MR. ROMENS: This is my first tack at something like this. My name is Elmo Romens. I was born on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, moved to Iowa from Wisconsin, operated a meat business for about 25 years. I went through in that business (inaudible) which the farmers are going through today, but I would like to make a presentation (inaudible).

If anyone tells you that a rising Dow Jones stock market index proves that the U.S. economy is growing, your reply ought to be: "Oh, you mean that the cancer is growing. Tell me, Doctor, how is the patient doing?"

The cancer is the financial bubble. The patient is the real economy which includes agriculture, industry and infrastructure. It is time to tell the truth. There is no economic recovery.

To quote from Schiller Institute founder and Democratic Party Presidential Precandidate Lyndon LaRouche in a recent release, The Economic I.Q. Test: "Look at the family farms which used to feed us. Look at the towns, where former productive industries have long vanished under the impact of Carter's deregulating of transportation, and all other disastrous structural reforms."

All of these and related fiscal-economic considerations touch evidence plainly within the reach of our sense perceptions. For more than 90 percent of our U.S. population, the conditions of life and levels of productivity become worse, and yet, many of the people having these sense perceptions speak of the growth of the U.S. economy. Such people are like a shopper who says, "I don't worry about the farmer. I get my milk from the supermarket." They have literally left their senses behind. For them, the important thing is money.

This is the cause of the crisis in the U.S. agriculture which is unparalleled in the postwar period, since the introduction of modern mechanized farming. Millions of family farmers have been driven off their land over the last 20 to 30 years by the crushing burden of mountains of debt and criminally low prices, often at 50 percent or more below the parity price. This is a disaster for our nation and for the world, which is suffering from a genocidal global food shortage.

Anyone who talks of so-called overproduction of food, and here I include the bureaucracy of the WTO, at a time when there are almost 900 million people going hungry around the world is at best an ignorant fool, and in many cases a conscious genocidalist.

The key point I make is that disaster is both deliberate and entirely unnecessary, but to be reversed must be, and I emphasize, must be understood in the context of the current terminal world financial crisis.

Mr. LaRouche's pamphlet goes on to explain how the conscious policies of institutions such as the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Trade Organization function to loot real wealth and the remaining real producers in our factories and family farms on behalf of the British oligarchic and Wall Street financial interests.

MR. BLOUIN: You're 30 seconds beyond, so take about 10 to 15 to wrap it up.

MR. ROMENS: I'd like to just read what I got July 9th. The really smart crowd operating from behind the curtains is longer trying to save the present world financial systems. They put the dying system on a financial and political life support system just to keep it alive long enough to repair it, bury it in ways which various groups of high-level insiders think might be to their long-term advantage. Don't ask who is going to end up holding the money after the system crashes. Instead, ask yourself who is going to have the political power to create money after the present world monetary and financial systems evaporates.