From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Deeper Implications of Hurricane Andrew
Date: 28 Aug 92 7:29:32 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

   Independent Presidential Candidate 
   Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. 
   August 25 
   
   Actuality 

   Some Observations of Reports On the Progress of Hurricane
Andrew and the Deeper Implications 

   This is presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche speaking, and
I think it worthwhile to share with you some observations which
I've made as of Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 25, respecting the
progress of Hurricane Andrew. 
   What I saw on the television screen, from news reports,
including reports of a Federal Emergency Management Agency press
conference on this subject in Washington, D.C., is something I
think I should share with you. 
   What I have seen is a devastation from these aerial views
and other views of regions of Dade County and so forth in
Florida, from the previous progress of this hurricane, which is
awesome. The figure put upon it by the news media is {$15 billion
damage.} I translate that into what I see in the pictures on the
television screen of these people who have lost everything. And I
look at, in a sense, how pitiful the picture is. 
   I see mobile home types of housing and similar types of
housing, shredded like matchsticks; and I look at the faces of
people--so many of them senior citizens my age or slightly
younger or older--and I know that this is all they had, or
essentially {all they had.} These few pitiful sticks were all
they had. And I see it obliterated--tract after
tract--obliterated, virtually, by the 150-mile (or something in
that order) winds. 
   And I look on the map, across the Gulf of Mexico, and I see
this storm headed toward my friends in Louisiana and Texas, or
parts of Texas. My concern for them is obvious as I look. And
think of what's going to happen there. I know a little bit of the
area; I know what the devastation of hurricane winds of up to 150
miles an hour will mean in that area, in terms of flooding and
other kinds of destruction. I remember Hurricane Camille, I
remember Hurricane Betsy and so forth. And there, people with
their few pitiful possessions, if they're not killed or face a
tragic loss, will be shredded by winds. And what was maybe $15
billion damage reported in Florida, will probably aggregate to
about $50 billion of damage--just in property damage and
equivalent--to people, most of whom will lose almost everything.
Their few pitiful possessions and their matchstick dwellings lost
in this business--$50 billion worth of damage, perhaps, in the
course of a few days, to our nation. That's about one-tenth of
the estimated Federal budget deficit for the current fiscal year.
It's a lot of money. 

            - Washington's Response Is Doubletalk -

   And I know Washington: It won't be spent. There's not $50
billion in relief coming to these people who have lost almost
everything or a great part of it in the path of the storm. It
just isn't there. And the government will {pretend} to meet the
problem with $50 billion, but they won't help with $50 billion;
they'll help with loans on some of it, to some people who are
creditworthy, and leave it to others to scratch up what they
can--a tiny fraction of the damage will actually be covered by
relief programs. 
   And this is very clear in my mind, as I watch the Federal
Emergency Management Agency press conference. I know this agency,
and know government agencies generally. I listen to this
doubletalk--oh, I suppose it's sincere in some way, but
effectively, respecting the problem being addressed, it's
doubletalk. We're taking the few shards of remaining relief
capability from various parts of the country, and we're throwing
it in, hither and yon. A little war surplus from supplies from
Desert Storm and so forth, we're throwing that in as a sop to the
whole problem. Much ado about nothing. I suppose some people will
get some help which they desperately need from these efforts. But
they're {pitifully inadequate as against the magnitude of the
problem.} 

                The Deeper Level of the Problem:
            25 Years of U.S. Postindustrial Economy

   Then I think about this thing on a deeper level. Why do
people have only such pitiful things? I'm not going to deprecate
what they had, it was all they had, and I've never had any money,
never had anything to speak of myself, especially over the past
20-30 years. And therefore, there's a certain dignity in what
they had. But they had so little and it was so vulnerable, so
easily blown away. 
   Why is that the case with our nation? We're supposedly this
great, rich powerful nation. I know about technology, I know
about manufacturing, I know what {could have been done} in the
past 25 years, with the kinds of technology we were beginning to
spin off, with the aerospace programs--before they were cut off
over 25 years ago, when the guns that shot down President Kennedy
were aimed implicitly at the head of Johnson and he capitulated
to the thing called the ``Great Society,'' and we've been going
downhill ever since. 
   {People didn't have to live that poorly.} They didn't have
to have houses that were that vulnerable to that kind of
windstorm. They didn't have to be so helpless in the wake of that
storm and its onset. The people in Louisiana didn't have to be so
helpless. We could have done things; we could have had greater
mastery over our environment. We could have had an economy which
is capable of producing. We didn't have to destroy our industry.
We didn't have to destroy our agriculture. We didn't have to
destroy our infrastructure. We didn't have to bleed our
government down to the point that the emergency relief
capabilities are a pitiful drop in the bucket against the
magnitude of a storm of this type. That didn't have to happen. 
   And then people will go out with hand-wringing exercises in
public. All the politicians, saying, oh, how much we're trying to
do, we have so little, but we're trying to do so much to help
these poor people, our fellow citizens who have been victimized
by this storm. 
   Doubletalk! Are they willing to learn the lesson, that our
people in the future must never be left as vulnerable as they
were in this case? Never have to live in such poor conditions in
the next generation as they came to in this? And that our
government never had to be so poor, that we had to doubletalk our
way around the fact that we didn't have adequate resources in the
budget on the state and local level to meet the catastrophe
represented by a storm or something else similar, such as this
one? 

                     - The Bigger Picture -

   And what I saw, and what I thought, in watching these
reports on this storm--I thought about such those things. I
thought about the bigger picture. And I wish you would, too.
Let's get rid of the kind of policy thinking which has brought us
to this low pass. Let's get rid of the kind of policy thinking
which was pointed at the head of Johnson like the guns that shot
down Kennedy, that began to turn us down with this
post-industrial society nonsense that has ruined us over the past
25-odd years. Let's get rid of the nonsense which has come out of
the mouths of every presidential candidate nominated by either
the Republican or Democratic Party since; by Nixon, by Ford, by
Carter above all, by the Reagan people, especially by the Bush
people, by Carter-Mondale in 1980, by Mondale in 1984, by Dukakis
in 1988. And above all, by that silly Clinton and Gore of 1992. 
   Are you going to be complicit in casting your vote for
either set of those jokers and to perpetuate the kind of policy
that has brought us to this mess, which is so disgusting and so
pitiful today? The pitiable character of our nation--so clearly
exposed in my view, by the sights of the progress of Hurricane
Andrew. 
   Thank you. 



----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com

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