Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 46, Number 12, March 29, 2019

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 46, Number 12, March 29, 2019

- EDITORIAL Mueller Releases Report: Now, Drive a Stake Through the Heart of the British Empire by Barbara Boyd

- I. The Battle for Europe

- Italy’s Cooperation with the New Silk Road Shows Europe the Way to the Future by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Italy Joins Belt and Road Initiative, Shows Path to the West by Claudio Celani

- Germany at a Crossroads Over the Silk Road by Rainer Apel

- II. Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche

- OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche! by Liliana Gorini

- EXONERATE LAROUCHE Thank You Very Much, Mr. LaRouche, for All that You Represent for All Mankind by Dennis Small

- III. Americas Report

- Severe Flooding Hits U.S. Farm Belt, Atop Economic Crisis by Marcia Merry Baker

- TELESUR INTERVIEW: DENNIS SMALL The Significance of Trump’s North Korea Diplomacy for the Venezuela Crisis

- The LaRouche Plan to ‘Hermetically Seal’ the Border Against Drug-Traffic by Dennis Small

- IV. The Prometheus of Our Day

- THE ‘SECRET OF FIRE’: Beyond Sense Perceptions by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (July 31, 2012)

Crush the British Empire, Exonerate This Man

Editor-in-Chief and Founder:

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editorial Board: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. , Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert, Gerald Rose, Dennis Small, William Wertz

Co-Editors: Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 46, Number 12, March 29, 2019

Cover This Week

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon H. LaRouche 1922-2019

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CRUSH THE BRITISH EMPIRE,

EXONERATE THIS MAN

3 EDITORIAL

Mueller Releases Report: Now, Drive a Stake Through the Heart of the British Empire

by Barbara Boyd

I. THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE

10 Italy’s Cooperation with the New Silk Road Shows Europe the Way to the Future

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

13 Italy Joins Belt and Road Initiative,

Shows Path to the West

by Claudio Celani

18 Germany at a Crossroads Over the Silk Road

by Rainer Apel

II. EXONERATE LYNDON LAROUCHE

21 OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP

Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche!

by Liliana Gorini

23 EXONERATE LAROUCHE

Thank You Very Much, Mr. LaRouche,

for All that You Represent for All Mankind

by Dennis Small

III. AMERICAS REPORT

32 Severe Flooding Hits U.S. Farm Belt, Atop Economic Crisis

by Marcia Merry Baker

36 TELESUR INTERVIEW: DENNIS SMALL

The Significance of Trump’s North Korea Diplomacy for the Venezuela Crisis

42 The LaRouche Plan to ‘Hermetically Seal’ the Border Against Drug-Traffic

by Dennis Small

IV. THE PROMETHEUS OF OUR DAY

49 THE ‘SECRET OF FIRE’:

Beyond Sense Perceptions

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

July 31, 2012

EDITORIAL

Mueller Releases Report:

Now, Drive a Stake Through the Heart of the British Empire

by Barbara Boyd

March 24—Robert Mueller delivered his long-awaited report to Attorney General William Barr on Friday, March 22. On Sunday evening, March 24, Attorney General Barr sent a letter to the leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, outlining Mueller’s principal conclusions. Mueller, despite a wide-ranging and completely politically motivated investigation, found that there was no conspiracy or collusion between any individual associated with the Trump Campaign and alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 Presidential election. That conclusion, despite its fabricated and dangerous premise about Russian interference in the 2016 election, is stunning: It is a complete exoneration of President Trump and his campaign, from a completely hostile prosecutor, concerning the wild and outrageous British and Obama intelligence agency claim that the President was under the thumb of Vladimir Putin.

True to Robert Mueller’s pedigree, however, he refused to exonerate the President from “obstruction of justice,” while not charging him with the crime. He left the decision on obstruction up to Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who promptly announced that what Mueller presented them with as evidence of obstruction (mostly comprising the President’s public actions and statements) does not constitute obstruction of justice, because the President lacked the corrupt intent necessary for the charge. In exonerating the President, Barr and Rosenstein consulted with senior DOJ career officials in rejecting Mueller’s “maybe, maybe not” approach.

Thus, the adults in the room—as opposed to the politically unhinged and hostile Special Counsel—spoke.

The President, upon reviewing the Barr letter, spoke the truth: “this was an illegal takedown that failed,” and otherwise noted the enormous damage done by this affair to the country and the human beings caught up in Robert Mueller’s inquisition. Lawyer and commentator Alan Dershowitz blasted Mueller’s non-decision on obstruction as a replica of what then FBI Director James Comey did with Hillary Clinton. Lawyer and talk show host Mark Levin angrily noted that Mueller never had a case for obstruction of justice and knew that he did not have one. Otherwise, he would have pursued the President’s testimony and fought for it.

Witch Hunt Flops

At the start of our efforts to oppose the coup which sought to destroy a President and our Constitution, we released the report, “Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him.” He clearly tried to take the President out. The problem is that no crime was committed and Mueller, despite trying mightily, could not magically create evidence where none existed. A significant portion of the American people came to agree with the President, that Robert Mueller was engaged in a witch hunt.

Contrary to the claptrap about Mueller’s fortitude and honor, which is repeated over and over again here in Washington like a childish nursery rhyme, it really is a question of which horrendous real or fictional obsessed character you want to compare him to: perhaps the Inquisition’s Torquemada, Melville’s Captain Ahab in the novel, Moby Dick—take your pick. In leaving to others the decision on charges against Trump on obstruction of justice, he acted like the weeny he really is, in order to open a small crack that the Democrats and their media friends could exploit another day, rather than being run out of town on rails, right now.

As writer Matt Taibbi put it, Russiagate was the WMD of this generation of journalists, a gigantic lie with devastating consequences for the country and the world. Mueller’s appointment was born of corruption at the top levels of the DOJ and FBI where, after talk about wearing wires to set up the President and fomenting cabinet factions in support of using the 25th Amendment against him, an endless Special Counsel investigation starring Robert Mueller seemed a sounder path to impeachment.

It was all generated by a request from British intelligence to unleash the full power of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies against a presidential candidate, and then, an incoming President, using a crappy, amateurish, and obviously fabricated dossier produced by British spy Christopher Steele and promoted by the Clinton Campaign and Barack Obama’s intelligence, foreign policy, and defense establishments. As we have reported before, this is the largest political scandal in American history. The Constitution itself is at stake. Mueller’s May 2017 appointment was revenge for the firing of James Comey, immediately allowing a coverup of the criminal actions of officials complicit in the coup, at the State Department, the FBI, DOJ, and CIA. In the process, the crimes of the actual foreign intervenors into the 2016 election, the British, and to a far lesser extent, the Ukrainians, were also supposed to be buried.

The deflation of the Democratic Party and the media hacks who have driven the coup against President Trump has, since Friday, been audible and smelly, like a balloon of sulfurous gas having finally been pricked. Predictably, they have begun a new round of attempts to hype the results and cover up the evil at play here. Thirty-four individuals indicted, 700 crimes, is the talking point that has emerged from Democratic Party candidates and the news media over the weekend, in a full-throated defense of Robert Mueller’s inquisition. To that can be added Sunday’s leading refrain from Congressman Jerrold Nadler, which seems to go something like this: “Saint Bob [Mueller] didn’t decide about obstruction, and the evil Trump disciple William Barr stepped in and is attempting to cover up for the evil President. We demand to have testimony from Robert Mueller.”

They are desperate losers facing an American people likely to say: “Stuff it—your time just ran out.” Our job is to make that happen.

Time for Real Justice

Justice now requires criminally investigating and jailing the perpetrators of the coup and ending all the actions against Donald Trump immediately, including the seditious activity now underway in the Southern District of New York, by that state’s insipid Attorney General and the Manhattan District Attorney, and by Democratic members of Congress led by Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, and Jerrold Nadler.

Left to right: official photo, official photo, Ralph Alswang

Left to right: Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Rep. Adam Schiff, Sen. Chuck Schumer

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Our Constitution specifically rejected the British Star Chamber as the means of settling political differences. Instead, our founders said we should settle them at the ballot box. The American people already knew about most of Donald Trump’s alleged sins when they voted for him in 2016. They voted for him anyway, because they wanted him to totally and irrevocably destroy the poisonous system imposed on them by two Bush presidencies and Barack Obama. Now, the Democrats propose to use the Congress to conduct opposition research for their 2020 Presidential campaign, a highly corrupt and illegal use of their oversight powers.

Justice requires demonstrating to the American people, with the relevant underlying declassified documents, that they were the victims of a British military intelligence operation, undertaken for British strategic purposes in complicity with the Obama White House. This, not Russiagate, is the actual conspiracy that took place. This is the conspiracy that must now be prosecuted, quickly. The British, who began this operation as soon as Donald Trump announced for President, were acting strategically. They saw in Donald Trump what most Americans only sensed and hoped. He is precisely the maverick, the outsider, who could end their Empire once and for all, by aligning with Russia and China and India, in a new Bretton Woods monetary agreement, an agreement between the most powerful sovereign nation states and economies in the world to fully develop the entire world to specifications reflecting the divine nature of human beings.

This is what Lyndon LaRouche proposed be done. From there, humans can proceed to further realize their divine potential in joint projects to explore and develop near space while developing a higher platform of mutually advancing cultures. The most wonderful reckoning to be delivered about the coup against the President requires, now, the realization of this potential in the Trump presidency. The corollary involves promptly removing all British originated imperial ideas, premises, and intelligence networks from our nation. Lyndon LaRouche would be very happy with this perspective.

Mueller’s Path of Destruction: The Special Counsel’s Report

Since it is clear that both the number of people indicted and the number of charges filed by Mueller is the primary line of defense for Mueller’s actions, let us begin our own “Spring Offensive for Justice” by briefly detailing the monstrous fraud involved in those numbers. Full release of the Mueller report, after all, which the crazy Democrats are now screaming about, would be, for the most part, simply a replay of these indictments, and the “evidence” supporting them. The discussion of an obstruction charge appears to consist of the President’s statements about the evil Russiagate coup attempt. Or, as President Trump once put it, fighting back against the lies and sedition constantly hurled at him, including the ugly campaign led by fired FBI Director James Comey.

So, before they get a chance to spin it, here’s the spoiler alert: it’s all a great big fraud and a massive abuse of the justice system.

The Fake Russian Hack Narrative:

27 of the 34 Individuals Mueller Indicted

As LaRouche PAC has demonstrated in its three-part dossier , the British and, to a much smaller extent the Ukrainians, were the major foreign powers intervening in the 2016 election. They did so to support Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump using the preposterous and outrageous smear that Trump was committing treason, as a Manchurian candidate under Putin’s thumb. The President’s complete exoneration on this count has just been handed to us. Now, we have to eliminate the fraud Mueller has foisted on us concerning the Russians.

Mueller indicted 12 officers of the Russian Army’s intelligence service (GRU) in July of 2018 for allegedly hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta and publishing their emails through WikiLeaks. He timed the indictment to maximize its negative impact on President Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

Left: CC/Lorie Shaull; right: C-SPAN

Left: Hillary Clinton; right: James Comey

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The documents liberated by WikiLeaks’ publication were truthful documents, showing that Hillary Clinton was a craven tool of Wall Street and that the DNC and Clinton were rigging the Democratic primaries against Democratic insurgent Bernie Sanders. Mueller’s indictment adopts, wholesale, the analysis provided by Democratic Party vendor and Atlantic Council Russian hater CrowdStrike, attributing the hack to Russia. Never mind that the National Security Agency (NSA), which would trace any such hack and pinpoint all aspects of where and how it occurred, never put up evidence supporting this claim. Never mind that the FBI never looked at the actual relevant computers. Since the members of the GRU who were indicted will never come to the U.S. to contest the charges, Mueller and his minions were pretty much free to repeat the DNC/Clinton narrative about Russian hacking without any real consequences.

William Binney, the former NSA Technical Director, conducted actual forensic studies of the WikiLeaks documents and of the persona known as Guccifer 2.0, demonstrating, convincingly, that the Wiki-Leaks trove of documents had been downloaded internally to a thumb drive or other storage device. This means it was an internal leak, not a Russian hack. WikiLeaks itself states that the documents were obtained as the result of an internal leak and was once in negotiations with the Justice Department to provide the actual story. That offer was deliberately blown up by Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James Comey, and Mueller never even bothered to pursue an interview with WikiLeaks.

Mueller also indicted three companies and thirteen Russian nationals for their social media operations during the 2016 election, a small portion of which disparaged and made fun of Hillary Clinton and supported Donald Trump. The rest, allegedly, inflamed divisive issues within the tattered American social fabric. An American, Richard Pinedo of California, was separately indicted because he sold bank account numbers to the Russian click bait social media merchandising operation known as the Internet Research Agency. Aaron Maté has demonstrated, again, conclusively, that this indictment is farcical. The alleged Russian operation spent $46,000 on Facebook ads and $4,700 on Google platforms in 2016. Most of the alleged activity occurred after the election. It was miniscule, juvenile in content, and, emphatically, had no impact on the election.

Roger Stone

Finally, long-time Trump advisor Roger Stone awaits trial on the charge that he lied to Congress about his efforts to find out what WikiLeaks had on Clinton and that he issued angry emails to people, who he believed sold him out and set him up for indictment. The angry emails were considered obstruction and witness tampering by the ever-inventive Mueller team. Stone’s indictment is the end product of a gestapo-like offensive by Mueller seeking to create the link that never existed between the Russians, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks.

True to Mueller form, the Stone indictment contains paragraph after paragraph of spin about the fake Russian hack and social media activities outlined in the GRU and Internet Research Agency indictments, leading the reader to believe that we are about to happen upon some form of actual collusion, imminently, in the Stone indictment. This is the part the media ate up and hyperbolically reported to Stone’s potential Washington, D.C. jury pool.

The spin evaporates, however, once the actual charges are presented in the indictment: lying to Congress about his WikiLeaks contacts and sending nasty emails to potential witnesses.

As the result of this wholly overblown narrative of Russian interference, U.S. and Russian relations are at their lowest point in years. The British, who started this, are seeking to foment a New Cold War along with regime change in Russia, an aggressive nuclear gamble that they have been attempting to sell through Russiagate to the American people. That is why it really matters that Mueller’s phony Russian indictments be repudiated as the complete frauds they are.

Alexandria, VA Detention Center

Paul Manafort

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Another 4 of the 34 Mueller Defendants

The Paul Manafort affair was a wholly Ukrainian/Anglo-American intrigue that certainly proves that Trump’s enemies desperately need a geography lesson.

Paul Manafort and his long-time associate, Rick Gates, were initially indicted by Mueller in October 2017, in Washington, D.C., for conspiracies involving the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a highly novel crime and prosecution. FARA violations are generally settled civilly with a fine. In fact, the headline Mueller put on the Russian and Manafort indictments was CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES, which, despite its McCarthyite echoes, is not even an actual crime. Conspiracies are agreements to violate specific laws and statutes, as numerous legal pundits have noted in discussing Mueller’s headline. The indictments were announced with great media fanfare with gestapo-like raids featuring Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units to take the 69-year-old Manafort, living only with his wife of many years, into custody. The same terror tactics were deployed when arresting Roger Stone.

Mueller then piled on, indicting Manafort again in the Eastern District of Virginia, on a variety of tax fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering charges. As U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis truthfully stated, Mueller was never really interested in Manafort’s substantive crimes. By placing Manafort in jeopardy of dying in prison and stripping away all of his financial assets, Mueller wanted a desperate Manafort to sing or compose lies about Donald Trump. That apparently did not happen. Manafort was targeted by a vengeful British intelligence as far back as 2014, because Manafort steered the pro-Russian Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine. The British have long targeted Ukraine as “the prize” in their effort to isolate Putin economically and strategically, a more recent iteration of the Great Game they have played in Eurasia for centuries.

Lie After Lie After Lie

Despite the fact that all of Manafort’s activities occurred in Ukraine, not Russia, MI-6’s amateurish spy, Christopher Steele, in his Clinton cash-for-trash Russiagate dossier, lied in stating that Manafort was the glue, the key conspirator in brokering Russian help to secure Donald Trump’s election.

Despite Steele’s inflammatory claims, which Mueller never corrected, the evidence at Manafort’s Virginia trial demonstrated that Manafort’s Ukraine activities consisted of trying to steer Ukraine’s Yanukovych government toward Europe and away from Russia and had nothing whatsoever to do with any fictional conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Instead of the treason claimed in the media, Manafort was convicted of garden variety tax crimes, involving income from his Ukraine activities, and bank fraud. None of the charges against Manafort or others concerned Manafort’s five-month stint as Chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, a job given to him because of his expertise in delegate operations, ahead of the Republican convention in which Never-Trumpers had promised a delegate revolt.

Alex Van der Zwaan, a lawyer working with Manafort, was charged by Mueller and pled guilty to lying about his contacts with Rick Gates and an unnamed person concerning the Ukrainian lobbying activities. Konstantin Kilimnik, a long-time business associate of Manafort and Gates, who now lives in Russia, was charged with obstruction of justice by Mueller because of completely failed attempts to influence other witnesses in Mueller’s Ukraine FARA investigation. Mueller has desperately maintained that Kilimnik is “Russian intelligence connected” despite a complete absence of proof for this assertion and despite Kilimnik’s having worked for years for the International Republican Institute in Ukraine, an American intelligence front.

Left: U.S. Embassy/Kiev, Ukraine; right: Twitter

Left: Amb. Marie Yovanovitch; right: Alexandra Chalupa

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Recent revelations from Ukraine show that the Ukraine government was deeply enmeshed in attempting to illegally swing the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by leaking the so-called black ledger of Ukrainian payments to Paul Manafort and providing other intelligence to the Clinton Campaign. A Ukrainian court has so ruled, and the Ukrainian Prosecutor General has opened an investigation that implicates the current U.S. Ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama holdover. George Soros and Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch who has provided millions to both the Atlantic Council and the Clinton Foundation, were key players in this operation, as were Christopher Steele, the discredited British spy, FBI informant, and Obama State Department asset, and Alexandra Chalupa, Hillary Clinton’s favorite Banderist opposition researcher at the DNC.

So, Mueller’s biggest fish, Paul Manafort, was involved heavily in Ukraine and had nothing even remotely to do with Russia. In fact, everything that was ever published about Manafort and Russia was proven to be outrageously false in the actual prosecution. It was all about Ukraine and hiding money from the Internal Revenue Service. No Special Counsel was needed for the actual crimes prosecuted and those crimes would never have been discovered had Paul Manafort not spent six months running delegate operations for Donald Trump. As former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in 1940, during his tenure as U.S. Attorney General, the gravamen of prosecutorial abuse consists of “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”

C-SPAN

Michael Cohen

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George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen: The Last Three British Targets

George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn were early victims of the British operation against Trump. Flynn had been targeted by the British intelligence circles of Sir Richard Dearlove, which include Christopher Steele, dating way back to 2014, because he proposed joint activities with Russia against terrorism and because he exposed the British/Obama Administration support of outright terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in regime change operations in Libya and Syria. Papadopoulos and Carter Page, both volunteers in a hastily constructed Trump Campaign foreign policy shop, were both targeted on British soil, using British operatives, including Professor Joseph Mifsud, in entrapment operations aimed at the Trump Campaign. Since both profiled out as young and extremely naïve, and Page had already been involved in a prior Russian espionage case, they seemed to be ideal targets for a setup.

The aim of the operation was to plant fabricated evidence, like the claim that Papadopoulos somehow had inside information on the Russian hack operation, or that Carter Page was conspiring with the head of Rosneft concerning sanctions, into internal email chains in the Trump campaign, justifying further investigative steps and surveillance.

Page was targeted and profiled heavily by Christopher Steele directly. Stefan Halper, a CIA/MI6 asset and a close collaborator and friend of Sir Richard Dearlove, was used in the attempt to entrap and plant evidence on both Page and Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos pled guilty to lying to the FBI about the timing of his encounters with the British agent Mifsud. Mifsud, Mueller claimed, falsely, was an asset of Russian intelligence. Carter Page was illegally surveilled thanks to a fraudulently procured Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, based on British agent Christopher Steele’s fabrications, but never charged. His life and his ability to make a living have been completely and forever upended.

Michael Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI, after Mueller’s gestapo-like targeting of both Flynn and his son for unregistered Turkish lobbying activities. At the time of his plea, Flynn’s family was on the edge of personal bankruptcy because of legal fees. Flynn’s partners in the Turkish lobbying were indicted by Virginia prosecutors for their unregistered lobbying activities. The problem here is that Flynn pled guilty to a crime specified by Robert Mueller, which the FBI itself had already concluded was not a crime.

McCabe’s Escapade

The alleged lie by Flynn, to which he pled guilty, was the result of an elaborate FBI sting orchestrated by fired Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions were recorded. Someone in the FBI illegally leaked the classified transcripts to the Washington Post. The Post published the transcripts, creating the pretext for the FBI to lure Flynn into an allegedly “friendly” interview about his conversations with Kislyak, without counsel. At the interview, the FBI agents had the transcripts; Flynn did not. During his lengthy “interview” with the FBI, Flynn made statements characterizing his conversations with Kislyak that were at variance with the transcribed conversations themselves.

However, in testimony to Congress later, the interviewing FBI agents and James Comey concluded that Flynn had not deliberately lied when he failed to remember things and should not be charged. Robert Mueller thus secured a plea to a non-existent crime—a crime that could not have existed had there been no investigation—based on threats to prosecute Flynn and Flynn’s son for Turkish lobbying activities. It was a plea also coerced by Flynn’s financial ruin caused by the cost of his defense against Robert Mueller’s inquisition.

Finally, Michael Cohen, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, was indicted in the Southern District of New York for various financial crimes related to his own business dealings. In addition, Cohen also pled guilty to participating in a scheme to hide hush money payments to two women who claimed they had affairs with Donald Trump. After procuring the assistance of Clinton fixer Lanny Davis, Cohen then entered into a plea deal with Mueller concerning lies he told to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow. The Moscow project was being pushed by Cohen and his childhood friend Felix Sater, a long time FBI informant and CIA operative.

Cohen appears to have undergone the type of psychological conditioning typical of the deprogramming of former members of religious or terrorist cults, as well as prosecution witnesses in politically important trials. He now portrays the Trump Organization as a cult and himself as the innocent but compelled doer of every dirty deed in the universe at Trump’s behest. According to Cohen, Trump spoke a coded language in delivering his demands for Cohen’s evil deeds. Thus, there is no actual record of Trump demanding things, only signals as interpreted by Michael Cohen. As a result of this sculpting, referred to in impolitic circles as brainwashing, Cohen seems incapable of uttering one paragraph now without obvious deception. This was illustrated in his recent Congressional appearance which netted him a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for perjury.

It should be clear from the foregoing that Robert Mueller has written a complicated work of fiction, full of twists and turns and tortured inferences, but with very, very little substantive, true crime.

The Russian indictments are a dangerous intelligence community hoax. The indictments of those associated with the President would never have happened if not for the coup in which Robert Mueller has served for the last two years as a lead player. All of the crimes here are process crimes, crimes caused as the result of the investigation itself. Manafort’s financial chicanery itself would never have been a focus but for the need to secure a scalp to justify the continuing process.

Mueller spent millions of dollars and timed his indictments to keep the churning of the coup in full force through the last two years. With each Mueller action, a complicit group of journalists, having lapped up their daily memes and talking points from such as the Democracy Integrity Project of Daniel Jones and the British Military’s Integrity Initiative, went to work advancing the Russiagate narrative. Now is the time for a reckoning. Now is the time for the American people to demand criminal indictments against the perpetrators of this atrocity against the American people and our Constitution. The most essential act in this reckoning, however, is that the stupid and suicidal Special Relationship between the United States and Britain must, at long last, be ended for the benefit of our own nation and the entire world.

I. The Battle for Europe

Italy’s Cooperation with the

New Silk Road Shows Europe

the Way to the Future

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

www.quirinale.it

President of China, Xi Jinping and President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella at the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, March 22, 2019.

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March 23—The March 22-23 state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Italy, where a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the two countries to cooperate in the development of the New Silk Road, was a powerful demonstration that inspiring and positive developments can still occur in politics. The new quality of cooperation and the revitalization of the ancient Silk Road will not only bring enormous economic benefits for Italy, such as port development, infrastructure modernization, new investment in a wide range of industrial plants, increased exports to China and joint investment in third countries—but because of its advantageous geographical location in the south of Europe and on the Mediterranean Sea, it will also make Italy the gateway between Asia and Europe, but above all a bridgehead for cooperation in the industrialization of Africa.

One would assume that this would be the number one topic in all news programs. Far from it, because the relationship with China is currently the crucial question in European politics. In Italy, from the thoroughly EU-friendly President Mattarella to the coalition parties and even across much of the opposition, everyone recognizes the enormous potential of China’s “culture of growth,” as Mattarella called it in his press conference with President Xi Jinping, for an Italy that has been badly shaken by EU austerity measures. Meanwhile, the alarm bells were ringing in the “other major EU member states and in the United States,” as T-Online put it.

Garrett Marquis, spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council

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The Silk Road is a Chinese Trojan horse, it brings no economic benefits, and Italy’s cooperation with it could harm the country’s global reputation, according to Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council who is close to John Bolton. He tweeted that there is “No need for [the] Italian government to lend legitimacy to China’s infrastructure vanity project”—the list of toxic arguments on the part of the geopolitical camp goes on and on.

Anyone who repeated this anti-Chinese line outed himself as a conscious or manipulated proponent of the Anglo-American neocon establishment. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, just like Pence, Pompeo, Bolton and all the recent U.S. Department of State Strategy Papers, had recently identified China and Russia as major security threats to the U.S., demonstrating the attempt of the neocon military and intelligence establishment to contain President Trump’s China policy, which is based on positive cooperation.

The Failed British Neoliberal System

Behind this anti-Chinese propaganda, which has recently flared up in the U.S. as well as in Europe, lies the conflict between the old paradigm of the neoliberal system, whose forces are intent on clinging to the geopolitical scheme no matter what, and the new paradigm of China’s foreign policy concept of win-win cooperation among sovereign nations. While increasing tensions in the U.S.-Russian relationship are certainly a cause for concern, many insiders believe that the primary strategic conflict is the relationship between the U.S. and China. This is all about the famous “Thucydides trap”: how will the hitherto dominant power—the U.S.—react to the rise of a second power? Twelve times in history, it came to war; while four times the rising power displaced the first power without war.

For over five years now, the Chinese government has put the Silk Road Initiative on the international agenda, as a completely new concept of strategic relations that overcomes geopolitics and replaces it with President Xi Jinping’s idea of a “community of common destiny.” This new model, which is undoubtedly in China’s interests, also brings previously unattainable advantages to the so-far 123 cooperating countries, and has simply proven to be more attractive than the status quo. Instead of assigning states as geopolitical proxies, it has made real progress in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even in the 13 European countries that have signed memoranda of understanding similar Italy’s, for infrastructure, investment in industry and agriculture, cooperation in science and technology, and cultural exchanges.

The EU, for its part, is extremely divided: on the one hand, as a junior partner to the Anglo-American Empire, it describes China in its recently released “ten-point action plan” as a “systemic rival” promoting “alternative governance models”—while on the other hand, it feels it cannot afford to pass up the economic benefits of cooperation with China. French President Emmanuel Macron, unsuccessful even with his EU reform plans and unpopular among his own people, praised that EU paper in the run-up to his meeting with Xi Jinping, saying that this wake-up call was necessary, that the time for European naïveté was over, and that China had exploited European disunity.

CC/German Finance Ministry

Italian Minister of Finance, Giovanni Tria.

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Far more productive, on the other hand, are the views of Italian Finance Minister Giovanni Tria, who refers to the “astonishing diversity” of areas in which Italy could contribute its expertise to the Silk Road Initiative: mechanical engineering, logistics, consulting, feasibility studies, design, engineering, safety, finance, and insurance. Tria continued:

Italy also enjoys a strategic geographic position in the current and future framework of trade relations between East and West and Africa. Located on the Mediterranean Sea, Italy has the second largest industrial capacity in Europe, and is a leader in technological innovation and well equipped with high quality ports, roads and rail networks. These characteristics make Italy the ideal southern portal for the European continent and trade routes between Europe and China

The confidence and recognition of the potential that is expressed in these words of Tria stand in stark contrast to perceptions of China as a threat. Interestingly enough, the opposition to China comes especially from the circles that had vehemently promoted China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, apparently assuming that this would automatically lead to it adopting the Western model of liberal democracy.

Instead of dismissing China as a “systemic rival,” and sticking to the rather arrogant opinion that the Western democratic model must be the only standard of good government for the whole world—it makes more sense to rethink the criteria for judging the quality of a system. The fact is that China has raised the living standards of its own people enormously in the last 40 years; has for some years offered developing countries for the first time the chance to overcome underdevelopment; has mastered the Asian crisis and then the 2008 crisis much better than the West did; and has produced in its own population an optimism about the future that has been completely lost in the West.

Optimism

In doing so, China has shown that, unlike Christianity and Islam, it does not intend to convert other cultures to its own philosophy, but expressly endorses the principle of sovereignty and the acceptance of other social models. The accusation that China is dividing Europe is more than transparent, in view of the unspeakable Brexit theater, the announced use of military force against the “yellow vests” in France, and the already deep division in Europe between East and West and between North and South.

On the contrary, if Germany and France were to join the Italian model of cooperation with China not only in bilateral relations, but above all in the industrialization of Africa and Southwest Asia, this might be the only platform from which Europe could overcome its inner divisions and find a common mission that is so completely lacking right now.

Instead of hoping to build up its own geopolitical bastion against China, Russia and the U.S., as suggested by Macron’s already failed European plans, a united Europe of closely co-operating countries, which would help shape, together with China itself, the “community for the future of humanity,” would also be the best way to strengthen those forces in the United States who want to escape the Thucydides Trap.

CC European Community/Christian Lambiotte

Giulio Tremonti, former Minister of Economy and Finance of Italy.

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Former Italian economics minister Giulio Tremonti pointed out in recent days that the vision of the New Silk Road, that is of a global development program to overcome poverty and underdevelopment, had already been proposed in the early 1990s by the American “visionary” Lyndon LaRouche. In fact, LaRouche had already done so in the mid-1970s.

Today, it should be clear to every thinking person that there are only two choices: either the West tries to suppress the rise of Asia and the developing sector, which would result in World War III with the use of thermonuclear weapons, or it succeeds in launching a new era of humanity, to create a new paradigm of living together. It is high time for the world to hear the “wise words of Lyndon LaRouche,” as former Mexican President José López Portillo once demanded.

If the EU can not reach a new perspective on the New Silk Road approach by the forthcoming EU-China summit on April 9, the cards are expected to be entirely re-shuffled by the European Parliament elections on May 23-26.

zepp-larouche@eir.de

Italy Joins Belt and Road Initiative, Shows Path to the West

by Claudio Celani

www.quirinale.it

A courageous Italy becomes the first G7 member country to sign on to the Belt and Road Initiative. Shown are Italian President Sergio Mattarella with President Xi Jinping emerging from the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome on March 22, 2019.

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March 24—Yesterday, Italy became the first large industrial economy, the first member of the G7, and the first founding member of the European Union to officially join the Belt and Road Initiative. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on “Cooperation Within the Framework of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative” was signed by Italy’s Minister for Economic Development Luigi Di Maio and his counterpart He Lifeng, Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, in the presence of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was visiting Italy with a large institutional and economic delegation.

The signing of the MOU had met strong opposition from self-described neocon circles in the United States, from the City of London, and even from some of Italy’s partners in the European Union (EU). French President Emmanuel Macron, who met Conte together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on March 22, stated after that meeting that “Bilateral negotiations on texts of agreement on the Silk Road route are not a good method.” Merkel, who admitted there was nothing to be objected to in the content of the MOU, on which Conte briefed them, complained that Italy had broken EU unity by negotiating on its own.

The EU and broader trans-Atlantic hostility against Italy is motivated by the fact that the Italy-China agreement, although not affecting Italy’s alliances (NATO and the EU), has breached “Western” geopolitical schemes by establishing a strategic partnership based on friendship between the two nations—whereas NATO continues to call China a potential enemy and the EU considers it a “rival.”

The Italians, indeed, have exposed the hypocrisy of these self-proclaimed leaders of the “West,” who claim to be champions of values such as freedom, justice, and welfare—while consistently ignoring these values at home—by explicitly incorporating those values in the Memorandum and establishing a framework to achieve them through cooperation in advancing a global paradigm for development. The MOU won “concessions” from China on such issues as intellectual property, transparency, and a level playing field, which the Italians can now play against the anti-Chinese faction. It is being said by some that the Italy-China memorandum is now being considered as a template for similar, future agreements by other countries.

The Memorandum of Understanding

The parties wrote into the MOU the commitment—

to promote the bilateral partnership in a spirit of mutual respect, equity and justice and in a mutually beneficial manner, in the perspective of a strengthened global solidarity; Conscious of the historical common heritage developed through the land and sea routes linking Asia and Europe, and of Italy’s traditional role as terminal of the maritime Silk Road; Reiterating their commitment to honor the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and to promote inclusive growth and sustainable development.

Based on that premise, the Memorandum sets the following “Objectives and Guiding Principles of Cooperation”:

The Parties will work together within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to translate mutual complementary strengths into advantages for practical cooperation and sustainable growth, supporting synergies between the Belt and Road Initiative and priorities identified in the Investment Plan for Europe and the Trans-European Networks, bearing in mind discussions in the EU China Connectivity Platform. This will also enable the Parties to enhance their political relations, economic ties, and people-to-people exchanges. The Parties will strengthen cooperation and promote regional connectivity within an open, inclusive and balanced framework beneficial to all, so as to promote regional peace, security, stability and sustainable development.

The following areas of cooperation are defined:

1. Policy dialogue. The Parties will promote synergies and strengthen communication and coordination. They will enhance policy dialogue on connectivity initiatives and technical and regulatory standards. The Parties will work together within the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to promote connectivity in accordance with the purpose and functions of the Bank.

2. Transport, logistics and infrastructure. Both Parties share a common vision about the improvement of accessible, safe, inclusive and sustainable transport. The Parties will cooperate in the development of infrastructure connectivity, including financing, interoperability and logistics, in areas of mutual interest (such as roads, railways, bridges, civil aviation, ports, energy including renewables and natural gas—and telecommunications). The Parties express their interest in developing synergies between the Belt and Road Initiative, the Italian system of transport and infrastructure, such as inter alia roads, railways, bridges, civil aviation and ports and the EU Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T). The Parties welcome the discussions in the framework of the EU-China Connectivity Platform to improve the efficiency of the connectivity between Europe and China.

The Parties will cooperate in facilitating customs clearance, strengthening cooperation in sustainable, safe and digital transport solutions as well as in their investments and financing. The Parties highlight the importance of open, transparent, and non-discriminatory procurement procedures.

3. Unimpeded trade and investment. The Parties will work towards expanding two-way investment and trade flow, industrial cooperation, as well as cooperation in third country markets, exploring ways to promote substantive, mutually beneficial cooperation. The Parties reaffirm their shared commitment to free and open trade and investment, to counter excessive macroeconomic imbalances and to oppose unilateralism and protectionism. In the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, they will promote transparent, non-discriminatory, free and open trade and industrial cooperation, an open procurement, level playing field and respect for intellectual property rights. They will explore closer and mutually beneficial collaboration and partnerships, which include advancing North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation.

4. Financial cooperation. The Parties will strengthen the bilateral communication and coordination on fiscal, financial and structural reform policies in order to create a favorable environment for economic and financial cooperation, also through the establishment of the Italy-China Finance Dialogue between the Ministry of Economy and Finance of the Italian Republic and the Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China.

The Parties will encourage the partnerships between the respective financial institutions to jointly support investment and financing cooperation, at bilateral and multilateral level and towards the third Countries, under the framework of Belt and Road Initiative.

www.qirinale.it

“Along the historical Silk Road, which our countries were the main terminal of, adventurous caravans transported fabrics and spices as well as more precious goods: ideas, inventions, innovation and culture. The contribution to human progress was extraordinary. Like then, exchange and sharing of ideas are the pillars of the ‘New Silk Roads’ in the third millennium.” Remarks of President Mattarella at the state dinner at the Palazzo del Quirinale on March 22, 2019.

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5. People-to-people connectivity. The Parties will endeavor to expand people-to-people exchanges, to develop their sister cities network, to fully utilize the platform of Italy-China Culture Cooperation Mechanism to cooperate for the finalization of the twinning among Italian and Chinese UNESCO world heritage sites, to promote cooperation arrangements on education, culture, science, innovation, health, tourism and public welfare among their respective Administrations. The Parties will promote exchanges and cooperation between their local authorities, media, think tanks, universities and youth.

Economic and Institutional Agreements

In addition to the MOU on the Belt and Road, Italy and China signed 10 economic agreements and 18 institutional agreements (19 of them with the BRI MOU).

The economic agreements include:

• A strategic partnership between Italy’s Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (a prominent investment bank) and the Bank of China to finance Italian firms in China.

• Cassa Depositi and the natural gas utility Snam signed a deal with the Silk Road Fund for investments along the Silk Road.

• An MOU between the Italian oil company ENI and the Bank of China for exploration in China.

• Ansaldo Energia (a power and engineering company) signed two agreements, one to develop gas turbines with China’s United Gas Turbine Company (UGTC) and another for the supply of a turbine to Shanghai Electric and Benxi Steel.

• The port authorities of Trieste and Genoa signed an agreement with the construction giant China Communications Construction Company (CCCC).

• The Institute for Foreign Trade signed a deal with Suning, one of the largest non-government retailers in China, to create a platform to promote an Italian lifestyle in China.

• The Danieli group, a supplier of equipment and physical plants to the metal industry, signed a contract with China CAMC Engineering, a construction engineering company, for the construction of a steel plant in Azerbaijan.

The institutional agreements, besides the MOU on BRI cooperation, include cooperation on innovative startups and electronic trade, as well as cooperation between the two nations’ space agencies, agriculture, culture, health, and media.

The Crucial Role of Michele Geraci

The architect of the Sino-Italian agreement is Michele Geraci, Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Economic Development who, before joining the government, had spent ten years in China as a teacher of economics. Geraci has explained on numerous occasions that Italy sees in the BRI a golden opportunity for Italian industrial firms in China and along the Silk Road routes, but also in cooperation in the development of Africa.

At a conference organized by MoviSol (International Movement for Civil Rights-Solidarity)—the LaRouche movement in Italy—and the Lombardy regional administration, just ten days before the signing of the Memorandum, Geraci had explained that Italy seeks to become the terminal of the Maritime Silk Road and to turn Southern Italy into a platform for investments in Africa (See EIR, Vol. 46, No. 11, March 22, 2019, pp. 6-9.) In this context, on March 24, Geraci accompanied President Xi and Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, on a private visit to Palermo, Sicily, where the presidential couple spent a day as tourists, while signaling Beijing’s interest in the island which, as Geraci said, “is the closest European place to Africa but not Africa.” [go to box: Italian Media Acknowledge LaRouche’s Role in the

New Silk Road]

A few days earlier, a Chinese government and economic delegation had visited Palermo to discuss options for investments in port, airport and other infrastructure. After Xi’s visit, Sicily regional President Nello Musimeci stated,

Sicily wants to intercept the Silk Road. One must arrive punctually and prepared for appointments. Therefore, we Sicilians must immediately sit with the national government around a table and understand what we want to do about Sicily.

www.quirinale.it

President Mattarella welcomes President Xi to the Palazzo del Quirinale on March 22, 2019. In addition to the Memorandum of Understanding, many economic and institutional agreements were also signed.

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East Meets West

The success of Xi’s visit to Italy was underscored not only by the MOUs signed, but also by the atmosphere of cultural dialogue and understanding established between the two countries, both conscious of being carriers of a great heritage of thousands of years. Before arriving in Italy, Xi authored a guest editorial in Italy’s leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera. Published in English by CGTN under the title, “East Meets West—A New Chapter of Sino-Italian Friendship,” it begins:

China and Italy are both stellar examples of Eastern and Western civilizations, and both have written splendid chapters in the history of human progress. Being the birthplace of ancient Roman civilization and the cradle of the Renaissance, Italy is known to the Chinese people for its imposing relic sites and masterpieces of great names in art and literature.

He reviewed the Silk Road connections between the Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire; Marco Polo’s travels and writings, which “roused the first wave of ‘China fever’ among European countries”; the Italian Jesuits who restored East-West scientific and cultural exchanges in the 16th and 17th centuries; and other highpoints through to the 1970 establishment of relations between Italy and the People’s Republic of China.

At the state dinner in honor of President Xi Jinping, Italian President Sergio Mattarella responded in this way:

I believe that the word ‘knowledge’ expresses at best the nature of the strong and fruitful bond which has united China to Italy for centuries. Along the historical ‘Silk Road,’ which our countries were the main terminal of, adventurous caravans transported fabrics and spices as well as more precious goods: ideas, inventions, innovation and culture. The contribution to human progress was extraordinary.

Like then, exchange and sharing of ideas are the pillars of the ‘New Silk Roads’ in the third millennium.

We have the task of building a complex and multiform whole made of interconnections, through which major flows of capital, goods, services, and material and immaterial infrastructures will transit, an enlargement of cultural horizons and opportunities for technological development for all countries involved. Along this path, Chinese and Italians are ideal travel comrades. We both belong to two industrious, creative and ingenious civilizations, endowed with immense cultural wealth, caring for quality and beauty. Two complementary economic, productive and manufacturing systems, called upon to generate more and more stimulating synergies.

Italian Media Acknowledge LaRouche’s Role in the

New Silk Road

On the eve of Xi Jinping’s visit to Italy, four Italian daily national newspapers, Corriere della Sera, Il Foglio, Avvenire and Linkiesta, all highlighted the truth that Lyndon LaRouche was the first to advocate what has become known as the “New Silk Road,” more than two decades ago.

It happened that on March 12—the day before the Milan conference on “Italy on the New Silk Road,” sponsored by MoviSol and the Lombardy Region—Corriere della Sera interviewed Giulio Tremonti, former Minister of Economy and Finance, who stated that the New Silk Road “is a project that goes back to the mid-nineties, by the American visionary Lyndon LaRouche, who viewed it as the salvation of humanity.”

Tremonti’s statement established a critical fact that the mainstream media could not ignore. Thus, Avvenire and Linkiesta acknowledged that truth in the context of their coverage of the Milan conference in two articles, one supportive and one critical, titled respectively, “More Than Convenient: It Is Inevitable: How the Chinese Silk Road Will Change Italy (and Europe Too)” and “Arm in Arm with Conspiracy Theorists, in the Post-Truth Era.”

A third newspaper, the economically liberal, rightwing daily, Il Foglio, which is overtly hostile to the Belt and Road Initiative, published an hysterical article by journalist Luciano Capone. Capone, who describes himself as an “unbridled, sometimes wild free-marketeer,” borrowed the usual list of slanders of LaRouche and blasted Tremonti for saying that LaRouche was the author of Xi Jinping’s policy. Tremonti denied having said so in a letter to Il Foglio’s editor on March 14, and opposed the signing of the MOU with China. [back to text]

Germany at a Crossroads

Over the Silk Road

by Rainer Apel

EIRNS/Christopher Lewis

Hans von Helldorff, spokesman for the Federal Association of the German Silk Road Initiative, addresses the Schiller Institute conference, “The Urgent Need for a New Paradigm in International Relations,” Bad Soden, Germany, July 1, 2018.

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March 24—A fierce fight has been raging behind the scenes in Germany for months, about whether the German government and German industry should rally behind the obstructive approach of the European Commission, or whether a constructive approach should be taken, toward China’s New Silk Road.

This fight broke out into the open on the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s historic three-day visit to Italy, March 22-24, when Germany’s premier state-run national television network, ARD, ran a slanderous prime-time report on March 18, charging China with pursuing a geopolitical world power agenda with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The report included a clip from an interview with Hans von Helldorff, president of the Federal Association of the German Silk Road Initiative (BVDSI). Von Helldorff charged that by opposing China, the German ministries of Economics and Foreign Affairs were fostering the risk that German industry would be excluded from the BRI dynamic. It was the first time that ARD has taken such prominent note of the BVDSI since the latter’s founding 18 months ago.

Von Helldorff and several co-thinkers in the German industrial Mittelstand (small and medium-sized enterprises) decided to create the BVDSI to have an institution that would fight for the genuine interests of those enterprises in active cooperation with the BRI.

This ARD television program attacking the Belt and Road, provoked an avalanche of media attacks on China. The online version of Bildzeitung, Germany’s leading mass tabloid, had a lengthy dossier on March 19, presenting the false claim that the BVDSI is an agent of Chinese geopolitics. That dossier included a link to a video on the BVDSI website, showing Hans von Helldorff’s speech to a February 27 Schiller Institute seminar in Berlin. He is pictured sitting right next to the Institute’s founder and president, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Helldorff, one of the main speakers at this seminar, charged the German elites with refusing to take notice of the worldwide changes that are underway, whereas China’s elites have proven that they are capable of learning and improving.

New World Economic Order Emerging

The new world economic order that is emerging, can be built only through cooperation, and not through confrontation, von Helldorff said. China has already committed $1 trillion to BRI projects, but in order to realize its full potential, another $4 trillion would have to come from the western industrial nations. The BVDSI was created in order to make these opportunities known to the German Mittelstand, making repeated direct references to Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who was shown in the video clip sitting to his right.

On March 20, Bildzeitung’s print edition—with a circulation of more than 4 million copies nationally—ran on its second page, a shortened version of the online dossier, attacking the BVDSI for its stated intent to “call the attention of German politics in a focused way to the positive aspects of the initiative of the Chinese government for the revitalization of the Silk Road.” Bildzeitung quoted the BVDSI further stating that it is important that “Germany and the EU wake up and replace the present policy of restraint and the policy of confrontation with a policy of cooperation.”

For the tabloid, these statements—and the fact that the Swiss Interrail Holding AG, which maintains logistical relations with the Chinese railway system, once financed an event of the BVDSI—made the BVDSI “dubious China lobbyists.” The print edition of Bildzeitung, however, did not run the link to the video, but did charge the Federal Ministry of Transport with supporting the BVDSI.

Under the pressure of this heavy harassment by Bildzeitung, the Ministry of Transport made it known the same day, March 20, that it no longer supported the BVDSI, and that it no longer shared the views of the association. On March 21, Bildzeitung gloatingly reported the ministry’s statement. Much of the tabloid’s arguments against China originated with the Sinophobe Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin, which in its latest “China Update 6/2019,” complained that “irrespective of mounting European Union criticism of China’s Silk Road Initiative, Italy is joining it,” and that Italy was even determined to sign “a controversial Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) during Xi Jinping’s visit.

Kremlin/RU

President of France Emmanuel Macron.

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MERICS claimed that France and Germany are doing well in their trade with China without such a Memorandum, and neither Poland nor other central European states that have signed such MOUs with China have had any benefit from the MOUs, quoting Macron alleging that China does not respect the sovereignty of other nations. Lucrezia Poggatti, Italian member of the MERICS staff, charged that Italy would “damage its credibility” in the EU, if it signed the MOU with the China.

Deutschlandfunk (DLF), Germany’s national radio station, ran similar propaganda against the Italian plans with China on March 22, quoting European Parliament President, (from the Forza Italia party), Antonio Tajani’s hysterical warning: “Do you want some alien in your house, who is buying everything from you? Kitchen, sleeping room, furniture? Then, you will soon be guests in your own house.”

DLF however also quoted Michele Geraci, Undersecretary of State in the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, saying that he has been active as an investment banker in China for ten years, and came back to Italy this past year to join the new government: “I have returned, enthused by the idea that Italy will reconquer its rank as an economically important country. Not just in a formal sense, but in substance.”

Geraci told DLF that Italy will not give anything away to China, but instead hopes to intensify trade with China: “With the present Memorandum of Understanding, we are trying to make good lost time. The Germans have done that in the past 10-15 years, rather well. We however do not have another 10-years’ time. What we are doing now is a means of acceleration.” An “acceleration program made by Geraci,” DLF commented, claiming that Geraci was the only “economic professional” in the Italian government, charging it with not knowing anything about economic issues at all.

CC/superbass

Heiko Maas, German Minister of Foreign Affairs.

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Failed Arm Twisting and Media Hype

If the intent of all that media hype in Germany over Italy and China was to prevent the Italians from signing that MOU with China, it failed. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas was speaking into the wind on March 24, about the MOU that had been signed in Rome the day before, when he said that Italy was about to be drawn into “a dependency by China.”

If the intent of that media hype was to manipulate public opinion in Germany, it will prove to be much more difficult now, given the efforts of the BVDSI and the Schiller Institute, institutions that are openly challenging the anti-China sentiments, which has now been made a prominent fact for the public. The arm twisting against those with pro-China views, which has long been practiced by the elites and the mainstream media behind the scenes, will be replaced by a struggle before the eyes of the public for the concept of German cooperation with China. The BVDSI will also fully formalize its role, with a congress in Bremen on March 29.

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II. Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP

Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche!

March 21, 2019

President Donald J. Trump

The White House Washington, D.C.

Mr. President,

I have been writing to you in the last two years, the first time on September 12, 2017, in defense of Christopher Columbus, whose statues were being destroyed or threatened in many American cities. Thanks to your intervention, the common cultural heritage between my country, Italy, and the United States, and which goes back to the Italian Renaissance, was safeguarded.

I wrote to you again last November 16, with a letter asking you to keep your election promise to reinstate Glass-Steagall and “make not only America great again, but also the whole world,” which has been signed by 217 members of the Italian and European Parliament and other elected officials and important representatives from all over Europe. Glass-Steagall is in the government program of the Giuseppe Conte government in Italy, and Premier Conte mentioned it during his inauguration speech at the Italian Parliament as the key to protecting savings and making investments in the real economy possible.

Today I am writing to you on another very important matter, for Italy and for the United States: the exoneration of the American economist and scientist Lyndon H. LaRouche, who died on February 12, aged 96. I had the honor and pleasure of working with Mr. LaRouche for 35 years, and to organize important conferences for him in Italy, including a 1988 conference in Milan on the Verdi musical tuning, and again in Busseto, the birth town of Giuseppe Verdi, in 1997, during which he was a speaker together with famous Verdi singers Piero Cappuccilli (baritone) and Carlo Bergonzi (tenor).

EIRNS

Left to right: Baritone Piero Cappuccilli, Tenor Carlo Bergonzi, Liliana Gorini, and Lyndon LaRouche, at a conference presenting Canto e Diapason, the Italian edition of the Schiller Institute’s Manual on Tuning and Registration at the famous Salone Barezzi di Busseto in November 1997.

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In 2007 and again in 2009, Mr. LaRouche was officially invited by the Italian Parliament, both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, and addressed the Defense Committee at the Italian Senate, and the Finance Committee at the Chamber of Deputies. He warned them of the danger of a financial blowout because central banks in the U.S. and Europe were feeding the financial bubble (derivatives and other toxic waste) which did explode in 2008. At that time, he also gave a conference with Giulio Tremonti, later Finance Minister in the Italian government, on the urgency of a New Bretton Woods and of a new Glass-Steagall Act. When the crisis started in 2008, many Italian members of Parliament told me that “LaRouche had always been to the point in his forecasts and his proposals; we should have listened to him.”

EIRNS/Flavio Tabanelli

From left to right: Members of Parliament Gennaro Migliore and Andrea Ricci, Liliana Gorini, and Lyndon LaRouche. By invitation of members of the Italian Parliament, Lyndon LaRouche spoke on “The Upcoming Tasks of the New U.S. Congress” in the prestigious Cenacolo Hall of the Chamber of Deputies on February 13, 2007.

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When he was railroaded and jailed in 1989—by the same British-allied networks, including William Weld and Robert Mueller, who are now conducting a witch hunt against you with the aim to destroy your Presidency one way or another—80 members of the Italian Parliament wrote to President Clinton asking him to free LaRouche from jail. And the then Parole Commission granted LaRouche parole.

Yet, he has never been fully exonerated. Had his ideas and proposals been realized at that time, we would not be in such a difficult economic and strategic situation today.

I therefore call on you, Mr. President, to exonerate LaRouche, also for the sake of my country, Italy, which always looked with the greatest respect to him and his ideas.

Respectfully yours,

Liliana Gorini

Schiller Institute

Chairwoman of MoviSol (Movimento Internazionale per i Diritti Civili, Solidarietà)

Milan, Italy

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche at lpac.co/exonerate

EXONERATE LAROUCHE

Thank You Very Much, Mr. LaRouche, for All that You Represent for All Mankind

by Dennis Small

The following is an edited transcript of the presentation by Dennis Small on the March 21 Fireside Chat. The audio of the presentation and the full discussion that followed is available here. Mr. Small was introduced by Dennis Speed.

Dennis Speed: My name is Dennis Speed. On behalf of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, I want to welcome everybody to our March 21 Fireside Chat.

There’s a saying that Mahatma Gandhi is credited with, with respect to his battle against British imperialism: “First, they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win.” The situation concerning Lyndon LaRouche took a particular turn last week, and as of tomorrow, we going to see something very important occur in Italy when the President of China Xi Jinping arrives with a 500-person delegation in Italy. In one sense, it may be the beginning of a kind of second Council of Florence, an idea we can say more about in the course of our presentation. Last week Helga Zepp-LaRouche was in Italy, participating in a conference together with Michele Geraci, Undersecretary of State at the Italian Ministry of Economic Development and the leader of what is called Taskforce China. [box: Message of Condolence from Ramsey Clark]

That process was a bombshell in Italian life. It was preceded by an interview in the news daily Corriere della Sera given by Giulio Tremonti, former Italian Finance Minister, and an associate of ours in the sense that he is a co-thinker with Lyndon LaRouche. In his interview, he said that the New Silk Road—

is a project that dates back to the mid-1990s by the American visionary Lyndon LaRouche, who saw it as the salvation of humanity. Since then, the Chinese plans have been articulated along various lines. Beijing, apart from its financial infrastructure, is developing along the Eurasian, Arctic, and southern routes. Italy is part of the last, which means Sicily, Trieste, and Genoa.

That was Corriere della Sera. Let me point out that Tremonti has been Finance Minister four times since 1994, once Deputy Prime Minister, and also wrote for Corriere della Sera for ten years between 1984 and 1994.

Yesterday, a guest editorial by President Xi Jinping was published in that same newspaper, called “East Meets West: A New Chapter of Sino-Italian Friendship.” I’m only going to read a couple parts of what he said, and then go right to our guest. Xi said:

China and Italy are both stellar examples of Eastern and Western civilization, and both have written splendid chapters in the history of human progress. Being the birthplace of ancient Roman civilization and the cradle of the Renaissance, Italy is known to the Chinese people for its imposing relic sites and masterpieces of great art and names in art and architecture and literature.

He goes on and says many other things:

China hopes to work with Italy to advance the Belt and Road cooperation. Our two countries may harness our historical and cultural bonds forged through the ancient Silk Road, as well as our geographical locations, to align connectivity, cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, with Italy’s plan to develop its northern ports.

And he goes on and says some other things after that.

I think you get the context. So, the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is essential strategically for the United States to enter into that visionary conception that Lyndon LaRouche designed, according to the former Italian Finance Minister, which is now about to come into fruition in Italy over the next 24-48 hours.

To talk about the concept of the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, we have Dennis Small, who besides the fact that he is one of the seven people who went to jail with Lyndon LaRouche in January of 1989, has been for many years the director of our work in Ibero-America, and has taken a particular initiative in this campaign. So, Dennis, we’re going to go to you right now.

The Strategic Necessity

Dennis Small: Posed in this Xi Jinping meeting with Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is, of course, the implicit question of, “OK, and what about the United States?” Trump is a friend of Conte and has worked hard to develop a good relationship with Xi Jinping; there have been ups and downs in that. On the table immediately is a wide-ranging economic discussion between the United States and China. There is the possibility of a trip to Mar-a-Lago by Xi; it’s not clear if and when that will happen.

But what is absolutely clear is that for the Belt and Road Initiative to function internationally as a full replacement for the existing bankrupt system of the British Empire, the United States must be on board. The only way the United States is going to be on board is with the policies of Lyndon LaRouche and by exonerating LaRouche and his ideas. The concept here, and it may just sound simple enough from the words, but I think that by the end of our discussion, you’ll see that there’s a little more complexity and depth to it. The exoneration of LaRouche means justice for the man means justice for his ideas.

What does that mean? Well, one thing it means is that the entire world is watching what happens in the United States and what the Trump administration is able to do in the face of a top-down British Empire attempted coup d’état against him. The entire world is looking at the United States to see which way this is going to move, and they’re looking at it from the standpoint—the strategically sensible person is—the standpoint of “OK, to what degree are LaRouche’s ideas actually being acted on?” the best way to actually understand what happens in the United States, therefore, is through the reflected perception or concept of what is happening strategically as a result of U.S. action. This is not a national U.S. question; this is an international strategic question. So, the complexity of the issue of LaRouche is what makes it both extraordinarily powerful and also possible and necessary at the same time.

What do I mean when I say, “justice for the man is justice for his ideas”? Well, let’s start by quoting Gottfried Leibniz, because Leibniz actually defined justice in an article called, “Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice,” which he wrote in 1702, during the latter part of his life. If I’m not mistaken, he died in 1716. What he wrote there was “Justice is goodness conformed to wisdom. And wisdom, in my sense, is nothing else than the science of felicity.”

The science of felicity, as in the pursuit of happiness, as in the founding principles of the United States. In fact, the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” comes from Leibniz. So, “Justice is goodness conformed to wisdom.” This is an interesting idea. This is not the kind of happiness or felicity you hear about these days from the viewpoint of “Don’t worry, be happy.” It’s quite the contrary. It’s felicity which comes from acting to change the world in a way coherent with the principles of the created universe.

Now, what does this have to do with LaRouche and the current strategic situation? Well, I want to approach this from three standpoints. I want to present you Lyndon LaRouche from three standpoints. For those of you who know him and know of his work already, it’s not an introduction. Some of you may not be very familiar with it, and it is a sort of introduction. But, it’s from three different standpoints, each of which alone is not sufficient. But as we go through each, I want you to think about the other two; look at each from the other two at the same time.

LaRouche Through the Eyes of His Friends and Admirers

The first is going to be through the eyes of LaRouche’s friends and admirers, much like those of you who were on this call last week, where there was a discussion of the condolence messages and the tributes to LaRouche that are pouring in from around the world from prominent people who wanted to say something after LaRouche’s death. Sergei Glazyev, Colonel Bao, many other people; which gives you a sense of Lyn’s tremendous impact internationally. Tonight, I will read from some comments on LaRouche while he was alive from people who knew him prior to his passing away. These comments are largely from foreigners, and there’s a reason for this, which we’ll get to at some point in the discussion.

First, then, through the eyes of LaRouche’s friends and admirers. Then, through the eyes of his enemies. I will talk a little about the LaRouche legal case. It was 30 years ago, and we could talk for weeks on end about this; there are many books and articles that we’ve written about this and the direct connection to the current coup d’état against President Trump. If we look at LaRouche only through the eyes of his friends and admirers, it’s not the full picture; it begins to give you an inkling.

We then will turn to look at LaRouche through the eyes of his enemies, to give another important dimension and depth to the picture.

And lastly, I’ll conclude by discussing Lyndon LaRouche through your eyes and through your action: What we are doing, and what you on this call will be doing or should be doing. I will pose a couple of things for you to do. One of them is going to be quite easy, the others might be a bit harder.

With that said, and keeping those three points of view—a kind of triangulation of sorts; not what is usually meant by triangulation, but looking at this from three standpoints simultaneously. Let’s first look at a couple of LaRouche’s friends and people who acted along with him over the years.

EIRNS/Steve Meyer

Dr. Enéas Carneiro with Lyndon LaRouche in the São Paulo City Council chambers in June, 2002.

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Dr. Enéas Carneiro

The first person is a Brazilian. His name was—because he passed away—Dr. Enéas Carneiro. Enéas, as he was widely known throughout Brazil, had about six PhDs; he was a mathematician, a physicist. He was a world-renowned professor in cardiology; he wrote a major international textbook on Electrocardiograms (EKGs). Over the course of his many decades of teaching, he had 30,000 students, which became the base of the political party he later organized.

To give you some idea of him, he spent his whole life working as a cardiologist; but he decided he hated the way Brazil was going, what was happening in the world, so, in 1989, he ran for President. As a minor candidate, he was granted all of 17 seconds of air time on national TV. In those 17 seconds, he shook the world completely and Brazil for sure. Ending with his famous trademark “My name is Enéas.” And everyone in the country remembered it. His message was that the situation had to change and change in a dramatic way.

Five years later, in 1994, he again ran for President. He won, by the way, millions of votes in that first round in 1989. In 1994, he ran again, and he was given one minute of national TV time. About that single minute, he remarked that it was “an eternity!” Enéas could speak very rapidly, by the way. What he chose to go through in that one minute of national TV time in Brazil, was Alexander Hamilton and the need for a credit system for Brazil and internationally. Enéas did not know us yet; he had not yet met Lyndon LaRouche. Because of that speech, our people in Brazil immediately contacted him, and that’s when we got to know him, and he got to know us and LaRouche.

In 1998, he went on national TV again; this time he was promoting Executive Intelligence Review magazine. He called it “the only magazine in the world which still defends the existence of the sovereign nation-state.” On an hour-long TV interview program, he described LaRouche as a brilliant economist, who had forecast the crisis and called for a New Bretton Woods. In another interview, he held up a copy of the August 29, 1997 issue of EIR with a feature article on George Soros and with Soros on the cover, deep in a marijuana field. So, he promoted EIR. That was quite something.

In June of 2002, Enéas decided to run not for President, but for Congress. He won from the city of São Paolo, which is the largest city in Brazil. It’s either the second or third largest city in the world; some 20 million people there. He won with the greatest number of votes ever registered in the history of Brazilian Congressional elections. He ran his campaign spending a maximum of $22,000. In that capacity as the candidate who had gotten the most votes for Congress in the history of all Brazil, Enéas and others from his party invited Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche to Brazil. Lyn was awarded honorary citizenship of the city of São Paolo by the City Council.

The full ceremony in which he was given the award was a huge political occasion. On that occasion, Enéas talked about LaRouche. I want you to look at LaRouche through the eyes of a person such as Enéas; that’s why I’ve described him to you, because I want you to actually get a sense of what we’re dealing with here.

Enéas began his speech, which he gave in the São Paolo city council chamber, asking: “Who Is Mr. LaRouche?” What he said was:

Until 1994, I knew of him only as a great political leader. I could also see the convergence of our thinking, but I had no idea at all of his immense and extraordinary culture in almost every field of human knowledge. . . .

I became increasingly astonished and deeply curious to know more and more about that man. Who, really, is he?

Recently, reading an article appearing in the May 10, 2002 issue of EIR, I was struck by Mr. LaRouche’s deep philosophical and technical analysis of the catenary, and I recalled my classes as a university physics student, 40 years ago, with my dear friend Dr. Osorio—who is here today—when we were being introduced to transcendental trigonometric functions, analytic geometry, and hyperbolic functions.

He went on to explain to the crowd of a couple hundred people:

The catenary is the curve describing the form taken by a uniform chain when it is suspended from its endpoints. Any freely hanging cable or rope assumes this shape. The catenary represents the constant search of nature for a state of order, with a minimum expenditure of energy. That is a universal principle, which, like many others, Mr. LaRouche explains magnificently in his writings.

Universal Principles of Least Action

But, let’s stop for a moment and think: What Presidential candidate in Brazil, or in the United States, for that matter, has ever heard of a catenary?

None of them, in their absolute ignorance of the scientific principles governing nature, has the slightest idea of the importance of scientific knowledge to the statesman who would lead a nation.

Besides being a mathematical philosopher, Mr. LaRouche has a keen intelligence and exceptional fluency in matters of the physical world, speaking with intimacy and profundity about the ideas of Gauss, Ampère, Oersted, and Kepler, and many other mainstays of physics.

Regarding philosophy as such, Mr. LaRouche is really a scholar. From Plato to Leibniz, from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, or Descartes, Spinoza, and many others, the depth of his reasoning and wise analysis is, for me, breathtaking.

He speaks about ancient history as if he were there, at the same table, on the same sofa, at Plato’s Symposium. . . . He who reads Mr. LaRouche’s articles receives a refreshing shower of science, fine arts, . . . and philosophy.

But, beyond such incontestable knowledge, what most impresses me about Mr. LaRouche is his concern for social questions, poverty, and the destiny of humanity. . . .

And then Enéas concluded, “Thank you very much, Mr. LaRouche, for your presence here in Brazil, and for all that you represent for all mankind.”

EIRNS/Philip Ulanowsky

Norbert Brainin and Lyndon LaRouche share some joy after a “Solidarity Concert for LaRouche” in Boston’s famous Jordan Hall, on December 4, 1987.

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Norbert Brainin

Now, lest you think that this was just one single, extraordinary individual in Brazil, let me briefly turn to another person—Norbert Brainin. Norbert Brainin was the head of the legendary Amadeus Quartet. Norbert Brainin was one of the greatest violinists of the 20th Century, without any doubt whatsoever. He was a good personal friend of Lyndon LaRouche. Norbert Brainin, with his accompanist Gunther Ludwig, gave a concert in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown University on December 2, 1988, exactly fourteen days before Lyndon LaRouche and six others of us were sentenced in the Alexandria “rocket docket.” What Norbert Brainin did, before performing in the concert, “Dedicated to Mr. Brainin’s Good Friend Lyndon H. LaRouche,” was to say:

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

I just want to say a few words. You see, we are here tonight, my friend Mr. Ludwig and I, to pay homage to a great man. We are here to bear witness to his stainless character, to his honesty. I know that all these things [he’s talking about the trial then ongoing] will resolve themselves, and his character will remain as stainless as it is now. But there is another reason why I am here. It is because I’m a friend of the United States of America. I love the United States of America. God Bless America!

He then proceeded to play a magnificent concert.

Seven years later, in September of 1995, that same Norbert Brainin held a master class at the Dolná Krupá castle in Slovakia. Some of you may have seen some footage of this in one of the classes that John Sigerson gave last year. Among the remarks that Professor Brainin said there in the course of his master class to a group of 100-150 people was the following:

Actually, the reason why I am here, is to make Motivführung visible to you. This question has always been very close to my heart. For a long time I have been carrying it around inside me, and for a long time this idea found no echo with anyone else.

The one person who did grasp the importance of the Motivführung [motivic thorough-composition] of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Dr. Brainin continued, was Lyndon LaRouche.

That is what unites us and brought us together. . . . Lyndon has understood the importance of Motivführung in Haydn; Mozart understood it—but when we look at the output of present-day Haydn and Mozart scholars, we must conclude that they haven’t the slightest understanding of the problem. Yes, they have written a lot about it, but they are not dealing with the question in an adequate way.

So, this is one of the most important and profound Classical artists of the 20th Century, commenting on Lyndon LaRouche.

EIRNS

Left to right: Dr. Revoli Suslov, Dr. Pobisk Kuznetsov, and Lyndon LaRouche share the speakers table at a seminar of 60 Russian scientists under the auspices of the “Prezident” program, to explore the application of life-support systems for spaceships to the survival of human life on Earth, at the Economics Academy in Moscow on April 28, 1994.

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Dr. Pobisk Kuznetsov

Let me give you the last example of comments about LaRouche while he was alive that I want to mention. This time from a Russian. His name was Pobisk Kuznetsov. Dr. Kuznetsov was a chemist, a philosopher, an engineer, and is considered the last great architect of the postwar economic recovery in the Soviet Union. Among other things, he headed the famous Scientific Council for the Study of Productive Forces. He was widely considered, because of his multi-faceted knowledge and talents, as the “Leonardo da Vinci of Russia.” In mid-1994, upon being invited to Moscow, LaRouche met with Kuznetsov and a group of other scientists. During that same Moscow trip, LaRouche also spoke to the Economics Committee of the State Duma (the Russian Parliament), on the invitation of Sergei Glazyev, who is now a Presidential advisor to Putin, and who sent the message of condolence on LaRouche’s death which you may have heard last week.

A couple of months after his meeting with LaRouche, in December 1994, Kuznetsov published an article in a Moscow journal, Rossiya 2010. Kuznetsov, one of the most prominent physical economists and scientists in Russia, decided that LaRouche’s work in physical economy was so profound that an actual unit of measurement of the physical economy had to be named after him. Of course, it should be called the LaRouche, and it should be designated by La for short; like amps for the French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère’s measurement.

Here is Kuznetsov’s idea of what he means; he wasn’t just saying, let’s honor LaRouche by simply attaching his name to something. He said:

Let us introduce the physical magnitude of “a larouche,” designated by La, which gives the number of persons who can be fed from 1 square kilometer, or 100 hectares, during one year. We share LaRouche’s view that the magnitude of potential relative population density” [ which is what he’s just described] can serve as an indicator of “intellectual culture,” but taking into account the quite diverse values for farv [photochemically active radiation per vegetative period], we shall compare not simply 100 hectares, but 100 hectares for a given local farv value.

Then he goes on to say how he has done calculations based on this, comparing Belgium’s capability and how much land-area is needed to feed 300 million people, saying: “We figured out how to do that, and what it would require to feed 300 million people corresponds to 20,000 larouches, or 40 times greater than the known productivity of Belgium.”

The key phrase there, if you want to mull over what he says, is that he shares LaRouche’s view that the magnitude of potential relative population density can serve as in indicator of “intellectual culture.” In other words, he’s recognized LaRouche’s fundamental discovery of the relationship of culture and human creativity to increased capabilities, increased power of mankind through potential relative population density.

We could go on all year, and we should, and we must, recounting the way LaRouche was viewed through the eyes of prominent thinkers around the world; because it gives the beginning of an idea of what we’re actually addressing here on justice for the man being justice for his ideas.

The LaRouche Case

Now let me quickly turn to a glance at LaRouche through the eyes of his enemies. You’ve probably all heard the famous quote from Ramsey Clark—it’s in the exoneration petition—who was an appeals attorney for LaRouche. You will recall Clark was also U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson. Ramsey Clark described the LaRouche case as—

a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time, in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, han any other Federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge.

I want to argue that that’s an understatement; because keeping an eye on what we were just talking about of “Who is Mr. LaRouche?” consider what was actually going on prior to the legal case, and then what happened at the LaRouche trials. Prior to the LaRouche legal case, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, LaRouche was playing a crucial role providing input and ideas and policy discussions to the Ronald Reagan administration. I would say that it happened in three areas worth noting. First, on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This was LaRouche’s idea, and on this President Reagan went with LaRouche’s policy in a nationally televised address on March 23, 1983. This was a total success which completely drove the British Empire and their friends on Wall Street berserk. They did everything to stop it; they could not.

White House

President Ronald Reagan, addressing the nation on national security in his Strategic Defense Initiative speech from the Oval Office on March 23, 1983.

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The second broad area consistent with the SDI, where LaRouche had enormous influence in and around the Reagan administration, was how to carry out a successful war on illicit drugs. Who’s behind the drug trade? Major international banks. You have to address the banking side before you can actually do anything about illicit drugs. We were in discussion with people in the Reagan administration, and I would characterize that as a partial success. We made some headway; we didn’t actually win the Reagan administration over to the LaRouche policy totally as we did with the SDI.

The third area—and all of these are related—was the reorganization of the world financial system. LaRouche’s Operation Juárez, which he had developed after his meetings with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Mexico’s President José López Portillo. The meeting with Gandhi was as central to Operation Juárez as were his meetings with López Portillo.

On the idea of bankrupting the IMF and the whole Wall Street trans-Atlantic system, and putting that failed system through bankruptcy reorganization, we did not succeed. Instead Henry Kissinger, on behalf of the Wall Street interests, beat LaRouche out within the Reagan administration. The same Kissinger who Reagan had emphatically excluded—and vocally so—for the first years of his administration, brought Kissinger back in, in 1983 as Central American negotiator or something ridiculous like that; but he got an inside track, obviously due to massive pressure placed on Reagan. Reagan had both the LaRouche proposal and the Kissinger proposal on his desk on financial reorganization, and we did not succeed. So, you can imagine what was going on in the centers of financial power when this was going on with LaRouche.

1986

It was nothing, however, compared to what happened after 1986 when these ideas took on direct political strength in the form of our electoral victories in the state of Illinois. That’s when they hit the panic button: “You know what? This is over! We are going to get LaRouche. We’re going to destroy him, we’re going to destroy the movement. This cannot be tolerated. Good ideas [for them bad ideas] are bad enough, but when that is hooked up with an independent political movement capable of implementing those ideas, there’s nothing we’ll be able to do to stop it.”

So, they moved. Documents exist proving exactly what happened behind the scenes. All of it was completely illegal. The first thing they did was put several of our publishing companies into involuntary bankruptcy in a totally illegal process without the requisite legal proceedings. Then, they launched a case in Boston against LaRouche and a group of his associates. When that case was moving toward uncovering the fact that it was government illegal proceedings against us through the office of then U.S. Attorney of Boston, William Weld and his sidekick Robert Mueller—the same Robert Mueller of today—there were documents that were about to be exposed on the LaRouche case in the archives of then-Vice President Bush. At that point, a mistrial was declared, and the Boston case was stopped. Lo and behold, jurors interviewed in the local press said that they were about to acquit LaRouche!

FBI

Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

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So, through various connivances, they managed to pull a mistrial. Then they immediately moved a similar case to Alexandria, Virginia, known as the “rocket docket.”

I’m going to focus on one thing about the Alexandria trial, and that is that prior to the trial itself, the government presented a motion in limine before the jury was even selected, asking the judge to rule that we, the defendants, would not be allowed to mention the bankruptcy proceeding as anything having to do with what we were charged with, which were phony charges that we had taken on loans without ever intending to pay them. Our defense approach was going to be straightforward: tell the truth. That was rather unique back then, and still is today, to tell the truth in a trial. The truth was: yes we borrowed money; and yes, at a certain point we did run into problems making payments on those loans. But the reason, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that we had problems paying those loans, is that the government bankrupted the companies! It would have been illegal to pay anything from companies that the government had bankrupted.

But, the judge granted the motion in limine: we could talk about that we had taken loans; we could say that we ran into problems paying them; but we absolutely could not mention why. Any lawyer, any witness who said that the reason that there had been a problem was because the government put us into bankruptcy, that person, that lawyer would have been proclaimed in contempt of court. In other words, we were told straightforwardly, that we were not allowed to defend ourselves.

The jury pool was made up largely of government-dependent people, and in particular the foreman of the jury was a gentleman by the name of Buster Horton, who we subsequently learned was one of the top people in the Department of Agriculture who had what they called “cosmic clearance”; which is way above Top Secret, because he was part of a small group in each department of government in charge of “continuity of government” under conditions of extreme crisis. In other words, he was a complete, total agent of the British imperial apparatus inside the United States. So, not surprisingly, we were all found guilty.

We appealed the bankruptcy verdict in civil court, and we won, as the appellate court found that the bankruptcy proceedings against us had not only been wrong but had been done on the basis of a so-called “constructive fraud” imposed on the lower court by the government. So, there we were, sitting in jail; we had been in jail for about six months at that point, and I figured—maybe I was naïve and others knew better—but I figured, “OK, the cause of the problem has just been declared to be the result of government illegal activity. Now, we’ll appeal, and our case will be thrown out on the criminal side.” We did appeal but—Oh no!—we were told that the civil ruling had no bearing whatsoever in a criminal case; one case is civil, the other is criminal. Sorry. We appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and lost.

That’s what happened under the Bush [41] administration. LaRouche got out after serving five years of a fifteen-year sentence during the Bill Clinton Presidency. You get the idea.

So, if you look at Lyndon LaRouche through the eyes of his friends and look at LaRouche through the eyes of his enemies, you start to get an idea of what’s going on here. And why his exoneration—that is, doing justice to his ideas—is so crucial.

LaRouche Through Your Eyes and Actions

The third and final matter to discuss, is to look at LaRouche through your eyes and your actions. We need to act; we need to get LaRouche exonerated, and we need to get that exoneration not simply because we want justice done in this particular case. Of course we do; and terrible things were done to Mr. LaRouche. However, the worst damage was to the United States itself, by denying Americans access to his ideas. The worst harm was done to those who tolerated this injustice and looked the other way. The worst damage was like that inflicted during the McCarthy period; not so much to the people who were witch-hunted, but to those who swallowed it—he good people who allowed this to be done to our country. The worst damage in the case of the early Christians being eaten by the lions—sure, it wasn’t really good for the early Christians—but the real damage, as St. Augustine discusses, was to the people who watched the spectacle and thereby lost their souls.

That’s what we’re dealing with here. The issue is you; you collectively, you individually, your republic. The issue is whether you will allow this kind of thing to happen in our country; because if you do, you don’t have a country. Both directly in terms of the policies, but also more substantially in terms of tolerating this kind of injustice.

What do we need? Well, we need money to make this thing work. We intend to hold a memorial for LaRouche. We intend to publish a pamphlet with many of the condolences for LaRouche, with the obituary, with the exoneration petition. I don’t have any detailed specifics at this point, but I would say that something in the range of $30,000 would get the ball rolling on this.

That’s above and beyond what we already require to function; which I know many of you are helping with. But I’m talking above and beyond here, so if there are 100-plus people on this conference call, we’re talking simply $300 a person on top of what you do otherwise to help make our work possible. But of course, as you know, not everybody can or will make such a contribution. So, those of you who are prepared to actually act and see LaRouche through your own eyes, are probably going to have to carry more weight than just your own. You’re going to have to carry your buddy’s weight; you’ll probably have to do twice that amount, or something like that.

“That’s the hard part,” you might say. I’d say it’s the easy part, because what we also need everyone to do is to go out and get ten signatures on the exoneration petition for LaRouche. That’s not going to come simply by appealing to people on the basis of, “Oh, he was treated badly; why don’t you sign?” People are going to have to understand what’s actually at issue here. That means you’re going to have to educate people. It’s very important. If 100 of the people on this call do that, we’ll have 1,000 new signatures.

And I would also call on each and every one of you—many of you have already done this, but do it again; and if you haven’t done it, do it now: Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper; we need a tidal wave in this country of people talking about LaRouche and talking about what this means in terms of the true justice that’s required, which is justice for his ideas.

If we get that kind of campaign off the ground in the United States, then the entire strategic situation changes. Because the United States will be viewed in a very different way by every other major power in the world, from Russia to China to Italy and so on. It will cease to be the United States of Henry Kissinger or Barack Obama, but instead will be the United States of Washington, of Lincoln, of John Quincy Adams, of Franklin Roosevelt; it will be the United States of Lyndon LaRouche.

And that can make all the difference.

Message of Condolence

I feel very saddened about the loss of Lyndon LaRouche. These things come in their time. Everyone's death diminishes us all and Mr. LaRouche will certainly find his place in history. He was treated unfairly in his life, for his vision and his work. His courage is especially notable in the face of pervasive and vicious propaganda. Time will correct this, in his memory. The truth will out.

Ramsey Clark

Attorney General of the United States, 1967-1969

New York, United States

[back to text]

III. Americas Report

Severe Flooding Hits U.S. Farm Belt, Atop Economic Crisis

by Marcia Merry Baker

Missouri Army National Guard/Alex Flynn

Preventable flooding has again brought vast destruction to the physical economy in the Missouri-Mississippi River Basins. Shown here is a major highway intersection underwater in Valley Park, Missouri on December 30, 2015.

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March 25—Major parts of the huge Mississippi-Missouri River Basins system are now under water from the combined effects of lack of infrastructure, and the confluence of heavy rains, snowmelt and this month’s multi-state “bomb cyclone” storm. The severe damage affects a large area in the heart of the farm belt—from South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, south to Louisiana. Wisconsin and other states are also hit. Overall, the flooding and debris impact will continue into May.

The disaster is all the worse in this region, as it comes on top of an ongoing crisis in agriculture, a result of the combined effect of several years that farmers’ prices have been below their costs of production, and the increasing consolidation of food control (processing, concentration of production, etc.). The lack of infrastructure shows up in all respects—transportation, water management, medical services, as well as disaster defenses. This reflects the impact of decades of government policy run to serve Wall Street/City of London financial gains, not the national interest.

USAF/Rachelle Blake

Catastrophic flooding in Nebraska has wiped out roads, overtopped dams, and left at least a third of the Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, submerged as of March 17, 2019.

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The significant question posed to the nation by the epic farm belt floods, is: Will the principle of the American System be restored, to see that the government once again intervenes to enable infrastructure and a sound food and farming sector, and deals with all other aspects of sustaining a productive nation, in the context of productive international relations?

One prominent farm leader puts this in terms of getting the United States into the worldwide development drive—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—which will have its second international forum next month in China. South Dakota farm leader Ron Wieczorek, who ran for his state’s Congressional seat in 2018, sent a special message out to his networks this weekend, about the flooding and farm crisis. The LaRouche PAC-endorsed candidate said:

The only engine powerful enough to stop the farm crisis is for President Trump to bring the USA into the “One Belt One Road”—100 nations are already on board, and we have a standing invitation to join.

Wieczorek’s mid-term election campaign made a big point of exposing how Russiagate all along was a British-instigated geopolitical scheme, to hem in Trump and the United States from developing new diplomatic and economic relations for the common good among the U.S., Russia, China and other nations. Building infrastructure-corridors of development in the Americas—disaster protection, modern rail, nuclear power—is the context in which all the apparently insoluble conflicts we face today can be resolved, from the question of migrants, to the matter of a productive future for Venezuela without British regime-change.

www.mo.gov

U.S. map showing the major Midwest river basins.

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Flooding Dimensions

Floodwaters are still cresting at points down the lower Missouri, and the Mississippi River has yet to see its peak flows. This region is huge in size, and accounts for a large part of the nation’s crops, especially soy and corn, and livestock—cattle and hogs. The damage is vast to every kind of essential infrastructure in the multi-state region: railroads, highways, and bridges, as well as schools, commercial buildings and homes.

So far 42 wastewater treatment plants in Nebraska are flooded. On March 14, the Spencer Dam gave way on the Niobrara River. Nine major levee breaches have occurred along the Missouri River itself. Transportation in the flooded areas is entirely disrupted. In Nebraska, 200 miles of roadway are completely gone, and hundreds more miles are still under water or badly damaged. Eleven main bridges are destroyed, and even where flood waters have receded, long detours are in effect. Hundreds of miles of gravel roads, the standard in rural areas, are washed out completely, taking out the culverts and underground cables as well.

In Iowa as of March 22, a long stretch of the north-south Interstate 29 highway along the Missouri River remained impassable and closed, requiring a 100-mile detour via Des Moines to go from Sioux City, Iowa, south to Kansas City. Amtrak has suspended all service across southern Iowa, which uses the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) tracks, now unsafe. BNSF spokesmen say they are re-directing all their regional freight movement, and can’t say when they can restore service until the floodwater recedes. The flooding of prime farm land brings problems of scouring, and deposition of sand, chemicals and debris. Emergency high-ground locations were set up for livestock that could be moved in time, but thousands of head of cattle and hogs have perished. Carcasses are visible floating or jammed up into huge piles by the force of the water.

A full damage assessment is still not possible. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Contingency Director toured much of the Nebraska-Iowa-South Dakota Missouri River region by helicopter beginning March 20, and emergency work is now proceeding in key places. In Nebraska alone, for example, major breeches have occurred in the 350 miles of levees along the Missouri River, the Platte and Elkhorn Rivers, and their tributaries. The USACE has rushed to shore up the Union Dike Levee near Valley, Nebraska.

On March 21, President Trump approved Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts’ request to declare the state a Federal disaster area. The White House statement declared that since March 9, the state has suffered an emergency from the “severe winter storm, straight-line winds and flooding.” On March 23, President Trump affirmed a Federal disaster declaration for 56 of 99 counties in Iowa. More declarations are expected.

Big Infrastructure Works!

During the course of this disaster, one positive feature stands out: Big infrastructure works. Nebraska’s Cooper Nuclear Station is operating safely at full power at its site in Brownville, along the Missouri River, after preparations for flooding functioned properly.

USACE

The Gavins Point Dam and hydroelectric power plant on the Missouri River, near Yankton, South Dakota.

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In South Dakota, the Gavins Point Dam and power generation plant are operating fully on the Missouri River. The 1957 structure (a rolled earthen and chalkstone embankment) is also providing a critical river crossing, via the Crest Road over the dam, while the nearby Highway 121 bridge is undergoing flood repair. This connectivity is critical for the greater Yankton, S.D. region.

These examples are part of what was to be an integrated system of water, power and development projects for the entire Missouri River Basin, but it was never fully built out. Instead, this productive basin has been subject to repeated flood devastation. In 1944 the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Project—named after its two design engineers, Gen. Lewis A. Pick and William Glenn Sloan—was put forward.

When completed, it was to have 147 multi-purpose dams and reservoirs (for flood control, power, irrigation, recreation); 38 hydro-power plants; a navigation channel nine feet deep and 300 feet wide, all the way from St. Louis on the Mississippi, up to Sioux City, Iowa; and continuous levees for 1,500 miles, and more. (See EIR, June 10, 2011, “No More Floods! Build the Missouri River Development Project,” by Anthony DeFranco, pp. 13-27.)

Only a portion of the Pick-Sloan Plan was ever built. After certain key, up-river dams were constructed, e.g., Gavins Point and others, the full plan languished. Moreover, the design had envisioned many related projects to upgrade land resources, which were also never done. The Missouri is nicknamed the Big Muddy because of its turbidity—the sediment load in its flow. To counter this, Pick-Sloan called for planting five-million acres of trees (equivalent to the area of Massachusetts), building 2.5 million acres of shelterbelt tree rows to counter wind erosion; and constructing two-million acres of terraces to deter top-soil loss from farm fields. William Sloan foresaw thousands of new farms, new cities and industrial centers.

But, like the continental-scale North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) project to upgrade the resource base all across western North America, all of these projects were blocked. It is time to resume the construction of these big projects.

Instead of pursuing the Big Projects approach—as the Franklin Roosevelt Administration had done—U.S. policy after World War II came under control of the City of London/Wall Street policy of casino economics—financial speculation, deregulation, and outsourcing. Moreover, the green-movement wing of Wall Street argued that the American West must renounce dams, let the bison return, and drive out people.

Farm Crisis

Even before the latest, preventable flooding disaster, an extreme economic crisis had already been gripping this region. One marker of that is debt. Independent farm household debt levels and bankruptcies are surging in the Midwest states, and worry and suicide rates are high. This was described Feb. 27 by the usually sunny Sonny Perdue, Agriculture Secretary, in his testimony to the House Agriculture Committee. He said,

Farm debt has been rising more rapidly over the last five years, increasing by 30% since 2013—up from $315 billion to $409 billion, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, and up from $385 billion in just the last year—to levels seen in the 1980s.

There has been a surge in farm household bankruptcies under Chapter 12 of the Federal Code, which was first devised expressly for agriculture operations during the 1980s, when farm foreclosures were soaring. At that time, Wall Street interests muscled Washington to disallow any debt moratoria, or resumption of parity pricing, which would have stopped the crisis. So instead, Chapter 12 was created. But many farmers are walking away altogether, or worse.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that the rate of suicide among farmers is the highest in the nation. The new five-year farm law, in effect since January, calls for setting up suicide-prevention helplines and other measures for rural residents. The National Farmers Union (NFU) wants to go even further. In a March 25 statement, the NFU calls for funding of $10 million in FY 2020 for the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network. The NFU reports, “Net farm income in 2018 was nearly 50 percent less than it was in 2013.”

marciabaker@larouchepub.com

TELESUR INTERVIEW: DENNIS SMALL

The Significance of Trump’s North Korea Diplomacy for the Venezuela Crisis

Dennis Small

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TeleSUR, the Ibero-American terrestrial and satellite television network headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela, broadcast a 20-minute English-language interview on March 4 with EIR’s Dennis Small, on the significance of President Donald Trump’s North Korea diplomacy for the Venezuelan crisis. The interview was conducted by TeleSUR anchor Jorge Gestoso. It can be viewed. Subheads have been added. A 30-minute Spanish-language interview with Small on the same subject was broadcast on March 6.

Jorge Gestoso: Hello, I’m Jorge Gestoso, welcome to a new show. On today’s program, the recent summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un—with Dennis Small, Latin American editor of Executive Intelligence Review. Dennis, a warm welcome to the program.

Dennis Small: Thank you, Jorge. I’m very happy to be here.

Gestoso: We have heard different versions of the conclusion of that summit. Some of them are trying to say it was not as successful. What is your reading of that summit? Success, failure, promising—what’s your reading?

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un opening their second nuclear summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, February 27, 2019.

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Small: I think that if we look at the summit narrowly, in terms of the immediate summit per se, it was not successful in what the possibilities were from that summit. But I don’t think we should jump to conclusions too quickly, as to where this is really going, because I think on the broader scale, of the directionality of this kind of diplomacy, I think the process is still very positive. And I’ll explain what I mean.

There are two different approaches going on internationally to the question of diplomacy and international relations: There’s one school of thought and practice, which we see, for example in the case of Venezuela, where the financial and political interests that have been dominant in the trans-Atlantic sector, have adopted the idea of what they call “R2P,” “Responsibility to Protect.”

Gestoso: To protect whom?

Small: That’s gobbledygook, as you indicate, which simply means, “I’m allowed to interfere in your internal affairs, violate your sovereignty, impose my view, making up some story about human rights violations, corruption, or anything.” The idea here, is to establish the precedent of eliminating national sovereignty, and creating a unipolar world with the domination of the financial interests of the trans-Atlantic sector—

Gestoso: “Trans-Atlantic” meaning?

Small: That means Wall Street and the City of London—basically, the Western financial system. Which, incidentally, is as bankrupt as bankrupt can be, because it has $1.5 quadrillion—don’t ask me how many zeroes, it’s a lot!—in speculative debt, derivatives and so on. Completely unpayable.

Gestoso: Much worse than 2008 crisis.

Small: Much worse, because the so-called solution of the 2008 crisis, was to simply create more speculation. In other words, you have a financial cancer, which you feed with more cancer. So, if the cancer grows, that’s not a solution, that’s a problem.

And this can blow, and it will blow at any time, and much of what we’re seeing in international relations, has to do with a bankrupt system trying to stay in control of a process of disintegration.

So that’s one whole process going on, and we see this internationally proposed by many of the people inside the Trump government.

Gestoso: For example, by whom?

Small: Well, for example, Vice President Mike Pence; for example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; for example, John Bolton, National Security Advisor. Elliott Abrams, the convicted felon who was just named to head up the U.S. relations with Venezuela. . .

Gestoso: Who lied to the Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair.

Small: Yes. He lied for that, and was found guilty in a court of law, for the felony of lying to Congress. And now, the idea is, he can somehow come back before the United Nations, as a convicted felon and a liar, to justify a military intervention into Venezuela—it would be ludicrous, if it weren’t so dangerous.

White House/Shealah Craighead

Chairman Kim Jong-un and President Trump during their expanded bilateral meeting at the Capella Hotel, Singapore on June 12, 2018.

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The ‘Singapore Model’

Now, that’s one whole process going on. But, I think what President Trump is doing in the case of Korea, in North Korea, South Korea, the Korean Peninsula, is to move in the direction of an entirely different approach, of what the Chinese call “win-win relations”: to find a solution to the crisis of the peninsula which is based on the cooperative economic development of North Korea and South Korea, within the context of the Belt and Road Initiative that the Chinese have inaugurated. And what President Trump did with Chairman Kim in Singapore—

Gestoso: The first summit.

Small: Yes, exactly, the first summit that they held, was a kind of model—you could almost call it “the Singapore model”—of a different approach. I think President Trump went to Vietnam for the recent summit with the intention of pursuing that approach. And clearly Chairman Kim did the same thing.

It ran into some problems and obstacles, and I don’t pretend to know the details of what they were. But I think they are momentary obstacles.

Gestoso: So you think there will be next summits, next encounters?

Small: Yes. I think that there is a coming process going on—that process is still under way. I think that the possibilities of this moving forward are definitely encouraging. But, let’s face it, there are people inside the United States government and there are people on Wall Street and the City of London, and there are people in the British Empire, who do not want that approach to succeed.

Gestoso: So, in a way, Donald Trump is swimming against tide inside his own government?

Small: Donald Trump is an expert at swimming against the tide in general. In fact, I don’t think he knows how to swim with the tide, except the tide he did swim with in the elections, was what got him elected, which is an expression of the popular outrage in the population against the existing institutions and establishment.

But, yes. What you’re saying I think is exactly the point. He is swimming against the tide inside his government, and, internationally. Because, if you just look at what happened, at the same time as the North Korean summit was going on, the people who want to overthrow his Presidency—and this starts in London, and continues with very powerful interests in the U.S. intelligence establishment, and others, like Mueller, and Brennan, and so on, they organized this complete clown show and circus, of Michael Cohen—another convicted liar—testifying before Congress, the very same day the President of the United States was speaking to Kim Jong-un.

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Intelligence chiefs: (l. to r.) FBI Director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and CIA Director John Brennan testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 9, 2106.

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Now, this is never done in American politics, as you know. You do not do that, no matter what you think of the President, you don’t wash your laundry in public, while he’s abroad, especially on issues of war and peace!

Not only did they do it, but they tried to undermine his very Presidency. And I think that gives you a reading of the level of opposition and hostility to Trump, coming from people who fear that their empire is threatened, not just because of Trump, but because of a global process, that we saw expressed in the Brexit vote, that we saw expressed in the Italian elections, and that saw, ironically, expressed in the elections in Mexico, where the populism didn’t take a so-called “right-wing” form, it took a “left-wing” form. And therefore, you have the basis of an alliance among Trump, China, Russia, Italy, Mexico, not on the basis of ideology of left and right, but on the basis of a new and different economic policy internationally, and a new global security policy. That I think is the big picture around North Korea.

‘Denuclearization,’ ‘R2P,’ and Sovereignty

Gestoso: When we hear what the mass media here is talking about the recent summit in Hanoi, they’re saying President Trump went to discuss the denuclearization—he has trouble with the word “denuclearization”—

Small: So do I!

Gestoso: [laughs] Welcome to the club—the denuclearization of North Korea, just specifically that part. And Chairman Kim was saying, we’re discussing here the denuclearization of the whole Korean Peninsula.

Talk to us about that, the whole picture, not only in the Korean Peninsula, but also around the other big players in the nuclear world?

Small: Chairman Kim, like the government of North Korea in general, has watched very carefully what has happened in Iraq, what happened in Libya, what the plan is for regime-change in Venezuela, what they tried to do in Syria but failed: Which is using the “Responsibility to Protect” for regime-change and once the government is overthrown, all the promises are out the window and the leadership is murdered, like what happened with Qaddafi in Libya.

The Koreans will not abandon their one capability for defending themselves, no matter what we think of them, unless they have security guarantees. This is a point that has been emphasized, I think correctly, by President Putin of Russia and by President Xi Jinping of China. And therefore, the role here, of China and of Russia, with the United States, in guaranteeing the conditions under which North Korea can denuclearize, safely, which means a denuclearization of the region and have some of the economic sanctions lifted on a step-by-step basis, a kind of a quid pro quo, that’s the only way this can go forward.

And I think that Trump has, on one level, recognized this. Even as he was leaving Hanoi, after this immediate meeting did not succeed, by saying, not only will we proceed, but also China and Russia have played a very positive role in this.

So, the broader picture here, is we’re dealing with a world where nuclear weapons and the development of new technologies in nuclear weapons, such as those announced by Putin recently, have reached such a point that nuclear war is unthinkable, unless we care to make the human species extinct.

And therefore, a new arrangement, a new architecture must be created for security, a return to the kinds of policies that President Ronald Reagan had proposed with the Strategic Defense Initiative at the time—which, incidentally, Mr. LaRouche, the founder of our magazine, of Executive Intelligence Review, played an important role in developing the concepts behind that SDI, which were two key points: Systems based on new physical principles, not the old, kinetic principles, new physical principles, because that technology, when it’s extended into the civilian economy can lead to an explosion of growth; and the second, working with, not against, but in cooperation with, not conflict with, Russia and China; Russia, then the Soviet Union.

That was Reagan’s policy, and unfortunately it was never actually carried out. We have to return to something like that, and I think that is a possibility with what’s happening in Korea.

Trump Should Sit Down with Maduro

Gestoso: Regarding Venezuela: We heard in the Security Council of the United Nations recently, the foreign minister of Venezuela Jorge Arreaza as saying: Why should President Trump not sit with President Maduro of Venezuela, and solve the whole thing? And also, he was sort of joking, he said, because President Maduro is the head of the Venezuelan government, and President Trump is the head of the Venezuelan opposition, so they can solve everything, just the two of them. [laughs]

But the basic thing here is, President Trump is sitting with Chairman Kim, because there is that sort of fear that there is the nuclear power. Latin America has decided that it is the region of peace, and it’s proud of it, because of being the region of peace, in a way, it’s much more vulnerable to the threats of the U.S. to invade them, because, as you said, they don’t like their sovereignty. Isn’t that ironic, that you need nuclear weapons to be “respected” by the big players of the nuclear world?

Small: I think that President Trump should sit down with President Maduro. When President Trump sits down on a one-on-one discussion with world leaders of big and small countries, you tend to get very interesting results that break out of the game plan of the geopolitical approach which the City of London and Wall Street want to establish.

This, incidentally, is why everything imaginable was done to prevent—and is still being done—to prevent President Trump from sitting down and meeting with President Putin. When they have done that, there is the basis for a discussion moving forward, like happened in Helsinki.

Now, what happens, every time President Trump breaks out in a direction of that kind of unusual diplomacy, which does work, that’s when every operation imaginable is launched, to try to sabotage it. I’ll just mention two or three: His talking with President Xi Jinping in Mar-a-Lago, just as you and I are talking here, except they were having a very nice banquet—

Gestoso: And chocolate dessert!

Public Domain

White House/D. Myles Cullen

U.S. Govt.

Heightened destabilization of Venezuela: (top to bottom) a rally of Guaidó supporters, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence meeting with Venezuelan refugees, and a highway blocked in confrontation with military.

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Small: Yes, a very nice meal, and so on—and at that moment, the [self-proclaimed] neo-cons inside the Trump Administration, with advice from London, from the British Empire, lied to President Trump and got him to go along with a military strike against Syria,—with Xi sitting in front of him.

On the occasion of Helsinki: Immediately as that was happening, the Mueller circus—which it is, it’s a circus, against Trump—there is no collusion; the whole premise of the thing is completely nonsensical, and it has been shown to be such. And parenthetically, let me just mention, an interesting article written by William Binney, the former Technical Director of the NSA—

Gestoso: The National Security Agency.

Small: Exactly. And, Larry Johnson—these are two whistleblowers, in which they prove, as only such professionals can prove, that it is technically impossible for Russia to have hacked the DNC [Democratic National Committee] computer. The speeds at which it happened, could only have been done by a download onto a thumb drive. It could not have happened over the internet. That’s the kind of information that completely disproves the whole thesis of this entire thing!

Gestoso: That the bogeyman is Russia.

Small: That the bogeyman is Russia. And part of this is designed to overthrow the Trump government, but certainly to prevent him from developing a good personal relationship with Putin, the way he has with Xi.

The Timing: North Korea and Venezuela

Now, I think that—and if you just look at when these things happened—it’s not accidental that also right at the time of this planned meeting with Kim in Hanoi, was exactly the moment, a week before, that the whole Venezuelan situation was kicked up, into a huge storm, making up stories, inventing things about how they couldn’t get humanitarian aid in—that’s just factually not true. Humanitarian aid is getting into Venezuela, if it’s done through the proper channels, of the United Nations. And that has been made clear internationally. Venezuela doesn’t have a problem with that.

Gestoso: And even the Red Cross opposes to do in that condition, in political conditions.

Small: Right, that you cannot use humanitarian aid as an excuse and a justification for the invasion of a country. Which is obviously what the game plan is here.

So I do think the reason the Venezuelan thing was blown up when it was, was to try to sabotage [Trump’s negotiations with] North Korea. This is how these people think.

Gestoso: So, timing is everything.

Small: Yes. And to establish the precedent in all of Latin America, that nobody can break out of the game of the bankrupt financial system of the West, and to ally, for example, with China and the Belt and Road. Wall Street is very nervous about that—there are numerous countries that are doing that.

And so, I think these are all factors in the Venezuela situation, which are related to North Korea.

The Two World Systems

Again, the big picture is this: We have two systems right now in the world: One, which is sinking and is bankrupt, and is falling apart, which is the system of the bankrupt, Western financial system, with its $1.5 quadrillion in unpayable debt; its promotion of war; and its desire to have a conflict with Russia and China in particular—system number one, going down.

System number two, beginning to surge internationally, is what is built around the Belt and Road Initiative of the Chinese, which is exactly what the United States should join. One of the great ironies, here, Jorge, is that system of the Chinese is almost exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the United States: It’s the American System of Hamilton, of Lincoln, and of Roosevelt. It’s that kind of win-win approach, where industrial advance, technological development, and science, for every nation of the world, respecting their sovereignty, has become a real prospect.

So we’re facing a global battle now, of exactly the sort Mr. LaRouche had long discussed, where the different regional situations can be best understood from the standpoint of that global chessboard.

Gestoso: In a way your vision, or part of your vision is that President Trump will be at least partially swimming against the tide of some hawks of his own government. His life, politically, or more than politically, physically, could be tried to be killed, like it happened with John Kennedy?

The British Empire Swims Against the Future

Small: I think that—let me invert it: I think that the British Empire, the City of London, Wall Street, those financial interests, will stop at nothing to defend their system. They will try to make sure that their chosen candidates are elected, like it was the case with Hillary Clinton, and when that doesn’t happen, they will try to overthrow the President of the United States, which is now going on around the Trump question, with completely manufactured accusations. If that doesn’t work, they will try to have people implanted inside his government to try to force him in a certain direction; they will try to blackmail him; and absolutely, these people are perfectly capable of assassinating heads of state, when they find no other solution.

I do think, however, that this is not hopeless by any means, because President Trump is a fighter—sometimes he fights for the wrong policies, but by and large, he’s fighting for the right policies in international affairs. And he’s a fighter, and he’s not going to go down easily. And what he has shown, so far throughout his Presidency, is that he’s capable of providing that kind of leadership.

If that moves in alliance with what China and Russia, and other nations are doing—like the BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa]—towards a different economic system, I think that will be the Achilles’ heel of this international financial system. It’s going down anyway. The only question is: Can we replace it with a new, human system that actually is based on that, which, after all, distinguishes us, the human species, from all other species, which is our creativity, our ability to innovate, to have science, and to build the present with an idea of what the future must be? I think that’s possible. And I think that the owners of this system also believe it’s possible, and therefore, they are really freaked out.

Gestoso: Dennis Small, thank you very much for joining us.

Small: My pleasure.

The LaRouche Plan to ‘Hermetically Seal’ the Border Against Drug-Traffic

by Dennis Small

March 20—There is no question that President Trump is right that there is a huge crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are desperate migrants trying to escape a hell made up of extreme poverty, drug gangs, shootings, kidnappings, etc., brought about by the very forces deployed to get President Trump out of office one way or another; and there are the problems of weapons and drug trafficking, which are national security threats to the United States, Mexico and Central America. And that problem does not only exist in one direction, as the “Fast and Furious” scandal taught us. So both countries need border protection.

But we must be clear. The only viable solution is to totally shut down drug production and trafficking, including the drug money laundering through the City of London and Wall Street; and we must also state emphatically that poverty has to be alleviated, which can only be accomplished with the real industrial development of all of Central and South America.

A unique opportunity exists for U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to forge an alliance that will secure the U.S.-Mexico border in the only way possible: by jointly defeating the drug trade, which is wrecking both countries; and by ending the terrible poverty and underdevelopment which feeds that drug trade and the related migrant crisis.

To solve a problem, you first have to properly determine its cause, and then design policies that will address that cause and correct it. On both counts—drugs and migration—Lyndon LaRouche has done exactly that. It’s time to return to basics.

Dope, Inc.

Let’s start with drugs. LaRouche and his associates wrote the book on the drug trade—literally. As the 1978 bestseller Dope, Inc. proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, the international drug trade is run as a single, international monopoly by the principal City of London and Wall Street banks that have otherwise created a $1.5 quadrillion unpayable speculative financial bubble. The potential annual sales by Dope, Inc. (including marijuana, cocaine, opiates, and synthetic drugs) is today about $1 trillion.

Other related components of the international black economy—arms, gold, diamonds, oil, prostitution, other human trafficking, etc.—account for another $1 trillion or so, and is run by the same London-centered financial apparatus. They do all of this both to help keep their speculative bubble afloat with laundered dirty money, but even more so as a kind of New Opium War being waged against targeted populations, emphatically including the United States. The epidemic of opioid and cheap heroin addiction and overdose deaths of recent years, is just the latest, intentional “marketing” offensive being carried out by that Dope, Inc. apparatus—much as they did with cheap crack cocaine decades ago, under the watchful eye of George H.W. Bush.

As Lyndon LaRouche stated as far back as 1985, in presenting a 15-point war plan against drugs to an international conference in Mexico City:

The international drug-traffic has become an evil and powerful government in its own right. It represents today a financial, political, and military power greater than that of entire nations within the Americas. It is a government which is making war against civilized nations, a government upon which we must declare war, a war which we must fight with the weapons of war, and a war which we must win in the same spirit the United States fought for the unconditional defeat of Nazism between 1941 and 1945. Law-enforcement methods, by themselves, will fail; even joint law-enforcement efforts by the nations bordering the Caribbean would fail.

The Strategy for Defeating Dope, Inc.

The strategy for defeating Dope, Inc. must proceed simultaneously on three fronts:

First, crop eradication: With modern technologies, especially those available to NASA, up to 90% of all global marijuana, coca and opium crops can be identified and eradicated. In fact, more than 40 years ago, a 1978 joint study by NASA and the Mexican government of José López Portillo proved the case even at that time:

The remote sensing techniques developed at NASA’s Earth Resources Laboratory to monitor agricultural crops from Landsat satellites [can] be used to detect cannabis. The particular radiation reflectance signature for the marijuana crop was determined to be in the 1.55 to 1.75-micron band, in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. With this knowledge, NASA analysts could find the cannabis fields from the air. A multi-spectrum scanning instrument (MSS) from NASA, mounted under the wing of a Lear 35 jet, could cover 12,000 square miles of Mexico per day. The entire country could be mapped every 15 days, to allow crops to be targeted for destruction almost as soon as they started growing.

USGA

The remote sensing techniques developed at NASA’s Earth Resources Laboratory to monitor agricultural crops from Landsat satellites can be used to detect cannabis. Shown is an artist’s depiction of the Landsat-8, a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, launched in 2013.

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Technologies developed in the intervening four decades, including satellite-based systems, can do far more.

Once the drug crops are detected, highly effective herbicides, such as glyphosate, can then be applied massively, using virtual air flotillas protected by the respective national air forces, if necessary. For hard-to-reach mountainous areas and deep valleys, modern, armored helicopters can be equipped for the task. Environmentalist arguments against such spraying are specious. Herbicides have been designed that are damaging only to the drug crops, and not to other plants.

Over recent years, much of domestic U.S. marijuana production (the United States is one of the major cannabis producers in the world) has been moved into vast, technologically sophisticated indoor or underground plantations that are not detectable with standard aerial surveillance. Here, however, infrared photography, which detects heat, is very useful. So, too, is the measurement of unusually high rates of water and electricity consumption in areas where they are not warranted. Similarly, the discharge of unauthorized chemical effluents can be readily detected.

The same basic approach can and must be applied to other drugs, including opium and coca. It is not unreasonable to suggest that as much as 90% of all three major illicit drug crops can be identified and eradicated on the spot.

Second, drug interdiction and seizure: With modern technologies, up to 75% of the surviving drugs can be interdicted, seized and destroyed.

In all the discussion of constructing a concrete or steel wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, little attention appears to have been paid to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA’s) own 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment report, which identifies how most illicit drugs actually enter the United States. The vast majority of the foreign marijuana, cocaine, opiates and synthetics enters the U.S. through Mexico. How does it get across the border? The DEA reports:

The most common method employed by these TCOs [transnational criminal organizations] involves transporting illicit drugs through U.S. POEs [ports of entry] in passenger vehicles with concealed compartments or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor trailers. In some instances, regardless of method, the size of the loads has decreased, while the number of them has increased. Other cross-border smuggling techniques employed by Mexican TCOs include the use of subterranean tunnels, which originate in Mexico and lead into safe-houses on the U.S. side of the border. . . . Mexican TCOs also transport illicit drugs to the United States aboard commercial cargo trains and passenger buses. To a lesser extent, Mexican TCOs use maritime vessels off the coast of California.

USCBP/Donna Burton

Motorists crossing the U.S./Mexico border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

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This poses the significant problem of inspecting all of the cargo that legally enters the United States. According to the DHS’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection (USCBP), nearly 25 million containers enter the United States every year: 11 million by sea, 11 million by truck, and 2.7 million by rail. Similarly, hundreds of millions of passengers cross the borders by car, as do about 11 million tons of air cargo shipments.

At this point, the USCBP conducts “risk-based” screening only—i.e., they are able to screen only a small fraction of the containers actually entering the country. Even in those cases in which inspection does occur, the drug traffickers are constantly developing ingenious new ploys to foil existing detection systems: packing cocaine inside concrete posts eludes X-rays; placing packaged cocaine deep inside blocks of frozen shrimp stymies drug-sniffing dogs; or hiding cocaine in canned tuna lots, where only one can in a thousand is not legitimate, which means that the whole lot stands an excellent chance of passing inspection.

So what is called for is a far more serious obstacle than a wall of 20 feet or more. Only the extensive introduction of new detection technologies will turn the tide.

For example, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technologies, today applied routinely in the medical field, hold promise for the war on drugs. Here the detection system excites atomic nuclei in the scanned material and, by “reading” the signature of elements, is able to locate the presence of illegal narcotics.

Another promising possibility is to use neutron beam technology, developed in the 1980s to verify nuclear and chemical weapons disarmament accords, in the antidrug war.

Such technologies can be applied to detect the signatures of not only cannabis, cocaine and heroin, but also of the opioids now being massively produced (including the deadly fentanyl), the ever-new kinds of synthetic drugs, and the precursor and processing chemicals used variously for the above.

Using such technologies, all containers entering the United States could be subjected to scanning by such detection systems. There would be a gigantic jump in the amount of drugs seized. This, combined with aerial interdiction based on coordinated deployment of space-based, Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS), and land-based technologies, tightly coordinated across borders while fully respecting national sovereignty, would be capable of interdicting and seizing perhaps 75% or more of the quantities of all drugs shipped into the United States. If only 10% of the drugs cultivated gets past the eradication stage, and if only 25% of that reduced amount gets past the seizure stage, we are talking about only 2-3% of the total amount initially cultivated actually making it through to the consumer market. That is still a lot of drugs. But it would put a substantial dent in Dope, Inc.

Third, stop drug money laundering: The silver bullet against drug money laundering is the Glass-Steagall Act, the FDR-era strict separation between commercial banking and speculative investment banking. This would immediately render Dope, Inc. insolvent. The “wall” most feared by the controllers of the drug cartels and the $1 trillion per year drug trade, is the wall between commercial and speculative banking established by Glass-Steagall, which remained in effect in the United States from 1933 to 1999.

CC/Håkan Dahlström

Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Limited (now HSBC), world headquarters in London.

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An exemplary case is that of HSBC, formerly known as the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, for centuries the central bank of London’s international drug trade—which was caught dead to rights laundering tens of billions of dollars of drug money from the Sinaloa cartel, as exposed in the 2012 hearings of Sen. Carl Levin’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Or recall the point made in 2009 by Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, who stated:

Drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital. . . . In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the biggest problem the banking system had, and therefore, this liquid capital became an important factor.

Here is how Lyndon LaRouche presented these three aspects of his proposed War on Drugs—against production, transit, and financial flows—in his historic 15-point plan of 1985:

Technologies appropriate to detection and confirmation of growing, processing, and transport of drugs, including satellite-based and aircraft-based systems of detection, should be supplied with assistance of the United States. As soon as the growing of a relevant crop is confirmed for any area, military airborne assault should be deployed immediately for the destruction of that crop, and military ground forces with close air-support deployed to inspect the same area and to conduct such supplementary operations as may be required. The object is to eliminate every field of marijuana, opium, and cocaine, in the Americas, excepting those fields properly licensed by governments.

With aid of the same technologies, processing-centers must be detected and confirmed, and each destroyed promptly in the same manner as fields growing relevant crops.

Borders among the allied nations, and borders with other nations, must be virtually hermetically sealed against drug-traffic across borders. All unlogged aircraft flying across borders or across the Caribbean waters, which fail to land according to instructions, are to be shot down by military action. A thorough search of all sea, truck, rail, and other transport, including inbound container traffic, is to be effected at all borders and other points of customs-inspection. Massive concentration with aid of military forces must be made in border-crossing areas, and along relevant arteries of internal highway and water-borne transport.

A system of total regulation of financial institutions, to the effect of detecting deposits, outbound transfers, and inbound transfers of funds, which might be reasonably suspected of being funds secured from drug-trafficking, must be established and maintained.

Special attention should be concentrated on those banks, insurance enterprises, and other business institutions which are in fact elements of an international financial cartel coordinating the flow of hundreds of billions annually of revenues from the international drug-traffic. Such entities should be classed as outlaws according to the “crimes against humanity” doctrine elaborated at the postwar [[World War II] Nuremberg Tribunal, and all business relations with such entities should be prohibited according to the terms of prohibition against trading with the enemy in time of war.

Now that is a wall against the international drug trade. Nothing less will work.

The other critical component of defeating the drug economy south of the border, is to replace it with great infrastructure and other economic development projects, especially between the United States and Mexico, but also including Central and South America—and all of this in cooperation with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. We will further discuss this aspect below, as it relates to the migrant issue.

cc/ProtoplasmaKid

Caravan migrants at the Ciudad Deportiva Magdelena Mixhuca temporary camp in Mexico City, looking for routes on a map of Mexico.

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The Migrant Crisis

George Soros and other British-run promoters of drug legalization are at the center of intentionally fomenting migrant “caravans” and other cruel provocations, as part of their stratagem to overthrow the Trump Presidency. What they are playing on is the underlying crisis that arises from the chronic, intentional looting and destruction of the nations and populations south of the U.S. border—Mexico, Central America, and beyond.

Here, too, LaRouche has provided the gold standard to understand the underlying cause of the crisis and how to correct it. The immigration crisis is best understood from the standpoint of LaRouche’s concept of Potential Relative Population Density (PRPD). The nations of the Caribbean Basin region, as also Mexico, today have levels of physical-economic activity (i.e., PRPD) which are significantly lower than their existing populations. This means they currently lack the economic power to maintain their existing populations at an acceptable standard of living. This in turn has led to sharp deficits in multiple physical-economic parameters (food, housing, health care), and it is also reflected in the sizable illegal and (to a lesser degree) legal emigration which occurs, especially to the United States. The remittances which these millions of individuals send home to their families are often their only means of survival.

CC BY-SA 2.0

George Soros, financial backer of migrant caravans.

CGTN America

A migrant caravan of 2,000 desperate Hondurans heading toward Mexico.

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For example, look at cumulative emigration to the United States from Central America and Mexico. As of 2015, more than 20% of native-born Salvadorans had emigrated to the United States, fleeing economic devastation, violent drug-running gangs which control large parts of the country, and natural disasters such as earthquakes.

Bringing the vast development potential of China’s Belt and Road Initiative into this region, will create the economic conditions in which populations that are today driven to emigrate from their homelands—or submit to the slavery of working for the drug cartels—will be able to find productive work and a dignified life for themselves at home, with the prospect of an even brighter future for their children and grandchildren.

In adopting such an approach, the United States will find a willing partner in Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who has repeatedly stated that Mexicans should emigrate by choice, and not by the force of economic penury. He has also proposed to discuss specific development projects with President Donald Trump, including some that would involve the nations of the Northern Triangle of Central America: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Trump should do exactly that—immediately meet personally with AMLO and hammer out between them a ground-breaking approach to the drug and migrant crises along the lines specified here.

Where President Trump has broken out of British geopolitical containment and engaged in such personal diplomacy—with Xi Jinping, with Kim Jong-un, with Vladimir Putin—the results have been excellent. The same can be expected of a summit with Mexico’s AMLO, who has asked the United States for co-investments to match Mexico’s considerable commitments to development projects in the country. The Trump administration should do so.

Coordinacion de Material Grafico

Mexican President José López Portillo on September 3, 1982, conducting a rally from the balcony of the National Palace overlooking the Zocalo (central plaza) in support his decision to nationalize Mexico’s private banks.

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LaRouche Plan for U.S.-Mexico Cooperation

LaRouche laid out the basis for such cooperation with Mexico in his 1982 book, Operation Juárez, drafted after his meeting with then President José López Portillo. Today, U.S.-Mexico cooperation against Wall Street looting must involve the Belt and Road Initiative as well, and include great projects (elaborated fully elsewhere by the LaRouche movement, as in The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Vol. II), such as:

• Constructing a high-speed rail line all the way through the Darién Gap (on the border between Panama and Colombia), running the length of all of Central America into Mexico, and then linking up with U.S. and Canadian rail lines, and finally crossing over into Eurasia through the Bering Strait tunnel. This would be a full development corridor, with related industrial and agricultural projects along its length, which will substantially increase productive employment for millions of people throughout the region.

LPAC-TV

A map showing a section of the projected Pan American high-speed rail line, crossing the Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia.

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• Building a high-speed rail line across Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, including deep-water terminals at the ports of Coatzacoalcos on the Gulf coast and Salina Cruz on the Pacific.

• Finally launching the massive North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) water management project, involving the United States, Mexico and Canada, along with Mexico’s related Plan Hidráulico del Noroeste (PLHINO) and Plan Hidráulico del Golfo Norte (PLHIGON) water projects.

Research into atmospheric ionization to increase rainfall should be a leading feature of Mexico’s water management program, as should nuclear desalination. These are two ways of producing more fresh water, and not simply transferring existing supplies from one basin to another, and as such, will help establish an entirely new technological platform for the country.

• Adopting a crash program for nuclear energy, including the construction of at least twenty nuclear plants in the country, as originally intended by López Portillo.

• Launching other science-driver projects for Mexico and the region, including space science activities centered at the Alcantara and Kourou launch centers located in Brazil and French Guiana, respectively. The Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP) should return to its historic role as a center of advanced scientific research and engineering work in all fields of endeavor.

A revitalized NASA has a special role to play in many aspects of the above policies for solving the interrelated drug and migrant crises threatening our hemisphere. Reawakening that great American dream is the best thing we can do for our country, and for our good neighbors.

IV. The Prometheus of Our Day

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

THE ‘SECRET OF FIRE’:

Beyond Sense Perceptions

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The following article was originally published in EIR on August 17, 2012.

On Wednesday, July 25, I had published a relatively short report, titled, The Human Mind: Two Views. The following day, I had presented a related subject as an included topic of the regular, Wednesday, video feature, The Weekly Report. Now, I shall present, here, an extended, summary, print version of the core of the most essential features of that topic, th e topic which is the subject of my own remarks on the core of the combined, crucial elements of both of the preceding, two presentations. Here I combine, and slightly amplify, the crucial elements of the essential content of both preceding reports, as “for the record,” as if “under a single roof.” Otherwise, thus, as I shall report here, these days in science represent the reaching of a significant milestone in my life’s work.

The implied question which I answer in this present report, is pointed at the fact that the control of society, allegedly from above, is based chiefly on what is fairly identified as “a pack of lies,” fictions which are distributed for what is claimed to be the edification of popular opinions.

Witness, for example, the recent exposures of truth from certain notable British and U.S. leading personalities, in the matter of Glass-Steagall. The evidence had been there “all along,” but when the time had come that it were more prudent for the edification of the wealthy, to expose the fact that the termination of Glass-Steagall had been a lie from the outset, the “change in party line” occurred with very little effort at informing the general public of what had happened all along through more than forty-odd years of “public opinion.”

The case of the popular belief in a wrong-headed notion of the meaning of “fire,” illustrates the point respecting the fabric, and fabrications of induced “public opinion.”

I. Why This Report on Fire

Heretofore, it had been a customary practice, to present the subject of the physical principles of nature, within the limits of the terms of “sense-perception” as such. In my long experience of this matter, presentations of that nature, have been, usually, composed of two distinct parts. There has been, first, a customary, explicit representation of the argument, as explicitly stated here, in terms of reports composed on the basis of the subject of demonstrations of sense-perceptions, as such; but, you will note in the course of this report, there is often added something which may be described, broadly, as a mere description of what it is proposed that the reader, or lecture-hall audience, might mistakenly attribute to the stated definitions presented in sense-perceptual categories.

wikimedia

Prometheus gave man the gift of fire. The principle of “fire,” writes LaRouche, can only be understood by mankind, not by the beasts. “There lies the meaning of human creativity. There lies the essence of scientific progress.” The painting is by Ian Cossiers (1600-71).

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The outcome of such a proceeding, might leave that audience with a stubborn suspicion, the suspicion that the art of the stage magician has been included in the play. The alleged facts presented under such circumstances, would be bad enough; the added element of explanation, has an effect on the audience, tending to say something like: “If what I have really said, sounds to you like a side-show, which you must figure out for yourself— I might hope that you understand what . . . I am trying to say.” The net effect of presenting such carnival music, is to suggest to the audience, the worrying suspicion, if only briefly, that the presentation of the alleged facts of sense-perception presented, seems to be some kind of fraud; the additional explanation makes one wonder, “Am I being taken in by some set of stage-magicians? Or, am I supposed to find it more comfortable, just to try to believe in this side-show?”

The more appropriate question, would be: “What has been missing here?” What has actually happened to produce effects, such as that, on this audience?

Should we console ourselves by wishing to believe, that: “The audience is being given the opportunity to see the texts and other exhibits on whatever is tantamount to ‘the screen.’ ” However: it might have been suspected, that there is nothing behind the screen. The customary audience is left to imagine what might be a possibility, which, somehow, might have been discovered behind that screen, a screen behind which I would warn you that what you might actually expect to find there, is nothing at all.

“Ah, but, perhaps, there is actually nothing behind that screen”?

So, the member of the celebrated, standard audience, is left to mumble to himself, or herself, perhaps with some resentment, or choose to enjoy the following dubious thought, that:

“Sense-perception is sense-perception, which is proven to be sense-perception, which is essentially shown, and (perhaps), proven, by nothing so much as the decision to continue to believe that there is a sense-perception on a screen, which, in turn, has, apparently nothing substantial within it, or behind it. Quite naturally, popular opinion, being popular opinion, it will be more comfortable for the victims of this side-show, to try to join the rest of the suckers in trying to believe.”

Bernhard Riemann pointed toward the existence of a similar kind of generic problem, as in the third, concluding section of his habilitation dissertation.

Therefore, let us, finally, provide the audience with what needs to be discovered, if anything, as “lurking behind the screen.”

A Musical Example

The possible best chance of discovering a solution to the kind of problem which I have just outlined above, might be found in the successive work of Johann Sebastian Bach, Arthur Nikisch, and Wolfgang Furtwängler. The advantage of such musical examples, is not merely the fact of the sounds (sounds are, after all, merely sense-perceptions, and therefore typical of that same rubbish known as “popular opinion,” or the like); it is the quasi-shadows expressed in the way in which the sound of the music might be projected upon the human mind (as if between the cracks in the written score), which is that which contains the direct evidence for the Classical musical cases. The proper question to be posed, on that account, is: “Why is the music itself necessary? Why must it be presented in that way?”

Such questions do have the merit of “amounting to something of importance for the questioning mind.” The question is: “Why do they do, what they do there?” If there is something wrong with the bare notes of a musical argument as such, “What is missing?” “What is the actually provable solution to that emptied riddle?”

The solution to that riddle, is not a mere object; it reposes, not on a screen, but in what sense-perception, as such, suggests might be the unseen action which actually works as if from behind the screen; that is what, in fact, moves the objects.

Therefore, that taken into account: “What is the demonstrable difference in the unseen motion whose effect is intrinsic to the matter at hand? It reposes in what is moving, as if from behind the screen of sense-perception.”

The answer reposes, essentially, in the proper distinction of man from beast. There, is where I, your author for this occasion, chooses to “look,” in both my writing, and my audio-visual presentations of yesterday; it reposes in the relevant, actually existing action lodged “behind the screen” which is the score, just as Bach, Nikisch, and Furtwängler had demonstrated that fact.

‘Another Vicarious Hypothesis!’[fn_1]

The secret of our subject here, lies not in “fire” as barely presumed as such, but in the principle which prompts mankind to define his own, efficient distinction from the beasts, which is to say: in his reliance on the usefulness of the notional experience of belief in “fire.”

“Fire,” when used, scientifically, merely as a descriptive term, signals the actual presence of a crucial element from which our investigation is derived; but, it is, also, so to speak, as Bernhard Riemann stated in the concluding portion of his habilitation dissertation, a kind of “hand-waving” term of convenience.

“Fire” serves, on precisely that account, as the term which illustrates mankind’s specifically unique, and willful capability of using “fire,” according to sundry manifestations of that homely, generic term. That term, so employed, is the hallmark-shadow of the most essential distinction of man from beast. It is the “fire behind the screen,” the fire whose heat is actually experienced in a very practical way, as if from behind the screen: in an experience which not only distinguishes man from beasts, but expresses that effect in a very unique way.

The accompanying code-term for pinpointing the identity of the human use of “fire,” is located, precisely, within mankind’s acquisition of successively higher “species” defined as expressions of the general category of matters signifying mankind’s willful power for using fire (when the term is used as in a manner of speaking) in ways and means which the upward evolution of mankind as a willful species has generated.

Let us discuss this term, “fire.” The discussion can become a bit tricky, if we ignore the fact that mankind’s use of the term “fire” covers a large (in fact, expanding) variety of respectively distinct types of species. For example: nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, matter-antimatter reactions, et al., et al. These latter categories, and similar ones, exist only for the noëtic potentials of the human mind, not for lower species of life. It is no exaggeration to state that these ideas, as ideas, are uniquely products of the capabilities which are potential for the human mind, not other species.

The distinction just stated, is of crucial importance, especially so for the poor fellow, scientist or not, who continues to believe in the efficacy of sense-perception as a supposed vehicle of scientific truth. Or, to express the same categorical thought otherwise, the proper (which is to say “efficient”) notion of the popular opinion’s general category of “fire” is actually known only as something unknown as a principle of “fire” as such. As scientific progress illustrates with a certain, ever-growing set of categories of “fire” in general, that notion of “fire” exists, for mankind until now, only in the creative powers of the human mind. The human mind is the only known instrument which can understand the true meaning of “fire,” because only the human mind is capable of knowing the efficient meaning of the series of categories of “fire” which I have illustrated in my remarks on this matter, just above.

In fact, it is proper to look at this subject-matter in a reverse ordering. “Fire” appears as the inherently fearful, least denominator of human creativity in its general, progressive ordering of the effects of the power of human reason. Sense-perception among human beings is a footprint of the implicit repertoire of assorted categories of ever-higher ordering of mankind’s ability to discover the true meaning of “thermodynamics” in general. “Fire,” viewed within those terms of reference, is the expressed power of human creativity. There lies the essential distinction of man from beast. There lies the meaning of human creativity. There lies the essence of scientific progress.

Sense-perception, is what is needed by our dogs. The argument is now continued from here.

II. The Argument Which

Must Be Used

I herewith continue the argument at the point I completed the preceding chapter.

Heretofore, usually, the most discreet customary continuation of the usual argument has abandoned a continued effort to assert a completed ontological proof; at that point, the customary practice has been some “hand waving” sort of statement used by the proponent as a “best guess” respecting an additional matter for which the proponent has no actually conclusive evidence to present, but, rather, the best reporters tend to wave their hands (often unctuously), suggesting that we have reached as far into the outskirts of the unknown as they are willing to treat as a fact on that occasion. That is commonplace practice.

Up to the point I have taken the present chapter’s scope this far, there is nothing terribly wrong in the scientist’s resort to such “hand-waving” methods for dealing with a subject-matter for which the relevant party presents no actual proof—on the condition that his implied claims go no further than that. The problems arise at the point the “hand-waving” evasion, is promoted, as if it were actually to be represented as a “scientific fact.”

The case of the work of Bach, Nikisch, and Furtwängler “hits the outskirts” of a science of music in just this way; but, only the “outskirts.” It addresses, and that securely, a very significant aspect of the problems to be considered. It “fails,” if the word “fail” should be used, only in respect to the deeper questions it does not encompass.

Therefore, we must state the case against the “hand-wavers” as follows.

The customary argument against which I represent here, must be attacked from the vantage-point of noting the inherent error of asserted belief in not only human sense-perception, but that of lower forms of life generally. Most simply, but correctly said, sense-perception by people and others is premised on the implied assertion of a proof which depends categorically on sense-perception. So, sense-perception depends upon sense-perception: not exactly an impressive claim to verities. In short, any human conclusion respecting sense-perception depends for its underlying (i.e., “categorical” authority) on a proof which is independent of an original basis in sense-perception as such.

This is not to imply that sense-perception is inherently false in the claims associated with it. It means, exactly, what Johannes Kepler meant in his method (echoing that of Nicholas of Cusa) employed for the uniquely original discovery of the principle of gravitation. Hence, the relative uniqueness of the authority of “fire.” But, do not halt there. It is man’s willful management of “fire as a principle,” which is the uniquely appropriate instrument for true empirical knowledge of mankind’s knowledge, “not the masturbation-likeness of reliance on sense-perception.”

[fn_1]. It is a most notably relevant fact to be inserted at this point, that the only original discovery of the principle of gravitation, was that which had been made by Johannes Kepler, that as a consequence of his inspiration from a principally leading founder of modern science, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. The factual evidence on this point, is beyond competent challenge. However, once the fact of the fraudulent claims on behalf of Isaac Newton became undeniable among competent scientists dealing with the matter, there were attempts to approximate, syncretically (as it is sometimes said), the measurements of Kepler by others who sought to make a plausible approximation of Kepler’s discovery.

The tendency in that direction was strengthened by the unfolding skein of evidence, since the close of the Eighteenth Century and beginning of the Nineteenth, showing that all of Newton’s nominal “discoveries” were merely wretched, false concoctions. There were, admittedly, some notable exceptions, mostly those errors which had been concocted as by-products of defects in even leading universities’ practice of a compartmentalism of certain kinds of teaching practices in those institutions. The result had been, that certain nonsense was built into the system of university education, under which otherwise qualified physics professionals would accept Newton’s notion as their particular religious belief, as distinct from actually scientific beliefs. [back to text for fn_1]