"We're headed for a global monetary collapse," said the LaRouche supporter on the streetcorner. "I don't know how aware of that you are."

"Monetary collapse?"

"Yeah, because we're not producing anymore. We're producing almost nothing."

"Who's 'we'?"

"The United States. It used to be, like in the 1940s, we were the biggest producer in the world. Like with. . . steel. And stuff. But now we've become a completely consuming economy."

Interested to see how the US loss of production was going to lead to a global monetary collapse, I kept my maw shut and listened to hear what gambits might come.

The LaRouchian produced a pamphlet and pointed to a graph which showed production veering sharply south and "financial aggregates" (stocks and bonds, she explained) becoming slowly outstripped by "monetary aggregates" ("They're just putting more money into the system, but since we're headed toward a collapse, it doesn't matter," she would say later). The graph was not the sort where observations are submitted graphically but rather the kind where smooth curves are sketched to illustrate an idea. All three curves were exploding at exponential-looking rates. The physical production was declining at such a rate, but where this relentless disappearance of productivity had been seen I didn't find out ("This is an idealized form. It is not the actual statistics, but I'll show you the actual ones later" reads the text, a speech by LaRouche).

"That's why Greenspan keeps lowering the interest rates," she was saying, "Becauase he wants to suck more blood out of the American people. He knows we're headed for a collapse"—presumably he's been reading the LaRouche pamphlet with its idealized forms—"and he just wants to get people to spend more before the collapse happens." After this followed some handwaving about how, during the Great Depression, you saw soup lines forming on the streets and knew there was a depression on, but these days you don't see that because people are using their credit cards. Greenspan wants us all to be deep in debt, she argued, and that's why he's lowering the interest rates: to sweeten the deal. I pointed out that lower interest rates meant that people could start an enterprise (like a coffee shop, a theatre company, or a porn palace) and give up less of their take to the banking establishment: more enterprises could then be feasibly undertaken. She agreed with that but countered that if we were headed toward total monetary collapse, we wouldn't be able to pay off our debts. I didn't ask her why Greenspan would want there to be more bad debts in the world.

"We have a youth movement that's changing the face of politics," she got around to saying.

"Oh. What are you doing to change it?" I naively sputtered.

"Well, for one thing we've printed up a million of these things" (she indicated the pamphlet with the specious graphs) "So everyone in Washington has seen it, basically."

"Isn't that pretty much politics as usual? Printing up pamphlets and distributing them?"

"No! Because we're reporting this stuff six months ahead of the major media."

(What stuff? The idealized forms, and the coming collapse, of course.)

"Oh, so the youth movement is doing some investigative reporting!"

"No but, like, we have reporters that work for us."

On my left a man was forfeiting his name and phone number for the privilege of being informed when the idealized forms changed and on my right a younger guy was asking what he could do to help.

"It's a really strong movement. We have seventeen people in Seattle and sixty in California." I never found out how the youth movement was changing the face of politics