ambassador
Matlock echoed much of what he had stated during previous appearances
in Washington, D.C., but also especially during his recent appearance on
the same dais as President Vladimir Putin at the Valdai discussion club
in Sochi, Russia two weeks ago. Matlock elaborated the 20-year process
of broken promises and outright lies and deceptions that resulted in the
eastward expansion of NATO all the way up to Russia’s borders, which
has an immediate and calculated threat to Russia’s domestic security,
worse, in fact, as Matlock pointed out, than the Berlin crisis of 1961.
The fact is that Berlin was not directly on Russia’s borders, but now
you have the immediate proximity of Ukraine, and other countries right
on the borders of Russian territory.
One More Base. . .
Stephen
Cohen underscored Matlock’s remarks and warned point-blank, in no
uncertain terms, that the placement of one more base on Russia’s
borders, or the incorporation of one more country in Eastern Europe into
the NATO security alliance, military alliance, would mean war between
the U.S. and Russia, and everything that entails.
www.RussianCenterNY.org/youtube
Professor of Russian Studies Stephen Cohen, at the Russian Center in New York City in Oct. 2012.
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He
pointed out that former Obama Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul’s
blog has shifted from what he called “Mickey Mouse democracy promotion”
to now, all-out strident calls for outright warfare and regime change
provocations. Cohen emphasized that the danger of war today is far worse
than at any time during the Cold War, mostly because of this
cross-partisan 100% close-to-consensus when it comes to the demonization
of Putin and Russia, and the lack of any substantial pushback from
among the corridors of power in Washington, against this narrative,
especially from within Congress.
This
failure was something which, he noted, was changing with this historic
event, changing in front of the eyes of all those who attended this
event. It had a packed audience, standing-room only, and was the first
open discussion of this kind in a forum such as this by anyone on Capitol Hill.
The Real Enemy
And
finally, John Pepper made a very impassioned call for a completely new
paradigm in U.S.-Russia relations, one which is founded on a concept of
common security, and a creation of a mutual common security
architecture, against what he identified as the real enemies,
as opposed to the made-up enemies: the real enemies of both the United
States and of Russia. Number one: international terrorism, and ISIS, in
specific. And number two: what he identified as the greatest enemy of
all mankind, which is thermonuclear warfare itself. He stated, the true
enemy that we must guard ourselves against is the enemy of nuclear
annihilation, and I think we can all find common cause in that.
So,
as I said, this was really an extraordinary event, especially when you
juxtapose it to another event which was happening literally
simultaneously on Capitol Hill, just a few doors down from this hearing
room. And this was a hearing featuring none other than [Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs] Victoria Nuland
herself, and that counterposition was pointed out very clearly by
numerous participants in this event, both members of the panel, and
members of the audience, as representative of the two stark choices that
are facing the American people right now: Obama’s World War III and
thermonuclear annihilation, or a new international policy of cooperation
and partnership with Russia, as well as with China. Which means the
immediate end of the murderous and deadly policies of the Obama
Administration.
So,
with that said, I’d like to ask Jeff Steinberg to come to the podium
for the next segment of tonight’s broadcast, to elaborate a little bit
more on what I’ve just covered.
What the Capitol Hill Forum Fatally Left Out
Jeff Steinberg:
Thanks, Matt. There were obviously some important things that were said
during that John Conyers event on Wednesday afternoon up on Capitol
Hill, but I think it’s critical to recognize that there was one thing
that was not said, and that was that the only viable solution
is the removal of President Obama through either impeachment, or
invoking of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, or some combination of actions, as happened with Richard Nixon, to force his immediate resignation.
The
fact of the matter is that you had prominent American diplomats,
prominent American scholars, leading members of Congress, standing
there, and saying to the American people that the President of the
United States is pushing the world towards thermonuclear annihilation,
and yet nobody took it to the logical conclusion, which is that we’ve
got to get this guy out of office.
Now,
in our discussion earlier today with Lyn and Helga LaRouche, Mr.
LaRouche was reflecting on where we stand, in terms of the dangers
represented to, really, the survival of the entire trans-Atlantic
region. Because that’s really what’s on the table right now. Assuming we
even avoid the immediate threat of thermonuclear war and annihilation,
the simple fact is that if the current trendlines continue, without a
reversal, in a very short period of time the entire trans-Atlantic
region will be doomed, will be finished, will not resemble anything like
what Europe and the United States historically represented,
particularly the United States.
Parts
of South America may very well survive, because they’re already
aligning themselves with the Asia-Pacific region, and with Eurasia more
broadly, where countries like China, India, Russia are doing relatively
well compared to the complete breakdown process that’s inflicted the
entire trans-Atlantic region.
Now
the problem of not directly addressing the clear and obvious solution
to this crisis, namely the constitutional removal of President Obama
from office, is in fact indicative of a much deeper problem, a problem
that very few people other than people such as Mr. LaRouche think about
constantly.
The
bottom line is that since the very beginning of the Twentieth Century,
since the intervention by Lord Bertrand Russell and others around him to
destroy Classical science, and to replace it with mathematics and with
the disease of pragmatism—since that process began at the beginning of
the Twentieth Century—we’ve been on a steady downward
trajectory—culturally, economically, philosophically, morally. We’ve
been, throughout the trans-Atlantic region, in a slow but now
intensifying complete collapse of society, and when you broach the issue
of a President who has committed atrocities, such as his drone kill
policy, all you need to do, is go back on the LaRouche PAC website, and
review the last three Friday evening webcasts. You’ll have all of the
details you need to know about that.
The
fact that there has not been a move to remove this President from
office, is because the disease of pragmatism has infected our political
institutions to such a great degree, and has infected our general
population to an even greater degree, that the only measure that can
prevent the possible annihilation of mankind, is considered to be
“unpractical, it’s not pragmatic, there’s no guarantee that this process
will succeed.”
So,
we’ve been on this long trajectory downward. It’s very much like the
principle of how you boil a frog. If you put a pot of water on the
stove, and get that water boiling to a full boil, and try to throw the
frog in the boiling water, the frog’s going to jump right out. He’ll run
away and you’ll never find him. If you put the frog in a pot of warm
water, comfortably warm water, and have a low flame, then, gradually,
that water will reach a boiling point, and the frog won’t notice it,
because the incremental changes are gradual. That’s why you’ve got to
look back and consider where we are as a trans-Atlantic civilization
today, and ask yourself, from that standpoint: can we survive by
continuing to cling to pragmatism and avoid taking the necessary urgent
measures that can save us from otherwise certain doom?
Don’t Call Obama a Murderer, or You’ll Be Next
The drone policy, as Mr. LaRouche emphasized in our discussion today, is emblematic of Obama. He’s a mass killer. He boasted to White House staff, back in 2011, that he was really good at killing. Coming into the office of the Presidency, he had no idea
how good he was at targeting people to be killed by others. But that’s
the character of it; that’s what the “Drone Papers,” like the “Pentagon
Papers” which earlier brought down Richard Nixon, show.
The
“Drone Papers” alone are more than sufficient to bring down President
Obama. But it has not yet happened, because a few phone calls from the
White House to the New York Times, to the Washington Post,
got the word out: this story is taboo; it’s not practical to tell the
truth about this mass murderer, because we might get cut off from access
to the White House. So, you’ve got this phenomenon.
youtube
Doctors Without Borders General-Director Christopher Stokes,
at the news conference Nov. 5 where he exposed the U.S. Airforce’s
deliberate targetting of medical personnel at the hospital in Kunduz.
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You
have the new reports that Matt just mentioned concerning the bombing of
the Doctors Without Borders [MSF] hospital in Kunduz, providing more
and more evidence that it was a pre-meditated assault on an
international medical facility under the lamest of excuses, and that as
doctors and nurses and patients were fleeing, they were being shot, on
the grounds that anybody who was there was automatically, de facto Taliban, and fair game for another mass kill.
Destruction of Life
But
there’s many, many more things to consider. You have the conditions of
life of the American people, which have been destroyed, systematically,
boiling-frog style, over a period of, really, the last 40 years, or you
could say even the period going back to the death of Franklin Roosevelt
in April of 1945.
It’s
been a largely downward trajectory ever since then, and that is merely a
slice of the process that began right at the turn of the Twentieth
Century, with Bertrand Russell’s invasion and assault against science.
If you look back at the sweep of the Nineteenth Century, you had some of
the greatest accomplishments in culture and in science—in real,
physical science. You had Bernhard Riemann, you had the great classical
composers—Beethoven, Brahms. You had the work of Friedrich Schiller,
branching over from the 1700s into the 1800s. You had a renaissance
underway, particularly in Europe, particularly in Germany, during the
end of the Nineteenth Century, covering the whole sweep of that Century.
And suddenly, it came it came to a screeching halt, with the British
top-down intervention, personified by Bertrand Russell. And we’ve been
on a cultural downslide ever since. If you destroy the culture, you
destroy the moral fabric of a society.
So,
where are we now? Earlier today, as I’m sure many of you are aware, a
series of propagandistic lies were put out by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, saying that 271,000 jobs were created last month in the
United States, and that the unemployment rate is now officially down to
5%. Five percent unemployment is considered to be tantamount to full
employment.
Well,
those figures are an absolute lie, and I think if any of you think
about it, any of you watching this broadcast now, think about whether
your conditions of life are better or worse than they were at the start
of the Obama Presidency, or, even more so, at the end of the Clinton
Presidency, when Bush and Cheney came in. If you say, “My conditions are
better, my prospects for my children and grandchildren are better,”
then you are in an extremely small minority. The simple reality is that
half of the 271,000 jobs claimed to have been created, are purely fictitious.
They’re the result of a mathematical sleight-of-hand trick, projecting,
on average, death and life rates and starts of new businesses and
bankruptcies. But there’s nothing normal about the current economy. So,
forget that number!
If you take the fact that 94 million working-age Americans, qualified to be in the labor force, are not
counted as part of the labor force, because they are either chronically
unemployed or have never been able to find a job, then if you add those
94 million people, working-age people, in, you find that the actual
unemployment rate in the United States, is 23%! That number is on a par
with the worst, darkest, days of the Great Depression in the 1930s,
before Roosevelt put people back to work.
U.S. Mortality Rates Rise
A
study came out just this past week from Princeton University,
indicating that for the first time in a long time, there are more and
more Americans dying during their middle-age—their 40s and 50s. And this
is due to a combination of job loss, of lack of access to adequate
medical care, addiction to drugs and alcohol—again, a reflection of a
process of chronic unemployment or under-employment. In rural United
States, according to a report in the New York Times earlier this week, the rate of suicides is rising astronomically.
In
a few moments, Megan will give you a detailed readout on the fact that
we’re in the midst of a heroin epidemic in the United States, and it’s
mostly afflicting middle-class and upper middle-class households all
over the country. You have all of the signs there, as if anyone out
there needed to be reminded or told, about the actual collapse of the
conditions of life.
View full size
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The shocking rise of mortality rates among U.S. White
non-Hispanics (USW), ages 45-54, shown in the study “Rising morbidity
and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 2st
century,” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences. These rates are compared with U.S.
Hispanics (USH), and six comparison countries: France (FRA), Germany
(GER), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada (CAN), Australia (AUG), and
Sweden (SWE). The full report can be found here. |
So,
this has occurred during the period of the Bush-Cheney Administration
and during the period of Obama. There’s nothing that we can do right now
in particular about Bush and Cheney, from the standpoint that they’re
out of office. They should have been impeached for a whole range of
reasons, and they were not impeached. Yet President Obama is the current
President. And he stands guilty of crimes that even go beyond the scope
of what Bush and Cheney did. The drone killing policy is a policy of
mass murder.
In
effect, you should be thinking about President Obama from the
standpoint of somebody who is a bigger mass murderer than Charles
Manson. How would you feel about having Charles Manson in the White
House? Well, guess what? Maybe you do. So, the question is, and this is
addressed to the outstanding individuals who did appear at that
Congressional forum, and it’s also addressed to you, the American
people. When are you going to shed the disease of pragmatism and face
the reality of the situation that you are now living through? This is
not something you watch on television, or read about in the newspapers
or on your personal computer. This is the life that you are being
subjected to; and there’s no reason for it.
The
trans-Atlantic region is dead; the U.S. economy is dead. The European
economy is even more dead in many areas than the U.S. economy is. Asia
is not thriving because of the impact of the trans-Atlantic crisis, but
Asia is doing vastly better. There’s growth going on—China, India, even
Russia; there’s growth going on in the entire region. There’s a
perspective of optimism, about space exploration, about extending the
high-speed links from the Asia-Pacific coast on to the Atlantic coast of
Europe.
View full size
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The astronomical rise in mortality among the white non-Hispanics ages 45-54, by cause. From the Case/Deaton study.
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The
document reports that drug-related deaths, as Matthew mentioned in the
opening, drug-related deaths have risen to become the leading cause of
injury death in the United States. More than firearms; more than car
accidents. And in 2013 alone, the United States lost 46,470 people to
drug overdoses—46,000 people. That’s more than 120 per day. Now among
drugs, controlled prescription drugs—mainly opioids—and heroin, account
for the largest type of drug by far; and the slight decline of the use
of prescription drugs is being steadily replaced by the use of heroin,
as people shift over to what’s a much more deadly drug. But it’s also
much cheaper and much, much more widely available.
Now,
to illustrate that a little bit, in 2013 there were 169,000 new users
of heroin; many of them very young. Between 2013 and 2014, the rate of
current heroin use—in other words, people who have used heroin in the
past 30 days—rose by 51%. Between 2007 and 2013—or in other words,
during the course of Obama’s Presidency—the addiction to heroin rose
150%; and the deaths by overdose of heroin more than tripled.
View full size
CDC/NCHA, National Vital Statistics System, Mortality.
The complementary increase in heroin deaths, as compared to
the decrease in deaths from opioid analgesics is shown in this chart,
part of a study by the Centers for Disease Control. The data can be
found here. |
Now
the primary area where this increase of death has occurred, is in the
Midwest; the formerly industrial centers that LaRouche took the
spearpoint to save over the course of 2005 and the following years, when
under the Bush-Cheney Administration, the auto industry and related
machine tool sectors were gutted and crushed. Now it’s the Midwest,
followed closely by New England and the New York/New Jersey area—all of
these formerly productive industrial centers of the country which have
suffered in every way under Bush and Obama.
Now
the increase, as you might guess, for the most part is not concentrated
in the inner cities; although I will mention that in the city of
Baltimore, one in ten people is a heroin user. The epidemic is not
centered among the poorest people in the country; it’s centered in the
middle class, the working class. For example, families with an income of
$50,000 or more, for families of that income rate, heroin addiction has
risen by 60% in the last four years. These are working class, upper
class families and their children.
But
this picture of the epidemic use of drugs is just part of a broader
picture. Death is on the rise under President Obama. A study was
released just a few weeks ago in September, which is receiving wide
coverage this week, which states that since 1999, over the course of the
four terms of Bush and Obama, the death rate among middle-aged white
Americans in the age range of 45-54 has risen dramatically; in an
unprecedented way, 10% overall, and 20% among the poorer, less educated
strata.
This
increase of the death rate of middle-aged people is not a natural shift
in demographics; it’s not due to some overall change in disease
mortality rates. In fact, for comparison, in comparable industrialized
countries around the world, the mortality rate for exactly this class of
people has fallen by 25% to 30%. So, this is purely the result of a conscious policy in the United States by Bush and Obama.
The
leading cause is not disease. The leading causes are signs of the
complete degeneration and despair among the American population: drug
abuse; alcohol abuse. And in fact, the authors of the report note
particularly, heroin and opioid overdoses, and suicide. And as Jeff
referenced, in rural areas of the United States, the suicide rates since
2004 have risen by 20%.
So
here you have an overview of the stark reality of the Obama death
policy, so clearly seen in the attack on the hospital in Afghanistan,
turned against the American people. When presented with some of these
figures the other day, LaRouche responded with this: He said, “Why
didn’t we, as a nation, respond years back, and take action to stop this
from happening? How did people get set up to accept the economic
policies of destruction of science, of industry, along with endless bail
outs of Wall Street? How were we induced to submit to do this to
ourselves?”
Creative Commons/Andrew Jameson
Typical of the shutdown of productive industry in the U.S.
Midwest is this Fisher Body Plant in Detroit, photographed in 2008.
|
So, I’d like to ask Jeff to come to the podium to respond and elaborate.
The Courage to Act
Steinberg:
I think it goes back to what I said earlier. Slowly, the level of
culture, the level of real science that had permeated our culture even
here in the United States in the Nineteenth Century has been under
steady and constant assault; largely coming from the British,
particularly reflected in people like Lord Bertrand Russell, who wrote
books professing to be about science.
Russell wrote a book in 1951, The Impact of Science on Society,
but he didn’t talk about science. He talked about methods of
destruction of young minds by turning the education system into a system
that basically drives people into accepting their subservience to be
trained, to be submissive, to be non-inquisitive. And again, the disease
that Russell imposed from the beginning of the Twentieth Century was
the disease of replacing physical science with mathematics. Everything
comes down to a formula; everything comes down to a probability. If it’s
not highly probable, then it’s not practical, and therefore, don’t go
there.
So,
you’ve had an assault on education, from the kindergarten level on up,
all the way to the major universities professing to be the great halls
of advanced education. You’ve had a culture that has been destructive in
the most unbelievable and egregious ways. And the net effect is that
even compared to the early 1970s, people have lost a certain sense of
fight. They’d rather watch reality television. Our leaders have accepted
the idea that there are boundary conditions on what they can even dare
think about.
Last
week on this broadcast, we talked about former Sen. Mike Gravel, who,
as a lowly first-term Senator from Alaska, had the audacity to put the
Pentagon Papers in the Congressional record. That act in 1971 led to the
demise of President Nixon, and contributed mightily to the end of the
Vietnam War. So, there are glimmers of recognition among some of our
elder statesmen that things used to be different.
And
so, we’ve got an enormous challenge on our hands right now. Do we
continue to tolerate, even knowing that the President of the United
States is sitting down every Tuesday afternoon with a small group of
White House advisors and basically ordering the murder of individual
citizens from nations all over the world, some of them American
citizens, without any kind of oversight, and without any accountability
for his actions?
As
Megan just said, he’s presided over an invasion of drugs, whether it’s
over-the-counter prescription or black-market illegal drugs; we have 94
million citizens of working age who are not working in the real economy.
Clearly not every one of those people is sleeping under a bridge
somewhere. How many of them are directly involved in the black market
economy that’s shoving heroin at a record rate into the arms of American
citizens? It’s all of a package.
And
again, as I said earlier, and as Mr. LaRouche emphasized in our
discussion this afternoon, Obama’s got to go, and the book of evidence
is absolutely there. It’s comprehensive, it’s irrefutable. Some of the
crimes that he is documented to be guilty of are crimes that go beyond
simply the question of impeachment. They may wind up being the basis for
criminal prosecution, because the immunity afforded to elected
officials does not extend to outright criminal action.
So,
we’ve got Wall Street, that’s a parasite sitting on top of and
destroying the United States economy. There are straightforward measures
that could be taken to eliminate Wall Street, starting with the idea of
simply re-instating Glass-Steagall. There are many things that could be
done. We could issuing credit to rebuild our infrastructure. We could
be adopting the model of Franklin Roosevelt from when he first came into
office, setting up training programs for young people to give them the
necessary skills and to also give them the sense of optimism that
they’ve got a constructive role to play in society, and that they’ve got
a bright future ahead of them.
All
of these things could be done. They’re all right there. If you go to
the LaRouche PAC website, you will see there’s a massive amount of
material spelling out chapter and verse exactly what kinds of measures
can and must be taken to turn this situation around. But ultimately it
starts with a very subjective question: Are you prepared to fight for
your own vital interests? Are you prepared to hold elected officials to a
Constitutional standard, and to hold them accountable if they fail to
live up to it? These are the issues. These are the questions that are
really right now staring us in the face, because we don’t have much time
left. We don’t have a great deal of time to solve these problems, to
tackle these issues, and the question is, are you prepared to give up
your pragmatism, to turn off your television, and to do something
constructive for your country, for your family, and for your future
generations?
That’s really the issue and that’s the question that should be the burning issue on everybody’s mind at this moment.
The Downing of Russian Airbus A321M
Ogden:
Now, our final segment for this evening is our institutional question,
which reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche, the Russian-operated Airbus A321M
crashed last Saturday shortly after taking off from the Red Sea resort
of Sharm al-Sheikh, on its way to St. Petersburg, killing all 224 people
on board. There are strong but unconfirmed reports that the plane had
been downed by a bomb, a claim contested by both Egypt and Russia.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, however, said that Britain had
weighed the whole information picture, including the Islamic State’s
claim of responsibility after the crash, and had concluded that there is
a significant possibility. If these reports are substantiated through
examination of the plane wreckage, what actions do you suggest the
Russian government should take against the perpetrators of this tragic
crime?
youtube
The crash site of Russia’s Flight 9268 in the Sinai Desert, as published on Nov. 2, 2015.
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Steinberg:
First of all, I think the actions taken by the British Foreign
Secretary were obnoxious and egregious. The British have no role
whatsoever in this investigation. If they had communications intercepts
suggesting that terrorists were planning such an attack, then the
obvious question is why didn’t they inform the Egyptian and Russian
authorities, if they knew this was happening? The fact of the matter is
that the British basically staged an ambush for Egyptian President
el-Sisi, because it was upon his arrival in London for a long-scheduled
state visit that Hammond made these comments, and basically announced at
the same time that British Airways was suspending flights into Egypt.
So,
you’ve got a British game being played here, and an Obama game, because
an unnamed Obama Administration official immediately came out and told
Reuters that the United States is in agreement with the British in terms
of jumping the gun, and drawing these hasty and perhaps completely
false conclusions.
Now,
what Mr. LaRouche said is, first of all, you’ve got to let the Russians
conduct the investigation. The Russians are perfectly capable of
conducting a thorough and honest and comprehensive forensic
investigation to determine what happened. And because of the nature of
the area where the crash occurred, namely, in the Sinai desert, all of
the remains of the plane have been recovered. The black boxes have been
recovered, with a little bit of damage to one of them. All of the bodies
by and large have been recovered. And therefore, because you’re dealing
with people who have competence, and who have a vested interest in
finding out what really happened, Mr. LaRouche emphasized, let the
Russians do their job. Don’t jam them. Don’t try to speed it up.
Patiently wait for the investigation to be concluded.
And
I should say that the head of the Russian FSB, their intelligence
service, Alexander Bortnikov, issued a statement today. I’ll just read
it—it’s brief—but it goes very much to the point that Mr. LaRouche just
made. Bortnikov said, and it was publicized on Channel 1 TV in Russia
today:
We
need to obtain absolutely objective and verified data on the reasons
for the crash of the plane. This is necessary for purposes of
investigating the cause of this disaster, and for informing the public.
This work must be done in the most meticulous fashion, taking as much
time as may be required, and I want to state that until we determine the
actual causes of what happened, I think it is appropriate to halt
Russian civil aviation flights to Egypt. This chiefly involves tourism.
At the same time, we find it necessary to cooperate actively with the
Egyptian authorities in joint work on the investigation of the causes of
this disaster.
Russia
1 then quoted the official spokesman for President Putin, Mr. Peskov,
who said the President concurred with Bortnikov’s recommendations; and
he added “Halting the flights does not yet mean that the version that it
was an act of terrorism is being viewed as the main one in the
investigation of this air disaster. Experts continue to exclude nothing,
including the possibility of a bomb explosion onboard the plane.” So,
this is the beginnings of an investigation into a serious tragedy; 224
people were killed in it. And it’s not known yet; we don’t have the
results of that forensic investigation.
Now
as the question of what the Russians should do, I think the answer is,
pretty obviously, that they’re already doing it. The Russians, as of
September 30, are carrying out a systematic, targetted campaign against
the terrorist networks that are operating inside Syria. They are, at the
same time, aggressively pursuing a diplomatic track to try to bring an
end to this five-year horror inside Syria; and that will obviously have
major implications for the situation next door in Iraq, in Lebanon, in
other parts of the entire Middle East region. So, in effect, Putin
already made a command decision and launched the flanking operation
against the Islamic State and allied jihadist groups and their sponsors
in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey.
So,
it would be a mistake to veer off what is already an extremely
effective and ongoing flanking operation. If it turns out—and again,
it’s premature to make any judgement on this—but if does turn out that
the Islamic State or some affiliate or spin-off was involved in planting
a bomb on that plane, then that’s another story; and you’ve got to
carry it several steps further. What was the infrastructure through
which that operation was conducted, if it proves to have been a bomb
rather than a mechanical failure? Now, if you’re talking about the
Islamic State, if you’re talking about Nusra, if you’re talking about
al-Qaeda, then ultimately, face it; you’re talking about operations that
were allowed to grow and allowed to fester as a result of the policies
of the Bush and now Obama Presidencies, and the Blair and Cameron
governments in Britain.
So,
ultimately, all roads lead back to what we’ve been discussing
throughout the entire evening broadcast tonight; namely, as the former
head of the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], Gen. Mike Flynn, told
al-Jazeera, and has subsequently repeated in interviews with American
and Russian media: the President, the administration were warned that
the actions that the United States was taking in places such as
Benghazi, was fueling the growth of jihadist organizations. And it was
not an oversight, or that the warnings were ignored, as General Flynn
said, it was in pursuit of the ongoing current policy that they made a
willful decision to keep doing what they were doing, having been fully
informed that this was fueling the growth of not just al-Qaeda. But back
in 2012, DIA was already looking at the prospects of the creation of a
jihadist caliphate in the area on the territory of parts of Iraq and
Syria.
White House/Pete Souza
President Obama with one of his key advisors on choosing drone
victims, CIA Director John Brennan. This photo from Dec. 2012 shows
Brennan, then Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, briefing
Obama on the Sandy Hook shootings.
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So,
in other words, the [former] head of the DIA has said openly and
publicly President Obama willfully pursued a policy that created ISIS.
So, let me ask you, if—and we’re not there yet by any means—but if it
turns out that this was a bomb; if it turns out that the Islamic State
was involved in it, then let’s go higher up the political and logistical
chain of command. Are we not talking about the consequences of Bush and
Obama administration policies and certainly the policies of the
parallel British government?
So,
that’s another dimension of what I want you to think about this
evening. And I hope that you’ve been disturbed enough by what we’ve
discussed tonight that you’ll lose a bit of sleep and think about what’s
required to end the tyranny of pragmatism. To end the tyranny of
basically “go along to get along;” and what it will take to actually
solve these crises before they bring the entire trans-Atlantic region
down, or may ultimately lead to thermonuclear annihilation.
Ogden:
So, as I said at the outset of this broadcast, the evidence has
continued to accumulate. The case against Obama has now begun to
snowball; the avalanche is ready to begin. It is now incumbent on those
who are in responsible positions of leadership to take the legal and
Constitutional actions which must be taken to protect the American
people and to protect the people of the entire world from the deadly
consequences of the continuation of the policies of the Obama
Presidency.
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