Economist, statesman, and 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Stuart K. Lewis/EIRNS

A 25-Year Solution to the Energy Crisis

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

From the Spring 2001 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology (partial text).

The first step which must be taken, is to put the entire, formerly regulated sections of our nation’s energy industry under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This does not necessarily mean putting each entity into bankruptcy; it means putting some entities under Chapter 11 protection immediately, but it also means putting the protective umbrella of Federal and state government threat to provide such protection to any relevant entity, within the domain of maintaining national and regional energy security.

As a leading feature of that use of Chapter 11 methods, bankruptcy reorganization must be conducted to further the aims of immediate reinstitution of former types of Federal and state regulation of the generation, and distribution of the nation’s energy supplies, that at prices sustainable by businesses and typical households, and consistent with pre-2000 trends in such prices.

The difficulty in taking those urgently needed forms of corrective action, is not only that deregulation has become, like cocaine, a habit; but that the financial interests associated most closely with the campaign for the election of the present administration, represent chiefly a Southern Strategy-based complex of financial interests which are deeply committed to defending the revenues from activities which are choking California’s economy to death at this moment.

If all among those interdependent courses of action are not taken, no real solution to the presently skyrocketting crisis is possible. In that case, the Bush Administration would come to be seen soon as more or less doomed from the outset, hung, so to speak, by the rope which supported its election.

The Franklin Roosevelt precedent is to be understood to be applicable to this case. The mission is to defend national economic security, as the principle of promotion of the general welfare and national security of all of the population and its posterity defines the meaning of law under our Federal Constitution, absolutely contrary to the errant opinion of some text-offenders among the U.S. Supreme Court justices.

The prices and assured, regulated flow of the stream of electrical and related supplies, must be immediately re-regulated by the standard of pre-1977 precedents. This regulation should be Federal, insofar as interstate commerce or national-security requires, and shall be otherwise left to the states, but with Federal support and guidelines, as needed for coordination among the states.

Presently strong official and related objections to such policies, should not be considered as tolerable excuses for failing take such actions. When the perceived pain is sufficiently acute, as will soon be clear, those objectors who are still capable of rational behavior, will feel themselves under the greatest pressures to become less stubborn in opposing the restoring of regulation. The nation’s electorate will demand such changes, and they will be right in demanding that such changes be made promptly, now, before the present crisis becomes impossible to manage under our Constitutional form of government.

These emergency measures of re-regulation must be complemented by a new matrix of combined, short-term, medium- term, and long-term national energy policy. . . .