Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 46, Number 24, June 28, 2019

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL From Cyberwar to Nuclear War? by Barbara Boyd

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 46, Number 25, June 28, 2019

- I. LaRouche’s Concepts for a New Paradigm

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST The Exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche Is Crucial To Stop the British Empire’s Drive for World War III

- Mobilization to Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche Strikes the War Party by Paul Gallagher

- II. Marijuana—A British Weapon

- THE PAST IS PROLOGUE! Marijuana Legalization: The Murder of Our Youth by Denise Bouchard Ham

- Medical Marijuana Is a Fraud by Ned Rosinsky, MD

- III. The New Silk Road

- African High-Speed Rail Finance Requires LaRouche Four-Power Pact by David Cherry and Ramasimong Tsokolibane

- CALIFORNIA BELT & ROAD FORUM An Historic Opportunity for the USA by Daniel Platt and Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Leading Italian Senator Heads International Delegation to Chinese Exposition by Claudio Celani

- IV. LaRouche’s Method of Forecasting

- SCIENCE VS. STATISTICS When Fate Hangs on a Forecast by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (September 7, 2007)

- EDITORIAL He Questions the Premise of Russiagate? Off With His Head! by Barbara Boyd

10 Minutes from World War III

Editor-in-Chief and Founder:

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

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

Co-Editors: Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

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Washington, D.C.: William Jones

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EDITORIAL

From Cyberwar to Nuclear War?

by Barbara Boyd

June 23—Lyndon LaRouche often described witnessing the sea change that came over the American population when it was announced that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor. In New York City, during the afternoon of December 7, 1941, LaRouche witnessed a population which, just moments before, had been preoccupied by life’s everyday activities, suddenly confronting a dramatically changed future with stunned absolute silence, solemnity, and determination.

On Friday, President Donald Trump called off U.S. military strikes on the nation of Iran after, it was claimed, the Iranians shot down an unarmed U.S. drone. The President, in a tweet, recounted his decision. How many people would be killed by the planned action? the President asked the Generals. They came back with the answer, “150, sir.” He thought for a moment, the President said in his tweet, and said, “No.” He added, “I didn’t think it was proportionate.” So, Washington’s armchair warriors had proposed that the United States kill 150 people over the shooting down of an inanimate object, a drone, which, they argued, cost a ton of money. In calling off the military strikes, the President told the public that he made the “common sense” decision any human would make in such a situation.

The intelligence community and news media—one cohesive, incestuous entity in the United States—and their British imperial masters, are furious about this President’s courageous decision and most important, the President’s direct discussion with the American public about it, mostly via twitter. It is a direct challenge to the mental and human capacities of the Anglo-American elite.

Did the President really abandon the so-called principals and advisors that have endlessly trapped Presidents in wars, and did he listen, instead, to his own judgment?—President Trump’s opponents rage. Was he influenced by Fox News Host Tucker Carlson, telling him on Fox TV over the three nights prior to Friday’s decision, lurid details about the lust for war that dominates official Washington, something the President himself has publicly condemned? Carlson argued repeatedly, that the larger war with Iran—ached for by official Washington and London, a war that would kill millions while giving Washington’s war hawks a “rush”—would also doom the President’s electoral prospects and his legacy.

Oh, how offensive and dangerous to official Washington—to the Mandarins steeped in British geopolitical doctrines and in the practice of “managing” populations, imperial wars, and American presidents! Was Iran’s shootdown really a mistake by a rogue Iranian military element, pronounced as a “theory,” by President Donald Trump and as “fact” by General Jack Keane who backed the President up in TV appearances? Who in the hell, the Mandarins ask, leaked that?

Surveillance State Under Examination

This article is the first in a series of examinations of the surveillance state—the realm of cyber and information warfare in which an actual war is now being fought. It is a battle for the mind of the American public, primarily, which has been dramatically escalated by the British in the wake of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the partial failure of the Anglo-American 2014 coup in Ukraine. It encompasses the illegal operations against the Trump Campaign and Presidency and the false-flag tarring of the Russians for malign election interference in 2016, when the real culprit was the desperate effort of the British and aligned intelligence services to swing the election to Hillary Clinton.

This war is now fully underway in the censorship regimes undertaken by Google, Facebook, et al., in direct alliance with the British government to de-platform and censor voices dissenting from the war aims of the British imperial forces. The British House of Lords itself proclaimed one aspect of this drive in its 2018 report, “British Foreign Policy In a Shifting World Order,” by openly declaring control of social media essential to defeating Donald Trump and managing the dissenting population that elected Trump in the United States, which widespread dissent also exists worldwide as a source of resistance to deadly imperial plans. It also encompasses a new and dangerous cyberwarfare doctrine embraced and escalated by the Congress and the “Five Eyes” intelligence community, using the fake Russiagate information-warfare operation as a pretext.

Those cyberwarfare doctrines are the subject of this article and were put on the public’s plate by the June 15 New York Times article that claims the U.S. Cyber Command has placed crippling malware into the Russian power grid controls, without explicit Presidential approval.

In fact, the Times article states, the President was not briefed explicitly because he might reverse these actions or tell the Russians about them. Can this moment wake us up, like the Pearl Harbor moment Lyndon LaRouche described? Well, it needs to—and this can only happen if the American public mobilizes against its real enemy, the imperial entity that controls the world’s money and finances and controls populations through psychological warfare and by shaping and controlling public opinion. It can if the American population mobilizes to cause the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche and thereby liberates the treasure trove of policies and ideas, which this President can wield to finally defeat our nation’s historical enemy.

For those who don’t know by now, the imperial opponents of LaRouche sought to eliminate his ideas through demonization and a monstrously illegal criminal prosecution, akin in its mechanisms to the atrocity they have now attempted to stage against Donald Trump and his supporters. Now, we finally have a President who will fight these ghouls, as he has repeatedly demonstrated. If you add LaRouche’s ideas and policies to the President’s intelligence and guts, victory can, finally, be ours.

Cyber Command Offensive Against Russia

The gravamen of the June 15 New York Times article is that the U.S. Cyber Command—under the command of General Paul Nakasone, who also serves as the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Chief of the Central Security Service—has undertaken offensive cyberwarfare activities on a scale not seen before that now includes the planting of disabling malware in the Russian power grid controls and other Russian systems. According to Nakasone’s bellicose and stupid Congressional testimony, the Russians “do not fear us” and that needs to change.

The rationale the Times and other outlets covering this classified leak offer for the offensive cyber actions is confused. It variously claims that this is punishment of the Russians for the cyberattacks falsely attributed to Russia in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and was done as a warning not to repeat such activities in the 2018 midterm elections, or that it is offensive preparation of the battlefield for a future war. The Times recounts a slew of alleged Russian cyber intrusions into the U.S. power system, infrastructure, and nuclear plants in addition to the alleged election meddling. The Times claims that President Trump was not briefed “in detail” about offensive cyber actions against the Russians—which most would consider a retaliatory act of war. The Times goes on to cite the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 and National Security Presidential Memorandum 13, a classified document, which followed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as the authorization permitting the cyber commander, General Nakasone, or the Secretary of Defense, to order offensive cyber actions without Presidential approval. In response, President Trump tweeted that the Times story was an act of treason and, also, that it was not true.

There are several key dates in the run-up to the events claimed in the New York Times story.

Obama’s Offensive Cyber-Ops

First, it should be noted that offensive cyber operations were conducted by the Obama Administration in an escalating fashion beginning in 2012. According to reliable sources in the intelligence community, cyber-surveillance inside a potential adversary’s essential infrastructure systems has been a common practice of major states, including the United States, Russia, China and Israel, for some years. Nonetheless, offensive cyberwarfare operations were rare.

That changed with the British Russiagate operation conducted in 2016 against the United States. Allegedly as punishment for the Russian hack—which never happened—of the DNC and John Podesta, Barack Obama placed malicious code into the Russian power grid controls to be activated by President Trump or a future U.S. President. That “sanction” was included in the package of Russiagate sanctions that saw the expulsion of many Russian diplomats from the United States by Obama. Despite the hysteria in the press and the Congress generated by Russiagate, President Trump refused to escalate cyberwar against the Russians. In the legislative run-up to the 2019 NDAA, the Conference Committee putting the legislation into final form criticized the Administration’s “stalling” tactics. The Senate and House conferees said that the President refused to take Russian’s malign meddling the in the 2016 election seriously and had not complied with Congressional demands for detailed plans for both cyber security and retaliatory actions. According to the Congress, President Trump provided nothing but a vague summary of possible future plans and 60 pages of recommendations for further study.

On May 24, 2018, British Attorney General Jeremy Wright QC (Queens Counsel), Member of Parliament (MP), publicly announced the United Kingdom’s position on applying international law to cyberspace. To make a long story short, the official British position is that British offensive cyberwarfare need not follow international law. In response to a cyberattack and in consideration of “countermeasures,” the British say they are not required, as they would be under international law, to give the attacking state notice before taking countermeasures against it.

They also state that a cyber response need not be “symmetrical” to the underlying unlawful act. This is consistent with the incorporation of British policies in the 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, arguing that nuclear weapons could be deployed in the wake of a devastating cyberattack on fundamental infrastructure. To make the British direction of U.S. policy absolutely clear, consider the fact that British intelligence and cyber operatives perennially occupied an entire floor of the NSA, right below the Director’s offices. It should also be noted that under the British “laws” of cyberwar, the placing of malicious malware in a potential adversary’s vital infrastructure systems is not an act of war unless it is activated.

National Defense Authorization Act

The NDAA for 2019 began its journey through the Congress with a House vote in April 2018 amidst the full hysteria surrounding Russiagate. It is called, appropriately, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act of 2019, after the bellicose Arizona Senator who hated Donald Trump and never saw an opportunity for war he wasn’t prepared to inflame. Thereafter, the U.S. Senate steered the bill toward the use of offensive cyberwar, while specifically targeting Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE for economic warfare. Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas, who has examined the cyberwarfare provisions Congress put into the NDAA, says that while Congress can’t make the President satisfy their lust for offensive cyberwar, Section 1642 of the NDAA amounts to an authorization of “proportional” cyberwar by the Defense Department in response to Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian cyber activities. Let that sink in, Congress is granting a war power to the Defense Department, to circumvent non-action by a President.

Critical to Congress’s cutting the President out of the cyber war approval chain was the NDAA’s recasting of most aspects of cyberwar as “traditional military activity,” rather than covert action, which requires a Presidential finding. Traditional military activities do not require any form of notification of the President and include, according to Congress, “forward preparation of the adversary’s battle space” and placing malware, which has not been activated.

Additionally, the Secretary of Defense was added to the “command authority” explicitly reserved for the President in ordering active and destructive modes of cyberwarfare after hostilities commence. According to an August 15, 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal, John Bolton, a hod carrier for British warfare policies throughout his long career, campaigned from the beginning of his term as National Security Advisor, in April of 2018, for a streamlined command authority for cyberwarfare, eliminating the “cumbersome” approval process under Obama.

Now flash forward to July 16, 2018 as President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki. On the Friday before, July 13, Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 12 Russians for the DNC hack that never happened, in a clear attempt to poison the prospects for the summit. Nonetheless, the two Presidents emerged to declare to the world that they wished to establish working groups to discuss de-escalating cyberwar, an urgent necessity for humanity based on all that I have just told you about.

President Trump also said that he accepted President Putin’s strong denial that the Russians had hacked the DNC, and both discussed a plan whereby U.S. prosecutors could interview the 12 Russians indicted by Mueller, and the Russians could interview Anglo-American assets Michael McFaul and Bill Browder, who have led the charge for regime change in Russia. The international news media, the Anglo-American intelligence apparat, and virtually the entirety of the U.S. Congress went absolutely ballistic after the press conference, declaring that Putin had eaten Trump’s brain and that the President was clearly demonstrating that he was nothing but a stupefied pawn of the Russian president. The President signed the NDAA into law on August 13, 2018, waiting to fight another day.

That day has now come. Attorney General William Barr is promising to expose all of the elements of the coup that was run against this President, including its British imperial components. The President has, once again, told the war party “No!”—because humanity is something alien to them. And, now, it is very much a battle that can be won, provided the American people approach it with openness, intelligence, and creativity, and with the steely and solemn determination to learn and to win, which Lyndon LaRouche witnessed on December 7, 1941.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 46, Number 25, June 28, 2019

Cover This Week

Tasnim/Meghdad Madadi

The remnants of an RQ-4A unmanned U.S. drone shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile are displayed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace Force, June 21, 2019

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10 MINUTES FROM WORLD WAR III

2 EDITORIAL

From Cyberwar to Nuclear War?

by Barbara Boyd

I. LAROUCHE’S CONCEPTS FOR A NEW PARADIGM

6 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

The Exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche Is Crucial to Stop the British Empire’s Drive for World War III

14 Mobilization to Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche Strikes the War Party

by Paul Gallagher

II. MARIJUANA—A BRITISH WEAPON

16 THE PAST IS PROLOGUE!

Marijuana Legalization:The Murder of Our Youth

by Denise Bouchard Ham

23 Medical Marijuana Is a Fraud

by Ned Rosinsky, MD

III. THE NEW SILK ROAD

27 African High-Speed Rail Finance Requires LaRouche Four-Power Pact

by David Cherry and Ramasimong Tsokolibane

36 CALIFORNIA BELT & ROAD FORUM

An Historic Opportunity for the USA

by Daniel Platt and Helga Zepp-LaRouche

39 Leading Italian Senator Heads International Delegation to Chinese Exposition

by Claudio Celani

IV. LAROUCHE’S METHOD OF FORECASTING

41 SCIENCE VS. STATISTICS

When Fate Hangs on a Forecast

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

First published by EIR September 7, 2007

50 EDITORIAL

He Questions the Premise of Russiagate? Off With His Head!

by Barbara Boyd

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. LaRouche’s Concepts for a New Paradigm

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

The Exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche Is Crucial To Stop the British Empire’s Drive for World War III

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s June 21, 2019 interview with the founder of the Schiller Institutes, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello! I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute, and I’d like to welcome you to this week’s webcast. It’s June 21, 2019. We’ll be speaking with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute and its chairwoman.

This is an incredible moment in history. We’re a week away from the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, where there’s a potential for an historic turning point around the idea that Lyndon LaRouche had put forward almost two decades ago, a Four-Power Agreement to establish a new financial system, a New Bretton Woods. At the same time, there’s an incredible war mobilization coming from the war party, defending the bankrupt system.

Mobilization to Exonerate LaRouche

But I think to start this, we really have to address this question of LaRouche’s exoneration and the initiative that was taken by LaRouche PAC and the Schiller Institute with the release of two new videos. The first is called, “The LaRouche Case: Robert Mueller’s First Hit Job,” and the second is of the memorial event that took place in New York City two weeks ago, titled “In Memoriam: The Triumph of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.”

So, Helga, why don’t you give us a sense of the mobilization that is underway around your husband’s exoneration, and the importance of these two videos released today.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Well, it may not be obvious to many people, but I am convinced that if Lyndon LaRouche is not exonerated, we will not be able to stop the present drumbeat to World War III. His exoneration and neutralizing the war machine, which is driving the world toward World War III, is one and the same thing. The apparatus that prosecuted my husband, despite the fact that he was completely innocent of all accusations, is the war party, which is now driving the world to the verge of extinction.

We launched an international operation today, simultaneously in many countries around the globe, with the release of the documentary, “The LaRouche Case.” I urge all viewers, all of you who are watching this program, to go to https://action.larouchepac.com/exonerate, download the video, and watch it; send the link to every possible contact you have—email lists, social media, everyone you know—and help us distribute this feature-length documentary internationally. This video demonstrates the absolute unprecedented violation of justice in the case against Lyndon LaRouche. The documentary includes the authoritative voices of Lyndon LaRouche’s defense counsel, Odin Anderson, and former Attorney General of the United States, Ramsey Clark providing, in depth, the reasons why the LaRouche case is the most incredible case of the warping and destruction of U.S. justice in the history of the United States.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

LPAC-TV

Four scenes from the Schiller Institute’s video documentary, “The LaRouche Case.” Testifying before hearings in Tysons Corner, Virginia on July 31, 1995 to investigate misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice are Lyndon LaRouche (both above),LaRouche’s lead attorney Odin Anderson (below left), and former U.S. Attorney General and LaRouche’s attorney on appeal, Ramsey Clark (below right).

LPAC-TV

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Now, our aim is to get both videos distributed everywhere and get them acted on—that action being the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche. The reason this is so absolutely important is, in my best judgment and that of my colleagues, the only way to stop World War III. The reason is very simple. The apparatus which prosecuted my husband in the 1980s, which has continued its operations into this century, is the same machi ne that is now the driving force for confrontation against Russia and China.

Drumbeat for War

This is clearly absolutely urgent. Look at how close we are to what could become World War III. The fact that, according to President Trump’s tweet [of June 21], the order to attack Iran after the shooting down of a U.S. drone was already given; and only ten minutes before the attack, which had three sites in Iran as targets, Trump called the attack off. According to the President’s tweet, he asked the relevant military commanders how many casualties such an attack on Iran would cause, and they said around 150. Then he said, “This is out of proportion,” and he called off the strike. Now this is an incredible story, because if this would have happened, we may have been on the way to World War III, and that is not an exaggeration.

The drumbeat for war was absolutely unbelievable. Just take a couple of steps back. You had the New York Times article saying that the U.S. security forces, the Pentagon, had escalated cyber-attacks against Russia behind the back of Trump, which Trump called treason. Then you had the story that supposedly the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were behind the attack on the two oil tankers in Gulf of Oman. This is, in all likelihood, another one of these fake news, false-flag operations. And it points to the fact that you have, in the United States right now, a dual power situation.

kremlin.ru

John Bolton, Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs.

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As we will discuss more, this is one week before the G20 meeting, where if this blows up, the last chance to have peace may be lost. Yet, there is the potential of Trump meeting Putin and Xi Jinping, and finding a solution to the many problems of this world.

So, we are in a countdown. But as I said, the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is absolutely crucial. The only way to disarm and neutralize the war party in the United States is to make the LaRouche case the most prominent issue right now. That case points to the coherence between the war party today, the apparatus that is responsible for the cover-up of 9/11, and for creating Russiagate as part of an attempted coup against President Trump. People have to understand that connection.

‘The LaRouche Case’ Video

Schlanger: The video of the LaRouche case is available on the Schiller Institute’s website, and also on the LaRouche PAC’s website. From watching this video, Helga, and talking to people about it, what becomes clear is that even though the hearings are more than two decades old, the topics are the same as what’s occurring today. It’s astounding, wouldn’t you say?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think that the tribunal that took place in 1995—in which a number of prominent people from all over the world, and American legislators, reviewed the case and heard the testimony of Odin Anderson and Ramsey Clark—makes absolutely clear that that case of my husband has to be remedied.

I urge people to watch the video of the LaRouche case together with the three-hour video of the incredibly beautiful and moving memorial for him, because you have to see the two things together. The prosecution and vilification of my husband is in complete contrast to his real life and works which you get a glimpse of in the memorial, which combines musical tributes and other narration with key presentations by LaRouche himself. That really is the message which has to be gotten out to the world. As I said in the tribunal, the crime against Lyndon LaRouche was not just that he, an innocent man, was put in jail; but that what was also put in jail, so to speak, was the entire body of his ideas and solutions to the world’s crises, and those ideas and solutions are more urgently necessary, now, today. So again, I am asking you, please take the time; watch these two videos. Then help us to distribute them worldwide, in any channel you possibly can, because this is the key to solving the war danger. So, that is my urgent appeal to all of you.

Ten Minutes from World War III?

Schlanger: Now, as you said, we could have been at World War III as of last night. While that was avoided, the push for confrontation continues from the war party. Do you see any change in that as a result of the decision by the President to pull back?

Zepp-LaRouche: We will have to see. I think this is a very incredible demonstration that, indeed, we have a dual power situation in the United States. That has become a topic of public discussion. Let us review this again, especially because our international viewers may not be as alert to the fact that the New York Times article bragging about the story that National Security Advisor John Bolton is reported to have told a seminar of the Wall Street Journal, a couple of days ago, that the U.S. security forces, intelligence services, and Pentagon had escalated an already existing cyber warfare ordered originally by Obama, targetting Russia. Now, this allegation is not a small affair. A nation’s electricity grid supplies power for hospitals, for the military command and control, and for crucial services including water supplies, and, therefore an attack on a nation’s electricity grid would have to be regarded as an act of war.

Trump tweeted immediately, saying the Times story was “a virtual act of treason.” He also said the story leaked in this way was “fake news.”

Prof. Stephen F. Cohen, a very well-known Russia analyst in the United States, pointed to the fact that in all likelihood the New York Times leaked that story in order to ruin the potential of a summit between Trump and Putin at the upcoming G20 summit, as the media have done before on many occasions. Every time there was a potential for a solution, they would leak something or do some outrageous act, to sabotage such a summit.

So, obviously this begs the question, if the President is not informed, who does run the United States? That’s a question which is being asked by many people around the world, who noticed that Trump is one thing—as demonstrated by him calling off this attack against Iran—but such members of his Cabinet as Bolton, Pompeo, and others are clearly something different. So it is not clear who gives the orders.

The same thing seems to have happened in the case of Iran—which is a rather unbelievable story: The Iranians were supposedly responsible for the attack on the two oil tankers—for which there is no proof; several governments, including the German and Japanese governments, have demanded evidence, because the video Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued is clearly no evidence.

Then, yesterday, the Iranians shot down a U.S. military drone. The U.S. said this drone was over international waters, but the Iranians have now released a video showing not only the drone, but a U.S. aircraft taking off from the United Arab Emirates, flying over the Gulf of Oman, returning, and then overflying not only international airspace, but Iranian territory. According to the Iranian military commanders, they sent several warnings that these two U.S. vehicles—the drone and the aircraft—had entered Iranian airspace, without getting any response. The Iranians then shot down the drone as a warning to the United States, but purposefully did not shoot down the aircraft.

Who does not wake up and know that we are on the verge of World War III?—such a person is not in the real world. We are closer to World War III I would say than at any time since the end of World War II. That danger is not yet gone. I think it’s a very good thing that Trump intervened in the last moments, but it was just 10 minutes before the attack! People should really realize that this is not a joke.

Again, the only way to answer that in the short-term is to keep up the drumbeat for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche. If you want to stop World War III, then help us to get the exoneration of LaRouche on the agenda internationally, but especially with respect to President Trump, who has a very good reason for doing it, because it would aim at the same forces behind Russiagate and who are giving him a hard time to carry out his intentions in respect of improving relations with Russia and China.

Joint Chiefs’ ‘Nuclear Operations’ Report

Schlanger: Helga, with the corruption of the media in the United States, not covering these things in any way in detail, or even in reality, the Russians seem to be more blunt than ever, in warning of the war danger. What can you say about that, that can help to wake people up to realize how close we are to a catastrophe?

Zepp-LaRouche: President Putin has warned that a U.S. attack on Iran would have catastrophic consequences. In an interview with Mir news agency immediately after the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he said that relations between the United States and Russia “are getting worse and worse” by the hour. I think that is a fair description. On June 11, the Joint Chiefs of Staff published for the first time in several years their nuclear strategy. Let me read to you a quote which makes is absolutely clear. This is a review of the nuclear strategy, the planning, targetting, command and control, which includes the idea of use of nuclear weapons in any confrontation. The quote I want to read to you is this:

Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.

—Joint Publication 3-72,

Nuclear Operations, page III-3

This is incredible! It is the idea you can use a nuclear weapon, in spite of that fact that many experts like MIT Professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and Internal Security Theodore Postol have written long and very convincing articles that it is the nature of nuclear weapons that once you use one nuclear weapon, it’s the logic of that kind of weapons system that all of them will be used. That would, in all likelihood, mean the extinction of civilization.

CC/Romy Marquez

Craig Murray, UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan (2002-2004).

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This report was reposted by the Federation of American Scientists, which wanted to point out the fact of this doctrine. I think that all has to be seen together, and it underlines the absolute necessity to neutralize the war party—which includes emphatically the British, about whom Craig Murray, the former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, said that for the UK political system, government, and media, the difference between fact and fiction has completely vanished; and this should be of grave concern to everybody, because the British role in instigating all of this is absolutely crucial.

G20: Potential for a New Paradigm

Now all this absolutely demonstrates that we have to change the paradigm, that the war party must be stopped, that Trump must be enabled to carry out his intentions to improve relations with Russia and China, which he has stated many times. That is really what I am asking you, the viewers, to help us to communicate: Because I think the danger right now is like it was in 1914. Without an in-depth mobilization of the people around the globe, but especially in the West, in Europe and the United States, we are in great danger of sleepwalking into a new war, exactly as it happened in 1914. So, join our mobilization to stop exactly that.

Schlanger: Going back to the question of Lyndon LaRouche’s exoneration, it was precisely under similar circumstances in the late 1970s under the Carter Administration, with lunatics like Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and others pushing for war, that Lyndon LaRouche intervened with the SDI and the deployment against him came as a result of Ronald Reagan adopting his policy. I think that’s another parallel that would be quite striking to people to understand why the attack today on Trump is parallel to what was done to Lyndon LaRouche in the 1980s.

Zepp-LaRouche: At this late stage of the strategic game, so to speak, the only way to get out of this situation would indeed be to have the kind of cooperation between not only the United States and Russia—between the United States and the Soviet Union as my husband had proposed it at the time—but to emphatically also include China and India. Because the argument he made was that you need the four most powerful countries in the world to end this British system of imperial control of the world. This is extremely important.

It would mean that hopefully at the G20 meeting, a summit does occur which is right now planned; but be on your toes, because the week before the G20 summit we have to expect efforts to destabilize that potential up to the last minute, as we have seen it now with this called-off attack against Iran.

Hopefully, it will come to a summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping, and they will not only end the trade war, but come up with a comprehensive agreement. There should also hopefully be a summit between Trump and Putin. And if everything goes really well, there could be a summit among the four leaders. Remember that following the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan a couple of days later, the three leaders—Putin, Xi Jinping, and Modi, already having met in Bishkek, said they would meet again in Osaka, Japan at the G20 meeting.

So the best thing that could happen, would be that they would invite President Trump to join that summit, and that Trump would accept the invitation—to address the really pressing issue of the pending financial blow-out of the system and to go for a New Bretton Woods credit system, for the industrialization of the developing countries, and, with this New Paradigm in international relations, end the debt system of the casino economy we now have.

I think we must discuss the New Paradigm a little bit more, but the nations of the world need to have a completely different kind of thinking in their approach to strategic questions; because if they remain in the area of geopolitics, in the idea that Europe has to become a strong, unified bastion against other strong powers—the United States, Russia, China—and if the United States thinks it has to contain China and the rise of China—if we stay in that kind of thinking, it is only a question of time until the whole strategic situation will go completely haywire and out of control.

So, mobilize with us to put the Four-Power Agreement on the G20 agenda, because this may be the last chance for this to be done. It’s very clear both strategically, militarily, but also concerning the financial situation, that we are all sitting on a giant powder keg. Therefore, we need an urgent change in the entire approach.

Should U.S. Hit Iran for Downing Its Drone?

Schlanger: I want to get back to the financial situation in just a moment. But in this possibility of a new discussion—especially if it comes from the American people, demanding some response to the danger of war—apparently there were some discussions in the Senate, where people like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, the usual war party supporters, were arguing that the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) is still valid, and under it, attacks could be launched. But there was some push-back against that. Do you know much about that discussion, Helga, and do you think there is a possibility of some change in the overall debate in the country?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. In a June 19 House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on Iran Policy, Brian Hook, the State Department’s Special Representative for Iran, basically let it be known that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at a previous, not public meeting, had argued that this military authorization act, which was passed in reaction to the attacks of 9/11, would still be valid, and enables the President to order acts of war without going to the Congress for authorization.

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Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA).

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Now, there was a very interesting debate on Fox News TV which included the Democrat, Congressman John Garamendi from California, who strongly argued against such an interpretation of the AUMF, saying that it is absolutely not the case; that the President has to go to the Congress for approval of acts of war. Especially because this 2001-era AUMF only refers to a military reaction in defense; but in the case of this present conflict with Iran, Garamendi said, “We’re clearly in a situation where it could be a war. Any kinetic action against Iran would be an act of war. Now, they may have started it, but now you’re in that situation. And that does require congressional involvement in that process.”

This is extremely important, because before this whole incident, there was, indeed, a complete hype. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, speaking about Iran’s “threat to start enriching . . . to weapons-grade,” Trump should “put Iran’s oil refineries on a target list and look at sinking the Iranian Navy if they attack shipping again.” If we don’t do that, North Korea will attack, he said.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

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Clearly, an atmosphere of complete hysteria is being created. Therefore, I think it was quite interesting that President Trump met with the entire Congressional leadership and the military two days ago, and then afterwards Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and so on, who told Trump they were worried about an accidental war breaking out.

A New Way of Thinking is Possible

So, I think that this all makes very clear, that if this incident didn’t go wrong, there is the danger that another incident will be created, another false-flag operation will be launched, as long as what we call the British Empire continues to exist—the apparatus of the imperial system of the City of London, of Wall Street, and the private security forces enforcing the policies of that monetarist system.

This British Empire apparatus must therefore be stopped and replaced by a credit system in the tradition of the American System, and a completely new set of international relations is established as the countries of the Belt and Road Initiative have already done. The United States must absolutely join this New Paradigm. If we don’t accomplish that, it’s only a question of time until another incident will be created. And then maybe the conditions will be a little bit less favorable, and war will not be called off ten minutes before it’s launched.

So, please help us to get this idea on the table, that a completely new way of thinking is possible, a new era of mankind’s history is possible, where all the countries work together for the common aims of mankind. That should happen fairly soon. The first step must be that President Trump joins with these other major forces to establish a New Bretton Woods system, preferably at the G20, because time really is running out.

Schlanger: Also, occurring in this same timeframe, is the exposure of the British Empire’s role in Russiagate, in launching the coup against President Trump, and its role in attacking your husband in the 1980s and putting him in prison. That apparatus was not stopped, then, when it could have been. And this time it’s not just attacking President Trump and the voters who elected him, but it is pushing the world toward war.

Financial System Breaking Down

Now, with the breakdown of the financial system, this does put front and center the Four-Power Agreement for a New Bretton Woods. Please give us your thoughts on the reports that have come out in the last couple of days on Deutsche Bank creating a so-called “bad bank” to offload euro 50 billion in derivatives obligations.

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Deutsche Bank’s twin towers headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.

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Zepp-LaRouche: That “bad bank” of euro 50 billion is really a form of hiding bankruptcy; it’s nothing else than that. Deutsche Bank has euro 40 trillion in outstanding derivatives, many of them really Level 3 assets, which means they are basically worthless. This is 16 times the GDP of the German Federal budget! Economist Marc Friedrich pointed to the fact that now the stocks of Deutsche Bank are at EU6; if they go to EU5, in all likelihood the German government would take over and nationalize Deutsche Bank. But he also correctly noted that if Deutsche Bank crashed, it would make the collapse and bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, then the largest bankruptcy in history, look like peanuts, because of the size and entanglement of the derivative apparatus of Deutsche Bank.

This is an urgent issue, and it is known and a matter of concern to China and also Russia. I thought the speech which President Vladimir Putin gave at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was quite remarkable in this respect, because he warned of a global financial breakdown by pointing to the fact that the powers that be in the West have done absolutely nothing to address the causes of the crash of 2008. The quantitative easing has just postponed the crash into the future; and that a complete change and a new system are really required, going in the direction of the Chinese model, and so forth.

Putin said something else which I think is quite noteworthy. He said there are all these children and teenagers now who are so concerned about climate protection; they should be a little bit more concerned that we have a complete danger of global catastrophe in the form of nuclear war.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin being interviewed by Radik Batyrshin, President and Editor-in-chief of the Mir Interstate Television and Radio Company on June 13, 2019 in the Kremlin, Moscow, Russia.

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I think that is a message I want to reiterate, because of all the hype about climate change. It needs more discussion, and we should take it up in another program. Right now, I think, we need an urgent mobilization to address the causes of the war danger, which is the pending financial collapse, and the urgent need to replace it with a new financial system, a credit system, basically putting the present monetary system in the circular file. And that has to be discussed at the G20. All the leaders, including the Europeans, will be measured by history according to whether they had the moral responsibility and the intellectual capacity to address this most pressing issue of the danger of a financial collapse and the danger of World War III, by changing course entirely at the G20 meeting.

I can only reiterate that the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is the absolutely important step to accomplish both of these things.

Watch and Circulate the Two Videos!

Schlanger: Helga, just to conclude, I think it’s worth reiterating that the work of Lyndon LaRouche, as presented in these two videos—his concern with the future of humanity, and his prophetic insights—will shock people. Someone I spoke to this afternoon who had just seen the preview, the trailer, told me that he can see now why the British were so afraid of LaRouche. He said that it’s clear that everything that we’re seeing today in the attack against Trump, was already done against LaRouche: “How can we get people to recognize that?” I replied, “Well, get this video around. Get people to see it.”

So, Helga, I’ll say it just one more time: I think the idea of an all-ahead, full international mobilization is crucial: everyone getting this out at the same time as widely as possible. Be as bold and courageous as you can in challenging others to think through what it is that the exoneration of LaRouche would mean for the world today. Any final words from you on this, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: People may remember the words of Martin Niemöller, who once said, first they come for your neighbors, then they come for the Gypsies, then they come for the Jews. Well, one can only add, “They already came for Lyndon LaRouche; they came for the U.S. President; and you better help us now to change this entire dynamic.”

So, please get these videos around, and study them. Many people have been afraid to go out with the idea that LaRouche represented powerful concepts to solve the world’s crises. The entire prosecution was done with only one purpose: To poison the well, to get people afraid. But right now, overcoming that fear of joining forces with Lyndon LaRouche and the movement he created, is what makes the difference between war and peace. So, join our mobilization.

Schlanger: And again, you can find a link to the videos we’ve been discussing on the Schiller Institute website. Take advantage of that immediately.

Helga, thanks for joining us today, and we’ll see you next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, ’til next week.

Mobilization to Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche Strikes the War Party

by Paul Gallagher

EIRNS/Ema Reuter

Exonerate LaRouche street organizing in Boston on June 21, 2019.

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June 23—Amid a clearly growing danger of another Southwest Asia war or even global war, Lyndon LaRouche’s movement on June 21 released two videos whose mass circulation is aimed at striking down the war party in an admittedly difficult, but yet the only potent, and clear path available to American citizens: exonerating Lyndon LaRouche.

An embattled President Trump is clearly blocking the start of wars pushed by British intelligence and the war party in his own administration and the Congress (see Barbara Boyd’s article, “From Cyberwar to Nuclear War?” in this issue). And he is the person in a position to reopen the case of the gross misconduct in the 1980s prosecutions of LaRouche, who became the British war party’s strongest adversary during his 70 years’ political life. In the struggle over war or peaceful negotiation, nothing would tip the balance in President Trump’s favor as forcefully as initiating the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.

Thus on June 21, the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LaRouche PAC) began a mass release—including to Members of Congress and to diplomats at the United Nations—of a video record of the 1995 hearings on Justice Department misconduct in prosecuting Lyndon LaRouche, and a video on his life as commemorated in New York City by the Schiller Institute on June 8, with a petition for his exoneration. The hearings were held by a commission headed by the late Congressman James Mann of South Carolina and including civil rights veterans such as Attorney J.L. Chestnut of Alabama. It heard former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark call the prosecutorial misconduct and combined government and media assault to persecute LaRouche, the worst he had seen or learned of in his long legal career. Because the prosecutions of LaRouche were begun in Boston in 1984 under then United States Attorney Robert Mueller—lately special prosecutor against Trump—that video is entitled, “The LaRouche Case: Robert Mueller’s First Hit Job.”

The links to these videos that would go live at 9:00 a.m. June 21, had been sent to tens of thousands of people who were contacts of the organizations and their individual leaders. Many of these quickly passed them on to their own e-mail contact lists or put them on social media groups. Leaflets were circulated that morning in several large metropolitan areas including New York City, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and West Coast cities from Los Angeles to Seattle. Leaflets were delivered to Trump Tower in New York by a LaRouche PAC supporter. Urging a meeting of activists in New York on June 22 to keep expanding the distribution, LaRouche PAC leader Diane Sare warned, “We really face a very grave danger” of war.

By the end of the weekend, 7,000 people across the United States had watched the exoneration video. One radio interview on X22 Report radio with Harley Schlanger, Lyndon LaRouche’s former national spokesman, generated 33,000 hits within 24 hours; another podcast by Virginia organizer Tim Rush generated 1,000 hits, and the first re-postings were seen on websites internationally. Large numbers of activists spoke up on radio programs and Internet broadcasts, reaching various political and social groupings, with the message: LaRouche must be exonerated to shock the war party and free the hands of President Trump.

In the situation of effective “dual power” between Trump and the British-inspired war party, one e-mailed response typifies large numbers of others: “Very interesting, and very similar to what is happening today to President Trump; leopards never change their spots, history repeating itself. Thanks.” The every-increasing mobilization has the power to change that sordid historical pattern and change history.

Another common response: “Whatever Lyndon LaRouche did or said scared the ‘powers that be’ to death.”

Strikingly, in Italy just two organizers in Milan reached 7,000 people with links to the videos, and a large number were Senators, Deputies, or regional elected officials, as well as artists, musicians and other cultural leaders. LaRouche’s life’s work and policies are widely known in Italy, where he has spoken to Senate Committees and to many other events with leading figures. Its current government is also enjoying good and active relationships with the Trump Administration.

In the United States, this is the first political mobilization in which the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LaRouche PAC) and Schiller Institute are effectively using social media in a planned and measured way to get a synchronized mass effect where the postings of large numbers of LaRouche activists are coordinated. This is fortunate, because it is the most critical of mobilizations for the movement and for the country and its presidency. LaRouche PAC’s Facebook page, for example, reached thousands more Americans, and individual LaRouche activists around the country posted the video links to scores of additional social media groups involving hundreds of thousands of individuals.

At the same time, LaRouche movement organizers found a heightened response when selling literature and raising money at street tables around the country. On the June 21 kickoff day, four activists in Michigan raised more than $1,200 to expand this mobilization by telling Michiganders that Robert Mueller and the British first went after Lyndon LaRouche, and now President Trump, and that is why LaRouche’s movement could immediately expose “Russiagate” for the foreign conspiracy it was. LaRouche, they said, had led the fight for 50 years against what the President calls the globalists, but LaRouche knew it was the British Empire.

Following the opening drives, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche asked for an acceleration of the mobilization and particular focus on winning leading figures in the United States to the exoneration call, as well as conducting interviews for publication with those such figures who had already signed the exoneration petition. As an example of what she meant, in the Rhode Island State House of Delegates, which had adopted a resolution honoring Lyndon LaRouche’s accomplishment upon his death, a single legislator began an e-mailing of the video links to “2,000 contacts.” State representatives and state senators in five of the six New England states had the video e-mails by Monday, June 24.

“It may not be obvious for many people,” Zepp-LaRouche had said, “but if Lyndon LaRouche is not exonerated, I do not think that we can stop the present drumbeat to World War III. Because his exoneration, and neutralizing the war machine which is driving the world towards World War III, that’s one and the same thing. Because it was that apparatus that prosecuted my husband, despite the fact that he was completely innocent of all accusations, which is exactly the war party driving the world to the verge of extinction.”

In this very dangerous situation, she noted, “The world is looking to us to have some courage.”

II. Marijuana—A British Weapon

THE PAST IS PROLOGUE!

Marijuana Legalization:

The Murder of Our Youth

by Denise Bouchard Ham

June 22—In a few short weeks, on July 20, we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Most in the baby boomer generation will vividly recall where they were on that date, and probably will think of it as one of the most important anniversaries in the history of this nation. President Trump, in that spirit of exploration and science, last month signed a space policy directive, reminiscent of the Kennedy era, directing NASA to return U.S. astronauts to the Moon by 2024. That is only five years away. The first question on many lips was, “Do we have what it takes to do this? Is our present culture one that can support extended space exploration and colonization?” Sadly, the answer is not what one would have hoped.

Our nation is dying of drug abuse. The ones with the most to lose are currently in grades one through twelve. This is the age-group that should become the first space-faring generation. They are all now at risk. This means that every adult who truly loves children—whether his or her own, or those of close relatives, or with the profound agapic love of all humanity—will engage in a fight against Britain’s Dope Lobby today. Immediately, we must move to rescind the legalization of marijuana in the ten sorry states (and the District of Columbia) that opted for it, on the mistaken idea that somehow marijuana is a medicine, and should be legalized.

In January 2019, Simon & Schuster published a very informative and useful book by Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. Everyone should read this book. If you are confident that you “know all I need to know about marijuana,” you are dangerously mistaken. The material in this meticulously researched book is shocking. This book will give you needed ammunition to destroy all the arguments that say marijuana is a harmless drug. Coupled with Berenson’s 2019 book, you will also need to read, or re-read, Executive Intelligence Review’s blockbuster, Dope, Inc.—Britain’s Opium War Against the World, which rips the facade from the oligarchy that controls the world’s drug trade.

You cannot run a nation when people are high on dope, or for that matter any substance that hinders clear and creative thinking. In the past, China, India and Egypt were all used by their imperial master—the British Empire—as petri dishes for the deployment of opium, hashish and marijuana as means of social control. These nations were massively hampered in their struggles for independence as the result of these British mass druggings. Exactly the same thing is being done to America today, only this time it is the result of our own foolishness, especially the left-liberal and libertarian outlooks so common today. Freedom is not the right to do what you feel like doing. Freedom is doing what is necessary for the good of all the people, not just a few.

Berenson’s Case Studies

Tell Your Children presents numerous case studies. I offer here only a few:

• December 19, 2014—Raina Thaiday, a 37-year-old mother in Cairns, Australia, stabbed to death seven of her children and a niece who happened to be present at the time. The psychiatrists who testified before Judge (Jean) Dalton “agreed she was psychotic when she killed her children. She stabbed herself and then waited outside her house, talking to herself and God, until her son, Lewis, found her.” In her report to the Court, Judge Dalton wrote: “Thaiday had a history of the use of cannabis since she was in Grade 9. . . . All the psychiatrists thought that it is likely that it is this long-term use of cannabis that caused her mental illness, schizophrenia, to emerge.” (In the introduction, pp. vii to xiv)

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A new generation of commercialized THC products from Colorado.

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• June 10, 2018—Kyle Tucker, a 34-year-old Harvard Law graduate, allegedly killed his mother with a baseball bat because he thought she tried to poison him, repeatedly; so, he burned her body in a backyard fire pit. He told police that God “got into my body and walked me downstairs with a baseball bat and it was very quick and almost even hard to remember.” In the month preceding this act, he told people he wanted the President to appoint him ambassador to Jamaica, so he could help local marijuana farmers. He was also obsessed with Bob Marley and singer Lana Del Rey, and he wrote, “If Lana keeps disrespecting me, I’m gonna burn that bitch with a slow bonfire on live television as I smoke weed and laugh in her inferior face.” (p. 183)

• August 2018—Blair Ness of Lewisville, Texas, allegedly “threw his one-year-old son, Ashton, down a concrete courtyard, then stabbed the boy to death as horrified neighbors tried to stop him. Neighbors told police Ness was yelling about Jesus; officers found his apartment reeking with marijuana.” (p. 206)

These are only three examples. Berenson supplies many more; other gruesome murders are described, with people going psychotic and throwing chopped up body parts in the toilet, and men making necklaces with the teeth of their victims. Also, it is believed that marijuana users with a family history of schizophrenia (a very serious mental disease), are more likely to become schizophrenic, and often at a very early age. There now exists a condition identified as marijuana psychosis. Young boys and girls are showing up in hospital emergency rooms, looking and acting very much like schizophrenics.

Today’s marijuana is an extremely potent drug. Back 50 years ago, in 1969, the average THC level in marijuana was only 0.5% to 2%. THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) is the poison that gives marijuana users their “high.” Today, however, THC levels are at least ten times more potent, typically anywhere from 17 to 50%, depending on how “high” you want to go. There is also pricey 100% THC hashish that can be used to boost the high, or be added to candy bars and gummy bears, which are now sold at legal marijuana dispensaries.

As those who lived through those years know only too well, marijuana became popular back in the days of the genocidal war in Vietnam. Unlike America’s recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the full horror of the Vietnam War was broadcast every evening into the living rooms of America by the nightly news programs of the major networks. Corpses, coffins and napalm strikes were all put on display in full color, every morning. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, would appear with the latest macabre “body count” of how many of the enemy had been killed that day. Over 50,000 young American men lost their lives in that conflict, with additional hundreds of thousands suffering severe physical and mental damage.

By 1968 the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had all been murdered, and the war in Vietnam was in high gear. It was within this context that millions of young Americans opted to “tune in and turn on.” Thus was set in motion a process whose full fruit is only being seen today.

Murdering the Minds (and Potential) of Children

From 1970 onward, our youth have been victims of menticide. Drugs are only part of it. Their minds have been crammed with zero-growth ideology; they are told that they are using up precious resources, space, and food. Children who are made to think that they are unimportant, and who are force-fed the nonsense of man-made climate change, will turn to existentialist philosophies that promote suicide, drug abuse, and murder. That is exactly what we are witnessing now.

The popular lie today—which both the media and the school systems repeat ad nauseam—is that the world is over-populated, and that 7.5 billion people on Earth are not sustainable. Children are being taught that people who reproduce while the Earth is dying are evil, and that the life of a chimpanzee is more important than the life of a child! For example, the World Wildlife Fund, founded by Prince Philip of Britain and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (a Nazi Party member of Hitler’s SS) promotes the idea that saving the lives of animals is more important than saving the lives of children living in squalor in under-developed nations. Prince Philip, a particularly nasty racist, publicly said, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

Today, this is a prevalent view among the young, as well as among adults who reached maturity after 1995. Every day the latest news on “catastrophic climate change” is broadcast across newspapers, radio, television, and the internet. Every hurricane, every tornado, every wildfire, every flood—these are all blamed on the adult population. What are the young supposed to think when they are bombarded with lies every single day?

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Teenage drug addicts hanging out in a cellar of a building in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

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For many of our children, the escape from such terrors is drinking alcohol or smoking cannabis. The real crime is that the media—and many elected officials—are openly pushing for marijuana legalization. One of the key turning points in this effort was the almost universally successful campaign for the acceptance of “Medical Marijuana,” a fraud based entirely on lies. The crucial importance of this effort was that it redefined marijuana, a Schedule I Controlled Substance, as “medicine.” The effect of this is that a large number of people now accept the argument, “Well, if pot is used as medicine, it can’t be harmful.”

Colorado has just ruled that medical doctors can use “medical” marijuana to treat opioid addiction, without a shred of evidence that this is a viable treatment option. The evidence is overwhelming that the lengthy campaign for “medicinal marijuana” was financed and led by the same pro-dope lobby whose stated aim, all along, has been full legalization of marijuana.

Here are some facts that can be proven about marijuana. We know that THC is drawn to fatty tissues in the body, the closest one being the brain! The human brain is not completely developed until age 24 or 25. During the period of development, neural connections are developing. It is known that cannabis can stunt the growth of the brain. Cannabis stays in the body for approximately 28 days. Women who regularly use cannabis can give birth to brain-damaged babies. Young children and teens who use marijuana can destroy neural links and do permanent damage to their brains—of which the last area to develop is the pre-frontal cortex, which isn’t fully developed until the age of 24 or 25. This is the critical area of the brain in which judgment takes place. Children depend upon the Amygdala (two clusters within the brain), which is where emotions and memory function. The development of the pre-frontal cortex is key to the transition to adult decision making, and this development is directly damaged by marijuana use. This issue is not obscure at all, and should make full sense to loving parents who have tried to guide their teenage children, and observed the many, many bad judgments that they make.

Pueblo, Colorado Physicians Code Red

Pediatrician Steven Simerville, MD

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A video on YouTube, made by Dr. Steven J. Simerville, a pediatrician in Pueblo, Colorado, shows how deadly marijuana is to pregnant mothers. Seven to ten percent of mothers giving birth while under the spell of marijuana (perhaps having been told that marijuana cures morning sickness) have babies showing THC present in their system. One in fourteen newborns had damage to the prefrontal cortex, proven by neuro-imaging of the brain.

I have seen many other reports on marijuana’s effect on pregnancy. This is a crisis calling out to heaven. Women who suffer from morning sickness are told by pot dispensing personnel that marijuana will ease their symptoms. What many women don’t realize is the impact this drug has on the fetus, because THC crosses the placental barrier, going directly to the fetus. If the mother is a frequent, heavy marijuana smoker, her baby is at risk of permanent brain damage, and she is at risk for miscarriage. Mothers nursing their infants are told not to smoke marijuana, as it passes from the milk to the brain of the baby.

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A storefront display window, showing a plethora of cannabis products for sale.

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The pro-dope lobby has proven its intense hatred of the next generation. As I mentioned earlier, high potency marijuana is made into chocolate candy bars, gummy bears, and other products popular with children. It is known that children as young as eleven use pot. In every state that has so far legalized marijuana, there has been a resulting increase in marijuana use among youth under 18 years old.

It is also known that parents who smoke pot, often do so with their children. There are also cases of parents who deliberately blow marijuana smoke on their infants to keep them quiet. Many aging baby boomers have continued or returned to marijuana use, as they grow older, and have become more depressed about their future in such a zero-growth world. This is comparable to the current epidemic of alcoholism among aging boomers.

Psychosis

The British medical journal, The Lancet Psychiatry, in its May 2019 issue, released a thorough and exhaustive study done by a group of prominent psychiatrists, led by Marta Di Forti, PhD, on “The Contribution of Cannabis Use to Variation in the Incidence of Psychotic Disorder Across Europe (EU-GEI): a Multicentre Case-Control Study.” In this study, Di Forti and her team looked at patients 18 to 64 years old who “presented to psychiatric services in 11 sites across Europe and Brazil with first-episode psychosis, and recruited controls representative of the local populations.”

In their five-year study, using 901 patients with first-episode psychosis across the 11 sites, and also 1,237 controls from the same sites, they divided the types of cannabis used; low potency THC (<10%) and high potency (>10%). The report states that,

Assuming causality, we calculated the population attributable fractions (PAFs) for the patterns of cannabis use associated with the highest odds of psychosis and the correlation between such patterns and the incidence rates for psychotic disorder across the study sites. Between May 1, 2010, and April 1, 2015, we obtained data from 901 patients with first episode psychosis across 11 site and 1,237 population controls from those same sites. Daily cannabis use was associated with increased odds of psychotic disorder compared with never users.

The report goes on to show that if high potency THC were not available, “cases of first episode psychosis could be prevented.” The two sites that registered the highest rate of psychosis were London (30.3%) and Amsterdam (50.3%).

Parents Opposed to Pot

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The Drug Culture Kills

Suicide is the second leading cause of death for ages 10-24 and the second leading cause of death for 12-18 year-olds, according to the Parents Resource Program at the Jason Foundation, a national organization “dedicated to the prevention of the ‘Silent Epidemic’ of youth suicide.” More teens and young adults die from suicide than cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, influenza and chronic lung disease combined. Each week over 100 youth successfully commit suicide; about 17.2% have seriously considered suicide over the last year; 13.6 percent have planned a suicide; and 7.4% attempted suicide. These figures come from the Centers for Disease Control.

In addition to suicide, a substantial amount of evidence has come in from Colorado, which legalized marijuana in 2014, showing sharp increases in marijuana-related deaths. In a report published by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (RMHIDTA) Strategic Intelligence unit, dated September 2018, I found the following statistics: Since legalization “marijuana related traffic deaths increased 151% and all other Colorado traffic deaths increased by 35%.” Traffic deaths involving drivers testing positive for marijuana more than doubled from 55 in 2013, to 138 people killed in 2017. The report states, “The percentage of all Colorado traffic deaths that were marijuana-related, increased from 11.43% in 2013 to 21.3% in 2017.” The RMHIDTA also reported that marijuana use (from its Sept. 2018 report) “shows a 45% increase in comparing the three-year average, prior to recreational marijuana being legalized, to the three years after legalization.” In the past month, marijuana use “for ages 12 and older is ranked third in the nation and is 85% higher than the national average.” The rate of Emergency Room visits (people in crisis/psychosis) increased 52%, while marijuana-related “hospitalizations increased 148%.”

The RMHIDTA also reports on 144 investigations of black-market marijuana in Colorado, carried out by ten task forces. The results: 239 felony arrests, 7.3 tons of marijuana seized, and with the marijuana destined for 24 different states.

RMHIDTA also reported that highway seizures “increased by 39%” and seizures via the U.S. Mail system “increased 1,042% from an average of 52 parcels to an average of 694 parcels.”

Adding insult to injury, RMHIDTA reported that the tax revenue from sales of marijuana was a piddling “nine tenths of one percent of Colorado’s FY 2017 budget.” There’s more: Violent crime has increased 18.6% “and property crime increased 8.3% in Colorado since 2013.” Some good news: As of this RMHIDTA report, now 9 months old, 65% of local jurisdictions in Colorado have now banned medical and recreational marijuana businesses.

Pro-Drug Politicians

The questions uppermost in many people’s minds must be, “How the heck can this be true? Is it true that the media, and even worse, our elected officials are all rallying behind this movement to commit menticide against the youth? Could it be that they don’t know this information? Are they in cahoots with the Oligarchy, who are determined to destroy the United States? Could it be they just want to make money? Could it be a conspiracy of all these elements?”

Almost all of what I have discovered about marijuana is information readily available on the internet. This means it is available to everyone, including those pushing legalization.

I should also report that when last I checked, all of the Presidential candidates support legalized marijuana except former Vice-President, Democrat Joe Biden, and New York’s attorney and Republican candidate, Richard Blumenthal. President Trump has so far stayed out of the fray, saying it is a “states’ rights” issue, and he would not involve the Federal Government. The other 20-plus candidates all support legalized dope! Almost all the candidates brag that they will federally legalize marijuana, and there is a big push for this in Congress.

It is now very late in the game, yet it is critical to recognize that this is a fight and the final outcome is not yet decided. Despite an enormous pro-dope mobilization nationwide, only ten states so far have legalized the “recreational” use of marijuana. Most recently, in both New Jersey and New York, efforts by Dope, Inc. to legalize marijuana were thwarted by citizen action. It is not a done deal, there is still time to bust this wide open.

NJ National Guard/Mark C. Olsen

Millionaire Philip D. Murphy, bought the Governorship of New Jersey. His major campaign promise: legalize cannabis.

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New Jersey

In New Jersey, the push for legalizing marijuana by the pro-dope Governor Phil Murphy was blocked by the legislature in May of this year. Murphy, who never held elective office before becoming Governor, is an extremely wealthy Wall Street insider who served 23 years as a top-ranking official for Goldman Sachs. In that regard, it must be noted that the 1978 book Dope, Inc. demonstrated that the wealth of many of Wall Street’s top financial institutions derives from the drug trade. Wall Street not only benefits from the drug trade, illegal, and legal, but absolutely depends upon ever increasing its vast revenues from the drug trade. While at Goldman Sachs, Murphy also worked out of Hong Kong. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), once known as the “Queen’s bank,” has been shown to be the largest drug money laundering center is the world.

Murphy spent $21 million out of his own pocket to buy the election. During the campaign, he stated that, if elected, one of his major goals was to legalize cannabis. The Republican Party suffered from ‘Christitis’ and simple gutlessness. No one in the Republican Party thought they could beat Murphy, so they offered up Chris Christie’s Lt. Governor, Kim Guadagno, as the sacrificial lamb. Murphy made legalizing drugs his number one issue (over poverty, teachers, homelessness, schools, unions, etc.—traditional Democratic Party issues). I am sure one person was very happy with that, namely the mega-speculator George Soros.

It should also be noted that Murphy is talking about a tax of $40 per ounce on legal marijuana. I can tell you, whatever the tax is, the drug mafia can sell it cheaper. It has now been shown, in the states where marijuana has been legalized, that this has had no impact on reducing the illegal marijuana trade. States that legalized were seduced with claims that organized crime would leave or be neutered; exactly the opposite has happened. People find it easier and cheaper to get pot from the drug mafia.

In lieu of immediate legalization, Murphy is attempting to massively increase the number of “medical marijuana” dispensaries. Currently, there are a fixed number of dispensaries in the state, and a handful of physicians who prescribe the drug. Playing to the millennial crowd, Murphy is demanding that this number be increased so that 30% will be owned and operated by women, minorities and veterans. In other words, an equal opportunity for menticide.

One of the groups responsible for defeating marijuana legalization in both New Jersey and New York was Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM). This group is for decriminalization but against legalization. SAM was co-founded by Dr. Kevin Sabet, who served as National Drug Control Policy advisor to Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Obama, and to former Democratic Congressman, Patrick Kennedy, the son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. The group just issued a report debunking the idea that opioid users can benefit from marijuana.

Since Murphy and New Jersey Senate President Steven Sweeney failed to get the necessary votes in the legislature to legalize marijuana, it is now reported that the question will be on the 2020 November ballot.

What Comes Next

On June 19, despite strong support for legalization by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the New York legislature refused to put marijuana legalization up for a vote. They did not have the votes to pass it. Reports from Albany state that the “mood changed” after New Jersey’s rejection of legalized pot the previous month.

In response to the failure of the legalization bill, SAM founder Dr. Kevin Sabet released the following briefing. It reads in part:

Today New York legislators learned that commercializing marijuana brings along a host of significant health, safety and societal costs that result in no tax money and no social justice. The predatory pot industry wanted legislators to believe that this was simple. Like they did in New Jersey, they said it was inevitable. The industry told people it would rain money for a host of pet projects, that our young people wouldn’t be at risk and drugged driving concerns were overblown. Thankfully, New York’s parents, doctors, law enforcement, teachers and many lawmakers didn’t fall for the con.

Our broad coalition, including the NYS PTA [New York State Congress of Parents and Teachers], Medical Society of the State of New York, NY Sheriffs’ Association, NY Chiefs of Police Association, County Health Officials, local elected officials, concerned parents, teachers, addiction and recovery activists made their voices heard.

As of June 2019, only three nations in the world have legalized the recreational use of marijuana: the Netherlands, Uruguay, and Canada. In Great Britain, marijuana was legalized until psychosis hit the youth population in London and nearby cities. Too close to the City of London, I suspect. They rescheduled the drug on Schedule B, as opposed to the liberal Schedule C. It seems that the country that drugged China, India, and Egypt—and America also—doesn’t think it advisable to have it legalized in its own backyard.

CC/InGodJake Trusts

Kevin Sabet, co-founder and President of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.

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So, the last question today is: “How do we take our country back?” The measures proposed by Lyndon LaRouche and EIR back in 1978, in the block-buster book, Dope, Inc., have never been tried, and that’s because it is so elegantly simple and would work: Focus law enforcement efforts on the drug-money laundering! Make it illegal to deposit money in the offshore and numbered accounts in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and whatever other hidey-holes that exist. It’s obvious that the people who park their money this way don’t want others, especially the government, to know how much money they have.

We live in a democratic Republic, not a plutocracy-oligarchy. Let us act that way. Go after the money trail! If you want your progeny to go into Space, colonize the Moon and Mars—to have a future—the first prerequisite is to stop our children from spacing-out. Don’t sit on the sidelines! Find out what is happening in your area and act! For more details on marijuana and how it affects people, read Alex Berenson’s book, Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.

Medical Marijuana

Is a Fraud

by Ned Rosinsky, MD

June 23—Medical marijuana has now been legalized in 33 states and the District of Columbia, allowing physicians to prescribe marijuana for a variety of ailments, including pain, vomiting, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As in the case of the quacks pushing various super-cures from the backs of wagons during the 1800s, the mania for Laetrile as the cure for cancer, or the recent flourishing of stem cell clinics that promise to cure virtually any illness with an infusion of your own stem cells back into you, there have always been unproven treatments hawked by biased so-called healers, and hyped by reports of happy patients who swear by the treatments.

What influences legislators around the country to legalize marijuana for medical use—a substance which is abusable and has been proven in scientific studies to be harmful to memory and other aspects of cognition, certainly more harmful and higher risk than the broad use of stem cells or Laetrile?

Evaluating the Trials of Medical Marijuana

The answer involves a definition of what is competent science. In the field of medicine, a proposed treatment of a disorder requires a therapeutic trial, including documentation of effectiveness. In the long-past history of medicine, for many years, the trials were made by individual practitioners on their own patients, usually involving a small number of subjects. The proposed treatment was explained to the patient, so both the patient and practitioner knew what was being used and why it was suspected that it might be helpful. The practitioner would then evaluate the effect of the treatment. This is termed an open trial, because both the patient and the practitioner are aware of what is being given to the patient. This initially certainly sounds like a reasonable approach.

However, there are several significant problems with this kind of study. First, there may be bias on the part of the practitioner or the patient. The practitioner wants the patient to get well, may want a financial benefit, a reputational benefit, or even an ego benefit. The patient may be biased as well, wishing the treatment to work. There is frequently a placebo effect in which the expectation of improvement frequently results in subjective improvement. The biological and psychological basis for the placebo effect is unclear, but likely involves neurological pathways and possibly hormones that are affected by expectation and a sense of relief that someone is concerned and being helpful.

For example, the size of the placebo effect in studies of antidepressants is well documented, at approximately 30% improvement, so for a given medication to be shown to be effective it must exceed this threshold.

In the case of marijuana, there may be additional bias due to the widespread awareness that success in medical trial use may be used as justification for total legalization, so if the patient or practitioner supports total marijuana legalization, there may be a significant bias towards showing that marijuana is medically effective.

These biases may influence the study in numerous ways. The practitioner may choose patients who are likely to be biased, such as people who are substance abusers, or in the age range of high rate of substance abuse, or in a geographical area of high levels of substance abuse. The practitioner may choose a rating scale that is heavily subjective, such as degree of pain, rather than something more objective such as days lost from work. Most of the purported medical uses of marijuana have been disorders that are quantified subjectively, such as pain, nausea, or anxiety from PTSD.

The issues of bias and placebo effect have been widely recognized since the 1960s as having severely negative effects on the reliability of therapeutic medication trials.

The currently accepted way to avoid these issues is to use a randomized double-blind study, in which the treatment to be tested is compared to a placebo, a “sugar pill,” and both the researchers and subjects of the trial are blind as to which subjects are getting the proposed treatment and which the placebo, until all the results are tabulated and analyzed. (Although this population-based approach cannot always be extrapolated to a given individual patient.)

In the early days of the attempts to get marijuana approved for medical use, the main arguments presented to state legislatures were individual testimonials by patients who stated that they felt better or improved in some way by smoking marijuana, or studies that were too small to be definitive, were biased, or were not double-blind. There was an accumulation of such small studies in the 1990s and the first decade after 2000, during which time numerous states approved the use of medical marijuana, largely influenced by these limited studies.

Meta-Analysis

However, more recently there have been overviews of the accumulated research, termed meta-analyses, which evaluate the total implications of all the studies available. These meta-analyses start out by listing the available studies, and then examining each study in detail to determine reliability. If a study is not randomized double-blind, or if there is bias evident, or if there is a problem with the statistics, then the study is usually eliminated from analysis.

A typical meta-analysis may start out with 100 published studies and end up with 20 that meet standards for reliability. Since the typical studies include fifty to several hundred subjects, the gathering together of 20 such studies usually includes a very large subject population that is usually geographically and socially widely distributed, so it is also more representative of the general population.

With this background, let us review the principal recent meta-analyses of medical marijuana.

Removing Bias and Error

The most prominent argument used for medical marijuana is pain control; the image of a terminal cancer patient dying in severe pain would naturally move almost anyone to advocate anything that would help.

The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) published in 2019 an overview document titled “Management of Cancer Pain in Adult Patients: ESMO Clinical Practice Guidelines.” In the section on Medical Cannabis, a meta-analysis was done using the MEDLINE database from the Internet site PubMed reviewing the cancer pain relief from nabixomols, an extract of marijuana containing two potentially therapeutic cannabinoids, D9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), and cannabidiol (CBD).

The conclusion, based on randomized, double-blind studies, was that—

Nabixomols did not demonstrate superiority to placebo in reducing self-reported pain. [and that] Nabixomols [were] not superior to placebo on the primary efficacy endpoint.

A meta-analysis published in Neuropsychopharmacology in 2017, “Opioid-Sparing Effect of Cannabinoids: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” examined the addition of D9-THC to opioid medication for pain control. The meta-analysis showed some promise in pre-clinical studies, but in controlled double-blind clinical studies,

Opioid dose changes were rarely reported, and mixed findings were observed for analgesia. . . . Prospective high-quality-controlled clinical trials are required to determine the opioid-sparing effect of cannabinoids.

In other words, in the real world of pain treatment, no conclusion could be reached indicating any significant benefit.

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The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry “Marijuana Use Is Associated with Worse Outcomes in Symptom Severity and Violent Behavior in Patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

In this observational study, initiating marijuana use after treatment was associated with worse PTSD symptoms, more violent behavior, and alcohol use. Marijuana use may actually worsen PTSD symptoms or nullify the benefits of specialized, intensive treatment. Cessation or prevention of use may be an important goal of treatment.

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In a 2015 meta-analysis published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) titled “Cannabinoids for Medical Use: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” the section on pain control assessed 28 individual studies: 13 of those studies evaluated nabixomols, 4 utilized smoked THC, 5 used nabilone, 3 used THC oral spray, 2 used dronabinol, 1 used vaporized cannabis, 1 used ajuvenic acid (a synthetic cannabinoid derivative) capsules, and 1 used oral THC.

The 28 studies were evaluated for bias, and the conclusion was that 17 were at high risk for bias, 9 were at unclear risk, and only 2 were at low risk for bias.

In this meta-analysis, apparently due to the overwhelming number of biased studies, all of the studies were used in the analysis. The best pain response was among those smoking THC, which would not be double-blind since the smoker in the THC group would feel the psychological effect of intoxication.

Even with this overwhelmingly biased group of studies, there was no statistical difference in average quality-of-life indicators.

A meta-analysis published in the journal Pain in 2018 titled, “Cannabis and Cannabinoids for the Treatment of People with Chronic Noncancer Pain Conditions [CNCP],” contrasted the low rate of effectiveness to the high rate of adverse effects, and concluded:

It seems unlikely that cannabinoids are highly effective medications for CNCP.

In contrast to the low-quality and time-limited studies, a large scale, double-blind study was published in The Lancet in 2018, titled “Effect of Cannabis in People with Chronic Non-Cancer Pain Prescribed Opioids: Findings From a 4-Year Prospective Study.” The study included 1,514 participants in Australia, who were prescribed opioid medications for CNCP.

In this study, marijuana was not provided by the researchers, but the use of marijuana by the participants was evaluated using follow-up questionnaires. The study concluded that the participants with the most pain used the most marijuana, as might be expected given the publicity regarding marijuana helping pain. However, the study also concluded that the marijuana use did not help the pain:

Cannabis use was common in people with chronic non-cancer pain who had been prescribed opioids, but we found no evidence that cannabis use improved outcomes. People who used cannabis had greater pain and lower self-efficacy in managing pain, and there was no evidence that cannabis use reduced pain severity or interference, or exerted an opioid-sparing effect.

Given this dismal picture of the state of research in the use of marijuana for pain, it is not surprising that the American Cancer Society’s 2017 position paper , “Marijuana and Cancer,” states,

The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the Society’s advocacy affiliate, has not taken a position on legalization of marijuana for medical purposes because of the need for more scientific research on marijuana’s potential benefits and harms.

The PTSD Argument for Medical Marijuana

The next most common argument for medical marijuana is for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition seen commonly in military combatants, assault victims, and other situations of extreme or chronic stress. The symptoms include anxiety, depression, and irritability, and may be disabling and long-standing.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has recommended treatment with antidepressants which are also effective for anxiety, and cognitive-behavioral therapy, both of which are moderately effective.

A meta-analysis in this area titled, “A Review of Medical Marijuana for the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Real Symptom Relief or Just High Hopes?” was published in The Mental Health Clinician in 2018 and concludes:

Conflicting data exist for the use of marijuana for PTSD; however, current evidence is limited to anecdotal experiences, case reports, and observational studies, making it difficult to make clinical recommendation.

A large, non-blinded study published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 2015 titled, “Marijuana Use Is Associated with Worse Outcomes in Symptom Severity and Violent Behavior in Patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” studied 2,276 veterans with PTSD and followed their progress with no marijuana prescribed by the researchers. The use of marijuana was documented, and the study concluded:

In this observational study, initiating marijuana use after treatment was associated with worse PTSD symptoms, more violent behavior, and alcohol use. Marijuana use may actually worsen PTSD symptoms or nullify the benefits of specialized, intensive treatment. Cessation or prevention of use may be an important goal of treatment.

Treatment for Nausea, Weight Loss, Sleep Disorders

Regarding marijuana and the treatment of nausea, weight loss, sleep disorders, and other conditions, the above-cited JAMA meta-analysis concluded:

There was low-quality evidence suggesting that cannabinoids were associated with improvements in nausea and vomiting due to chemotherapy, weight gain in HIV infection, sleep disorders, and Tourette’s Syndrome [a tic disorder].

A meta-analysis of marijuana and treatment of nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy published as a Cochrane Review in 2015, titled “Cannabis-Based Medicine for Nausea and Vomiting in People Treated with Chemotherapy for Cancer,” concluded:

There was no evidence of a difference between cannabinoids and prochlorperazine in the proportion of participants reporting no nausea, or no vomiting. However, there were more people withdrawing from the study due to adverse events when they were treated with cannabinoids, such as dizziness, dysphoria (negative emotional feelings), euphoria, and sedation.

Regarding glaucoma, which was an early claim for medical marijuana, a National Academy of Sciences review of the available research published in 2001, “Marijuana and Glaucoma,” notes:

There is no question that marijuana-based medicines can be used to lower IOP [intra-ocular pressure]. But like several other glaucoma medications that have fallen into disuse, their drawbacks outweigh their benefits. This was not the case when the first reports of marijuana’s effects were published in the 1970s, a time when relatively few drugs—all of which caused troublesome side effects—were available to treat the condition. Those drugs have been superseded by more effective and less problematic medications. That seems the likely fate of marijuana-based treatments for glaucoma as well.

In summary, the evidence for medical marijuana is generally weak for any significant therapeutic effect, and in the marginal areas in which there is some effect, there are alternative medications already available that are as good or better. Therefore, the only reason for urging the legalization of medical marijuana would be to legitimize marijuana use, as preparation for complete legalization of use. On the other side of the question, the harmful effects of marijuana are well documented regarding memory and other cognitive functions, as well as serving as a gateway drug encouraging the use of even more dangerous substances. The legalization of medical marijuana encourages youth to think it must be harmless, and is used by youth to justify abusing the drug. This harm caused by legalizing medical marijuana is real, palpable, and adversely affects the most vulnerable segments of our population.

III. The New Silk Road

African High-Speed Rail Finance Requires LaRouche Four-Power Pact

by David Cherry and Ramasimong Tsokolibane[fn_1]

Nigeria Railway Corporation

Nigeria is bustling with railway construction, including new standard gauge lines, the rehabilitation of 3,500 kilometers of old colonial gauge lines, and new urban transit rail systems.

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June 23—The vital plan for an African Integrated High-Speed Railway Network (AIHSRN), approved by the African Union (AU) in 2014, appears to be going forward energetically. But in fact, Africa is getting only half a loaf at best. Standard gauge rails are being built, but to “save money,” they are not being built to standards permitting the high speeds that the African Union had specified. These “higher”-speed lines are not “high-speed” by any accepted standard. Or, worse, existing lines of the old colonial gauge are being rehabilitated—again because “there is not enough money.”

Yet having “enough money” is not the problem it seems to be: The principle of Hamiltonian credit—credit extended by government, on the strength of nothing but the skills of the population, and earmarked for projects sure to produce leaps in productivity—has been known in theory and practice for 200 years, even if suppressed by the business schools.

Individual African governments, however, do not have enough leverage against the British monetary system and its banks to travel this most efficient path to industrialization in the freedom of sovereignty. It is the world system that must change to favor this path, and for that, Lyndon LaRouche’s prescription for a Four Power Agreement—among China, Russia, India and the United States at least—is the practical answer, incorporating a new Bretton Woods system, very different from the one we have known. It must be, rather, the one that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt—the enemy of the British Empire and of all empire—had intended before his untimely death in 1945.

AU Vision: A High-Speed Rail Network

Railroad planners, specialists and government officials met in Kenya, April 10-11 under the aegis of the African Union Development Agency (AUDA, formerly NEPAD) to chart the way forward for construction of the African Integrated High-Speed Railway Network, a system to connect all 54 national capitals and all major economic centers on the African continent. This objective is meant be achieved by 2063.

CC/NicholasNCE

“Al Boraq,” in Morocco, inaugurated in November 2018, can travel at 320 km per hour (200 mph) and is the only high-speed train in Africa.

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A modern, integrated Africa-wide rail system is visionary. But the plan approved by the African Union (AU) transport ministers in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea in 2014 goes even further. It specifies a high-speed rail system—the “HSR” in AIHSRN. “High speed” is defined by the AU as a design speed (maximum speed) of at least 240 kilometers per hour (150 mph). Most trains in Africa today run on tracks of one of the old colonial narrow gauges, and most can only travel at 50 km/h (31 mph) or even less. This proposed jump from today into tomorrow is what China calls technological “leap-frogging,” and the AU has adopted the concept. Perhaps the last shall be among the first.

AIHSRN is not a master plan for all rail transport in Africa. It is, rather, a plan for rapid rail transport across long distances. And Africa has long distances. To go from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope by road or rail is more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles)—the equivalent of going from New York to San Francisco and back again.

Yet with the AIHSRN, an express train could depart from Cairo at 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning, travel at an average of only 220 km/h (137 mph), make only five half-hour stops—at Khartoum, Nairobi, Dodoma (Tanzania), Harare, and Johannesburg—and arrive in Cape Town in time for an early breakfast on Wednesday. The east-west trip from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Dakar, Senegal—“only” 8,100 km—will be quicker. The implications of such speed for the African economy—and for African integration in all respects—are enormous.

FIGURE 1

African Integrated High-Speed Railway Network (AIHSRN)

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The continental plan is for six west-east routes from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean/Red Sea, and four routes that run from north to south—a 6x4 grid (see Figure 1). Because of their high speeds, the trains must run on dedicated, standard gauge lines that will not usually accept traffic from other, slower lines of the sometimes denser, surrounding rail network.[fn_2]

The plan includes the construction of railway manufacturing industries, parts suppliers, maintenance facilities, and the building up of railway training academies.[fn_3]

The AIHSRN is part of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, a fifty-year plan for the economic, social and cultural development of the entire continent, born in 2013. The attending physician at the birth of Agenda 2063 was Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, MD, who chaired the African Union Commission at the time. The newborn came at full term—after a succession of studies from varied sources that go back at least to the OAU’s Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa (1980). Dr. Dlamini-Zuma personally conceptualized what Africa should look like in 2063 in the poetic prose of her “E-Mail from the Future,” written in January 2014.

‘The Scope of Its Beauty and Modernity’

The AIHSRN plan is not the whole story. The execution of the plan so far is a mixture of good news, on one hand, and unsolved problems on the other. Two well-known success stories are the recently completed Addis Ababa-Djibouti line and the Mombasa-Nairobi line. These are recognized as elements of the AIHSRN and they are fast trains, but their maximum speeds are 120 to 160 km/hr—half to two-thirds of the 240 km/hr maximum specified as the bottom line in the AIHSRN plan. We will address the question as to why so slow, a little further along. The only high speed train on the African continent is the 320 km/hr (200 mph) Moroccan line Al Boraq from Casablanca to Tangier, inaugurated in November 2018. The 323 km electrified line—which has double-decker passenger cars—will be extended to 1500 km (930 miles). It, too, forms part of the AIHSRN.

FIGURE 2

Schematic Map of Nigerian Standard Gauge Lines

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Like Ethiopia and Kenya, Nigeria is among the African nations building standard-gauge rail lines that permit travel at only about 120 km/hr. Some of these lines are on the AIHSRN map, and some go beyond the plan. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari strongly supports rail modernization, and his Transport Minister, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, is personally strongly committed to the standard-gauge projects (see Figure 2), of which a major line—from Lagos, the commercial capital, through the national capital, Abuja, and on to Kano in the far north—may be completed next year. Indeed, it seems that Nigeria has caught railroad fever. Newspaper publisher Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, who accompanied Minister Amaechi on several construction inspection trips on the 158.5 km section from Lagos to Ibadan, waxed lyrical over what he witnessed. In his April 28 Vanguard article, “The Challenge of a New Nigerian Railway,” he wrote in part:

Those inspection trips, taken together, had a tremendous impact on me and opened up for me vistas of new possibilities in my assessment of the future of our country.

He wrote of—

the scope of its beauty and modernity. The sheer joy of watching before our very eyes, Chinese and Nigerian engineers ploughing through thick and swampy equatorial forests, cutting down giant vegetation, and painstakingly laying state-of-the-art rail sleepers [ties] with skill and dexterity, and then proceeding to roll out air-conditioned passenger coaches in a record two-year time, was a sight to behold.

The raw details of the project, quantities and all, testify to an engineering feat of considerable proportion. The entire project involved some 24.26 million square meters of earth work. There are thirty-one different categories of bridges in all, . . . The specially manufactured refrigerated freight locomotives, and livestock locomotives and wagons are as modern as any, anywhere. Details of the contract include the supply of adequate spare parts for the rolling stock and the supply of maintenance equipment for a substantial period of time.

The contract details even go further. In order to ensure knowledge transfer and the localizing of the manufacturing process, President Buhari, on the advice of Rotimi Amaechi, insisted on the immediate implementation of two other aspects of the contract from inception, namely, the take-off of the training of young Nigerian undergraduates in Railway Engineering and other important transport-related disciplines, in China, under a scholarship scheme to be paid for by the Chinese, and the establishment of a Transport University in Nigeria. . . . Messrs. CCECC Nigeria Ltd have established a Transportation University in Daura, Katsina State.

But in his conclusion, Dr. Ogunbiyi made this pointed remark:

In the era of speed trains, we should be looking beyond the refurbishment of antiquated narrow gauge trains and the construction of slow-moving Standard Gauge lines. And fast trains are already here with us. We should take full advantage of the latest rail transport technology and be driven by the same objectives that characterize the best prototypes of modern rail travel today: speed, comfort, safety and cost-effectiveness. [Emphasis added.]

Newspaper publisher Yemi Ogunbiyi, who has followed recent railway advances in Nigeria, writes that it has opened up new vistas of the future.

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Yet high-speed rail lines are much more expensive than “slow-moving Standard Gauge lines.” For example, to ensure sufficient stability, the trackbed may require more work. Track segments may have to be welded end-to-end. The curves must be gentler (larger turning radii), have steeper banking, or both. Signalling communications equipment must be of higher quality and reliability. The rolling stock must also be built to higher standards.

High-speed rails are expensive to build and maintain, but the pay-off comes in the greater integration of the economy. A broken machine in a rice-processing or textile factory in Kano will be able to get replacement parts and possibly a repairman, from Lagos, quickly. The greater political and cultural integration of the country, the continent, and the world are priceless.

Where Is the ‘Money’?

The problem of financing such large projects has broken out in dramatic ways in recent months. In Nigeria, Transport Minister Amaechi told a discontented Senate, in November and December 2018, that the construction of two of the major lines—Port Harcourt to Maiduguri and Lagos to Calabar—would have to be postponed, because there was no room in the budget for them. The China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) is already at work on the remaining sections of the major, double-track line from Lagos to Abuja to Kano, dubbed the Speedline (1,316 km), and the contribution from the Nigerian budget to go with the loan from China for this project, is not small.

The good news, as of late May, is that the Nigerian government and its collaborator in China have together come up with 20% of the money needed to build the Lagos-Calabar line, so that project can get underway. And, Minister Amaechi announced that there was money to build a standard gauge connection from the capital, Abuja, to Itakpe in iron ore country, where a standard gauge line to coastal Warri is already functioning. He said the construction of a seaport at Warri is also approved. A deep seaport at Bonny in the Niger Delta (crude oil is lifted there), and an inland dry port at Ibadan had already been announced. The ports are not as costly as the rail line.

Such good news does not dispose of the problem, “Where is the money?” especially for countries that are not oil rich like Nigeria.

The problem has emerged in Kenya and Uganda. On May 8, Kenyan Transport and Infrastructure Minister James Macharia announced that, while the next leg of the Kenyan standard-gauge line from Nairobi to Naivasha is on schedule for completion in August, the subsequent segment to the Ugandan border—to meet planned standard-gauge construction on the Ugandan side—will not be built: It will be built “eventually,” he said. A financing deal for that segment with China had seemed imminent at the time of the April 10-11 AUDA meeting in Nairobi. Instead, Kenya will “modernize” the existing colonial-gauge rail line along that route and transship freight and passengers at Naivasha. An unnamed private sector partner will carry out the colonial upgrade through a public-private partnership, and will operate the line to recover its investment.

Uganda, meanwhile, has decided to follow suit and will carry out a colonial upgrade of the line from its capital at Kampala to the Kenyan border at Malaba, instead of building the planned standard gauge line, with encouragement from the European Union—for old colonial times’ sake. The EU is contributing $32 million to the project. Whatever anti-China pressures and threats had come from the European side are therefore not to be spoken of. Uganda had been in negotiation with China for a loan for the standard-gauge project.

The prioritization study presented at the April AUDA meeting[fn_4] had put the Nairobi-Kampala line among its three highest-priority pilot projects, based on a weighted combination of factors favorable to early success.

The South African Problem

South Africa should be making an especially large contribution to developing Africa, including its rail development. It has an industrial economy—the only full-set economy on the continent—and has been operating two nuclear power reactors for 35 years. South Africa has a much larger number of people with some degree of technical qualification per 1,000, than other African countries. South Africans working in manufacturing, construction, and utilities amount to almost 6% of the total population. The equivalent figure for Nigeria and Kenya is not quite 1% in each case. The electricity consumed per capita in South Africa is 27 times the Nigerian, and 22 times the Kenyan per capita consumption. It is indicative of this difference in industrial level, that South Africa’s state-owned Transnet operates existing rail lines in Nigeria under contract, and now heads the consortium to rehabilitate and operate Nigeria’s 3,500 kilometers of narrow gauge railways.

The Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) weekly bulletin tells the South African President what he must do.

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But today, South Africa is not on Africa’s leading edge. In President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA), delivered June 20, he did say,

We want a South Africa that has prioritized its rail networks, and is producing high-speed trains connecting our megacities and the remotest areas of our country. We should imagine a country where bullet trains pass through Johannesburg as they travel from here [Cape Town] to Musina, and they stop in Buffalo City on their way from eThekwini back here.

“We want . . . We should imagine . . .” He has no plans. South Africa has actually done nothing to move toward fast, standard gauge rails since 2012, when Gautrain, the 80 km shuttle between Pretoria and Johannesburg, was completed. Gautrain is South Africa’s token standard gauge project. Despite Ramaphosa’s airy language, the South African policy is still where it was in 2009, when the Department of Transport’s Rail Gauge Study Report recommended against conversion to standard gauge—unless eventually forced to do so by developments in Africa at large.

It is noteworthy that Ramaphosa made no mention of the urgent development of the Moloto Rail Corridor to open an economically crucial bottleneck between the provinces of Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and Limpopo. He made no mention of the Durban-Pretoria-Gaborone rail corridor—which had received extremely high marks in the prioritization study presented at the April AUDA meeting in Nairobi, in terms of both physical-economic and revenue criteria, and in many other respects.

South Africa is being held back by the enemies of its own development and that of the continent—the banks and mining companies whose allegiance is to the British neocolonial empire. The empire had been guiding South Africa into deindustrialization for years—until President Zuma came close to breaking out, with Russian and Chinese help. For that, the corrupt footstools of the British lords ran a years-long campaign of vilification that led to his forced resignation. Now, with Cyril Ramaphosa as president, the British are working at speed to accelerate deindustrialization and its eventual corollary, depopulation.

James Rea

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish child malthusian, wrote the script adopted by South African President Ramaphosa. It means no coal, no nuclear.

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There is, of course, continuing opposition to these policies within the ruling party and indeed within Ramaphosa’s cabinet. The British reminded President Ramaphosa of their policy prescriptions in the weekly Chatham House bulletin of May 23, including the break-up and privatization of Eskom, the government electricity monopoly. But Ramaphosa was unable to speak of moving in that direction in his SONA because of that domestic opposition, saying instead that “Eskom is too vital to our economy to be allowed to fail.” That is not a very solid reassurance: At the beginning of his address, he had bowed deeply to the British policy outlook: He endorsed the radical green deception and the radical agenda for reducing baseload electricity production—now associated with poster child Greta Thunberg—in saying,

The extreme weather conditions associated with the warming of the atmosphere threaten our economy, they threaten the lives and the livelihoods of our people, and—unless we act now—will threaten our very existence.

If Eskom is not supported and strengthened, and its nuclear power capacity is not increased, South Africa will retard Africa’s development in all respects, railways included.

The Hamiltonian Solution

African governments complain that they cannot find the money to build to the AIHSRN standard.

They are willing to spend from their budgets. They may also follow the example of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who successfully appealed to the patriotism of the citizenry to buy up a savings bond issue for a specific major project—expanding the Suez Canal. Bond issues of this kind can also be promoted to the nation’s diaspora.

And Daniel Osiemo, CEO for AUDA in Kenya, revealed last month a major missed opportunity in the practice of African government finance, which can now be exploited. At the April AUDA meeting in Nairobi, he exclaimed, “Look at the pension funds—all over the continent we have pension funds that have been established, but which have not been channeled to productive investments. So, if these are harnessed and put into this kind of investments, in a little time to come, they will be able to pay everybody. It will be a win-win for everybody.”

What happened to those pension funds is easy to imagine, since it happened everywhere: The fund managers were persuaded by the bankers to go for the high-yield, high-risk speculative investments, which were never in the business of building roads, rails, and harbors!

Governments can—and are—borrowing successfully from China. There is no China “debt trap,” as EIR’s investigators and others have shown.[fn_5] But not all loans from China are—or can be—concessional.

All of these options are understood. What is missing is the principle of Hamiltonian finance—an expression of Alexander Hamilton’s understanding of physical economy found in his famous four economic reports to the U.S. Congress. A sovereign government has the power to issue paper currency on the strength of the skills and mental powers of its people—the ultimate basis of all wealth. Such issues do not have to be tied to stores of gold, provided the currency is used by the government solely for investment in infrastructural, agricultural, industrial and other “great projects” that are sure to produce for the nation more wealth (typically much more wealth) than the nominal amount of the currency itself.

The government of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln did not have enough money to fight the Civil War to the finish—until he issued currency, called Greenbacks, on the credit of the nation. Some of the economists who were behind this Greenbacks project intended the use of the Hamiltonian principle to continue—for purposes of general national development—after the end of the war, and so it did for a while, until Wall Street regained enough control over the government to stop it. This history is documented in A Resource of War—The Credit of the Government Made Immediately Available (1869, re-issued 2018) by Elbridge Gerry Spaulding, Chairman of the Congressional Ways and Means Committee during the Civil War.[fn_6] Even so, in the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the principle of the national credit to bring the backward Tennessee Valley into the 20th Century, without having the “money” to do it.

Most so-called economists have difficulty with the Greenback principle, but normal people do not: People, and their skills and mental powers, are the basis of wealth, not money or gold bars. Credit can therefore be issued on the strength of the availability of those mental powers for projects that benefit the common good and support the expanded reproduction of those mental powers. With proper sequencing of the projects, such credits are not inflationary.

There is urgency—the Hamiltonian principle of credit generation is needed now. The success, so far, of China’s intervention for the development of Africa, is no reason for complacency. The British-steered mass media around the world are building up hostility toward China for reasons that include British outrage that China is enabling Africa’s industrialization. The British formula for aid to Africa has been support—limited support—for health, education, and democratic institutions, but never industrialization.

African governments are aware that the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)—and its eventual offspring, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—are demanding deindustrialization and depopulation. But Africa’s ability to resist is limited. The banks pressure governments to build wind mills and solar farms as a condition for loans, and so the governments try to build the wasteful and expensive “renewable” facilities and new baseload power plants. At the UNFCCC meetings of the climate COPs, Africans and others think they can call the bluff of “the West” (really, the British world system) by agreeing to do their part if the “West” will do its part. But now “the West” is increasingly doing its suicidal part. This is not coming from the outlook of businessmen motivated for profits. It is the oligarchy—the old families—who have power and therefore need not worry about the money, who steer governments from behind the curtain and control the speculative banks. They fear that their control will be lost if the living standards—and the conceptual powers—of the majority of people rise.

The whole world needs Africa in the fight, and Africa needs the transition to a new system as much as any other part of the world.

The Necessary Four Power Agreement

African governments, unfortunately, do not have the kind of leverage against the British neo-colonial system of London and Wall Street that would be necessary to make use of Hamiltonian methods. The British system’s oligarchs have no intention of giving up their control—or even their inflated interest payments. Their “friendship” was graphically and irrevocably exposed—for those who needed a picture drawn for them—in John Perkins’Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and even he, with his prescription of windmills and solar panels, presented no concept of a viable pathway to economic justice and development.

The solution lies in a new world system of sovereign national states—states that implement national banking and create the kind of anti-imperial Bretton Woods arrangements that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt intended, but did not live to implement.[fn_7] That system can be created through an initial, powerful combination of four nations—China, Russia, India, and the United States—a combination capable of squeezing out the British system. What the four have in common, in varying degrees, is a history of orientation towards physical economics, rather than toward accepting monetary price as a measure of value. Lyndon LaRouche was aware of this affinity when he formulated the Four Powers solution in a May 26, 2007 presentation.[fn_8]

EIRNS

Lyndon LaRouche (left), “Silk Road Lady” Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and Presidential Advisor Sergei Glazyev (right) in Moscow. LaRouche spoke before the Duma EconomicAffairs Committee on June 29, 2001.

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The history of the United States embodies a long struggle between advocates of physical economics to serve the common good, on the one hand (Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Friedrich List (both a German and an American), Henry C. Carey, Abraham Lincoln, Elbridge Gerry Spaulding, and Franklin Roosevelt, among others), and on the other, British agents and agents of influence, including Hamilton’s assassin Aaron Burr, and several U.S. presidents, including such pro-slavery presidents as Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan. The enormous growing strength of the United States since its inception, despite setbacks, continued until the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963, when the descent into insanity in both domestic and international policy began, and increased at an increasing rate.

In China, since the death of Mao Zedong, Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy has come to command respect among economists, and Lyndon LaRouche is well received. In post-Soviet Russia, LaRouche is recognized as a leading, or the leading economist opposing the British; LaRouche collaborated with Russian economists beginning in 1994. India’s post-colonial history has included socialist impulses inspired by the Soviet system and the direct collaboration between Indira Gandhi and Lyndon and Helga LaRouche. The LaRouches have had the long view. The Four Power Agreement is not a new form of geopolitics. Rather, it reflects a difference in the concept of the human being.

In the United States today we have—for a change—a President who is not a creature of the British system. It is an opportunity not to be missed. A Four Power Agreement is not only necessary. It is also thus possible.

To get there, we could take inspiration from the “can do” spirit of Wole Soyinka, the famous Nigerian poet and playwright. In February of this year, at age 84, he spoke at the inauguration of the Lagos-Ibadan segment of the Nigerian Speedline standard gauge railway, which took place on land he said had once been his hunting grounds. He very much approved of the new rail line and said, to applause: “One of these days, from this very platform, a rocket will go to the next planet.”

[fn_1]. The authors gratefully acknowledge the help of Mark Paul Bender in tracking infrastructure developments in Africa. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. Initially, passenger and freight transport may both run on the same tracks, even though freight rail speeds are much slower. At bypass points, freight trains can let passenger trains go by. Container freight cars can also be included in passenger trains, but with some loss of speed. Some segments will have double rails for concurrent travel in both directions; elsewhere, single rails will have to suffice—for now.

Although it is much less expensive to power trains via electric lines alongside, the initial expense of laying on electric power over the long distances is great, and diesel engines will be used for the time being in most cases. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. A summary of some of the railway planning history, leading to AIHSRN, has been published by Cziranák Ráhel in her 2017 article on the website of the Pallas Athene Geopolitical Research Institute, titled “Prospects for African Railway Development in the Light of China’s Engagement.” The article is posted in Hungarian, but an option to machine-translate is provided.

Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa by Hussein Askary and Jason Ross (Schiller Institute, 2017) provides a broader scope of African transport history and current developments at the time of writing, in especially its Introduction and Chapter 7. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4]. The meeting in Nairobi on April 10-11 released a working paper that gave highest priority to three projects: Kenya and Uganda in the East (Mombasa-Nairobi-Kampala), South Africa-Botswana in the South (Durban-Pretoria-Gaborone), and Côte d’Ivoire-Burkina Faso in the West (Abidjan-Ouagadougou). It provides extensive, Africa-wide data as a basis for prioritization of these and other projects. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5]. For example, “Why Accusations Against China for ‘Debtbook Diplomacy’ Are a Hoax,” by Hussein Askary and Jason Ross, in EIR Sept. 7, 2018 and “Philippine Journalist Refutes the ‘Debt Trap’ Story,” EIR Daily Alert, Sept. 30, 2018. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6]. Spaulding’s book is reviewed in two parts in EIR, April 12 and April 19, 2019, under the title, “What Is America’s National Credit? Can We Use It for Real Economic Growth?” by Paul Gallagher. [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7]. Roosevelt’s fights with Churchill during World War II on the subject of empire are recorded by an eyewitness, his son and intermittent aide-de-camp, Elliott, in Elliott’s 1946 book, As He Saw It. He records, for example, one of Roosevelt’s August 1941 meetings with Churchill: “Churchill . . . brandished a stubby forefinger under Father’s nose. ‘Mr. President,’ he cried, ‘I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that . . . we know that you constitute our only hope. And’—his voice sank dramatically—‘you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.’ Churchill admitted, in that moment, . . . that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, . . . and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.” (pp. 41-42) And there is much more. Elliott wrote the book after his father’s policies had been reversed and suppressed by his successor, the British-steered President Harry Truman. [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8]. His Four Powers presentation of this date is also excerpted in a video titled, “The Four Powers Solution and The Eurasian Land-Bridge” (Dec. 2, 2009), which includes its implications for Africa. [back to text for fn_8]

CALIFORNIA BELT & ROAD FORUM

An Historic Opportunity for the USA

by Daniel Platt and Helga Zepp-LaRouche

EIRNS/Lex Pike

Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressing the Belt & Road Forum in Glendale California, by pre-recorded video, on June 15, 2019.

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In the midst of a flare-up of tensions between the United States and China, sparked by the Anglo-American establishment’s fierce commitment to drive a wedge between the two nations, the Schiller Institute and the Consulate of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles co-sponsored a forum in Glendale, California on June 15, titled “China’s Belt and Road Initiative—A Historic Opportunity for the USA,” to promote the idea of cooperation in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed the forum by pre-recorded video. We present here an edited transcript of her address, followed by a report on the forum.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I’m very happy to talk to you, because I think that the relationship between the United States and China, for the future of humanity, is the most important question. And I’m absolutely sure, based on my experience with people from both countries, that the people have no problem with each other, especially once they get to know their respective cultures.

But as people are painfully aware, in the recent period, there has been in the United States a quite nasty campaign against China: Confucius Institutes, Chinese students, Chinese scientists have been treated as being not welcome. And many think tanks and even security papers have targetted China as a systemic competitor, or even as an adversary.

This is very dangerous. If the United States and China end up in the so-called “Thucydides trap,” meaning that the rising power is regarded as a threat by the up-to-now dominant power, it will lead to war, and probably the final catastrophe for all of mankind.

Why is this all of a sudden happening?

Well, since it started its opening up and reform policy, China has accomplished the most incredible economic miracle in all of human history. The Belt and Road Initiative has not only transformed China, but now China is offering its very successful approach to other developing countries. I was very excited, just recently, when President Xi Jinping extended an offer to Brazil to join in development and research regarding the far side of the Moon—which for me, is the absolute proof that China is sharing even its most advanced technologies with developing countries. For the developing sector, this cooperation with China has really brought an incredible hope that, for the first time, these countries can overcome underdevelopment and poverty.

Why Be Upset About the BRI?

The United States and Europe should not be upset about the BRI, because they could have done the same thing. Why did the United States and Europe not develop Africa, Latin America, and most of the Asian countries?

Now there is an opportunity to remedy that, by not only cooperating with the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa, in Asia, even in Europe and Latin America, but emphatically to take the approach of the President of Panama, Juan Carlos Varela, who said that Panama will cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, while emphatically inviting the United States to be part of it. I think the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, said something similar very recently.

We want to encourage a whole chorus of countries, around the world, to issue the same message: We want to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, and we emphatically insist that the United States should be part of it. I think that otherwise a solution to the urgent problems of the world will not be found. There are many urgent problems, not only the U.S.-China trade war, which has made people very upset in China, but also, as Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out at the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the model of globalization is presently deteriorating.

So, we hope that at the upcoming G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan later this month, the Presidents of the United States, Russia, China, and the Prime Minister of India, will decide to implement a new credit system—a New Bretton Woods system—because it is urgent to avoid the danger of a coming financial crash of the Western financial system. If a decision is made to implement a new system, then other countries could rapidly join.

And I think we are at such an historical epoch, in which we can now envision the development of a completely new potential of civilization. We should look at what mankind can and will have to achieve 100 years from now: In 100 years, we will have, hopefully, commercial fusion energy that will give us energy security, and with fusion torch technology, we will be able to “create” new raw materials, by separating waste into its constituent isotopes and, by putting them together again, to create new resources. One of the main reasons for tensions—shortages of energy and raw materials— will be solved.

In 100 years from now, we will also have international cooperation in the colonization of space and the beginning of interstellar space travel. I think a recent example of such international cooperation is the first imaging of a black hole, which required the tightly coordinated joint effort of radio telescopes in eight different countries, spanning the entire globe, from Spain, to Chile, to the United States, to the Antarctic, and to other countries. That accomplishment also really showed not only that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is proven correct, but that we have to make new breakthroughs in our knowledge of the laws of the universe, new physics, and that can only be done through international cooperation.

So, I think if we focus on that, and the common aims of mankind, then the beautiful vision of President Xi Jinping, to have a shared community for the future of the one mankind, can become a reality.

Thank you!

EIRNS/Lex Pike

Schiller Institute and Chinese Consulate staff. Daniel Platt is at far left.

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Daniel Platt’s Report on the Conference

June 23—Among the eminent personalities who took part in the forum were the consuls general of Kenya and Belgium, as well as consular officials from Armenia and Malaysia, and a large delegation from the consulate of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

As is traditional at Schiller Institute events, music was first on the program, this time a movement from the Partita in E minor for unaccompanied violin by J.S. Bach, performed by a student from the Los Angeles County High School of the Arts.

Schiller Institute founder and chairperson Helga Zepp-LaRouche, followed the music, via a pre-prepared video, greeting the attendees and provided a strategic context for the meeting.

Shi Yuanqiang

Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche was followed by Shi Yuanqiang, Deputy Consul General for the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles. Shi provided a very thorough explication of the goals and methodology of the BRI, stressing that there is extensive consultation between China and the many, many other participating nations, and that all parties participate as equals and share in the benefits. He provided examples of the projects being built with Chinese collaboration in Africa and Central Asia, and elaborated on President Xi Jinping’s vision of a “Community of Common Destiny,” a mutually beneficial, win-win relationship among nations.

At the end of his speech, Shi departed from his notes and became more animated as he addressed the tensions in China’s relationship with the United States, referring numerous times to Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks. He highlighted the good relations between the Chinese and American people, including the large number of American tourists going to China and the large number of Chinese students studying in U.S. universities, emphasizing that there was a place at the table for the United States.

U.S.-China Forum

Following Shi’s presentation, there were remarks by Richard Chen, a board member of the U.S.-China Forum, who had acted as an interpreter for Chairman Deng Xiaoping during his historic visit to the United States in 1979. Chen said that the two great accomplishments of the United States after World War II were the establishment of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, comparing China’s BRI and current role with respect to the developing nations to the Marshall Plan.

Addressing two BRI projects that have been criticized by BRI detractors as failures—the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport in Sri Lanka and the proposed East Coast Rail Link in Malaysia—Chen said that China is learning from these two projects that are exceptions to the otherwise stunning success of the BRI, and that the failures were due to issues internal to Sri Lanka and Malaysia, not China.

EIRNS/Lex Pike

Daniel Platt displays a map of three projected Eurasian and African transportation and development corridors, first presented by associates of Lyndon LaRouche in 1992.

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Concluding Remarks and Discussion

Schiller Institute representative Daniel Platt illustrated his concluding presentation with two historic paintings of Americans and Chinese fighting their respective battles against British colonialism during the American Revolution and the Opium Wars. Platt asserted that the methodology of the British Empire, typified by the “zero-sum game” approach of geopolitics, is an “article of faith” for today’s neoconservative movement. To this he contrasted President Xi’s concept of “win-win” and Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s vision of humanity entering adulthood. He discussed the historical parallels between the United States and China—Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s embrace of the economic conceptions of Abraham Lincoln and their shared approach to infrastructure development.

Platt then reviewed the history of the proposals made by Lyndon LaRouche, beginning with LaRouche’s 1988 Kempinski Hotel address in Berlin and the early plans for the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and concluded with a map of the World Land-Bridge and a discussion of the Bering Strait Tunnel proposal.

A lively discussion session followed the presentations. The PRC Deputy Consul General was very happy to be addressing a supportive American audience. Questions were asked about how to get the United States to join the BRI; China’s relationship to the Philippines; why the focus of the BRI was on railways instead of air travel; the cost of the BRI; how to use the BRI to stop the genocide in Yemen; how to involve libraries in promoting the BRI; and whether China had asked or told the United States before it launched the BRI. On this last question, the Consul General of Belgium remarked from the floor that there were no secrets: that Europe as a bloc was consulting with the BRI via the EU.

The PRC delegation was happy about the collaboration with the Schiller Institute, and more such meetings to educate the American public are expected to follow.

News coverage of the forum appeared in a short posting in ChinaDaily USA’s website on June 18 and also on the Chinese-language website, chinesenewsusa.com, which published a longer story on the forum, including pictures of the speakers and the audience.

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Leading Italian Senator Heads International Delegation to Chinese Exposition

by Claudio Celani

EIRNS/Claudio Celani

Italian Senator Raffaele Fantetti at the opening ceremony of the Jiujiang International Famous Tea and Spring Expo 2019.

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June 15—As part of China’s opening to the world and in the framework of its Belt and Road Initiative, one of China’s most famous and ancient tea-producing regions organized the first Jiujiang International Famous Tea and Spring Expo 2019, held in Jiujiang, in Jiangxi province, May 29-31, celebrating the world of tea and the importance of water, two elements of pride for the city and for China. Senator Raffaele Fantetti, Secretary of the Italian Senate Budget Committee, was invited to head the international delegation, a testimony to the newly forged Italy-China partnership for the Belt and Road Initiative.

Sen. Fantetti emphasized the leading role of Italy in his speech to the opening session of the event, saying:

The last time I was here in China, about a month ago, I took part in the very successful Second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing attended by Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and I was pleased to observe that Italy was the first and only G7 country to sign onto the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. We sincerely believe this to be a program of mutual benefit to foster deeper cooperation along better connected East-West corridors.

Italy and China have shared a long tradition in such matters, going back to the time of Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci.

Foreign delegation with the conference staff.

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Just as President Xi said during his visit to Rome in March, China and Italy are both great examples of Eastern and Western civilizations: both have made solid contributions to the development of mankind and have played crucial roles in linking the Eurasian continent. Since the establishment of bilateral ties in 1970, China and Italy have intensified their relations in all fields. This became even more important in 2004, when a comprehensive strategic partnership was established, paving the way for intensified cooperation. Last year Task Force China was launched within the Italian Ministry for Economic Development, with the aim of elaborating a systemic and comprehensive approach for bilateral cooperation. The bilateral trade between the two countries reached almost $50 billion in 2017 and has been increasing since then.

Fantetti’s presentation followed that of Xie Xiping, the mayor of Jiujiang, who welcomed the 700 guests. The next speakers were the International Tea Federation president, Jan Gibbs and the President of the China International Tea Culture Institute, Hou Guofu.

EIRNS/Claudio Celani

Looking out from the entrance to the Jiujiang International Famous Tea and Spring Expo 2019.

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After the speeches there was a stunningly beautiful opening ceremony with music, dance and poetry, with four choirs, one with children. All the singers had well-trained voices, what we call an “operatic choir.” Experts know that it is generally difficult to find enough voices to build just one such choir, and therefore can appreciate what an effort was made in building four!

The opening ceremony was preceded by a light show on the evening of May 29, followed by an experts’ forum in the Peach Garden on Mount Lu (Mount Lushan), a UNESCO World Heritage site, on the afternoon of May 30.

For the Chinese, tea is a cultural experience, similar in some respects to the wine culture in the West. As with wine, tea is not just a beverage, but a cultural, social and aesthetic experience. As with wine, tea taste must be developed in order to appreciate the complexity of its flavors, due to varied cultivation regions and production methods.

We were introduced to Chinese tea culture during innumerable tastings at and around the Expo, helped by the advice of experts in our delegation. We were introduced to and grew to appreciate many of the most famous of Jiujiang teas. On the last day of our stay, we visited a tea plantation and tasted Lushan Cloud Misty Tea, named for the mists that cover the mountain’s verdant slopes.

Mount Lu, which means “a lot of water” in Chinese, has cloud cover for an average of 200 days a year. This provides tea plants a unique constant humidity. The mountain also has three of the most famous springs in China. It has a rich history and has been the preferred summer residence, hermitage, and place of exile of artists, as well as religious and political figures. One famous person celebrated on Mount Lu is the poet Bai Juyi, whose poem “Peach Blossom in Dalin Temple” is engraved in stone. Mount Lu has a modern cable car to serve the growing tourist traffic.

Situated on the southern shore of the Yangtse River, Jiujiang is surrounded by natural and artificial freshwater lakes. The city is not as large as Shanghai or Beijing, but the metropolitan area has 4.8 million inhabitants, large by European standards. It has grown from being a purely agricultural region into a vibrant agro-industrial center and tourist attraction. Beyond agriculture and tourism, Jiujiang features a logistics industry and five main manufacturing sectors: electronics, new non-metallic materials, energy-saving electric appliances, food processing, and energy. Traditional industries are petroleum, chemical, steel, and light textile.

The International Famous Tea and Spring Expo was co-hosted by the Jiujiang Municipal People’s Government, the China International Tea Culture Institute, the China Forestry Group, and the China Tea Science Society, and was co-organized by GBTimes.

IV. LaRouche’s Method of Forecasting

First published by EIR

September 7, 2007

SCIENCE VS. STATISTICS

When Fate Hangs on a Forecast

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The actual, strategic purpose and function of competent economic forecasting, is not to attempt to predict what will happen, but to cause it to happen.

Today’s subject is a field of combat in which I have developed certain unique skills, skills in that branch of strategic intelligence called long-range forecasting. This is not merely foreseeing, passively, what might be likely to happen; it is about crafting policies of the type which I am presenting, with the intention to bring about an urgently needed action which might rescue us from a currently onrushing, global financial disaster, an oncoming disaster which has now entered its terminal phase.

It is not through bare perception that we might calculate what willful power lies, hidden from perception, between those mere dots upon the screen of our senses. It is by our acting upon the universe, to force its secrets to manifest themselves, not merely as perception, but manifest themselves as the higher authority of the mind which must test the unseen presence and suspected intentions of whatever willful power lies behind that action which might be otherwise only perceived.

These unseen powers must be forced, thus, to reveal themselves. They must be forced to reveal not only the efficient presence hidden behind the footprints we call perceptions. We must test the suspected willful intentions of those powers, tested intentions which true science knows as universal principles, as such principles were known as dynamis to the Pythagoreans, or modern dynamics of Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, and Bernhard Riemann. From the knowledge which can be gained by us only in this way, we obtain the means by which man and woman made in the likeness of the Creator, are enabled to act more or less efficiently according to the manner which fulfils our mortal destiny, in a manner uniquely assigned to us by Him.[fn_1]

On this account, the fact is, that, since the time, during 1953, I settled upon Bernhard Riemann’s method of physical geometry, no economic forecast I have ever delivered, has failed; and, only by exception has that forecast assumed the form of what might have appeared, mistakenly, by some, to have been what is usually regarded as merely a prediction.

My first such forecast was short-term, crafted in the Summer and early Autumn of 1956, a forecast in which I foresaw the worst recession since the immediate post-war period, as probably scheduled to erupt before Spring 1957; it came on time, and lasted, pretty much as long as the accompanying agony of the young of the “white-collar” Baby-Boomer households, an agony which it produced, until about the time of the November 1960 general election.[fn_2]

My June-July 1987 forecast of a highly probable stock-market crisis for early October 1987, is notable for what some erring observers would consider to be a prediction, rather than what it was, what I define, categorically, as a forecast.

Similarly, during the time of the 2000 Democratic Presidential campaign, I had forecast the development of a real-estate crisis within Loudoun County, Virginia; numerous among those who rejected that forecast were led by that error of theirs into making some very serious business or related mistakes, mistakes which will worry them now.[fn_3] As in Gottfried Leibniz’s uniquely original discovery of the calculus, all competent forecasting, even when it seems to point to a short-term prospect, is intrinsically the fruit of a method of long-term forecasting. As I shall indicate in the course of this report, there are scientific reasons why this is necessarily so.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche’s famous “Triple Curve: A Typical Collapse Function”: The top curve is a hyperbolic, self-feeding growth of financial aggregates; the second curve is the monetary expansion, by Treasuries and Central Banks and so forth, which feeds the money-flow in, to help pump up the growth of the financial bubble. The bottom curve shows the accelerating decline in real physical output and consumption, in terms of productive potential per capita and per square kilometer. Here, LaRouche explains the Triple Curve at a conference in 1998.

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Thus, my outstanding forecasts, from the late 1950s onward, until my Democratic Prolegomena, have been relatively long-ranging. Thus, you have my major, long-range, now realized forecasts, from 1959-1960 onward, of that break in the Bretton Woods system, which occurred in mid-1971. You have, also, the forecast, which I had developed in late 1995, but first published in January 1996 as a Presidential campaign statement, featuring what is known as my “Triple Curve.” We must focus our attentions on the misguided personal motives of those who have argued, some loud and long, that I was “wrong” in any of these forecasts. All forecasts made by me then, and since, have been on the mark in respect to what I had actually stated, that in very carefully crafted terms on such occasions. The “Triple Curve” expresses, in appropriate symbolic forms, the dominant features of both the U.S. and world markets, combined, since January 1996 up to the present moment.[fn_4]

The point is, that I had come to understand, more and more, and ever more clearly, how modern history works, and, what happens to societies which brush aside the kinds of strategic forewarning produced by the method which I have employed.

Considering the presently ongoing global financial crisis, the behavior of those who have sought to deprecate those forecasts, now becomes, clinically, most interesting; in most among the studied cases, the reason they rejected my forecast, is that they were, more or less hell-bent on continuing stubbornly in a wrong direction, and my forecast spoiled the pleasure of their obsessive search for pleasure in their own dream-world’s foolish, and often fanatical fantasies.

Right now, understanding the validity of my forecasts, and the method which my forecasts have correctly expressed, is pretty much a life-or-death matter for our own and the world’s economy. On that account, my just recently issued Prolegomena for a Democratic Party campaign platform, also provides a valuable illustration of the proper crafting and use of my forecasting method.[fn_5]

As for what have been often foolishly self-described by a silly press as my usually anonymous “critics,” every interval of U.S. economic history under Alan Greenspan’s tenure, has been one successive interval of ruin of our economy, after another, during all of which, the U.S. physical economy was ratcheting down, down, down. Those who rejected my forecasts usually had their own peculiar reasons, but, looking back, over the record of the recent decade and longer, those reasons were always of a similar character to the motives of the alcoholic, compulsive gambler, or political figure behind the wheel, who, like President George W. Bush, Jr., snarls, “I’m driving!”[fn_6]

U.S. Treasury

President Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (shown here in 1999) led a Herculean, and temporarily successful bailout of the crisis-stricken U.S. financial system, following the LTCM blowout.

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Warning: Ideology at Work!

Since the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis of August-October 1998, the most memorable example of a failed forecast has continued to be that caused by the prize-winning methods of Myron Scholes and his associates. That really took the prize, as the saying goes! At that time, President Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin led the temporarily successful bail-out of a crisis-struck U.S. financial system. The effort was considered Herculean, and perhaps justly so; but, although the patient survived, temporarily, none of the causes for the LTCM crisis were treated, and, therefore, the crisis of 1998 has returned in a much more resistant strain, as the global monetary-financial breakdown-crisis of today.

The characteristics of the methods used to cause that crisis then, have been continued, in all essentials, by Scholes and others since, still today.

The exotic methods crafted and employed by Scholes and his like, have been, in a certain sense, actually a leading contributing cause of the present lurch to the brink of a general, chain-reaction form of global monetary-financial breakdown-crisis. It is time to get the mathematical witch-doctors off the case, while the patient might still be saved.

As I have reported in earlier publications, such as the most recently published Prolegomena,[fn_7] the issue posed by the repeated systemic failures of the methods of Scholes et al., must be traced to their origins in the dispute between Gottfried Leibniz, on the one side, and René Descartes and John Locke, representing the opposing camp. The principled root of that issue of method then, as now, is the contrast between the dynamic methods of Leibniz (and also his follower, Bernhard Riemann) and the mechanistic-statistical methods of Descartes.

Cartesian method is contemplation of what is essentially mechanical action among apparently discrete objects floating in what is wrongly presumed to be that otherwise empty Euclidean space where percussive interactions are presumed to occur. The Cartesian approach to analysis of the motions among such particles is guided, essentially, by the method of a famous medieval irrationalist, William of Ockham, whose methods were revived at the direction of the influential modern Venetian Paolo Sarpi. The application of the neo-Ockhamite empiricist method of Sarpi and his lackey Galileo Galilei, is the principle otherwise associated with games of chance, such as casting of dice, the statistical method.

The risk this poses for the forecaster using modern neo-Cartesian methods, is that physical space-time, the actual space-time which we and our planet inhabit, is not Cartesian, but Riemannian. This includes the physical space-time which real economies inhabit.

In real-life physical space-time, action is governed by universal physical principles, such as Johannes Kepler’s uniquely original discovery of the harmonic principle of gravitation among the planets of the Solar system. This action occurs within a physical space-time which is bounded by the role of those principles. The general method required for such work, is Riemannian.

Competent forecasting obliges the forecaster to consider the boundary-conditions characteristic of the kind of processes being considered. Thus, the Cartesian or neo-Cartesian projects statistical forms of mechanical action confined within the bounds of gambling expert Galileo’s space-time. Since the heredity of the Cartesian method is that of Sarpi’s empiricism, no principled boundary condition is taken into account. For Descartes and his devotees, the future is the indefinite projection of the present. In the Riemannian approach, we start from the principled definition of the discovered boundary conditions, and turn our attention, then, to the “object” whose behavior is determined, in the manner Riemann defined the function of a sonic shock-wave, by the manner in which it is approaching that boundary condition.

In the modern expression of the Cartesian method, as applied to economics, the subject is the interaction of objects defined by their monetary or analogous qualities. The statistical method used becomes, in one disguise or another, something akin to the obscenely wild-eyed methods of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and virtual idiot-savant von Neumann’s outrightly lunatic The Computer and the Brain.[fn_8]

In real economies, the boundaries are physical, not simply monetary. The physical acts of production and consumption, together with the physical function of the infrastructure within which these acts occur, define boundary conditions. To the extent that the approach echoed by Scholes et al. is employed, the unscheduled boundary condition which their forecasting encounters, produces a reaction of such forms as a Weimar, Germany of 1923 hyperinflation like that at the beginnings of a take-off right now, and an ensuing general physical breakdown of that actual economy to which the ivory-tower variety of mathematical forecaster is, predominantly, indifferent.

Where Do We Go Now?

My July 25th LaRouche PAC webcast coincided with a point in history, at which we, in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, have entered the zone of a boundary condition, where we are at the verge of passing into the interior of a certain kind of “new world,” a new physical phase-space. We live in a society, most notably in the Americas and Europe, which has passed about four decades in moving away from a time when increase of the physical productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer, gave guidance to the combination of net economic growth and improved conditions of life. The ultimately ruinous habits acquired over the course of those recent four decades and more, since the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, have now ruined us.

Since the riotous events of 1968, within Europe and the Americas, the emerging adult generations have been a leading factor within the population generally, for a sharp reversal in direction, into the direction of trying to get more money, while actually earning less, these days, even much less. That inclination to get money persists, but the currently reigning body of opinion has little desire to actually earn income by contributing directly or indirectly to effecting that increase of real, physical wealth per capita and per square-kilometer, for society as a whole, as by technological and scientific progress in farming and manufacturing, and building up, contrary to those marginal Laputan minds of the utilitarian schools, the net improvements in conditions of basic economic infrastructure, a class of improvements upon which production of wealth depends absolutely.

Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann represent the modern form of the Cartesian or statistical method, which has been counterposed to Riemannian economics. Their “obscenely wild- eyed methods” are touted in books such as these.

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During these past four decades and more, since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, we have changed the physical characteristics of the U.S. economy, with presently disastrous effects. We have passed over, from being the world’s leading physical economy, to what is called a “post-industrial” economy, within what is called a “globalized” world. By exporting the production of the goods we used to produce, and buying those goods from so-called “cheap labor” markets abroad, we actually earn less and less, and in approximately that proportion; and, therefore, we soon reach a point at which we subsist on an increasing portion of our consumption for which we are less and less inclined, and less and less able to pay. So, many, like the current President of our U.S.A., have actually entered that sort of paradise which Jonathan Swift portrayed as the floating island encountered in Lemuel Gulliver’s travel to the island of Laputa.

A prime example of the way in which that attitude has contributed to bankrupting the present U.S. financial-monetary system today, is the case of the role of Felix Rohatyn. Rohatyn is an exemplar of a type of many similar freebooters who insist that satisfying their peculiarly nasty and usurious form of greed at public expense, must be the only means by which some of the capital improvements of society will be met, doing this always in a way which leaves the country on which they prey, such as our own, poorer after that, than before. (Or, to make a city appear richer, as under a former tyrant of the Dominican Republic, by driving out its poor.)[fn_9] The “hedge funds,” whose practices should have been forbidden as criminal activities, express this in the extreme, as the Cayman Islands’ version of a modern Caribbean pirate addressing his next corporate victim for takeover (“Would you please walk my plank, so that I don’t have to kill you?”).

The search for an understanding of how we did this terrible thing to our nation and ourselves, should lead us to the subject of the principles by which the great mass of populations of nations, or empires, are misruled, again, and again, then, as now, by a tyrannical few. This is also the subject of the indispensable role of forecasting, instead of predicting, in the design of policies to guide successful designs for political-economic systems. The two subjects are reverse sides of the same coin: to lack the power to know efficient universal principles, such as those of physical economy, is to be deprived of the efficient power to rule oneself under the conditions of crisis prevalent today.

So, you, like our nation, were swindled in the name of our people’s own folly in the believing, by so many among us, in “free trade.” By believing in “free trade,” you abandoned the right, and power to forecast rationally, and became, thus, a true believer in what you imagined to be the witch’s and croupier’s power to predict. By adopting orientations such as a drift into “out-sourcing” and “globalization,” we have not only lost productive employment within the U.S.A., but have been even hysterical in our determination to continue such economically suicidal national behavior.

To get directly to the foundations of that problem, I state the exemplary issue at hand, by stating it, again, in the terms of one of my favorite topics, the hallowed, Classical case of the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.

The Tyranny of Ignorance

Tragedy is the use of a rope of culture by which the leaders and others of a society hang themselves. The circumstances, within the U.S.A., among others, today, which would lead a society to continue to accept the methods employed by LTCM’s Scholes to produce the 1998 crisis, once again, still today, illustrate what I point to as an ideological “rope of culture” with which that culture typically submits to a built-in cultural obligation to hang itself.

For such a tragedy, there is only one reliable remedy: destroy the rope. That is the implication of true strategy, the true essence of forecasting.

Following the Nazi seizure of Paris in June 1940, Hitler (dressed in white) visited the tomb at Les Invalides of his hero Napoleon. Like Hitler and Napoleon, Dick Cheney ranks among the worst monsters in modern history since the Inquisitor Torquemada.

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The evil Zeus represented an oligarchical society, in which Zeus was—as President George W. Bush, Jr. claims for himself—the bearer of the loutish title of “The Decider.” During a certain time in Germany, a “Decider” was called “Der Führer.” That convergence of Bush’s and Hitler’s idea of leadership is no exaggeration; similarly, the members of Bush’s “Olympus,” the so-called Federalist Society followers of the Carl Schmitt whose argument was used to appoint Hitler to the rank of dictator, insist on a Presidential authority which is no different, under law, than the authorities, copied from Schmitt, which Bush has claimed for himself! Is there really any difference between Bush’s idea of his own and Vice-President Dick Cheney’s shared authority over what have appeared to be, so often, the helpless sheep of our Congress, and the parallel case of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels’ and Hitler’s reliance on a humbled German people’s respect for the practice of Gleichschaltung?[fn_10]

The comparison of the Bush-Cheney regime to that of Hitler, is, admittedly, strong stuff, but, from the history of statecraft, it is not merely a matter of comparison, but also a necessary one. There are many comparable cases of similar tyrants. Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada is not only the worst such monster in modern European history, until Vice-President Cheney, but is the model used for the design of dictators Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon’s admirer Adolf Hitler. The tyrant William of Orange is also one of these types; a similar case is that of lackey Jeremy Bentham’s master, Lord Shelburne, who was hated, but also feared, who ruled usually from behind and above the scene, all that in approximately the degree he was often hated at a safely respectable distance. Such tyrannical creatures, such as loutish George W. Bush, Jr., rule by buffoonery and myth, not as President Franklin Roosevelt led, according to the dignified principle of our constitutional law.

To see the innards of the relevant case of the George W. Bush, Jr. Presidency, look to what was called “the oligarchical model,” the model expressed by the gods of Olympus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.

That said, now look back, for comparison, to Aeschylus’ portrait of the brutish Olympian Zeus. What is the principle of law expressed by Prometheus Bound? Ask the question: did Zeus believe that man’s knowledgeable use of power were feasible? Or, did that Zeus object to man’s use of fire precisely because he believed it was feasible—i.e., a universally lawful principle of man’s specific nature? In fact, as all real-life adherents of the oligarchical principle of tyranny have suppressed the natural powers of the greater mass of humanity, as with imperial Rome’s persistent attempts, over many generations, at genocide against Christians, they did so precisely because those powers they sought to uproot thus, were the means by which human beings distinguish themselves from creatures in the likeness of cattle.

“The Emperor Tiberius’ virtual son-in-law, Pontius Pilate, employed his special authority as surrogate in wielding of law for the Emperor himself, to order the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth,” LaRouche writes. Jesus was feared by the Roman Imperial authorities “as the deadliest of its adversaries from within that region. . . .” In Rembrandt’s etching, “Christ Presented to the People” (“Ecce Homo”), Pilate (wearing a turban) is the ultimate Sophist, leaving it up to the mob to decide whether Jesus, or the thief Barabbas should be crucified.

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Take, as an illustration of the principled issue involved, the case of one of the Federalist Society types sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court today, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. What is Scalia’s stated notion of the nature of law? He has been emphatic; his view, as he has described it, is that of what is named, and rightly derided as “dictionary nominalism,” with the added qualification that fresh revisions of the dictionary, like those of Wikipedia, are formulated, and freely revised without regard to any lawful principle, even to simple truth, or to the matter of content. Scalia is thus in the tradition of Paolo Sarpi’s Liberalism, and a rather radical form of Liberalism at that. It is the “fire” of natural law which Scalia identifies as the principle he, like Federalist Society icon Carl Schmitt before him, is attempting to stamp out. Scalia, like Schmitt, has sought, thus, to stamp out specifically human nature, as both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney also echo Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt.

So, the Roman Emperor Tiberius’ virtual son-in-law, Pontius Pilate, employed his special authority as surrogate in wielding of law for the Emperor himself, to order the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was feared by the Tiberius resident on the Mithraic shrine of Capri, as what the Roman Imperial authority considered as the deadliest of its adversaries from within that region; hence, the Roman Empire of Tiberius crucified Jesus as “The King of the Jews,” as the Emperor Nero did to Peter later.

What is natural law? What is the connection between the concept of natural law and competent modes of economic forecasting? How should a competent modern forecaster view and treat the factor of the religious beliefs of Jesus and his Apostles, especially John and Paul? How are these values expressed in the science of forecasting?

Whether You Like It, or Not

All reasonable law, in any society, is derived from the notion of the quality of immortality which, examined from the standpoint of rigorous experimental method, is specific only to man among all species of ostensibly animal life. Hence, whether you like this news, or not, mankind’s nature requires of us, that, naturally, we must be self-governed by discovery of natural law, as Plato typifies the ancient root of modern practice of natural law.

clipart.com

The creative powers of the individual human mind can be found in the expression of the ontological infinitesimal of Kepler’s discovery of the planetary orbits; or in Bach’s musical compositions; or in great poetry, such as Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

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On this account, it is impossible to separate the notion of decent law by society from natural law as I identify its crucial feature here and now.

Like a musical composition by Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, the relationship of the mortal individual to past and future generations, up and down, from bass to soprano, is a performance of the composition of humanity as a whole, is the domain of an Idea, with no acknowledgment of the prototypical ideologue of Romanticism’s modern fascist form of state, G.W.F. Hegel.[fn_11] Hegel and his ilk thrown thus summarily aside, how must a lawful order in society be composed? Thus, one should ask: What generates the music?

In the method of J.S. Bach, of Beethoven, and of Wolfgang Mozart from the beginning of his Sunday visits to Gottfried van Swieten’s salon, the Bach choral work, such as the smaller motets and the great Passions and Mass, the essence of any competent composition and its performance is the vocal chest of voices performing within the external and internal bounds of the Florentine bel canto chest of voices pitched at C=256.[fn_12] As in physical science in the Pythagorean-Platonic and Kepler-Fermat-Leibniz-Riemann tradition, the musical domain is composed of a chest of singing voices (as also the instruments which mimic the vocal domain), in which counterpoint and development are of the same form as the Riemannian universe, such that development is expressed by transitions which are effected through the method identified by conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as “performing between the notes.”[fn_13] Between the two media, we have physical science and Classical musical composition from Johann Sebastian Bach onward through Bach’s great students and followers, such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.[fn_14]

The point I am making at this juncture, is that the ontologically definable creative powers of the individual human mind are located in the expression of the ontological infinitesimal of Kepler’s elimination of the notion of quadrature from the concept of the ontological character of the action of the elliptical planetary orbit, and the identical sort of mental action expressed by functions such as performing a great Bachian form of contrapuntal work as between-the-notes, as the Bach concept of the fugue situates this pedagogically. The same appears in great poetry, as, succinctly in John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, or the revolution in perspective discovered by Leonardo da Vinci, or similar accomplishments by Rembrandt van Rijn.

This ability of a discovery of principle, which is unique to the individual human mind, is the ability of the individual member of the human species which separates us, as human, and that absolutely, from the essential characteristics of all beasts. The infinitesimal as defined by Nicholas of Cusa’s correction of the fault in Archimedes’ attempted quadrature of the circle, as by Kepler’s discovery of gravitation, in Fermat’s discovery of least action, in Leibniz’s uniquely original discovery of the calculus, and the genius of the great followers of Bach’s method in composition, express what is otherwise met among living species only in what mankind can do: willfully increase the potential relative population density of our species.

This unique quality of advantage of a species conforming to the definition of man and woman in Genesis 1, is the location of what the curiously brilliant founder of so-called General Semantics implicitly defined as the distinction of man from beast, as mankind’s “time-binding” mode of existence. The distinction lies not in the making of signs and sounds, but of “singing between the notes,” as Cusa, Kepler, Fermat, and Leibniz did with the concept of an ontologically infinitesimal, rather than algebraically infinitesimal, as the expression of the action of universal physical principles in qualitatively changing man’s intrinsic power to exist as man.

It is the transmission of human progress over successive generations, by means of this principle of action unique to the human species, which then serves as the location of what can be competently presented as expressions of natural law.

On this account, our true self-interest as human beings, is not confined to the bestial dimensions of life afforded the individual member of an animal species. Our essential self-interest lies in the outcome of our having lived, the outcome for mankind at large, especially future mankind. Our essential interest therefore lies, also, as the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia prescribes at its outset, in the future of other people’s, and nations’ future, even more than our own.

The essential interest of mankind is the improvement of the human future, and, for that reason, the precious heritages similarly bequeathed from earlier times and places.

The greatest achievement of our republic, on which account we at our best have been, is, as Lafayette proposed, as a beacon of hope for all mankind. We expressed this in our best moments, as in the fruit of the victory bequeathed by President Abraham Lincoln, as by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, by the great productive power we unleashed to inspire men and women of good will throughout much of the world.

Unfortunately, with the successive deaths of President Franklin Roosevelt, and by the President John F. Kennedy who avowed his intention to return the nation to the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, and others, the misleaders in sundry places of relatively great influence have robbed us of our honor and our prosperity. Often, as recently, as the long wars in Indo-China and Southwest Asia should rebuke us, we are like a stinking old man who refuses to change his socks, or his underwear, because he has become accustomed to their aroma.

My duty is to chart a return to such a noble course for our republic, a republic to become again a beacon for all mankind. The course we must chart on that account, is not simply a repeat of the past, but a new leg, never before travelled, in a continuing, eternal journey.

To sum up the crucial lesson of mankind’s known experience:

The greatest evil is the conception of the oligarchical model of society, as depicted by the condemnation of the Olympian Zeus as an essentially satanic being, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. The essentially satanic evil is therefore the notion of zero-technological growth, the notion of Giammaria Ortes as flagrantly plagiarized by Thomas Malthus, or the “Global Warming” hoax of former Vice-President Al Gore. Such people are of a disposition as to bring, again, upon themselves, an outcome like that which Friedrich Schiller described for the Habsburgs’ Netherlands wars, of wars not between men, but as among beasts.

In that respect, man always wills his destiny, whether to prosper in a new journey into the future, or to be doomed, as often in the past, to rot in the tired and tragic swamp of his own stagnation in old, failed ways. The question posed to the citizens of our U.S.A., and also of the world at large, is which destiny will they choose? Will they change their foolish ways within the bounds of the brief, relevant time remaining?

[fn_1]. The greatest challenge in modern science, was Johannes Kepler’s recognition of the underlying principle of dynamics which could be discovered only through going beyond the mere evidence of vision, to include the mind’s faculty of hearing the harmonics which govern the ordering of the Solar system. It was with the work of Riemann that the goal which Kepler intended for his successors was clearly defined for practice. All competent economics today depends upon that notion of universal physical principles. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. The effect on the group dynamics among the parental households of the children born to the “white-collar” branch during, approximately, the 1945-1958 interval, is of crucial importance for understanding the social-economic and related political history of the United States over the entire sweep of the 1945-2007 interval to date. At the high point of its euphoria, prior to the 1957-1958 downturn, the parental community of the “Baby-Boomer” sets was a rather disgusting “We are the wonderful people” outlook, as described in C. Wright Mills’ White Collar (1951) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1957). The harsh economic slap-down, as of executives stockpiled in the $40,000 annual income-range, to hopes for new employment at the $10,000 level, was reflected from parents to child in the form of the rage factor of the “68ers.” [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. Since enormously expanded amounts of Federal money poured into Loudoun and adjoining areas, there was growth in Loudoun County, which was largely at the price of collapse in the states from which the growth of population in Loudoun, for example, flowed. This influx tended to draw attention of Loudoun suburbanites, away from the underlying collapse already in progress. When the net decay outran the sustainable expansion, the net collapse, already in progress, hit. The turning-point in the direction of change was Y2000, when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s Y2K bubble collapsed. Now, seven years later, there is a net collapse of all leading combined factors. This outcome was already inevitable to those who thought in terms of real physical cycles of investment and depletion. “True believers” see only what is right under their noses, and thus tend to overlook the oncoming foot aimed at their posteriors. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4]. I refer to those who duck what my forecast had actually stated, by their own resort to the habituated sophist’s “In other words, what you meant to say was . . .” and, then complained that what they, in fact, had stated, had not come true. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5]. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “The State of Our Union: The End of Our Delusion,” EIR, Aug. 31, 2007. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6]. Now, since the beginning of August 2007, there are some changes in progress. More and more citizens who had clung, earlier, to the hope that I was mistaken, are now reacting as if in the legendary TV advertising clip, “I needed that!” Or, more in the direction of a wistful sigh of relief: “I wish I hadn’t needed that!” [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7]. Op. cit., LaRouche, “Delusion.” [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8]. Morgenstern and von Neumann (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2000); von Neumann (Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2007). [back to text for fn_8]

[fn_9]. Those citizens not wearing shoes were not permitted to enter the capital city, lest they might be seen by talkative modern tourists. [back to text for fn_9]

[fn_10]. As I have recently observed in at least one particular set of persons in Germany, the practice of Gleichschaltung has been passed down, as a cultural heritage, from the habits of the Hitler regime, to some Sophist representatives of the Baby-Boomer generation, thus to be expressed by that next generation as the practice of certain circles to lie in raucously factitious unison. One is left to doubt nothing except a suspicion that such ritual group-lying is accompanied by some exotic variety of organic sexual release. [back to text for fn_10]

[fn_11]. “Genetically,” so-to-speak, the diabolical Tomás de Torquemada begat the idea of the Jacobin Terror, designed the synthetic personality crafted by Joseph de Maistre, as the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte I, the Napoleon from which the passionately inflamed Metternich correspondent (and agent) Hegel extracted the model used to produce a new Bonaparte as the Nietzschean existentialist form of the philosophy of history and the state, which was, in turn, to be incarnated, by successive aid in matters of law, from Savigny and Schmitt, as the dictator, Adolf Hitler. [back to text for fn_11]

[fn_12]. Confirming an implication of my own discoveries, laboratory tests on some great voilins, showed the instruments to have been crafted to C=256, just as the greatest singers from the same generations as my parents’ and my own, based their art on that Florentine bel canto standard: until the existentialist freaks of the (implicitly perverse) Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) imposed their own copy of Nazi Gleichschaltung, as elevated pitch, on the terrorized musical institutions. The strongest among some of the greatest voices of my lifetime testified to me personally and others, that they could survive the new standard imposed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s variety of fascist tyranny on the stage, but the majority of relatively weaker voices could not, thus reducing competent solo performances to a relative handful of super-stars to hold up Italy’s traditional great cultural tradition as long as they could maintain their performing careers. [back to text for fn_12]

[fn_13]. This great artistry has gripped me since I first heard a recorded performance of his conducting while sitting in a U.S. Army replacement depot in India, fresh from northern Burma (Myanmar) in early 1946. What Furtwängler does with that concept, is equivalent for music, of what the “performance” of the Leibnizian infinitesimal becomes in the hands of Bernhard Riemann. [back to text for fn_13]

[fn_14]. Furtwängler’s famous post-war recorded performance of Schubert’s “Great” Ninth Symphony is an outstanding demonstration of what is either wrong, or missed in the conducting of the same work by other notable conductors. The second movement does not fall apart, but retains, at its tempo, the great burst of energy expressed by the last. The similarity lies in the conducted execution of transitions between the notes. Thus, here, in this way, C.P. Snow’s paradox vanishes. [back to text for fn_14]

EDITORIAL

He Questions the Premise of Russiagate? Off With His Head!

by Barbara Boyd

C-SPAN

Roger Stone

---------------------------------------------

June 21—The filing by four Assistant United States Attorneys in the name of the United States on June 20, seeks, once again, to force Roger Stone, or anyone outraged by the circumstances of his case, to shut up, lest Stone be immediately jailed. The triggering episode this time, was Stone’s challenge to the main premise of the entire Russiagate myth—that truthful documents published by WikiLeaks concerning the efforts by the Democratic National Committee to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, and exposing Mrs. Clinton’s craven ties to Wall Street, were the direct result of illegal Russian military hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Stone stands charged with lying to Congress and obstruction of justice concerning the Russiagate hoax. After almost two years of investigations in Congress and through Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Mueller Report demonstrates that there was no conspiracy or collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and other investigators of the mythical conspiracy-and-collusion narrative, tried to pin Stone as the non-existent link between WikiLeaks and the Trump Campaign.

In pursuit of this objective, Stone was called to testify before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and, according to prosecutors, lied about his email correspondence with WikiLeaks and raged at a Mueller witness, Randy Credico, who, according to Stone, had provided information to Stone about the timing of WikiLeaks’ various disclosures. Stone was subjected to several search warrants by the Mueller team, many of his associates were called before Mueller’s Washington, D.C. Grand Jury, and he was arrested unarmed and in his pajamas via a televised, armed SWAT-type assault on his Florida home.

Stone has challenged the search warrants in the case, many of which appear to rely on the premise that the WikiLeaks DNC publications resulted from a Russian military operation. Stone submitted affidavits from former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and computer security expert Peter Clay, demonstrating that it is likely that the WikiLeaks DNC files were accessed internally at the DNC by someone with access to the DNC computer system and provided to WikiLeaks on a thumb drive. This expert forensic analysis is based on the metadata associated with the actual WikiLeaks files.

If there was no Russian military operation that provided the WikiLeaks DNC files, then the entire dangerous and false Russiagate narrative fails, and evidence produced from search warrants based on that falsity must be suppressed. In support of that suppression and other motions, Stone’s attorneys sought unredacted versions of the computer forensics of the DNC computers produced by the NATO-associated, private DNC vendor, CrowdStrike, upon which the intelligence community relied for its assertion of a Russian hack.

No CrowdStrike DNC Forensics? No Problem!

Shockingly, it turns out the United States government does not possess unredacted and final versions of CrowdStrike’s DNC forensics report—upon which it relied in its January 2017 assessment that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta, and then arranged the WikiLeaks publication in order to swing the election to Donald Trump.

According to the prosecutor’s filing seeking a modification of Stone’s conditions of release on bail pending trial, Stone posted on his Instagram account the simple fact that CrowdStrike’s unredacted reports were not available to the United States. Other individuals and journalists who have been disputing the entire fake Russiagate narrative also noted this astounding fact. According to the prosecutors, Stone’s postings and the other news coverage concerning the redacted and incomplete CrowdStrike reports produced to Stone’s defense team and the government, fans the flames of potential prejudice against the prosecutors’ case against Roger Stone.

This contention has absolutely no basis in reality. Stone will face a jury pool in Washington, D.C. that has been pounded by the Russiagate narrative and is extraordinarily anti-Trump and hostile to anyone associated with him. Stone is already under a gag order which bans him from any effective attempt to reverse this prejudice. There is not exactly an onslaught of coverage in the press available to the jury pool about the government’s non-possession of unredacted reports from the DNC’s computer security vendor. Under Stone’s extant gag order, anything Judge Amy Berman Jackson determines to be derogatory or prejudicial to the prosecution, authored by Stone or people she deems to be associated with him, lands Stone in jail pretrial.

The real motivation for this new threat is, in all probability, a damage control effort aimed at Attorney General Bill Barr and an audience outside the Beltway, which has yet to imbibe the Russiagate Kool-Aid.

In addition to the threat to jail Stone, prosecutors were allowed to file an additional opposition to his motion to suppress. In that filing, the prosecutors swear that the indictment of 12 Russian GRU officers for the so-called Russian hack and influence campaign was based on some independent investigation by Mueller that did not rely on CrowdStrike.

Since no one but CrowdStrike ever examined the alleged crime scene at the DNC, and the FBI itself was relying on CrowdStrike’s forensics, it is difficult to ascertain what that investigation might have been. The government’s supplemental filing contains nothing but a conclusory two-sentence assurance that they did something, other than to rely on the discredited DNC computer security vendor. True to form, they aren’t saying what the something was.