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October 6, 2009 (LPAC)-- While the U.S. health infrastructure is disintegrating, and there have been waves of layoffs and closings of nursing homes as a result of chronic underpayment by Medicaid and Medicare, Lyndon LaRouche uttered the following statement about the real nature and cause of what some people would mistakenly treat as "current events":

"The way you have to look at these things, is that the employment patterns changed since World War II in the United States. You had a bread-winner, the head of household who was generally the breadwinner, with occasionally some supplementary income from other members of the family. But then the basic long-term care was generally placed back into the family, or the neighborhood, by community organizations in a neighborhood, where you put the older folks who were a little more crippled, and you put them so you could care for them during the day, just like they did for the kiddos. And they would be cared for while poppa was at work, and momma was doing something else. Or they would take turns in caring for people.

"Now we've changed the social standard," LaRouche explained. "We went to all-adult members of the household, breeding children but not raising them. And together with that, the long-term care went, which was integral to the community and the household. With the change, you didn't have the family as a functioning unit. The family became sort of a sleeping place, and one meal a day, or something, at the family household. So there's no room for grandpa or grandma.

"So this is a pattern. The pattern is essentially that, at the end of World War II, instead of using the capacity we had built up, using the full-family involvement in the war effort, instead of going back and using the high tech capability, instead of running three shifts or four shifts—where a guy would run two shifts, work overtime like hell—you cut that back. But what we cut back was not the low-tech stuff, which was the periphery of the war effort; we cut back on the high technology stuff.

"This was the change from a credit system to a monetary system, which came in with Truman almost immediately. So therefore we did not develop the productive powers of labor. We cut back on everything, and just went to the low-grade stuff. So we downgraded the productivity of the population.

"So it's this pattern, it's a social change which was introduced together with Truman, in the so-called right-wing reaction against Roosevelt in the closing months of the war and beyond. That's what's happened.

"For example, you go back to 1966-67. In 1966-67 we levelled out, or zeroed out, or went below zero, on net investment in basic economic infrastructure. Now, since the basic economic infrastructure would have a 25-50 year life span in it, or even longer, therefore the effect of this cutback did not show up as acute, until the maintenance of this infrastructure began to wear out, around now. But it had already happened. In other words, the potential had declined.

"So when you try to take your cost per year analysis, and do it by an accounting standpoint, the accounting standpoint covers up all the truth about the situation. So we've been going in this direction since 1966-67, and it was a development which was set into motion by essentially the assassination of Kennedy and the coordinate effect of the launching of the Vietnam War. And that's how it happened.

"So we're now in that situation and, in talking about reforms to deal with these atrocities, we're not talking about the reform that's required. The required reform is exactly in the opposite direction of what we've done. We've got people who are in jobs, who produce nothing—green jobs. We should probably cancel most green jobs; let them share the unemployment, in order to create employment in things which are productive.

"So what you're seeing now," LaRouche said, "is a Malthusian process which is coming to the acutely Malthusian phase, right now with this crisis. But that picture has to be seen: not just, 'this is a bad thing, now.' This is a culmination."