Subject: Re: Bo Gritz and Friendly Fascists

From: [email-masked] (Steve Crocker)
Date: 19 Sep 1992 05:31:09 GMT

[email-masked] writes:

>In article <[email-masked]>, 
>[email-masked] (Steve Crocker) writes:

[rant from me claiming Chip Berlet's criticism of Gritz lacked 
substance and employed "guilt by association" deleted]

>        What concerns me is the almost total lack of knowledge among
>those on this network about Bo Gritz or any other third party candidate
>who might have constructive or at least controversial ideas to offer
>at election time.  Only Perot with his billions to play the game has
>received any significant amount of press.

Fortunately, here on the Net we have, for the time being at least,
an environment where the views of candidates such as Gritz, Larouche, 
Agran, Daniels, Fulani, and others blacked out of the mainstream media
can be heard and actively discussed. We need to spread this openness,
whether using this technology or some other, throughout society.

>        I am very limited as to my knowledge of Gritz but was impressed
>by his courage in rescuing what was left of the Randy Weaver family from
>almost certain destruction at the hands of our own government...and at
>significant personal risk to himself.  I was not impressed by the way
>the media, at least in this area, reported the story.  Some reports did
>not mention his name and simply referred to him as a Vietnam veteran.
>If his name was mentioned, nothing was said of his third party candidacy.
>It was as if there was a news blackout against him.  

I was very impressed by some of the information he has uncovered 
relating the POW situation to CIA heroin traffic in Southeast Asia.
I have some files on this which I will try to post soon.

>        I know nothing of the validity of his supposed statement that
>control of the Fed was in the hands of certain Jewish families.  I do
>feel, however, that the Fed is tightly controlled by those with real
>financial clout and as an institution of highly questionable value.  I
>don't consider being at odds with the Fed an extreme 'right-wing' view,
>whatever that means.  I recently received a letter from Sen. Lloyd
>Bentsen who mentioned a bill pending before the House of Representatives
>that proposed an audit of the Fed (the Fed has not been audited since
>its inception in 1913...some banking practice, huh?) and Bentsen went
>on to say that if a similar bill was introduced in the Senate that he
>would give it careful consideration.  

The Fed has been a favorite target of conspiracy theorists over the
years precisely because it wields great power, does so in ways the
average person does not understand, is not democratically accountable,
and the silence on these matters in the mainstream media has been 
deafening. That many of these theories may shade off into nonsense 
around the edges should not detract from their valid insights.

>        I personally suspect we need to go further and abolish the Fed
>which appears to be a serious problem in our bankrupt economy and return
>to the economic thinking of Jefferson and Madison (Jefferson liquidated
>the Second Bank of the United States, the Fed of his day).  If Gritz
>is in favor of doing that, it's a point in his favor as far as I am
>concerned.

Well, I have to disagree here. I like the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, 
who proposes not to abolish the central bank, but to use its great
power for good rather than evil. Whether this would be done by taking
over the existing Fed, or abolishing it and replacing it with some
other form of central bank is a tactical question. The central issue
is not whether to have a central bank, but what policies it should 
follow. LaRouche proposes to cause the central bank to issue massive
amounts of new credit, at low interest rates (I think 2-4 %) and
target that credit preferentially toward investment in infrastructure,
high technology energy development, high tech capital goods, and a 
series of "great projects" in areas such as water resource development,
transportation infrastructure, etc. In fact, here is the proposal in 
his own words, excerpted from his TV broadcast of 3/08/92.

<excerpted from a post on alt.activism by [email-masked]
(John Covici) >

LAROUCHE: The federal government will issue over $600
billion in low-cost credit to state and federal authorities for
infrastructural public works. This will create 3 million jobs in
the public sector, and also an additional 3 million jobs among
vendors to the government, in the private sector. 
   These combined six million new jobs will be devoted to
rebuilding five vital components of America's industrial
infrastructure. 
   First, the creation of a water management system capable of
insuring a sufficient supply of fresh water into the 21st
century. 
   Second, the rebuilding of our transportation grid,
especially our rail system, and development of roads and ports. 
   Third, the construction of the energy grid needed to power
an industrial recovery. 
   In addition to these three areas of ``hard'' infrastructure,
I will develop two vital areas of so-called soft infrastructure,
which are of equal importance. 
   The fourth of the five, therefore, is the creation of a
new health care infrastructure which is consistent with the
already-established, but now much neglected, requirements of the
Hill-Burton Act of 1946. 
   Fifth, we shall develop educational facilities suitable for
the tasks of the rising productivity in the coming century. 
   Federal investment in these five areas of infrastrucutre
will immediately halt the current depression collapse--as nothing
less will do. But, on top of these measures, and in order to
promote continued growth and increase in industrial productivity,
we will need a sixth area of development. We will need a science
driver, some great national mission, like the Kennedy Apollo
program, whose goals will be the kind of scientific breakthroughs
which will transform our productive, technological base. 

<end excerpt>

(This is not his entire program - but it is representative and
typical)

Now some will say, well this is awesome power. How do we know 
LaRouche or some future president won't abuse it and become a 
tyrant. As far as LaRouche goes, the answer is that he is 
campaigning for these programs explicitly in a democratic way.
If, against all odds, he were ever to be in a position to
impliment such a program it would only be because he had sold 
the program to enough citizen-activists, who in turn had sold it
to enough voters, to cause him or a surrogate to be elected on
such a program. The people would know EXACTLY what policies they
were voting for and the election victory of LaRouche or an
associate would be a mandate for such a policy.

Whether such power would then be abused by a subsequent president,
one answer is that is is abused already by the faceless 
bureaucratics who control the Fed presently. Public abuse of power
by an elected official who must face the voters is infinitely 
easier to deal with. Beyond that, there would surely be institutional
safeguards, such as the involvement of COngress, etc. But ultimately,
the only guarantee against the abuse of ANY government power is 
citizen vigilance. If people woke up for a few years, elected 
LaRouche, and then weht back to sleep while his successor became an
economic dictator, we would have only ourselves to blame. 

The question of abolishing or reorienting the Fed is one of the
philosophy of power. Populists tend to want to destroy power
because they do not conceive of it as being under their control.
The have a perpetual victim image of the "little me" who is 
always being pushed around by the big guys. I think a more 
appropriate relation to power is to see it as both necessary and
good, and to devise ways in which we can all share in the 
responsibility for exercising power and making wise decisions
about the future direction of our society. 

I guess part of the point is that any government strong enough
to protect our rights will also be strong enough to violate them.
Which of these occurs in practice is up to us as citizens.

-Steve

---

From: [email-masked] (Steve Crocker)
Date: 21 Sep 1992 01:18:06 GMT

[email-masked] writes:
 
>[Steve Crocker writes]

>> Well, I don't think there's NECESSARILY a problem with the exponential
>> growth inherent in interest. It depends on what the money is invested 
>> in. If you invest in PAPER (new debt to roll over old debt, other more
>> exotic instruments, etc.) then there is a serious problem. The interest
>> creates an exponentially expanding CLAIM on wealth which is not matched
>> by a corresponding PRODUCTION of wealth. In such a situation, the attempt
>> to preserve the perogatives of creditors inevitably leads to a financial
>> crisis. 

>The problem can be [oversimplified] looked at this way:  A bank, private
>or national, creates money when it makes a loan.  The value of the loan
>then becomes an asset for the bank.  But the interest to repay the loan
>is not created.  We are not playing a zero-sum game.  Somebody loses
>when the bankers (with premeditation on an international basis) call the
>notes every fifty years.  Stated another way, if I had the only ten dollars
>in the world and loaned it to you at ten percent interest, where are you
>going to get the dollar for interest repayment?  Kondratieff, a Soviet

I think this analysis confuses the roles of money and wealth. In the most
primitive case, I will employ your $10 to purchase seeds and grow crops.
At harvest, I can simply give you back $11 dollars worth of wheat. In
actual practice, the government will print more dollars and loan them 
out, or private banks may create money via the "fractional reserve"
principle. In either case, the money eventually reaches the hands of 
someone who will buy my wheat and hopefully pay me more than $11, out
of which I will repay you. The point here is that monetary relationships 
should reflect the physical processes of wealth creation, rather than
subordinating those processes to the necessities of existing financial
structures.

>economist sent to Siberia by Stalin for entertaining capitalistic ideas,
>noted the 50/60 year cycle which is called the Kondratieff Long Wave.
>But what drives this long wave if it is not the accumulation of debt
>through interest buildup.  What is it that drives inflation but this
>same force (presumptive??), and not Milton Friedman's definition that
>inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods.  There is
>more money around than ever.  But who has it?  The trickle down has
>stopped.  Something can be done about this at a Federal level although
>regulation of private banking is another matter and a pandora's I
>had just as soon not open in this discussion. 

I'm not familiar with Kondratieff's work, so I can't comment too 
much here. I just want to say that financial relationships will
have different economic implications, depending on the physical
conditions of production. Robert Heinlein appears to have been
approaching this principle when he said (paraaphrased) We may
see the $10 hamburger, or even the $50 hamburger, but in the 
long run it won't matter AS LONG AS THERE'S PLENTY OF HAMBURGER.
(emphasis mine). Larouche places great emphasis on the need to
continually advance the level of technology embodied in capital
goods and infrastructure (and in the skill levels of society
generally). I think as long as your monetary arrangements are 
consistent with doing this, your economy will run physically
ok. When technology stagnates and productivity lags, at that 
point the exp[anding claims on wealth due to interest become
a problem, and research, plant expansion, and worker living
standards become canabalized to service the debt. "The wheels
of progress begin to run backwards". And people get ground up
in the gears.

>One more note:  A plot of the federal debt shows an interesting exponential
>and supports the idea of the impossibility of repaying this debt with
>anything akin to current monetary policy.

>> But how do we get there from here? We are presently in a fairly advanced 
>> stage of the financial crisis. Is there an alternative to fascist 
>> austerity? LaRouche has come up with some rather ingenious monetary 
>> reorganization schemes in the past, drawing heavily on Alexander
>> Hamilton's policy of monetizing the debt of the early republic. I
>> don't understand all the technical details, but the concept as I 
>> understand it is that you do something like putting the whole economy 
>> through a bankruptcy reorganization. (He has proposed to do this on
>> an international scale as well, as regards third world debt, etc.)
>> This involves, in part, issuing new credit in the form of low-interest
>> gold-denominated bonds (i.e. the face value of the bond is pegged to 
>> the price of gold). These bonds would be used both to buy up the old
>> debt as a part of a general debt reorganization as well as for investment
>> in making the various debtor economies productive. 

>Aha. Mention of Alexander Hamilton.  Parts of this discussion are as 
>old as the Republic itself.  Hamilton supporters wanted a central bank
>and their thinking was opposed by Jefferson, Madison and later Jackson.
>Jackson, in his farewell address to Congress warned of the perils of
>central banking.  Wilson would have done well to have listened.

LaRouche is a great admirer of Hamilton, and his organization has 
reprinted Hamilton's "Four Reports" (Report on... The Bank,  On Money
on Manufactures, and I forget the fourth). Interestingly enough, an
economic history of Japan, written by a Japanese scholar, credits
Hamilton's ideas and the example of the early U.S. debt reorganization
as being the inspiration for the Japanese economic expansion in the late
1800's during the Meiji restoration. Apparently, no less a figure than
ex-President Grant served as an economic advisor to Japan, and is quoted
as warning them against becoming entangled in foreign indebtedness. 

>You mention that you feel LaRouche was sent to prison for his ideas on
>monetary policy. [Forgive me for accidentally editing out your precise
>statement].  I don't doubt this at all.  Not many things are as 
>important to politicians as monetary policy and he was proposing drastic
>changes [and improvements].  Although perhaps he stood little chance of
>ever being elected to high office he was serving an educational purpose
>in letting the public know that something was seriously wrong...irregardless
>of the accuracy or error of his ideas on specific issues.  I suspect
>as more information is made available on the ethics of those who have been
>running the government is made available, he will be cast more in a
>martyr role than as a villain.

It hit me with somewhat of a shock once when I was reading one of 
LaRouche's books on economics, and in the middle of some hard to
digest technical discussion was this beautifully simple and profound
statement. "Whoever controls the currency rules." Think on the 
implications of THAT for a while, and it is not surprising at all
that the man who proposes that sovereign nations around the world 
take that power into their own hands is sitting in a prison cell.

-Steve
P.S. this will probably be my last post here for 3-4 days, as I'm
about to leave town until late thursday night.