Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 46, Number 26, July 5, 2019

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 46, Number 26, July 5, 2019

- I. From the G20 Summit:‘Presidential Diplomacy’ Reemerges

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Trump-Kim Meeting Revives ‘Singapore Spirit’ Demonstrates Potential of Presidential Initiatives

- The Strategic Urgency of Exonerating Lyndon LaRouche by Paul Gallagher

- Voices Against War Escalate Around the World

- LaRouche’s Ideas Presented to Conferences in Ivory Coast and Angola by Stephanie Ezrol

- SCHILLER INSTITUTE REPORT Bringing LaRouche’s America: A Joyous Night of Music and Strategic Discussion

- II. How LaRouche Defeated Imperial Intentions

- Lyndon LaRouche at Work: Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative And the Moon-Mars Mission

- U.S.-China Cooperation with Mexico Is Key to the Migrant Crisis by Dennis Small

- Another Silicon Valley Monster: Facebook Wants To Coin World Money by Paul Gallagher

- III. ‘Climate Change’ Fakery Under Attack

- Petition on Anthropogenic Global Warming

- California Labor Bucks the Green New Deal by Marcia Merry Baker

- IV. The Curvature of Human Progress

- 1997 Is Not 1929: A Lesson from Carl Gauss by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (November 5, 1997)

- EDITORIAL When Future Historians Review This Week, Will They See a Turning Point, Or a Descent on the Road to Hell?

On the 35th Anniversary of the Founding of the Schiller Institute:

The New Paradigm Begins to Emerge

Editor-in-Chief and Founder:

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

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

Co-Editors: Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

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

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

ON THE WEB

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 46, Number 26, July 5, 2019

Cover This Week

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump, joined by Chairman Kim Jong Un, becomes the first sitting U.S. President to set foot on North Korean soil, in his meeting with Kim in the DMZ on June 30, 2019.

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THE NEW PARADIGM BEGINS TO EMERGE

I. FROM THE G20 SUMMIT: ‘PRESIDENTIAL DIPLOMACY’ REEMERGES

3 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Trump-Kim Meeting Revives ‘Singapore Spirit’; Demonstrates Potential of Presidential Initiatives

9 The Strategic Urgency of Exonerating Lyndon LaRouche

by Paul Gallagher

10 Voices Against War Escalate Around the World

14 LaRouche’s Ideas Presented to Conferences in Ivory Coast and Angola

by Stephanie Ezrol

17 SCHILLER INSTITUTE REPORT

Bringing LaRouche’s America: A Joyous Night of Music and Strategic Discussion

II. HOW LAROUCHE DEFEATED IMPERIAL INTENTIONS

20 Lyndon LaRouche at Work: Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the Moon-Mars Mission

40 U.S.-China Cooperation with Mexico Is Key to the Migrant Crisis

by Dennis Small

53 Another Silicon Valley Monster: Facebook Wants To Coin World Money

by Paul Gallagher

III. ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ FAKERY UNDER ATTACK

55 Petition on Anthropogenic Global Warming

59 California Labor Bucks the Green New Deal

by Marcia Merry Baker

IV. THE CURVATURE OF HUMAN PROGRESS

62 1997 Is Not 1929: A Lesson from Carl Gauss

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

November 5, 1997

73 EDITORIAL

When Future Historians Review This Week, Will They See a Turning Point, or a Descent on the Road to Hell?

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. From the G20 Summit:

‘Presidential Diplomacy’ Reemerges

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Trump-Kim Meeting

Revives ‘Singapore Spirit’

Demonstrates Potential of Presidential Initiatives

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un meet in the Korean DMZ on June 30, 2019.

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This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s New Paradigm Webcast of July 1, 2019. A video of this webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello! I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s July 1, 2019. There’s been a lot of developments on the strategic side of things, Helga; why don’t we start with the Trump-Kim meeting in Panmunjom at the DMZ. What’s your assessment of this meeting?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think that is definitely going back to what I called the “Singapore Spirit,” referring to the first summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, and I think this is, potentially, the real thing. Because, as we have observed, the summit in Hanoi was sabotaged essentially by, I think, Pompeo and Bolton.

But this time, I think the fact that in Osaka, on the sidelines of the G20 meetings, there were these meetings between Trump and Putin, Trump and Xi Jinping, Trump and Abe, which is in the background, also, and also with South Korean President Moon Jae-in—I think this is all back to the idea that policy is being made on the level of the presidents. There was a summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping, and they also had a dinner about which very little is being reported. but Trump’s spontaneous decision was that he would go to the DMZ, meet with Kim, which was sort of a surprise; he even went earlier than announced, and he stepped symbolically over this very important border [into North Korea].

Now, the interesting thing about it, is that it is very unusual, is that the North Korean media, all, instantly, very broadly reported about this, calling it a “historic meeting,” “bold,” and “efficient,” and that the two leaders will stay in close personal contact from now on. This is all really a sign that the chickenhawks in the Trump cabinet were outflanked, and policy is back to being made by Trump. I think especially for the viewers outside of the United States, who generally, at least in the West, only have an extremely negative picture of Trump from the media, it’s really important to see this difference: When President Trump has the freedom to act, he tends to do very important things, and I think this is very, very promising.

Unlike with the previous summit follow-up, this time it will not just be Pompeo who will do the follow-up, but there are supposed to be working groups, entire teams from the State Department and North Korea, and they’re supposed to follow this up.

EIRNS

Michele Geraci, Undersecretary of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development.

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Further Reactions to Trump-Kim Meeting

The Italian politician Michele Geraci made a very important characterization that I tend to agree with, where he said this event is probably the event of the year, and it may be the event of the first term of the Trump Presidency. So I think there is all reason to be really optimistic, because, with Russia and China in the background, and it seems to be that also South Korean President Moon was in the environment; he was on the video together at the press conference with these other two leaders, that all means that a potential for the solution for the North Korean denuclearization is shaping up on the horizon.

Only if there are security guarantees for North Korea, will the country denuclearize, and not fear that Kim Jong Un would face the same fate as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi—which is the main reason why North Korea insisted on its nuclear program. Now, with Russia and China in the picture, an entire Asian security architecture may be possible, which could then address the North Korea situation in a serious and fruitful way. And if that would come together, and all signs now point that way—with the Belt and Road Initiative being the economic dimension of this whole program—I think this is a very hopeful sign, and it would mean that one of the most dangerous crisis spots in the world strategic picture could be resolved.

So, I think this is very, very promising, and it really shows that on the level of the Presidents Xi Jinping, Putin, Trump, solutions can be found. And in this case, also, the Japanese government is in a supportive role. There are many Japanese and Chinese scholars who want to improve the relationship between China and Japan. South Korea has the greatest interest in seeing this problem resolved. So, I think this shows you the incredible potential of the New Silk Road to be the inspiration for peaceful solutions and a durable peace.

Schlanger: Helga, you mentioned the outflanking of the chickenhawks within the administration: It appears from the hysterical reaction of the Democrats that they were also caught off guard by this meeting.

Zepp-LaRouche: Oh, yes. The Democratic reaction. Absolutely, they just lost it. Tim Ryan, for example, compared the meeting between Trump and Kim with the meeting between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938. That shows you that they really have gone off the deep end, so to speak. I don’t see Kim Jong Un taking over all of Asia. But it just shows you that the Democrats are really the war party, and the only very good exception in this chorus of insanity, was in the first Democratic debate, where Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard spent the entire seven minutes she had to participate in the debate, in denouncing the danger of nuclear war, saying it’s closer than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Gage Skidmore

Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Congresswoman and Democratic Party pre-candidate for President in 2020.

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She denounced the endless regime-change wars, and she also attacked Trump for letting the conflict with Iran get as close as 10 minutes to war. So, Tulsi Gabbard, at least on the war issue, is a very good exception in the chorus of Democrats, and it’s quite good that the population has increased their support for her in the polls after this debate. That shows you that once you have leaders who speak to the issue of war and peace, the American people are not for war and that is a very important lesson in this Presidential campaign.

The G20 Summit

Schlanger: Let’s look briefly at the G20 summit, because it seemed to be a waste of time, although there were all the side meetings that were quite significant.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. The important fact is that the meeting between Trump and Putin did take place. Remember, that previous such summits there were last minute sabotage actions. This did not happen [this time]. The Trump-Xi Jinping meeting was also very important, and naturally, many other bilateral meetings. But essentially the most important meetings were those that involved Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping, while the EU was completely irrelevant.

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan on June 29, 2019.

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Now, as a criticism, I must say that the G20 should have addressed the danger of a coming financial crash, but they did not do that, probably having to do with the fact that the G20 is not a format that is capable of addressing this issue.

On the more positive side was a definite improvement in the relationship between the United States and China. Trump and Xi Jinping got the trade war at least stalled, so that there is room for new negotiations. The Huawei ban was lifted, at least for the time being, so that American products can be sold to Huawei, and also China agreed to import a large quantity of U.S. agricultural products, so that, hopefully, this can now get on a better track. I’m not giving a de-warning sign yet, but I think this was definitely a step in the right direction.

But I said that the big issue, the one that the G20 should have addressed, that is, the pending danger of a financial collapse, did not take place, and that shows you that our proposal, that you need a different combination—preferably the combination of Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, and Narendra Modi of India—to address these issues is a viable idea, because the G20 failed again to do what really is their responsibility to the world’s population.

Financial Crash Ahead

Schlanger: The Bank for International Settlements just issued a report saying that we are, as a result of overleveraged corporate debt, heading for a potential crash. What do you make of this report?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, that is not the only voice making such a warning. However, the BIS is the so-called “central bank of central banks,” which is, in essence, reporting that the corporate debt crisis and their engagement in derivatives is the equivalent of what the subprime mortgage crisis was in 2008.

Now, that obviously has been building up for a while, and now, all the data for the first and second quarter of this year show that the world economy, with very few exceptions, mainly countries that are working with the Belt and Road Initiative, but all the European countries, most of the Asian countries and the United States, exhibit signs of a recession or zero growth. All the figures are negative; so I think we are in for a very big crisis.

Our colleagues in the United States at EIR have just published a new study, “The Bitter Truth about the Economic Recovery,” referring to the supposed recovery in the United States. In that study, EIR has analyzed the different segments of the U.S. economy, everything from collapse of infrastructure, unemployment, homelessness, the drug epidemic, the falling life expectancy in the United States—and the U.K., one should add—so all these parameters of the physical economy show that there is no recovery. We have warned all the time that the increase in the price of shares on the stock market is rather an alarming sign, rather than an indicator of the real economy. For example, Deutsche Bank just announced, or is rumored to be having, major layoffs, and yet their stocks went up significantly.

So I think we are in an urgent situation, where the economic package designed by Mr. Lyndon LaRouche some years ago, the Four Laws—Glass-Steagall banking separation; a National Bank in every country; a new credit system, a New Bretton Woods system, and the United States and Europe joining with the New Silk Road—is an urgent, urgent question. We need to have a mobilization: So, I’m asking you our viewers and listeners to help us. Contact us, because this crisis is coming on fast, and it would be almost a miracle if a crash doesn’t take place very soon this year.

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump and Russian President Putin, in a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan on June 28, 2019.

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The Positive Trump-Putin Meeting

Schlanger: One of the important developments was the meeting of Trump and Putin, coming as it did, especially after the danger that we saw over the weekend before last, over Iran. What’s your assessment of where things stand now between the United States and Russia?

Zepp-LaRouche: It’s not yet a situation where one could be satisfied, but, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, there were some inspections involving what they call the New START agreement—Russian and U.S. military talking with each other in this context, and Russian specialists doing investigations in Turkey and in Romania, according to the OSCE document. So, I think that there are clearly signs in the aftermath of the Putin-Trump meeting, that a normalization could occur.

There was also an agreement between Russia and NATO: They agreed on some non-escalation agreement, and that is not much, yet, but it means that for the time being that there will not be an increase of troops into the East on the borders of Russia, and no increase of equipment. So that is not yet a solution, but at least these are very tiny, baby steps that show some hope. And also President Trump accepted the invitation by President Putin to attend the 75th anniversary next year in Moscow, celebrating the end of World War II, which is a good sign.

And also French President Emmanuel Macron, seeing things not going so well for him, in general, accepted a similar invitation from Moscow, which is a good step in the right direction—unlike, unfortunately, I have to say, the new head of the CDU in Germany, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (or AKK, as she is called) who made another one of her really mindless, Cold War speeches, defending the sanctions at a family-entrepreneur conference in Germany.

So the dividing line is really between those people who are trying, in this very dangerous strategic situation, to open new discussions, towards a rapprochement of Russia and China with the West; and those who are in the old paradigm and are backwards oriented. I think that that is an important difference.

The European Union Is Finished

Schlanger: Many Americans are wanting to know what actually is going on with the European Union. The EU seemed to play almost no role in Osaka, at the G20, and they couldn’t even elect a new leadership. Where is this headed?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think the EU is essentially finished: This organization is a large bureaucracy, modeled on the principles of the British Empire, have completely moved away from the interest of their member-states, of the populations they’re supposed to represent, and I think it’s falling apart. I mean they couldn’t agree on the successor of Jean-Claude Juncker for European Commission President.

Manfred Weber, the candidate of Germany was completely rejected, and Macron made intrigues against him. Then, for the time being, the Dutch social democrat Frans Timmermans was mooted—he was opposed by the Visegrad Group [Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland] and Ireland, and I think Bulgaria. Naturally, then there is wheeling and dealing, that “we will give that post to this one, and then the other one gets this post”—this is all very much without any dignity, and that becomes visible to the public eye, so they had to break off the EU summit because they couldn’t find a solution as to a joint leadership. Now that, in my view, reflects the fact that there is no unity in the EU, and naturally, the EU policies overall are completely unfit for any of the crises that exist.

So it’s high time to replace the EU with something different, and again, I have to quote Michele Geraci, who also commented on the fact that the EU has completely become superfluous, and will vanish in a larger Eurasian kind of combination. And that actually makes a lot of sense, because you already have the integration of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union, and if European countries would start to associate with that, in the context of the joint building of the New Silk Road, then all of these problems could be addressed.

And since I’m quoting Geraci, let me just mention one other important, interesting thing he said, namely, that the West has completely underestimated the rapid growth of China, and that China is now a leader, not only in 5G technology with Huawei, but also in e-cars, e-batteries, DNA mapping, and quantum technology. One could add fast train systems, fusion energy research, and Moon exploration.

So I think China is on a very good trajectory, and countries who really want to solve their problems should cooperate with China. Xi Jinping offered again, at the G20 in his speech, that the BRI is an open concept for international cooperation. And I think the countries of the West would be well-advised to take up his offer.

Italian Scientists Attack Climate Hoax

Schlanger: One exception to the dysfunction of the European Union seems to be Italy. A group of prominent Italian scientists, from the Italian Association of Research Scientists and Technologists (ASTRI), has issued a significant statement, attacking this climate hoax. What do you know about that, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: It’s very important. This is a group of extremely well-known and prestigious scientists who have made an appeal to the Italian President, the Italian government, and the parliament, not to adopt policies of reducing CO_2 emissions, with the argument that CO_2 is not a pollutant, that to the contrary, CO_2 is extremely important for life on the planet. And that in any case, all of these claims about control of the climate by reducing this CO_2 emissions is a complete hoax, that there is not one single fact for that, and that in science, facts cannot be replaced by the number of people who claim to have the same opinion. All of these predictions are based on computer simulation models and not on any true physical science.

CC/Gabriella Clare Marino

Prof. Antonino Zichichi, Italian nuclear physicist and past President of the World Federation of Scientists, in 2006.

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So, I think this is very important. There were about 70 original signers, and then one signer, the very famous Prof. Antonino Zichichi, who was the leader for many decades of the famous Erice Center in Sicily. And I think this is something that deserves support by many people in other countries as well, so we are planning to publish this appeal. [See the Petition in this issue of EIR.] Actually, if people are interested to have an honest debate, they should sign this appeal, so that Reason is brought back into the debate.

They also note in this resolution, by the way, that the consensus among the scientists on this issue, does not exist at all, but that there is a growing number and a large number of scientists who absolutely oppose the findings of these models, and say it’s a complete illusion to think that you can control climate by CO_2 reduction. Climate change is obviously taking place, but it’s almost a fakery to claim that you can influence the climate by such measures, because it’s not anthropogenic, it has to do with quite different phenomena in our Milky Way, in the galaxy, on the Sun—all things that man cannot influence as such.

Now, talking about fakery, just to mention, that we will probably pick this up in the next program next week, a group of journalists has just documented that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) completely faked their report on the supposed chemical weapons attack on Douma, Syria in 2018, and that the initial OPCW report said it was a staged event! So this is all now coming out, and the role of the British in that fakery, as well. But that we will deal with more next week.

Celebrate July 4 and July 20!

Schlanger: We are coming up to the moment where the British Empire is increasingly exposed as not just corrupt, but is the continuing dominant force in the old paradigm. This week is the week of July Fourth, the founding of the American republic. How should people think about this situation, by reflecting both on what the American Founding Fathers did, and the upgrading of the American Revolutionary ideal by your husband, Lyndon LaRouche?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think the July Fourth celebration is not just for barbecues: People should remember the proud history of the American War of Independence against the British Empire, the Declaration of Independence, and the principles declared there. The idea of Benjamin Franklin, of Alexander Hamilton, and the Founding Fathers in general, to declare a republic, to give the United States a Constitution devoted to the common good, not only of the present generation, but of posterity, is an extremely important inflection point in all of human history. And if the United States could go back to those ideas, and with the present policies of Trump, at least in the first steps, there is the hope that America can become a republic again.

I’ve said this many times: If the United States would remind itself of the ideals of its origins, and act on those principles, and abandon the role of junior partner of the British Empire, then America will have all the friends in the world. This move by United States, back to its principles, is the crucial step for world peace, not world war.

I hope that people on this Fourth of July reflect on that, and make a step in this direction—especially, because shortly after the Fourth of July will be the 50th anniversary celebration of the Apollo Moon landing. There will be many events, and the Schiller Institute will also have major events on July 20, especially focussing not on the last 50 years, but on the next 50 years, and what kind of economic crash programs are needed to make possible what President Trump had promised, when he said that by 2024 there will be again a man, and this time hopefully also a woman, on the Moon: But that requires to go into the kind of economic crash mobilization as it was defined by the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche. And it’s actually the absolute mandate to be implemented in the near future.

So, I think we have an incredibly—what Friedrich Schiller would call “a pregnant moment”—in history. I think a great catastrophe has been barely avoided with the situation with Iran. And now with talks again between the U.S. and China and Russia, there is actually hope, but that is just the first baby step. And we need the full New Paradigm, a new system of international relations, and especially a new economic system based on the physical principles developed by Lyndon LaRouche.

So therefore, I can only appeal to you, as I have done in the past: Help us with the exoneration campaign for my husband, sign the petition, and, please, take the time to watch the two videos: of the Memorial for Lyndon LaRouche and the Case of Lyndon LaRouche that describes exactly what was done against him and why, and why it is so absolutely crucial to exonerate him, to make the way free for his solutions.

So, please watch these two videos, help us to circulate them as widely as possible, and join the Schiller Institute.

Schlanger: Well, Helga, thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you maybe even later this week, as events are happening so rapidly.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till soon.

The Strategic Urgency of Exonerating Lyndon LaRouche

by Paul Gallagher

DoS

President John Kennedy meeting with Soviet Chairman Nikita Krushchev at the U.S. Embassy residence in Vienna, Austria on June 3, 1961.

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In answer to a question posed during the last class of the five-part class series, “Earth’s Last Fifty Years, and Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” Paul Gallagher made the following very timely remarks. The edited transcript of that class, “Lyndon LaRouche at Work: Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the Moon-Mars Mission,” is in this issue of EIR.

The fact that we are alive today and that nuclear war did not break out in October 1962, really depended on Kennedy literally dragging his feet—digging in his heels and dragging his feet, and almost nothing else, until something came along which enabled the situation to break open. During the Euro-missiles crisis, the 10 years, from Jimmy Carter’s election until the INF Treaty of 1987, there was a totally different process, because of LaRouche personally. It’s true that at that point, he had a movement with which to intervene, but it was his force and credibility, personally, which changed the course of that crisis, changed the course of history.

We are in a very dangerous situation now, with the combination of the threat of regime-change wars (at least two that are still ongoing); combined with the withdrawal from the INF Treaty by the United States. We don’t now have Lyndon LaRouche on the scene, with his force and credibility to intervene. Interventions by him have an entirely different effect, than interventions individually by any one of us. So, it rather depends on all of us moving strategically. We don’t have that kind of effective spear-point in the Trump Administration. We know that what we’re doing is known there, is watched there, but it depends on all of us acting as strategically as we can, and planning on a national and international basis, in the way that Helga Zepp-LaRouche does, in order to try to bring about the same effect and essentially replicate what Lyndon LaRouche would do.

The best way to do that, is to bring him to the fore, through exonerating him, and make his policies, all of a sudden, erupt as a surprise. If his case were suddenly taken up, with the prospect of exoneration or even of public investigation of what was done to him, that would be a strategic surprise, which would have everybody talking about what he did, and what policies he stood for.

So, that’s what we really have to do in this crisis. We shouldn’t pretend that it’s any less serious than that.

Voices Against War

Escalate Around the World

July 1—When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) stated on June 26, during the first Democratic Party 2020 presidential candidates’ debate, “We’re in a greater risk of nuclear war today than ever before in history,” there was a tidal wave of ridicule unleashed against her in the British, American and European liberal media. “How silly of her! How preposterous to think there is actually a danger of war! Why that’s just a load of Russian propaganda,” they pronounced in near unison.

And yet Rep. Gabbard was absolutely correct: She stated the stark reality that the British and their allies in Washington have deliberately provoked, in an effort to salvage their collapsing empire. In this issue of EIR, the matter of that urgent danger is addressed both in Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s weekly webcast, as well as in the article, “Lyndon LaRouche at Work: Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and the Moon-Mars Mission,” which significantly reviews the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the last such threat of nuclear war.

Here the reader will learn more about the discussion of this threat in Russia and will find documentary excerpts from explicit, sharp warnings from the Russian side by President Vladimir Putin and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, as well as a series of voices of sanity in the West who at least recognize the strategic danger the planet faces, if not yet stating agreement with those policies of Lyndon LaRouche that alone provide a solution for a durable planetary peace.

kremlin.ru

Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Putin: The World Is ‘Pretending To Be Deaf, Blind or Dyslexic’ to Nuclear War Danger

Before the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) got underway on June 6, Russian President Vladimir Putin held his traditional press conference with heads of the world’s leading news agencies attending the event, which this year represented Great Britain, Germany, Iran, Spain, Italy, China, the United States, France, and Japan. The roundtable press conference was chaired by TASS Director General Sergei Mikhailov, who said that those present “account for almost 90% of the global news landscape.”

Mikhailov’s opening question was very broad: “Why is the world not becoming any safer? Where is our civilization going? Do you see the light at the end of the tunnel? What can the countries that are the main players in the political process do about it?”

Putin delivered a very tough response, addressing the news directors personally, and not just as journalists, slamming the British for launching the Cold War:

“Let’s recall Winston Churchill, who first hated the Soviet Union, then called Stalin a great revolutionary when they had to fight Nazism, and then, after the Americans developed nuclear weapons, he practically called for the Soviet Union to be destroyed. Remember his speech at Fulton [Missouri] that kick-started the Cold War? . . .

“Little has changed since that time. We should just keep in mind, should understand what kind of world we live in, and what threats and dangers might await us. If we do not keep this ‘fiery serpent’ under control, if we let it out of the bottle, God forbid, this could lead to a global catastrophe.”

Putin proposed dialogue and cooperation as the way to address the crisis. “What’s the solution? It is in cooperation, period. The most recent conversation I had with President Trump, I must say, inspires certain optimism, because Donald told me that he, too, was concerned about this. He is fully cognizant of the amount of arms-related expenses incurred by the United States and other countries. This money could be used for other purposes. I completely agree with him.”

Putin elaborated on the nature of the problem, noting that youth today are very concerned about environmental issues. “But they do not realize, these young people, especially teenagers and children, they are not aware of the global threat and serious challenge posed by possible global conflicts. This is something adult men and women should think about.

“Our U.S. partners upped and withdrew from the ABM Treaty [in 2002]. So, ladies and gentlemen, I want to ask you: Did any one of you go out with a poster and protest? No one, silence. As if this is the way it’s supposed to be. Incidentally, this was the first step towards a fundamental destabilization of the global security framework, and a major step at that. Now, we are talking about our American partners terminating, also unilaterally, their INF Treaty membership . . .

“Listen: you and your readers, your audience should open the INF Treaty and read it. Its articles clearly stipulate that short- and medium-range missile launchers cannot be deployed on land. The treaty says so outright. However, they went ahead and deployed them in Romania and Poland which is a direct violation . . .

“Everyone is pretending to be deaf, blind or dyslexic. We have to react to this somehow, don’t we? Clearly, so . . . Our latest systems guarantee Russia’s security for a fairly long period into the future, I mean we have made significant strides. And, I must put it bluntly, we have outrun our competitors in terms of creating hyper-weapon systems. If no one is interested in renewing the START-3 Treaty, we will not renew it. We have already said a hundred times that we are ready to do so, but no one is willing to talk about it with us. Please note that there is no formal negotiating process, and everything will expire in 2021. Mind you, there will be no more instruments to limit an arms race. Or, for example, deploying weapons in outer space. Do we understand what this means or not? Ask the experts . . .

“Will anyone ever think about it, talk about it, or show any concern? No, complete silence. Do you realize how serious and dangerous this is?”

U.S. Mission Geneva/Eric Bridiers

Anatoly Antonov, Ambassador of Russia to the United States.

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Russian Diplomats Issue Sharp Warnings on the Danger of War

Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov, spoke at a meeting of the Seattle World Affairs Council on June 17, held at the Perkins Coie headquarters in that city:

“As I travelled through Seattle today, I saw many smiling people. Many shop owners who looked happy. Surely they do not want nuclear war. But if we do not fix these problems, this is what we face.”

He insisted that the U.S. and Russia “can and must find a common ground. . . . In order to rebuild trust, a dialogue is essential,” stating that “it’s impossible to speak to each other through mass media.”

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters on June 18 that, “For quite a while, we have been witnessing the United States’ continuous attempts to increase political, psychological, economic and military pressure on Iran. I think that such actions are rather provocative and cannot be considered as anything other than a deliberate policy to instigate a war,” TASS reported.

Speaking to the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian legislature, Ryabkov also addressed the question of possible U.S. deployment of intermediate-range missiles near Russia’s borders: “The Russian President said on Feb. 2 that, being guided by our responsible approach to ensuring global peace and security, we were launching scientific, research and development activities for creating medium-range missiles so that we were able to repel prospective U.S. missiles, the production of which has entered an advanced stage.” But, he continued, Putin had made it clear that Russia “will abstain from deploying our units anywhere until the U.S. does it.”

Less than a week later, on June 24, Ryabkov told the upper house of Russia’s legislature, the Federation Council, during debates on a bill on the suspension of Russia’s participation in the INF Treaty, according to TASS: “We should brace for the worst scenario. There are no plans, but the [NATO] Mk-41 launchers are a reality. NATO’s intentions have been aggressive all along and they remain so. If it comes to the real deployment of such systems on the ground [referring to U.S. ABM batteries in Eastern Europe and withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty—ed.], the situation will not just get worse, but aggravate to the maximum and we may find ourselves in the situation of a missile crisis pretty close to the Caribbean one.”

Ryabkov had earlier stated that, “The U.S. is seeking to impose concepts saying that a nuclear war can be won” with very low-yield nuclear weapons “that cannot be seen as anything but meant for combat uses.” Then, in response of the June 25 demand by NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg that Russia destroy its 9M729 (NATO designation SSC-8) cruise missiles for allegedly violating the INF Treaty within five weeks or NATO will take countermeasures, Ryabkov stated that Moscow will be forced to take “countervailing military measures” should NATO make good on its threats. “Attempts to portray what is happening as a military and political response to Russia’s actions reek of a propaganda campaign with a large element of deliberate misinformation being fed to global public opinion. When these threats begin to materialize into real action, we will have to take countervailing military measures. We will contain NATO’s aggressive plans, measure them and adopt a very selective approach to dialogue with the alliance, which the member-states of this organization are promoting.”

U.S. Political Voices

Donald Trump, President of the United States. To Fox News, May 20: “Don’t kid yourself, you do have a military-industrial complex. They do like war. . . . I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate. I said, ‘I want to bring our troops back home.’ The place went crazy. They want to keep—you have people here in Washington, they never want to leave. I said, ‘You know what I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind,’ but if it was up to them they’d bring thousands of soldiers in. Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex. They never want to leave, they always want to fight.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), Iraq war veteran, presidential candidate.

June 26: “We’re in a greater risk of nuclear war today than ever before in history. . . . That’s why it is so important that every one of us, every single American, stand up and say ‘no war with Iran’.”

May 16: “President Trump promised to get the U.S. out of stupid wars. The U.S. must not go to war with Iran. . . . [It] would prove far more costly and devastating than anything we experienced in Iraq, far more American troops being killed and injured and great suffering for the Iranian people.”

May 3: “Neocons, neolibs, and the mainstream media all sing from the same songsheet: war war war. Trump never gets positive media unless he’s threatening war/carrying out military action. Today, Venezuela, tomorrow, Iran? Cuba? Next? No wonder North Korea won’t give up their nukes.”

Gage Skidmore

Sen. Rand Paul, MD (R-KY)

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Rep. Rand Paul (R-KY). June 21: “I have strongly encouraged Donald Trump to trust his instincts and avoid another war.”

Sen. Richard Black, Virginia (R-Dist. 13), former U.S. Marine and U.S. Army JAG Corps officer. June 8: “John Bolton has usurped your authority as Commander-in-Chief. He countermanded your order for an immediate withdrawal from Syria, and now he has alarmed our allies by agitating for war against Iran. . . . America elected you to end wars of regime change, and to lower tensions. Our nation is war-weary, there is no public support for a war against Iran.”

Tucker Carlson, Fox News.

June 20: “Hungry for War. The permanent foreign policy establishment in Washington wants a war badly. That’s why they are putting American troops in a position where conflict is inevitable, in order to start a war—and everyone in Washington knows it, because they have seen it before.”

June 21: “War Averted—U.S. was minutes from a disastrous mistake. . . . Bombing Iran would have ended [Trump’s] political career in a minute. There would be no chance of re-election after that.”

Steven F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. May 13: “Russiagate Zealotry Continues to Endanger American National Security” . . . “by depriving a U.S. President, for the first time in the nuclear age, of the diplomatic flexibility to deal with the Kremlin leader in times of crisis.”

Retired Military and Intelligence Professionals Speak Out

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), June 22: VIPS Memo to the President: “We are concerned that you are about to be mousetrapped into war with Iran. . . . We have serious doubts about Secretary Pompeo; it is clear to us that he has his own agenda, and we know from our experience with him that his agenda is not always the same as yours. . . . Pompeo’s behavior betrays a strong desire to respond with military force—perhaps even without your express approval—to Iranian provocation (real or imagined). . . . He is a neophyte compared to his anti-Iran partner John Bolton, whose decades-long dilettante approach to interpreting intelligence, strong advocacy of the misbegotten war on Iraq . . . and his own aggressive agenda are a matter of record.”

Admiral (ret.) Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2007-2011). June 24: “My biggest concern is, the President is running out of room, running out of options, and while rhetoric goes back and forth on how close we came to hitting Iran just the other day, that this thing could spin out of control. The last thing in the world we need right now is a war with Iran.”

Scott Ritter, former Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector. May 19: “By purposely escalating tensions with Iran using manufactured intelligence about an all-too-real threat, [National Security Advisor John] Bolton is setting the country up for a war it is not prepared to fight and most likely cannot win. . . . It is John Bolton, not Iran, who poses the greatest threat to American national security today.”

Col. (ret.) Pat Lang, Sic Semper Tyrannis website. May 14: “Once [Trump] is committed to a war in the Mideast, he’s just screwed. . . . It’s time for Bolton and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo to be hung out to dry.”

Col. (ret.) Ann Wright. May 13: “Trump might wish to double check Bolton and Pompeo’s statements on the threat coming from Iran’s actions, against the interests of the U.S. and its allies . . . before Bolton’s long-standing regime-change and war agenda [leads to] an unnecessary and horrific military confrontation with Iran.”

Foreign Leaders

Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour Party Leader. June 15: “Britain should act to ease tensions in the Gulf, not fuel a military escalation that began with U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. Without credible evidence about the tanker attacks, the government’s rhetoric will only increase the threat of war.”

Joey O. Razon

Delfin Lorenzana, Philippines Department of National Defense Secretary.

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Delfin Lorenzana, Philippine Secretary of Defense. June 2: “A troubling form of superpower rivalry [has brought the danger of] confrontation that could lead to war . . ., sleepwalking into another international conflict like World War I. . . . The risk of miscalculation and unwanted conflict is rising on a daily basis, as great powers expand their military footprint and pursue divergent visions.”

Barham Salih, President of Iraq. June 25: “We do not want our territory to be a staging post for any hostile action against any of our neighbors, including Iran. This is definitely not part of the agreement between the Iraqi government and the United States. . . . It’s easy to start a war, but very, very difficult to end a war.”

LaRouche’s Ideas Presented to Conferences in Ivory Coast and Angola

by Stephanie Ezrol

Schiller Institute

Students attending the “New Silk Roads, African Opportunities” conference in Ivory Coast, on June 15, 2019.

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June 30—French Schiller Institute representative and Africa development expert, Sébastien Périmony, was invited to present the economic and scientific ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, focusing on the urgently required education of the next generation of scientists, to two conferences in Africa. The first was, “The New Silk Roads, African Opportunities, Focus on Ivory Coast” in Ivory Coast on June 15, and the second was at the June 18-20 ANGOTIC 2019 in Angola.

Périmony’s detailed report on both conferences is available on the Schiller Institute website.

We focus here on the development and application of human creativity as the driving force of the future, and the significance of those two different African conferences in both reflecting and advancing mankind’s innate ability to create the capability for durable peace now, and for the next 50 years—with the perspective of mankind as a galactic, rather than an earthbound species. Africa, if viewed from this perspective, is an enormous and necessary contributor to that process with a population now of almost 1.3 billion people.

Ivory Coast Conference

Périmony’s audience in Ivory Coast was composed of 400 students, aged 20-25, drawn primarily from the Félix Houphouët-Boigny National Polytechnic Institute in Yamoussoukro, but also students from universities from across the country, as well as local government officials. The Polytechnic Institute—modeled on the French École Polytechnique education system of Lazare Carnot and Gaspard Monge—with a student body of 4,000, studying science and technology and a curriculum that includes mechanical engineering and hydraulics, is unique in French-speaking Africa. That French polytechnique approach of Monge and Carnot was also the basis for the best of the science, and engineering education at America’s first military academy, West Point, in the era of the American Revolution.

Most Americans are probably ignorant of what West Point highlights on its website:

Aware of our young nation’s need for engineers, Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer made civil engineering the foundation of the curriculum. For the first half century, U.S. Military Academy graduates were largely responsible for the construction of the bulk of the nation’s initial railway lines, bridges, harbors and roads.

Recent West Point graduates like U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo would do well to heed that tradition, rather than the anti-American claptrap hawked by the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s partner-in-crime, Samuel Huntington in his 1957 book, The Soldier and the State.

The Ivory Coast conference, “The New Silk Roads, African Opportunities, Focus on Ivory Coast,” was organized by the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Foundation for Peace Research, the nation’s leading foundation, and the Association for the Preservation and Promotions of the Ideas of El Hadj Boubacar Gamby Sakho (ASPP-BGS) in partnership with the city’s Confucius Institute.

Lyndon LaRouche’s unique focus on the necessary increase of scientific and artistic creativity, per capita, on the entire land area of the Earth, and among all nations and peoples, provided the platform for discussion with this important group of educators and thinkers.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—the New Silk Roads—is the largest set of infrastructure projects in the history of mankind, and requires a highly educated, scientifically oriented workforce on every continent. Périmony was invited to present LaRouche’s unique economic contributions to the science of economics, including: the need for an ever-increasing energy flux density in production processes; the metric of potential relative population density, based on natural geography and resources as enhanced by man-made improvements at an ever-higher technological level; the use of sovereign currency and credit as implemented first in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, then by Alexander Hamilton and later Abraham Lincoln; the requirement of ever-increasing creativity per capita to increase the productive powers of labor; and why Africa, like China, can leap-frog into the future.

The invitation to Périmony was extended by Mr. Fofana Boubakar, President of the ASPP-BGS Association, co-sponsor of the conference and nephew of the Association’s namesake, Patriarch El Hadj Boubakar Gamby Sakho, who has worked to bring people, cultures and civilizations closer together, especially through education. The impetus for the conference itself was the presentation in Paris, by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in November 2018 of the French language edition of the Schiller Institute’s 422-page report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge: A Shared Future for Humanity, Vol. II.

Schiller Institute

A student demonstrates a science project, one of the many exhibits on space policy at the ANGOTIC 2019 expo in Luanda, Angola.

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The Angola ICT Forum 2019

Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas were presented in a very different type of venue in Angola. The Angola ICT Forum 2019 (ANGOTIC 2019), featured information and communication technologies (ICT) exhibitors from various government agencies and industrial and telecommunications exhibitors from all over the world. There were more than 8,000 participants and 150 speakers over three days. Périmony was invited to address a breakout session titled, “Education for the Digital Age,” sharing a panel with the Secretary of State for Technical Education (who stood in for the Minister of Education), two corporate representatives and a professor of law from the Agostinho Neto University.

Périmony opened his talk with Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks this past May:

I think we are probably the generation on whom later generations will look back to, and say, “Oh! This was really a fascinating time, because it was a change from an epoch to another one.” And I have an image of that, which is, this change that we are experiencing right now, is probably going to be bigger than the change in Europe between the Middle Ages and modern times. Now, I think we are before, or in the middle of such an epochal change, where the next era of mankind will be much, much more creative than the present one, and that’s something to look forward to, because we can actually shape it, and we can bring our own creative input into it. And there are not many periods in history when that is the case: So we are actually lucky.

The perspective of the Schiller Institute’s World Land-Bridge idea, and its unfolding in the new paradigm initiated by China’s President Xi Jinping in 2013, provide a platform for cooperation with Africa. The future of the African continent requires the elimination of poverty everywhere through industrial and scientific development. Périmony underscored this vision:

With a top-down approach, the deficit of basic infrastructure in Africa, as it was in China, is an advantage, in that it allows nations to skip the intermediate stages of development that occurred over centuries in the industrialized countries, to leapfrog directly into the technologies that are at the frontier. This is the approach that has been taken by China, deploying high-speed rail and magnetically levitated trains, and fourth-generation nuclear fission technology. Similarly, China’s space program is not simply repeating what other nations have done, but is carrying out challenging missions that have never been attempted before.

This approach to development will require a revolution in education dedicated to fostering a learning culture in which Africa’s children will seriously concern themselves and apply their talents to the major infrastructure, science and technology challenges, and the growing number of projects on the horizon.

Schiller Institute

Schiller Institute Representative Sébastien Périmony (center) holding a CanSat at a space policy exhibit at the ANGOTIC 2019 expo in Luanda, Angola.

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The CanSat Program

The seeds of that revolution were evident on the second day of ANGOTIC 2019 when 700 people gathered to watch the first successful launch in Angola from the Cabo Ledo military base in Angola on June 19, 2019, of student-designed space-monitoring instruments in small containers (CanSats), similar to sounding rocket payloads. The operation was carried out with the assistance of the National Air Force (FAN).

The science program to create, launch and test these mock mini-satellites was sponsored by the Angolan National Space Program Management Office (GGPEN), the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology (MTTI), and the Department of Space Science and Applied Research (DCEPA). One hundred twenty-six students were selected to participate from 26 Angolan colleges and universities from across the country.

CanSat competitions, begun in 1999 in the United States, for just such educational development purposes, are now run by the European Space Agency (ESA), the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, as well as other national groups and governments, and are a fascinating and critical element of taking the New Silk Road out into the Galaxy, which will require massive increases in energy-flux density, infrastructure, and the elimination of the disease of poverty on Earth.

ESA describes a CanSat as—

a simulation of a real satellite, integrated within the volume and shape of a soft drink can. The challenge for the students is to fit all the major subsystems found in a satellite, such as power, sensors and a communication system, into this minimal volume. The CanSat is then launched to an altitude of a few hundred meters by a rocket or dropped from a platform or captive balloon and its mission begins: to carry out a scientific experiment and achieve a safe landing.

African participation, to this author’s knowledge, had until now been limited to South Africa and Egypt—Egypt only having created a space agency in 2107.

The CanSat program is an important step for Angola in creating a growing cadre of scientists and engineers skilled in space exploration, satellite mission design, assembly methods, testing, launch, data collection and analysis.

Périmony reported from Luanda that ANGOTIC 2019 conference participants were able to follow live on a giant screen, the release of the CanSats from a helicopter aloft at 500 meters, and waited with tense anticipation for the scientific monitoring results to be captured by the students who had built experimental payloads. Emotions peaked when the first transmitted results began to arrive on the students’ computers. Explosions of joy, and seemingly endless applause celebrated this historic moment in Angola.

The excitement was palpable at the various exhibits dedicated to Angolan space policy. A CanSat mini-satellite was on display in the exhibit about Angola’s new communications satellites, the AngoSat program, operated by its Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology and the GGPEN.

The majority of those present were young people, and all of them are convinced that the future of their country will not proceed without the policy of developing space technologies.

SCHILLER INSTITUTE REPORT

Bringing LaRouche’s America: A Joyous Night of Music and Strategic Discussion

EIRNS

Schiller Institute representative Michael Steger addresses an Open House in Honor of the Schiller Institute, hosted by the People’s Republic of China Consulate in San Francisco on June 27, 2019.

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San Francisco, June 28—“We had brought Lyn’s America to representatives of China, and they were profoundly overwhelmed with joy.”

Anyone and everyone who attended the Open House in Honor of the Schiller Institute by the People’s Republic of China Consulate in San Francisco—as each of the three large screens proudly declared as you walked into the hall—now know, with increasing power, the importance of exonerating Lyndon LaRouche. It was on the faces of everyone: a sense of joy, of optimism, of urgency, and a sense of responsibility towards the future because such a man, such an America, such a view of the world and of humanity, and such an organization exist, and at a moment when, without a true America, without such a worldview, mankind might not survive.

The idea of such an event was first considered with the passing of Lyndon LaRouche on February 12, 2019. The consulate was informed soon after, and a meeting between Schiller Institute representatives and the Consul General was held the following week. After an hour-plus discussion with the Consul General and the Deputy Consul General, ranging from Lyn’s life and ideas to the current strategic situation, the idea of an event between the Schiller Institute and the Consulate was proposed.

So, on the very eve of the G20 summit (Putin and Trump would actually be meeting at 10 p.m. this same night), the Schiller Institute brought nearly 70 guests to an event hosted by the China Consulate, which included a remarkable Chinese buffet. To reciprocate the generosity of the Consulate, the Schiller Institute brought Beethoven’s ’Cello Sonata, Opus 69, for a universal demonstration of the potential collaborative relationship between the United States and China, with piano and ’cello played at the lower tuning. Including speeches by Consul General Wang and Schiller Institute representative Michael Steger, the event set a new standard for collaboration around the power of Lyn’s ideas.

The Deputy Consul General introduced Consul General Ambassador Wang Donghua and Schiller Institute representative Michael Steger, and acknowledged special guests, including a Consul from Vietnam, a member of the Indonesian Consulate, a member of the East-West Accord, and the President of the Russian-American Congress, as well as two local Republican leaders.

Strategic Assessments

The Consul General then gave a very hard-hitting speech expressing China’s frustrations with the current trade talks, before touching on the importance of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Steger then addressed the broader strategic aspects of the global dynamic, beginning with the introduction of the BRI by Xi, in consultation with Putin, during the chaotic coup in Ukraine in 2013, which clearly indicates the required role of the BRI in ending the risk of nuclear war today.

In summary, Steger emphasized the importance of the G20 and the BRI as exemplary of a new global system, which was on the minds of everyone in the room on the eve of this critical summit. It is also the 35th anniversary of the Schiller Institute’s founding and the 40th anniversary of the establishment of China-U.S. diplomatic relations. The LaRouche view of the next 40 years has never been more important. There is a long positive history of America and China—from the time of Columbus’s voyages in the wake of the Italian Renaissance (Columbus is honored with a massive stone statue on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, looking west across the Golden Gate Bridge to China), to Ben Franklin printing sections of Confucius’ Analects in the Gazette, to Lincoln’s appointment of Ambassador Anson Burlingame to China, to Grant’s tour of China, and his identification then of China’s coming dominance of the global economy, to FDR’s insistence that no foreign ships would enter Chinese ports after the defeat of Japan.

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A group photo of some of the 70 Schiller Institute guests of Consul General Wang Donghua (front row, center).

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This history of the best of the United States, and our positive relations with China, makes the point that this is the real America, the LaRouche America, and it is this that the American people are calling for today, however darkly through the mirror.

China’s development is a modern miracle, and the BRI is a precious contribution to the world that must be grasped now. FDR wanted to expand U.S. productive capabilities to develop the world, but his legacy was nearly destroyed. It was Lyndon LaRouche who picked up this fight for global development after World War II, and today, it is China that is making this offer, this precious gift for a new system of collaboration, of sovereignty, amd of space exploration. As a Russian scientist once said, space exploration demonstrates most clearly the nature of economy, that money is worthless. Energy, water, infrastructure, science and culture are paramount for a new global system, on Earth and on the Moon. This is the BRI: It is a great gift to the world that must be adopted by the United States, and it is the very essence of the true U.S. legacy of Lincoln and LaRouche.

So, we all hope and pray that there is a breakthrough at the G20, but if there is, and there may be, will the American policy actually change? Only if we organize the American people to insist that it does, otherwise the corruption in Washington will crush any potential for a breakthrough. It is not only up to the anointed leaders, but up to us to create a new culture of development.

Music, a Universal Language

There was strong applause for both speeches. The Deputy Consul General referred to Steger’s remarks as truly representing the American people, before introducing the music.

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My-Hoa Steger (keyboard) and Andrés Vera (‘cello) performing Beethoven’s ’Cello Sonata, Op. 69.

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Before the music began, we told the assembled audience that we are eager to work with others on the music of China. In the course of the evening, a music teacher, who was one of the very first students of piano after the Cultural Revolution, offered to work on Chinese music for four hands with My-Hoa Steger! A professional violinist/violist also expressed interest. We intend to make more classical Chinese pieces available in western notation with the help of these and other Chinese musicians.

My-Hoa Steger and Andrés Vera then played “Mo Li Hua” (Jasmine Flower) on keyboard and ’cello before performing a lively rendition of Beethoven’s ’Cello Sonata, Op. 69. The audience, uncertain, gave a standing ovation after the first movement, but once aware, were absolutely silent after the second, allowing the Adagio Cantabile of the opening of the third movement to strike the harmonious chord of collaboration that Beethoven intended.

It was now a festive celebration, with food, discussion, and humorous delight. The Schiller Institute brought a cross-section of people, from young people, to blue collar Americans, to people from the Chinese-American community in San Francisco, as well as a leading retired Pakistani journalist. All, young and old, left beaming.

The Consul General, and his staff of twenty or so, mingled and talked with all of the guests for over an hour. There was a long discussion with the Indonesian representative on the political culture of the United States and the importance of classical culture—the mode through which nations adopt their profound missions. Several people expressed interest in holding future events with the Schiller Institute. Several Russia-associated contacts who came were struck by the optimism and gained a greater insight into the nature of our work and mission. The necessary and immediate exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche became an important topic of discussion.

At the end, the Consul General and his staff said good-bye, greeting people as they left, touched by the love and concern from real Americans towards the importance of the collaboration of our two nations. In essence, we had brought Lyn’s America to representatives of China, and they were profoundly overwhelmed with joy. When asked by his Deputy Consul General if we should do this once every two years, he said, “Once a year, at least!”

To those of us in the Schiller Institute, it comes as no surprise that Lyn’s personality and vision have such an overwhelming effect, but we also know that it is not always so easy to convey. In this case, we feel triumphant in our attempt at such a historic moment, and intend to carry that spirit into our work, outreach, and follow-up in the critical days and weeks ahead.

Buy The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Vol. II

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II. How LaRouche Defeated Imperial Intentions

Lyndon LaRouche at Work: Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative And the Moon-Mars Mission

LPAC-TV

Paul Gallagher

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The current superpower tensions and confrontations threatening war, highlight Lyndon LaRouche’s work for peace in the last such nuclear war threat—the “Euromissiles Crisis” at the start of the 1980s—to bring about President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

This June 25, 2019 presentation by Paul Gallagher and Benjamin Deniston was the fifth in a series of classes given in New York City on LaRouche’s life and work. The transcription has been edited and does not include the discussion period that followed the presentations.

Jason Ross, Moderator: First, Paul Gallagher, who is the economics lead for Executive Intelligence Review and was the Executive Director of the Fusion Energy Foundation at the time that Ronald Reagan promoted and sought to implement LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

PAUL GALLAGHER

The SDI

Paul Gallagher: Thank you. Lyndon LaRouche, as he himself said, worked long and hard to create the Strategic Defense Initiative. He rejoiced when it happened, and he repeatedly changed the course of events over the course of a decade, over two Presidencies, between 1977 and 1987 as a result of the impact of what he had done to bring about that new doctrine of Ronald Reagan’s. The effectiveness of it was perhaps the primary reason that he was prosecuted and vilified by agents of the empire of London and Wall Street from that point on, intensely. He had three broad aims from the beginning of that campaign in 1977, and to the end of it in 1987, they remained the same.

The first was to create and bring into effective use a new strategic doctrine based on the impotence of nuclear ballistic missiles in the face of a new generation of technologies. As he said, “laser and laser-like devices”—lasers and relativistic beams of other types. This was necessary not only because it was right, but also because the deterrence balance of Mutually Assured Destruction at that time in the late 1970s was becoming unbalanced, sufficiently to trigger nuclear war. That was the situation when he began on this campaign.

Second, he wanted to launch a technological industrial revolution; he talked about this many times, including very forcefully in one video that you’ll see. Again, the impact of lasers and laser-like devices on technology used in industry internationally and on the kinds of projects which could be developed with a new credit system in developing sectors. He put the two together—the industrial technological revolution and the need for a new international credit system.

Third, he wanted to enable the great powers to get rid of intermediate range nuclear weapons, as they are sometimes called, which are the quintessential destabilizing element in the nuclear balance of terror. Repeatedly in the post-World War II period, these have caused crises of imminent nuclear war because of the extremely short time between the point at which those missiles can be launched, the point at which—if at all—they can be defended against, and the point at which they will strike and destroy millions of human lives and vast areas of economy. There is almost no time, effectively, between the launch and the destruction in the case of IRBMs (intermediate-range ballistic missiles). He wanted the U.S. and the Soviet Union to be able to get rid of those.

kremlin.ru

Russian President Vladimir Putin (center right) meeting with John Bolton, U.S. National Security Advisor, at the Kremlin on October 22, 2019.

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A fourth effect of the SDI was the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a conference in Princeton in December of 1992. Senior former officials of the Soviet Union, led by the former Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, said at that conference that it was the Strategic Defense Initiative which destroyed the Soviet Union. Former senior officials of the Reagan administration, including his Secretary of State, George Shultz, said at that same conference that they were absolutely “thrown for a loop”—that was his phrase—when Reagan actually made the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative. As recently as 2007, the notorious National Security Advisor to President Trump, John Bolton, publicly stated that he was told by a very high-ranking Russian (no longer Soviet) military official that he—Bolton—needed to know that it was Lyndon LaRouche who had been the author of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Obviously it changed history; but the collapse of the Soviet Union was not one of the objectives of Lyndon LaRouche in pursuing the SDI. It was not among the objectives that I just went through that he consistently pursued from 1977 to 1987. Nonetheless, once that process was underway, he was able to forecast it extremely accurately, including telling his Soviet interlocutors, the Soviet diplomat with whom he was directly speaking, that the Soviet Union effectively had five years left if it did not accept the offer of joint anti-missile beam defense development from Reagan.

Penn. State Univ./Philip Nash

A U.S. Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missile, shown with removable skirting, deployed at Cigli Air Base, Turkey during early 1962 or 1963.

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The IRBM Crisis of 1962

Since now we are in the middle of fighting a three-year-long attempt to force President Trump into confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China, and also to resume regime-change wars, and since Lyndon LaRouche is no longer alive to intervene with his great personal force and credibility in this situation, I just want to note first the most serious crisis of the postwar period, which was one in which, while he was extremely active in 1962 as a successful economic forecaster and business consultant, he did not have a political organization through which to make this kind of intervention.

That was the only time since the Second World War when not just certain experts, but tens of millions of people in the United States and Europe and elsewhere in the world, thought that they had reached the end of their lives. They thought that nuclear war was about to break out within days, and they were in terror as a result of that, not for 24 hours, but for two solid weeks between October 14 and October 28, 1962. That crisis was caused by the combination of intermediate range nuclear ballistic missiles and regime-change war.

The United States’ armed forces began the development of Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) and the deployment of IRBM nuclear missiles at the end of 1957. These missiles were developed for the United Kingdom, which very desperately wanted them, as well as for the United States Army and Navy. These were the Jupiter missiles. They were deployed in 1961 in Italy and in Turkey; Turkey, in that case, literally on the border of the Soviet Union.

The Jupiter missile had an error radius—that means the circle of radius within which it could be more or less guaranteed to land around its target—of one-half mile, which was less than one-quarter of the error of any previously developed missile. It was mobile; it could be readied for launch in 15 minutes, and it was deployed on the borders of the Soviet Union with a range of 1,500 miles and had a warhead of 1.5 megatons.

At the same time as the Jupiter missiles were deployed in Turkey, Eisenhower very famously warned against the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address. He did not control the military-industrial complex very effectively while he was President. Most particularly, there was a plan called either the Cuban Project or Operation Mongoose, which was to eliminate the Cuban government. It was launched in 1960 under Eisenhower’s administration with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; it was headed by the Army Chiefs of Staff member General Edward Lansdale. It was escalated by John F. Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was from Wall Street and the Ford Motor Company, and also, General Lansdale, and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer. It began with a secret Joint Chiefs document called “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba—Top Secret.”

Mongoose had one part, the Bay of Pigs invasion, which became very widely known; it failed. Kennedy scaled it down at the last moment, when it was sprung on him as he came into office, and it failed. But the core plan, Operation Mongoose, had a $50 million a year budget. It involved the CIA, FBI, State Department, Commerce Department, Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Security Council. It continued right up to and through the nuclear war warning situation of October 14-28, 1962. In fact, the target of Operation Mongoose, the target date for the removal of the Castro government, was October 1962.

So, what are you looking at?

Operation Mongoose, rather than resulting in the removal of the Castro government, resulted in the near elimination of large parts of the human race. The Soviet leadership saw an opportunity in this, that they could offset the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which bothered them extremely. In August 1962, they began a plan to place short-range nuclear ballistic missiles and Backfire bombers in Cuba; at the same time, cleverly leaking out selected news.

National Archives

U.S. aerial reconnaissance photo of a medium range ballistic missile launch site at San Cristobal, Cuba on November 1, 1962.

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There were rumors throughout September 1962 that what they really wanted was to trade these missiles for the Jupiter missiles, and get rid of both. But by October 14, the U.S. Air Force and the CIA had hard photographic evidence that these missiles had been put in place in Cuba; that the Backfire bombers were there; that they were nuclear-armed. Now the United States, like the Soviet Union, could be hit with nuclear weapons before it could respond.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded an immediate invasion to take these missiles out. President Kennedy instead began a series of exchanges, some of which were outright demands, with Nikita Khrushchov, the Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Cuba was quarantined by U.S. naval ships to keep any more of these missiles or missile parts from being delivered. They called it a “quarantine” and not a blockade in order not to declare war on Cuba, which would have had the implication of the beginning of a declaration of war against the Soviet Union, which was providing the armaments that were in Cuba in the first place.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) on October 14 went to what’s called “Defcon 2”—Defense Readiness Condition 2. It stayed at that level for three weeks. That level of alert means “strategic armed forces ready to deploy and engage in less than 6 hours”; “strategic armed forces” meaning the nuclear force. It otherwise means the next step is nuclear war. Soviet nuclear forces were equally ready to launch, and even though not too many people knew the details of these strategic orders, as I mentioned, tens of millions of people knew that it was very likely their lives were about to come to an end.

They lived in terror for two weeks while the preparations for an invasion of Cuba by the U.S. military, and the preparations for running the quarantine or blockade of Soviet ships were made. Kennedy was holding out against the military and against McNamara for more diplomatic attempts before invading Cuba, but he too thought that an invasion was likely to happen.

U.S. Navy

U.S. Navy Lockheed P-3A-LO Orion flies over the Soviet cargo ship SS Metallurg Anosov and the U.S. destroyer, USS Barry on November 10, 1962.

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Then on October 26, 1962, there was an NBC News public report of this Soviet formula: Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Then on October 27, a message from Khrushchov, which of course was not public, but later became public: “If there is no intention to drive the world to the catastrophe of nuclear war,” Khrushchov said, “then let us not only relax the forces pulling the ends of the rope. Let us take measures to untie the knot. We are ready for this.”

DoS

President John Kennedy meeting with Soviet Chairman Nikita Krushchev at the U.S. Embassy residence in Vienna, Austria on June 3, 1961.

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Later the same day, Khrushchov send a second message which made explicitly the demand that the missiles in Turkey come out, that there be a trade of these missiles. Kennedy made the decision which is of course famous, that he would ignore the second message and answer the first. But while he was doing that, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, his brother, who had a back channel going on, promised the exchange which was in the message JFK ignored, provided that the exchange could be kept quiet and would not be part of any announcements of the missiles being withdrawn. The next day, Khrushchov announced that the missiles would be withdrawn. In April of 1963, five months later, the Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey.

The Euromissiles Crisis

Twenty years later, the same thing was happening again, in what was called the “Euromissiles Crisis.” This is when Lyndon LaRouche intervened, and did have a movement which he had recruited very rapidly in the decade or so before that, and intervened very effectively beginning in 1977 in order to change what happened in this second crisis, which otherwise would have come out the same way, or worse.

The result of LaRouche’s intervention was, first of all, Reagan’s adoption of a great-power cooperative defense policy based on relativistic beam defense. Second, the disintegration of the Soviet Union on a timetable LaRouche had not sought, but which he was able to forecast quite accurately. And third, as a secondary consequence, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty of 1987, from which the United States has recently withdrawn.

An additional effect of this, obviously, was a great deal of research on relativistic beams, including tunable laser and other particle beams, research in optics, in optical biophysics, in medical laser technologies, in industrial laser technologies. Most of it which stayed at the level of research only, unfortunately; but nonetheless, was extremely important from a scientific standpoint. And from the standpoint that Ben will discuss further, of the second flank of this SDI campaign, LaRouche’s campaign for a Moon-Mars mission, beginning particularly in 1985.

EIRNS/Chris Strunk

LaRouche organizers intervene at a rally for Jimmy Carter in New York City on October 27, 1976.

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On this Euromissiles crisis, the SALT treaties, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties in the 1970s, came directly from the fears in the Cuban Missile Crisis and from JFK’s call in 1962 at American University, for the beginning of nuclear weapons arms control discussions between the superpowers. But in early 1977, Jimmy Carter came in as President, and his administration headed immediately for a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. LaRouche spoke to the nation with a 30-minute national network broadcast on the eve of Election Day 1976, and told Americans a vote for Jimmy Carter is a vote for nuclear war.

Carter very quickly suspended the United States’ ratification of SALT I, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty; suspended negotiations on SALT II, the second treaty; and stopped the secret exchanges regarding the situation in Europe which had been going on with the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. While he was doing this, the Soviet Union deployed ground-based, intermediate-range nuclear missiles in European Russia. These were the SS-20 missiles. The Soviet Union explained these as offsetting the missiles of the United Kingdom and France.

The United Kingdom in particular had emphatically demanded that it be provided with Polaris nuclear missiles so that it could put them on its missile-launching submarines which it was developing, the so-called Resolution class submarines. Neither this British nuclear force, nor the French force de frappe, the French nuclear missiles, were counted in the SALT treaty negotiations. The Soviet Union said, we are matching these missiles which are aimed at us on a short range, with SS-20 missiles in the European parts of the Soviet Union.

In 1979, the Carter administration adopted an idea of Henry Kissinger’s called “double track,” by which they insisted that negotiations about missiles in Europe would be combined simultaneously with the United States throwing more than 400 Pershing II IRBMs and ground-launched cruise missiles into Europe. The British Margaret Thatcher government and the French Mitterrand government clamored for these Pershing II missile deployments, and this was going to return the world, obviously, to the hair-trigger nuclear stand-off on both sides as if we were back in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but this time, on the scale of the entirety of Eurasia.

CC/Rob Bogaerts

A demonstration against the deployment of nuclear weapons in Bonn, Germany on October 10, 1981.

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When the deployment actually began in Germany, at the end of 1981, huge demonstrations broke out in numerous countries in Europe—the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, the U.K., and in Germany itself. Once again, there was massive fear that nuclear war was imminent, and various arms control experts and scientists claimed leadership of these large demonstrations for what they called a “nuclear freeze”—which amounted to stopping the Pershing II missile deployments.

I should mention, LaRouche had just had his International Development Bank outline, How the International Development Bank Will Work, adopted at that time by the Non-Aligned Nations Movement, which numbered more than 100 nations at that time. It proposed an international development bank, and for credit and technology transfer to developing countries. Question: What technologies?

In the May 2, 1977 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology, at that time a very widely read aerospace, defense and aviation industries magazine, published warnings by General George J. Keegan, the head of Air Force Intelligence at that time, about Soviet experiments on laser and particle beams for defense at a closed research facility that was near the Russian city of Semipalatinsk. In its editorial, Aviation Week said, “The Soviet Union has achieved a technical breakthrough in high-energy physics applications that may soon provide it with a directed-energy beam weapon capable of neutralizing the entire U.S. ballistic missile force and checkmating the country’s strategic doctrine.”

A great deal of exaggeration was involved in this report, but nonetheless a kernel of truth: “The race to perfect directed-energy weapons is now a reality.” President Carter denied this publicly himself, in person; but LaRouche had become aware that conceptual work on directed-energy defense of this kind in Russia went back to the late 1950s. He foresaw these three objectives immediately that I mentioned at the beginning: a new strategic doctrine; a technological industrial revolution; and enabling the superpowers to eliminate these hair-trigger intermediate-range missiles.

Cover of a 44-page pamphlet issued by LaRouche’s U.S. Labor Party in May, 1977.

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The Carter administration’s nuclear confrontation policy also had to be defeated. The way to defeat it was with the relativistic beam revolution in military strategy, the new physical principles, which were not governed by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Treaty of 1971, but rather required under that treaty that the whole treaty be renegotiated. So, that was the subject of LaRouche’s first publication of this ten-year campaign, which I think is widely known, was called “Sputnik of the ’70s.” That pamphlet, which was a mass distribution pamphlet, emphasized that the technologies on the horizon were really not military technologies; they were not new weapons as such, but new physical principles which would revolutionize both technology and weaponry and would also enable credit to provide development of a new type to the developing world.

LaRouche Meets with Reagan Officials

In August of 1979, already LaRouche representatives were holding discussions with representatives of the Reagan campaign—this is in late 1979—on energy beam defense. Then of course, there was the very famous discussion, captured in a photograph, between LaRouche and Reagan directly on the podium in New Hampshire, waiting for a Presidential debate to begin.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche and Ronald Reagan share thoughts at a candidates’ debate in Concord, New Hampshire during the 1980 Presidential campaign.

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In early 1981, during the transition period when the Reagan administration was coming in, LaRouche and his representatives had meetings on the strategic doctrine and related scientific energy policies with quite a number of the Secretaries of departments in the Reagan Administration—the Science Advisor; the Security Director of the National Security Council (NSC), Richard Morris, who would play a role later; and also the Deputy Director of the CIA, all on this subject within a relatively short period of time.

At this point, I should just interject, huge so-called nuclear freeze demonstrations were reaching their peak. In the United States they were largely composed of scared-to-death college students. At the same time, we were campaigning very actively for beam defense: “Beam the Bomb” was our slogan. This was, for those students, a higher peace movement than the one that most students had been stampeded into. Our campaign really made a great deal of headway.

Then in the fall of 1981, LaRouche and his representatives began to meet regularly with representatives of the United States CIA and other intelligence agency representatives to discuss the beam weapons strategy. Court testimony later by that same Security Director of the NSC, Richard Morris, who testified in LaRouche’s own trial, and again in the trial of his associates in Virginia several years later, that when he was at the NSC, there were six major areas of ongoing discussion between the NSC and Lyndon LaRouche and his immediate representatives. Those included economic development of Mexico and the Caribbean area, but the primary discussion, he said, was of beam-weapon nuclear missile defense. Let’s hear directly from Lyndon LaRouche’s video broadcast.

Lyndon LaRouche: Then [in 1980 in New Hampshire] I had this conversation with Reagan, and as a follow-up after he was President, we had a follow-up with various people in the Reagan circle, including his National Security Council. I was working with the head of the National Security Council on this operation, and with people from the CIA on this and that; I was sworn to this, and sworn to that. So, I was doing the whole thing, and the SDI was my work, which they liked.

And there was a faction including the President, who liked it. He liked it because he was against, he always hated Henry Kissinger. He hated Henry Kissinger particularly because of the “revenge weapons.” The idea that you build super weapons, and if somebody throws a bomb at you, you obliterate the planet. That is not considered a good defense. He was against that, and what he saw from experts was that what I was saying was accepted by experts—military and others. This was French intelligence, the leadership of the Gaullist faction in France, this was the leadership of the German military, this was the leadership of the Italian military, and all over the world.

LaRouche Back-Channel with USSR

Gallagher: Now in December of 1981—and this is really a crucial shift in the situation—the Reagan administration, through intelligence agencies, directly requested that LaRouche start a back-channel, or a series of back-channel discussions, with Soviet representatives about this new scientific and strategic doctrine. In February, after that request was made, EIR had a conference in Washington, D.C. on anti-missile defense. It was attended by more than 300 people, including people from the U.S. government, the Soviet government, and representatives of the East bloc nations’ governments. LaRouche gave the keynote on relativistic beam defense. That same month, he was able to actually begin the back channel in discussions at the Soviet Embassy in Washington with a Soviet diplomat named Yevgeni Shershnev. . . . LaRouche would give a full report to the National Security Council, through Morris, of everything that happened in the back-channel.

Then in October and November 1982, another kind of back channel began. Henry Kissinger personally, along with others on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB)—a board that I think no longer exists in this same form—over his own signature, contacted then FBI Director William Webster, asking that LaRouche be targetted. This letter later became public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board also developed its own new strategic policy, in a National Intelligence Estimate document called, “Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict, 1982-1992,” Issued by the Director of Central Intelligence. This is the document that provided the first 25 minutes of Reagan’s famous speech on March 23, 1983. The last five minutes were derived from a National Security document that directly reflected LaRouche’s policy. But there was that alternative policy which had been developed, which was essentially a policy for full nuclear confrontation. This dates the point of the really insane idea that if we drive the Soviet Union to a confrontation, it will back down. If we get into a real nuclear stand-off, they will give up, and we will then be able to rule, and place or remove any government in the world that we want to, without Soviet interference.

You see Reagan, in a way, addressing this in the last portion of his speech:

President Ronald Reagan addressing the nation from the White House on national security, during which he made the surprise announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative,. March 23, 1983.

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LaRouche and the Strategic Defense Initiative

President Ronald Reagan: I clearly recognize that defensive systems have limitations and raise certain problems and ambiguities. If paired with offensive systems, they can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy, and no one wants that. But with these considerations firmly in mind, I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents, now, to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. . . .

Gallagher: At just that time, the Soviet diplomat Shershnev, in one of the back-channel talks, detailed to LaRouche why the Soviet leadership would reject his doctrine, if Reagan were to put it forward. They said it would work militarily, but its development would be much to the advantage of the United States and Western countries, because of their superior ability to propagate scientific breakthroughs into the civilian economy.

In February, just before Reagan’s speech, LaRouche had been in Europe, holding seminars for European military officials, effectively securing backing for his idea by the French and German commands. He met with European military officials all over the continent and briefed them on everything that he was doing. In February just before the President’s speech, Shershnev informed LaRouche that the Soviet leadership was confident that any intention by Reagan to do anything like this would be blocked.

In March of 1983, ten days before this speech, Uwe Parpart—then a scientific representative of LaRouche—met with National Security Council scientists and consultants on this possible forthcoming Reagan announcement. And then, on March 16—that is, one week prior to the speech—LaRouche representatives Jeff Steinberg and I met with nine representatives of the Air Force and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and briefed them; they told us the Pentagon was unaware of any prospect of any new strategic policy coming out! Again, this was one week prior to Reagan’s speech. You know from that, therefore, that the policy did not originate or come immediately from the Defense Department. Not even from DARPA, which was charged later with carrying it out.

Then you had Reagan’s speech which you’ve all no doubt heard.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Paul Gallagher, then Executive Director of the Fusion Energy Foundation, is interviewed by CBS-TV about beam weapons on March 24, 1983, the day after President Reagan’s SDI announcement.

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On March 24, the day after the speech, I appeared, representing the Fusion Energy Foundation, on the CBS Evening News as the first nongovernmental spokesman to explain and defend the SDI. And the next day, a similar appearance by Uwe Parpart, who was on another of the networks.

In April, the month after, Shershnev informed LaRouche that he had been ordered to stop the back-channel. He was recalled to Moscow, and it ended. I think it’s unnecessary to mention, that meant that the situation had now become extremely dangerous from the standpoint of the ongoing Euro missiles crisis, since by this time, the deployment of the Pershing 2 missiles and the ground-launched cruise missiles was well under way. The full battalion would not be there and ready to launch until the beginning of 1985, but it was well under way at this point. So the situation with the Russian rejection was obviously quite serious.

Attacks on LaRouche

Soviet attacks in the press against the SDI, and on LaRouche personally as the author of the SDI, began to multiply. Then there was the first NBC TV prime time, half-hour program, called “First Camera,” in March 1984, attacking “The LaRouche Factor in the Reagan Administration.” And the New Republic magazine came out in its November 19 issue with a cover story, “The LaRouche Connection”—here’s the rest of the title, get this—”Since 1981 the leaders of a lunatic movement have conferred repeatedly with top administration officials. Their aim? To win respect and to influence Reagan’s Stars War plan. They succeeded.”

It reached the point where there were simultaneous, major attacks on LaRouche in Izvestia in Moscow, and a press conference held in Chicago held by Charles Manatt, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Walter Mondale, by then, the actual Democratic candidate for President, for the purpose of demanding that Ronald Reagan break all his connection, and all connections within his administration, to Lyndon LaRouche or any of his representatives.

EIRNS/Philip Ulanowsky

A Schiller Institute march and rally in Washington, DC, addressed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche (below) on January 15, 1985.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

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It was then that the Department of Justice first began its attempt to prosecute LaRouche and his associates, which went on through a period in which LaRouche and movement organized a higher peace movement, literally: On January 15, 1985, as the deployment of the Euro missiles was being completed, we organized a demonstration of 10,000 people in Washington, addressed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, right at the south side of the Capitol: These 10,000 people came to Washington and demonstrated in 8° weather on Martin Luther King’s birthday.

That same day, the Washington Post published the first of three days’ consecutive articles, each one about 5,000 words long, starting on the front page and jumping to inside pages—that day, the next day, the next day, attempting to chronicle every single contact between LaRouche representatives and Reagan and his representatives, since 1980, and to print the names of the officials who were doing these meetings, and demanding—essentially threatening—this end, or the Post will begin a serious, all-out campaign against these officials, if they don’t end their contacts with Lyndon LaRouche.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche addressing a “Beam the Bomb” Conference in Washington, DC on April 13, 1983.

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So this was now the demand of the nation’s major liberal press, of the Democratic Party candidate for President, of the chairman of the Democratic Party, of Izvestia and Pravda and a number of other major Soviet publications, all simultaneously: Break the connection between LaRouche and Ronald Reagan.

Let’s listen to the three objectives that I said Lyndon LaRouche was pursuing throughout this campaign. It’s very clear from his speech, delivered in April of 1983, to a conference in Washington, called “Beam the Bomb”—that was the name of the conference; it’s very clear that Lyndon LaRouche still had those three intentions very clearly in mind and was pursuing them all simultaneously as one. In fact, he started out the speech, by saying “Let me outline the rules which must govern the upcoming negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Those negotiations were the beginning, the ones which led eventually to the INF Treaty of 1987, but not until many things had happened!

New Physical Principles

Lyndon LaRouche [video]: Five days after the President announced the adoption of our new strategic doctrine, the Soviet weekly whose name translates as Economic Gazette came off the press. This issue—it’s number 14 for 1983—contains on page 2 a feature article written by the head of the Soviet laser program, Academician [Evgeny] Velikhov. It’s entitled, in the translation done by my staff, “The Laser Beam Is Working.” A few quotations from the article give you the flavor of the matter. It begins as such.

“The development of laser technology is convincing confirmation of the determining influence of fundamental scientific discoveries on the economy. The laser effect, predicted, discovered and researched with the decisive participation of Soviet scientists, has, in a comparatively short period—a little more than two decades—gone through all the stages of development, and emerged into the open range of multi-purpose utilization in the national economy.”

He summarizes the present picture of applications of lasers to the Soviet economy:

“Lasers can be applied effectively in mass production in the chemicals industry. They are very promising also for such areas as biology, environmental protection, construction and irrigation, communications, computer technology, printing, recording, and graphics processing. The potentialities of lasers serve as one of the paths toward solution of the problem of the controlled thermonuclear reaction.”

To provide you a general sense of the matter, from the Soviet side, which is also true on our side,— to provide you a sense of how important these economic spin-offs of military laser technology are, and to demonstrate why these economic spin-offs will be a critical part of Soviet thinking about the coming missile-crisis negotiations, you must have the following parts of the overall picture.

If we of the United States are not morally a collection of crazy lemmings jumping over a cliff of “post-industrial” collapse, we shall probably spend, in terms of today’s purchasing-power, about $1 trillion, more or less, on combined strategic and tactical applications of lasers and laser-like devices during the remaining years of this century. For the edification of spies from the New York Times, let it be clearly understood that I am not leaking some highly secret fact of our government’s secret policy-planning. Anyone who understands the logic of the U.S.-Soviet laser arms race and also knows a few facts about the situation, will recognize that my estimation of about $1 trillion is a safely conservative figure. . . .

Now, on the U.S. side, I am certain that the program I am projecting will cause the greatest economic boom in world-history in the United States. What Academician Velikhov wrote in the indicated issue of the Economic Gazette is only a hint of the sweeping revolution in modern science, as well as in agricultural and other fields, which will be hitting our economy in the civilian sector by 1985, or even perhaps as early as 1984. By ’84, I mean that there are existing laser technologies, technologies which we are not using, and we should be using in the U.S. economy, but because of our habits of thinking, we’ve been throwing them off.

During the last part of this decade, we’ll begin to get significant spinoffs, if we’re determined to do so, in the civilian sector of the economy from new developments coming out of the military sector. And if I have any influence on it, that will happen very rapidly.

As I said, I predicted this spending of $1 trillion won’t cost the U.S. economy a single penny. The increase in average level of income per person will be of a much greater amount, as a result of the technological spin-offs, than we spend per person than we spend for the program.

Now, it’s true that military spending as such is economic waste. You can’t eat it. I hope you don’t try to wear it. [laughter] And so, it’s waste! But let’s look at waste in terms of laboratory terms. Let’s imagine that military spending is nothing but a gigantic laboratory, and what comes out of the back end of that laboratory, as far as material, is scrap! Which is what military goods are, as far as an economy is concerned. But if you use them too freely, they turn the economy into scrap.

But think of that as a laboratory, and think of the technologies coming out of the laboratory, coming into the economy. So, think of the $1 trillion as being spent as a laboratory expense—albeit not in the most efficient way—but as a laboratory expense, and then, think of its effect on the economy. It’s not unrealistic to expect, that as a result of this program, the growth output, tangible output per capita in the U.S. economy will increase between two and three times within the next 15 years. It’s very simple: All we have to do, first of all, to get a very substantial increase in the economy, is to reverse the post-’65 trends.

We had,— 55% of the labor force, in 1929, as we entered the Great Depression, was employed either in production of tangible goods, or in transportation of goods. In 1946, at the beginning of the postwar civilian economy, we employed 62% of the labor force either in producing tangible goods or in transporting them. Today, we’re employing a shrinking 28% or less.

If we simply reverse that trend, through reindustrialization, we will automatically, very easily, double the total output of the economy, in the next 15 years. Now, if we add,— we compare the case of NASA’s research and development effect on the economy back during the early 1960s; if we compare that, it is extremely modest to say, that the overall increase per year in productivity of the U.S. labor force over the next 15 years will be growing at about 5% per year. That’s an extremely modest estimate. It could grow up to as high as 10%, for reasons I’ll indicate.

Now, from Moscow, this may look a little different. I would estimate, on the basis of what I know of the scale of Soviet work and the capabilities of Soviet science, that over the next four to five years, the Soviet Union can probably approximately match anything we can do in this area, in the military sector. The question is, can they enjoy the same rate of economic growth in the economy that we can, as a result of a civilian economy spinoffs? Thus, can they continue to afford the expenditure, at the level we can, after 1986-87-88? . . .

By going back and forcing ourselves to do what we should have done anyway, to commit ourselves to technological progress, we’ll force back cultural optimism. And if the two superpowers have any brains, we’ll force ourselves to live together on the same planet.

How shall we do that? How shall the two superpowers negotiate? Just take this point. I would say that the counsellor for the two superpowers in the coming negotiations [on the banning of the intermediate-range missiles] should be Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Why? She probably is the best statesperson alive today. We’ve met once; I’ve had correspondence with her; I know people around her. But that’s not why—that’s a necessary included qualification.

But she happens to be the leader of 101 nations of the Non-Aligned Nations group, 101 nations who also live on this planet, and who would like to continue to live, and whose destiny is very much determined by the conduct of the two superpowers. The only way the two superpowers can live on this planet together, is by living together with these 101 nations, and others. And that’s the only way—by finding a common cause, by making the voice of the non-aligned peoples who aspire to technological progress, who wish the benefits of this new technology—that’s the only way we’re going to make it.

White House

President Ronald Reagan with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on the last day of their summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland on October 11, 1986.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

FBI raid of LaRouche offices in Leesburg, Virginia on October 6, 1986.

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Gallagher: And then later, near the very end of this speech, he describes how this negotiation—if it is based on the new strategic doctrine which Reagan has introduced, and only if it’s based on that—will actually lead to the two superpowers being able to, as he said, “get rid of these missiles! Just get rid of these missiles.” And then, he ends by saying what I quoted at the beginning: “I’ve worked long and hard to bring this about. I was thrilled when it happened, and I’m going to make sure that it’s done in the right way.”

That was then followed—some of which I’ve already discussed—by the more and more intense, combined persecution, prosecution and vilification of LaRouche, in order to remove him from the stage, and above all, to break this link between him and the Reagan administration, this policy link.

And it culminated in the October 11-12, 1986 Reykjavik, Iceland summit between President Gorbachov, who was by then Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and President Reagan, at which there were 1,000 reporters. Reagan and Gorbachov went into their personal meeting, and when they came out, then Secretary of State George Shultz—a dedicated enemy of the SDI—announced that there could have been an intermediate forces agreement reached at this summit, but it was not possible, because of the Soviet demand for the elimination of the SDI.

All these thousand reporters went into shock, that this subject, which was not on the agenda at all, had collapsed the summit before it could reach an agreement.

During that summit, as people may know, while the reporters were being entertained waiting around for the heads of state to emerge, they were being entertained by CNN reports of the October 6-7 raid of 400 armed federal and state agents on Leesburg, Virginia. The narrowly-averted killing of LaRouche, the arrest of many of his associates, and the seizure of our offices in Leesburg and so forth. The reporters were given that for their enjoyment, while they were waiting for this anti-climax, because Reagan had refused to give up the SDI. The Reagan-LaRouche connection hadn’t been broken yet. It wasn’t until after LaRouche was under indictment, that Gorbachov felt it safe to sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement with Reagan, which was signed near the end of 1987.

Ross: Thank you, Paul. . . . We’ll now hear from our second speaker, the leader of the LaRouche PAC science team, Benjamin Deniston.

BENJAMIN DENISTON:

Moon-Mars Mission

LPAC-TV

Benjamin Deniston

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Benjamin Deniston: I hope most people watching, know we’re in a major mobilization to get Trump to exonerate Mr. LaRouche, to declare that the reasons for the legal attacks on him were unjust, because they were a political operation against him. . . .

From that perspective, I want to look at the evolution of his conception of the SDI, and into LaRouche’s idea of space colonization, but from the standpoint of what I think—and this is my perspective on it—was that, underlying his idea of the SDI, underlying his policies generally, Lyn was, and is, a real threat to the British Empire.

On March 30,1984, LaRouche issued a memo, “The LaRouche Doctrine: Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the United States and U.S.S.R.” This was right around the time Paul was discussing, pertaining to the SDI—what the SDI really meant. And the issue that he addresses, which carries into the space program, which carries into today, is this: What is the scientific basis of a sustainable peace among the leading powers of the planet? I’ll argue that it was Lyn’s insights into this, as the real threat to the existence of empire on the planet. Just to highlight a couple of quotes, in the paragraph preceding the quote I am giving you, he had asked what would it mean were the SDI to go through, that is, if we got the U.S. and the Soviet Union to agree to the SDI, what does that mean?

EIR

April 1984: The LaRouche Doctrine.

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For a significant period of time, the defense would enjoy approximately an order of magnitude of superiority, man for man, over the offense, relative to the previous state of affairs. This would permit negotiation of a temporary solution to the imminence of a “Launch on Warning” posture by both powers: a solution which might persist for 10, 15 years, or longer. The true solution must be found in the domain of politics and economics, and the further shaping of military relations between the powers must produce military policies by each coherent with the direction of development of the needed political and economic solutions.

So he says very clearly, the core idea of the SDI would be a step, something 10, 15 years or more, but a step in the direction of a sustainable, lasting peace, and as he elaborates in other locations, the ending of an imperial system on the planet.

LaRouche continues:

The political foundation for durable peace must be: (a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and (b) cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.

The Core of U.S.-Russian Relations

Paul highlighted LaRouche’s focus on the spinoffs, and he had the wonderful clips from LaRouche discussing the economic spinoffs of the SDI, that being but one expression of the type of technological driver needed.

In this core document for U.S.-USSR relations in the context of the SDI program, he says:

The powers jointly agree upon the adoption of two tasks as the common interest of mankind, as well as the specific interest of each of the two powers: (1) The establishment of full economic equity respecting the conditions of individual life in all nations of this planet during a period of not more than fifty years; (2) Man’s exploration and colonization of nearby space as the continuing common objective and interest of mankind during and beyond the completion of the first task. The adoption of these two working-goals as the common task and respective interest in common of the two powers and other cooperating nations, constitutes the central point of reference for erosion of the potential political and economic causes of warfare between the powers.

June 1985: LaRouche keynotes Krafft Ehricke memorial.

August 1985: LaRouche on a Moon-Mars mission.

December 1986: LaRouche on the science of Mars colonization.

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So even in this 1984 document, Lyndon LaRouche looked at the space program, the exploration and colonization of nearby space, as the continuation of the core principles of sustainable peace, which would be initiated by the SDI.

If we jump to one year later, on June 15-16, the Fusion Energy Foundation and the Schiller Institute co-hosted an international memorial conference celebrating the life and work of space pioneer Krafft Ehricke, the proceedings of which were released in this book, Colonize Space! Open the Age of Reason. LaRouche’s keynote was “Ehricke’s Contribution to Global and Interplanetary Civilization.” Again, LaRouche continues the development of the continuity of the underlying key issues of the SDI in terms of a sustainable, lasting peace, into the Moon-Mars program. He says:

In other words, if we wish to develop the SDI and its offshoots in the best way, the way to organize the program is as a by-product of a mission assignment for colonizing first the Moon and then Mars. It would be an error, if the task-orientation of the SDI were limited to a list of projected military requirements. The proper mission orientation adopted as the mandate of the program should be the Moon-Mars colonization task. Each weapon system developed, should be developed by accelerating the by-products of the primary mission assignment, [the Moon-Mars program].

The SDI and a Moon-Mars Mission

Shortly after the Krafft Ehricke Memorial Conference—and I believe he mentioned this in his address—he drafted a document titled, “How Private Initiative Can Help To Colonize the Moon and Mars.” Once again, he takes the idea further:

[T]he adoption of a Moon-Mars mission assignment subsumes implicitly every technology required by the SDI, and more. It provides each participating nation the “spill-over” benefits otherwise peculiar to SDI development. It bypasses the political obstacles to participation in SDI development. It puts the research and development in the task-oriented form which coincides with the fundamental interests of each and every nation.

UCLA/Andrea Ghez et al.

Imaging the stars orbiting Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, using the W.M. Keck Telescopes.

NASA

Mars, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003.

Fusion Energy Foundation

1983: Mutually Assured Survival.

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So, over a several-year span, LaRouche saw the SDI as a critical intervention in a certain period of time. But the fundamental rooted issue is always technological progress, unleashed for all nations on the planet. The only sustainable peace is progress, is growth, is scientific revolution, is technological revolution. That was a central component to the SDI, as Paul identified it clearly. It’s that principle that must continue out of the SDI, into future policies, and LaRouche saw colonization of space as an imperative from that standpoint, a necessary action for all mankind to partake in, a view shared by Krafft Ehricke.

The following year, in 1986, he published a paper called, “The Science and Technology Needed To Colonize Mars.” It appeared initially in the November-December 1986 issue of Fusion magazine, and was republished in EIR, in two parts, the first in the April 26, 2019 issue, and the second in the May 3, 2019 issue. I think this paper lays out a rather unique perspective that LaRouche has on this process of fundamental human progress and development. At a certain point, in a discussion of how to colonize the Moon, how to colonize Mars, the issues and technologies involved, he has a very interesting interlude on fundamental science:

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

Major European rivers (l.), and cargo being transported on a canal (r.).

CC

A Phoenician-Punic ship, from a relief carving on a 2nd century sarcophagus.

A spiral galaxy like our Milky Way Galaxy.

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Remote Observational Platforms

After this interlude, LaRouche introduces a conception of reworking the entire Moon-Mars colonization program, from the standpoint of providing future generations the scientific instrumentation that will make evident the new anomalies, which will then require creative hypotheses for new, fundamental revolutions in science. And he worked the whole program backwards from there. He develops the conception of an entire orbital array of satellite observation systems, telescopes that can look across vast parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

He says that we will want to position these instruments far away from Earth, far away from the Sun, to minimize noise and interference. We will want to array them over a large area, but integrate them to act as if they were part of a single system. And he throws out the idea of actually distributing them along Mars’ orbit around the Sun, at different locations along that orbit with the different observation systems, and integrate them to operate as if you had one satellite system the size of Mars’ orbit.

That’s the kind of revolutionary, groundbreaking observational system that will then allow us to see completely new areas of the universe, study other stellar systems, our galaxy, other galaxies, all kinds of anomalous phenomena which will be the critical basis for completely new revolutions in science. And those scientific revolutions then will provide potentials for new technologies and economic growth.

1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States

The rail network in the United States as of 1870.

Schiller Institute

The proposed World Land-Bridge.

Human civilization leaps to the Moon and Mars.

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He says, that should really be our goal. What do we need for that? Well, we need scientists to operate these things and repair and manage them: So they need to be able to be in space. They need support systems, so we need to be able to have supporting infrastructure, supporting people to help the scientists with their objectives. That means, we need bases on other planetary bodies, which means we need to be able to colonize the Moon and be able to produce materials from the Moon, to get out into farther parts of the Solar System. . . .

I think it’s worth emphasizing LaRouche’s growing interest in the galaxy, our galaxy and galactic systems in general, as providing completely new frontiers for science, new anomalies, as he laid out at the time. If you look at even some of the key boundary conditions of our current scientific knowledge, repeatedly they break down at the level of galactic systems.

Gravitation on a galactic scale, for example: Because of the limits of current science, we can’t get it to work, so the scientists have invented dark matter. Recall the recent, fascinating image of the “black hole” in Galaxy M87 by the Event Horizon Telescope Consortium. This tells us something, but it tells us really that we still have no idea what’s going on. Then there is speculation of the existence of a so-called “super-massive black hole” at the center of our own galaxy.

In the equations of modern physical science, these phenomena show up as a singularity, it’s when the equations go off to infinity—meaning we just don’t know what’s going on there. All we know is that we have a new angle of definitive proof that phenomena in the physical universe seem to meet conditions at which our equations break down. But that doesn’t mean the universe breaks down there. It just means we have yet to understand what’s actually happening within these phenomena.

It’s just interesting to note that some phenomena are also associated with some of the most active and energetic activity we see, producing massive jet and lobe structures which can dwarf the size of an entire galaxy, coming from tiny phenomena at the very center. So there are all kinds of anomalies out there.

Ben Deniston

NASA

First close-up views of Pluto, as imaged by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.

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Imaging the Universe

The image of the “black hole” at the center of M87 didn’t require telescopes populating the entire orbit of the Sun at Mars’ distance. But they did require an array of telescopes covering the entire Earth. There were telescopes from Antarctica, Europe, Hawaii, Mexico, and the continental United States—all had to be integrated to operate as a single system, giving a telescope the size of the Earth, to get the resolution needed to see this. Anything less than that, wouldn’t have been able to detect it.

The next steps are already being discussed: putting similar telescope systems in orbit around the Earth, to get a farther distance. In Earth orbit, the degree of area covered will be larger than on Earth’s surface. Putting telescopes farther out, will get even better resolution on these kinds of phenomena.

We can go to the Moon. Many of you are probably familiar with an interesting lunar phenomenon—the same side of the Moon always faces us. Meaning the other side of the Moon is always shielded from the Earth. There’s an entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we’ve never been able to observe in the universe, because the Earth is way too noisy with manmade and also natural emissions.

So, for low-frequency radio emissions, the far side of the Moon is a unique place to begin to develop observation systems. Each one of these different images is a different part of the electro-magnetic spectrum [optical, X-ray, and radio frequencies]. It wasn’t until we looked at the universe in radio waves, that we even knew these phenomena existed around some galaxies. Imaging in the X-ray, has revealed huge additional structure dwarfing the scale visible to us in optical images of those galaxies. It’s like a completely new window, a completely new “sense.” And there are parts of the spectrum that we haven’t even looked in yet. We don’t even know what the universe looks like in some of these low-frequency ranges. So the far side of the Moon will provide us an excellent place to go to next, for these observations.

NASA/GSFC Ariz. State Univ.

The two faces of the Moon: Near Side (l.) and Far Side (r.), as imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

CC 3.0/Mark Wieczorek

Topography of the Moon, from data obtained during the Clementine mission in 1994.

Left: Victor Blacus; CC 3.0. Right: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O’Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Source: NRAO.

A composite image of galaxy Hercules A reveals a massive black hole (r.). The electro-magnetic spectrum chart (l.).

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I could go on forever. But one other thing I’d like to tell you about involves a collaboration between some Russian and American scientists who have been pursuing a potentially new approach in recent years: the idea of using the Sun itself as a telescope. Some of you might be familiar with the first major positive test of relativity, in which the issue of the anomaly in Mercury’s orbit was addressed. But then there was a huge breakthrough when, I believe, Arthur Eddington observed stars during a solar eclipse and noticed stars were displaced from their apparent positions, when observed very close to the Sun. The gravitational effect of the Sun actually did slightly bend the starlight.

Well, if it’s bending the starlight that’s coming in, people reasoned, then if you could go out far enough away from the Sun, those bending light rays would come to a point where you could use the gravitational field of the Sun itself as a telescope. I apologize for forgetting the numbers, but it’s like a billion-fold greater resolution than anything we could possibly construct on Earth, or even in Earth orbit, or many other types of systems.

And you have to get out to a distance of, I believe it’s 500 Astronomical Units [1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance], so it’s pretty far out there. But if you have fusion propulsion, if you have the type of systems that LaRouche was outlining for his space colonization, this is the kind of stuff we could be doing.

That is the only way to conceivably get any kind of decent imaging of planets around other stars, to potentially see planets around other stars, at I think it was 100 light-years—and there are quite a few stars that, from recent missions, we know they have planets around them. So we could actually be getting images of this quality of other planets around other stars, which, if you know about the distances involved, you’re talking about an incredible feat.

CC 3.0/B.P Abbott et al.

First measurement of a gravitational wave event, by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in 2015, marking the very beginning of gravity-wave astronomy, an entirely new way of perceiving our universe.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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A Sustained Peace for Humanity

But I think this is a perfect time to be supporting and pushing a campaign for space colonization, for a space development perspective, from Lyndon LaRouche’s standpoint. This is not just a science issue for people who like science; this is an issue for human progress, human development. And as LaRouche laid out very clearly in his work in the ’80s and up to the point he died, this is the only basis for mankind to have any kind of sustained peace. Peace is only going to come through shared commitment to continuous progress, continual development, scientific revolution upon scientific revolution, each step of the way providing new resources, new wealth available for mankind as a whole.

So if you ever take that out of the equation, you’re never going to be able to address a sustained peace on this planet, which is absolutely one of Lyndon LaRouche’s unique insights into the strategic situation.

U.S.-China Cooperation with Mexico Is Key to the Migrant Crisis

by Dennis Small

gob.mx

President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

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June 28—After marathon negotiations in Washington, D.C. from June 5-7, cabinet-level representatives of the governments of the United States and Mexico emerged to announce that they had reached an agreement on the issues of migration and trade, which had reached a crisis point between the two countries. The accord did defuse the immediate threat by President Donald Trump to impose a 5% tariff on all Mexican exports to the U.S. beginning June 10, which would escalate monthly up to a 25% level unless and until “the illegal migration crisis is alleviated through effective actions taken by Mexico.” The deal also reiterated the agreement reached on Dec. 18, 2018 between President Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) that “both countries recognize the strong links between promoting development and economic growth” in Mexico and Central America and solving the migration crisis.

But the announced agreement in reality did little more than dodge the bullet this time around, without addressing—let alone solving—the underlying issues of both trade and migration. Fundamental misconceptions about those issues, and about physical economy more broadly, continue to exist on both sides of the border—as they do on the related question of China’s necessary participation, along with the United States, in the economic development of the region. Unless they are addressed and resolved, those misconceptions will remain as festering sores which Wall Street and other British-run financial interests can and will exploit in their efforts to prevent the emergence of a global alternative to their bankrupt financial system. They will also try to use those misconceptions to feed their unquenched drive to overthrow the Trump government in Washington, as part of that strategic thrust to prevent the emergence of a new system.

In the Spirit of Lincoln and Juárez

On May 30, President Trump tweeted his surprise announcement about slapping tariffs on Mexican exports to the U.S. as the flood of illegal migrants stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border reached the historic level of 144,000 for the month of May. A follow-up White House statement asserted that the crisis at the border is due to “Mexico’s passive cooperation in allowing this mass incursion” of largely Central Americans, and that “Mexico could quickly and easily stop illegal aliens from coming through its southern border with Guatemala.” In subsequent tweets Trump also stated that “the Tariff is about stopping drugs as well as illegals,” placing the blame for that on Mexico’s doorstep as well.

The Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was especially unhappy with Trump’s announcement, because it came as a rebuff, just a few days after Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard had presented to the Trump administration a Mexican proposal to address the migration and drug problems through cooperative economic development in southern Mexico and northern Central America—a proposal that goes in the right direction for a solution, which Trump’s tariff approach definitely does not.

Right: Alexander Gardner

Left: Benito Juárez, President of Mexico (1858-1872); right: Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States (1861-1865)

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AMLO quickly responded to Trump’s May 30 statement with an open letter to the U.S. President, which began: “From the outset, let me state that I do not want a confrontation,” adding that the two countries should instead always “appeal to dialogue and act prudently and responsibly.” He then gave examples:

The best president of Mexico, Benito Juárez, maintained excellent relations with the great Republican [President] Abraham Lincoln. Later, during our petroleum expropriation, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood the profound reasons that led the patriotic President Lázaro Cárdenas to act on behalf of our sovereignty.

It is notable that EIR founder Lyndon LaRouche also repeatedly cited these two cases as exemplary of what U.S.-Mexican relations should be, as elaborated in his 1982 book, Operation Juárez. In his letter, AMLO then went on to cite FDR’s famous Four Freedoms as an example of the universal values all nations share. On the matter of migration, AMLO continued:

Human beings don’t abandon their own people out of choice, but out of necessity. That is why, from the beginning of my government, I proposed to you to choose cooperation for development to help Central American nations, with productive investments to create employment and solve the underlying painful problem. . . . President Trump, social problems aren’t resolved with taxes or coercive measures.

AMLO signed the letter, “Your friend.”

A Positive Spirit

The ensuing June 5-7 negotiations reflected a positive spirit on both sides. AMLO subsequently commented that “I have to recognize that Trump has shown a willingness to reach agreements,” and that the agreement they came to was a “good one.” The joint declaration issued on June 7 summarized the results, including the following:

• “Both countries recognize the vital importance of rapidly resolving the humanitarian emergency and security situation” at the border, and “the Governments of the United States and Mexico will work together to immediately implement a durable solution. . . .”

• Mexico will take “unprecedented steps to increase enforcement to curb irregular migration, to include the deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border. Mexico is also taking decisive action to dismantle human smuggling and trafficking organizations as well as their illicit financial and transportation networks. . . .”

• “The United States will immediately expand the implementation of the existing Migrant Protection Protocols across its entire southern border. This means that those crossing the U.S. southern border to seek asylum will be rapidly returned to Mexico where they may await the adjudication of their asylum claims. In response, Mexico will authorize the entrance of all of those individuals for humanitarian reasons, in compliance with its international obligations, while they await the adjudication of their asylum claims. Mexico will also offer jobs, healthcare and education according to its principles.”

The two sides also agreed to meet within 90 days to evaluate progress achieved, with Trump explicitly stating that he reserves the right to slap on tariffs at that point if he doesn’t like where things stand.

Since the signing of the accord, Mexico has been actively organizing for the joint development approach in southern Mexico and Central America’s Northern Triangle that was agreed to. At a June 21 press conference, AMLO announced that the Comprehensive Development Plan for Central America and Southern Mexico was moving forward.

A working group is in place with representatives of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras; and Mexico has signed a bilateral accord with El Salvador’s new President Najim Bukele, by which Mexico will provide $100 million to promote a “Sowing Life” reforestation program in that country, with the goal of providing 20,000 jobs to poor Salvadorans. Foreign Minister Ebrard reported on June 13 that the deal signed with Washington included a commitment to provide $5.8 billion for Central American development projects and $2 billion more for southern Mexico, but Washington has yet to confirm that. “We’re of course going to invite the U.S.” to keep its commitment, Ebrard stated.

wikipedia

A maquiladora in Mexico in 2007.

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The Actual Trade Issue: the Importer of Last Resort

A resumption of Trump’s tariff threat against Mexico would be a mistake—just as the initial idea of hitting the country with tariffs was misguided, and would have backfired. Here’s why.

In 2018, Mexico exported $346.5 billion in goods to the United States and imported $265 billion from the U.S., for a surplus of about $82 billion, according to official statistics provided by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Of Mexico’s exports to the U.S., a whopping $280 billion—81% of the total—came from the maquiladora sweatshops located in Mexico along the border with the United States, run mainly by U.S., Chinese, Japanese and other non-Mexican owned companies. If a 10-25% tariff were imposed on all exports from Mexico to the U.S., over 80% would simply hit re-exports of the maquiladoras back into the U.S.—which would amount to shooting the U.S. and other companies themselves in the foot, which is one reason that Trump’s threat led to howls of protest from many American corporations.

As EIR has documented for decades, these maquiladora in-bond assembly plants import raw materials and parts principally from the U.S.; use cheap Mexican labor (principally young women), cheap Mexican electricity, and cheap Mexican water to assemble the products; and then re-export the finished products back to the United States.

Lyndon LaRouche described this maquiladora looting process, designed by Wall Street and the City of London, and fortified and codified under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as an “Auschwitz south of the border,” which both destroyed U.S. manufacturing jobs and decent wages, and also wrecked the Mexican economy at the same time. The maquiladoras operate as a virtual foreign enclave on Mexican soil, while employing two out of every ten employed Mexicans.

Under this system, Mexico’s principal exports to the U.S. are autos and auto parts ($93 billion); electrical appliances and equipment ($64 billion); agricultural products ($26 billion); and only after that comes oil ($16 billion). And under this system, the U.S. has been converted into “the importer of last resort,” as LaRouche put it in an EIR study he commissioned back in 2001: “Look at the resort to virtual slave-labor operations, abroad, to export productive employment from the United States (and also western Europe) into regions where the price of labor is relatively the cheapest, and relative skills most marginal.” In the intervening 18 years, things have gotten far worse. Excerpts from the 2001 study follow this article.

British Free Trade Is the Succubus

President Trump is right that the U.S. is being victimized and is running a persistent trade deficit, not only with Mexico, but also with China and most of the world. But that will not be solved by imposing punitive tariffs in any of these cases, because that trade pattern is the intentional result of the entire British system of free trade and globalization that was imposed with the 1971 demise of the Bretton Woods system. It can only be rectified by changing that entire system, and establishing a New Bretton Woods of the sort specified in detail by Lyndon LaRouche, with the boom in skilled, productive employment that would accompany it—on both sides of the border.

UNICEF/Gilles Vauclair

In Cholomo Honduras, sleep interrupts an exhausted child laborer’s hand-stitching of cowhide covers onto softballs produced for the U.S. market.

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We have to rethink the entire approach to trade policy, from the ground up. As Lyndon LaRouche has shown, world trade today is simply a determined component of the entire, rigged global system of British free trade and globalization and its $1.5 quadrillion speculative bubble. To wit: under the British system, the United States economy has been driven to stop producing industrial and manufacturing goods, and to be the importer of last resort for low-wage producing nations around the planet, who export their hearts out, including food, raw materials, and other products, leaving their nations totally destitute. They do this as part of a “global supply chain,” as it has come to be called, which over time has reduced the overall technological and energy-flux density level of the total global economy.

The export revenues of the low-wage producing countries are in turn used toward paying down their unpayable foreign debt and other foreign obligations. As part of this British imperial scheme, the United States offsets its huge and growing trade deficit of goods, with a surplus on the services account, which means primarily financial and insurance services. It also offsets the trade deficit with a large and growing capital account surplus, which means sucking in huge volumes of financial capital into Wall Street to feed the cancerous $1.5 quadrillion financial bubble.

But it simply will not work to try to balance America’s trade account from the standpoint of win-lose trade negotiations and tariffs within the current, rigged global financial and monetary system. That approach will only accelerate confrontation, lead to what LaRouche called “the demise of an importer of last resort,” and have its trade effects immediately reversed in any event, by other countervailing effects due to the current floating exchange rate system. Concretely, every time Trump has put new tariffs on China, that country’s currency has dropped, thereby offsetting the tariff effect on its exports to the United States. The net result of this approach has been that the trade deficit of the United States has increased, not fallen; and that tensions have increased with the countries that should be our allies.

The Actual Migration Issue: Genocide

One key to understanding the real issue behind the migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexican border, is that of the huge increase in illegal migrants being detained at the border, a growing majority are Central Americans coming from the so-called Northern Triangle nations (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras), and not Mexicans.

Why the falling number of Mexicans? Historically, there have been huge flows of undocumented Mexicans entering the U.S., even more than from Central America.

There are a number of reasons for the relative decline in Mexicans. Beginning with the 2008 financial crash and economic collapse, more Mexicans began leaving the United States than entering it each year. As a result, the total number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico residing in the U.S. declined from 6.9 million in 2007 to 4.9 million in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. Then in each of the last three fiscal years (2015-18), the number of southwest border apprehensions of non-Mexicans has exceeded that of Mexicans, for the first time. And in the first eight months of fiscal 2019 (which began in September 2018), the Central American component of total apprehensions has soared even further. Some press accounts indicate that up to 90% of those currently being detained come from the Northern Triangle countries.

swiss-image.ch/Michael Wuertenberg

World’s leading drug legalization promoter and mega-speculator, George Soros, in 2011.

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One of the reasons is plainly political. George Soros, the world’s leading drug legalizer and mega-speculator, is a prominent financier of vicious non-governmental organizations that are heavily involved in the lucrative human trafficking networks operating in Central America and Mexico. According to Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, these criminal operations produce $6 billion per year in revenue. These groups are actually just cogs in the broader $2 trillion per year Dope, Inc., apparatus, which runs drugs, illegal arms, and human trafficking on behalf of the British Empire.

Soros is intent on destabilizing and toppling the Trump government, and has been using his assets in Central America to beat the bushes to deliberately induce caravans of desperate people towards the U.S. border, to try to create violent incidents and an overall crisis for Trump. It is noteworthy that the Mexican government arrested two top agents in this network on June 5—just as the negotiations in Washington were getting underway. Irineo Mujica, director of the U.S.-Mexican migrant rights group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), was arrested along with migrant “activist” Cristóbal Sánchez. Both are involved in organizing Central American caravans of migrants.

A day later, on June 6, the Financial Investigative Unit (UIF) of Mexico’s Finance Ministry announced it had blocked the bank accounts of 26 individuals accused of trafficking Central American migrants through Mexico. The UIF reported that it had “detected a series of financial organizations and transfers from Querétaro [Mexico] to six cities on the U.S. border . . . originating in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Cameroon, the U.S. and England.”

The Flow of Migrants

Another important reason there are far fewer Mexicans than Central Americans in the massive flow of migrants at the U.S. border, is that the Mexican government has actually gotten a handful of major infrastructure and other projects underway, which have helped create some job opportunities, and have given rise in the population to a sense of hope about prospects for the future inside the country. As AMLO himself has repeatedly stated, people don’t leave their homeland because they want to, but out of despair and the need to simply survive. Help bring about development in Mexico and Central America, AMLO has told President Trump, and that is the best way to start cutting into the migration problem. AMLO rightly argued that the worst thing to do to reduce migration, is to impose trade tariffs that would only sink the Mexican and Central American economies further into hell.

And hell it is. According to a study recently published in the Mexican daily El Economista, in El Salvador in 2018, 66% of workers were employed in the informal economy; in Guatemala, it was 71%; and Honduras 72%. The “informal” sector is just a polite way of saying the drugs-and-gangs-dominated black economy in general—where “employment” often means prostitution, street peddling and begging, and the like. It is, in fact, disguised unemployment, from the standpoint of a productive physical economy.

The real unemployment rate in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America ranges from 50 to 80%. In Honduras, a whopping 51% of its population lives in extreme poverty; 46% in Guatemala, and 13% in El Salvador. Violence, as a result of drug cartel and gang-related activity, is another key factor in the desperate migration. Honduras’s murder rate stands at 44 per 100,000 inhabitants; El Salvador, 51 per 100,000. Guatemala’s rate is somewhat lower at 22 per 100,000. But the totality of circumstances in the region constitutes intentional genocide.

China and the World Land-Bridge

Just think of what the region would look like if the United States and China had already jointly broken ground on building a high-speed railroad from Panama, through Central America, and into Mexico and the United States, as the backbone of an industrial development corridor that would provide millions of productive jobs to the region’s desperate population—as the LaRouche movement has long advocated.

Consider what other joint great development projects could be launched throughout the Caribbean Basin, if the U.S. and China were to jointly take up that task. This would lead to a sharp increase in U.S. capital goods exports throughout the region, and the return to the U.S. of well-paying productive jobs needed to produce those exports. Detroit could be Detroit again! (See the excerpts below from the 2018 Schiller Institute special report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Vol. II: A Shared Future for Humanity, for a discussion of some of the proposed great projects for the region.)

Right: Gage Skidmore

Major political figures in Trump’s immediate circle have insisted on U.S. policies toward Mexico directly opposite to those of the Presidents of both countries. Two such figures are Secretary of State Michael Pompeo (left) and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

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And yet, major political figures in Trump’s immediate circle have insisted on the opposite approach. For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on June 10 was quick to pronounce, that despite the agreements reached between Trump and AMLO, the U.S. would not be providing any additional funds for regional development: the U.S. “made no incremental resource commitments associated with this deal,” he stated; no “resource assistance” was offered to the Mexican government to deliver these outcomes, nor to Central America. “Where we find it in our interest in the Northern Triangle or in Mexico to provide resources that make sense to protect the American people, we’ll do that. But in the first instance, these nations have the responsibility to take care of these immigration problems in their home country.”

Pompeo has also been one of the most vocal opponents within the administration to cooperating with China on economic matters, despite the fact that it is President Trump’s stated intent to do so.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has also delivered a message to the Mexicans to stay away from Chinese investment, or else. According to Alfonso Romo, the head of the Office of the Presidency (Chief of Staff) of Mexico, “In Merida, after the [April 12, 2019] CEO Dialogue ended, a number of members from Mexico had a meeting with Secretary Wilbur Ross. . . . He said to us: ‘Well, I want to ask for a number of things; we want to strengthen our relationship because the only path the U.S. has, is to have a very strong common front trade bloc to compete with China,’ he said. ‘Second, we don’t want any very active participation of Chinese investment in Mexico, especially in strategic projects’.”

But that is exactly the area in which the U.S. and China must cooperate to bring development to Mexico and Central America, as the only viable way to solve the trade, migrant, drug and related crises.

The U.S. as Importer

The Demise of an

Importer of Last Resort

On Jan. 29, 2001, EIR published a feature package commissioned by Lyndon LaRouche under the headline, “The Demise of an Importer of Last Resort.” We reproduce here key excerpts from that set of articles.

Lyndon LaRouche

In his opening essay, LaRouche specified the nature of the collapse.

What is collapsing today, is not an economy, but a vast financial bubble, a bubble whose chief economic expression is the U.S. financial system’s role as “The Importer of Last Resort” for the world at large.

Look at what is called U.S. production. How much of the nominal U.S. production output’s content is the resale of imported components, assemblies, and even entire products? Compare the country of origin of your clothing, and nearly everything else, by type, which you wore or used otherwise two decades ago, and the country of origin of the same or a similar product today. Look at the resort to virtual slave-labor operations, abroad, to export productive employment from the United States (and also western Europe) into regions where the price of labor is relatively the cheapest, and relative skills most marginal. Look at the U.S. industrial corporations, so-called; what portion of the total income of those entities has been a reflection of pure financial speculation, such as that associated with City of London-pivoted mergers and acquisitions?

In effect, the world has been supporting, until about now, a vast U.S. dollar-denominated financial bubble, all largely for the purpose of propping up an inflated, intrinsically bankrupt U.S. economy’s role as “importer of last resort” for much of the world.

What happens, when that financial bubble moves into its inevitable chain-reaction-collapse phase? That is what is happening now.

Richard Freeman

In a second article, “The Bursting of the U.S. Import Bubble,” EIR’s Richard Freeman highlighted the internal destruction of the U.S. economy.

During the past few decades, but especially the past five years, the United States has attempted to disguise and override a physical economy that is contracting at the rate of 1 to 2% per annum, and producing a falling living standard, by a simple expedient: using its overvalued dollar to import—suck in—goods from other countries. What the U.S. does not produce, and in many crucial instances, is no longer capable of producing, it imports from abroad. As a result, imports have soared far above exports, leading to record trade deficits, with each year’s deficit successively dwarfing the previous year’s. In turn, the rising trade deficit is the leading element that swells the current account deficit.

To cover the current account deficit, Wall Street and the City of London have rigged the world financial system so that large flows of foreign-held dollars are attracted back into investment in the United States. What the United States pays in dollars for its physical goods and other items that make up the current account deficit, and more, is brought back into the United States.

This entire system of foreign goods flowing out of other countries and into the United States is held aloft by the U.S. financial bubble. Foreigners will bring dollars across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans into the United States, for investment in the U.S., only as long as the dollar is seen as a sound currency, and as long as dollar-denominated investment instruments—such as U.S. Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, stocks, derivatives—pay a relatively higher rate of return than the comparable instruments of other nations in the world. Thus, the bubble of the U.S. investment market has to be maintained, in order for the Anglo-American financier oligarchy to keep its grip on power.

This is not a healthy arrangement for any of the nations concerned. The United States is importing such a huge amount of physical goods, mostly, not because its economy is expanding, but because it has impaired or permanently destroyed the capacity to produce these goods by its own productive facilities.

Dennis Small

A third article, by Dennis Small, “Mexico Is Exporting Its Heart Out,” is excerpted here.

Mexico’s foreign trade has, in fact, grown phenomenally over the last 20 years, led by total exports to the United States, and in particular by exports from the maquiladoras (which go almost exclusively to the United States). Trade is now more than one-third of Mexico’s Gross National Product. . . . There is an inverse relationship between this globalized trade boom and the real physical economy. In the case of Mexico, while maquiladora foreign trade barreled ahead by more than 19% per year on average over the last two decades, and total trade grew by more than 12% per annum, the country’s physical economy (as measured by EIR’s market-basket studies collapsed by more than 2% yearly over the same time period.

Empleos Maquiladoras Matamoros Public Group

Thirty-five percent of Mexico’s imports are semi-finished products for the maquiladora sector, which are then simply re-exported as assembled consumer goods.

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In a healthy developing economy, about half its imports would be capital goods and other technology-bearing products, to speed its industrialization process. In Mexico, however, only 14% of total imports are capital goods, and about one-third of these go for the maquiladora sector, which in no way benefits Mexico’s national development. Thus, less than 10% of Mexican imports are usable capital goods. On the other hand, a shocking 35% of its imports are semi-finished products for the maquiladora sector, which are then simply re-exported as assembled consumer goods. . . .

It must here be underscored that the maquiladoras are, properly speaking, not part of the Mexican economy: They are a foreign enclave on Mexican territory, which grind up Mexican slave labor, and spread Auschwitz-like conditions, especially in the north of Mexico. . . . Maquiladora employment has skyrocketed by an order of magnitude, from a mere 120,000 twenty years ago, to about 1.4 million today—an average annual rate of increase of 13%. At the same time, actual employment in the manufacturing sector of Mexico proper, has dropped by about one-third, from 2.2 million to about 1.5 million—an average annual decline of 2%. In other words, about the same number of workers are now employed in these maquiladora slave-labor shops, as are actually employed in the entire manufacturing sector of Mexico proper.

Consider the insanity of it all:

• U.S. manufacturing jobs are fleeing to Mexico’s maquiladoras;

• the maquiladoras, in turn, are exporting cheap products to the U.S. consumer bubble;

• that bubble, in turn, is kept going by a speculative financial bubble maintained, in part, by massive Mexican debt payments to Wall Street;

• and those flows, in turn, are premised on the maquiladora export binge.

The result: U.S. industry and jobs are collapsing; Mexico’s physical economy and labor force are being ground up; trade is booming; the foreign debt is being paid punctually; and Wall Streeters are laughing all the way to their own banks.

Ah, the wonders of free trade and globalization!

The Future of the Americas

Lies with the New Silk Road

by Dennis Small

The following is excerpted from the chapter on Ibero-America in the Schiller Institute’s June 2018 special report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge: A Shared Future for Humanity, Vol. II.

The Maritime Silk Road

The Caribbean Basin lies at the crossroads of maritime traffic linking Eurasian economic activity with the entire Western Hemisphere. This will become a fulcrum of the region’s integration with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its resulting development, by taking full advantage of the newly-expanded Panama Canal (especially with Panama’s recent adherence to the BRI), and by:

• Constructing the even larger Nicaraguan Grand Inter-Oceanic Canal, which will permit the passage of the world’s largest bulk cargo and container ships, significantly shortening shipping distances and times from South America to China;

FIGURE 1

The Caribbean Basin Belt and Road

• Developing the deep-water port of Ponce, Puerto Rico, which lies directly on the principle shipping routes from Europe and Africa to the Panama and Nicaraguan canals, and can serve as a connection point for cargo traffic to U.S. Gulf and Atlantic Coast ports, as well as to the Caribbean nations. The fact that Ponce, Puerto Rico is part of the United States is particularly important to help integrate the United States into the Caribbean Basin Belt and Road project, and into the global BRI more generally; and

• Finishing construction of a deep-water port and industrial development zone in Mariel, Cuba, which is especially well-suited to Cuba’s relatively skilled labor force, and its significant hydrocarbon and other raw materials deposits, into the BRI.

The Iberian nations of Spain and Portugal have both stressed that they have a special role to play in the extension of the BRI into Ibero-America and the Caribbean, because of both cultural and language affinities and long-standing economic ties, as well as the natural shipping routes connecting Europe with the Americas, which can readily extend the Maritime Silk Road into the region. The Chinese government has also stated that they are promoting the extension of the Maritime Silk Road into Ibero-America and the Caribbean.

The November 2016 Chinese Foreign Ministry’s “Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean” stressed China’s role in this regard:

[China will] promote the connectivity of infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean. . . .

China will strengthen cooperation on technical consultation, construction and engineering, equipment manufacturing and operation management in the fields of transportation, trade logistics, storage facilities, information and communication technology, energy and power, water conservancy, housing and urban construction. . . .

China will support its strong enterprises to participate in major resources and energy development projects and infrastructure construction projects in Latin American and Caribbean countries and, using these projects as the basis, to build production lines and maintenance service bases in the region for construction materials, non-ferrous metals, engineering machinery, locomotives and rolling stock, electric power and communication equipment, with the purpose of reducing costs for resources and energy development and infrastructure construction in Latin American and Caribbean countries. . . .

USACE/Robert DeDeaux

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Task Force power restoration lay-down yard at the port of Ponce, Puerto Rico on February 4, 2018.

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A Deep-Water Port in Ponce, Puerto Rico

Ponce, located on Puerto Rico’s south coast, lies on one of the main shipping routes from Europe to the Panama Canal (and the planned Nicaraguan Canal), through the Mona Passage. Ponce’s Port of the Americas is a potential hub for the biggest cargo ships, with “spoke” routes for somewhat smaller ships going from there to ports across the Caribbean and on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States. The government of Puerto Rico has invested over $285 million in upgrades to the port, including dredging the entrance channel and berths up to 50 feet, and it is now the deepest port on the island, and one of the deepest in all of the Caribbean. Additionally, two super Post-Panamax ship-to-shore cranes and 4,400 linear feet of quayside have been installed.

The development of Ponce as a super-port is also important as part of any viable plan to reconstruct the island after the 2017 hurricane damage—the other elements being replacing the entire power grid, building rail lines (there are now none on the island), and expanding the San Juan international airport, already the busiest in the Caribbean.

A Deep-Water Port in Mariel, Cuba

This project parallels and complements the Ponce port project. Mariel lies on Cuba’s northern coast, just west of Havana, and as such is directly on major shipping routes connecting South America and the entire Caribbean Basin to New Orleans and other major U.S. ports.

Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Trade Minister Antonio Carricarte announced on October 31, 2017 at the China Pavilion of the Havana International Fair, accompanied by Chinese Ambassador Chen Xi, that Cuba hopes to become a regional hub as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, so that the BRI can extend throughout Ibero-America and the Caribbean. Specifically, Carricarte said, Cuba’s goal is to become a maritime and air transport center for the entire region, particularly in the Mariel Special Development Zone. “This goal for our country can connect us with China’s Belt and Road, for the purpose of extending that noble goal to the Caribbean and Latin America,” he said.

The fact that our (Schiller Institute) proposal for the Caribbean Basin Belt and Road involves nations still plagued by border disputes, and more broadly the participation of such disparate nations and language groupings—South and Central American nations, Caribbean nations, the United States, and the European Union—is a fact which some might consider a weakness and vulnerability, but it is actually one of its greatest strengths. The Caribbean Basin can be a microcosm of the kind of cooperation that is required for the global success of the BRI.

FIGURE 2

Proposed Mexico-China Rail Project

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Mexico Rail Projects Derailed

The Enrique Peña Nieto government in Mexico (2012-2018) was one of the first in Ibero-America to announce its intention of working with China on a number of key rail corridor projects which, had they not been sabotaged, would have marked the de facto incorporation of Mexico into the broader BRI-BRICS/Ibero-American alliance for development which emerged out of the July 2014 BRICS summit in Fortaleza Brazil. For Mexico, such development projects are the only physical-economic basis for breaking the country free of the Dope, Inc. coup d’état which Barack Obama and his British controllers orchestrated in Mexico in 2009, and of reversing the decades of looting under the IMF and the Bush-Salinas North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which las left the country at death’s door.

On November 3, 2014, Mexico’s Communications and Transport Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Esparza announced that a consortium led by China Railway Construction Corp (CRCC) had won the contract to build Ibero-America’s first high-speed rail line, from Mexico City to Querétaro. The 130-mile route was to have trains traveling up to 186 mph, making the trip in just under an hour. Construction was expected to begin before the end of 2014, with the line open for business in 2017, and daily passenger traffic of 27,000 people expected.

CRCC was the only final bidder for the project when other international companies—including Siemens of Germany and Bombardier of Canada—had to withdraw because they could not pull together a financing package in time. The CRCC-led consortium—which included four Mexican construction companies and the French company Systra—was backed by financing from China’s Eximbank for 85% of the cost of the project, which was some $3.74 billion.

It was widely expected that China would win the bidding; what is significant is that the award was made official on the eve of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s Nov. 8-15, 2014 trip to China and Australia, which included participation in the APEC and G20 summits and a state visit to China. In late October 2014, there was a flurry of reports that the Peña Nieto trip had been cancelled, when the President’s office temporarily withdrew a request to travel that it had presented to the Mexican Senate, as required by the Constitution. According to reliable Mexican intelligence sources, the Mexican government had come under intense pressure from the Obama White House to cancel the trip, as well as from domestic forces also opposed to the prospects of deepening cooperation between Mexico and China, and with all of the allied BRICS nations.

NASA

Rodolfo Neri Vela, Mexican scientist, was Mexico’s first astronaut as a payload specialist aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-61B) in 1985.

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In addition to the Mexico-Querétaro high-speed rail line, Peña Nieto was expected to finalize a number of other projects with China, including a major rail line covering the route Nayarit—Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua—El Paso, Texas. That area of northwestern Mexico is currently controlled by the drug trade, which can only be defeated by bringing development to the area. This rail link is also critical for connecting the cross-Pacific Maritime Silk Road to a new deep-water port in the state of Nayarit, and to a high-speed rail line into the U.S., and to the broader World Land-Bridge.

A third, strategically important Trans-Isthmus rail corridor was also agreed upon, connecting the port city of Coatzacoalcos on the Gulf of Mexico, with the port of Salina Cruz on the Pacific. This corridor is often referred to as a “dry canal,” because with intermodal transfers at the ports, it is expected to function much as the Panama Canal does today. This trans-isthmian project harks back to the projects and policies of the great Mexican President José López Portillo (1976-1982), a friend and ally of the American statesman Lyndon LaRouche.

Faced with the prospect of a reawakening of López Portillo’s policies and political networks in Mexico, and of the BRI establishing itself right on the doorstep of the U.S., the Wall Street and City of London banking crowd went wild. They howled their objection, and used a well-publicized alleged “corruption scandal” to force Mexico to revoke the announced Querétaro-Mexico City high-speed rail contract on November 6, 2014—only two days after it had been officially announced!

The Economist, the flagship magazine of the City of London financial oligarchy, celebrated Peña Nieto’s capitulation in a November 8, 2014 column: “It was a good sign on Nov. 6 when, in an unprecedented move, Mr. Peña ordered the overturning of a controversial award of a $3.75 billion railway tender because it lacked transparency,” The Economist gloated.

Immigration and Drugs

Given the region’s geographic and political proximity to the United States, it is vital to include the United States in the Caribbean Basin Belt and Road process in particular, as well as the broader global BRI effort. To do that, it is important to stress that the connection of the region to the BRI is not a threat to the U.S., but is actually the key to addressing a series of vexing problems of great concern to the United States, which have no available workable solution outside of the BRI. The two most salient such problems are the vast flows of illegal immigrants into the U.S. from the region and the related issue of the enormous, often dominant role of the drug trade in the area.

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

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

A closely related problem is that of the drug trade, which has largely taken over the economies of Mexico and Colombia, and many of the Central American countries in between (as well as a number of Caribbean islands). A full discussion of this matter would take us well beyond the scope and intention of this report, but suffice it to say that there can be no solution to the drug problem in the Caribbean Basin region (as in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan), without a solid economic development policy which can guarantee a livelihood to the millions of peasants, and also urban youth, who today see no alternative to conscription into the drug mobs.

The Belt and Road thus offers the best hope to the nations of the region to solve this problem, and retake their national sovereignty back from the international drug-running apparatus that has stolen it from them. The BRI is thus also critical to aid the United States in properly addressing the drug problem on its southern border. . . .

agenciabrasil

Rocket launch tower at the Alcântara Launch Center in Maranhão, Brazil on September 14, 2018.

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Space Science Cooperation

Another project in this area which will be a game-changer for all of Ibero-America and the Caribbean, is fostering a renaissance of coordinated space launches and other space science activities at the two existing launch sites nearest to the Equator of any on the planet: the European Space Agency’s site at Kourou, French Guiana, and the Brazilian Space Agency’s site at Alcântara, Brazil (Location marked on Figure 1). The center at Kourou is located at a mere 5.3° (575 km) north of the Equator, and Alcântara is even closer, at 2.3° (267 km) south of the Equator. The significant advantages of such locations for launching satellites into geostationary orbit are well known. The coastal location is another significant advantage.

The center at Kourou is the launch site for the European Union’s space program, as well as for some Russian launches—precisely the sort of international cooperation required. The center at Alcântara, however, has been plagued by various problems. On August 22, 2003, an attempted launch of a VLS-1 rocket ended tragically with an explosion which killed 21 Brazilian technicians. Brazil did recover and successfully launched its first rocket into space a little over a year later, and it has subsequently carried out a number of successful launches. But budgetary and related constraints have also limited its development. Brazil had established a strong working relationship with Ukraine for launches from Alcântara, but that has suffered as well, with the foreign-sponsored coup in that country.

Nonetheless, a concerted international effort in this area of advanced science—one in which China is also well-positioned to participate and help—is crucial for providing a science-driver for all the nations of South America and the Caribbean Basin, and for pulling the labor force of the entire region into a science driver policy. Brazil and Argentina are the most advanced in space activity among the nations of the region, and clearly have a decisive role to play.

In terms of the Caribbean Basin per se, in addition to Cuba and Costa Rica, where significant initiatives have been taken in the area of space science, perhaps Trinidad & Tobago is the nation which currently has a labor force most suited to rapid participation in this area of scientific endeavor, because of its significant oil and petrochemical activity and the training it has provided to a stratum of local workers.

China’s 2016 “Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean,” weighed in clearly on this matter:

China will actively explore the expansion of its cooperation with Latin American and Caribbean countries in high-tech fields such as information industry, civil aviation, civil nuclear energy and new energy, to build more joint laboratories, R&D centers and high-tech parks, support innovative enterprises and research institutions on both sides to carry out exchanges and cooperation, and promote joint research and development . . . China will pay full attention to the role of space technology as a driving force for the scientific, technological and industrial development of Latin American and Caribbean countries, and promote sustainable development in science and technology and the economic fields.

Another Silicon Valley Monster: Facebook Wants To Coin World Money

by Paul Gallagher

June 19—Facebook on June 18 announced a plan to try to form a kind of private global central bank issuing a global private currency, the “Libra,” leveraging both its huge advertising business ($60 billion annual revenue from 90 million businesses) and Wall Street bank “partners.” Through this plan, if successful, Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates would team with Wall Street and London banks to try to replace national currencies, to a greater or lesser degree, with a currency whose value they could control. These tech conglomerates are already effectively running surveillance operations on citizens of many countries, and now are moving to try to control speech and content on the Internet.

That the Facebook money scheme is a direct attack on the sovereignty of nations—including that of the United States—is so clear that some members of Congressional committees dealing with finance immediately demanded that Facebook suspend the plan indefinitely. U.S. regulators have previously shut down small attempts to create private digital currencies which are supposedly “pegged to” the dollar or other national currencies. But the projected Facebook combine would be a far more powerful monetary adversary. The U.S. Constitution is clear in Article I that only the Federal government—specifically, Congress—has or can delegate the authority to create coin or paper currency and regulate its value. A global currency created by private banks and companies could at least create chaos in valuation of the dollar, if not partially drive it out of circulation.

As we will see, the Libra would also directly disadvantage those who use it, like those wildcat “gold-backed” currencies issued by hundreds of state banks in America in the 1836-1860 period of bank panics and recessions, when a sovereign national U.S. currency also ceased to exist. This time the monetary chaos could be on a global scale.

The Libra is a much more serious disruptive prospect than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest put together. It is planned as a digital currency, but not a “crypto” currency, as there will be nothing secret or limited about it and its value is supposed to be “based on” a basket of major currencies and investment assets. In effect, it is a project to form a huge private investment bank or money-market fund—to be called Calibra—which will issue its own money worldwide and manage the value of it, like a central bank.

All of Facebook’s “partners” in this scheme are not clear yet, but one is VISA, the globally dominant (outside China) credit card issuer backed by Bank of America; others are venture capital firms such as Union Square Capital; others are PayPal, Uber, Lyft, etc. Regarding Wall Street, David Marcus, Facebook’s developer of the Libra currency, told CNBC on June 26, “We have had conversations with banks. We still have conversations with banks. And my expectation is that by the time this thing launches next year you will have banks that are going to be members of this.”

Sovereign vs. Private Currency

There are basic principles of sovereign currencies of nations. The nation does not charge fees for the use of its currency, and makes sure that it is usable for all payments, purchases and investments. The banks through which the currency is distributed, offer interest to savers who leave the currency in the bank. And those institutions and people who use the currency, also use it to buy debt (bonds) of the issuing national government, providing the basis for issuance of credit by that government.

None of these will be true of Facebook’s planned Libra.

The consortium plans to charge user fees to the 90 million companies who advertise on its platform and/or provide apps to 2.7 billion users, for taking payment in Libras to sell directly through the platform. It claims that it will not charge the consumers for payments, but may charge them for converting between Libra and real national currencies.

Second, those supposed millions who leave their national currencies with the Facebook consortium in exchange for Libra to spend, will provide interest income to the investors in the consortium, while earning none themselves. The Libra Association, created to manage the currency, says so directly. The “partners” will buy and provide an initial reserve of, say, dollars, euros, government bonds, etc. for the Libra.

But the cash of those who buy Libra will become part of the reserve, which will be “invested in low-risk assets that will yield interest over time. The revenue from this interest will first go to support the operating expenses of the association—to fund investments in the growth and development of the ecosystem, grants to nonprofit and multilateral organizations, engineering research, etc. Once that is covered, part of the remaining returns will go to pay dividends to early investors in the Libra Investment Token for their initial contributions.”

So interest will go to the partners; none will be available to those who buy Libra, use them and keep them. This is like a PayPal account; it is not like saving money in a national currency in a bank. And Facebook may be selling their transaction data for additional profit.

And the issuer of Libra, which the announcement says will be a company called Calibra, will of course issue no credit as governments do, and undertake no public works or services.

Manipulating Libra’s Value—Down

Users will lose money if the value of Libra declines, as is likely, relative to a basket of national currencies, while they leave their money in their “digital wallet.” As a June 27 analysis by Rabobank stated, “If the Libra reaches larges volumes [of use—ed.], the demand for high-quality, liquid and short-term assets to cover it can lead to upward pressure on the price of such assets”—and therefore a corresponding fall in the value of the Libra itself while the user is keeping Libra in a digital “wallet.” Not only will there be “upward pressure” on the prices of the basket of currencies which the so-called Calibra Company is holding as reserves; the Libra Association says Calibra may manage the values, so manipulating the Libra value downward will not be difficult for it. Thus a currency which—even conversion fees aside—costs money to use.

The Libra Association says it will target, especially, people who don’t currently have bank accounts, to use the Libra. They are particularly numerous in developing countries with weaker national currencies. There, the Libra could drive national currencies largely out of circulation, or into use only for saving. It might initially appear to be “pegged to the dollar”—or the dollar and euro—but could cause major disruption in the value of those major currencies as well, and their use in trade.

Since the 2007-08 global financial crash, the biggest central banks have revived their dream from the 1930s: To get fingertip control of the amount of currency in circulation, not allowing banks to increase it by lending or paying interest, nor governments by new issues. They could then, their theory goes, absolutely control inflation and deflation, ignoring the factor of economic productivity. They have intensively studied digital currencies for that purpose, and the added purpose of automatic tax collection. The “currency boards” imposed on the British and other European colonies did the job—no more currency allowed in circulation, than the holdings of gold. The Rabobank analysis notes, “The Libra is managed as a currency board, in which the money-supply of a country moves one-on-one with the size of the foreign currency reserves.”

Facebook’s currency is projected for launch in January 2020. A June 18 letter from Patrick McHenry (Ranking Member) to Maxine Waters (Chair) of the House Financial Services Committee, asked for a committee investigation. In his letter, McHenry said:

Unlike existing digital currencies, Facebook has a worldwide platform and scale that can impact global payments and the digital currency market. . . . We need to go beyond the rumors and speculations and provide a forum to assess this project and its potential unprecedented impact on the global financial system.

Waters issued a statement: “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.”

A statement by Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, said: “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.”

III. ‘Climate Change’ Fakery Under Attack

Rome, June 17th 2019

To the President of the Italian Senate

To the President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies

To the President of the Italian Government

PETITION ON ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING

The undersigned, citizens and scientists, send a warm invitation to political leaders to adopt environmental protection policies consistent with the current scientific knowledge. In particular, it is urgent to combat pollution where it occurs. In this regard, we regret the delay in applying the available scientific knowledge aimed at reducing the abundant anthropogenic pollutants present in both land and marine environments.

But we must be aware that carbon dioxide (CO_2) is not a pollutant. On the contrary, like water, it is an indispensable element for the life on our planet.

In recent decades, it has been claimed that the warming of the Earth’s surface by about 0.9°C observed since 1850 would be anomalous and caused exclusively by human activities, in particular from emissions into the atmosphere of CO_2 coming from the use of fossil fuels. This is known as the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGWT) that has been mostly promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations. This theory predicts serious and harmful environmental changes in an imminent future, unless drastic and costly mitigation measures are immediately adopted. In this regard, many nations of the world have joined programs of reduction of CO_2 emissions and are pressed to adopt even more demanding programs, which entail heavy burdens on the economies of the individual member states, with the pretense of controlling the climate and, therefore, “save the planet”.

However, the claim that the observed warming has been induced by anthropogenic activity is an unproven conjecture that has been deduced only from some climate models. These are complex computer programs called General Circulation Models (GCMs). On the contrary, the scientific literature has increasingly demonstrated the existence of a natural climatic variability that the models are not able to reproduce. This natural variability explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850. Thus, the anthropogenic responsibility for the climate change observed during the last century is exaggerated. Therefore, the catastrophic predictions of these models are not realistic.

The climate is the most complex system on our planet, and it must be studied using methods adequate and consistent with its level of complexity. Yet, climate simulation models do not reproduce the observed natural variability of the climate at multiple time scales. In particular, they do not reconstruct the warm periods observed during the last 10,000 years. These occurred about every a thousand years and include the well-known Warm Medieval Period, the Roman Warm Period and other warm periods during the Holocene Optimum. These periods have been warmer than the current one, despite the fact that the concentration of CO_2 was lower. A consistent amount of evidences suggests that these large climatic oscillations were induced by the millennial cycles of solar activity. This strong climate sensitivity to solar changes is not reproduced by the above models.

It should be noted that the warming observed since 1900 began in the 18th century, that is since the end of the Little Ice Age (around 1700), which was the coldest period of the last 10,000 years. This cold period was induced by a number of grand minima of solar activity such as the Maunder’s Solar Minimum (1645-1715). Since the 18th century, following its millennial cycle, solar activity has increased and warmed the Earth’s surface. Furthermore, the models fail to reproduce known climatic oscillations such as one with a period of about 60 years. These were responsible, for example, for a warming period (1850-1880) followed by a cooling (1880-1910), followed by another warming (1910-40), again by another cooling (1940-70) and by a new warming period (1970-2000) similar to that observed 60 years earlier. The following years (2000-2019) have not seen the 0.2°C/decade warming predicted by the GCMs, but a substantial climatic stability that has been sporadically interrupted only by the rapid natural oscillations of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, known as the El-Niño Southern Oscillations, such as the sudden warming observed between 2015 and 2016.

The mass media also claim that extreme events, such as hurricanes and cyclones, have dangerously increased in the last decades as a result of anthropogenic activity. Conversely, these events, like many climate systems, are modulated by the aforementioned 60-year climatic cycle. For example, the official data from 1880 regarding tropical Atlantic hurricanes moving toward North America, show a strong 60-year oscillation, well correlated with the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation, which is a natural thermal oscillation of the North-Hemisphere Atlantic Ocean. The observed hurricane frequency peaks per decade observed in the years 1880-90, 1940-50 and 1995-2005 are compatible with each other. From 2005 to 2015 the number of hurricanes has decreased following the aforementioned cycle. Thus, in the period 1880-2015, between number of cyclones (which oscillates) and CO_2 (which has increased monotonically) there is no correlation.

The obvious conclusion is that the climate system is not sufficiently understood yet. Although it is true that CO_2 is a greenhouse gas, according to the same IPCC, the equilibrium climate sensitivity to its atmospheric increase is still extremely uncertain: it is estimated that a doubling of the atmospheric CO_2 concentration, from the preindustrial level at about 300 ppm to 600 ppm, could warm the global surface temperature from a minimum of 1°C to a maximum of 5°C. This uncertainty is enormous. In fact, many recent studies based on experimental data have estimated that the climate sensitivity to CO_2 increase is significantly lower than that estimated by the IPCC models.

Thus, it is scientifically unrealistic to attribute to anthropogenic emissions the responsibility for the warming observed from the past century to today. The proposed alarming forecasts are not credible, since they are based on models whose results contradict the experimental data. All evidentiary facts suggest that these models overestimate the anthropogenic contribution and underestimate the natural climatic variability, especially that induced by the sun, the moon, and by the oceanic oscillations.

Finally, the mass media publicize the message that there would be an almost unanimous consensus among scientists in favor of the AGWT of the IPCC, therefore the scientific debate is closed. However, the scientific method requires that the facts, and not the number of adherents, make a conjecture a theory.

In any case, the same alleged consent does not exist because there is a remarkable variability of opinions among specialists—climatologists, meteorologists, geologists, geophysicists, astrophysicists—most of whom recognize the importance that natural climatic variability has had for the global warming observed since 1850 or 1950 to today. There have also been petitions signed by thousands of scientists who have expressed dissent with the conjecture of anthropogenic global warming. These include the one promoted in 2007 by the physicist F. Seitz, former president of the American National Academy of Sciences, and the one promoted by the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) whose 2009 report concludes that Nature, not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.

In conclusion, given the crucial importance that fossil fuels have for humanity as an energy supply, we suggest not to adhere to uncritical policies finalized to mitigate CO_2 emissions with the illusory pretense of ruling the climate.

PROMOTERS COMMITTEE

1. Uberto Crescenti, Professore Emerito di Geologia Applicata, Università di Chieti-Pescara, già Magnifico Rettore e Presidente della Società Geologica Italiana.

2. Giuliano Panza, Professore di Sismologia, Università di Trieste, Accademico dei Lincei e dell’Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze, detta dei XL, vincitore nel 2018 del Premio Internazionale dell’American Geophysical Union.

3. Alberto Prestininzi, Professore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Roma La Sapienza, già Scientific Editor in Chief della rivista internazionale IJEGE e Direttore del Centro di Ricerca Previsione e Controllo Rischi Geologici (CERI).

4. Franco Prodi, Professore di Fisica dell’Atmosfera, Università di Ferrara.

5. Franco Battaglia, Professore di Chimica Fisica, Università di Modena; Movimento Galileo 2001.

6. Mario Giaccio, Professore di Tecnologia ed Economia delle Fonti di Energia, Università di Chieti-Pescara, già Preside della Facoltà di Economia.

7. Enrico Miccadei, Professore di Geografia Fisica e Geomorfologia, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

8. Nicola Scafetta, Professore di Fisica dell’Atmosfera e Oceanografia, Università di Napoli.

SOME OF THE SIGNATURES

1. Antonino Zichichi, Professore Emerito di Fisica, Università di Bologna, Fondatore e Presidente del Centro di Cultura Scientifica Ettore Majorana di Erice.

2. Renato Angelo Ricci, Professore Emerito di Fisica, Università di Padova, già Presidente della Società Italiana di Fisica e della Società Europea di Fisica; Movimento Galileo 2001.

3. Aurelio Misiti, Professore di Ingegneria sanitaria-Ambientale, Università di Roma La Sapienza, già Preside della Facoltà di Ingegneria, già Presidente del Consiglio Superiore ai Lavori Pubblici.

4. Antonio Brambati, Professore di Sedimentologia, Università di Trieste, Responsabile Progetto Paleoclima-mare del PNRA, già Presidente Commissione Nazionale di Oceanografia.

5. Cesare Barbieri, Professore Emerito di Astronomia, Università di Padova.

6. Sergio Bartalucci, Fisico, Presidente Associazione Scienziati e Tecnologi per la Ricerca Italiana.

7. Antonio Bianchini, Professore di Astronomia, Università di Padova.

8. Paolo Bonifazi, Astrofisico, ex Direttore dell’Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI) dell’Istituto Nazionale Astrofisica (INAF).

9. Francesca Bozzano, Professore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Direttore del Centro di Ricerca Previsione, Prevenzione e Controllo Rischi Geologici (CERI).

10. Marcello Buccolini, Professore di Geomorfologia, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

11. Paolo Budetta, Professore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Napoli.

12. Monia Calista, Ricercatore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

13. Giovanni Carboni, Professore di Fisica, Università di Roma Tor Vergata; Movimento Galileo 2001.

14. Franco Casali, Professore di Fisica, Università di Bologna e Accademia delle Scienze di Bologna.

15. Giuliano Ceradelli, Ingegnere e climatologo, ALDAI.

16. Augusta Vittoria Cerutti, membro del Comitato Glaciologico Italiano.

17. Domenico Corradini, Professore di Geologia Storica, Università di Modena.

18. Fulvio Crisciani, Professore di Fluidodinamica Geofisica, Università di Trieste e Istituto Scienze Marine, Cnr, Trieste.

19. Carlo Esposito, Professore di Telerilevamento, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

20. Antonio Mario Federico, Professore di Geotecnica, Politecnico di Bari.

21. Mario Floris, Professore di Telerilevamento, Università di Padova.

22. Gianni Fochi, Chimico, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; giornalista scientifico.

23. Mario Gaeta, Professore di Vulcanologia, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

24. Giuseppe Gambolati, Fellow della American Geophysical Union, Professore di Metodi Numerici, Università di Padova.

25. Rinaldo Genevois, Professore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Padova.

26. Carlo Lombardi, Professore di Impianti nucleari, Politecnico di Milano.

27. Luigi Marino, Geologo, Direttore del Centro di Ricerca Previsione, Prevenzione e Controllo Rischi Geologici (CERI).

28. Salvatore Martino, Professore di Microzonazione sismica, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

29. Paolo Mazzanti, Professore di Interferometria satellitare, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

30. Adriano Mazzarella, Professore di Meteorologia e Climatologia, Università di Napoli.

31. Carlo Merli, Professore di Tecnologie Ambientali, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

32. Alberto Mirandola, Professore di Energetica Applicata e Presidente Dottorato di Ricerca in Energetica, Università di Padova.

33. Renzo Mosetti, Professore di Oceanografia, Università di Trieste, già Direttore del Dipartimento di Oceanografia, Istituto OGS, Trieste.

34. Daniela Novembre, Ricercatore in Georisorse Minerarie e Applicazioni Mineralogiche-petrografiche, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

35. Sergio Ortolani, Professore di Astronomia e Astrofisica, Università di Padova.

36. Antonio Pasculli, Ricercatore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

37. Ernesto Pedrocchi, Professore Emerito di Energetica, Politecnico di Milano.

38. Tommaso Piacentini, Professore di Geografia Fisica e Geomorfologia, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

39. Guido Possa, Ingegnere nucleare, già Vice Ministro Viceministro del Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca, con delega alla ricerca.

40. Mario Luigi Rainone, Professore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

41. Francesca Quercia, Geologo, Dirigente di ricerca, Ispra.

42. Giancarlo Ruocco, Professore di Struttura della Materia, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

43. Sergio Rusi, Professore di Idrogeologia, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

45. Emanuele Scalcione, Responsabile Servizio Agrometeorologico Regionale ALSIA, Basilicata.

46. Nicola Sciarra, Professore di Geologia Applicata, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

47. Leonello Serva, Geologo, già Direttore Servizi Geologici d’Italia; Accademia Europa delle Scienze e delle Arti, Classe V, Scienze Tecnologiche e Ambientali; Movimento Galileo 2001.

48. Luigi Stedile, Geologo, Centro di Ricerca Previsione, Prevenzione e Controllo Rischi Geologici (CERI), Università di Roma La Sapienza.

49. Giorgio Trenta, Fisico e Medico, Presidente Emerito dell’Associazione Italiana di Radioprotezione Medica; Movimento Galileo 2001.

50. Gianluca Valensise, Dirigente di Ricerca, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Roma.

51. Corrado Venturini, Professore di Geologia Strutturale, Università di Bologna.

52. Franco Zavatti, Ricercatore di Astronomia, Università di Bologna.

53. Achille Balduzzi, Geologo, Agip-Eni.

54. Claudio Borri, Professore di Scienze delle Costruzioni, Università di Firenze, Coordinatore del Dottorato Internazionale in Ingegneria Civile.

55. Pino Cippitelli, Geologo Agip-Eni.

56. Serena Doria, Ricercatore di Probabilità e Statistica Matematica, Università di Chieti-Pescara.

57. Enzo Siviero, Professore di Ponti, Università di Venezia, Rettore dell’Università e-Campus.

58. Pietro Agostini, Ingegnere, Associazione Scienziati e Tecnologi per la Ricerca Italiana.

59. Donato Barone, Ingegnere.

60. Gianfranco Brignoli, Geologo.

61. Luciano Lepori, Ricercatore IPCF-CNR, Pisa.

62. Roberto Madrigali, Meteorologo.

63. Luciano Biasini, Professore Emerito, già Docente di Calcoli numerici e grafici, Direttore dell’Istituto Matematico e Preside della Facoltà di Scienze Matematiche, Fisiche e Naturali dell’Università di Ferrara.

64. Benedetto De Vivo, Professore di Geochimica, Università di Napoli; ora Professore Straordinario presso Università Telematica Pegaso, Napoli.

65. Carlo Del Corso, Ingegnere Chimico.

66. Umberto Gentili, Fisico dell’ENEA, Climatologo per il Progetto Antartide.

67. Umberto Minopoli, Presidente dell’Associazione Italiana Nucleare.

68. Arnaldo Radovix, Geologo, Risk Manager in derivati finanziari.

69. Marco Ricci, Fisico, Primo Ricercatore, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.

70. Roberto Simonetti, Geologo, R&D c/o Azienda S.I.I.

71. Maria Grazia Tenti, Geologo.

To sign, send name, profession and organization to

giaccio@unich.it and eirns@larouchepub.com

California Labor

Bucks the Green New Deal

by Marcia Merry Baker

CC/Neon Tommy

Pat Guinn, Governor of Illinois (left) and Eric Garcetti, Mayor of Los Angeles.

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June 30—As of June, the end of the fiscal year for most state and local governments, several localities and states have fallen in line to enact various crazed versions of the Green New Deal, while it is currently and rightly blocked at the Federal level by the Trump Administration. Nine states, and several prominent cities, have set goals, ranging from 2030 to 2050, by which carbon dioxide emissions are supposed to be lessened or eliminated—sketching spacey plans to de-energize the economy. The latest to join in this bedlam is New York, whose state legislature on June 18-19 passed the “Climate Community Protection Act” (CCPA). It asserts the goal of achieving 100% so-called clean electricity by 2040 and specifies such measures as creating a “market-based limit on transportation emissions.” The other states with new “Green New Deal” actions are: California, Colorado, Hawaii (2015), Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico and Washington.

Against this green frenzy comes a critical show of opposition from California labor unions, whose impact is all the more significant, given that California has been home to the most extreme green mindset. Moreover, California has been out front in asserting states’ rights to contest Federal authority over energy, “pollution,” and the like, taking off in this direction during the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003-2011).

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California (2003-2011).

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At the Democratic Party’s statewide convention in San Francisco on June 1, members of the state Building and Construction Trades Council—representing over 400,000 workers—staged a protest action. Its President, Robbie Hunter, called it the “Blue Collar Revolution.” The action took place at the opening of the event, during which some 5,000 attendees, including 14 presidential candidates, were present. In the convention’s election for a new state chairman, another labor leader—Rusty Hicks—won decisively by 57%. Hicks is the head of the Los Angeles Labor Federation.

The momentum for the Building Trades’ action in San Francisco comes out of Southern California. In Los Angeles, unions protested forcefully this spring against Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s launching of his “Green New Deal” for Los Angeles. Union protesters demonstrated outside his announcement event with chants and placards demanding: “Garcetti’s Gotta Go!”

The Los Angeles Green New Deal calls for every building in the city to be “emissions free” by 2050. By 2036, the city is to have 80% of its energy supply from renewable sources. Garcetti declared that the shifts involved will result in thousands of new jobs through installing “carbon free” technologies. Among the presumed measures: in-state oil production will be cut. The five gas-fired power plants in the Los Angeles basin will be shut. California has already shut down one of its two nuclear power stations—which ironically are non-CO_2 emitting, renewable energy.

Skilled trades’ leaders are speaking out against the whole Green New Deal outlook, as well as Garcetti’s LA version. At the time of the Democratic Party state convention, Politico ran comments from several of these figures. The Business Manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) in Los Angeles, Brian D’Arcy, said, “I’m getting hate mail and blowback from our workers, saying the Democratic Party is doing nothing for us.” Paul Valdez, described as a “third-generation building trades worker from Thousand Oaks,” told Politico, “[Garcetti’s] got the big corporations with him, and he’s not thinking of the effects on the common people. If they start taking away our jobs, who’s going to pay our bills?”

Calif. Building & Construction Trades

Robbie Hunter, President, State Building and Construction Trades Council of California.

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Robbie Hunter denounced the national Green New Deal for endangering jobs involved in the Southern California oil sector. He said, “All it does is do what the Democratic Party seems to be very good at lately—which is export our jobs, while doing nothing for the end game, which is the environmental.”

Build Projects, Not Poverty

Hunter has spoken out for infrastructure and jobs—often in the name of “climate,” and labor lobbyists in Sacramento are pushing for building projects. In March, Hunter issued a guest commentary in calmatters.org, headlined, “Don’t Leave California’s Climate Goals Stuck in Traffic.” He called for building statewide high-speed rail and modern mass transit. He made the point:

Having built most of California’s utility-scale solar and wind generation, we who work in the building and construction trades think it’s time to get real about our ambitious climate goals. If Californians want to hit their greenhouse gas goals, we’re going to have to create clean mass transit options.

And he listed the benefits of high-speed rail:

Our airports and freeways are at capacity, and our population is careening towards 40 million and beyond. If we don’t build the high-speed rail, we are going to have to spend more than $120 billion to build thousands of miles of additional freeways to accommodate the state’s ever-proliferating drivers. And that’s real.

In Sacramento, labor constituencies have been going toe to toe with the Green New Deal opposition over projects for modern transportation and energy production. One fight was over expanding the required buffer area around new gas and oil wells (on non-Federal land). Whereas, for example, Los Angeles County requires a 300-foot setback, a new proposal—CA AB345 (19R) in the state Assembly, would increase this to a 2,500-foot buffer zone. This would limit wells and other energy production activity. The bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (Los Angeles area), was stalled out in late May after union workers staged a mass protest at the hearing on it, held by the Assembly’s Committee on Natural Resources. The defeated bill was described as “overreach” by lobbyist Scott Wetch, representing the IBEW, who told Politico, “We have to respond accordingly.”

Calif. State Assembly

Albert Muratsuchi, California State Assembly Member (D-66th AD).

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Another fight in Sacramento, has been over whether to build a new hydro-power dam, near the Joshua Tree National Park. The dam has been strongly opposed by a green front of groups claiming to represent consumers and environmentalists. Labor lobbied for constructing the dam—for reasons of clean energy, jobs and public benefit, but the bill to back it was defeated. On this, IBEW’s Wetch told Politico:

We have environmental credentials that I’ll defend anytime. But when it no longer becomes a discussion of smart public policy and how you get to your stated goals, but just one politician after another trying to out pander one another to claim they’re greener than the next guy, that’s when you run into extreme problems.

Get ‘Real’ with Big Infrastructure

Nationally, the lowlife media are trying hard to spin the California labor revolt as a Democratic Party “fracturing” problem, which they either praise, denounce or try to minimize. On June 6, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leadership foolishly passed a resolution endorsing the Green New Deal at their Minneapolis international executive board meeting—the first union to do so. Hailing the SEIU initiative, some green Democratic Party voices declared, who needs industry anyway! But the economy and future are not party issues, and the green onslaught is having deadly consequences in terms of energy, jobs, and the cultural degradation of peoples’ thinking, especially the young.

In this context, the union activation against the Green New Deal in California is internationally significant in the drive to re-direct the United States onto a course of economic development, with big infrastructure at the core of the effort—projects for high-speed rail, nuclear power, and large-scale water management—all to restore and raise the productive base of the nation. This is how to create a massive number of new jobs.

Such an approach is implicit in the recent agreement by President Donald Trump and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to collaborate on economic development in the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) and southern Mexico, to end the desperate search for livelihood. It is at the heart of the new global Silk Road—the “Belt and Road Initiative”—which awaits U.S. participation with China, Russia and the other major powers, in both U.S. infrastructure-building, and joint third-country projects.

Most of all, it is urgent to “get real” about raising productivity in the U.S. by collaborating with other major powers, to succeed in space exploration, as Trump’s recent Moon-Mars commitment so boldly put forward.

—marciabaker@larouchepub.com

IV. The Curvature of Human Progress

November 5, 1997

1997 Is Not 1929:

A Lesson from Carl Gauss

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The following is the edited transcript of Lyndon LaRouche’s keynote speech to an EIR symposium, “Toward a New ‘Bretton Woods System,’” held in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Germany, on Nov. 5, 1997. It first was published in the EIR of November 21, 1997.

We are in a phase-change, right now, in world politics. With the partnership which was established between the President of the United States and the President of China, a turning-point has been reached in planetary political relations. This agreement, this partnership, signifies a long process, since 1989, of a shrinking of importance of the Atlantic relationship, and a relative increase of the polarity of the Pacific relationship.

This has been due to two processes: One was the collapse of the Soviet system, beginning in 1989. The importance of the European economies became less, particularly after George Bush, then President of the United States, supported the policies of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher of England and François Mitterrand of France, to destroy eastern Europe, and to prevent Germany from rising in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet system, to become a stronger power in Europe. The result of the self-destruction of the European economies since then, plus the destruction of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union itself, means, that the economic center of gravity on the planet is no longer Atlantic, but it is presently Pacific.

The agreements between the two Presidents—whose importance, I think, is even underplayed greatly in the European press, the depth and profundity of the practical understanding between the two heads of state—that this will become a strategic bloc, a partnership, not a fixed kind of partnership, but a partnership-process, which will engage Japan, which will engage Russia, which is already engaging Southeast Asia, which will hopefully engage South Asia, centered around India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, as well as Iran. That process is in place.

What I should say today, in the nature of addressing the subject, will include: Under these circumstances, what is the role of Europe, and especially western Europe, in these circumstances? What crucial strategic role and what crucial strategic interest does western Europe, especially western continental Europe, have, in these circumstances?

In addressing this problem, it is important, as we assemble in Germany today, to emphasize four leading thinkers of Germany, whose words bear directly upon the problems and solutions we have to consider here. The first is Johannes Kepler; his follower Gottfried Leibniz; his follower Carl Gauss (it is a very specific work, that he did as a follower of Kepler); and the work of a follower of Gauss and Leibniz, Bernhard Riemann. These four figures of German thought are crucial for understanding both the nature of the problem which faces us, and the possibility of a solution.

Carl Gauss (1777-1855) successfully determined the orbit of the asteroid Ceres, by looking at the curvature of action in the very small. Using this method, LaRouche proves that the current collapse of the world financial system is no “cyclical crisis,” but is comparable to a comet which is heading directly for the Sun.

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What I shall do this morning, in keynoting this particular morning session, is to define the nature of the problem and the direction of the solution. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who will be keynoting the afternoon session, will be addressing the practical approach of the problem from the standpoint of Europe as such.

In the recent period, particularly in the past weeks, we can say that the number of persons who doubted that we were in a systemic crisis, has greatly diminished. Virtually all intelligent, influential statesmen, economists, and so forth, agree, at this point, that we are in a systemic crisis. They may not want to use the words, but they will describe it as such. The references are made commonly, as I have been doing this past month, to the October 1987 stock market collapse in New York City.

In the past week, more and more references were made, misguided references, nevertheless, to the 1929-1931 process leading into the 1930s’ depression. It is useful, of course, that people will recognize the severeness of the crisis; but, it is a great error to assume, that we can learn something from the 1929-1931 experience which will be of any use to us today in defining a solution. As I shall indicate, there are no similarities of substance between the present crisis and that of 1929-1931. Today, it is qualitatively different and much worse; and, with the help of Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, we can demonstrate the difference.

Go back to 1801 in Germany, when an Italian-Swiss astronomer had recently discovered the presence of a new heavenly body, which we refer to today as the asteroid Ceres. A great number of observations were made, and a number of people used statistical methods of the time, to attempt to construct the orbit of this newly discovered heavenly body.

Most were erroneous; only one young mathematican of the time correctly determined the orbit of Ceres to be that, in harmonic values, defined for a missing planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, which Kepler had provided years before. Kepler had specified the existence of a missing planet between Mars and Jupiter, and gave the harmonic overall values for that planet. Gauss was able to show that the newly discovered body was a fragment, in effect, of this missing planet, and had the same harmonic orbital characteristics, that Kepler had specified for the missing planet.

Most of the people who investigated this and attempted to construct the orbit, tried to measure it by statistical methods: methods superior, then, to most of statistical methods used today in economic studies. They were wrong. Gauss selected, out of all the studies, three intervals, orbital intervals, which he used to determine the orbit of this, or the trajectory of the particular heavenly body. And, he was right.

He used a principle which we can call self-similarity. That is, the body had certain characteristics in the small, the orbit had characteristics in the small, which could be used to determine the characteristics of the trajectory in the large. That method, which is central to the work of Gauss, was actually a continuation of the work of Kepler, and of Kepler’s definition of astrophysics earlier: and, by way of Kepler, after Kepler, also Gottfried Leibniz. So, these things become crucial to understand that today.

Now, I should demonstrate that not only is this not like the 1929-1931 period of crisis, but, rather, much worse, of a much more serious and more profound nature; but, that the policies which might be adduced from studies made of the so-called Great Depression and the 1929-1931 crisis—these policies, studies, are virtually worthless, and worse than worthless, for defining policies today. There is a fundamental difference, and it would be fatal, if we did that.

A homeless woman in Frankfurt, Germany. The self-destruction of the European economies since 1989, means that “the economic center of gravity on the planet is no longer Atlantic, but it is presently Pacific.”

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We have people debating the question: “Let’s go back and study the 1929-1931 crisis; let’s look at the policy considerations then; let’s apply the policies we should have applied, then, to the situation now, and that will be the answer.” That would be the most fatal error one could make.

There is no way to fix this system, in the way the former crisis could have been fixed. We have a completely different kind of problem, which was called by some economists, back in the 1920s and 1930s, and earlier—was called “a general breakdown crisis” of the entire global system.

The causes of this problem we have today are not economic. The crisis on the surface is an economic crisis, it manifests itself in economic effects, but the causes are not economic; they are political and ideological. The beginning of this crisis is the years 1964-1972, in which, after the missile crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy, a number of powers decided that the process of détente had been secured with the Soviet system, as the result of negotiations coming out of the missile crisis. At that point they said: We are no longer in danger of general warfare, of what was called an annihilation warfare in German strategic studies, formerly. But, we would now have only limited wars, wars which would manage the diplomatic edges. We would have limited wars, which would be conducted to adjust diplomacy, and would be managed as a matter of diplomacy. This was called the new phase of balance of power.

Under these conditions, the emphasis, which is always laid in modern warfare, upon developing an adequate logistical basis and technological military basis for conduct of general warfare, this was thrown out the window. And, with it, there was a process of taking down the machine-tool design and other economic and scientific sectors, which would be essential for modern warfare.

A Large-Scale Cultural Paradigm Shift

At the same time, there was introduced, beginning 1964, a large-scale cultural paradigm shift, which targetted, principally, people entering universities during the middle to late 1960s. The degeneration of society, the degeneration of economy, over the past 30 years, is a result of the effects, not only in Europe and in the United States, but in other parts of the world, of the so-called “march through the institutions” of the new generation of radicals, out of the universities of the second half of the 1960s.

These policies were not only the rock-drug-sex youth counterculture, which echoed the youth counterculture in Germany, for example, of the 1920s. This was a synthetic counterculture, which utilized a principle of shock.

This was, for example, studied by the London Tavistock Clinic, and Tavistock Institute: that if you take people, as this was studied in the First World War—if you take soldiers and you put them under great stress, you produce an effect, among many, which was called, in the First World War period, “shell shock,” from the effect of extended service on the French-German front in France, in which soldiers would go again and again into combat, charging against the machine guns and the barbed wire, and the artillery; and, they would be broken men; and they would be taken back and treated as mental cases.

Now, the people who studied the so-called “shell- shock” effects, including the Brigadier General Rees who set up the London Tavistock Clinic, determined, that people in this condition were highly suggestible and labile, easily managed, easily controlled.

What happened to the youth population during the 1960s, raised under conditions of the threat of general nuclear war during the late 1940s and 1950s, being subjected to the global shock of the missile crisis of the October-November period 1962, and then the shock, in the United States, of the Kennedy assassination in 1963: these young people lost their equilibrium. They became highly suggestible, highly labile.

I was teaching on campuses, a number of them, at that time, during the period of 1966-1973, and I observed the extreme lability, the extreme suggestibility, the rapidity with which they would go through evolutions, the general movement from one evolution to a more degenerate one. So, on the one hand, we had the rock-drug-sex counterculture, the youth counterculture, which was concentrated initially in the university populations, under the influence of the so-called Frankfurter Schule and the Tavistock Clinic, and people like that. The same thing pretty much in Europe, and in the United States, and in the Americas. And, also, in the East bloc, in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, similar processes of demoralization occurred: very important in the process leading up to the collapse of the Soviet system.

This population was not only involved in this existentialist flight from reality, in the sense of Heidegger’s theory of existentialism: the individual thrown into an alien society, not part of a society, but thrown into a jungle, in which you took care of yourself, or maybe a few of your friends, but you were living like a beast in a jungle.

Along with this came the idea that technology is bad; technology—at that time, that generation of the 1960s, associated technology with warfare. We had the rise, immediately under the influence of a cult of information theory, which had just begun to be spread heavily as a mass propaganda movement at that time— We had the idea of a “post-industrial society.”

Now, as these people became more and more influential, the so-called baby-boomer generation’s march through the institutions, as these ideas spread into broader sections of the population, outside the university graduates, as they spread into the entertainment industry in particular, with the mass media, we had a change to a post-industrial ideology, such that in the United States, for example, if we look at economy in physical terms, and measure productivity in the physical content of market baskets of consumption, by infrastructure, by industry, by agriculture, by essential things such as medical care, education, and so forth: that, the actual income in the United States, per capita of labor force today, is half of what it was 30 years ago.

Similar things are happening in Europe. People say we must have lower wages, you must find cheaper labor in other parts of the world. You don’t invest as much in infrastructure, you cut budgets; and, you cut away the essential economic stimulus of economic development, and even the maintenance of the present level of society. What happens, then, in economics, with the corrosive effect of this ideology, as people who were brainwashed in the universities in the 1960s graduated, advanced to higher and higher positions, occupying the top positions in banking, more and more positions in government, positions in business, in the professions? As the percentage of people who actually produced declined, and were replaced by services industries, by entertainment, by useless activities which are really of no benefit to society, just to keep them employed and give them a minimum wage, to keep them alive and keep them in the system: the economies decayed.

The Breakdown of the Bretton Woods System

And, this 1970-1971 period is crucial; 1971, the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreements, by choice, essentially. It started with the British, under the Wilson administration, back in the early to middle 1960s. The British sterling collapse of the fall of 1967, the crisis of the U.S. dollar, which broke out after the sterling collapse, beginning in January 1968, to the first breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in March 1968. In 1970-1971, the collapse of the Bretton-Woods agreements; 1972, the first step to a floating exchange-rate monetary system, after which point, virtually all Third World net development collapsed, because of the impact of this.

This was aggravated by London’s rigged oil-price shock of the middle 1970s. The oil-price shock and the evolution of the so-called petro-dollar bonds and the floating-exchange-rate system, and then finally, the agreements of Rambouillet and the new rules for the floating-exchange-rate system, doomed the Third World, essentially. Yes, there is growth, there is investment, but in net effect, in terms of the total population of South America, Central America, not to speak of Africa, but also a good deal of Asia, has been doomed. The condition of India, for example, today, is much worse than it was in 1982.

Mexico has not had any net growth at all since 1982. The conditions have become worse, at an accelerating rate. And, this is generally true in most parts of the planet. As a result of these social policies, in the name of ecology, in the name of zero growth, in the name of information theory, and all these things that came in, we have systematically destroyed the economy. The idea of investing in infrastructure, in advanced education, in science and technology, as a way of providing increase in man’s power over nature as a way of macroeconomic profit of our economies: that idea has long gone. The dominating idea, is to find other ways of making profit, outside of investments in scientific and technological progress and basic economic infrastructure.

As a result of that, the per-capita physical values of production have collapsed around the world, since the 1960s. Something else has happened: The floating-exchange-rate system opened the doors to unregulated speculation against currencies and economies. The first phase of this major speculation was the oil-price shock, orchestrated by the London petroleum marketing cartel, in 1974-1975.

The second shock was the collapse of the U.S. economy, willfully, by Paul Volcker, in October 1979. Volcker’s methods had been studied during 1975-1976, at which time they had been called “controlled disintegration of the economy.” Volcker, in October 1979, after being selected and nominated as Federal Reserve chairman, introduced the policies, which he personally also referred to, accurately, as controlled disintegration of the economy. The radiation of the Volcker policies outside the U.S., into the rest of the world, produced that kind of effect: controlled disintegration of the world economy at an accelerated rate.

As a result of the Volcker measures, in 1982 we had the growth in the U.S. of junk bonds. Junk bonds are, essentially, looting body parts from the dead. It was done simply by moving in on institutions, which had been implicitly bankrupt, as a result of the measures of the 1970s, including the Volcker measures, and then coming in to find new ways of refinancing and looting these organizations—such as the savings-and-loan banks.

The junk-bond phase came to an end with the 1987 stock-market collapse. It continued for one more big gasp into 1988, and then collapsed. In 1987-1988, there was the unleashing of derivatives. Now, today, we have the combined on-balance-sheet and off-balance-sheet volume of derivatives, which are current obligations, of $100 trillion, plus or minus. Of course, in addition to that, there are also highly inflated, i.e., exaggerated values of real estate mortgages, and things of that sort, as we see in the Japan case, which add up to several tens of trillions of dollars, globally. On that account, the current and near-current obligations, on financial account of the world, are several times the growth of domestic product combined of all nations of the world. Thus, implicitly, on this account alone, the world is bankrupt.

How has the mechanism functioned? It has functioned, because we discounted used-up assets of the past. We paid labor less than it cost to reproduce that quality labor. We discounted and looted these things in order to generate monetary aggregates which we put into the financial markets, which we were not investing in production, in infrastructure, in technology, but simply investing in speculation. That is, the profits of speculative gain became the profits for which people invested. So, we had a financial parasite sucking at the economy. Not only were we propping up speculation by monetary aggregates which were pumped into pure financial speculation; but, the rate of speculation increased.

For example, in the U.S., from 1956 to 1972, foreign trade, imports and exports, accounted for about 70%, consistently, every year, of total U.S. foreign exchange turnover. By the inauguration of Reagan, at the beginning of the 1980s, this had fallen to 5%. Foreign trade now accounted for only 5% of the total annual foreign exchange turnover. By 1992, it had fallen to 2%. It is, today, substantially below 0.5%.

So, you have a disengagement, a decoupling of finance from reality. We reached a point of no return, a point at which the relationship among total financial aggregates to monetary aggregates goes implicitly hyperbolic; at which the relationship between increasing monetary output and decreasing net physical output per capita, also is hyperbolic. Therefore, the system goes into something that is analogous, in physics, to a trans-sonic velocity, in which anything done to put monetary aggregates into the system, to perpetuate it, makes it worse. You reverse, you go into negative curvature. So, the attempt at this point, to continue pouring in monetary aggregates, to stave off financial crises, is like pouring cold gasoline on the fire, as a way of trying to put it out. You may slow down the rate of burning for a moment, but you are building up the explosion for the next moment. We have now come to the end of the system.

The counterculture turns out for an anti-nuclear demonstration in Wiesbaden, Germany, in April 1996, on the the 10th anniversary of the accident at Chernobyl. Slogans read “Nuclear Power? No Thanks” (left) and “Chernobyl was also a sure thing—sure as death” (right).

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This Crisis Is Not Cyclical

What is the characteristic of this process? The 1929-1931 crisis was a cyclical crisis. That is, a kind of crisis in a system, which can occur periodically, without threatening to actually destroy the system. This kind of crisis, sometimes called a “business cycle,” was characteristic of modern European economy, for a simple reason: Modern European economy was not homogeneous; it had two contrary elements in it, cohabiting.

One: You had what Friedrich List referred to as “national economy,” the real economy: infrastructure; the nation-state as protector of national development; investment in scientific and technological progress; development of basic economic infrastructure; improvement of education; improvement of health care; improvement and fostering of scientific services. That was the national economy.

Then, there was another element: the financier oligarchy, one of the relics of feudalism. Feudalism had two basic, dominant classes. One was the landed aristocracy, which was gradually eliminated, up to about 1848, when the power of landed aristocracy was broken by Lord Palmerston’s deployment of the Benthamites throughout Europe, to bring down the remains of Metternich.

But, the financal oligarchy, typified by Venice, under feudalism—that continued. It established a new base, centered in London, and in the Netherlands, and continued. So, the European economies became mixed economies, with a financier oligarchy on top, dominating the finances of the economy, but underneath a national economy.

What happened was, that you would have, periodically, this accumulation of these excess financial assets in the financier section of the economy. You would purge the economy of this, by having a little depression, burning up some of that useless paper, bankrupting it. Then, usually patriotic upsurges in the nations would say: Go back to national economy! And, governments would then turn back to national economy. Or, the threat of a war would force national governments to go back into national economy policies, for strategic reasons.

So, we had—during the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, we had these business cycles, which are the pulsations of interaction between two opposing social forces: the social forces of national economy, and the social forces of finance economy.

That kind of system is like a planetary orbit. It goes through winter and summer, spring and fall; but, it keeps on going, with some qualification. It is not determined by the laws of the universe, but it is subject of the laws of the universe: that is quite a difference. This gives us a planetary orbit.

And, so, people talked about business cycles; and, people today are trying to talk about business cycles! This is not a business cycle. It is something else.

What happened, over the past 30-odd years, is, we have destroyed, systematically, the foundations of national economy. People say, “We can do it, because there is no longer a danger of war.” We did it under détente, from 1964-1989. We took down our economy, saying: “We don’t need that kind of economy any more, because the danger of war does not require it. Therefore, there is not a strategic imperative for maintaining national economy.”

When the Soviet system began to disintegrate in 1989, under the influence of Thatcher, and a Bush who was almost a little dog on Thatcher’s leash, and François Mitterrand, the other dog on the leash, these adopted a policy, celebrated by the Desert Storm war, which broke the back of Europe, politically, as it was intended to do. It had nothing to do with Iraq; it had to do with breaking the back of Europe; and, breaking the back of the Soviet system. The Soviet system, or what is left of it today, has been cannibalized. Pure cannibalism!

There is no possibility of a recovery of the system in its present form. It cannot recover. The conditions in every state in eastern Europe, in terms of per-capita economic values, are vastly worse than they were under communism! We are on the verge of a social and political explosion, coming out of Russia and adjoining states, and igniting the conditions in eastern Europe—unless we do something about it.

What we are faced with now, is a crisis, not a cyclical crisis within a system, such that you could go back to the precedence of the system and use certain rules to bring the cycle back into focus again. We are now at the end of the system, at which we no longer have national economies, or only the tattered remains of it.

What has happened with the German steel industry? This is an example of that. Simple monopolization is a symptom of the last phase. The next thing is: There is no German steel industry. And, this is in sight, if things continue.

We are dealing, not with a planetary orbit; we are dealing with a comet which is headed directly for the Sun.

A Principle of Curvature

I used curvature, not as an analogy, not as a hyperbole. There actually is a principle of curvature involved here.

In the words of Schiller, most educated people, are not really educated, they are Brotgelehrte. They are learned; they don’t know. They didn’t study to find the truth; they studied to secure a position, a career. They studied to pass the examination; not to know the truth. Truth is not popular. These days, one hears of “relative truth.” Everyone has their own truth. No longer does one say: “This is the universe with laws, which is occupied by human beings, who have minds; and, these minds also have laws. And, that by the interrelationship between the human mind and the universe, there are certain things which are truth, or not truth. The long history is the struggle for truth.”

But, since Plato and his Socrates have been abandoned, everybody now has “relative truth;” opinion determines truth: popular opinion. “What is the truth?”

“Go out and take a popular opinion poll.”

Since we have abandoned truth, we forget some things, especially in economics.

What is a “macroeconomic profit”? What should it mean?

Someone would say: “Go ask your accountant!” Or, “Ask some economist!” These are the worst people to ask. The accountants accept the figures given to them, which don’t represent the truth in any case. They represent the truth in the books, not in nature, and, therefore, don’t tell you much. The economist is a person that lied so well, that they took him off being an accountant and made him an economist.

What is “real profit”? It presumes that in man’s relationship with nature, that, in coming to an area which is poor, we improve the area; we introduce new technology, new skills; and, suddenly, the per-capita and per-square-kilometer productivity of that land area improves.

We say, “There is a gain.” That gain is the only possible source of profit, if you want to take true profit, of the economy as a whole.

How do we get this gain? Where does it come from? Leibniz was the first to examine this question, and dealt with this in references to Analysis Situs (that is one term he used), and to monads.

Where does the gain come from? Is there any monkey who can do this? Any lower species? Only man can do it.

How does man do it? We call it scientific and technological progress, or Classical artistic progress—which are both related things. The mind of man, faced with crises, faced with problems, which are sometimes called ontological paradoxes in their formal aspect: Man’s mind discovers principles, which are principles of nature, or principles of the way the mind works (which we call art, or statecraft). These principles are then applied to change human behavior in respect to nature.

As a result of the application of validated principles, man’s power over nature increases. The land is improved; the productivity per square kilometer is improved; the productivity per capita of labor force is improved; the life expectancy of people is increased; the quality of life in the family, in terms of mental and cultural development, is improved. This is true profit; this is what we should invest in, to produce.

This is what Leibniz refers to as the monad, the ability of the cognitive processes of mind to generate discoveries of principle; and, this articulation by Leibniz became the basis, later, for Riemann’s fundamental contribution to modern physics.

How Discoveries Are Made

What is a discovery? Let’s take the case of physical science. Let’s presume, that our physical science is based on the experimental authority of physical experiments, or observations, which have the same function as physical experiments, as in astrophysics. Now, we come along, and we find that something has occurred in nature, for which the supporting evidence is as valid in nature as the supporting evidence for our existing physics. But, our existing physics says, that this thing that we just observed, couldn’t happen. Now we have, therefore, two things presented to us: an old physics, validated on an experimental basis; and, new evidence, also validated on an experimental basis, which defies the old physics. We have, therefore, what is called an ontological paradox.

Now, put yourself into the mind of a student in a good classroom, as in the Humboldtsche program, in which the student is given this problem at the appropriate point in the student’s education; and, the student is asked to reinvent the discovery made by someone, without telling the student exactly what the discovery is. So, the student has to relive the mental act of discovery.

The student, then will have a principle; he thinks he has discovered the solution. He reports the solution to the class. They will discuss it, and they will, probably, also discuss the way in which you can validate, or invalidate, that conclusion, by means of an experiment. A good instructor will outline the experiment which is done to prove or disprove that assumed principle, and, probably, will have the equipment prepared for the classroom, for that point.

Now, the student has relived the act of original discovery, of a person perhaps centuries, or millennia earlier, as in the case of some of the Greek Classical studies.

Go through the steps of that. How do we represent each of those steps?

Step one: Can we represent the conflict between two bodies of evidence? One for the old physics, one for the new phenomenon, that contradicts it? Yes.

Can we represent the second stage, the mind of the student actually generating a solution? No. Not by sense-perception. We only generate that by imitating that, by doing the same thing ourselves.

Third: Can we report, in a form which can be represented, the discovery of principle we have made? Yes.

Can we describe the experiment to be done; and, can we observe the result of the experiment which validates the discovery? Yes.

But, the second step is missing, in the normal course of events: the most important of all steps, the thing that makes the difference between man and a monkey. Something which some monkeys have not yet discovered: the role of the creative powers of the sovereign individual mind, the ability of the human mind to discover, and to replicate the discovery of a principle of nature, or a principle of art: to generate what Plato calls an idea. The idea belongs to the second phase: the concept of the solution in the form it is generated from the problem: ideas, which can only be understood, and communicated, by replicating them. That is: You can repeat the experiment. You can repeat the problem.

How do we train people? We train people in ideas: to relive the experience of discoveries of people before them. Because, human history is all ideas. Man’s power over nature: ideas. We want children not to learn how to do things, but how to use this thing that sets man apart from and above the beasts: the power to generate valid ideas, and, to prove them, and, to utilize those ideas to transform man’s relationship to nature.

That’s how we get progress. We generate ideas, we apply those discoveries, once we have validated them, to human behavior.

We do this also with machine-tools. How does the machine-tool system work?—something people see less and less of these days. You make a scientific discovery. You go to test it. What do you do? You go down to someone who has machine-tool capability. You build an experimental device, or observational equipment. You keep refining this experimental test, until you get it right. You either prove or disprove what you want, and you get the measurement that you need. Now, the fellow who has designed this equipment for you, or worked with you in perfecting his design, now turns it into a machine-tool principle.

This discovery can now be incorporated in the design of product, and in changing and improving the quality of productive processes. This is, essentially, the simple way in which man increases his power over nature; and, this is where profit comes from.

It is the gain resulting from the improvement in nature through the development of nature, and the improvement in man’s behavior, his economic behavior, by increasing his knowledge, that is, increasing the ideas made by sharing, replicating, old scientific discoveries, or, new ones.

What do we do in art? Classical art? Why is Classical art important, as opposed to the stuff that people like these days? Because Classical art is based on the same principles as scientific discovery; but Classical art studies the human mind as such, the individual mind, the relations among minds, in society.

Classical art is the basis for statecraft: to study the mind of people. What is statecraft supposed to do? It provides the circumstances under which the people can achieve their common goals. It is supposed to make sure education exists, to make sure infrastructure is developed, to make sure medical care is provided; to ensure that society is self-organized in such a way as to meet the needs of the individual, and the society as a whole; to satisfy the aspirations of previous generations; to maintain the present generation; and, to lay the foundations for a betterment of future generations. And, that is what art is conceived to do: to train the mind, to train and educate the passions in such a way, as to produce a better, more moral individual.

Where do you find that thing in mathematics? Where do you find this quality of the mind which is able to make scientific discoveries, to replicate them, to change human behavior, to create artistic works. To perform Classical music, for example: which can not be done by playing the notes. As Furtwängler said, you must re-create the idea of the process of composition, experienced by the composer, and then you must perform that, according to the notes he specified.

It is from this power, that man is able to increase man’s power over nature; and, it is from the expression of this power, and only from there, that a true macroeconomic profit is generated.

What is this?

This is like the problem that was faced by Gauss, in dealing with the question of determining the orbit of Ceres, as the problem that Kepler already understood, a problem which Leibniz understood, a problem which Riemann addressed: The curvature of action in the very small, in the almost dimensionless magnitude of the cognitive powers of the mind, shapes the entirety of the trajectory of society as a whole. There it is: this not-entropic characteristic of this quality of creative potential in the mind, which generates macroeconomic profit; in the real sense, the physical profit.

The Basis of Statecraft

It is this, that improves the quality of man; it is this, that is essential to relations among states. We don’t deal with people as animals. The Chinese are not a fixed magnitude; the Iranians are not a fixed magnitude; the Africans are not a fixed magnitude. They are human beings, exactly like ourselves, perhaps with a different experience.

How do we solve our relations with the rest of the world? Do we look at these people as stereotypes, or do we look at them as human beings like ourselves; and, do we apply the methods of art and creativity, to establish the kind of relations among states which we need for our security?

Or, do we try to find out who our enemy is, like gossiping about this nation or that nation, or this stereotype or that stereotype?

The Schiller Institute performs Bach at the St. Johannes Kirche in Dalsheim, Germany, March 1997. “Classical art is based on the same principles as scientific discovery; but Classical art studies the human mind as such, the individual mind, the relations among minds, in society. Classical art is the basis for statecraft: to study the mind of people.”

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Do we love mankind? It is supposedly a Christian principle. Do we love mankind: because mankind, every person, has this potential? Do we seek to develop that potential in every person? That is the question.

Now, look here at Germany, in particular, from that standpoint, at what has happened in Germany, which threatens the very existence of the German nation—apart from Maastricht.

The machine-tool industry is being destroyed. The relationship of science through economy, through the machine-tool sector, is being destroyed.

Look at Asia. Look at the population of most of this planet, which is located in East and South Asia, across the vast undeveloped areas of Central Asia. What do they lack?

They have people. The people have minds. They can be developed. There are resources which can be developed. What do they lack?

Look at the density of the machine-tool design, the machine-tool sector per capita of labor force, throughout East and South Asia. When you go out of Japan and Taiwan (you find a few capabilities in Korea), what have you got? You’ve got almost nothing. There is no machine-tool capability in this sector of the world, relative to population.

What is Europe’s traditional power? Europe’s traditional power is located in this machine-tool sector, which is an expression of science, an expression of a long process of development.

What is Europe’s export product? It is an essential one: it is machine-tool design.

And, therefore, the relationship, the solution in this crisis, is to define a new frontier of economic development. The new frontier of economic development is concentrated in East and South Asia. India will soon exceed China in population. Then, you have the next, smaller: Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so forth. You have Southeast Asia, an area of growing population, an area also of growing food shortages.

Next to Asia, we have, in Africa, the largest potential area of food growth left untapped on this planet. The largest area for growth of food: present, but undeveloped. You can feed much of Asia out of Africa, if you simply supply the development to Africa that it needs: the transportation networks and other development. Then, South America, and so forth.

This is our future. The export of technology, expressed in terms of machine-tool design. The machine-tool that makes machine-tools, to bring to these parts of Asia, which cannot develop without that kind of potential, that kind of catalyst. That becomes, potentially, the strategic destiny and widening self-interest of Europe.

Look At What We Are Doing to Ourselves!

But, above all, we must recognize one thing, which is what I think is the root of all our devilish problems that we face today.

We forget the real meaning of Genesis 1:26-30, as understood by the apostles Peter, and, especially, John and Paul: of men and women made in the image of God, to exert dominion on this planet: to recognize that all humanity is defined by this capability, the capability which I identified with the “spark of reason,” with which mankind, unlike any animal, is capable of making discoveries and of replicating past discoveries, and capable of transforming those discoveries, in the nature of science and art, into increases in power per capita in the universe, and through art, in terms of improvements in statecraft and relations of man to man in this universe.

If you look at our curriculum, as taught in the universities today—look at the sociology department, look at the psychology department, where do you find man so represented? Man does not exist in these departments. If you look in the science departments, what defines science? No, science is buried, it is a corpse.

You know, you have a difference in art between the Egyptian and Greek Archaic art, in which you have all these tripods, this tombstone design in art, called the Archaic. Then you have— In the Classic age in Greece, you have the development of art as exemplified in sculptures which were like something captured in mid-motion. The same thing in great plastic art, in terms of painting, the paintings of Leonardo or Rafael, you have art in mid-motion.

But, what we have now, is a return to the Archaic, in thought: Everything is now linear, everything is linearized in the small. You make a linear model on a computer; you are trying to make a linear model of man in sociology, on a computer. Man is nowhere there, the human being is nowhere acknowledged. It is just a number, it is something that you go to replace with the “artificial intelligence” machine. Presumably, sometimes, it does not lie.

We have lost the spark of science; we have lost the spark of humanity, in our studies of men, in our practice of art. And, this has become worse and reached a peak in the past 30-odd years, with the changes that were imposed 30 years ago, in destroying the minds of those who marched through the institutions later, destroying the conception of man, the conception of science, with the youth counterculture of that period.

We now come to the point, that we should recognize it; because, we abandoned that very principle, of the conception of man, upon which all the achievements of modern European civilization were based. We suddenly find, European civilization is crumbling around us, crumbling in mass destruction. We are not being killed by the laws of economy; we are destroying ourselves.

And, one would hope this, then:

That the very shock of what we are doing to ourselves, the fact that we are destroying nations, we are destroying our people, we are commiting crimes against humanity beyond belief, simply in carrying out these policies—that perhaps the shock of that, and more than that, the shock of the fact that we ourselves are not going to continue to live like this, our nation will disappear—perhaps, finally, we will come back to our senses and say: “The problem is not what we have to get; the problem is what we are doing to ourselves.”

EDITORIAL

When Future Historians Review

This Week, Will They See a Turning Point,

Or a Descent on the Road to Hell?

June 25—It is now official that there will be a meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the June 28-29 G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan. President Xi Jinping will also conduct a crucial meeting with President Trump there.

These may turn out to be two of the most crucial meetings ever held among heads of state. On Monday, Reuters reported that a senior Russian official, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, had raised a nightmare scenario—of the possible deployment of U.S. missiles near Russian borders turning into a repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Most who lived through that terrifying event never imagined that it would, or even could, ever happen again. What if, however, we are now sleepwalking, as in 1914, as in 1939, into a global war, which would this time be thermonuclear extinction? Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, prior to receipt of the Russian statement, had already said,

Who does not wake up and know that we are on the verge of World War Three? Such a person is not in the real world. We are closer to World War Three than at any time, I would say, in the entire postwar (1945) period. . . . I think it’s a very good thing that Trump intervened at the last moment [to call off air strikes against Iran], but it was 10 minutes before the attack! People should really realize that this is not a joke. . . . If this would have happened, we may have been on the way to World War Three, and that is not an exaggeration.

Why is the world closer now to self-extinction than it was in 1962?

The treasonous influence of British intelligence on the American electoral process of 2016, known as the “Russiagate” hoax, has now been compounded by their attempt, using the United States Congress in addition to the usual neo-con suspects infesting the Trump Administration, to introduce the insane idea of winning war against Russia through “cyber-methods.”

In the middle of the insanity about Russiagate, during the spring and summer of 2018, a corrupted Congress passed the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 (NDAA), overriding President Trump’s direct negotiations with Russia and China and demanding low intensity and prewar maneuvers against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. In the process, they took away the requirement that the President approve cyberwarfare actions against these four nations, changing the definitions of cyberwarfare in order to give command authority to the U.S. Cyber Command and the Secretary of Defense, rather than the President. They also pre-authorized warfare against these four nations in response to alleged cyberattacks by those four nations. This was the exact area that President Trump had discussed with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July of 2018, despite the attempts to use the Russiagate “red herring” to stop that meeting at that time.

When, in the Helsinki meeting, the President once again attempted to use his Constitutional authority to directly negotiate with President Putin, opening a critical dialogue about de-escalating cyber warfare between the U.S. and Russia, the British and their assets in the United States intelligence community, the media, and the Congress went absolutely ballistic, claiming that Trump had committed treason against the United States!

Peace and Development Are Possible

As a result, as the President goes to Osaka, where the heads of the United States, Russia, China, and India need to be free to discuss a four powers arrangement for peace, development, and a new financial architecture, the specter of ultimate war is being used to terrorize the world and to change the subject. This must not be allowed.

Let us take a page from the diplomacy of President John F. Kennedy, who together with the Soviet Union pulled the world away from the brink of extinction in October 1962. In September 1963, he told the United Nations:

Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the Moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty. . . . Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the Moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.

An agreement among the Four Space Powers—Russia, China, India, and the United States—as well as others, to de-escalate the threat of global war through a global coordinated effort in space, in this year of commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landing of mankind on the Moon, is one idea. This effort, with which John F. Kennedy was so identified, could forge a pathway forward, away from the brink of war, and toward the “Win-Win” cooperation without which the human race has no possible chance of durable, rather than accidental, survival.

Lyndon LaRouche, author of the nuclear defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed an entirely new paradigm for the world. LaRouche developed comprehensive plans for new strategic relationships based on China, Russia, India, and the United States creating a new gold reserve based monetary system that would dedicate its credit to physical development of the world, rather than offshore financial chicanery and usury—the means by which the City of London and Wall Street presently control the world’s finances.

For that, LaRouche was defamed and prosecuted by the very same British-directed apparatus that is now going after President Trump, right down to the same prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller, III. LaRouche must be exonerated so that any sane policy of international and national development, benefiting all human beings, can be fully discussed, debated, and understood by the American population. Such a debate now, in this time of crisis, is a literal force for peace.

Ask your U.S. Representative or Senator: Where do you really stand on war and peace when it comes to Russia and China? Did you vote for the 2019 NDAA in 2018? Do you have any idea at all what was in it? Will you now join a great movement for peace, by acting to eliminate the British imperial system’s treasonous influence on the U.S.?

Will you act to exonerate LaRouche?