Table of Contents

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Notre Dame de Paris on Fire by Jacques Cheminade

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 46, Number 16, April 26, 2019

- I. The Untold Truth in America

- STOP THIS TREASONOUS HOAX! Mueller’s $35 Million Gaslighting of the American People by Barbara Boyd

- A NEW ‘MISSOURI BASIN AUTHORITY’ Midwest Flooding Is National Emergency: Space-Age Mobilization Required by EIR Staff

- II. Second BRI Forum April 25-27 in Beijing

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE IN BEIJING REVIEW Roads to the West—Geopolitical Spectacles Make It Impossible To See the Solutions by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Belt and Road Initiative: A Winning Idea of Space and Time by Claudio Celani

- Glimmerings of U.S.-China-Russia Economics Cooperation? by Paul Gallagher

- III. LaRouche’s Design for the Moon-Mars Mission

- The Science and Technology Needed To Colonize Mars by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1986) PART 1 OF 2 PARTS

- IV. Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche

- Ibero-American Memorial for LaRouche: ‘A Great Man Has Left Us, But He Has Left Us His Ideas’ by Dennis Small

- EDITORIAL Dozens of Heads of State to Attend Second BRI Forum in China April 25-27. When Will the United States Join? by Diane Sare

Midwest Flooding Is National Emergency:

Space-Age Mobilization Required

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

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Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

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INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

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History: Anton Chaitkin

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United States: Debra Freeman

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Notre Dame de Paris on Fire

by Jacques Cheminade

CC/Milliped

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Cheminade, a former French presidential candidate and long-time friend of Lyndon LaRouche, issued the following statement on April 15.

I have just learned about the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. I want to express here the emotion that we all feel, friends and political allies—an emotion all the stronger because we have just concluded our seminar at Autun, home to the St. Lazarus Cathedral, the older sister of Notre Dame de Paris. Our cathedrals, centers of education for all, inspired the industrial and agricultural revolutions of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Through them the connection between soul and matter, which always brings about a superior good for humanity, becomes manifest.

That in the 21st century, in France, in Paris, such an accident has been possible, overwhelms me. It is time to pull ourselves together in all areas of human activity, because we cannot remain inactive in those areas where humanity is at stake, and where human beings create objects so beautiful that they must be there forever, and for all of us sources of joy.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 46, Number 16, April 26, 2019

Cover This Week

Fremont County, Iowa Emergency Management

Levees along the Missouri River failed during flooding in Fremont County, Iowa, March 17, 2019.

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MIDWEST FLOODING IS NATIONAL EMERGENCY:

SPACE-AGE MOBILIZATION REQUIRED

2 EDITORIAL

Notre Dame de Paris on Fire

by Jacques Cheminade

I. THE UNTOLD TRUTH IN AMERICA

4 STOP THIS TREASONOUS HOAX!

Mueller’s $35 Million Gaslighting of the American People

by Barbara Boyd

13 A NEW ‘MISSOURI BASIN AUTHORITY’

Midwest Flooding Is National Emergency: Space-Age Mobilization Required

by EIR Staff

II. SECOND BELT & ROAD FORUM APRIL 25-27

26 ZEPP-LAROUCHE IN BEIJING REVIEW

Roads to the West—Geopolitical Spectacles Make It Impossible to See the Solutions

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

28 Belt and Road Initiative: A Winning Idea of Space and Time

by Claudio Celani

30 Glimmerings of U.S.-China-Russia Economics Cooperation?

by Paul Gallagher

III. LAROUCHE’S DESIGN FOR THE MOON-MARS MISSION

32 The Science and Technology Needed to Colonize Mars, Part 1

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

1986

IV. EXONERATE LYNDON LAROUCHE

45 Ibero-American Memorial for LaRouche: ‘A Great Man Has Left Us, But He Has Left Us His Ideas’

by Dennis Small

52 EDITORIAL

Dozens of Heads of State to Attend Second BRI Forum in China April 25-27. When Will the United States Join?

by Diane Sare

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

I. The Untold Truth in America

STOP THIS TREASONOUS HOAX!

Mueller’s $35 Million

Gaslighting of the American People

by Barbara Boyd

CC

Robert Mueller failed to fulfill the British-run coup to unseat Donald Trump.

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April 20—Special Counsel Robert Mueller has written a 448-page fictional novel, grounded in treason, about the British/Obama Administration intelligence hoax known as Russiagate. It is intended to preoccupy your mind for the next two years, at least through the 2020 elections. It is intended to stir your passions to support your absolutely mad Representative or Senator in enacting further sanctions and supporting the British drive to overthrow Putin’s government in Russia based on fictional events which, for the most part, never happened.

The British sponsored and oriented intelligence services that sponsored this hoax have also started a campaign to ensure that the same mad passions will destroy Donald Trump’s quest for new and peaceful relationships with China. Congressional investigations based on the “road map” provided by Robert Mueller are supposed to provide, on your taxpayer dollar, possible impeachment and, at the very least, opposition research for the 2020 Presidential campaign. This would fulfill the British vow, openly set forth in the December 2018 House of Lords report, “British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order,” that Donald Trump must not have a second term.

But, most of all, it is intended to get you to doubt what is coming next. The President’s allies have promised an investigation of the investigators and a full accounting of how this sordid affair came to be. As Conrad Black discusses in the April 20, 2019 National Interest article, “What the Mueller Probe Really Means,”

[It is now known that] senior intelligence and FBI and Justice Department officials lied under oath to Congress, or lied to federal officials . . . in order to influence the result, and then reverse the result, of a presidential election. In terms of subversion of the highest constitutional process, the selection of the president and vice president of the United States, this sort of activity, that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, former attorney general Loretta Lynch and others appear to have engaged in, is the last stop before there are tanks on the White House lawn and military control of the media outlets. Mueller, having failed to do anything to address the real crisis that threatened the country, failed altogether, and compounded his failure by his sadistic entrapment of General Michael Flynn, and hounding of Paul Manafort and others, far beyond what was necessary or excusable, in an effort to extort a false inculpation of the president.

As most know by now, the first part of the Mueller report concludes that there was no collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s campaign to swing the election to Donald Trump. This conclusion occurred despite thousands upon thousands of hours of fake media claims, fed by British and American intelligence leaks, which made it an article of fanatical religious faith to many, that Donald Trump was a Putin dupe. According to Mueller’s report, while the Russians tried endlessly to infiltrate and steer the Trump Campaign, they didn’t succeed. Undaunted, Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on television on April 18 to claim that Mueller found “passive collusion.” That is not an unfair characterization of the McCarthyite premises of Mueller’s report. According to Mueller, investigation of an American Presidential campaign was justified because Trump refused to toe the British line on Putin and Russia.

Here is how Mueller blithely reports it:

On June 16, 2015 Donald J. Trump declared his intent to seek nomination as the Republican candidate for President. By early 2016, he distinguished himself among Republican candidates by speaking of closer ties with Russia, saying he would get along well with Russian President Vladimir Putin, questioning whether the NATO alliance was obsolete, and praising Putin as a “strong leader.” The press reported that Russian political analysts and commentators perceived Trump as favorable to Russia.

Beginning in February 2016, the Report continues, the “press” began to report the connections of various campaign figures with Russia, namely, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page. According to Mueller’s report, Trump pursued WikiLeaks during the campaign regarding the timing of further releases of Clinton Campaign and State Department documents, he said that he doubted that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta, he falsely claimed that he had no business dealings in Russia, and the Campaign was involved in changing a plank in the Republican Party platform about providing lethal assistance to Ukraine. Contrary to this lying account by Saint Mueller, we know that the “press” were being steered by a British intelligence originated propaganda campaign aimed at preventing any U.S. accommodation with Russia.

Now that we know that the President is not a traitor, can we move on to address the thousands of opioid deaths, adolescent and other suicides, flooded farmlands, and crumbling infrastructure which have been pushed aside, as we were, trapped within the walls of this British-created delusion?

Left: facebook; right: Nadler.house.gov/videos

Left: Rep. Adam Schiff; right: Rep. Jerrold Nadler

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Well, no, according to Mueller and his Congressional toadies, Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff. Nadler, who looks and acts like a venomous toad, stuffing himself into over-sized suits which have that oh-so-subtle Manhattan mafia cut, vows to spend from now until 2020 redoing the Russiagate investigation. Schiff, who has constantly propounded the most fictitious crap possible about Russiagate, is just too invested to ever be sane, if he ever was.

Thus, the second part of Mueller’s report attempts to seamlessly switch the anti-Trump political narrative by presenting an entirely novel theory of “obstruction of justice” in which the President knew he was innocent, while those investigating him, knowing he was innocent, sought to exploit Trump’s emotions as they rolled a full scale coup right over him, hoping he would cross the line into illegal acts. He did not, according to both Attorney General William Barr and Mueller’s boss throughout this escapade, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Mueller also acknowledges this by saying he can’t charge Trump with obstruction of justice.

But Mueller also takes a cheap shot, designed to inflame the Congress and the public, saying he cannot “exonerate” the President, either. In doing so, he impermissibly shifts the burden of proof, under our Constitution, to imply that Trump must now prove his innocence. This is, of course, reminiscent of the Star Chamber.

Left to right: CC, Adam Hartman, FBI

Left to right: John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe

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When Donald Trump was informed by his then Attorney General Jeff Sessions that a Special Counsel was being appointed, he said, according to Mueller,

Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked. . . . Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Perversely, this absolutely true statement by the President, borne out by months of an insane inquisition which crippled his ability to act, is cited by Robert Mueller’s crew of biased prosecutors for the proposition that the President repeatedly skirted obstructing justice. On April 17, Attorney General Barr said that Donald Trump confronted an unprecedented situation at the beginning of his presidency. The President was attempting to form an administration, while his own intelligence community was investigating him as an agent of a foreign power.

Barr might have added that Trump knew—and everyone else knew—that the “collusion” nonsense was just that. They knew it all along. In such circumstances, there was never any ability, in reality, to charge obstruction of justice, which requires a corrupt intent or motive. There can be no corrupt intent or motive where a President believes, rightly, that he is innocent, that he is being framed up, and that a coup is underway. He fights back, to preserve both the Presidency and the Constitution itself, breaking the rules of what Saint Robert Mueller considers to be appropriate conduct by those he targets—don’t say or do anything, just let us slice you up.

All the while, the Mueller report makes clear, Trump’s emotions about the coup are being recorded and/or falsely portrayed, minute by minute by those who would sell him out—some as traitors within, others, if only to save themselves. That is the reality. It was never obstruction of justice. It was a psyop against the President attempting to drive him mad.

The British, Not the Russians, Tried to Swing the 2016 Election

Mueller makes three significant claims about Russian interference in the 2016 election. First, page after page of his report attempts to paint an amateurish and small-bore social media campaign conducted by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian internet marketing and click-bait operation, as exercising a hugely powerful lure on the American mind. Despite Mueller’s indictment of the IRA, which is pending now in Washington, D.C., and despite British intelligence’s five-year fixation on the IRA as the essence of newfound Russian powers in hybrid warfare, this is a hoax.

Aaron Maté, in his article, “New Studies Show Pundits are Wrong About Russia Social Media Involvement,” and Gareth Porter, in his article, “33 Trillion More Reasons Why the New York Times Gets it Wrong on Russia-gate,” and others, have demonstrated, conclusively, that the IRA spent minimal amounts of money on Facebook and Google in 2016, for a campaign which barely mentioned either candidate. Only 11% of the IRA activity even occurred during the election period.

The IRA effort spent a grand total of $46,000 on Facebook ads, compared to $81 million by the Trump and Clinton campaigns combined, and $4,700 on Google platforms. Its most-liked Facebook post was a gun-toting image of Yosemite Sam; its most shared Instagram post said, “Click here if you like Jesus.” Another favored meme featured Jesus counseling a young man how to stop masturbating. Otherwise, the IRA’s campaign was dedicated to creating revenue from themed t-shirts and LGBT-positive sex toys. Mueller never explains how this ad content impacted the election in any way, nor could he.

Mueller next focuses on the alleged Russian military intelligence hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta, for which he has indicted 12 Russian GRU officers, secure in the knowledge that they will never appear in a U.S. courtroom to contest the charges. The first fact lost in the sauce here is the fact that the files the Russians allegedly sent to WikiLeaks for publication demonstrated, truthfully, that Hillary Clinton was a craven tool of Wall Street and that her campaign was illegally rigging the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign.

CC/Gage Skidmore

Hillary Clinton

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Further, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), led by former National Security Agency (NSA) Technical Director William Binney and former NSA cryptologist Ed Loomis, have cast substantial doubt on Mueller’s entire theory that the Russians hacked the DNC. They conducted forensic studies demonstrating that what Mueller says about Guccifer 2.0 is fraudulent and that the claim that a GRU hack of the DNC computers resulted in the WikiLeaks releases does not square with any science known currently to man. The download speeds and file metadata point to a thumb drive or similar storage device and a human source, rather than a Russian cyber attack conducted over the internet.

Mueller’s failure to even talk to WikiLeaks founder and director, Julian Assange, reviewed in the article, “VIPS Fault Mueller Probe, Criticize Refusal to Interview Assange,” brings up the next question—why Assange and/or WikiLeaks were not indicted in Mueller’s grand GRU conspiracy indictment.

Instead, Assange was indicted on a highly dubious charge involving the 2010 Chelsea Manning leaks which may not even survive a challenge under the statute of limitations. Obviously, Mueller’s proof of his indicted Russiagate conspiracy falls short. Indicting Assange for the claimed DNC and Podesta hack conspiracy would necessarily allow Assange to prove that the Russian hack never happened, as he has long contended. It would expose how James Comey and Senator Mark Warner intervened in Assange’s early 2017 negotiations with the Justice Department, to ensure that the truth would never come out.

It was Comey, after all, who never secured the DNC servers for FBI forensic analysis, relying instead on the forensics provided to him by the Atlantic Council’s Russia-hating CrowdStrike, the unreliable vendor to the DNC and the Clinton Campaign. And it was Comey, it is reliably claimed, who relentlessly pushed the Russiagate narrative even after his lead case agent told him after months of investigation, “there is no there, there.”

If Mueller pursued the logic of his own indictment and included Assange in his fabricated GRU conspiracy, it would also have exposed exactly what happened after Bill Binney met with then CIA Director Mike Pompeo at Donald Trump’s direction on October 24, 2017, explaining exactly how the intelligence community was lying to the American President. Binney’s offer to collaborate in demonstrating what actually happened with the DNC and John Podesta has been successfully blocked to date.

C-SPAN

Attorney General William Barr news conference on the Muller Report release on April 18, 2019.

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The last prong of Mueller’s Russiagate plot involves all sorts of contacts with Russians who allegedly unsuccessfully reached out to the Trump campaign, in order to seduce them. Here the report just lies egregiously. We are told that Russiagate started as the result of a July 2016 report to the FBI by the Australian Ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, about a conversation he had in London with a 28-year-old Trump Campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos.

According to Mueller, Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor with “connections to Russia” told Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, and Papadopoulos repeated this information in a meeting initiated by Downer. According to Mueller, when the DNC’s computers were hacked, the former Australian Ambassador to London remembered his early 2016 meeting with Papadopoulos in which Papadopoulos recounted Mifsud’s claim about Clinton’s emails. This tidbit, according to Mueller, launched a full-scale FBI counterintelligence investigation of a U.S. presidential nominee.

As Attorney General Barr has pointed out, including in his testimony on Capitol Hill, investigating an American presidential candidate is “a very big deal” and the Mifsud/Papadopoulos/Australian Ambassador hearsay hardly serves as adequate justification or predication. This is particularly egregious since the FBI knew that Papadopoulos never repeated to anyone in the Trump Campaign what Mifsud told him. And Mifsud is also a British intelligence asset, not a Russian intelligence asset, as suggested by Mueller’s rambling legal partisans.

Mueller, of course, never references the fact that Russiagate actually started way back in late 2015 when the British government started demanding Donald Trump’s head because of his sane view of Russia, a fact acknowledged by Obama CIA chief John Brennan in his Congressional testimony.

Nor does Mueller reference the fact that MI6’s Christopher Steele’s dirty dossier was the driver of Russiagate, and that Steele was a joint British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), U.S. State Department, and FBI asset dating back to collaboration on the 2014 Ukraine coup conducted jointly by the Obama State Department, CIA, and British intelligence. The Ukraine coup began a British march toward regime change in Russia, risking nuclear war, a march which was rudely interrupted by the Brexit vote in Britain and by the candidacy and election of Donald Trump.

The Real Story

The real story, the one now being promised by Trump’s allies and others, is that many of the alleged Russian outreach efforts cited in Mueller’s report, such as multiple entrapment efforts conducted against Papadopoulos and Carter Page, as well as the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, were transparent British/State Department operations designed to plant and fabricate evidence, namely, Russian generated “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

facebook

Natalia Veselnitskaya

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Mueller has completely avoided the real story, despite its public availability, in order to concoct his hit job. Each of these operations involved British intelligence personnel collaborating with Obama White House, the CIA and State Department. These entrapment efforts were designed as the pretext for creating and maintaining an FBI investigation. The FBI investigation in turn made the preposterous claims in Christopher Steele’s dirty dossier, that Donald Trump had been compromised by the Russians, palatable to the journalists who repeated Steele’s claims both before and after the election.

Like the Steele dossier itself, the dirt and allegedly Russian-sourced information about Putin and Trump did not originate with actual Russian “dirt” or with actual Russian sources. According to well-placed Congressional sources, Christopher Steele’s main source for his dodgy dossier is a former Russian intelligence officer living in the United States. But, no former Russian intelligence officer lives in the United States without reporting to the CIA. That is just a simple fact.

There is also evidence that the Trump Campaign was being flooded as early as May, with FBI informants acting as “pretend” Russian agents. Mike Caputo has documented just such an approach of FBI informant and Russian criminal, Henry Greenberg, to himself and to Roger Stone, offering “dirt on Hillary Clinton.” Papadopoulos claims that Sergei Millian, the alleged source of the infamous Ritz Hotel prostitute claim in Steele’s dirty dossier, sat silently as Millian’s friend told Papadopoulos that Millian was working for the FBI.

The Moscow Trump Tower project also consumes hundreds of words in Mueller’s screed. It was created by long-time FBI and CIA informant Felix Sater and his childhood friend, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and was presented in emails by Sater in September of 2015 as a Russian project which would help elect Donald Trump President with Putin’s assistance. It was pushed, and pushed, and pushed by Sater, whose agreement to become an informant, was signed by none other than Andrew Weissman, Mueller’s chief henchman. Former CIA and State Department analyst Larry C. Johnson has fully demonstrated this chain of fabrications in an article on the Sic Semper Tyrannis blogsite.

As for the last portion of Part I of Mueller’s Report, portraying efforts to secure peace with Russia and in Ukraine during the transition as some sort of diabolical plot—Wow, just think about that. Can you seriously join Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller in treating efforts to establish the foundations for peace with Russia, as some form of criminal act? Or, as crazy, former Director of National Intelligence, Jim Clapper, calls it, “passive collusion”? This is, of course, the same Jim Clapper who claims that Russians are genetically predisposed to attack the United States.

As Professor Stephen F. Cohen, of New York University and Princeton University, continues to reiterate in an August 16 interview on the Real News Network, there are immense nuclear dangers in stoking hatred of Russia, compared with seeking a just accommodation. In that same interview, Professor Cohen noted that in the history of election interventions by the United States into Russia, even if you accept all of Mueller’s preposterous claims, what the Russians are accused of doing here, is equivalent to jay-walking. Compare the publication of truthful information about Hillary Clinton rigging the Democratic primaries, a juvenile and largely ineffective social media campaign, and numerous attempts to improve U.S. Russian relations, with the $10 billion the Clinton Administration provided to re-elect Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, for example.

Obstruction of Justice

Mueller’s screed of 250-plus pages about obstruction of justice focuses on 10 “episodes” where he says the President almost crossed the line into what he considers to be obstructive conduct. Mind you, he admits that, as opposed to most obstruction cases, there was no underlying crime which the President was trying to cover up. There were also never ever any acts like those Hillary Clinton’s crew committed, such as smashing cell phones with hammers and BleachBitting computers. In fact, the White House gave the Special Counsel everything he asked for, including notes of President Trump’s discussions with White House Counsel Don McGahn, over which Executive Privilege could rightly have been claimed—and many lawyers believe such privilege should have been exercised. Mueller interviewed just about everyone in the White House and on the Trump Campaign, with the President’s blessing and his urging them to “cooperate.” From this cooperation, Mueller’s minions concocted a hit job, designed to portray the President as unstable and irrational and out solely to protect himself, concealing derogatory facts from the American people in statements on his Twitter account and to the press.

Nowhere, however, even in this entire rabid prosecutor’s screed is there any act which the courts have recognized as obstruction of justice. Instead, Mueller’s argument is essentially this: “If you take all of this together, maybe it amounts to something, but I can’t decide, so Congress should just stick the knife in, already.” There is not sufficient evidence to charge a crime, Mueller says, but Trump has also not proved his innocence.

Here’s the CliffsNotes summary of the entire 448 pages: The President was under constant attack, including from within his own White House, in an obvious attempt to frame him up while claiming he was committing treason. He got angry and didn’t sit silently by while Mueller and his minions tried to frame him up. He complained loudly. Sometimes he even asked his staff to figure out how to proclaim his innocence. Under no conceivable construction is that obstruction of justice.

Institute of Politics/Kristyn Ulanday

Michael Flynn

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Three incidents make the fraud in Mueller’s tedious novel very clear. First, Mueller babbles on about the President’s conduct concerning Michael Flynn’s firing, but he never references that Michael Flynn had been targeted by the British authors of the Russiagate hoax, the circles of Sir Richard Dearlove and his friend Stefan Halper, way back in 2014. They falsely accused Flynn of a dalliance with Russian historian Svetlana Lokhova at a Cambridge event both attended. What really flipped the British out about Flynn, however, was his exposure of support for Al Qaeda and similar groups in Syria by both the U.S. and British governments. Flynn had been a target of FBI investigation and surveillance based on British demands for his head since early 2016, if not much earlier.

When Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia in the waning days of his Administration, in retaliation for what his intelligence chiefs claimed was Russian “interference” in the 2016 election, the sanctions included implantation of a Stuxnet type worm in Russian state infrastructure. This might be considered by the Russians as a very hot potential act of war.

Flynn, the incoming National Security Adviser, had conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, to the effect that the Russians should not overreact to Obama’s sanctions, among other things. These conversations were intercepted, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and Mary McCord of the National Security Division at DOJ, along with Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, plotted how to set Flynn up for undermining Obama’s dangerous threats and actions.

First, someone from a tight circle who had viewed these transcripts, leaked the classified transcripts to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius who wrote a loud column about Flynn colluding with the Russians to undermine Obama. That leak was a felony. McCabe then called Flynn as the article hit, saying that he was sending over two agents to talk to him about what this was about and telling him that involving any lawyers would be an encumbrance to a relaxed conversation.

Flynn couldn’t remember certain things the agents asked him about. They had the transcript of Flynn’s conversation and never showed it to him. In the course of the interview, Flynn made statements at variance with what he was known to have said in the transcripts. Nonetheless, the agents themselves said that Flynn had not deliberately lied to them when they reported back to the FBI.

After Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Pence and others about the Kisylak conversations, FBI Director James Comey claims that President Trump pulled him aside and said he “hoped” Comey would let the Flynn thing go because Flynn was a good guy. The maniacal Comey insists that the President’s “hope” was an “order.”

FBI

James Comey

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Comey, the fabricator, had previously insisted that the President’s alleged request for “loyalty”—at a point where all of Washington was talking about RESIST members covertly acting against the President from within his Administration—was somehow equivalent to a mafia induction ceremony.

Michael Flynn was subsequently convicted by Mueller of lying to the FBI in his White House interview despite the fact that the original agents concluded that no such lying even occurred. This was part of a coerced plea deal resulting from the fact that Flynn was bankrupted by the legal fees necessary to defend himself against Mueller’s inquisition, and threats by Mueller to indict Flynn’s son.

The Comey Firing

Then there is the Comey firing itself. Comey’s Congressional testimony, which Mueller never mentions, lays out that each time Comey met with the President he returned to compose contemporaneous memos of his conversations and to plan future encounters with a close group of associates who he characterized as a “murder board.” Such activities clearly indicate that Comey was engaged in attempting to set the President up. Comey told Congress and Trump that he was not under investigation in Russiagate but refused to tell the public that, knowing full well that the President felt it was completely hindering his ability to act, particularly with respect to Russia.

DoJ

Rod Rosenstein

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Mueller does disclose that, from the beginning, Trump railed against Comey because he was blocking what Trump wanted to do with Russia on trade and ISIS. In fact, Trump dictated a letter to Steven Miller firing Comey because he would not tell the public the truth about Russiagate and because it was hindering his ability to deal with Russia. Trump’s letter was rejected by White House staff, including then White House Counsel Don McGahn, who came up with the idea of firing Comey based on Comey’s misconduct in the Clinton investigation.

The President repeated the real reasons he was firing Comey publicly and almost immediately after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s letter detailing Comey’s misconduct in the Clinton investigation was released, and did so again, in an oval office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak. This is hardly the concealment associated with obstruction of justice.

Furthermore, the firestorm following Comey’s firing illuminated the level of plotting against the President at the top levels of the Department of Justice—Rod Rosenstein seriously offered to wear a wire to record the President and participated in discussions centered on organizing the cabinet to orchestrate the President’s removal.

Mueller never mentions any of this in his report. Instead he adopts, wholesale, James Comey’s claim that Trump fired him to hinder the Russia investigation, despite the fact that the investigation was never hindered.

Mueller also never references Comey’s leaks of classified materials to a friend for media publication, in order to trigger Mueller’s own appointment as Special Counsel, or that everyone already knew, at that point, that there was “no there, there” with respect to collusion with Russia.

Instead, the game was on to frame the President, to build the case Comey had not been able to make about obstruction of justice. This proceeded through a series of calculated provocations and media leaks all designed to provoke the President into overreaction.

One of these is found in the episode involving the so-called attempt to “fire Mueller” which the media and Congress are salivating about. According to Mueller’s report, Trump called White House Counsel Don McGahn and told him to raise Mueller’s conflicts of interest with the Department of Justice and—according to McGahn—that Mueller could not be Special Counsel. This call occurred soon after the Washington Post published a leak that the President himself was under investigation by Mueller for obstruction of justice.

CC/Gage Skidmore

Don McGahn

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McGahn construed Trump’s words as an order to fire Mueller, even though, by his own account, no such order to fire Mueller was stated. McGahn claims that he immediately decided to resign, although he never informed the President of this. No call was ever placed to the Justice Department, Mueller was not fired, and Trump never repeated what he allegedly said on one heated occasion to Don McGahn. Based on his drama queen account of this alleged aborted attempt at some undetermined act of obstruction, however, McGahn is being hailed by the anti-Trump media as a modern Sir Thomas More.

The President denies ever saying anything like this and there is considerable evidence in the Mueller report itself demonstrating that Trump’s repeatedly pronounced distrust of McGahn was fully justified. The kicker here is that even if Trump had followed through and fired Mueller, he would have been within his Constitutional powers to do so. There would have been plenty of political heat, but no obstruction of justice, despite McGahn’s ridiculous fantasy that he was being asked to re-enact Nixon’s Saturday night massacre. Mueller’s report otherwise shows White House Counsel McGahn, a total creature of the Washington Republican establishment who attached himself to Trump early in the campaign, keeping book on the President and taking notes on everything the President allegedly said—hardly something typical of normal lawyering.

So, despite this weekend’s huffing and puffing of the Democrats and the media about the Mueller Report, it is important to remember, first and foremost, that they suffered a bone-crushing defeat when Saint Robert Mueller’s magical curtain was pulled back, revealing a tale, full of sound and fury, but signifying absolutely nothing. Attorney General Barr will shortly conduct a seminar for the children in Congress when he testifies about the actual law.

The real story—the one about the attempted coup and treason against this President and its perpetrators—is coming, and it will come fast. A big opportunity is presenting itself to crush the British apparatus which has haunted this country since the end of World War II.

Act now, don’t get confused by the heat of battle, and we can take the country back.

A NEW ‘MISSOURI BASIN AUTHORITY’

Midwest Flooding Is National Emergency:

Space-Age Mobilization Required

by EIR Staff

State of Nebraska

Aerial view of what’s left of the Spencer Dam on the Niobrara River in Nebraska, which gave out March 14, 2019.

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April 20—The new “Moon-Mars” directive by President Donald Trump, committing the nation to an accelerated return to space, is the necessary spirit for the space-age mobilization required to respond to the severe flooding and food production emergency now playing out in the Missouri-Upper Mississippi River Basins. That spirit will enable us to deal with the vast damage, and also act to create a new, modern platform for higher productivity in the Midwest and nationally. From immediate flood relief, to a full build-out of needed water management, new rail lines, nuclear power, and other infrastructure in the center of the continent, and population growth, not depopulation, in these rural counties—this is the right disaster response.

There is no “natural” reason for the vast damage now taking place in the multi-state region, from the Dakotas south through Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and into the Lower Mississippi. The Federal “Flood Control Act of 1944” mandated the building of a “Missouri River Basin Project,” which was an integrated plan encompassing more than 100 dams on the tributaries and mainstem of the Missouri River, plus hundreds of miles of levees, new irrigation areas, navigation and other features.

Additional legislation authorized upper watershed dams to be built on smaller feeder streams, under the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act of 1954.

All these improvements taken together would have prevented the destruction we are now seeing in the High Plains, and expected to continue on in to May. But this Missouri River Basin Project was never completed.

The very limited infrastructure that was built involved five new mainstem dams (constructed 1946-1966) and a small number of lesser dams, levees, irrigation programs, etc. Therefore, huge flood disasters have repeatedly occurred over the past half-century.

The Missouri, second longest river in North America, has the largest watershed in the United States. The Missouri Basin is home to a large share of the corn and soybean output of the U.S., which in turn, accounts for a third of total world production. Much of this area is now in crisis. The National Weather Service forecasts above-average rainfall to continue in the Missouri Basin on into June.

After the last two huge flood disasters in the Upper Midwest in 1993 and 2011, EIR printed a full report on the original 1944 water management program, the Missouri River Basin Project, called the Pick-Sloan Plan, after its design engineers, Gen. Lewis A. Pick from the Army Corps of Engineers and William Glenn Sloan from the Bureau of Reclamation.

It is time to finally act on the Pick-Sloan Plan, as updated by experts. This is the needed agenda focus of the newly formed Missouri Basin Governors’ Task Force, whose first meeting April 3 in Council Bluffs, Iowa called for actively building flood control; and for a series of public meetings by the Army Corps in the Basin. It is citizens’ leadership that will force the action.

Lyndon LaRouche commissioned many infrastructure reports in his campaign to raise U.S. and world productivity.

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Mobilizing for action in the Missouri and Upper Mississippi Basin, also calls for finally moving on relevant disaster defense systems, and infrastructure build-up for all the other obvious places across the country hit by, or vulnerable to disasters, for want of infrastructure.

Most outstandingly, this includes, the New York/New Jersey region, hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and still waiting for a sea wall and other defenses, and modernized transportation, etc.; the Western drylands, hit repeatedly by floods and wildfires, as in California, for want of the continental-scale NAWAPA (North American Water and Power Alliance, proposed back in the 1960s); the Gulf Coast and Florida peninsula, and most outstandingly, the need to fully build up Puerto Rico, constructing modern systems of transportation, power, soft infrastructure—schools, medical services, housing, and a port system to figure in the Caribbean’s position in the newly expanding world Silk Road.

All this is coherent with and will contribute to the nation’s commitment to resume manned space missions, as announced by President Trump. In his Space Policy Directive No. 1, issued December 2017, Trump stated, “This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint [on the Moon], we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps, some day, to many worlds beyond.”

This was the lead statement on the new White House Fact Sheet released March 24, setting a five-year goal for a new manned mission to the Moon.

Implied in this imperative, is the long-overdue revival of U.S. industrial capacity and productivity, in collaboration with other nations, to produce the metal, plastics, chemicals, fixtures, designs, machine tools, and skilled people, to carry out the mission.

All the elements required for space activity call upon the ability to produce the highest precision requirements. But the components for disaster defense on Earth, and modern infrastructure-building likewise are a challenge to provide in quantity and quality. In the case of water management, this ranges from brigades of heavy construction machinery, to culverts, lock and dam gates and fixtures, to pipes, pumps and turbines.

The Rust Belt must be restored as a powerhouse in this process. Plus, putting the space program, and disaster response forward as the same mission, breaks the current impasse on how to fund U.S. infrastructure-building and thus get it going again.

Five years ago, statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche outlined the steps needed to create the national credit and commitment to carry this through. Released in 2014, his proposal is called “Four Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now!”

In this document, LaRouche spells out how to restore sound banking through the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall law; secondly, creating a national bank for priority infrastructure funding; thirdly, making plentiful credit available for essential economic activity in industry, agriculture, infrastructure, science and so forth; and lastly, carrying out science-driver projects for space and for the earliest development of fusion energy.

Over the last half century, LaRouche issued study after study and many mass-circulation reports on the necessity of “big projects” in infrastructure, space exploration, advanced nuclear power, together with the way to create and circulate credit to fund such endeavors. LaRouche worked tirelessly to turn out such studies for the United States, but also internationally, including the 50-year plan of projects to develop the nations of the Indo-Pacific Basin, and the 50-year plan for the development of Africa.

Not merely a series of “good ideas,” these programs were essential. The funding mechanism he proposed then—especially in the United States—will also serve to prevent the financial chaos and total economic breakdown being brought on by the anti-development Wall Street/City of London system now near blow-out.

To succeed in creating this urgent shift into a new financial system for development, LaRouche repeatedly called for the “Four Great Powers”—the United States, China, Russia and India, and others, to come together and confer on this task. In effect, to initiate a new “Bretton Woods” process of deliberation to create a financial architecture to serve the development interests of all.

Great power collaboration on lunar and space exploration, in the spirit of President Trump’s new Moon-Mars initiative can lead the way for this. LaRouche identified this as the vantage point from which to pursue basic science questions here on Earth, such as how to conceptualize the atmospheric water cycle in a way to go beyond even recurring patterns of droughts and floods, to where man can intervene directly in the dynamic which causes them. This is described below.

Thus today’s terrible devastation in the huge Missouri Valley and upper Midwest is the occasion for a national mobilization to restore the nation to its founding national identity of deliberate advancement, both at home and internationally.

NOAA

Legend: Flood Category: purple: Major; red: Moderate; yellow: Minor. Issued March 21, 2019. This U.S. map depicts locations where the chance of flooding is greater than 50% during March-May 2019.

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Scale of Emergency

The scale of the flooding crisis is indicated in the annual Spring Outlook weather forecast of March 21, provided by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The map shows the area where there is a greater than 50 percent chance of flooding of some degree, in the March through May 2019 period, and that the flood areas are concentrated in the watersheds of the Missouri and Mississippi Basins, including the Tennessee River.

This NOAA projection has come to pass. The precipitation has even included two “bomb cyclone” phenomena of high winds and snow hitting the Dakotas and Minnesota and nearby, one in March and then again in April, the latter which dumped two feet of snow. Some farmsteads and homes suffered days of electricity outage.

Beginning in March, the volume of run-off in the huge Missouri River system, was beyond the impoundment and control capabilities in place with the dams. Flooding spread widely, and continues.

The Missouri—known as the “Big Muddy” for its silt load—runs nearly 3,800 km (2,500 miles). Its watershed area covers one-sixth of the United States, and has parts of ten states and two Canadian provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan. The ten states involved in the Basin are: Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. Their combined population—though not all in the flood zone—is 29 million.

These states now face burdens in their operations and budgets from the emergency, to one degree or another. The features of the destruction include both the damage to every category of basic community and government functioning, as well as to agriculture—the leading economic activity in the region.

Transportation. Both rail and road grids were extensively disrupted by wash-outs and other incidents, some of which have been fixed, but others remain out. BNSF and Union Pacific (plus Kansas City Southern), the main freight carriers, re-routed much traffic (ethanol, grain, fertilizer, cement, bentonite clay, and other cargo) but the flood disruption is showing up even in the way that the total national volume of rail freight haulage (number of carloads) declined during the flood weeks, because of the Midwestern disruptions. In the week ending March 30, the Association of American Railroads reports nationwide carloads down nearly 9 percent, reflecting the Midwest flooding impact. The effects are made worse by the fact that the rail grid is so limited throughout the High Plains. For example, there is no High Plains north-south passenger route at all. Connectivity has been dramatically reduced since 100 years ago, when the U.S. grid was at its maximum extent in the 1920s.

Roadways. Roadways sustained big damage, seen in significant closures of major highways, such as on Route 29 the main north-south artery in western Iowa, and on rural secondary roads. At one point during the March floods, an estimated 20 percent of all Nebraska’s road grid was closed. Gravel roadbeds were scoured out of existence down to the culverts and underground cables. Dozens of bridges remain out. Some residents now have to drive up to 40 miles to a destination once reached in 10 miles, pre-flood.

Water and sewage. Hundreds of rural wells are now contaminated with microbes and chemicals from the dirty flood waters. Central treatment plants are also damaged or destroyed. Many schools, churches and homes are functioning only with portable toilets and bottled water.

USAF/Rachelle Blake

Offutt Air Force Base, home to the U.S. Strategic Command, near Omaha, Nebraska, under water on March 17, 2019

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Public buildings. There is widespread damage to public buildings of all kinds, from medical centers, to government offices. The point is made by the military installations which were under water, for example, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, home to the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees U.S. nuclear strike capabilities for The Pentagon.

Levees and dams. There is widespread damage to flood protection structures, including breaches to Missouri River mainstem levees, with water still pouring through, and more flooding to come. Col. John Hudson, Commander of the Army Corps Omaha District, which oversees the Missouri River system, said at a briefing April 11, “We have an enormous amount of work to get done” on repairs. For example, there were more than 40 levee breaches in the 280 miles of levees between Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the Iowa-Missouri state line.

In addition, those not breached are still very damaged from having been overtopped by floodwaters for more than four days. The town of Pacific Junction, Iowa is still under water in mid-April. Its residents have been under mandatory evacuation for over 25 days.

There are other losses. In northeastern Nebraska, on March 14, the Spencer Dam broke, on the Niobrara River, a tributary of the Missouri.

Power. One outstanding success during the current flooding, is the continued maximum functioning of the Cooper Nuclear Power Station, at Brownville, Nebraska, on the Missouri River. All its flood-protection measures are working properly.

However, the negative pattern in the region has been the take-down of nuclear capacity in the multi-state area, and the installation of wind and solar, which don’t function in storms. Iowa is reliant for up to 30 percent of consumption on wind power, and many farmers—in need of cash from losing money at farming, have turned to installing solar units for revenue.

In Iowa, two sites for potential new nuclear power reactors were cancelled, when Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway took controlling ownership over Mid-American Energy in 1999. Mid-American has announced a goal of becoming the first investor-owned utility to provide all its electricity to customers sourced from “renewables” by 2020, when it completes a gigantic $920 million Iowa wind farm.

Case: South Dakota. The Pine Ridge Reservation is home to the Oglala Sioux. There are some 20,000 residents of this area—the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined—in the Missouri River watershed, which was flooded. Water supplies were disrupted for 8,000 people. Homes, roads and public buildings are damaged or destroyed, creating an impossible situation where 10,000 of the residents are way below even the already low Federal poverty line.

The status of aid to the entire region, as of mid-April, is that dozens of counties in each of the Missouri River and other watershed states have been declared Federal disaster areas, eligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other programs; plus National Guard corpsmen continue with diverse functions in some states, from delivering water, to dropping hay to stranded livestock.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service.

U.S. corn and soybean production is concentrated in the Missouri Basin and nearby states.

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Vast Agricultural Damage

The Missouri and Upper Mississippi Basins are the location for a huge share of U.S. agriculture activity. The two maps [Figures 1 & 2] show the concentration of corn and soybeans in the region, which is also home to significant livestock production. According to NOAA’s projection, an estimated 55 percent of U.S. corn and 60 percent of soybean fields were at risk of flooding this spring. This is turning out to be the case.

In addition, farmers had more carryover of corn and soybeans in storage on their land, held out of the market hoping for a better price. The flooding not only ruined this grain, but the swollen corn and beans burst open the metal storage bins. There is no market at all for the ruined grain. Not even ethanol plants will take the corn, because the distillers grain byproduct would be contaminated and unsaleable

Spring plantings will be disrupted for large parts of the cropland. Land under water now is almost surely not going to be seeded this year. Debris in the fields ranges from metal shards, to rocks, to silt and sand. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) April 12 weekly crop report showed that plantings are running behind. For example, farmers in Missouri had only 6 percent of their corn planted, in contrast to the 5-year average of 15 percent as of early April. Kansas farmers had planted only 6 percent of their corn crop, compared with their 5-year average of 14 percent. Iowa reported no corn planted at all (too wet and too cold everywhere) vs. their average of 2 percent by now.

There is also a big problem with ruined pastures. The perennial grasses are gone in many fields, and piles of sand are left all over. What kind of annual forage crop can be planted, if any, is a big question. The core Missouri Basin states hit by flooding—South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas, account for 27 percent of U.S. cattle. Some 26 million head are in the region, mostly in the flood regions of eastern Nebraska and northwestern Iowa.

Density of Livestock Production

USDA/Food and Water Watch

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The larger region—Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and South Dakota—have 48 percent of all U.S. hogs. Egg production is concentrated here, with 34 percent of all U.S. egg output in the six states of Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Illinois.

Thousands of livestock have perished either due to extreme cold weather, blizzard conditions, or extreme flooding. The fact that the disaster comes during spring calving season has increased the animal losses everywhere. Flood waters penetrated feed lots and hog and poultry barns. Surviving cattle are suffering significant trauma after-effects, including disease susceptibility and lack of weight gain. There are increased infections. Humans and animals alike are stressed.

The loss of potable water in many areas has caused big trouble for large livestock operations, necessitating hauling in supplies. Cattle feedlots report losses adding up to $1 million a day, from the increased logistics costs of all kinds.

Case: Nebraska. Most of the state’s 93 counties are now officially declared as disasters. The state was ground zero for flooding, from the raging Missouri River on its eastern border, and the overflowing Platte, Elkhorn, Niobrara and other rivers draining into the Missouri. The state’s plight is an automatic hit on the U.S. food output capacity. Nebraska is the third-ranking state for corn production, and fifth for soybeans. It is the largest cattle state in the Missouri Basin, with its third largest state crop, after corn and soybeans, being hay for winter feed. The American Farm Bureau Federation, National Farmers Union and others are raising funds, and shipping in hay donations to support stricken ranchers. As much as 10 percent of the new calves may have been lost due to the floods and cold.

NOAA

Flooding in Bellevue, Nebraska in March 2019.

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Nebraska is the first in the nation for amount of area irrigated, having 8.3 million acres, which is 14.9 percent of the U.S. total. Its normal yields per acre are therefore very high. California, once first, now ranks second, at 7.9 million acres, because of decreasing water supplies. Much of Nebraska’s irrigation system—pipes, pumps, pivot apparatus and other fixtures, was ruined by flood water.

The types of “normal” Federal aid offered to farmers in these disaster circumstances, is in the realm of covering only 75 percent of what is lost. Most is handled through the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA). For example, the Emergency Conservation Program may pay up to 75 percent of the costs of restoring grazing lands to pre-disaster conditions (removing debris, grading, etc.) The Federal Livestock Indemnity Program (LIP) pays 75 percent of the market value on lost livestock, and so on. But the market value was already below the rancher’s costs of production.

Farm Income Crisis, Farmers Quit

The flood disaster hits farm communities when already more than half of U.S. farm households lost money farming in recent years, according to the USDA, which estimated that the median farm income for U.S. farm households was minus $1,548 in 2018. This is despite record productivity in corn and soybean yields and meat production!

U.S. farm debt has grown to $409 billion, the highest debt volume in 40 years, not seen since the farm crisis of the 1980s, when farmers staged a cross-country tractorcade to Washington, D.C. in protest. This has hit both large-scale farms that grew rapidly on rented land, and smaller farms run by families working multiple off-farm jobs. Farm bankruptcies—filing of Chapter 12 under the Federal code—are surging in the Midwest. North Dakota southward through Arkansas, has seen the number of Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings rise over 95 percent from 2008 to 2018.

The low prices to farmers come from the rigged commodity pricing structure, after the phase-out in the 1970s of the parity-based Federal pricing system, though the spin you hear puts all the blame on the Trump trade disputes with China and Mexico, for low oilseed, corn and meat prices. Likewise, low milk prices are blamed on overproduction and retaliatory cheese tariffs by China and Mexico. The buildup of U.S. meat supplies is blamed for lower beef and chicken prices.

But the totality of the farm income crisis, and ruin of the independent family farm household derives from a whole set of Wall Street and City of London-serving policies, including non-enforcement of anti-trust, and furthering of vast monocultures of soy and corn as cheap supply sources for the mega-trading houses—Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus and the rest—to get guaranteed returns from dominating trade.

Source: 2010 U.S. Census Population compared with 1980 U.S. Census Population. Note: Growing—population increased between 1980 and 2010; Declining—population declined between 1980 and 2010; Accelerated Declining—population declined between 1980 and 2010, and the rate of decline between 2000 and 2010 worsened from the previous two decades. Legend: Population Category (Number of Counties): lightest blue: Growing (2195); medium blue: Declining (650); dark blue: Accelerated Declining (393).

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The process has reached such a stage of concentration in the supply chain that outright depopulation of the Farm Belt is now at the crisis phase. The latest five-year Agriculture Census, released by the USDA this month, documents certain features of the situation. The “2017 Agriculture Census” data show a decline in the national number of mid-sized family farms—operations between 500 and 999 acres—over the 30-year period between 1982 and 2012, and many of these were in the Midwest. During this same three decades, the number of much larger farms—2000 acres and up—have grown 27 percent; and otherwise, the number of small operations, often niche or hobby operations, has also increased.

Just in the last five-year census period, 2012-2017, there was a total loss of 3.2 percent of all farms—down to 2.04 million as of 2017, and within that short time, the trend continued for an increased number of larger farms and smaller farms, and fewer mid-sized farms. When broken down, the data show that a dramatically small number of 78,865 U.S. mega farms—3.8 percent of total U.S. farms—today produce over 66 percent of the $389 billion in total value of all U.S. farm production. If even a small number of these “mega-farmers” go out of operation, a big percentage of our nation’s food production capacity will be knocked out. That threat is live and growing in the Midwest right now.

The 1.56 million farm operations—77 percent of all operations classified as farms—account for just 2.9 percent of the value of U.S. agriculture production. Many of these are small, “life-style” farms.

On the national map of counties experiencing depopulation over the past 30 years, the entire High Plains Farm Belt stands out strongly, as people die or leave the region.

What this means for food security, is that when the large, as well as remaining mid-size farms are hit by a disaster, in a region accounting for such a large share of one commodity, there is automatically a food shortage threat.

Case: South Dakota. The “2017 Agriculture Census” reports that the number of farms in the state dropped by 6 percent over the period 2012-2017, to 29,968, a level below 30,000 for the first time in decades. That is a loss of 2,000 independent farms in just five years, or an average of 30 farms gone per county.

Average net income per farm from 2012 to 2017 dropped 20 percent, down to $81,763.

And, there are fewer and fewer young farmers. The average age of a South Dakota farmer in 2012, was 54.3 years; in 2017, it was 56.2. Only 12 percent of the state’s farmers are 35 years old or younger. This is in a state where an amazing 89 percent of its land area is in farming, compared to the national share of 39 percent.

ACTION MEASURES—

‘Missouri Basin Authority’

Required in this flood disaster region, is not only immediate emergency relief for the general community, and agriculture in particular, but also full-scale infrastructure building.

Water management infrastructure. The following core proposals based on the original 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan are the starting point for building a comprehensive Missouri River Basin water management system for flood control and multi-purpose uses—power generation, irrigation, navigation, recreation, and so forth.

This is best carried out, in the tradition of the Tennessee Valley Authority, to also include in intent, plans for an upgraded electrical, telephone and internet network, expanded and improved rail grid, a modernized medical system, and all other necessities supporting a growing population, including new cities. Not to mention the most advanced agriculture equipment and techniques, based on independent family farms—a “Missouri Basin Authority.”

One thousand five hundred miles of levees from Sioux City, Iowa to St. Louis, Missouri could be built from river dredgings to deepen the channel to 12 feet. This would allow larger barges, and increase the river flow at peak volumes, while preventing spill-over during times of high water.

Jobs created: an estimated 8,380 for five years. The non-levee flood control dams, reservoirs, and channelization in the Missouri River Basin Rivers. This includes, 18 dams, 8 power stations, 235 miles of channeling, and 175 miles of levees on the Grand, Gasconade, Osage, Fishing, Platte, Chariton, and Meramec Rivers.

Jobs created: 7,220 jobs lasting five years. Irrigation acreage expansion. With the new dams and lakes, the system for 4.5 million acres under irrigation should be built.

Extended navigation. The Missouri River navigation channel can be extended another 850 miles from Sioux City northward to Williston, North Dakota, at the new 12-foot depth, as originally proposed by Col. Pick.

Infrastructure platform construction. There are baseline projects required to lift the region not only out of flood danger, but to new levels of productivity.

Nuclear. In the context of a national plan to advance nuclear power generation, a plan for the central states is urgent. Take the measures necessary to make nuclear power provision the priority, and phase out the extensive wind energy throughout the entire Midwest, and likewise, phase out the ethanol production system, centered in this region.

At present, in the upper Midwest, there are no nuclear power plants—in Montana, Wyoming (coal states), the Dakotas or Colorado.

Nebraska is down to one plant at Brownville, after the shutdown in 2016 of the Ft. Calhoun nuclear station in Omaha. Iowa has one nuclear plant, the Duane Arnold Energy Center. Missouri has the Callaway Energy Center. Wisconsin has only the Point Beach plant left, as its Kewanee nuclear plant was shut down in 2013. The sole plant in Kansas is Wolf Creek. Minnesota has three reactors at two sites, Prairie Island and Monticello. Illinois leads the country, with six nuclear stations, having 11 reactors.

Rail. Take the measures necessary to provide the density of rail grid necessary for this central region of the continent to function. This is best seen in the context of corridors of development, in the World Land-Bridge concept long promoted by Lyndon LaRouche, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

This perspective requires selected high-speed rail routes, double-tracking to separate freight and passengers, and coherent “local” lines

One outstanding feature of what is required, is a north-south rail-based development corridor on the High Plains, in addition to that of the Mississippi River Valley. This should interconnect in the far northwest, with the inter-continental Land Bridge linking Eurasia, via the Bering Strait, with the Western Hemisphere nations all the way to Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.

Courtesy of Hal B.H. Cooper, Jr.

Artist’s rendering of a proposed transportation/utility corridor, running north-south over the High Plains, to further development and population growth.

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Transportation engineer Hal B.H. Cooper, Jr., PhD, P.E. has delineated the proposed U.S. route, integrating roadway, pipeline and utility lines into a single corridor, coming down through the Dakotas, skirting the Black Hills, going southward through Nebraska via Valentine and North Platte, proceeding into the Oklahoma Panhandle through Liberal, Kansas, thence into the Texas Panhandle and onward to Mexico. Cooper commissioned an artist rendering of this “Central Corridor,” as part of the World Land Bridge.

Hospitals. Launch a new round of the original Hill-Burton survey of medical services in the Midwest, as part of a national effort, to determine the number of licensed hospital beds, diagnostic, natal and other services are needed per 100,000 residents. At present, at least 20 percent of the remaining hospitals in rural areas are facing shutdown for financial reasons.

The original 1946 “Hospital Survey and Construction Act,” commonly referred to as the Hill-Burton Act” after its two Senator co-sponsors, Lister Hill (D-Ala.) and Harold Burton (R-Ohio), determined how many beds per thousand residents in all 3,000 U.S. counties were needed, and then over a 25 year period, supported building up the hospital system to provide this. This very positive approach was all later discontinued, with the introduction of deregulation and “market” economics.

New cities. Mobilizing to create the new hard and soft infrastructure described above not only creates conditions for the former ghost towns in the farm communities to come to life, but for new cities to be born and grow up in the High Plains. The fruited plains of Central Plains Corridor are an obvious spine for new points of industry and urban growth, with supporting educational, scientific and cultural centers.

Immediate Relief

As of mid-April, the projection is for continued flood danger, and bad weather. The full combined relief and clean up services of state agencies, e.g., the National Guard, as well as Federal agencies, are both necessary. In addition to FEMA, U.S. military capability should be deployed where necessary, given the scale of the crisis.

In addition, the regular and reserve military engineering cadre are an invaluable asset to be deployed on projects to shore up impaired infrastructure on an interim basis, and to aid in the damage assessment, design and construction of new infrastructure systems. Civil engineer Cal Smith, P.E., calls for the Federal government to redirect forces like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Naval Facilities Engineering Command and Air Force Civil Engineering currently deployed in support of our military overseas.

Space Age Agriculture Capacity

The physical economic measures listed above are essential for modern agriculture. Financial measures must also be taken for supporting a restored system of independent family farms.

Apart from first-response aid, the massive flooding poses the urgent need to restore sound financial conditions in the agriculture sector. The following measures are the kinds of actions called for on an emergency basis:

A moratorium on farm foreclosures. This measure, implemented at different times in the past, is urgent now, because of the impossible financial conditions farm families face, after five years of prices for their commodities being below their costs of producing them, and no degree of off-farm income able to make up for the prolonged gap.

Indemnity for lost crops in storage, livestock losses and any other such types of farm disaster.

Funding for clearing and restoring fields, rebuilding bins, irrigation systems and other essential structures and farm infrastructure.

Clamp down on the farm/food commodities speculation at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and other exchanges by restoring regulation of currently out-of-control commodities trading. Immediately re-do or cancel the 2001 Commodities Futures Modernization Act, in order to restore such controls.

Reinstate parity-based pricing measures for farm commodities through the Department of Agriculture’s existing (Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) authority, using production management.

A moratorium on mergers of food processing and other vital corporate functions, plus reactivating anti-trust enforcement, to bust up existing large concentrations in the food chain, in order to restore a system favoring the independent farmer, which serves the national interest in fostering ingenuity and productivity.

Initiate win-win food trade consultation with trading partner nations, to mutually determine which commodities being traded will serve the interests of both sides, for what period of time, and related details, instead of trade deals being determined by Wall Street/City of London trade and food cartels.

For example, Mexico may choose to resume producing more corn, and Nebraska corn producers—currently a big supplier to Mexico—can be supported to diversify to other crops and markets. The same holds for the China-U.S. soybean trade. Institute all necessary measures, such as Country of Origin Labeling (COOL), and end cartel-driven global sourcing of food for profiteering.

Initiate a “million new farmers” program to back the return of young farmers, and independent family-scale operations, with a package of tax credits for older farmers transferring operations to selected youth, and special inducements to young farmers and other means.

Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, to restore sound banking in the U.S., by separating commercial banking—which merits Federal insurance and similar measures—from speculative financial activity—which should not have Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protection, or any more bail-outs.

On April 9, a Glass-Steagall restoration bill was introduced into the House of Representatives, H.R. 2176, the “Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2019.” President Trump explicitly stated his support for the Glass-Steagall restoration in the months before his election. It is now urgently necessary, if any of the relief and infrastructure-building is to proceed, and also to put in place, before an uncontrolled financial meltdown occurs.

Create the Credit and Full Funding

Following Federal disaster emergency aid to farm households and businesses across the affected region, the issuance of national credit can begin with the creation of a Missouri Basin Reconstruction Authority (MBRA) charged with creation of a new flood-control and economic infrastructure. Its leadership will need engineering, agricultural and business experience, and to work in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Agricultural Department and farm organizations.

Critical cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will be needed because of the importance of laser and space-based location and reconnaissance technologies to both water management in great river basins, and agriculture generally; and for the development of new construction and other materials and techniques.

For the MBRA to deploy the billions of dollars required to complete the Pick-Sloan Plan and related transportation and power infrastructure projects, it will have to receive credit from a national credit institution modelled on the Roosevelt Administration’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation or the “Hamiltonian” national banks of the 19th century. This institution is long, long overdue for creation by Congress, given the national deterioration and the major failures of infrastructure across North America, not to speak of the long-standing plain lack of critical economic infrastructure, as painfully shown in these repeated Upper Midwest flood disasters.

The Treasury can simply issue special U.S. Treasury bonds for the purpose of funding the operations of a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation; it can organize capitalization of a new national bank for infrastructure by itself and by private investors; or it can issue its own currency, Treasury notes, to provide the operating capital for a national credit institution, supported by new taxes collected over a long period into the future.

As for the Missouri Basin Reconstruction Authority itself, it can combine its own spending—especially working with the Army Corps of Engineers on the Pick-Sloan Plan itself—with lending to state and county agencies for the restoration of their flood-destroyed basic economic infrastructure at the same or a higher technological level.

NO MORE FLOODS!

Pick-Sloan:

The Missouri River Development Project

The map here shows features of the “Comprehensive Plan” for flood control in the Missouri River Basin, proposed in early 1944 by Col. Lewis A. Pick of the Missouri District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, after the devastating Missouri River flooding in 1943.

Later in 1944, the Pick Plan was combined with other plans proposed by William Glenn Sloan of the Bureau of Reclamation for the Western Missouri Basin, for irrigation, erosion control, and other improvements, to soon become a joint Missouri River Basin Project approved by Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt by the end of the year, as part of the “Flood Control Act of 1944.”

From 1946 through the 1970s, important features of the Pick-Sloan plan were carried out, including five new mainstem dams completed by 1966—Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall and Gavins Point; but the full program of improvements to the land and water resources base was never carried out. Critical infrastructure improvements including creating new irrigation areas and hydro power, to lift the productive economic platform for the future were likewise not carried out. This lack of improvements continues to cause harm, even today, especially to the tribal peoples in the region. The obstruction of water management infrastructure comes strongly from the green movement, led by the Britain-centered “wildlife,” anti-population campaign, and from the Wall Street/City of London circles, lying that infrastructure is “too expensive.”

The result has been repeated and devastating floods. After the terrible 1993 Missouri Basin/Upper Mississippi flood, EIR News Service published a full report on the Pick-Sloan Plan titled, “No More Floods! Build the Missouri River Development Project,” by Anthony DeFranco. After the terrible 2011 flooding in the same region, EIR reprinted the article in June 2011. It is long overdue for action.

The full EIR report is available at https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2011/eirv38n23-20110610/13-27_3823.pdf

The Missouri Basin and NAWAPA:

Space-Age Water Management

North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA)

Sources: Parsons Company, North American Water and Power Alliance Conceptual Study, Dec. 7, 1964; Hal Cooper; Manuel Frías Alcaraz; EIR.

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Beyond the immediate need to deal with Missouri River Basin flooding, is the urgent requirement to commit to building continental-scale water management infrastructure, called for more than 50 years ago but persistently obstructed.

The map here shows the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which had widespread support in Washington in the 1960s, to divert a portion of run-off going into the Arctic, southward throughout the entire dry western regions. The plan, which also involved hydro-power, would foster favorable biospheric effects through greening of large areas of now-barren desert. Hydrologists have studied how to make the core NAWAPA plan coherent with the Missouri-Mississippi Basins—to augment the flow in these rivers during drought; and to divert westward the flow, when the rivers were flooding, as now.

One of three such water conveyance plans for surplus Missouri flow is the Kansas Aqueduct. As proposed by the Army Corps in 1982, the Kansas Aqueduct would draw off water from the Missouri River in the northeast of the state, conveying it westward 375 miles, to the dryland farm region above the fast-diminishing Ogallala Aquifer in western Kansas, or even running the flow into Colorado. There are two other such water transfer proposals: one would draw off Missouri surplus flow at the South Dakota-Nebraska border, and run it southwesterly through the dry High Plains states. The other would draw off water from the lower Mississippi into Texas.

Beyond building these large-scale, interbasin water transfer projects, the necessary future of mankind’s water supply is the management of the water cycle as such, which depends on creating new sources of freshwater through desalination, and managing the precipitation of water in the atmosphere through ionization techniques—space-age endeavors.

Benjamin Deniston of the LaRouche PAC Science Team has presented the principles involved in this outlook, and written research updates in several reports. See his “Solve the World’s Water Crisis” in the EIR Special Report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge (2014) and the April 2018 study by Deniston, “New Perspectives on the Western Water Crisis.”

II. Second BRI Forum April 25-27 in Beijing

ZEPP-LAROUCHE IN BEIJING REVIEW

Roads to the West—Geopolitical Spectacles Make It Impossible To See the Solutions

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The following article by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and President of the Schiller Institute, was first published in the April 18, 2019 issue of Beijing Review. It is reprinted in EIR with permission.

April 17—For the last several years or so, Western media and mainstream politicians have chosen to largely ignore the Belt and Road Initiative, which Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed in 2013. The initiative, consisting of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, efficiently addresses the infrastructure needs of developing countries, which the West simply pretended not to exist.

But, at a certain point it dawned on the Western establishment that China was not only building an enormous number of railway lines, ports, bridges, power plants and industrial parks in Asia, Africa and even in parts of Europe, but that the prospect of poverty alleviation offered by China instilled an unprecedented spirit of optimism.

China’s Vision

China impressed the world by lifting more than 700 million people out of poverty over the last 40 years, constructing the world’s best high-speed train network and becoming a leading space nation. It has now offered to share this experience with countries which were heretofore relegated to be the “Third World.”

Leaders of these countries suddenly demanded to be treated equally by the West, rather than simply the recipients of development aid, which would mostly vanish in the pockets of non-governmental organizations.

In an obviously coordinated fashion, many leading think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic produced lengthy studies based around a foreseeable theme. They declared that the motivation for the Belt and Road Initiative was an ill-natured attempt by China to replace the “rules-based system,” actually the Anglo-American imperialism, with Chinese imperialism and lure participating countries into a “debt trap.” They also noted that China is built on an authoritarian system and that there would be a competition of systems between the “liberal, open and social market economy” and the “state-controlled economy of China.”

Ironically, it was the same neoliberal critics who enthusiastically welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, sure that China would adopt the Western model of democracy and neoliberal economics.

Convinced of their own political and cultural superiority, these circles thought it to be a waste of their precious time to pay attention to such revolutionary concepts as a community with a shared future for humanity, presented by Xi and other Chinese leaders in hundreds of conferences and international gatherings to political leaders from all over the world.

Looking through their geopolitical spectacles and hearing through their colonial headsets, they completely dismissed the conception that China could be serious in presenting a new model of international relations, one that would put the concept of the one humanity ahead of narrow national interest. The reality that the future of existence depends on shaping a new era based on the common interest of humanity has escaped the proponents of the old collapsing world order.

Anybody who looks at the totality of Chinese policy and to what China has achieved in terms of poverty alleviation can only come to the conclusion that China means what it says.

The aim of Chinese policy is to create a new paradigm in strategic relations, whereby geopolitics is overcome through win-win cooperation, where international politics stops being a zero-sum game but instead where harmony prevails.

In this way, China is operating on the basis of Confucian philosophy, namely the idea that there can be only peace if there is a harmonious development of all. But it also carries out the principles of the Treaty of the Peace of Westphalia, that all policy for peace must be in the interest of others.

CC0 Creative Commons

The largest vessels are handled at the container terminal of the port of Sines, Portugal.

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EU Cooperation

The Silk Road spirit has also caught on in an increasing number of European nations, some of which have signed official documents with China to cooperate under the Belt and Road Initiative. EU member states from East, Central and South Europe, and also individual cities and regions in other parts of the continent have found it in their best interest to work with China to build new or modernize existing infrastructure, for which the EU’s austerity policy has provided no funding mechanism.

Ports like Piraeus, Trieste, Duisburg, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Sines have realized unprecedented economic opportunities to become hubs for the Eurasian land rail lines, which connected 56 Chinese cities with 49 European cities in 2018. They also have the potential to become centers for the trade routes of the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road.

From the standpoint of universal history, this growing integration of infrastructure as the precondition of industrial and agricultural development for all is both obvious and organic.

But it has already irked the forces in Europe of the old neoliberal paradigm, who would rather accuse China of disuniting Europe, as if this needed to be, rather than reflecting on the effects of their own policies. Unlike in China, there is no plan within the EU to alleviate poverty.

Nonetheless, the heavy artillery of black propaganda against China was launched just before Xi’s state visit to Italy in March and the signing of a memorandum of understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative. Unprecedented falsehoods and threats were uttered, accusing China of pulling Italy, a G7 country and founding member of the EU, away from the United States and stating that Italy would have no economic benefit from such cooperation and would suffer damage to its international image.

An Alternative Idea

It is obvious that some circles, who owe their privileges to the “liberal system of Western democracy,” which increased the gap between the rich and the poor beyond the pain barrier for more and more people, cannot overcome their geopolitical point of view. But there is an increasing chorus of people, such as chief of the IFO Institute, a Munich-based research institution, and other members of the European Economic Advisory Group, who think that the fear of Chinese investment in Europe is exaggerated and that it is in Europe’s interest to attract more Chinese investment, not less.

Many middle-level entrepreneurs in Germany also think that European countries must cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative.

CC BY-SA 4.0

Giulio Tremonti

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Italy, on the other hand, has the potential to become the model for cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Former Italian Minister of Economy and Finance Giulio Tremonti cited Italy as the door to the heart of Europe and said it could be the driver of Chinese-European cooperation in the industrialization of the African continent. The Chinese engineering firm Power China and the Italian firm Bonifica have already signed a memorandum of understanding for the realization of the biggest infrastructure program in Africa, the Transaqua Project, a canal system bringing water from the tributaries of the Congo River to refill Lake Chad and benefit the development of many neighboring countries.

The only realistic way for the presently divided Europe to unify again will be to cooperate with China. Not only through win-win cooperation and in the joint development of third-party markets, but by bringing the rich heritage of European classical culture to the concert of nations. If European nations reconnect to their own cultural traditions, they don’t have to worry about China, instead we will have a dialogue of the best humanity has produced.

The author is the founder of the Schiller Institute headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Copyedited by Craig Crowther

Comments to yulintao@bjreview.com

Belt and Road Initiative:

A Winning Idea of Space and Time

by Claudio Celani

EIRNS

European participants in the International Conference on Lake Chad, convened in Abuja, Nigeria, February 26-28, 2018. Left to right: Sébastien Périmony (Schiller Institute, France); Franco Bocchetto (Technical Director, Bonifica); Romina Boldrini (CEO, Bonifica); Claudio Celani (Schiller Institute, Italy); and Ercole Incalza (Foreign Director, Bonifica).

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April 21—One of the best descriptions of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was provided by a former Italian government official, Ercole Incalza, in his blog, Stanze di Ercole. Incalza knows what he is talking about. For many years he was an infrastructure director for the Italian government and is considered one of the two founding fathers of the Italian High-Speed Railway (TAV). He was also a pioneer in promoting within the European Union (EU) what became the T-TEN (Trans-European Network).

On March 22, the day Xi Jinping arrived in Italy, Incalza wrote an article describing the BRI as a project that “shifts the dimensions of space and time.”

China, Incalza wrote,

is reinventing “the use of the world” and it is doing so by completely rethinking the consolidated culture, now characterized by “blocs” centered on the United States, the European Union, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and so on. . . .

The new and shocking element is the changed approach to two dimensions, those of time and space. And the first question that is raised spontaneously by those who today are witness to these evolutions is related to how can we get to the economic area of Europe and Africa, to maximize and optimize the logic of trade and, in the case of the African continent, create conditions for the birth of production, trade, and logistic processes—how to make the Mediterranean a single logistics hub.

It might sound strange, but having proposed and already implemented a series of financing and action plans, having already signed a series of Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with several countries that are interested in the project, China is, in effect, at a point of no return, a strategic line that certainly disrupts the privileged positions, which have for years divided the world into reinforced territorial spheres, unwilling to challenge the power and relevance of those two dimensions, again: space and time. The distance now between the Chinese and the European economic theatres is 18 days by land routes and 40 days by sea route. This represents the first big revolution accomplished by China and it has been accomplished not by drawing a vague future but by building a measurable project-proposal.

What China is going to implement in the next 15-20 years will be the biggest cycle of infrastructural investments in a century: 900 projects, a trillion in investments, $780 billion generated by trade among the countries involved, 200,000 jobs. The BRI involves 65 countries in which 62% of the world population (4.5 billion people) lives and produces 30% of the global GDP.

Incalza makes a reference to the analogy with the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after the war. However, at that time, the United States had no strategic alternatives to reconstruction of the economy of its former enemies. This is different:

Not China. For the first time, China is attempting a plan that, as I said before, fully shifts the dimensions of time and space. The BRI is designed, and is working, in a widespread framework that exposes once more our provincialism—which is a losing proposition, dominated by our fears of abandoning the typical old schemes of short-term planning and short-sighted vision.

Incalza concludes in this polemical mode, addressing himself to the Trans-Atlantic critics of the Italian decision to sign the MOU with China.

Glimmerings of U.S.-China-Russia Economics Cooperation?

by Paul Gallagher

C-SPAN

President Donald Trump, speaking to a rally in Richmond, Kentucky on October 13, 2018.

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April 18—Economic events in mid-April involving the United States, China and Russia included indications of a certain, small degree of collaboration among Presidents reviled as “authoritarian” by their London-led opponents. Their potential great-power cooperation, however, remains blocked by the fury of anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda in the United States. The inglorious end of Russiagate opens the possibility that that blockage might be defeated by a concerted mobilization that the LaRouche movement, and its publications such as this one, are leading.

China’s reaccelerating economic growth, combined with its adherence to the commitments President Xi Jinping made to President Donald Trump at their 2018 summit in Buenos Aires, have “paused” what was a decline toward recession from Trump’s two years of industrial recovery. This is now the view of many U.S. economists and financial analysts—while some of the same economists ironically claim that the Chinese upswing is entirely caused by unsustainable government credit and won’t last. Others say they don’t believe China’s figures!

That data, released by the Commerce Ministry on April 16 (April 17 in Asia) included first-quarter industrial production up by 6.5% from the same quarter of 2018 (compared to a 5.9% increase in the last quarter of 2018, from the last quarter of 2017).

Retail sales were up 8.7% (compared to 8.1%); fixed asset investment was up 6.3% (compared to 6.1%); property investment was up 11.8% (compared to 11.0%); surveyed unemployment was 5.2% (compared to 5.3%). The economy as a whole expanded by 6.4% (compared to 6.3%).

Going along with the reaccelerated growth in China, is the prospect of a U.S.-China agreement on trade. China’s first-quarter exports also rose compared to the 2018 first quarter, but exports to the United States fell by 3.6%. American exports to China rose 21%, with a big increase in semiconductors exports, soybean sales and aircraft. Consequently, the U.S. trade deficit fell in January, and then dropped sharply in February below $50 billion, at $49.1 billion; and the trade deficit with China fell to $30.1 billion, nearly $8 billion below what it was running last summer and fall.

President Xi’s commitments to President Trump made in Buenos Aires are clearly being carried out. This will save U.S. first-quarter GDP growth from falling below a 2% annual rate. China’s export growth is coming from countries of the Belt and Road Initiative. World trade as a whole actually fell in the period through January, according to data from the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.

Reuters reported April 16, from “two sources familiar . . .,” a story really not exclusive or new: The U.S. trade negotiations team has made significant concessions in getting China to stop industrial subsidies, and on the so-called enforcement mechanism: China made legal changes regarding industrial property rights and joint-venture requirements. Thus an agreement has come nearer.

Russia Interferes in U.S. Aluminum Shortage

Economists’ talk of yet another U.S. economic “recovery” from the threat of recession, has been based on U.S.-China trade improvements and the prospect of a return toward zero interest rates; U.S. manufacturing, in particular, has been steadily sliding after two Trump years of relative rebound.

Russia’s interference—in the U.S. aluminum shortage—is opportune. It appears that the $200 million investment by Russian aluminum/alumina giant RUSAL in the new Ashland, Kentucky plant of Braidy Industries, giving RUSAL 40% ownership, is in addition to supplying aluminum of very high quality from a RUSAL plant under construction in Siberia. The Braidy plant, in turn, will exclusively supply aluminum sheet to the auto industry, needed under conditions of developing shortage.

The RUSAL/Braidy deal comes after the so-called “Midwest” aluminum price in the United States had risen from $.80/lb. to $1/lb. since the steel/aluminum tariffs were imposed in early 2017. Primary aluminum production had actually gone down to a 750,000 metric ton annual rate from 850,000 metric tons in 2015-16; it was once nearly 5 million metric tons in the early-mid 1980s. A drop in auto production, larger than the recent gradual drop in auto sales, is connected to this.

Last October, at a campaign rally at Eastern Kentucky University, President Trump said: “Thanks to our job creation and economic [policies], Braidy Industries recently broke ground on a billion-dollar aluminum mill that will create up to 1,500 jobs right next to Ashland, Kentucky. You know where we’re talking about?” The rally-goers did. But Braidy, with some aid from the state, has struggled to build the $1.6 billion project. In February, Braidy sought an $800 million loan from the Department of Energy. It has been trying to capitalize the mill with a stock-share raise, but has repeatedly announced and then postponed it.

The Trump Administration removed sanctions on RUSAL in January, despite a resolution opposing this having passed the House and nearly passing the Senate. The investment initiative for Ashland evidently came from RUSAL, very recently, and the investment will be documented only later this quarter. Though RUSAL supplies some aluminum to the United States otherwise, this supply is definitely new, coming from a newly-built RUSAL plant. Braidy Industries CEO Matt Bouchard said “The bottom line is that without RUSAL we could not build an environmentally-conscious mill of this scale. Low cost, high quality and low carbon is the future of aluminum.”

Interestingly, this is happening with the presidents of the United States and Russia still unable to meet without a wild McCarthyite outcry.

Yet, it is still a far cry from the world-changing economic collaboration potential of the Trump-Xi-Putin relationship, if that three-way relationship were to lead, with other great powers like India and Japan, into a New Bretton Woods international credit system.

III. LaRouche’s Design for the Moon-Mars Mission

1986

The Science and Technology

Needed To Colonize Mars

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

PART 1 OF 2 PARTS

NASA/JSC

Artist’s concept of a manned rover departing a Mars landing craft.

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April 20, 2019—It will be evident to the reader that Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas expounded in this 1986 article have stood the test of time magnificently, and must light our way today. But certain circumstances would have changed Mr. LaRouche’s way of expressing them were he writing this during the Twenty-First Century. Writing in 1986 when the United States was in a form of confrontation with the then-Soviet Union, LaRouche spoke of the Mars colonization mission as a U.S. mission. But later, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, he wrote of it as a cooperative international mission in which Russia, China, India, Japan and other applicable nations would be invited to join as sovereign equals. This article was first published in the November-December 1986 issue of Fusion magazine.

Rarely mentioned in news media accounts so far, forces around President Ronald Reagan are now working industriously to elaborate what could be seen by future generations as the crowning achievement of Mr. Reagan’s Presidency: the commitment of the United States to establishing a permanent colonization of the planet Mars, 40 years from now.

Such a mission-assignment for the United States is fully feasible today, on the condition that we recognize that about 40 years of step-by-step work will be needed to bring us to the point that we can build the first self-sustainable Earthlike artificial environment under “domes” on Mars. We are presently developing each and all of the new technologies needed to accomplish that, although it will require about 40 years of scientific development and engineering to bring us to the point of applying those technologies to this specific task.

It is also economically feasible. For every penny spent on the research and development work of the NASA-manned landing on the Moon, we gained between 10 and 20 cents of income, perhaps even more, from the application of those technologies to our civilian economy. Civilian use of new technologies we shall be developing in connection with the Mars-colonization mission, will increase the average productivity of labor by at least tenfold over the coming 30 to 40 years, perhaps two to threefold by approximately the end of this present century.

The Mars-colonization mission is not only feasible, both technically and economically; it is urgent that we undertake this project, both for scientific reasons, and also for economic reasons. There are certain classes of technical and economic problems now developing on Earth, which we shall not solve on Earth without help from some of the scientific and economic by-products of a Mars-colonization project.

Above all, it is time that we begin work on that project.

The purpose of this present report, is to assist both policy shapers and the general public in understanding the most basic features of a 40-year Moon-Mars-colonization mission-assignment. We describe the most basic features of the project itself. We also describe the way in which such a project will affect life on Earth during this 40-year interval. The objective of the report is to provide the reader with an integrated view of both the project itself, and its impact on our lives back here on Earth.

The Technologies Needed for Regular Travel Between Earth and Mars

By about the time our astronauts first landed on the Moon, the United States had worked out most of the technologies needed for establishing an industrial colony on the Moon. Had the NASA program not been scaled down repeatedly, beginning with the 1966-1967 cutbacks, the United States would already have today, a functioning industrial colony on the Moon. With approximately 10 years of effort, beginning today, we could rebuild our space-mission capabilities to the point that we could begin such a colonization of the Moon.

For several reasons, the colonization of Mars can not be accomplished with the technologies we had either developed, or were working to develop, at the beginning of the 1970s. Essentially, the difference boils down to the fact that Mars is a far greater distance from the Earth than the Moon is. We need more advanced technologies to overcome the several kinds of effects of that great distance.

Therefore, setting the date for colonizing Mars had to wait, until we had begun to master four kinds of new physics breakthroughs: controlled thermonuclear fusion, as the primary source of energy used, lasers and other forms of coherent electromagnetic pulses as a basic tool, new developments in biological science of the kind now emerging around optical biophysics, and much more powerful, more compact computer systems to assist us in handling these new physics technologies. During the past dozen years, we have made some spectacularly promising breakthroughs in the four areas just listed. At an easily foreseeable rate of continued progress in these four areas of technology, all the conditions for establishing the first permanent colony on Mars could be met approximately 40 years from now.

For example: to bridge the long distances between Earth and Mars, we need continuous acceleration for about half the journey, and continuous deceleration for the second half. For the sake of the health of the passengers, it would be desirable to maintain the equivalent of a standard gravity on the surface of the Earth during the flight; the easiest way to do this is to fly the spacecraft at the appropriate constant rates, of both acceleration or deceleration. The proper way to achieve such continuous acceleration, is by use of controlled thermonuclear fusion, preferably using modes of fusion we call inertial confinement.

On the surface of Mars, we shall require a great deal of artificial energy. We shall consume much more energy per person than in the most developed industrial regions of Earth today, simply to maintain an agreeable artificial environment. The basic industries we develop on Mars, to produce essential materials from the natural resources available there, will operate at much higher temperatures than are used in any basic industries on Earth today. For these uses, we require energy generated at very high energy densities. This requires what we call today the second-generation level of controlled thermonuclear fusion, which should be on-line about 25 to 30 years from now.

The most common industrial tool we shall use on Mars is advanced forms of what we call lasers and coherent particle beams.

To master the problems of biology, both on Mars itself, and in long interplanetary flights, we require development of what we call today optical biophysics. Work in this area has been under way in the Soviet Union for decades, and, has begun to take off in the Western countries more recently.

NASA/Pat Rawlings (SAIC)

Artist’s conception of a fusion rocket orbiting Mars.

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To handle the new kinds of industrial processes used, both on Mars and in interplanetary flight, we require systems which use much more powerful computers than exist today, computer units which can perform the equivalent of a billion floating-point arithmetic operations in an average second, and also computer units which can perform what are called nonlinear calculations at the speed at which the controlled processes are reacting. The first kind of improvement in computer systems is already in progress, and first steps are now being made on the second problem.

So, one of the reasons we must allow 40 years for the beginning of permanent colonization of Mars is that decades are required to develop these four sets of technologies up to the level they are fully reliable for use at great distances from the nearest repair shop on Earth.

There are other reasons we must allow so long a period of time. Before we actually start building the first permanent habitation on Mars, we must complete a series of preliminary steps. The best way to view these steps is to look backward from a point in the imagination, about 40 years ahead. At that point, we shall have assembled in orbit above Mars, all the gear we need, to be taken down to the surface of Mars to begin building the first permanent habitation. Let us consider some of the steps which must be completed, before we have reached that point of readiness to begin the permanent colonization.

We start with the assembly of all this gear in Mars-orbit, and trace our steps backward, to indicate at least some of the major steps of preparation.

In the Orbit of Mars

Before beginning to construct the first permanent colony on Mars, we shall have made a significant number of interplanetary flights from Earth-orbit to Mars-orbit, and return. These flights will haul the materials needed to begin the colonization from something like a great railway freight classification yard, in an orbit perhaps about 22,000 miles above the surface of Earth. The spaceships will haul this material from Earth-orbit to Mars-orbit, and return for another load.

Let us suppose that we use one of Mars’ moons, Phobos, as the destination to be reached by those spaceships carrying freight. We might prefer to use a large orbiting, manned station, rotating to provide the personnel inside a reasonable gravity effect. The first thing would be to construct such a manned station, on which technicians and scientists would serve a tour of duty, before catching a return flight to Earth-orbit. The primary missions of the station will include the functions of serving as a spaceport and providing warehouse-management for the freight being parked, entrusted to their supervision, in Mars-orbit.

Let us turn our attention to those space vessels carrying the freight and personnel. Each will be very large, much larger than today’s ocean supertankers. They will not fly on long solitary flights; since the United States began working on a manned Mars mission, at the beginning of the 1950s, it has been understood that the ships will fly in flotillas, each commanded by its captain, and the flotilla under the immediate, overall command of a flag-officer, of the rank equivalent to naval commodore or admiral. The minimum number will be about five in each flotilla. Physical communication among the ships, during the interplanetary flights, will be provided by fast-flying “space launches.”

We shall probably launch 5 or more flotillas during the time required for 1 flotilla to complete the journey from Earth-orbit to mars-orbit. This suggests a minimum of 10 to 15 flotillas in various stages of outward and return journeys during the time any one flotilla completes its round trip: probably as many as 100 such giant space vessels in service during the period of buildup for the initial colonization of Mars.

Where shall we construct approximately 100 such giant space vessels? Most of the weight of the ships’ components will be produced in industrial colonies on the Moon. Also, the greatest part of the weight of the freight carried to Mars orbit will be manufactured on the Moon. Much of the preassembly will be completed in Moon-orbit, and the final work of assembly and readying done, possibly, in Earth orbit.

The components supplied from Earth’s surface, and personnel will probably reach the space terminal above Earth in two stages. In the first stage, the flight from Earth’s surface will occur in trans-atmospheric aircraft, craft which lift up through the atmosphere as airplanes, and then shift to spaceflight for the remainder of their outward journey. These trans-atmospheric craft will carry passengers and cargo to a relatively low-orbit terminal, where the passengers or freight are transferred to space ferries, for the remainder of the journey to the space terminal.

Trace the developments leading up to 2026-2027 backwards in time, to the present. The result looks something like the following. The indicated dates are estimates provided solely for purposes of illustrating the conceptions involved.

Phase 1: Lift-Off From Earth. We must first build a space terminal, a permanent, expandable space station, above Earth. We shall also build a system of lower-orbit stations, as the place where both the trans-atmospheric craft and the space ferries dock to exchange passengers and cargo. We must build fleets of trans-atmospheric “shuttles,” and “space ferry” shuttles. Complete this phase during 1995-2000.

With the completion of Phase 1A, we must prepare the first steps of colonization of the Moon. This is done in a manner resembling the more ambitious preparations for the beginning of permanent habitations on Mars, but with very much less effort than for Mars. Complete during 2000-2005.

We construct the first permanent habitation on the Moon, approximately 2000-2005.

Phase 1 is done entirely with materials and technology supplied from the surface of Earth.

Painting by Christopher Sloan

Selenopolis, the first city on the Moon, housing thousands, as envisioned by Krafft Ehricke, is powered by fusion reactors.

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Phase 2: Industrialization of the Moon. Establish a Moon-based industrial power grid. Do this during a span of time which precedes and follows the establishment of the first permanent habitation there: about 2000-2010.

Establish a self-sustaining supply of a major part of required foodstuffs and materials from the Moon, as the first step of agro-industrial development of the Moon, approximately 2005-2015.

(c) Develop the first steps of space export-oriented primary materials production on the Moon, about 2005-2015.

Expand and improve the permanent habitations on the Moon at a pace ahead of industrial requirements: 2005-2015.

Phases 1 and 2 of the operation are based on perfected technologies available during the years 1995-2010. By about 2015, the industrial economy of the Moon is a significant space exporter, producing types of basic space-use ceramics materials and products beyond anything yet produced on Earth today.

Phase 3: Manned Exploration of Mars. Unmanned survey of Mars: 1995-2005. Place a system of permanent, unmanned satellites in orbit around Mars, and drop linked sensoring stations to the Mars surface. This will aggregate to a complete astrophysical observations complex, as well as a Mars survey.

Place the elements, for assembly, of a future manned orbiting station in Mars orbit, circa 2005.

A series of manned visits to Mars-orbit in flotillas of approximately five exploration vessels. During this phase, a series of craft is assembled in Mars-orbit for descent to Mars’ surface: 2005-2010.

Manned visits to Mars surface: 2010-2015. Manned flight to Mars-orbit is based on technologies perfected during 2000-2005. Manned visits to the surface are based on technologies perfected during 2005-2010.

NASA

Artist’s depiction of a Mars Artificial Gravity Transfer Vehicle.

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Phase 4: Build Interplanetary Space-Fleet. Assemble approximately 100 such vessels during 2015-2025.

Phase 5: Launch Powered Flights of Flotillas to Mars.

(a) Build the Mars-orbit space terminal: 2020-2025.

(b) Begin delivery of materials for constructing the permanent habitation on the surface: 2020-2025.

(c) Complete delivery of materials and personnel to begin main descent to Mars surface for constructing permanent colonization: 2025-2026.

Phase 6: Descend to Construct on Mars Surface: 2026-2027. The foregoing listing merely illustrates the conception of the phase approach required. Our leading points are to show that:

(1) the colonization of the Moon is an indispensable, integral feature of a Mars colonization mission;

(2) the steps required compel us to proceed in rather well-defined, pre-timed phases;

(3) 40 years is a reasonable lapse of time for completing all the essential phases, not too tight a schedule, and not too loose a schedule.

This summary will now serve as background for discussion of the other key points to be considered. Next we shall consider some of the leading reasons we must colonize Mars; and then, we shall consider the benefits this will mean for people who stay behind on Earth, both during each decade of the coming 40 years, and later.

The Scientific Objectives

The astronomers are the first to tell us why we must go some distance away from Earth’s orbit. The Earth’s atmosphere prevents us from observing the full spectrum of radiation from the stars and galaxies, and we have reached near to the limit of what we can discover about our larger universe by Earth-based observatories. We can do a little better with telescopes and radio-telescopes in near-Earth orbit, but for many important measurements, the area in the vicinity of the Earth’s orbit is a very dirty and noisy place. We must be able to measure the full range of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation in space, from the very long wave to the very, very short: from every distant star, galaxy, and other phenomenon to be observed.

Building observatories as far out as Mars orbit, and beyond, will make young astronomers very happy, but our purpose for spending these many billions of dollars is obviously not merely to give astronomers some special sort of personal pleasure. The point is, with aid of such observatories, our astrophysicists will be able to answer many questions very important for life on Earth, questions which can not be answered without information from such complexes of space-based scientific observatories.

As physical science progresses, what was accepted as the best physics yesterday seems to break down around the edges. Usually, when this first occurs, the physicists mumble the ugliest curse word in their scientific vocabularies: “anomalous.” At first, they look at the embarrassing experimental results suspiciously, thinking someone must have played a mean prank upon them. Sooner or later, some physicists warn: “It’s no good calling these embarrassing experimental results “anomalies.” We have to face scientific facts; there is something wrong with our existing scientific textbooks.”

NASA

Artist’s depiction of a habitat on Mars.

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The history of “anomalies” is the history of fundamental progress in science. Modern science began with the work of Nicholas of Cusa. In 1440, Cusa published a book, On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia) which accomplished, chiefly, two things. Cusa presented a discovery which modern science calls the Principle of Least Action, and which mathematicians refer to as the isoperimetric theorem (see Appendix). Cusa proved that geometry, as then taught, contained a fundamental error, and that this error had a bad effect on our thinking about physics. In the same book, Cusa presented a way of thinking about physics which set the stage for the later work of such leading figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, and Leibniz. Every step of fundamental progress in experimental science since has centered around discovering mistakes, called “anomalies,” in generally accepted scientific doctrines.

By about the middle of the 19th century, with the work of Karl Gauss and his collaborators, science developed a more effective way of looking at this problem of “anomalies.” It was established as a rule, that to settle any fundamental principle of physics, we must move away from the everyday scale of experimental work, and study the way in which the universe behaves at its extremes, the very, very large and the very, very small. In other words, we can not say that any physics principle is true experimentally, until we have proven that principle by means of astronomical observations and also on the size-scale of molecules, atoms, and subatomic behavior.

It has also been recognized, off and on, since the work of Leonardo da Vinci, that we must also prove principles of nature in a third region of physical experiments and observation: living processes. Today’s progress in optical biophysics is reminding us of that, once more.

In brief: The practical importance of astrophysics for life on Earth is that without the special kind of knowledge of laws of the universe we gain from astrophysics, we are blocked in scientific progress on the scale of everyday practice. Astrophysics, microphysics, and optical biophysics, are the frontiers of all scientific progress on Earth today.

To explore the behavior of the stars and galaxies, we must measure the full range of radiation from those sources. We must measure not only the visible light, but also microwaves and radio frequencies, the very large infrared spectrum, the ultraviolet, the X-ray region, and so forth. The farther from the Sun we make those observations, the better. What we are searching for is “anomalies” in our present textbooks’ physics. We are searching for the kind of evidence, which compared with work in microphysics and optical biophysics, will enable us not only to uncover those “anomalies,” but to solve them.

NASA

Artist’s depiction of humans exploring near a base on Mars.

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The rate at which science progresses on the surface of the Earth depends very much on these kinds of coordinated investigations.

A considerable amount of benefit can be gained from unmanned observational stations placed in various locations around our solar system. More and more, we are faced with the fact that there must also be manned laboratories and manned observatories in space, as well.

So far, most of our space exploration has been based on these kinds of objectives. This will continue to be a large part of man’s work and life in space for the foreseeable decades ahead.

Once we move to place observatories and space laboratories at interplanetary distances, the idea of permanent colonies in space pops up. Once we think of putting a few dozen scientists and technicians at interplanetary distances, we are already raising the question of space colonization.

The logic of the problem is simple enough. To support a few dozen scientists and technicians in the “front line” missions of research in space, we must have a much larger number of people there to maintain the life-support systems on which those scientists and technicians depend. As soon as one has sketched the table of organization for the persons necessary simply to maintain those life-support systems, we realize that once we have decided to put a few dozen scientists and technicians into front-line space missions, we might as well put a few hundred such scientists and technicians out there. The size of the life-support staff needed to sustain a few dozen scientists, would actually support hundreds with relatively little more effort.

Once we have decided to put observatories and laboratories a significant part of the distance toward Mars-orbit, we see it is much better to go all the distance, and take advantage of the fact that Mars is the most convenient place to establish a logistical base for the more remote stations.

NASA/Case for Mars

Greenhouses and other food production will be a necessary component of any future Martian settlement.

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Once that point is settled in our minds, we must estimate the minimum population on Mars necessary to maintain all functions indispensable to life support on that planet. Even with continued logistical support from the industrial base on the Moon, we are in the range of a city-sized population in our initial Mars colony. We must stop thinking in terms of the word base, as we might say “Antarctica base”; the word we must use is permanent colony, a chiefly self-sustaining, permanent colony on Mars.

We might look at the project in this way. Think of it as recruiting several thousand scientists, and supporting research technicians, to staff the major U.S. laboratory in space research. However, instead of establishing this university-like research center in the middle of Arizona, we place it on Mars. To provide the goods and services the scientific teams and their families require, we develop a small city around the research center, analogous to the case of Los Alamos.

This population is composed of human beings, not robots, and also not fellows clomping around in space suits in some Hollywood science fiction sort of space opera. Without a human ecosystem, many of them would go mad, or nearly so. Building an atmosphere on Mars so that the colonists could bicycle or hitchhike around the planet’s highways, might be a bit farfetched for the foreseeable future; cities and farms in Earthlike artificial environments, under large domes, is the more likely prospect for the foreseeable future. Within such domes, human activity and environment must be as Earthlike as possible. Think of a similar center placed in the middle of the Sahara Desert: pretty bleak and unlivable outside the oasis under the air-conditioned dome.

Painting by Christopher Sloan

Kepleropolis, a domed city on Mars. By this time, there are nearly half a million residents living on Mars.

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An Illustration

To make a bit clearer, the kind of work which requires large colonies of scientists in space, we describe some of the relevant features of one type of work to be done.

To analyze and measure radiation from very distant astronomical objects, as accurately as today’s leading scientific questions require us to do, we must construct what we call lenses of very large aperture, floating in space at some distance from Earth. These lenses measure a great variety of kinds of radiation from distant sources.

Such supergiant astrophysical lenses are not the solid sheets we ordinarily associate with giant telescope mirrors. They are built up out of a kind of mosaic of many individual sensory devices, each separated from all of the others by rather large distances of interplanetary solar space. The total number of such sensory devices would be distributed over an area many thousands of miles in diameter, and even much larger. The radiation sensed by each and all of these component devices is coordinated, as “information,” by a supercomputer, a computer of capacities way beyond anything presently in use. The bigger the area of the “lens,” the more precisely we may focus on very distant objects and regions of galactic and intergalactic space. The principles involved are very basic principles of known electromagnetic optics.

Ask a mature young astrophysicist dealing with anomalous cosmic ray and other radiations from the Crab Nebula region, or fast-rotating binary-star complexes, or “black hole” regions, what he would really like for Christmas, something which is technologically thinkable today, something which would be of great practical value for exploring the most important kinds of anomalous phenomena with precision. While he is thinking about this, interrupt him with a hint: “Imagine a lens with an aperture on the scale of the Mars orbit.” He will respond with statements to the effect: “That’s technically possible; you have just described every astrophysicist’s dream.”

What we shall accomplish by about 2027, will be far more modest than that, but we shall be moving in such directions.

This is not science-fiction fantasy. This merely describes, on a larger scale, what we are already doing today. We are already using this kind of technology. The importance of very-large-aperture lenses of this sort in interplanetary space is not only a very well-defined technologic requirement; there is a well-defined need for such observatories in terms of leading problems of present-day physics. Any good physicist can write out a list of specifications for building and operating such devices in space, as well as writing out a list of some of the observations which are indispensable for settling certain fundamental anomalies of physics today. This list of requirements for improved technologies is fully covered by the technologies we have indicated as needed and developable, for starting a permanent mars colony by 2026-2027.

There are fundamental principles of physics, which recommend developing such observational instruments along one of the solar system’s available Keplerian orbits. The physics significance of Keplerian orbits, is that they are what are sometimes called force-free pathways, or better named “Least Action” pathways. We must use this principle of “neo-Keplerian” physics (Kepler’s work as corrected by Gauss et al.), to ensure the desired stability of the lens’s mosaic, to minimize the perturbations in the lens-object’s relative position with respect to the other elements of the mosaic. Earth’s orbit is one of those accessible to us during the coming decades; the Mars orbit is a happier choice.

The kind of observatories which justify, and which require, Mars-colonization belong more or less to the family of such instruments we have just described. Thus, we are dealing with thousands of elements of each large mosaic, each of which requires either direct, manned intervention, or robotic intervention under human control within that locality of interplanetary space.

Similar considerations apply to manned laboratories, and semiautomatic laboratories in interplanetary space. A whole range of industrial and other production and research projects, most of currently known practical importance for life on Earth, are involved.

So, within the span of the foreseeable future, about two to three generations ahead, we must anticipate tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working in interplanetary space. Much of this work has a more or less well-defined urgency for settling questions which are important to life on Earth itself. To support tens of thousands of scientists associated with such projects, either permanently in space, or on extended tours of duty there, requires colonies in space with populations on the scale of important cities on Earth today.

All of this requires powered spaceflight, preferably at accelerations and decelerations with the effect of one Earth gravity, or high accelerations in craft modified to reduce the effect on the passengers and crew to that of one Earth gravity. It requires the conditions which can be provided only by 40 years of the kind of development we have outlined here.

The Spiritual Imperative for

Conquest of Space

Empiricists generally, and behaviorists in particular, have a definition of “human nature,” which is very simplistic, very wrong, and very morally degrading. They insist that “human nature” is based essentially on irrational sorts of hedonistic impulses, or “instincts.” It is not accidental, that the behaviorist psychologists base their research into “human nature” on close observations of monkeys and other beasts. They are flatly wrong; human beings are not beasts, at least not the sorts of individual one should wish to have as a neighbor, or to marry one’s daughter.

Human beings are absolutely distinguished from beasts by virtue of the fact, that every normal newborn infant has what is sometimes called “the divine spark of reason.” This spark, if developed, enables each of us to develop the power of creative reasoning, the quality of reasoning typified by the work of the best scientific discoverers. Such persons are potentially of great benefit to both contemporary society and future generations: One new, useful idea, discovered by such an individual mind, is of benefit to all mankind. This benefit is partly direct. It is also indirect: new, better ideas to come, will start from the most advanced discoveries of preceding scientists.

This same spark of reason, gives man not only the capacity for scientific discovery, which no beast can do. This spark of reason is the basis for durable ideas of beauty, and for that quality of lovingness toward other persons typified by Christian love: not bestial forms of erotic “love,” but what the classical Greeks called “agapē.” Everything that is good and beautiful in a person, is a reflection of the development of this divine spark of reason.

It is the potential for development of this divine spark of reason, which places mankind above the beasts, which defines mankind as in the image of the living God. This quality which sets each of us above the beasts, is our true “human nature.” The fuller realization of this beautiful potential in ourselves, is our true self-interest.

If this be our “human nature,” then what does this nature tell us is mortal man’s proper destiny? Can it be anything but the efficient self-development of that capacity for good which is the divine spark of reason within us? To be good, can never be separated from good deeds, from work which is consistent with goodness. Which, then, is the goal: the deeds of which goodness makes us capable, or the goodness which is affirmed by such deeds? The answer to this seeming paradox is elementary: Good deeds are necessary to the fulfillment of the quality of goodness in ourselves; it is by responding to the challenge about us with good deeds, that we strengthen goodness within us. To become good, by aid of deeds which respond properly to whatever practical challenge faces us, is our true self-interest, our true goal.

What we have just said, goes far from everyday thinking today. Ordinarily, only theologians, philosophers, and a handful of scientists who think philosophically, concern themselves with such ideas. For that reason, most readers may have some difficulty, both in grasping the concept we have just described, and in recognizing the practical importance of such ideas in day-to-day life. At this point, we must make the idea clearer, and show the reader the practical importance of such ideas.

The philosophy we have just outlined, is indispensable for any society which has entered the era of exploration and colonization of space. No person could survive extended periods in space exploration or colonization, without adopting this point of view: Without this philosophical outlook, many of them would break down psychologically under the impact of a gradual accumulation of “subliminal” psychological stress.

This will show up, sooner or later, as the major human flaw in the Soviet space program. Psychological problems of this type have already appeared around the edges of the impact of space exploration on sectors of the U.S. population, including some veterans of that program. The difference between us and the Soviets on this account, is that Western culture provides us with the resources needed to overcome the “culture shock” of space exploration, whereas Russian culture, both Soviet “materialist culture” and present-day relics of pre-Soviet mysticism, does not.

Although this philosophical “technology” is indispensable for extended space exploration and colonization, the reality and importance of this principle is rather easily demonstrated by suitable forms of reflections on the recent 2,500 years of European culture. The problem addressed has “always been there”; the conditions of space exploration on a large scale, over extended periods, merely brings this “factor” up front as an immediate practical issue of great importance.

Think back to the greatest heroes of European culture, since Solon of Athens during 599 B.C. Although some aspects of their contributions to our civilization are still of continuing practical importance today, most of the practical things accomplished in their lifetimes have vanished into the dust: used-up, outlived parts of our civilization’s earlier history. Yet, however obsolete most of their practical work has become, our civilization would not have progressed as far as it has, in its best periods to date, had these heroes of the past not lived. The question posed to each of us, by the example of these heroes, is: “What is durable, and therefore most important, in our mortal lives?”

Brilliant new discoveries of today, make many ideas of the preceding time obsolete. Later, many of today’s discoveries, and great deeds, too, will be made obsolete. So, we are forced to recognize that there are two ways of looking at our mortal lives. On the one side, we place the emphasis upon the concrete actions which seem to make a person important or unimportant during his or her lifetime: the actions which make one appear to be important, or unimportant to most contemporaries. On the other side, we look at ourselves as we look back to the great heroes and devils of the distant past; many of the things which appeared most important to the opinion of their contemporaries have vanished into the dust of past events.

EIRNS

“This combined development of the moral character, and science-like intellectual development, the pursuit of the good . . . developed in the individual and the nation, is that person’s, that nation’s potential for responding to contemporary challenges in a way which will have enduring value. Shown: members of the LaRouche Youth Movement in Bogotá, Colombia display pedagogical exhibits at a summer camp.

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The second view instructs our conscience: What is important in our living and having lived, is our contribution to human progress. The specific acts we perform have importance, of course. But, the aspect of those actions which survives, is the way those actions either contribute to the progress of man’s moral and material self-development, or have an opposite effect.

The simplest case, is the obscure parents engaged in the sustenance and loving rearing of a child. For that child to develop, the child must be sustained materially, of course. Therefore the physical care of the child is an essential part of a moral act. However, the essential thing, is the development of that child’s character. The very least contribution made by the development of the character of a child by its parents, schools, and so forth, is the child’s capacity and resolution, as a later adult, to the building of the character of his or her own children and grandchildren. In this way, the most ordinary activities of parental life, even by an illiterate mother confined to the limits of ordinary life in the household, the extended family, the local community, have a moral outcome which extends to far-distant generations.

From this historical vantage point, this historical way of looking at individuals of both the distant past and the present, the most essential aspect of a good and important action by a living person, is that person’s moral character and scientific intellectual development. It is the ability to choose between right and wrong, and the ability to react to challenges in a way which is efficiently consistent with goodness, which enables an individual, or an entire nation, to choose and to perform the kinds of actions which will be rightly judged as beneficial by later generations.

Let us call this combined development of the moral character, and science-like intellectual development, the pursuit of the good. This quality of goodness, as developed in the individual and the nation, is that person’s, that nation’s potential for responding to contemporary challenges in a way which will have enduring value.

As we have indicated here, so far, at least implicitly so, there are limits to our power to foresee the practical work which will confront our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Each decade ahead, the exact nature of that work becomes less and less concrete, less precisely exact. Even the most developed scientists can not look much more than 50 years ahead in forecasting the general levels of technology, and related problems, which might confront our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

How, in that case, can we know whether the outcome of our generation s’ work will be ultimately good or disastrous? Our capacity to pose suggested answers in practical terms, is a limited one. We find ourselves on sure ground, only if we make our more fundamental goal, the enrichment of the moral character and science-like intellectual development of the coming generations. If we can accomplish that, we are pre-assured that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have a greater moral and scientific capacity than we today; therefore, they will be better equipped to perpetuate the good into the 50 years following their lifetimes, than we.

NASA

Two children fascinated by an X-ray mirror cylinder.

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To make this point clearer, consider the case, that we make the United States a great economic and military power, unchallengeable, on either count, by any nation or combination of nations on this planet; yet, we neglect the development of the moral character of our children and grandchildren. In that case, as we see in the fallen nations and empires of the past, those grandchildren and greatgrandchildren will destroy this nation with wrong choices.

That has been precisely the root of our undoing over the postwar period to date. Our postwar State Department turned our foreign policy away from the nation-building perspective we developed during the war years under President Franklin Roosevelt. We allowed the subversion of the morals of the nuclear-family household, the rock on which the development of the child’s character depends. We allowed the immoral subversion of our educational systems. We tolerated the spread of the rock-drug-sex counterculture during the past quarter century. Although, into the middle of the1960s, we continued to be the world’s greatest economic and military power in history, over the past 20 years we have frittered both away, through our neglect of the moral character building of our children and grandchildren. It is those so-mistreated children who are now taking the lead in destroying the institutions upon which our nation’s future depends.

Our essential task is twofold.

First, on the practical side of policy shaping, a wise nation lays the foundations for what will be bequeathed, materially, to our posterity, 50 years or so ahead. The ordering of the leading practical goals of our nation to be consistent with, and sparked by the Moon-Mars colonization mission-assignment, essentially fulfills the practical side of our obligations to posterity’s general welfare.

The Moon-Mars colonization mission, illustrates the point, that what the world and our nation will be, 50 years from now, will depend upon what we do, or fail to do, during each of the five decades between now and then. To build a house, or an industry, the basic economic infrastructure and the foundation of that house or industry must be constructed first. To operate a farm, wasteland must first be developed as fertile land. It would be impossible, 50 years from now, for our posterity to do the kinds of things a successful Moon-Mars mission makes possible, unless, during each of the next five decades, we accomplish the step-by-step tasks needed to make this possible. That, our posterity can not control; that is our moral responsibility to the future generation of this nation, which no one but we can do.

Second, whether our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will build upon, or destroy what we have bequeathed to them, depends chiefly upon the development of their moral character. Provided we have bequeathed our posterity a good material foundation, the rest depends upon their moral character.

The first, the material basis for the future 50 years ahead, is indispensable, but the second, the development of the moral character of our posterity, is what is essential, what is fundamental.

The practical question on which we are concentrating here, is: How should we think, in order that we may place the essential and the indispensable both in the properly coordinated perspective? It is the development of good moral character and science-like intellectual development of the individual and the national culture, which has permanently efficient effect. The meeting of the practical tasks of present-day society, is indispensable to the perpetuation of the good; however, if the development of the moral character and science-like intellectual development of the individual and the culture is consistent with the principle of the good, then each generation will tend to make the right choices of leading practical tasks.

NASA

Dr. Wernher von Braun (left) briefs President John F. Kennedy on the Saturn V Launch System at Cape Canaveral, Florida on November 16, 1963.

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We must think of a process of the self-development of the good within our national culture. In this process, it is the development of the good which is fundamental, and the practical tasks merely the indispensable activity of goodness.

Our potential capacity to act and think in this way, is bequeathed to us as the essential thread of Augustinian culture. The work of the great Jewish reformer and collaborator of St. Peter, Philo of Alexandria, contributed nourishment to the elaboration of Christianity, as our Judeo-Christian heritage is summed up in an integral way by the work of St. Augustine. This culture incorporates the Socratic method of Plato, while correcting the crucial theological defect in Platonic paganism.

The center of Augustinian culture, from the special, limited standpoint of European civilization’s statecraft, is the way in which Augustinian Christianity defines the human individual. We define the individual as being in the likeness of the living God, in respect to that divine spark of potential for creative reason in the person. This divine spark defines each person as a universal existence, both spiritually and from the vantage point of practice of statecraft.

This universality is most readily portrayed from the standpoint of reference to the individual scientific discoverer. Although each scientific discoverer depends upon the contribution of his or her entire society, past and present, to the development of his individual powers: each particular scientific discovery is the work of an individual human mind. As this discovered idea for practice has impact upon all humanity, present and posterity, so that discoverer is a universal being by virtue of the development of his or her individual character, as an individual character.

As we have indicated already, the same universality of the individual personality, applies also to the simple parent who shapes a positive outcome of the development of the child’s character. It applies to all who use the development of their moral character, of their science-like intellectual development, as an integral part of whatever work they perform.

If the individual, developed in this moral way, is conscious of this kind of universality as his or her personal identity, and as the essential center of his or her personal self-interest in life, we are thus presented with the kind of person morally, philosophically prepared for the work of space exploration.

(To be continued.)

IV. Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche

Ibero-American Memorial for LaRouche:

‘A Great Man Has Left Us,

But He Has Left Us His Ideas’

by Dennis Small

Dennis Small, EIR Ibero-America Editor.

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April 22—An Ibero-American Memorial was held on April 11 to honor the great American statesman and world citizen, Lyndon LaRouche, the second of a series of such memorials. The first was held in South Africa,[fn_1] and memorial events will be held in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere over the coming months. The Ibero-American event was sponsored by the Schiller Institute; it linked together, in a videoconference format, live meetings in five cities (Mexico City, Querétaro and Hermosillo in Mexico; Lima, Peru; and Buenos Aires, Argentina), and was moderated from Purcellville, Virginia.

The gatherings brought together some 200 associates and friends of the LaRouche movement, who heard sections of recorded speeches by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, as well as messages of condolence received since LaRouche’s death on Feb. 12 of this year from prominent individuals from around the world who knew LaRouche and had worked with him—such as Ramsey Clark (former Attorney General of the United States), Sergey Glazyev (adviser to the President of Russia), Col. (ret.) Bao Shixiu (Professor at China’s Academy of Military Sciences), and others.

The audience—about half of whom were university students and other youth—also watched a video report on Lyndon and Helga LaRouche’s historic 2002 visit to Brazil, as well as dramatic footage of Mexican President José López Portillo’s October 1982 address to the United Nations General Assembly, which strongly reflected his personal discussion with Lyndon LaRouche in July of that year, and López Portillo’s December 1998 joint conference with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, where he issued his now famous call: “It is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche.” LaRouche’s contributions to the science of classical culture were also highlighted by video clips of Norbert Brainin, lead violinist of the Amadeus Quartet.

The gathering also heard video tributes to LaRouche received from prominent political, trade union, government and social leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, testifying to the impact that LaRouche’s work had on their countries—of which we publish significant excerpts below.

After listening with concentration throughout the first part of the nearly two-hour program, individuals from the five gathered audiences in turn took the floor to express their deep appreciation for what LaRouche had done for them, their countries, and their ideals. There was general excitement at the recognition that the Memorial they were participating in showed that the LaRouche movement in Ibero-America is alive and kicking, and is a force to be reckoned with. Youth from Mexico and elsewhere took the lead in this discussion, recalling the way that exposure to LaRouche’s ideas had changed their lives and given them meaning—a gift which they hoped to pass on to future generations.

We first present excerpts from the opening remarks to the Memorial by its moderator, EIR Ibero-American Editor Dennis Small, followed by the excerpted messages, in the order they were delivered at the event.

Opening Remarks

Dennis Small: Gathered for this Memorial are five meetings being held in three countries: Mexico, Argentina and Peru. That is not an accident, because these are three of the four Ibero-American countries that Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche visited personally over the years (the fourth was Brazil). In the cases of Mexico and Argentina, he met with the Presidents of those countries during his visits, and this is just a small indication of the impact that his ideas had, and continue to have, across the continent . . .

As most of you know, Lyndon LaRouche passed away this past February 12. A little over 30 years earlier, on December 2, 1988, Lyndon LaRouche and a number of his associates were found guilty in a corrupt political trial in Alexandria, Virginia. Mr. LaRouche was sent to jail on January 27, 1989—30 years and three weeks before his death. The intention of those who jailed him, as in the case of the jailing of other great statesmen, such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, was to silence him, silence his ideas, and destroy his movement. They did not succeed in doing that.

The enemies of LaRouche, the guardians of the British imperial system, of the City of London and Wall Street, are totally convinced that now, with the physical passing of LaRouche, that finally his ideas and his movement will vanish. It is our intention, with the help of this series of memorials, to prove them wrong: that they have failed, and they will not achieve that. They truly believe that Man is nothing but flesh and blood, and exists only in the here and now. And that when he disappears physically, the power of that individual to change the physical universe that surrounds him, including the political universe, also disappears.

But that is based on a false idea of the nature of Man. Lyndon LaRouche dedicated his entire life to the idea that Man is creative and that he acts within a physical universe which is also creative. And that the essence of Man is creativity, which is something that goes way beyond the here and now, and is a substantial form of power which goes way beyond the finite time that he lives on this Earth. There is a simultaneity of eternity. Man, his soul, his mind, is immortal in that sense. And the best proof that that concept of Man is correct and that the contrary concept, that of the imperial system, is false, is this very process of memorials to Lyndon LaRouche.

Our intention is to achieve the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, not only because he was innocent, and those of us who went to jail with him are likewise innocent of what we were charged with—which the enemy knows perfectly well. We want justice for LaRouche in that regard. But justice for the man is justice for his ideas, and this is what concerns us most of all, because the ideas of LaRouche must become the living force to change the world, and it is that which the speculative financial enemy most fears.

The London Times about a week ago published an article as a kind of obituary on LaRouche—they took six weeks after his death to decide what they were going to say about him! Interspersed among the lies upon lies in that article, they said that there are two things that really worried them about LaRouche. The first was the influence LaRouche had in the Ronald Reagan government with regard to the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative and what that means for changing the entire international strategic order. And the second was that LaRouche met with Mexican President José López Portillo in 1982, and that they were acting together to totally change the international financial system. That is quite interesting.

The real problem the British Empire faces is something that they refuse to recognize. For this, I would like to briefly refer to Nicholas of Cusa, the 15th century philosopher and founder of modern physical science, who said the following: “Mind is the same as the soul of a human being. . . . Mind is a living substance. . . . Its function in this body is to give it life, and because of this it is called soul. Mind is a substantial form or power.”‘

What we would like to do in this Memorial to LaRouche, is to explore some aspects of that “substantial form or power” of his ideas. In addition to a discussion about his ideas in economics; in addition to some aspects of his work in science and classical culture; in addition to his work on the subject of the nation-state; perhaps the most important idea of all underlying all of the rest is LaRouche’s constant central point about the fundamental nature of Man: that Man as a species is different and superior to any other animal species, in the sense that the characteristic that distinguishes us is our creative capability, which is what also gives us morality. . . .

Lyndon LaRouche is perhaps best known in many parts of the world, including Ibero-America, for his economic proposals, and his battle to the death against the City of London and financial speculation, and in favor of world development based on great infrastructure projects, the establishment of a new credit system modeled on the system first developed by Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States. In this field, one of LaRouche’s best-known works is Operation Juárez, which came out of his relationship with Mexican President José López Portillo.

Now, it is true that LaRouche met with López Portillo in Los Pinos, the Presidential palace, in July 1982, after various earlier visits to Mexico. But in LaRouche’s mind this was not simply a relationship between himself and the Mexican President. LaRouche was working on a much bigger grand design, which was how to entirely get rid of the existing bankrupt and genocidal international monetary system, and replace it with a just New World Economic Order.

During this same period, LaRouche also met with India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in order to organize a combination of forces capable of doing this.

And the third key piece in his grand design in statecraft on an international scale, was U.S. President Ronald Reagan. LaRouche was in dialogue with Reagan and the people around Reagan on exactly these same issues. When Reagan arrived in the Presidency, LaRouche saw a golden opportunity to achieve a combination of forces perhaps sufficient to bring about this profound international change he was working on.

Now there is an important parallel here which I would like you to keep in mind. The relationship which LaRouche developed with Reagan was a relationship on the basis of organizing him around ideas, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative and the economic program presented in Operation Juárez, because Ronald Reagan was not a President run by the Establishment. He was not a President run by Wall Street. He had his problems, his weaknesses, he made his mistakes, to be sure; but LaRouche saw in Reagan the possibility of achieving an international combination of forces that would be both sufficient and capable of destroying not merely the British Empire as such, but the principle of empire itself.

Lyndon LaRouche, in the years before his death and as we in his movement continue to organize in the same regard today, are organizing to bring together around LaRouche’s proposals four world powers that have the ability to jointly change the entire planet, and bring about a New World Economic Order. And those are the United States, Russia, China and India. And other countries could then unite around those four leading powers.

And in fact today, we have a President in the White House who, like Ronald Reagan, is not run by the Establishment. That’s why they have tried to overthrow him. That’s why they have organized any number of completely false scandals against him, including supposed collusion with the Russians. And it is quite important, even though we don’t have time to go into this in detail tonight, that the same people who today are activated against Donald Trump—people from the FBI, from the Justice Department, from the CIA, and from British intelligence above all—are the very same people who sent Lyndon LaRouche to jail.

So this combination of political forces that were not under the control of the Establishment that LaRouche was working on back then, is a valuable lesson to us today as to how we have to use those same ideas to organize similar forces today.

Left: Mario Roberto Morales; right: Max Ibáñez

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Messages of Tribute to Lyndon LaRouche

Mario Roberto Morales is a Guatemalan writer, university professor and journalist. He holds a doctorate in Latin American Culture and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and a 2017 Doctor Honoris Causa from San Carlos University in Guatemala. He won Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize for Literature in 2007. He has been a university professor in the U.S., Guatemala and Costa Rica.

Good evening. I am very happy to participate in this Memorial to Lyndon LaRouche, an intellectual, visionary political thinker, whose ideas not only remain alive as theories, but above all they are taking shape in practice throughout the world.

I think this memorial is also very timely, because his ideas and proposals for an alternative globalization to neoliberal planetary suicide, are without question as of now the only visible alternative for the necessary change in paradigm on the planet. Both for saving the planet, as well as to save humanity.

China’s New Silk Road initiative and Russia’s initiatives for pacifying the world through a physical, productive globalization, returning to the creation of substantial real growth, instead of this unproductive, parasitical, speculative capitalism of great financial centers such as Wall Street and the City of London, are a solution which is not only feasible, but necessary, indispensable, almost a matter of life and death. Not only for the West, and not only for the East, but for the whole world, whose interconnectedness now is not only inevitable, but absolutely necessary. . . .

LaRouche’s ideas were visionary, and the fact that China is putting them into practice with undeniable success, and that Russia, for its part, is managing to deter any return to the warmongering and arms build-up on which neoliberal globalization is based, is certainly impressive. The case of Venezuela now is emblematic of that tension.

Thus it is a great honor for me that I have been asked to pay tribute to this U.S. thinker who has undoubtedly left a legacy which is rightly going to continue to generate commentary and critical theory.

Max Ibañez is a veteran trade union leader in Bolivia. He was formerly Secretary of Grievance Resolution of the National Federation of Electrical and Telephone Workers of Bolivia, and he was a founding member of the Schiller Institute Trade Union Commission.

On the 13, 14 and 15 of July of 1985, the Schiller Institute Trade Union Commission convened its First Continental Trade Union Conference with trade unions from various countries in Ibero-America, with prominent participation from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Mexico, and from us in Bolivia.

That is where we first learned of the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, and from that time forward, the Schiller Institute Ibero-American Trade Union Commission began to spread those ideas in the trade union movement.

At that meeting we drew up a joint strategy for the labor movement, with the goal of mobilizing our countries to overcome the problem of the foreign debt and the austerity programs of the IMF, and against the drug trade that was spreading as a result of those austerity programs.

The Schiller Institute got right to work and the next year we published the book Ibero-American Integration: How to Create 100 Million New Jobs by 2000. That book became our main organizing tool across the continent. . . .

At one of those conferences, one of the participants was a trade union leader from Cochabamba, Evo Morales, today President of Bolivia. We spoke about how to create productive jobs in an economy driven by scientific and technological development; about great mining, agricultural and industrial projects; about the complementarity of our countries and great infrastructure projects, high speed railroads, highways, ports, airports, and science-cities.

As you know, these ideas have now spread across the whole continent and the entire world, thanks to China’s New Silk Road initiative. Mind you, I’m talking about 33 years ago, when all of that seemed to be a science fiction dream!

In Bolivia we have now begun to build that future based on scientific and technological progress, which we learned from Lyndon LaRouche. And I don’t think I’m deceiving myself when I say that, slowly, we are now no longer the poorest country in South America, which is how we were viewed 33 years ago.

But we are now moving forward, and on that path the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche and his personal character have been our guide, and they will continue to be.

Marino Elsevyf Pineda is an attorney in the Dominican Republic. He was the only Ibero-American jurist who travelled to the United States to join Ramsey Clark, Amelia Boynton Robinson and others on the Schiller Institute’s Martin Luther King Tribunal, seeking the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.

It is my great joy to commemorate Lyndon LaRouche, a man who established new paradigms for humanity.

I met Lyndon LaRouche in 1985, in Boston. And then I had the opportunity to participate in the Martin Luther King Tribunal when he was unjustly imprisoned through the machinations with which the Justice Department used false evidence to prosecute his ideas, prosecute his ideology.

To remember Lyndon LaRouche is to establish the parallel idea that humanity must reconstruct itself with a new financial architecture, under the postulates of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.

And now, we face this great immigration crisis, incited by groups, by persons, by financial cartels. These migrations can only be solved with development, with infrastructure projects such as those which Lyndon LaRouche put forward in Operation Juárez in 1982, during the government of Mexican President José López Portillo. . . .

Humanity can only transform itself by abandoning geopolitics and embracing the international cooperation of China, Russia and the U.S. through a New Paradigm for humanity, as the great Lyndon LaRouche believed, dreamed of, and designed.

Dr. Julio C. González is the former Technical Secretary of the Presidency of the Nation of Argentina from 1973 to 1976, and he has been Professor at the Lomas de Zamora National University in Argentina from 1989 to the present. He is on the international advisory board of the Schiller Institute.

Lyndon LaRouche developed the concept of physical economy. He emphasized that it is sovereign nation states that are responsible for creating credit, money, and banking, financial and trade regulations. He emphatically stated that man does not merely live, but that he lives together with other men. And that states do not exist, but they coexist. That is the world community, which cannot coexist with international free trade imposed by those whose only goal is a speculative economy and the benefits of a privileged sector: speculators and usurers.

Lyndon LaRouche back in the 1980s conceived of the idea that the solution to the tragedy of geometrically increasing debt and interest, is to establish a debtors’ club based on universal opposition to financial speculation, which is the problem that annihilates life, procreation, and physical and intellectual creation.

Left: Patricio Ricketts; right: Rear Admiral (ret.) Hugo Ramírez Canaval

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Patricio Ricketts is a former Education Minister of Peru, a leading historian, author, journalist and political analyst. He was a strong defender of Peru’s national sovereignty against the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) onslaught, two narco-terrorist groups with powerful international financial and political support, such as that of George Soros.

In remembering Lyndon LaRouche, I share the sorrow of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, his wife and staunch supporter. Recalling him, although we met only briefly, we mourn. We think once more of his vigorous person, vast reach, ebullient creativity and polemical alacrity, which sometimes called to mind Don Quixote de La Mancha, battling the scoundrels encountered along the way.

He was daring, self-controlled, unique, alert, a lover of polemics like few others, which were perhaps delightful and sporting for him: thus his abundance of tenacious enemies. . . .

Over more decades than can be easily counted, his frequent warnings and early and repeated foresight into all kinds of matters were notable. It is worth recalling some of his forecasts. Like his repeated warning of the catastrophic collapse of dizzily-rising financial aggregates and derivatives, until what he called his typical collapse function, the short circuit of speculative growth along with a productive downturn, came to pass. Or the heinous spread of Soros’s pro-drug evil.

Fortunately, his encouraging and healthy successes were plentiful. Among them, his reasoned and early celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, as well as the instructive presentation of the effect produced by the totality of the German miracle’s fortunate economic decisions and harmonized policies, which was the mainstay of Europe. Likewise, his forecasts of the miraculous resurrection of China, Russia’s recovery, and the “fantasy,” which today is in full swing, of very rapid [maglev] trains suspended on air, were way ahead of their time. From afar he foresaw and announced the continents coming together, a spider’s web of railroads everywhere: the New Silk Road. In short, passages from a new version of Jules Verne.

Peru was present in his thinking, aspirations and concerns.

In the border conflict, he supported our just position, finally agreed to by our brotherly parties with international blessing.

He was uncompromising and exemplary in his fight against terrorism in all its forms; he deplored the insane inflation; he supported foreign aid for recovery; he was interested in the progress of the Armed Forces and in the soundness of civilian economic, financial and social positions. He was, in sum, a friend. He could be counted on.

Rear Admiral (ret.) Hugo Ramírez Canaval is one of the most distinguished leaders of the Peruvian Navy. In 1988 that institution published the book, Modern Irregular Warfare, by Friedrich von der Heydte, with an introduction by Lyndon LaRouche, for its senior officers to study and analyze. It proved vital to their understanding of the new type of narco-terrorist enemy that the nation was facing.

It is an honor to speak to you about Lyndon LaRouche, a great friend of Peru in its worst moments. While they speak today about the dictatorship of [President Alberto] Fujimori, this was a man who supported Fujimori in saving a destroyed, shattered country, with no foreign accounts, kicked out of international banking.

Mr. LaRouche spoke up for Peru many times in the United States. He prefaced a book about the famed irregular warfare [by Prof. Friedrich August von der Heydte], and he included us within that concept. How could we not continue to be grateful to this man? . . .

I feel very honored to speak about this gentleman whom I always admired for what he said or did for Peru. For me, Lyndon LaRouche has been a mentor, the creator, the one with the basic or initial idea with which Mr. Trump is now dealing with the powers of the world. Mr. Lyndon LaRouche was the one with the idea that Peru had to forge ahead and succeed; and we did so! . . .

My tribute and memorial to Lyndon LaRouche, who was a friend of Peru. May God keep him close and let him continue to look after Peruvians.

Ramón Emilio Concepción is an attorney in the Dominican Republic, having received his law degree Summa Cum Laude from the Dominican World University. He is a pre-candidate for the Presidency of the Dominican Republic for the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM).

While it is true that when someone great dies, it is humanity’s loss, in the case of Lyndon, affectionately called Lyn, as all of us who are his followers called him, his leaving of course leaves a void. But at the same time it leaves strength.

The power of the ideas he spoke of on innumerable occasions fills us with strength, with courage, with rigor, to continue upholding his ideas.

I remember when I was very young, in 1984, how startled I was when I read Dope, Inc. Later, I came across [Alexander] Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures,” “Report on the National Bank,” and “Report on Public Credit.” In short, the works which this outstanding man leaves us with are many and immeasurable. But one which caused a sensation from the beginning, his great dream, his great goal, which today is becoming a reality, is the Belt and the Road, referring to the integration of the world through infrastructure projects under the Eurasian Land-Bridge, today known as One Belt, One Road.

Happily for humanity, China is developing extremely rapidly. This is due in large measure to the efforts of Lyn and dear Doña Helga. Without Helga, LaRouche perhaps would not have been so great; and without LaRouche, perhaps Helga would not be so great.

But these things happen in life, in humanity. When two great individuals join together, what results is great, that is the efforts of this married couple and what their Schiller Institute have done for Humanity.

We should not feel sorrow because Lyn has gone. On the contrary, we should be happy, because he left us the power of his ideas. He is immortal precisely because of the great vigor with which he used the ideas which he had. And which he leaves all of his followers worldwide, leaves us here in this small country, the Dominican Republic. Without Lyndon it would not have been possible to put up the fight we did. And even though the creators of the current bankrupt predatory model have defeated us, partially, thanks to Lyn’s ideas we were able to defend strategic areas which will help development when his ideas come to power in the Dominican Republic.

All his effort, all his sacrifice, all his studies, all his reports, had a fundamental core: the dignity of the human being.

For that alone Lyndon has already gained immortality, and belongs among the greats! . . . Words don’t come to mind, perhaps, which do justice to him. I simply want to say: he was a great person, but he has not left. He left in a figurative sense.

But his ideas remain; his work remains; his efforts remain.

Jaime Miranda Peláez is the former President of the Small Landowners Association of the Yaqui Valley and then of the state of Sonora, and former President and current Advisor to the Agricultural Credit Union of Cajeme in Mexico.

I have been a farmer all my life, and Lyndon LaRouche had a great impact on my life and my way of thinking from the time I began to read his writings, particularly his proposal for the Northeast Hydraulic Plan and his great knowledge of economy and agricultural questions.

Yes, “There Is Life After the Death of the IMF” was the document which most affected me. I remember perfectly when the problem of Mexico’s past-due farm debt exploded in 1992. [LaRouche activist] Alberto Vizcarra came to a general meeting of Yaqui Valley farmers to argue that we should propose to the government that it write off the past-due debts, restore parity prices and subsidies for frontier agricultural research, and reject the Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] which had been already discussed with the Bush government.

Very determined, we organized the following year, on August 19, 1993, a caravan of tractors from Ciudad Obregon to the airport in Guaymas, more than 129 kilometers away, in temperatures reaching up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Surrounding the Guaymas airport with 150 tractors, we got then President Carlos Salinas de Gotari to grant us a “15-minute” interview which went on for more than half an hour because of the bombshell which we came to propose to him: write-off of the farm debt, fair parity prices, and the conviction that Mexican agriculture and the economy of the country would be destroyed by the trade opening with the United States: “for the above reasons,” I told him, “Mr. President, do not sign the Free Trade Agreement, because it will destroy the national economy.”

That phrase has remained with me for my whole life, and I still remember it as if it were yesterday. Obviously, he did not pay attention to us, but he was very startled by the level of the argument which we made to him.

Today, 27 years later, I am very proud that this document, based on Lyndon LaRouche’s economic method, was totally prophetic. The ideas of Lyndon LaRouche are being implemented now in the entire planet, with the New Renaissance that he developed, with the New Silk Road, which he envisioned before anyone else. And while there is sadness at the passing of a human being with a creative mind so invaluable for humanity, I know that the seed which he planted has already produced fruits which shall last for centuries. And that, at my ninety years, makes me happy.

[fn_1]. Ramasimong Tsokolibane, “LaRouche South Africa Honors the Memory of Lyndon LaRouche,” EIR March 15, 2019. [back to text for fn_1]

EDITORIAL

Dozens of Heads of State to Attend Second BRI Forum in China April 25-27.

When Will the United States Join?

by Diane Sare

This week, 37 heads of state, 360 government ministers, and 100 leaders of international organizations, will be among the 5,000 participants gathering in Beijing for the second Belt and Road Forum, entitled “Belt and Road Cooperation: Shaping a Brighter Shared Future.” Launched in September 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a Chinese-led international framework for infrastructure and other investment on a massive scale, involving, by some estimates, nations accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population. It coheres, in many respects, with the proposals made by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, especially since the end of the Cold War.

According to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, this year’s event will build upon the success of the inaugural Belt and Road Forum held in 2017, doubling the number of forums and conferences to twelve and incorporating a CEO conference with 800 business leaders. The high-level event will occur on April 27, with national leaders attending a plenary session. The significant level of participation of both government and business leaders is expected to result in billions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure projects and trade deals, which will raise the standard of living of hundreds of millions, or even billions of people worldwide.

As of this writing, it has not been confirmed whether the United States is going to send any high-level official representation to participate, beyond the vague “diplomatic representation” Wang Yi said would be attending, in spite of the fact that 124 nations and 29 international organizations already have signed BRI agreements with China, making this by far the largest project of physical economic development ever carried out by the human race and in spite of the tremendous economic growth in trade and productivity enjoyed by participating nations.

Shortly after President Trump was inaugurated in early 2017, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, wife of the American statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche, forecast that if President Trump were to accept invitation of China, “to join China and other nations in the New Silk Road, he could become one of the greatest American Presidents in history.”

So far, thanks in large part to a British-orchestrated ongoing attempted coup against President Trump—which included not only the now thoroughly discredited fraudulent Muller report, but a never-ending torrent of “fake news” denouncing the Chinese and Russian leaders as “authoritarian” or worse—Trump has not been able to make good on his pledge to establish collaborative relations with Russia and China, although he has been careful to repeatedly comment on his “good relationship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the two of them seem optimistic about reaching a trade deal in the near future.

The United States and the BRI

Just before the first BRI Forum in 2017, Zepp-LaRouche wrote an article with the provocative title, “Only a Bystander? Once the United States Joins the Belt and Road Initiative, A New Paradigm for Mankind Can Begin,” which was published byChina Investment magazine and distributed to all participants at that gathering, which included 28 heads of state. In this article she wrote:

The infrastructure requirements of the United States are enormous, due to decades-long non-investment by the previous administrations. Except for those who have actually been to China, most Americans have no idea how far behind China U.S. infrastructural development is.

The average speed of the Washington-Boston 736 km Acela “high-speed” line is only 105 km/h, with only very short segments at 145 km/h. This is by no means high speed, compared to the approximately 130,000 kilometers of high-speed rail in China . . . U.S. roads are in terribly dangerous condition, and so are the bridges, and sanitation systems—but their use is still expensive. For a trip between Washington and New York, one has to pay the substantial amount of $115 in tolls and gas per car.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, at a recent conference, released the estimate that current U.S. infrastructure investment requirements are actually $4.5 trillion. There is no way that the financing of either of these amounts will come from the private equity market.

One recent example of the lack of infrastructure investment referenced by Zepp-LaRouche is the devastation of the U.S. farm belt in the last month caused by the lack of water management infrastructure proposed many years ago by the Army Corps of Engineers but which was never built. As a result of this failure, Iowa, Missouri, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas have been devastated by frozen rivers flooding over, wiping out over one million head of cattle, and wreaking havoc on our corn, soy, pork and egg production. Terry Branstad, the former governor of Iowa, is the current U.S. Ambassador to China, and has a friendship with President Xi stretching back decades, from the time Xi spent as a student in that state. Given China’s experience with the massive flooding of the Yellow River, and the recent completion of the Three Gorges Dam, one might imagine President Xi is well aware of the desperate situation in Iowa and surrounding states, and would probably be very inclined to join forces with President Trump and local governors to assist in developing a long-term solution to the problem.

Such potential cooperation should be seen in the context of offers from Chinese institutional investors to invest potentially trillions of dollars’ worth of treasuries and other dollar-denominated assets into a vehicle such as a U.S. infrastructure bank, providing an opportunity to accelerate an infrastructure renewal in the United States.

Defeating and Replacing Geopolitics

It is precisely the sort of international cooperation, and cooperation on advanced scientific endeavors like space exploration and fusion research, that the British instigators of the attempted coup against President Trump wish to prevent. To them, the BRI represents a mortal threat to the current world order; it is representative of a new paradigm of international relations, in which geopolitics is overcome and superseded.

Later in her article, Zepp-LaRouche elaborates something unknown to most Americans (due to the “fake news” anti-China propaganda), namely, the compatibility between the values of American System economists and the Chinese approach today:

If one studies the economic theory behind the tremendous success of the Chinese economic miracle of the last 30 years, one will find out that current Chinese economic policies, basing themselves on the education of its citizens, are very much in coherence with the Confucian principle of lifelong learning and innovation, and are actually very close to the economic principles of the American System of economy, as it was developed and implemented by Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Henry C. Carey, and Abraham Lincoln. All of these men understood that the most important source of wealth of a country is the development of the creative powers of its own population. And therefore, they designed a system of economy that furthered exactly that, in order to catalyze the greatest rate of scientific and technological progress and innovation.

In the wake of President Trump’s recent announcement—made shortly after China demonstrated the successful sprouting of seeds on the far side of the Moon—of his plan to land a man and the first woman on the Moon by 2024, it would be the most natural thing in the universe for these two great nations to collaborate to bring the Earth into a new paradigm. The late Lyndon LaRouche dedicated his life’s work to bringing this about, and we should ensure that it finally happens. The lives of billions, born and unborn, depend on us.