Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 20, May 15, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- Joint Statement by President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Meeting on the Elbe

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 20, May 15, 2020

- I. Today’s Mission

- 75TH ANNIVERSARY Victory Over Fascism in World War II: The Optimism of Higher Resolve by Dennis Speed

- SCHILLER INSTITUTE CONFERENCE A Sacred Day—The Victory Over Fascism by H.E. Dmitry Polyanskiy

- Stockholm BRIX Webinar: The Health Silk Road by Ulf Sandmark and Hussein Askary

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Don’t Fall into a Geopolitical Trap: Cooperation Is the Key to Overcoming Pandemic

- II. Ending the Paradigm of Imperial Finance

- The British Empire is the Only Enemy Of America, China and All of Humanity by Robert Ingraham

- German Supreme Court Affirms National Law Against EU Super-State by Claudio Celani

- AN OPEN LETTER Economic Recovery via Infrastructure Investment: Thinking It Through by James Moore

- III. Creativity & Scientific Frontiers

- Schiller Institute Conference on the Internet April 25-26, 2020, PANEL 2 For a Better Understanding of How Our Universe Functions

- Dialogue with Prof. William Happer and Dr. Marie Korsaga

- IN MEMORIAM James Beggs, 1926-2020: A Leader in Space Exploration by Marsha Freeman

- IV. The Coming Revolution in Science

- The Reciprocity of Extremes: The Astrophysics of Gurwitsch Radiation by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1998)

Fulfilling the Promise of 1945

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

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.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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April 25, 2020

Joint Statement by President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Meeting on the Elbe

April 25, 2020, marks the 75th Anniversary of the historic meeting between American and Soviet troops, who shook hands on the damaged bridge over the Elbe River. This event heralded the decisive defeat of the Nazi regime.

The meeting on the Elbe represented a culmination of tremendous efforts by the many countries and peoples that joined forces under the framework of the United Nations Declaration of 1942. This common struggle required enormous sacrifice by millions of soldiers, sailors, and citizens in multiple theaters of war.

We also recognize the contributions from millions of men and women on the home front, who forged vast quantities of war materials for use around the world. Workers and manufacturers played a crucial role in supplying the allied forces with the tools necessary for victory.

The “Spirit of the Elbe” is an example of how our countries can put aside differences, build trust, and cooperate in pursuit of a greater cause. As we work today to confront the most important challenges of the 21st century, we pay tribute to the valor and courage of all those who fought together to defeat fascism. Their heroic feat will never be forgotten.

International News Service/Allan Jackson

On April 25, 1945, American and Soviet troops linked up for the first time at the Elbe River near Torgau, Germany.

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 20, May 15, 2020

Cover This Week

NARA/Pfc. William E. Poulson

At the conclusion of World War II, American and Soviet troops met for the first time on April 25, 1945, at the Elbe River near Torgau, Germany.

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FULFILLING THE PROMISE OF 1945

2 Joint Statement by President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Meeting on the Elbe

I. TODAY’S MISSION

4 75TH ANNIVERSARY

Victory over Fascism in World War II:

The Optimism of Higher Resolve

by Dennis Speed

10 SCHILLER INSTITUTE CONFERENCE

A Sacred Day—The Victory Over Fascism

by H.E. Dmitry Polyanskiy

11 STOCKHOLM BRIX WEBINAR

The Health Silk Road

by Ulf Sandmark and Hussein Askary

15 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Don’t Fall into a Geopolitical Trap: Cooperation Is the Key to Overcoming Pandemic

II. ENDING THE PARADIGM OF IMPERIAL FINANCE

22 The British Empire Is the Only Enemy of America, China and All of Humanity

by Robert Ingraham

28 German Supreme Court Affirms National Law Against EU Super-State

by Claudio Celani

34 AN OPEN LETTER

Economic Recovery via Infrastructure Investment: Thinking it Through

by James Moore

III. CREATIVITY AND SCIENTIFIC FRONTIERS

Schiller Institute Conference on the Internet

April 25-26, 2020

MANKIND’S EXISTENCE

NOW DEPENDS ON THE ESTABLISHMENT OF

A NEW PARADIGM

PANEL 2

36 For a Better Understanding of How Our Universe Functions

40 Dialogue with Prof. William Happer and Dr. Marie Korsaga

43 IN MEMORIAM

James Beggs, 1926-2020

A Leader in Space Exploration

by Marsha Freeman

IV. THE COMING REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE

46 The Reciprocity of Extremes: The Astrophysics of Gurwitsch Radiation

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

August 23, 1998

Schiller Institute Conference

May 9, 2020

75th Anniversary of V-E Day: Commemorate the Victory Against Fascism

with a New Bretton Woods System

Visit the Schiller Institute web page for a video

of the entire conference.

ADVERTISEMENT

I. Today’s Mission

75TH ANNIVERSARY

Victory Over Fascism in World War II:

The Optimism of Higher Resolve

by Dennis Speed

The Schiller Institute sponsored a 3-hour conference honoring VE day on May 9. The video of the entire conference is available on the Schiller Institute website. That conference was opened by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, and His Excellency Mr. Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations. Mr. Polyanskiy’s full speech follows this report.

May 11—It is said that in the fifth century BC, the citizens of the city of Delos, Greece, found themselves beset by a terrible, lingering, lethal plague. Unable to defend themselves against the new disease, and believing that they had somehow offended the gods, they consulted the Oracle, whose admonition was: “you must double the size of your altar.” The altar, made in the shape of a cube, was of solid gold.

When every new form of the altar built by the Delians to appease the gods was rejected as incorrect, they then consulted Socrates of Athens to see if he had any idea how they might solve the problem. Socrates replied that the meaning of the Oracle was that, because the citizens of Delos had abandoned the study of universal physical principles, as expressed in the geometric problem of doubling the cube, they had irrevocably doomed themselves, in the short term, were they not to return to those studies. That same—“Delian”—judgment now grimly haunts the entire trans-Atlantic world which, up to now, has not truly grasped the significance of the coronavirus pandemic, itself a lethal commentary upon the failed economic and geopolitical policies path taken since the death of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 12, 1945.

On the verge of the world’s greatest crisis since the Second World War, the Schiller Institute convened its conference, “The 75th Anniversary of V-E Day: Commemorate the Victory Against Fascism with a New Bretton Woods System!” Though the desired Four Powers meeting of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping has not yet occurred, the necessity for it is greater now than it was when Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued a call this past January, after the killing of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, for such a summit.

Schiller Institute

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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In her keynote to the May 9 conference she said:

The danger is today that we are repeating the mistakes by not paying attention to how these wars came into being. World War II was a collapse into barbarism, which was engulfing the whole world. It was a situation where things happened, crimes happened which destroyed all ideas of civilization. It was a war around the whole world. It was 65 states which were involved directly or indirectly. There were 110 million soldiers under arms. The victims were mostly civilians. All together, 60 million dead people. There was the Holocaust, there were other massacres, there were mass genocides, war crimes, and all of this was the result of the inhuman ideologies of some of the key protagonists and the way they were manipulated actually on a chess board which was orchestrated by the forces of the Empire.

The Meeting on the Elbe

Zepp-LaRouche contrasted the difference between the joint statement commemorating V-E Day issued by Russian President Putin and American President Donald Trump, and that of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, saying:

Both [Putin and Trump] said that this event at the end of World War II and the meeting [between American and Russian soldiers at Germany’s Elbe River] at Torgau is an example of the fact that our nations—meaning the United States and Russia—can cooperate, that they can put aside differences, build trust, and cooperate in the pursuit of greater causes. They say, “As we work today to confront the most important challenges of the 21st Century, we pay tribute to the valor and courage of all of those who fought together to defeat fascism. Their heroic feat will never be forgotten.” Pompeo, on the other side, chooses a different narrative by putting out a joint statement with the Foreign Ministers of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, which is a completely geopolitical narrative with the connotation of anti-communism, anti-Russia, equating Russia with communism implicitly.

Schiller Institute

James Jatras

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A Four Power Meeting

Veteran American diplomat James Jatras, speaking shortly after Zepp-LaRouche, agreed, saying:

A few years ago, some of us were calling for a meeting of the big three [Russia, China, and the United States].... I certainly think [India’s] Prime Minister Modi should be included in that company, that we need to have the primary responsible countries in the world come to a common agreement....

The problem is, unfortunately, again, what goes on in Washington. I think the juxtaposition that Helga made between President Trump’s statement about the meeting on the Elbe, versus the statement by Secretary of State Pompeo, illustrates this almost schizophrenia you find in the American administration, which as far as many of us can tell, basically pits President Trump against everybody else in his administration. If there’s anybody in his administration who would like to go down that path of a responsible meeting of the minds with the other principal world leaders, it will be President Trump. But then you’re very hard pressed to say, “And who in his administration actually agrees with him about that?” Certainly not Mr. Pompeo, not Mr. Esper over at the Pentagon, not Mr. O’Brien at the National Security Council.

An Indictment of Pompeo

The possible reasons behind that severe and dangerous division in the President’s administration were touched upon by William Binney, former technical director at the National Security Agency. Binney, the designer of the ThinThread surveillance program, and a master code-breaker specializing for decades in monitoring Russian activities, knows something about why the differences between Mike Pompeo and President Trump exist. It was at the request of President Trump in the fall of 2017 that Mike Pompeo, then CIA director, met with Binney, who informed Pompeo that from everything Binney could determine by a forensic work-up of the evidence, it was physically impossible that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee files—the central contention of Russiagate. In other words, it was a lie. To this day, Pompeo has never informed Binney as to what President Trump’s response was to his evaluation.

Schiller Institute

William Binney

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From all indications, Pompeo chose to do nothing to correct the still-circulated national intelligence misestimate. Bill Binney told the audience:

And so, the basic case is, for example, the Russiagate issue—and they’re still pushing the Russiagate! “The ‘Russians did it,” you know: “They hacked the DNC.” Well, they didn’t provide anything to WikiLeaks, because all that data was hand-carried to them, and it was evidenced from the metadata and the forensics that we could prove all of that data was physically transferred to WikiLeaks.

And the other thing was Guccifer 2.0. Guccifer 2.0 came out shortly after June 15, I believe it was, in 2016. And when he did that, he produced items that had “Russian fingerprints” in ’em. But when you went to the WikiLeaks publication of the [John] Podesta emails, you found some of the same ones there, and they didn’t have those fingerprints! Well, that gets back to the compromise of the CIA Vault 7 material by WikiLeaks, which showed that they [the CIA] used a program called Marble Framework one time in 2016. This program, when they used it, they could hack into sites and make it look like somebody else did it.... They could make it look like the Russians did it, the Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians or Arab countries.... That was all put in there. Guccifer 2.0 was a fabrication by CIA and elements within CIA. So we’re all being manipulated here....

Binney concluded:

You cannot cover up criminal activity using classification; it’s illegal, and that’s based on Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7: That is the governing order for all classification of the United States government, and it says, very simply, you cannot classify, maintain classified, or not declassify any evidence of a crime, corruption, fraud, waste, abuse, and other types of criminal activity.

Attend to History, Reject the Fabrications

This conscious, criminal distortion of history deviates from true universal principles respecting man and nature, and if continued will doom the very architects of the lies, who eventually wall themselves up within their own carefully constructed cave of deception.

Schiller Institute

H.E. Amb. Igor Anatolyevich Khovaev.

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Ambassador from Russia to the Philippines, H.E. Igor Anatolyevich Khovaev, said:

I’m convinced it’s high time to learn some lessons of history. It’s really relevant today when all of us have to face another common enemy: the coronavirus pandemic. So, we need to learn the lessons of history, because it’s high time to combine our efforts: Instead of drawing new dividing lines in the world, looking for your enemies, and playing other social political games. It’s obvious for all reasonable, truthful people that no country—small or big, it doesn’t matter—is able to efficiently cope with this new, global threat on its own: So we need to be together. We need to combine, to join our efforts, because each and every nation can, and should make its indispensable contribution to this joint struggle.

Diane Sare, the founder and co-director of the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus, added:

What I was thinking about on this anniversary of V-E Day are the remarks made by Gen. Douglas McArthur on V-J Day, Sept. 2, 1945, on the deck of the battleship Missouri, about the question of what had become very clear to him, after the nuclear bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is, that once the human species has the capability of completely annihilating itself, then you have to find another way to resolve conflicts and disagreements, than war, and he said that it requires a recrudescence of the spirit, if we are to save the flesh.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, in his sobering remarks, commented that,

Unfortunately, after the beginning of the ’90s, there are trends which are very worrying, when there are countries that try to rewrite the history of the Second World War, sometimes to change places between the victors and those who were the criminals during this war. We in Russia and in some of our neighboring states are doing our best not to allow such an interpretation of history, which absolutely turns the whole course of the Second World War upside down....

Earlier, he had remarked,

It’s a great honor for me to address your event, which happens on a very sacred day for us. It happens on the day of the victory over fascism, that my country—at that time the Soviet Union—made the most valuable contribution to. This day is very much enshrined in the memory of our people, because everybody in my country has some relatives who perished in this terrible war, or participated and were maimed, or were working in the real economy of our country to help to boost military production and to change the course of the war. As you know, we were not provoking this war, we were not expecting it, and this happened as a big, big problem for my country, and for the whole of mankind: 27 million of my compatriots perished....

American casualties in the entire war are today estimated at 405,399 killed and 671,278 wounded. In fact, the total number of Americans in uniform during the entire war—about 16 million—is far lower than Russian deaths, as well as Chinese deaths, which totaled about 20 million, almost ignored in many accounts of the conflict. The experience of war, for China (1937-45) and Russia (1941-45), war fought in their nations and on their soil, was far different, and needs to be comprehended, in order to competently address the present complex of crises facing the world, requiring a “Four Powers” Summit as soon as possible.

‘How Did We Get Here?’

The purpose of the May 8-9 conference was not a mere commemoration. It was an attempt to return the thought processes of the American people to “resolving the Delian paradox,” at a time of great anxiety, when the United States has in a mere six weeks been suddenly plunged into unemployment comparable to that of the first three years of the Great Depression. “How did we get here, sunk to these depths, from the summit of American power and influence in 1945?” How did Americans go from the status of citizens of a great republic to become subservient subjects of what Winston Churchill called the British “Empire of the mind”?

Only by resurrecting the study of the current history of the past 75 years—for example, the wartime disagreement between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on ending the dominance of the British, French, and other colonial empires over the post-war world—and by determining how that disagreement played out tragically for the world after FDR’s death, can the real and present enemies of the United States, and of forces of progress worldwide, be thoroughly understood. A new dialogue on these matters of history needs to be begun worldwide.

Schiller Institute

Jacques Cheminade

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Conference speaker Jacques Cheminade, founder of Solidarité & Progrès in France, attacked one of the misconceptions around the leadership of the alliance:

Lyndon LaRouche wrote with me—he wrote most of it, but we had many discussions about it—a book called France after Charles de Gaulle [La France aprés de Gaulle]. There is a dark legend about the relations between Roosevelt and de Gaulle, and we should dissipate the unnecessary and evil clouds of that legend. The legend says that Roosevelt and de Gaulle utterly disliked each other, even to the level to considering themselves as enemies. Many Americans say that Roosevelt considered de Gaulle as an anti-American proto-fascist; and many French pretend that Roosevelt was an American imperialist who wanted to take over the world. It is essential today to rise above such vulgar, petty, and subordinate quarrels. Both de Gaulle and Roosevelt not only fought together for the same cause, but both overcame the prejudices and stereotypes of their time and their social environments.

There have been some efforts to rekindle the interest in the real history of the 20th century by others than the Schiller Institute. Film maker Oliver Stone, whose father played a role in the reconstruction of France after the war, is one such person. In an interview a few years ago, on the show The Young Turks, about his 12-part documentary series, The Untold History of the United States, Stone, himself a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, observed:

Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II, no question about it. In Moscow, they turned back the Germans, but it wasn’t the same thing as at Stalingrad.... And the Soviets took enormous casualties, civilian and military.... And that was the exact turning point in the war, because from that point on Churchill and Roosevelt, they knew that things had changed....

Winston Churchill was trying to preserve the British Empire. And he goes to great lengths to do it. And as a result, it’s the Russians that fight the Germans on the Eastern front, who do most of the fighting, because Churchill is busy trying to keep hold of the Balkans and trying to get back into his British Empire in the east. Very interesting story, geopolitically. Roosevelt is suspicious of Churchill, and very divided, and he puts out a warm hand to Stalin. There is a relationship and alliance between us and the Soviet Union. The moment that Roosevelt dies, Churchill is working hard to change the alliance, and he gets Truman, who is a small, narrow-minded man, to fall into the British camp, and to take this strong anti-Soviet stance two weeks after Roosevelt dies.

Stone went on to discuss his view that the United States also did not need to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the Japanese were not only already defeated, but were actively negotiating a peace arrangement.

Stone more recently applied his earlier studies of current history, including of World War II, to exposing the truth behind the 2014 Ukraine Maidan coup, in two documentaries: Ukraine On Fire and Revealing Ukraine. The true story of Russiagate, Christopher Steele, the Barack Obama Presidency and British intelligence, is right at the center of this, which, if revealed, may well not only prevent war, but also foster real trust and cooperation with other nations subjected to the same criminal geopolitical game fight on behalf of a dying City of London-directed financial empire.

Knowledgeable Optimism

The conjuncture of crises confronting humanity—war, famine, pestilence, and death by all three—can be transcended. The conference opened with the showing of an excerpt from a speech delivered by EIR founder Lyndon LaRouche in New York City in June 2003:

So, the most important thing, in my view, in my experience in leadership, is optimism. Not arbitrary optimism, not false optimism, but knowledgeable optimism. The knowledge that we can, if we will, do the things that have to be done. I know that in the period of World War II, when the United States had gone through a great period of pessimism in the 1920s and early 1930s, we began to come out of that pessimism during the period of the 1930s and the war. We were able to meet the challenge of war and the challenge of the hope of peace, which Roosevelt represented. Because there was optimism in the people. I saw things happen in wartime, under wartime conditions, which expressed optimism. People would do what they thought was impossible, because they were optimistic.

I’m confident that the United States can change. It can change from what it is now. It can change quickly. What we’re doing now is wrong, but it can change. It doesn’t have to go on like this, and I’m determined to bring that change about.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech identified the immediate, concrete content of this solution:

We have to go back to the idea of Bretton Woods as Franklin D. Roosevelt intended it, namely, that the main aim would have been to overcome poverty in the developing countries by providing long-term, low-interest credit lines for a real industrialization of the developing countries. This program was never implemented because of the untimely death of Roosevelt, and the fact that Churchill and Truman organized much of the environment of the actual Bretton Woods....

There is a program which can be the blueprint to start this kind of global infrastructure development tomorrow, if the political will can be mobilized. That is the program which EIR published in 2014 called The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. This was our answer to President Xi Jinping putting the New Silk Road on the agenda, and this was a program we have worked on literally for more than 40 years. It contains a concrete development plan for Africa, which we published in 1976; it contains a program for the integration of Latin America; for the development of South Asia, the Pacific Basin, the Eurasian Land-Bridge, the Oasis Plan for the Middle East, and many more aspects. So, we have a blueprint to completely start the development of the planet immediately.

A Miracle of Changed Axioms

What is needed is, in one sense, a miracle. That miracle will rely on the sort of militant optimism through which the 17-year-old commander of the French army, Jeanne D’Arc, triumphed in the Battle of Orleans on May 8, 1429, giving that army its first victory over English forces in 100 years and liberating her countrymen. Five hundred and sixteen years later, on May 8, 1945, Europe, including Germany, was liberated from the tyranny of fascism, but the imperial, geopolitical axioms that provoked that conflict in the first place, as well as its World War One predecessor, remained.

Schiller Institute

Dr. Gary H. Kitmacher, Communications and Education Mission Manager, International Space Station Program.

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How might those axioms be discarded? Dr. Gary H. Kitmacher, Communications and Education Mission Manager, International Space Station Program, in a written statement to the conference, said:

Hundreds of years ago, civilization’s great achievements were the great cathedrals. They would take centuries to complete and required the work of the greatest organizers, artisans, architects, craftsmen and laborers. Today that life-affirming project is the International Space Station.... It is the largest and most complex spacecraft ever placed in orbit. It’s a laboratory, an observation post and a testbed for future technologies that will one day take men and women to other worlds.... One day in the future more men and women will probably live and work in space than on Earth. Our work today will have been the critical factor in making that possible....

Only societies with the courage to change their own axioms, to look over the shoulder of their present failed state, and correct themselves, are morally fit to survive. In order to successfully resolve the Delian paradox of doubling the cube, a society must first stop being block-headed.

SCHILLER INSTITUTE CONFERENCE

H.E. Dmitry Polyanskiy

A Sacred Day—The Victory Over Fascism

Schiller Institute

H.E. Mr. Dmitry Polyanskiy

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We present here the edited transcript of the speech to the Schiller Institute’s 3-hour conference on May 9, commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Victory in Europe (V-E Day) over fascism, by His Excellency Mr. Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.

It’s a great honor for me to address your event, which happens on a very sacred day for us. It happens on the day of the victory over fascism, that my country—at that time the Soviet Union—made the most valuable contribution to. This day is very much enshrined in the memory of our people, because everybody in my country has some relatives who perished in this terrible war, or participated and were maimed, or were working in the real economy of our country to help to boost military production and to change the course of the war.

As you know, we were not provoking this war, we were not expecting it, and this happened as a big, big problem for my country, and for the whole of mankind: 27 million of my compatriots perished, mostly civilian population. There were immense atrocities committed. Of course, one needs to remember the Holocaust, and these things should never happen again. We all understand this.

Unfortunately, after the beginning of the ’90s, there are trends which are very worrying, when there are countries that try to rewrite the history of the Second World War, sometimes to change places between the victors and those who were the criminals during this war. We in Russia and in some of our neighboring states are doing our best not to allow such an interpretation of history, which absolutely turns the whole course of the Second World War upside down.

We are very much worried by these trends in some of our neighboring states, when there are Nazi collaborators who are now being respected as “heroes,” and when the monuments to the real heroes, the real Liberators are being demolished, or placed in other locations without addressing us and without speaking to their relatives. We think that this is not normal. We think one should avoid such actions, which really are not tolerable in our world. We need to respect the memory of those who fell victims of this war, and we need to be very accurate in describing the events of this war.

That’s why conferences like yours are very important. They mobilize opinion, they raise awareness of specialists and of experts on this situation around the history of the Second World War, and they help people to understand better the sentiments and the moods in different countries of the world, including my country.

I wish all of you success in this endeavor, and you can always count on Russia in defending the heritage of the Second World War, and in honoring the victors and providing accountability for the perpetrators of terrible crimes during this war.

Stockholm BRIX Webinar

The Health Silk Road

by Ulf Sandmark and Hussein Askary

BRIX

Hussein Askary

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April 30—An extraordinary webinar, “The Health Silk Road—Key to the Global Fight against COVID-19,” was held in Stockholm on April 29 by the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden (BRIX), bringing together ambassadors, healthcare specialists, economists, and think-tankers from 12 countries, to discuss the roles of the Health Silk Road, and Belt and Road, in building a global healthcare front line against the COVID-19 pandemic and other epidemics and diseases.

The speakers included Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the ambassadors to Sweden from China, Serbia, and Malaysia. The Deputy Head of Mission from Pakistan also spoke. One of the most prominent Chinese virologists, Prof. Dr. Wang Gui-Qiang, Director of Infectious Diseases at the Peking University First Hospital, spoke, as did Prof. Göran Tomson, Professor of International Health Systems Research at the Karolinska Institute, the most important health research institution in Sweden. Other speakers were co-founder of the ICHI Foundation in Norway, Thore Vestby, a former member of parliament; the Director of the OBOR Institute in Italy, Michele De Gasperis; Ulf Sandmark, Chairman of the BRIX; and Ms. Isabelle Hannouche, a young entrepreneur from Senegal working in Shanghai. Hussein Askary introduced the webinar and was the moderator. Forty-nine attended the webinar, including diplomats from 11 countries.

The webinar started with an opening statement by the moderator of the event, Hussein Askary, Board member of BRIX, in which he reviewed the effects of the Corona Pandemic on the world, and the importance of the Health Silk Road to create a global front line against it. He reviewed the history of the Health Silk Road and its relationship to the Belt and Road Initiative, emphasizing that developing adequate physical infrastructure, education, and scientific research are the three main components of a global healthcare system envisioned for the Health Silk Road in an international conference in Beijing in August 2017.

Both photos: BRIX

Left: Amb. Gui Congyou; right: Amb. Dragan Momcilovic

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Diplomatic Reports

Speaking first on panel one, “Why International Cooperation is Indispensable in the Fight Against the COVID-19 Pandemic,” was the Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China, Gui Congyou, who thanked BRIX “for providing this online platform where we join each other for timely communication on battling COVID-19 and improving cooperation.” He emphasized that,

From a historical angle, a pandemic could happen at any corner of the world, and the history of humanity is a history of battles against various plagues and prevailing over them. We are confident that COVID-19 is another that will be defeated. The Chinese government, despite facing a challenging situation itself, has been providing assistance with medical supplies to over 150 countries and international organizations, including the World Health Organization and the African Union.

Serbia’s Ambassador, Dragan Momcilovic, said that the COVID-19 pandemic had been largely controlled in his country because China came to the rescue, not only with protective gear but also with ventilators and most importantly, Chinese doctors came to Serbia with advice on how to handle the virus. Ambassador Momcilovic also emphasized the importance of the role of the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s transport, power, and industrial projects, in reviving the economies of the eastern European countries. He also urged the EU and the U.S. to join hands with China to build the world economy and help fight pandemics.

All photos: BRIX

Left to right: Amb. Datin Paduka Nur Ashikin Mohd Taib, Irfan Ahmad, Prof. Wang Gui-Qiang

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Malaysia’s Ambassador, Mrs. Datin Paduka Nur Ashikin Mohd Taib, stressed the importance of international cooperation to handle the virus, as it is a global phenomenon. “On the bilateral level Malaysia has received a lot of help from China in terms of equipment and experts,” she said. She concluded her remarks by saying, “It is time for cooperation and definitely not for competition. We have to find ways to come through this as a global community.”

Mr. Irfan Ahmad from the Embassy of Pakistan said “COVID-19 proves indeed that the world now is a global village and, whether we like it or not, individual countries cannot stay isolated from each other anymore.”

The Government of Pakistan looks at the pandemic as a challenge but also as an opportunity to mitigate health problems in third world countries. Pakistan’s Prime Minister has called for a global initiative for debt relief and in consultation with the UN, will call together a group to look for a comprehensive solution to the debt problems resulting from the COVID-19 situation. Domestically Pakistan has launched a nine-month program to build up its health system and has launched a very large program to aid poor and marginalized people with financial support. Eighteen hundred three- and four-star hotels in the country have been turned into quarantine centers for COVID-19 patients. Two thousand hospital beds have been created in railroad sleeper-cars. The international cooperation with China in line with the Health Silk Road is strong.

Learning About COVID-19 from China

Prof. Wang Gui-Qiang is one of the absolutely top experts on COVID-19 in China as a member of the medical treatment expert group of the National Health Commission, and in his participation in the compilation of, and updates to the Chinese COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment protocols. He reported the latest from China on the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19, covering many issues not sufficiently clarified among international experts.

Swedish Prof. Göran Tomson made a strong appeal for cooperation among all countries against the virus. He sharply rejected, in the name of science, the politicization dividing nations in the struggle, pointing out the importance of the existing cooperation within the World Health Organization (WHO), to which he is an advisor. and to the many cooperative initiatives being taken by the Karolinska Institute. Especially significant for the promotion of the Health Silk Road is the work on the UN Agenda 2030 by the President of the Karolinska Institute, to which he is a counsellor. Also important is international cooperation to minimize emergencies and limit resistance to antibiotics. Dr. Tomson was one of the founders of the ReAct Network on antimicrobial resistance, INRUD (the International Network for Rational Use of Drugs), and IMPACT, a Sino-Swedish integrated multi-sectoral partnership for antibiotic resistance containment.

All photos: BRIX

Left to right: Prof. Göran Tomson, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Thore Vestby

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The second panel, “The Role of the Belt and Road in Building a Global Health Front Line,” was keynoted by Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and president of the international Schiller Institute, who took up the background to the threat of global pandemics and how to turn around the situation by establishing a new paradigm among nations.

Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the need to implement an economic policy of the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche and a New Bretton Woods. She called for a top meeting of the four major powers—United States, Russia, China, and India—to challenge the power of the dying and deadly system of Wall Street and the City of London, in order to implement that economic policy. She referred to the recent Schiller Institute conference of April 15-26.

Thore Vestby, a former Member of Parliament and co-founder of ICHI Foundation in Norway, contributed some observations from one of Sweden’s neighboring countries, which has followed a different pathway in fighting the COVID-19. He pointed to the statement by Norway’s Foreign Minister at the Norwegian Atlantic Committee in early February, saying that China is an indispensable partner. Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg has taken the lead and has received unanimous support from the parliament. She told CNN, “Global problems have to be solved by global solutions.” Norway is supporting and closely cooperating with the WHO and has sent a medical team to support Italy’s Lombardy region. Now the situation has turned around and Norway is receiving a lot of help from the Health Silk Road.

Opportunities for Advanced Research

Also on the panel was a think-tank expert from Pakistan, Shakeel Ramay, Director of the Asia and China Study Center at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, who made a presentation on infrastructure development as one of the keys to building a real Health Silk Road. He explained the necessity of creating a multi-layered economic development model based on joint efforts by private business and state institutions, emphasizing that ultimately the responsibility for ensuring the resilience and sustainability of the development process must be shouldered by the state.

Michele De Gasperis presented the impressive activities of the OBOR Institute of Italy in involving Italian and Chinese business in international cooperation along the One Belt One Road/BRI. With seven offices, two in Italy and five in China, the OBOR Institute is coordinating an international network of think-tanks and chambers of commerce in developing the business opportunities of the Belt and Road Initiative.

All photos: BRIX

Left to right: Michele De Gasperis, Isabelle Hannouche, Ulf Sandmark

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Businesswoman Isabelle Hannouche from Senegal works as a China-Africa trade expert in Shanghai. She has been active in directing Chinese aid for the coronavirus fight in her homeland. The lack of ventilators in Senegal and the high prices have prompted entrepreneurs there to start producing a ventilator at the cost only US $60 per unit, she told the conference.

The final speaker, Ulf Sandmark, reported on the cooperation between China and Sweden in very advanced research in coronavirus diagnostics and testing. A special cargo plane has brought robots for automated analysis of mass testing from China to the Karolinska Institute/SciLifeLab. This is a model of using innovation to leapfrog the methods of fighting COVID-19, he said, along the lines of the Chinese strategy for using innovation as the core of the BRI development policy and bringing the world together on the basis of science.

All conference videos, including a link to Professor Wang’s presentation, are available here.

Buy The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge

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ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Don’t Fall into a Geopolitical Trap: Cooperation Is the Key to Overcoming Pandemic

CGTN

International cooperation is key to defeating COVID-19. Here, a scene from the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s May 6 webcast featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche. The video is available here.

Harley Schlanger: Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is May 6, 2020, and we’re in the midst of a very tumultuous period in history—tumultuous and dangerous.

An enormous pressure is being put on governments around the trans-Atlantic region to reopen their economies, to move out of the lockdown stage and social distancing. But there are some complications involved in this. Helga, what’s your view of the situation?

‘Opening Up’ When Unprepared

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The worldwide pressure to open up—from industry, from firms, from the people who are losing their livelihoods—is, indeed, enormous. And the situation is for sure not helped by the large amount of disinformation being channeled—all the varieties of fake news, ranging from the “China is behind this” and “China created the virus in a Wuhan laboratory,” to “Bill Gates is the originator of this whole pandemic to make a fortune selling vaccines,” to “Covid-19 is only like a seasonal flu.” I could add to this list quite a number of variations, but the reality is that the coronavirus pandemic is really not under control; it is real. And people who don’t look at the totality of how this is affecting the whole world, are for sure not getting the picture right.

Due to pressure, there is the so-called “opening up,” both in the United States and in European countries. This is not a good thing at all because, as a virologist, Prof. Alexander Kekulé from Halle, Germany, pointed out, a pandemic is not a slow-moving catastrophe. It has the dynamics of an explosion. If the wrong steps are taken, and you “open up the economy,” without having protective measures in place, the danger is exceedingly high.

But they are not in place. Such measures include testing and really knowing what we’re dealing with; that has not been accomplished, either in Europe or the United States; full capabilities to isolate and do contact tracing; full protective measures like masks, protective clothing for medical personnel. And still, we don’t know what we’re dealing with! Have the schoolchildren, who are now supposed to go back to school, been tested? I don’t think so! What about the teachers? What about the way the virus is transmitted among children? There are big question marks and contradictory reports are coming out all the time.

Look at the figures, or the picture as a whole. Don’t just go by your wish that now that the weather is getting nice and you want to get out, you want to go to the club, or whatever other modus people have to oppose certain health measures being imposed. Look at the total picture!

USDA

In the absence of scientific understanding, all segments of the population are vulnerable, including the school-age children seen here.

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The total picture is that in various so-called hotspots, like Lombardy in Italy, like New York/New Jersey, more corpses came from this pandemic than the health institutions could manage. So, this is serious! This is not a “flu.” It’s really a symptom of a society in which the population is so hedonistic that it cannot accept the fact that this is a serious virus and it is a pandemic and it has its origins neither in a Chinese lab nor in the evil thoughts of Bill Gates and such people, but is the result of at least 50 years of wrong economic policies, as we have warned since the early ’70s: That lowering the living standards of large parts of the population, especially in the developing sector, invites pandemics to come, because of the collapsed immune system, because of the malnutrition, all these factors.

So, I really urge people not to go haywire, but to take the time and the patience to really rethink this whole situation through. The bottom line is that unless we change the unjust economic system, which is in the long term responsible for this, there is no solution. A solution is possible, but we need a new credit system; we need large-scale, long-term credit lines for industrialization of the developing countries, and we must increase the living standard of every single person on this planet. And that has to go along with the building of a top-level health system, as it used to be under the Hill-Burton standard in the United States, or the German or French system until the ’70s, in every single country. Unless you are willing to consider those solutions, everything else is too short-sighted.

The Coronavirus Is Not Like a Seasonal Flu

Schlanger: One of the arguments that some people are using is that with the changing estimates of the death totals, including from the various models that are out there, this just shows that there’s corruption and fraud. But the fact is, we still haven’t finally gotten down to understanding exactly what we’re dealing with. Isn’t this one of the great dangers?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. This is a new virus, and the estimates in the recent period from several medical experts are that it may take one-and-a-half to two years before vaccines are available. All the people who are anti-vaccine are already jumping out of their seats. The point is, there is a science to this matter. Look at what China has been doing, why they were successful in containing the virus in about two months, and why they were able to restart their economy relatively quickly after they contained the virus.

Look at what is going on in Africa, in India, in Russia. If these factors are not considered as a totality, you come up with the wrong solution. What we need is international cooperation, among all the scientists, among of all of these countries, to, indeed, discover the nature of this virus, and the nature of other ongoing pandemics. Because if we don’t remedy the causes, there is no guarantee that there will not be another pandemic following this one, perhaps even more dangerous than coronavirus.

People should really understand that this is the moment when international cooperation among scientists in all countries is the only rational way to go.

Famine and the ‘Informal Economy’

Schlanger: You were talking about the economic aspects of it, and the injustice. There are new figures just out from the International Labor Organization (ILO), on the “informal” economy, the numbers of people who live a hand-to-mouth existence. This gets right to the heart of the danger, doesn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think that that is something that I would really urge all the people who are now upset about this or that aspect of what I said, to review. The ILO just published new figures that are extremely relevant in the context of COVID-19; that is, that of the 3.3 billion people in the global workforce, 60%, that is, 2 billion, are in the so-called “informal” economy, and of that 2 billion, 86% of them are in Africa. “Informal economy” means that people do not get regular wages, they just get paid for the day, they don’t pay into social insurance, they don’t have healthcare benefits, sick leave, or vacation time.

They just live from hand to mouth. International food production is collapsing because of the insane agriculture policies coming from such places as the EU Commission, but also in the United States, with the result that the entire food processing spectrum—from sowing to harvesting, to processing, to distributing to the markets—is all under the control of about five super-cartels; and their policy has been such that now you have a breakdown of agriculture.

So we are looking at the danger of a famine situation developing. If many of those now kept out of work by the coronavirus pandemic, cannot soon return to work, they will rapidly die of hunger.

cc/Aron Simeneh

“Listen to what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia is saying, or listen to what was discussed at the conference of the Non-Aligned Movement.” Here, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

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The pandemic is now arriving in Latin America, other Asian countries, South Africa, and Africa, where the conditions are already incredibly bad. Africa is already suffering under a locust plague, which could have been resolved a year ago, but nothing was done when there was still time to stop it. Now it’s become a huge problem in large parts of East Africa, on top of widespread HIV infections, tuberculosis, malnutrition. Listen to what the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia is saying, or listen to what was discussed at the conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, which just took place: These are real facts, and you have to consider them!

Schiller Institute April 25-26 Conference

The reality is that unless we change this present, unjust economic system, which denied de facto real economic development to the developing sector, there is no way to stop this coronavirus pandemic, and we will be looking at a catastrophe.

So, please, pay attention to what we discussed at our April 25-26 Schiller Institute conference, in which we brought together forces from all over the planet to form an alliance to fight for a new credit system, a new development perspective for the developing countries. That is the only possible way we can change the conditions of this situation. People who are not thinking this through, come up with the wrong conclusion, and I think that that is contributing to the irrationality which we see now in many places.

Schlanger: One of the most effective parts of the conference was the panel with American agricultural leaders, discussing the problems of American farmers, who are the most advanced in the world, what they’re facing. We see the same thing happening in Europe—the same policies of the cartels destroying farms and taking food from countries that are food insecure!

Helga, you mentioned the Non-Aligned Movement. They just had an Online Summit meeting May 4 where they discussed the kind of cooperation that’s necessary. What went on at this meeting, and what were the results?

Zepp-LaRouche: They concluded that the Non-Aligned Movement, which after all represents more than three-quarters of the human species, will have to take a larger role in defining what the new order following this pandemic must be. And that is a very good thing, because, we, that is, the LaRouche movement, have been working with elements of the Non-Aligned Movement since my late husband developed in 1975 the proposal for an International Development Bank to replace the IMF, and create exactly a credit mechanism for long-term investment in development projects. That was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intention: He wanted the Bretton Woods system to be exactly that, to overcome poverty. He said that poverty anywhere on the planet, threatens the security of humanity as a whole. He regarded the increase of the living standard of every single nation around the world as the precondition for a stable world order.

Now, as we discussed at our conference, and which was also discussed by Gerry Rose May 2 at the LaRouche PAC Town Hall meeting, that effort was unfortunately abandoned because of the untimely death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. The actual Bretton Woods was determined and influenced by UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the idea of providing credit for the development of the developing sector was never introduced. This is why we need a New Bretton Woods system, exactly because it takes up again large-scale, long-term credit for real development.

Should we get through this present crisis without further calamities such as war—which is also becoming a big factor because of insanity of the geopolitical faction—then the post-pandemic order must be one which gives justice to the developing countries. It’s exceptionally good that the Non-Aligned Movement is now coming into play in a big way, and is taking a leading role, and that is exactly where the idea of starting with a world health system really falls on the most fertile ground.

British Manipulating U.S.-China Relations

Schlanger: International cooperation has been at the center of everything that you’ve been talking about, since the beginning of the year, and is crucial in that it has been the relationship between the United States and China. While there was some improvement with the Phase 1 trade agreement at the end of last year, and a particularly good relationship between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping, anti-China attacks now dominate U.S. discussions of both the coronavirus, but also the general strategic situation.

Helga, this has come to a head in the last week or so. Where do things stand right now, between the United States and China?

CBP/Glenn Fawcett

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, leading China-basher.

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Zepp-LaRouche: It’s extremely dangerous. It started, literally, with the British secret services, MI5 and MI6. They started the line that China is responsible for the coronavirus. Then the Henry Jackson Society sitting in London made up a bill of damages China supposedly has to compensate the world for. This has now been picked up by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro, Senator Ted Cruz—even the previously sometimes rational Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson, who earlier was defending Trump on Russiagate, but is now one of the worst ones. And many, many other people in the United States are really on a rampage, blaming China, that China did not inform the world in time. Which is a lie.

You can go back and look at our previous webcasts. We followed this extremely closely. By December 27, somebody in Wuhan, China had discovered some inexplicable cases of pneumonia. One week later, on January 3, they informed the World Health Organization, the United States, and other countries, that they had a breakout of a new virus. And then they immediately gave the genome code to all scientific laboratories around the world. So there is an undeniable record that China did absolutely nothing wrong. There were maybe a couple of days of confusion about what this new virus was, but—we had a case here in Germany, where somebody came from Wuhan, got pneumonia, was hospitalized, treated, and only weeks afterwards was it found out that he actually had had coronavirus. So the German doctors didn’t know what this was.

So, this is getting ridiculous: If you have a new virus, before it is clearly identified, if there are a couple of days of confusion, it’s absolutely normal. All this accusation that China was “covering up” and that even the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory was the place where biological warfare was conducted, or experimented with, is all ridiculous!

The reality is: China was able to contain the virus by locking down people for almost two months—60 million people! If you remember, in the beginning, the Western media said, “Oh! This is a violation of human rights! Look at this dictatorial country!” So they were attacking China for taking radical health measures. And then, when they realized that China was not only successful in containing the virus, but were able to restart their economy, relatively quickly after two months, and the West was not able to do so, and you have still now, a complete lockdown and many firms going bankrupt—so to the extent that the Western societies recognized that they were not able to deal with it, the British faction—that is, the Pompeo and his like—started to blame China and say that China was responsible.

Now, this is extremely dangerous. Because if you say that a country which is also a nuclear power is responsible for conducting biological warfare, this is building up an enemy image for a war. Don’t kid yourself! Anybody who repeats that is contributing to what could potentially become World War III.

Now, we are still one step away from this getting completely out of control, because President Trump, while he blames China, has not yet gone all the way to say that this was an act of biological warfare. But it’s awfully close. Mnuchin has said that Trump is preparing to “punish” China. So this is absolute insanity: This is a geopolitical game and you can see the role of the British in the clearest possible fashion.

Reuters just put out a story saying an institute called CICIR, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, has produced an internal report for Xi Jinping discussing many options, including a “worst-case scenario” which would include a military confrontation between China and the United States. Of course, if you constantly attack a country, and then find that the country is discussing defense options, what would you expect? But then Reuters turns this around and says, “See, China is preparing this …”

CC/Fronteiras do Pensamento

Niall Ferguson’s anti-China lies have been debunked.

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This is typical of the way the British always provoke something, and then turn around and play all sides. Their aim is to prevent any possible cooperation between Trump, Xi Jinping, and Putin, the very cooperation we have been pushing for, for a very long time. If Trump were to fall into the trap, then the entire world would be in quite serious trouble.

Some Pushbacks

Schlanger: Well, there have been pushbacks coming from some interesting circles. Niall Ferguson, a leading apologist for the British Empire, wrote a column in the London Sunday Times on April 5th claiming that there was massive international travel out of Wuhan, even after China had, on January 23, shut down all travel, including air flights, in and out of Wuhan to the rest of China. This story was completely debunked by a Prof. Daniel Bell, on his website.

There was also a very strong op-ed in the Washington Post from the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai. What did he write?

UN/JC McIlwaine

Cui Tiankai, Vice Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China.

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Zepp-LaRouche: In his op-ed Cui Tiankai goes through the evolution of the last three-four months of this story, showing the record as it was, and in the end appeals for cooperation.

I want to say a little more about Prof. Daniel Bell. When Niall Ferguson put out this lie that China had sent these persons infected with the coronavirus to infect the world, this Prof. Daniel Bell started looking at the records for flights out of Wuhan after January 23. From those records, he discovered very quickly that all the international flights from Wuhan had been cancelled, and so none of the flights claimed by Ferguson actually took place! I think this is especially important and people should not fall for these lies, but really understand that it is really the rise of China that has all of these people now going for “regime change,” including Matt Pottinger!

Matthew Pottinger, the Deputy National Security Adviser, has come out attacking the Communist Party of China, saying we have to have “people to people” discussion, and calling for regime change in all but name. This dangerous nonsense has to be countered. People must not to fall into the geopolitical trap.

75th Anniversary of VE Day

This coming Saturday, May 9, is VE (Victory in Europe) day. We will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, and the victory over fascism. People should really have in mind that two world wars in the 20th century were caused by geopolitics. And if you go in this same geopolitical direction, now, we could have a Third World War, including with thermonuclear weapons. I don’t think anyone would want to be one of those left alive after such a war. Many who have studied thermonuclear war, say that the people dying in the first hours are the lucky ones, compared to those who make it for a few weeks longer.

I really want to shake up people to stop this China-bashing! And come to reason and work together as the only option.

Court Rules for German Sovereignty Over the ECB

Schlanger: We now come to our conclusion for today, with a very interesting story coming out of the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where there was a ruling against the bail-out policies of the European Central Bank. This could have very profound implications, not just for the European Union, but also by extension for the United States, where the Federal Reserve is going completely “ape,” with one of the most massive bailouts ever.

What did the court in Karlsruhe say, Helga, and why is this significant?

CC/Shaqspeare

The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, Germany.

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Zepp-LaRouche: This is really an unprecedented move, because the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe [Bundesverfassungsgericht] ruled that the European Central Bank, in the context of the Public Sector Purchase Program, that allows the ECB to buy bonds—is actually a bail-out program for the banks, and therefore ultra vires [Latin for “beyond the powers”—in this case, outside the ECB’s jurisdiction]; that the European court ruling in an earlier case that such purchases were legitimate, was outside the laws of even the Maastricht Treaty; and that it violates national sovereignty because neither the German government nor the parliament checked into the ECB buying bonds, and that since the ECB is not elected, and is not accountable to the citizens, its actions constitute a violation of Germany’s Basic Law.

There was complete hysteria over this ruling by the extreme liberals, including the former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who wanted to have the bail-out mechanism in place for Italy.

Of course, I think this ruling is exceptionally good! It’s only a step, but it’s the first time in a very long time that there has been a legitimate assertion of sovereignty by an important German institution, in this case, the German Constitutional Court. I think that this ruling may be a step in the reestablishment of sovereignty in the post-pandemic world, where the question of who creates credit will be decided: Will it be by some private interest, like the European Central Bank for the interest of the banks and the speculators? Or, will the power to create credit come back to the sovereign power of the nation-state, which is naturally what Hamiltonian economics would require?

The measures of the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche, such as Glass-Steagall style banking separation, and the establishment of a national bank, gives the power of credit generation back to the sovereign state, and creates the required platform for a New Bretton Woods system that would connect national banks of all participating sovereign countries to an international credit-generating system.

The court’s ruling is one step, and an important one in the right direction. It is a hopeful sign. This casino economy, in which the central banks just endlessly print money at the expense of the people has to stop. That’s actually what the Karlsruhe court ruling also says: that the bank bailouts lacked proportionality, that the ECB did not consider the side-effects on, for example, the people who have savings, the people who have real estate, the people who have investments, but especially the savers; and that therefore it’s in large part anti-constitutional.

This is an important development. Hopefully, it is the first step in the direction of reasserting full national sovereignty and redirecting the economy toward the common good, which has been abandoned for so very long.

We’re Dealing with the British Empire

I would say we are in a very fast-moving situation, and I really urge people not to go off on all kinds of strange theories, but to take the time to study what we have been publishing for the last 50 years! We have made many analyses of pandemics, of the injustice of the IMF and World Bank, of—yes, Bill Gates, we’ve published a lot of articles about him; but he’s not the only one. He’s part of a system. And if you reduce an extraordinarily complex world to one name, or a simple explanation, then you are not catching reality.

The problem is that we are dealing with the British Empire, an empire that has kept the population of the world deliberately in backwardness, and that system has to be replaced, it has to be eliminated. Oligarchism in all of its forms has to be finished and Bill Gates is just one element of that system that has to be replaced.

So, I urge people to go into our archives, look at the presentations of the April 25-26 Schiller Institute conference and then get into action to help us to bring through the solutions, because if you don’t discuss solutions, everything that you may have figured out is pretty useless. Now is the time to change the system, not only to “analyze” it.

Schlanger: Well, Helga, thank you for a very fascinating and hopeful overview of the situation. Again, on Sunday, May 9, people should go online to the Schiller Institute website, to watch our conference commemorating the 75th anniversary of the victory over fascism in Europe.

Helga, thank you very much, and we’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till next week.

II. Ending the Paradigm of Imperial Finance

The British Empire is the Only Enemy Of America, China and All of Humanity

by Robert Ingraham

CC/Policy Exchange

Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, promotes imperial “green financing.”

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May 8—From January through April of this year, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world, the overriding dynamic shaping events was one of cooperation and solidarity in the face of this threat. Nations and world leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder, offering aid and support in the battle to save lives. But now, even as the deaths continue to mount, we see a shift. A new dynamic, something entirely different, has been created and threatens to propel the world in a direction with unimaginably dangerous consequences. There is now a deliberate intervention to split nation from nation, to sow mistrust, to provoke confrontation, and most importantly, to destroy the relationship—so carefully built up by Donald Trump and Xi Jinping—between China and the United States.

It is a matter of the utmost urgency to recognize the danger of what is now transpiring on the world stage and to identify those powerful interests that are pushing this new agenda. To do this, however, and to stop the current devolution in affairs from worsening, the necessary change in thinking that is required will mandate that American citizens, as well as government leaders throughout the world, must now do what they have so far refused do,—think through what Lyndon LaRouche has been telling them for almost fifty years about the British Empire.

Throughout his mature years, Lyndon LaRouche fought to educate world leaders, as well as the American people, as to the nature of the “Oligarchical Principle” and its historic evil role in human society. Specifically, LaRouche directed teams of researchers to study and document both the historic and continuing role of the British Empire as the primary enemy of the American republic and of all sovereign nation states throughout the world. The historical, scientific and philosophical evidence compiled by those teams, and then analyzed and developed further by LaRouche himself, has been published and presented personally by LaRouche, over the span of decades, in many international settings. Yet many otherwise intelligent individuals of good will have failed or refused to think through what LaRouche has said on this.

We have now arrived at a point where this is no longer optional. On the one hand the global war against the COVID-19 pandemic offers the immediate potential for greater cooperation among nations, including efforts aimed at a rebuilding of the physical economy and a massive upgrading of the world’s health systems. This is clearly the tendency of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. On the other hand, we are now witnessing an escalating campaign to use this crisis to turn the United States against China and Russia, and to turn those—and other—nations against the United States, to forcibly plunge the world into a deep strategic crisis. U.S. relations with Russia and China are to be destroyed, and the economies of all three nations massively damaged.

This deepening crisis will also be used to escalate the attacks on Donald Trump in an attempt to deny him a second presidential term, as has been repeatedly demanded by the British ruling elite. At the same time, the British will step in with former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney’s proposals for imperial “green financial reform” and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s proposals for the weakening or elimination of national sovereignty. Under this scenario, the Belt and Road Initiative will be crippled, if not stopped altogether, Trump’s efforts to rebuild the productive economy of the United States will be stopped, and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of human beings, particularly in the poorest countries, will be consigned to die.

Yes, we must win the war against the invisible enemy of COVID-19, but it is vital that we also win the peace, that we emerge from this fight with prospects for a brighter future, not locked into a downward spiral of crisis, confrontation and decay. It is time—past time—for the false geopolitical narratives to be discarded and to finally heed LaRouche’s warnings.

Left: CC/www.vegeldaniel.com; right: swiss-image.ch/Monika Flückiger

Two voices attacking China and national sovereignty: Niall Ferguson (l.) and Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister.

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If you are an American,—recognize that it is the British Empire who is our enemy, not Russia or China. If you live outside the United States, in Africa, Asia or South America,—recognize that anti-Americanism is a carefully cultivated British creation, that it is only the British financial oligarchy which benefits from this divide-and-conquer tactic. Recognize where actual evil resides. COVID-19 is the enemy of all of humanity, but there is a greater enemy, and if you don’t comprehend the nature of it, you will be manipulated over and over again, a mere pawn who has been captured and now deployed to serve the master who oppresses you.

British Push U.S.-China Confrontation

The current onslaught of anti-China ranting has its origin in Britain. It was at a meeting of British leaders at the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (COBRA) in London, as reported in the London Daily Mail on April 6, 2020, that the accusation was made that the Chinese government was lying about the origin of COVID-19, that the virus actually emerged from a Chinese medical lab in Wuhan. According to the Daily Mail article, the COBRA meeting prepared a report detailing the accusations against China, and this report was then transmitted to a selection of governments and agencies world-wide.

Within twelve days of the appearance of that article, the story went viral worldwide and became the basis for increasingly rabid attacks against China. On April 15, the former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir John Sawers, publicly called on the United States to officially hold China, not the World Health Organization, responsible for the coronavirus pandemic. The next day, in an interview with Britain’s Sky News, Sawers continued to attack China, including saying that “We need to do more to protect Western technology from being bought up by Chinese companies.”

Earlier, on April 5, the pro-British Empire historian Niall Ferguson authored an article in the London Sunday Times accusing China of deliberately spreading the coronavirus to other nations by allowing international flights from Wuhan to continue after January 23, when all domestic flights in and out of Wuhan had been cancelled. This now discredited accusation was then used to blame China for the pandemic.

CC/Policy Exchange

Dominic Raab, UK Foreign Secretary: “No more business-as-usual with China.”

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On April 16, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, in a London press conference, stated that there could be no more “business as usual” with China when the coronavirus pandemic is over, saying “There absolutely needs to be a very, very deep dive after the event and review of the lessons, including of the outbreak of the virus. I don’t think we can flinch from that at all.”

On the same day, the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee warned that an orchestrated disinformation campaign by China is “costing British lives,” charging that China has sought to “obfuscate” what was really happening when the outbreak began.

The London Guardian also reported, on April 12, that the British spy agencies, MI5 and MI6, are both urging the British government to take a tough stance against China and impose “tighter controls over high-tech and other strategic industries.”

On April 17, a featured posting appeared on the website of London’s Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), the unofficial mouthpiece for the elite of the City of London establishment, titled “Avoiding a Virus-Induced Cold War with China.” Presented under a thin veneer of the need to “work things out” with China, is the demand to apply more diplomatic and economic pressure on China, with the argument that only substantial concessions from China will prevent a new cold war.

A Warning for Trump Supporters

In the material presented above, the role of MI6 is particularly revealing, since it has been irrefutably documented by EIR and others that MI6 and its former head Sir Richard Dearlove were deeply involved in the Russiagate conspiracy against Donald Trump, including the use of Christopher Steele in the initial phases of Robert Mueller’s investigation. It is proven that the entire “get Trump” operation was hatched in London and then conduited through corrupt elements of John Brennan’s CIA and other sections of the U.S. intelligence community into the Mueller operation.

It is also useful to remember that in December 2018 the Select Committee on International Relations of the UK House of Lords issued a report, “UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order,” in which the committee argued that it was a matter of vital strategic importance that Donald Trump be prevented from serving a second term as President of the United States.

Outright British or British-worshipping outfits such as the Henry Jackson Society and the Atlantic Council, both of which have deep ties to the intelligence community and elements within the military, are violently anti-Trump, and they helped lead the charge in attacking President Trump’s efforts to improve relations with Russia. Today their websites are dominated with anti-China vitriol. The London-based Henry Jackson Society has initiated the demand that China be forced to pay trillions of dollars in compensation to the rest of the world, and both of these organizations are arguing that the deepening crisis is a golden opportunity to reinvigorate the NATO alliance and deepen U.S.-British relations.

The domestic political problem inside the United States is that the majority of Trump supporters have never learned the most obvious lesson of the “get Trump” operation. The insistence, which prevailed for some time, on applying the term “deep state” to the attackers of Trump,—or the even more erroneous viewpoint that it is the “socialist Democrats” who initiated the “get Trump” vendetta—despite massive evidence of the British authorship, is indicative of this failure of judgment. The evidence is overwhelming that the British forces who have vilified Trump for almost four years and tried to remove him from office are the very same people now demanding a U.S.-China confrontation, in direct opposition to President Trump’s intentions.

The initial phase of the “get Trump” operation, i.e., Russiagate, was intended to destroy U.S.-Russian relations. This is now superseded by Chinagate, intended to destroy U.S.-China relations. At the same time, the failed impeachment effort is now replaced by a determination to defeat Trump, come the November elections. All of this is directed from London.

A Warning to Anti-Americans—

Understand Your True Enemy

The current intention of the British oligarchy is not only to turn the United States against Russia and China, but to also turn those two nations, as well as a host of others, against the United States, to manipulate all sides into irreversible geopolitical conflict. In so doing they rely on the ability to profile ideologies and weaknesses in various nations and cultures. In America, anti-Communism is easy fodder for British intentions, and this has been augmented by the “human rights” lobby which names China, Russia and a slew of other nations as “totalitarian states,” thus enemies of our “free democratic system.”

Elsewhere in the world, the decades-long effort to portray “Yankee Imperialism” as the primary force for evil in the world has been an easily accomplished British ruse, gobbled up by credulous leftists, among others. A failure of historical memory prevents many nations from recognizing that up until 1945 the United States was the premier anti-colonial nation in the world, and that it was only with Franklin Roosevelt’s death that the British were able to sabotage the original intention of the Bretton Woods System and to prevent the intended rapid economic development of the former European colonies.

Today, very few national leaders recognize the face of the true enemy. We are dealing with an imperial financial system, one which now dominates nation-states that are increasingly “sovereign” in name only. It is that system which is the 21st century British Empire. Its emergence began with the 1960s creation of the London-based speculative Eurodollar market, a development which led to the downfall of the Bretton Woods system in 1971-1972. Since that time, step-by-step, we have moved into a realm governed more and more by the principle of “financialization,” and the world center of this financialization is the City of London.

It is this imperial financial system which has looted nations, prevented development, killed millions, and pushed nations into war. This is the system which not only loots Africa and South America but also has imposed forced de-industrialization on the United States and Europe and prevented productive economic investment everywhere. All sovereign nations have been its victim.

How It Came About

The creation of the post-1971 “floating exchange-rate” financial system signaled the end of a paradigm based on physical economic development. A full chronology of the 40-plus years’ transformation that ensued would read like the script of a bad 1950s sci-fi monster film, and is beyond the scope of this article.

Of particular note, however, was the City of London “Big Bang” financial restructuring carried out in 1986 by then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This not only reestablished London as the financial capital of the world, but forced the entire world in the direction of financialization and deregulation, resulting in developments such as the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall bank separation in the United States, as well as many other catastrophic changes. Additionally, since 1971 a network of what have been dubbed “offshore financial centers” (OFCs) has been created. A 2010 report by the IMF lists 46 of these, but this is probably a serious undercount. The financial power of these completely unregulated OFCs, together with their sponsorship from London, has changed the entire face of world finance and placed sovereign government increasingly in a secondary role in regard to banking and monetary policy.

Today, enormous volumes of money flow through the OFCs, none of it under the scrutiny or supervision of sovereign government, and almost all of it used in pure financial speculation, as opposed to actually building something useful, like a hospital or a factory or a power plant. Of the ten largest OFCs, eight are located in British Crown Dependencies, British Overseas Territories or former British colonies, and their financial operations are tightly integrated with the City of London. Whole nations are now dominated by the London-OFC financial octopus, and the axioms of this speculative financial system are pervasive on every corner of the planet. The operations of the so-called “too-big-to-fail” major banks are also incestuously intertwined with this global speculative colossus.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the world, one thing that everyone has agreed upon is that “We were not ready for something like this.” The reason for this universal unpreparedness is to be found directly in the policies and practices of this post-1971 British imperial system. Today, hundreds of trillions of dollars flow through purely speculative investments, while infrastructure rots, manufacturing disappears and farms go bankrupt. In nation after nation, budget-cutting austerity has resulted in the under-funding of hospitals and health care. The people of China didn’t do this. Neither did the people of the United States. Look to London and the system it has imposed on the world since 1971.

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Prince Philip

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The British Spoor

Prince Philip has repeatedly—and publicly—indicated his desire to reduce the world population to fewer than one billion human beings. He has been flagrantly open on this matter. This intention, however, is no mere eruption of his own personal perversions. As Lyndon LaRouche has demonstrated, that intention encompasses a broader and endemic imperial outlook as concerns the human species. That oligarchical outlook is grounded in a deep hatred of humanity, a denial of human creativity, and a fanatical determination to prevent human scientific progress. Every waking day, anti-human filth drips from the lips of Prince Charles and Prince Philip, but their sentiments are echoed by many underlings in government, finance and academia worldwide.

Today, we are essentially dealing with a “global British party.” Since 1971, emanating from London, they have created a global oligarchical consensus, one which now subsumes both Wall Street and the European Union, as well as the majority of the so-called “supra-national” institutions, like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization.

This oligarchical consensus has an agenda: to limit—or to entirely eliminate—national sovereignty; to impose Malthusian population control; to prohibit industrial and scientific progress in the name of combating “man-made climate change”; and to implement further “financial reform” of the type which will enhance the already over-arching power of the City of London-based financial interests.

If one looks at the recent proposals of Mark Carney, Gordon Brown and others—such as Carney’s article in the April 16, 2020 issue of The Economist—it is crystal clear that the British interests they represent intend to use this crisis to advance precisely the agenda enumerated above. London’s intention is to emerge from this crisis with a more powerful global financial “green” dictatorship, accompanied by an increasing surrender of national sovereignty.

In thinking through the implications of this oligarchical agenda, it becomes possible to recognize the spoor, the malodorous scent of the true enemy of humanity.

A Common Mission

Ask yourself: Who does a China-U.S. friendship hurt? Who does a Russia-U.S. friendship hurt? Certainly not the people of any of these nations. Also, think of what friendship offers: a lessening of strategic and military tensions; increased cooperation in trade and manufacturing; increased cooperation in science and space exploration; and collaboration in rebuilding the world’s health system.

Swiss-image.ch/Monika Flückiger

Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia, is gleeful that COVID-19 might destroy U.S.-China economic cooperation.

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On the other hand, consider the comments to the South China Morning Post on April 15, 2020, by former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, now president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. Rudd was positively gleeful that the economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely, at least in his view, cripple the Belt-and-Road initiative, confront China with an existential financial crisis and completely destroy U.S.-China economic cooperation.

That is the British gameplan. If you fall for it, please don’t call yourself an American, or for that matter, don’t claim citizenship in any nation which stands to be destroyed if the world is propelled into the abyss.

The crucial axiomatic problem is that too few individuals understand the difference between the Oligarchical Outlook, as Lyndon LaRouche has scientifically defined it, and the pro-human Republicanism inherent in the General Welfare clause of the U.S. Constitution, as that republicanism flowed from the European Renaissance and also exists, in principle, in other cultures throughout the world.

LPAC-TV

To overcome this crisis, you must recognize the mind-set and intention of who it is that you are fighting. You have to defeat the actual foe, the British Empire. Shown: Lyndon LaRouche at a New Paradigm for Mankind webcast on May 14, 2014.

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It is critical to recognize that this fight is not fundamentally about money. Yes, the financial empire which squats in the City of London, with its tentacles spreading to the European Union, Wall Street and elsewhere is bankrupt and determined to save itself at the expense of the rest of the world,—but there is a deeper motivation to their actions. The neo-feudalist British oligarchical system hates humanity, hates the agapic creative potential within each human being, and is determined to halt all scientific and technological progress. And they hate national sovereignty and the potential of nation states to work together on behalf of the common good.

In this crisis the only solution is to extirpate this British disease and bring sovereign nations together in common cause to rebuild health systems, rebuild the physical economy and cooperate in science and space. Nations must reclaim their sovereignty over monetary and credit policy and begin to work together to build things that humanity needs.

But first, you must recognize the mind-set and intention of who it is that you are fighting. You have to fight the actual foe, not the one who has been chosen for you.

Buy LaRouche Collected Works, Vol. I

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German Supreme Court Affirms National Law Against EU Super-State

by Claudio Celani

May 10—In a historic ruling May 5, the German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe initiated the most serious crisis faced by the European Union (EU) since its inception, by affirming supremacy of national law above EU law. The Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht or BVerfG) has invalidated a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), by which the CJEU had rejected complaints raised against the European Central Bank (ECB), which was accused of violating its mandate. The German high court declared that the CJEU had acted ultra vires, i.e., beyond its powers. Furthermore, the German Court criticized the ECB’s policy on its merits, stating that the monetary policy of that supranational central bank has had more negative effects than positive results, thus violating the principle of “proportionality.”

The BVerfG issued a press release that included a three-month ultimatum to the ECB to argue its case, or Germany shall pull out of its programs. The ruling was a response to a complaint filed by former Christian Social Union vice-president Peter Gauweiler and a group of economists, including former Alternative für Deutschland members Bernd Lücke and Hans-Olaf Henkel.

The BVerfG, by its ruling, has struck a blow against two holy cows of the European Union system: the supremacy of so-called European Law over the national law of member states, and the so-called independence of central banks.

CC/Razvan Orendovici

Court of Justice of the European Union, in Kirchberg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.

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The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is a body that interprets EU law to make sure it is applied in the same way in all EU countries, and settles legal disputes between national governments and EU institutions. The so-called “integrationist” school of thought, whose aim is the establishment of a European Federal State, insists that member states cannot challenge CJEU rulings; but although this has been customary so far, the sources of EU Law are treaties among states (the Lisbon Treaty) and not a Constitutional Charter of a European State.

The BVerfG therefore recalled that “even under the Lisbon Treaty, the Member States remain the ‘Masters of the Treaties’ and the EU has not evolved into a federal state.... The European Union ... is based on the multi-level cooperation of sovereign states, constitutions, administrations and courts....”

The BVerfG is therefore entitled to judge that the CJEU, which had earlier rejected the same complaint, has failed “to give consideration to the importance and scope of the principle of proportionality.”

Getting Germany Out of Bank Bailouts

Going into the merit of the complaint, the Court found that the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP) of the European Central Bank, a very large quantitative easing (QE) scheme, has failed to achieve its target (raising inflation) but has produced a series of negative effects on the economy and on the population.

The PSPP was started in March 2015 and was terminated in December 2018. Since then, it has kept on refinancing those securities, which constitute a large chunk of the total €5.4 trillion assets listed in the ECB balance sheet as of May 1, 2020. As the BVerfG correctly points out, the PSPP has failed to achieve inflation targets but, by eliminating the “moral hazard” factor and compressing government bond yields and consequently the general cost of money, it has distorted the market and produced devastating effects on the banking sectors, on savers and investors. The Court reports:

The PSPP also affects the commercial banking sector by transferring large quantities of high-risk government bonds to the balance sheets of the Eurosystem, which significantly improves the economic situation of the relevant banks and increases their credit rating. The economic policy effects of the PSPP furthermore include its economic and social impact on virtually all citizens, who are at least indirectly affected, inter alia as shareholders, tenants, real estate owners, savers or insurance policy holders. For instance, there are considerable losses for private savings. Moreover, as the PSPP lowers general interest rates, it allows economically unviable companies to stay on the market.

According to the Court’s report, the ECB has furthermore put the European Monetary Union itself at risk:

[T]the longer the program continues and the more its total volume increases, the greater the risk that the Eurosystem becomes dependent on Member State politics as it can no longer simply terminate and undo the program without jeopardizing the stability of the monetary union.

The BVerfG then scolds German government institutions for having failed to see the problem:

The Court found that the Federal Government and the German Parliament, the Bundestag, violated the complainants’ rights under Art. 38(1) first sentence in conjunction with Art. 20(1) and (2), and Art. 79(3) of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) by failing to take steps challenging that the ECB, in its decisions on the adoption and implementation of the PSPP, neither assessed nor substantiated that the measures provided for in these decisions satisfy the principle of proportionality….

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European Central Bank headquarters, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

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In conclusion, it said, the ECB must present a complete and convincing justification of its program within three months, or the German central bank, the Bundesbank, will cease to participate to the PSPP program.

The Federal Government and the Bundestag are required to take steps seeking to ensure that the ECB conducts a proportionality assessment. This applies accordingly regarding the reinvestments under the PSPP that began on 1 January 2019 and the restart of the program as of 1 November 2019.

Following a transitional period of no more than three months, allowing for the necessary coordination with the Eurosystem, the Bundesbank may thus no longer participate in the implementation and execution of the ECB decisions at issue, unless the ECB Governing Council adopts a new decision that demonstrates in a comprehensible and substantiated manner that the monetary policy objectives pursued by the PSPP are not disproportionate to the economic and fiscal policy effects resulting from the program. On the same condition, the Bundesbank must ensure that the bonds already purchased and held in its portfolio are sold based on a possibly long-term strategy coordinated with the Eurosystem.

The House Always Wins

Let us explain something here.

ECB purchases of public sector assets (government bonds) is seen by many as an aid to some member states, as it supports the value of their sovereign debt and allows them to keep their borrowing costs low. However, the main purpose of such programs is not to bail out states, but to bail out banks. In fact, the ECB does not buy government bonds at emission, but on the so-called secondary market; i.e., from the banks. So, contrary to those who claim that the PSPP and other programs are a way of indirect financing of government debt, these programs are, in fact, a direct financing of megabanks. The banks buy government debt which they then give to the ECB, getting fresh money in exchange.

It does not end there.

Whereas banks are bailed out and get rid of assets—including junk corporate assets covered by other QE programs—governments become debtors to the ECB! In fact, the PSPP and similar programs work like this: The ECB orders the central bank of nation A to buy a certain amount of sovereign debt from banks of nation A, and writes the corresponding bill as a debt of that central bank to the ECB. In case a central bank of nation A buys sovereign bonds of nation B from banks of nation A, the central bank of nation A gets a credit at the ECB. This complex system is regulated through a clearing board called “Target B,” where central banks of the Eurosystem are listed as debtors or creditors.

The net effect of such a system is the same as a classic “debt monetization,” with the difference that while liquidity is injected in the system in the same way, the debt does not disappear. To extinguish the debt, national governments must borrow Euros, as if they borrowed a foreign currency!

Implications of the Ruling

The Karlsruhe Court ruling concerns only the PSPP, but it will have indirect effects on other ECB programs, including the newest ECB bailout operation, called PELTRO (Pandemic Emergency Longer-Term Refinancing Operation), which offers loans to banks at a record negative rate of –1% (minus one percent), laying the basis for future successful complaints against it.

At its virtual board meeting on April 30, the ECB also lowered the rate for the existing TLTRO III (Targeted Long-Term Refinancing Operations) by 50 points, to –1%, retroactive to 1 March 2020.

This comes on top of the easing of ratings for assets eligible for the Assets Purchase Program (APP) the week before, allowing the ECB to buy junk assets, and the beginning of the PEPP (Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program) at the end of March. The PEPP allows the ECB to buy up to €750 billion assets until the board “judges that the coronavirus crisis phase is over, but in any case until the end of this year.” Under this new program, the ECB has been purchasing banks’ assets to the tune of €7 billion daily during the week ending April 15, printing almost €5 million every minute! Not one cent of all these programs will go to the real economy, but will be used by banks to speculate in new bubbles as they have done throughout the past years.

With its ruling, the Karlsruhe Court has put a big wrench in this perverse game, doing what governments and parliaments should have done long ago.

CC/Dontworry

Udo Di Fabio, a former judge of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court.

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Reactions from Germany

Reactions in Germany, France, Italy and Poland show that the ground-breaking implications of the German Constitutional Court ruling on the ECB and the European Court of Justice have not gone unnoticed.

In Germany, Udo di Fabio, a former member of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, in an interview dated May 5 with Capital magazine, said:

The ECB judgment is making legal history. For the first time, the Federal Constitutional Court has determined that an act of Union law does not apply in Germany. The Federal Constitutional Court accuses the CJEU [European Court of Justice] of exceeding its mandate with its decision on the ECB’s bond purchase program at the end of 2018.

Whereas immediate serious consequences for the ECB are not to be expected, they may come into play in the future, Di Fabio said, hinting that for instance, the German Court ruling may compel the German government to go against the ECB’s bond purchasing policy and insist on its termination. The German Court ruling provides a model also for the other EU member countries, in that sense the “unity” of Europe that has so far been practiced, may suffer, he said, calling for a “clearly defined exit program” to end countries’ participation in the ECB purchasing approach. For the time being, the German Bundesbank is prevented from taking part in the ECB program, as a consequence of the court ruling, Di Fabio assessed.

Former German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), who is now President of the Bundestag, raised his concern for the future of the Euro. “It may well be that the existence of the Euro is now being called into question also by other EU member states, because indeed every national constitutional court could have its own ruling,” Schäuble told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland news chain. He assessed that it would not be easy to counter the Court’s ruling, because “independent institutions [like the ECB—ed.] that are not legitimized and controlled democratically, are obliged to stick to their mandate and must not extend it too much.”

Left: CC/Aron Urb; right: CC/Institut Jacques Delors

Left: Bruno Le Maire, France’s Minister of Economy and Finance; right: François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France.

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In France and Italy

In France, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that the ruling “does not help stability” and that “European Treaties guarantee the independence of the ECB.” Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau stated that “criticizing ECB independence and its concern for price stability, the two pillars of the central bank, seems to me not only unnecessary but also dangerous.”

And a panicked leading architect of the Eurosystem, Jacques Attali, tweeted: “The German constitutional court decision this morning is of vital importance for the future of the Euro, the European economy and jobs in Europe. May European leaders react quickly and in a unified way, starting today!”

CC/©EU 2017, European Parliament

Matteo Salvini, former Deputy Prime Minister of Italy.

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In Italy, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte criticized the ruling, whereas opposition leader Matteo Salvini, in a May 6 interview with Sky TG24, called for re-founding the EU on new principles and for regaining national monetary sovereignty:

Not accidentally, those who are reacting better in Europe and losing less jobs are countries that can issue more liquidity, more money into the economic system and into citizens’ pockets. It is clear that we must re-think the entire European system, including the right to issue currency, because jobs, welfare and healthcare come before European criteria and economic constraints…. We should also reflect on whether money is in the service of man or whether man is at the service of money. In recent years, European rules told us that man is at the service of money and money must be issued with a dropper. I believe that in an emergency such as this one, we should turn the issue around, not because of sovereignty but because of common sense. If it is necessary to print money so people can eat, we should print money.

But I repeat: If only 19 countries [of the Euro area] among the 193 UN member countries do not have their own currencies, while everybody else does, from Japan to Great Britain to the United States to Sweden, something must evidently be radically reviewed in the European context.

CC/Interpretante logico finale

Giulio Tremonti, former Italian Minister of Economy and Finance.

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And Italy’s former Economy Minister, Giulio Tremonti, in an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore, blasted the ECB policy and said that with the German court ruling, the ECB QE policy is dead:

[The German Court] ruling reflects the letter as well as the spirit of both the German Constitution and the German people. It’s merit is questionable and in that it says that the ECB does not illegally monetize debt, but it does illegitimatize economic policy. This, however, is meaningless. The essential point is that we had economic Picassos at the ECB and the U.S. Federal Reserve, who replaced solids with liquids, capital with debt, put rates below zero, pursued inflation as an (unreachable) friend, and replaced reality with magic tricks. And all this apparatus, which started as a necessary exception and became a continued praxis, goes against the German idea of good government.

Whereas we [Italians], have put the Union above Constitution, Germany has put its Constitution above the Union … For Italy, this means that the illusion of an unlimited access to ECB funds is dead. Notwithstanding the technical nature of the ruling, it is evident that nothing will be the way it was before, and nothing will be as it was announced and hoped for. Certainly, having the ECB announce that it would accept junk bonds as collateral, has not helped.

Tremonti suggested that Italy take its own course and use national savings for national credit.

MSC/Barth

Mateusz Morawiecki, Prime Minister of Poland.

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‘A Declaration of War’

In Poland, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote to the German Sunday newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, about the Karlsruhe court ruling:

[It is] one of the most important rulings in the history of the European Union. [For the first time it has been clearly stated that] treaties are made by member states and the latter decide what are the limits of competencies of the organs of the European Union.

The pro-EU faction has seen the Karlsruhe ruling as a declaration of war, in the words of one of its attorneys, Franz Mayer. Mayer has represented the Bundestag in all legal cases against EU institutions in the Federal Constitutional Court, and in a May 6 interview he said:

Even if the ruling is officially against the ECB, which is the object of the complaint, it really goes against the CJEU. It is an open declaration of war…. When the legal binding force [of the CJEU] is directly challenged, the whole project [the European Union—ed.] is immediately threatened.

The EU must answer; it cannot leave it at that. It would be opportune for the EU Commission to start a legal proceeding for violation of the treaties.

Mayer’s proposal was picked up by the head of the German Green Party faction in the European Parliament, Sven Giegold, and endorsed by EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen. In a written reply to Giegold, von der Leyen said that the Commission is analyzing the ruling and “on the basis of our assessment, we will explore further steps, including a proceeding for violation of the treaties.”

What Next?

European patriots should stand behind the Karlsruhe Court’s ruling and mobilize their nations to move in a similar direction. The European Union is a dinosaur doomed to extinction. Similar to the Soviet system, it is not reformable, as was proven once again by its lack of adequate response to the pandemic and economic crisis.

The EU left the member states to fend for themselves in this COVID-19 health emergency, and then reacted with a fake program “to respond to the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic.” The program is too late and too little. Whereas, in the short term, large amounts of liquidity (grants) are needed to support families and businesses during months-long lockdowns, and investment programs in the order of trillions of euros are needed for the recovery, the EU came out with loan programs that only minimally depart from its now standard fiscal austerity policies.

In endless meetings during the months of April and May, the EU Council and the Eurogroup of finance ministers approved a package composed of: (1) unemployment money from a program called SURE; (2) a scheme called “Recovery Fund” to finance reconstruction; and (3) the activation of a “Pandemic Crisis Support” facility at the European Stabilization Mechanism (ESM) for member states.

Whereas the SURE program is entirely insufficient to cover unemployment costs and is financed by member states anyway, and the Recovery Fund is up in the air and will probably never materialize, the issue on the EU agenda is the approval of a reformed European Stability Mechanism, a treaty that should have been signed last December 12-13, when the Italian government asked for a postponement. With the reform, the ESM is to become a “backstop” to the bank bailout fund called SRF (Single Resolution Fund), a fund established by the EU for resolving failing banks in the context of the Banking Union. As anyone can read on the European Commission website, “In the event that the SRF is depleted, the ESM can act as a backstop and lend the necessary funds to the SRF to finance a resolution.”

Since the SRF has only €33 billion (as of July 2019) and in the end is supposed to have only 1% of the amount of covered deposits of all credit institutions within the Banking Union by December 31, 2023, it is clear that in case of a bank crisis, the activation of the ESM is certain.

If activated as a backstop, the ESM can demand that member states pay up to a collective amount of €700 billion in one week to bail out a bank. And this, in total legal immunity and with secret proceedings.

In the event of a bank crisis, the ESM will first bail in, i.e., confiscate the funds of shareholders, investors, and depositors, and eventually bail the bank out with those funds. Facing a systemic crisis worse than 2008, which cost the Federal Reserve alone $28 trillion, €700 billion is a joke.

As to the “Pandemic Crisis Support” facility, member countries could draw up to 2% of their GDP and use it only for expenses directly or indirectly related to the health system. Such a program would bear 1-2% rates and would not have conditionalities, at least at the beginning. However, the draft proposal, which must still be approved by the EU Council of heads of state and government, has a clear reference to the ESM statutes, which tie any aid to “strict conditionalities.” Furthermore, the EU Commission has already stated that once the pandemic crisis is over, deficit rules will be enforced again, forcing debt-ridden states to accept painful austerity programs. All this explains why the EU must be replaced by a viable system in which nation-states regain monetary and budgetary sovereignty.

While support for exiting the euro monetary straitjacket grows stronger every day, what is lacking is a strategic plan of what to do with the physical economy. Former Italian government official Michele Geraci underscored that question of the need for a real physical-economic program on April 25 at the international Schiller Institute conference.

AN OPEN LETTER

Economic Recovery via Infrastructure Investment:

Thinking It Through

by James Moore

James Moore and his wife Pam.

James (“Jim”) Moore is a commercial fisherman in Alaska. He and his wife Pam have three grown children, who learned the art of hard work while growing up fishing with family in some of the most remote and beautiful places on Earth. Jim serves on boards of directors of several industry-related organizations. He describes himself as a life-long learner and has acquired a passionate interest in history and science. Jim loves building, inventing, music (violin, viola, cello), and painting. As a representative of his fishing industry he is currently collaborating with scientists from different research agencies and the University of Alaska SeaGrant program to develop a logbook program. It will collect important oceanographic data to further our understanding of changing ocean conditions.

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I wholeheartedly support the President’s proposal for a major infrastructure upgrade!

It is absolutely essential that we invest in a great infrastructure upgrade, the actual physical economy, rather than in another bailout of the bankrupt international financial system. Back-filling their gambling losses, and enabling the continuance of the so-called “too big to fail” private banking cartels is not in the national interest. We should have learned that by now.

A “casino economy,” based on speculation, has replaced our former production-based economy. Since 1971, with the elimination of fixed exchange-rates between nations, and especially since the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, huge amounts of capital have been diverted into short-term risky investments (which promised rapid turnover and high rates of return—gambling), rather than placed into maintaining and upgrading infrastructure, including health care infrastructure. The time is now to address this properly.

Protect the population by placing the bankrupt system into bankruptcy reorganization through a 21st Century Glass-Steagall—a promise made to the nation in the 2016 election, as I recall.

Fear and uncertainty ride in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. A great national infrastructure upgrade, to raise the economic platform of the economy, would inspire hope and national pride while providing meaningful productive employment for millions.

Such a project could move forward only through a rebirth of the American System of Political Economy which has been instrumental in enabling great periods of dynamic growth in our nation’s history. President Trump made clear reference to this during his 2016 campaign; he must understand its relevance right now. Actualize our national potential by {directing} federal credit through a National Bank to provide low interest loans for this purpose. (This makes more sense than giving it to private investors to buy up junk bonds and devalued stocks in their own companies to justify huge bonuses and to play the stock markets.)

The American System of Physical Economy

The American System was truly revolutionary. Ours is not the so-called “free trade” money-based system that we have come to identify with over the past 75 years. It’s not Adam Smith, or Milton Friedman, or J.M. Keynes. They represent neo-liberalism, the British System. We fought the American Revolution to free ourselves from that system. The antithesis, the American System developed by Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, and enabled through the U.S. Constitution, allowed the U.S. to prevail in the economic warfare waged against our new republic by the money power of the British Empire.

Under the brilliant direction of Hamilton, Revolutionary War debt held by the states was nationalized and used to capitalize a National Bank, which in turn directed federal {credit in the form of low-interest loans} back to the states to build infrastructure and industry, the physical economy. That investment, along with protective tariffs, increased our nation’s productive capability, so that the debt was rapidly retired. Low-interest federal credit was directed by Congress through a National Bank toward projects that would benefit the whole nation (promote the general welfare).

Our economy has been re-captured by the London-Wall Street based British System. This has happened several times in our nation’s brief history. Consider the dynamic effects of the American System as it was restored under the guidance of these great presidents: John Quincy Adams—national credit through the Second National Bank (Erie Canal); Abraham Lincoln—national credit via Lincoln Greenbacks (enabling construction of the Transcontinental Railroad while fighting a proxy war with the British-supported Confederacy); Franklin D. Roosevelt—national credit through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (TVA, Rural Electrification, Four Corners, the arsenal of democracy—all out of the ashes of the Great Depression). We stand a good chance of recovering our national identity and mission again today under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump. An opportunity to “Make America Great Again,” indeed.

The important questions in initiating great national projects are (1) Will this benefit the nation (promote the general welfare); (2) How will it be financed and will the investment pay for itself; and (3) Are there obstacles other than funding that will have to be overcome?

Upgrade Infrastructure with Credit from a National Bank

Upgrading critical infrastructure—such as bridges and highways, railroads and water systems, and the power grid, including nuclear and hydro (please, no unreliable wind and solar!)—will elevate the economic “platform” of the nation and provide millions of people with meaningful productive jobs. Definitely, the entire nation benefits from this. We have identified the American System of directed credit through National Banking as the instrument of financing. A Third National Bank could be capitalized through bonds backed by Treasury. Consider, also, that China has indicated willingness to invest its holdings of U.S. Treasury Notes in such an infrastructure bank. It should be noted also that China has elevated 850 million of its people out of poverty over the past 30 years by means of something very much akin to the American System.

As we rebuild and upgrade our infrastructure, there will be resistance. Those who stand the most to lose will become increasingly desperate and dangerous.

The global banking cartels—that have been allowed to divert money from the physical economy into their investment scams for decades—are faced with the “everything bubble,” the mother of all debt bubbles, which has been collapsing since last fall. On September 17, the Federal Reserve Bank began a massive infusion of liquidity through overnight repurchasing agreements. That “temporary” measure has increased in size exponentially ever since, and the loan agreements are being rolled over—an inflationary bailout on steroids! To buy more time for this bankrupt system, the coronavirus was blamed for the economic collapse and more capital was infused into these banks through the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act). Unbelievably, the Federal Reserve has now become “lender of last resort” to the failed European central banks through an expanded repo.

The corrupt globalist cartels that have gotten fat through endless wars and drug money laundering, are getting another bailout, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Their global system is hopelessly bankrupt (two quadrillion dollars in derivatives) and cannot be saved, but they have been laying the groundwork for the next scam—the green economy! The private banking elite of the western world is intending to decide who gets a loan and who doesn’t, based on the whether the prospective borrower passes the low-carbon-footprint test. This is simply a supranational fascist takeover. What stands in the way? Donald J. Trump and the U.S. Constitution!

The war hawks are ranting and the media propaganda machine has been cranked up in a renewed effort to create enemies abroad, especially China. This is the Thucydides Trap. We are being baited into a war with the second greatest economic power on the planet, an uncalculable catastrophe for humanity and collapse of civilization. President Trump’s instincts are correct. Join with other powerful sovereign nations—China and Russia and India—to defeat mankind’s common enemies: war and famine and disease. (Those common enemies of mankind were identified as friends by the Malthusian, Bertrand Russell!)

I believe that there is a beautiful future to be built, not just for our nation, but for all humankind. Granted, that optimistic outlook is uncommon today. We have been programmed to believe that humans are the virus plaguing Planet Earth. That outlook is toxic thinking and prevents the necessary and appropriate response to the challenges we face. I confess that my optimism probably springs from a vision of the potential for humanity, and that is encouraging! I have been inspired in this outlook by the scientific work of Lyndon LaRouche on physical economy.

My hope is that these ideas will inspire courage and conviction to act on behalf of our country. They are the product of decades of personal study and reflection and not of media propaganda, or the parroting of some group-think ideology or party line. To the degree they reflect truth they are powerful, and useful, and speak for themselves.

III. Creativity & Scientific Frontiers

Schiller Institute Conference on the Internet

April 25-26, 2020

Mankind’s Existence Now Depends on the Establishment of a New Paradigm!

PANEL 2

For a Better Understanding of How Our Universe Functions

We present here a report on the second panel of the April 25-26 Schiller Institute conference. The audience was presented with a process of deliberation among scientists, astronauts, doctors and policy makers speaking about their explorations of humanity’s relationship to the universe—a universe guided by creative and moral principles. Underlying all of the contributions by the various participants, was a passionate commitment to the future development of humanity. Coming from all corners of this Earth, each participant expressed the importance of international collaboration for solving the immense problems facing humanity today. A video of the Panel is available here.

Taking place as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the world’s population, the panel’s discussion—on the importance of scientific discovery and international cooperation in human advancement—could not have been timelier, nor more urgent.

The opening tone was set with an excerpt from a speech delivered by Lyndon LaRouche to a 2000 Schiller Institute conference in which he spoke about his proposal, which in March 1983 became President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), that was designed to be a science driver program akin to President Kennedy’s Apollo Program. LaRouche intended that the collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union around the SDI would spearhead an international effort to develop industrial and technological progress throughout Asia, Africa and Ibero-America. LaRouche stated:

... [A]nd if we focused upon developing countries—South America, Africa, Asia—to do what Roosevelt proposed be done for these countries, had he not died, then the benefit of such a program would put—two things: would put the two economies back on the plus side, together with Europe; and it would also be a way of creating a global agenda which would solve the conflict problem. Now, that was the SDI, in original form….

Leading off the panel was a joint presentation, “In Defense of the Human Species,” by associates from the LaRouche PAC Science Research Team—Jason Ross, Benjamin Deniston and Megan Beets.

Other participants included Jean-Pierre Luminet, PhD, astrophysicist and emeritus researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research, who spoke on “The Role of ‘Free Invention’ in Creative Discovery”; Michel Tognini, an Astronaut and founding member of the Association of Space Explorers, speaking on “Friendship Between Astronauts: An Exemplary Precedent for International Cooperation”; Walt Cunningham, Apollo Astronaut, on “Apollo 7: An Astronaut’s Reflections”; Marie Korsaga, PhD, astrophysicist from Burkina Faso, on “The Necessity of Science Education for African Youth”; Sen. Joe Pennacchio, New Jersey State Senator, on “Making Nuclear Fusion a Reality”; William Happer, PhD, and Professor Emeritus of Physics, Princeton University, on “The Inside Story of Contemporary Science”; Dr. Kildare Clarke, a New York physician who discussed the implications of the take-down of the public health system in the United States; and Guangxi Li, MD, PhD, Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, on “Chinese Medicine Treatment of COVID-19.”

All photos: Schiller Institute

Clockwise, from upper left: Jason Ross, Benjamin Deniston, Megan Beets, Jean-Pierre Luminet

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LaRouche’s Science Team:

How Our Universe Functions

Jason Ross, co-author on the Schiller Institute’s recent draft program addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, “LaRouche’s ‘Apollo Mission’ to Defeat the Global Pandemic: Build a World Health System Now!” opened the panel by presenting the paradox of a human species which has accomplished stunning creative breakthroughs in the Apollo Program, atomic science, and quantum physics, now being held hostage to the global COVID-19 pandemic. How did this happen?

Benjamin Deniston then raised the question of additional threats to the human species. He referenced the 2011 offer by the Russian government for the Strategic Defense of the Earth (SDE), which was an obvious reference to LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDE). The Russian proposal for the SDE would include asteroid defense and research into various aspects of other immediate considerations for life in our solar system like “space weather,” such as galactic influences and the solar system’s electromagnetic activity, and how that may affect geological events and life on this planet. Despite the urgency of international collaboration on the SDE, this proposal has yet to be taken up.

Picking up where Deniston left off, Megan Beets went on to describe the issue of space weather, saying:

In reality, there is nothing local or even merely planetary about the weather. Our Earth and the other planets in the solar system swim in an environment created by the Sun. One feature of that environment is the solar wind, which is a constant flux of charged particles streaming out from the Sun, which creates the interplanetary magnetic field, and modulates Earth’s magnetic field. Why is this important? Because the Sun is a dynamic body; it is changing! And we are mere babies in our understanding of it.

Beets also addressed the issue of viruses and bacteria and that perhaps these may have cyclical issues as well:

Not only do pandemics tend to occur more frequently during periods of solar maximum, but they tend to cluster around periods when solar maxima are more intense. We also have the anomalous years of pandemic during solar minimum. Studies were done which showed a very interesting fact, which is that these years were also years during which the Earth received a higher influx of cosmic radiation from galactic sources, due to—among other causes—bright supernovae. But a question mark left by these researchers was, what is the mechanism? This is unanswered. It is known that viruses can be activated and deactivated by certain frequencies of light. It’s also been observed in many astronauts on the International Space Station, that virus infections that were latent would suddenly become active again. While all of this research is still quite preliminary, and requires further investigation, it is undeniable that the anomalies that I’ve hinted at here point to a higher causality.

A Discussion of Theoretical Aspects of the Universe

Jean-Pierre Luminet, PhD, astrophysicist, emeritus researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, presented his views on the history of the development of scientific thought, and his approach to creative thought. Luminet said that his work in modern theoretical physics, “which seeks to unify the laws of gravitation and quantum mechanics,” was ultimately based on a philosophical and poetic approach:

Deciphering the fragments of reality under the foam of the stars is to detach oneself from the limits of the visible, to free ourselves from customary deceptive representations, without ever forgetting that the fertility of the scientific approach is watered from underground by other disciplines of the human spirit such as art, poetry, music, and philosophy.

All photos: Schiller Institute

Clockwise, from upper left: William Happer, Marie Korsaga, Walt Cunningham, Michel Tognini.

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Will Happer, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University, who also spent time on President Trump’s National Security Council, presented his views on the process of scientific discovery, which he provocatively described as often occurring by accident. Happer referred to Enrico Fermi’s “discovery” of transuranic elements as the product of his bombarding of uranium and thorium with neutrons. For this “discovery,” he won the Nobel Prize. What he had actually done, was to achieve nuclear fission, as Lise Meitner and her team in Berlin showed a few years later. (The byproducts of the fission were elements that were already known.) Nuclear fission, Happer pointed out, was thus an accidental discovery.

Marie Korsaga, PhD, an astrophysicist originally from Burkina Faso, spoke next. Korsaga said that the purpose of her research “is to study how dark matter is distributed inside galaxies in order to better understand the formation and evolution of our universe, and therefore, the origin of life on Earth.” She went on to say that beyond her research, she is interested in the development of scientific institutions in Africa, and education more broadly. She referred to the fact that “according to the African Union, Africa has the youngest population in the world, with more than 40 percent of its people under the age of 15.” Korsaga said that this was “a huge advantage for the nations of Africa if there is education and economic development for these young people”

Science in Action

It was left to two astronauts, Michel Tognini and Walt Cunningham, to “bring to life” the importance of the science driver principle, through describing their experiences in actually participating in the missions expressed by that principle.

Walt Cunningham was an astronaut on the Apollo VII mission, and is a recipient of NASA’s highest award, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. In response to a question about his reflections on John F. Kennedy’s Rice University speech in 1962, where Kennedy laid out the ambitious mission to make it to the Moon in the next decade, Cunningham said that it was only as he got older that he was able to put it into perspective. At the time, he “thought it was a good speech,” but it was much more than that. “Now, it’s something that goes down in history, and I think it’s because at the time, our minds were not working quite the same way. You’ve got to let your mind mature in order to get the perspective on what’s going on historically.”

Cunningham then made the comparison to the first voyages to sail around the world:

They moved our society forward.... That was 500 years ago. The society in the world benefits from [you] being willing to stick your neck out, but not doing it wildly. You’ve got to be committed to what you’re trying to accomplish. I’m sure I feel I can speak a lot more about that now than I ever did at the time, because you’ve got to get wise.

French Astronaut Michel Tognini focused on the importance of space exploration as a domain of international collaboration. Tognini is a test pilot, engineer, and former astronaut at the National Center for Space Studies (CNES) in France. He has logged a total of 19 days in space aboard the Soyuz, the MIR station, the Space Shuttle Columbia and the International Space Station. He stated:

What did I learn from this cooperation with Russia and with NASA? I learned humility. And I think humility is really important for an astronaut, and also for us to truly understand that life itself is very fragile. As someone said before, we could be hit by a comet or an asteroid any time, and we need to have a plan to fight against an asteroid or a comet. And the only way to fight this danger is to work together. In the Association of Space Explorers, where we have several different countries joined together and different astronauts from these countries, we have a plan to study every year, the way to deflect an asteroid from Earth … And the second question is how to go to the Moon and Mars. I strongly believe that slowly, we need to cooperate together, even with China and India, because they have very good potential for a program in space. And the example of the International Space Station is an example that could be applied to the whole world.

All photos: Schiller Institute

Left to right: Guangxi Li, MD; Kildare Clarke, MD; Joe Pennacchio

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Science in Medicine

This section of the panel included Guangxi Li, from the Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, and Dr. Kildare Clarke, a physician from New York who shared his insights into the implications of the takedown of the public health system in the United States. Dr. Clarke was also involved in the LaRouche-led fight in the 1990s to save D.C. General Hospital from closure. He stated:

The powers-that-be think it is best for them to look at healthcare as a numbers game, like playing with widgets on Wall Street. But people’s lives are not widgets; they’re human beings. Without them, there is no world. And it is incumbent upon us, as healthcare providers to make that message go through loud and clear! We might have to give up a lot! We might be fired from our jobs, we might be thrown in prison! But it’s a cause which is so indelible in my mind, that we must do it, and do it for the good of society. It’s not a personal thing, it’s for the good of society.

Dialogue on Youth and Education

In a dialogue that developed later in the panel, Will Happer took up the importance of education for youth, in a broader dialogue on policy.

New Jersey State Senator Joe Pennacchio, who has put forward legislation for the development of fusion, also weighed in concerning the importance of providing visionary policy for the future of young people. In response to a question about high school students who were present for the public hearing on his legislation promoting fusion, and the importance of this work for their future, Pennacchio responded:

It’s as much for their future as it is for mine. I’m 65 years old: My future is not measured in too many decades, if God is willing. But their future is measured in an awful lot more decades than I am. So again, imagine a clean, safe, renewable energy source, where we don’t have to go to war with each other to get it, and we don’t have to worry about breathing in some of the gases which may be harmful in the production of those energies.

Happer also weighed in, in the discussion of federal policy, discussing his time on the Trump Administration’s National Security Council. He had been part of a team investigating the arguments on the validity of anthropogenic climate change. The team was ultimately shuttered due to pressure exerted by the climate change lobby. Happer went on to describe how “climate change” is impervious to criticism:

You cannot criticize it. It’s like denying some religious belief. In fact, it’s interesting: The language that they use is all religious. “You’re denying climate.…” Well, what does “denying” mean? Why are you using that word in connection with a scientific field? So, it has all the trappings of a religious cult, and that’s what it has become for many people. There are exceptions; there are honest climate scientists, but they’re deluded by many cultists.

Dialogue with Prof. William Happer and Dr. Marie Korsaga

April 25—This is an edited excerpt from the discussion that followed Panel 2, “For a Better Understanding of How Our Universe Functions,” of the Schiller Institute’s April 25-26 conference, moderated by Jason Ross. Subheads have been added.

Dr. Happer served as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science from 1991 to 1993, and was a science advisor to President Donald Trump on climate policy as a member of the National Security Council from the fall of 2018 to September 2019. He is currently Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University.

Dr. Korsaga, from Burkina Faso, became West Africa’s first female astrophysicist, taking her PhD at the University of Cape Town in South Africa with a dissertation on “The distribution of dark and visible matter in spiral and irregular galaxies.”

Jason Ross: Several questions came in for you, Dr. Happer, based on your speech. I’ll combine a couple of them.

One of the things that you brought up in your talk was the role of accidents in making discoveries. Even if you weren’t really intending to make a discovery, they sort of come up. You had said at the end of your talk that it might be possible, one day, to be able to rapidly react to a virus that arises, and be able to create antibodies or antidotes quickly, but that making that breakthrough might require a fortunate accident.

Could you say more about the role of accidents in scientific discovery? And also the apparent contrast between the ability to have a science-driver program, as when Kennedy said “We are going to the Moon,”— how do you see the relationship between having a crash program to really try and make a scientific discovery, versus the serendipitous nature that some of them take?

Happer: Well, frankly, you can have focused research programs and they can do some good. But the really big breakthroughs historically have usually been some accident or another. For example, the discovery of X-rays was a complete accident: [Wilhelm] Röntgen was perceptive enough to recognize something strange was happening in his laboratory, and he worked hard and he turned it into modern X-ray technology.

It was an accident that fission was discovered. Nobody predicted fission: It was thanks to Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn that when they tried to repeat Enrico Fermi’s experiments on transuranics. They did some chemistry but they did not find what they thought should be there. They thought there should be neptunium and plutonium transuranics; that’s what Fermi got the Nobel Prize for. But in fact, that wasn’t what he was doing. He was splitting the nucleus, and Meitner and Hahn were smart enough to demonstrate that. The radioactivity was really associated with barium, not with plutonium.

There are many cases like that, where the initial breakthrough is just completely unexpected.

The other extreme of that is you take something like the semiconductor industry, you know, there has been systematic investment in better and better equipment, higher resolution, photolithography, better photoresists, better control of the equipment—that also works. But it’s a different type of scientific progress than the type that I think will be necessary for example to solve the controlled fusion problem. I think that will be solved by an accident.

Another example of that is not practical, but I think you know that the low-hanging fruit in physics and cosmology today is to discover the nature of dark matter, what makes galaxies rotate a lot faster than they really should be rotating. Some people are desperately trying to figure out what it could be, trying to build detectors that would detect weakly interacting particles, heretofore unimagined—this, again, I think will be a problem that will be solved by a lucky accident and some perceptive person who can tell the difference between an important accident and just the usual mistakes that are made in experiments. I hope that’s enough.

Science is Subjective

Benjamin Deniston: Glad to speak to you, Dr. Happer. You’ve discussed and other people have discussed the benefits of higher levels of CO_2 in the atmosphere, and I’ve found that to be some fascinating areas of science to look at, just how our biosphere responds to some of these things. And when I’ve discussed that with other people, what I find is that there seems to be more of a gut reaction, even from scientists, about that, that it doesn’t seem to fit a certain narrative; and oftentimes, in the most fundamental sense there tends to be a narrative that human activity is inherently problematic for the planet and human activity inherently causes problems and catastrophes and any idea that it could be good just doesn’t fit this perspective.

And people tend to think about science as “objective,” “fact based,” kind of like a cold just-follow-the-facts process, when in reality it seems like we have these narratives and dogmas that do play a substantial role in affecting where science goes and doesn’t go, and what areas of science—which could be incredibly beneficial and interesting, including various factors of natural causes of climate change—are actually affected by this. So, I’d definitely appreciate any thoughts you have on the reality of this social aspect and of these narratives in science, the effect they have, and where we can go to get past some of that.

Happer: I think science has always been much more subjective than scientists would like you to think. Ever since Galileo, and long before, people have been disputing the nature of this or that aspect of science. The idea that scientists are somehow different from other human beings who have prejudices and who have infatuations or are mistaken frequently—that’s just not true. Scientists have all those faults, and that’s been demonstrated generation after generation.

An example is continental drift: You might remember that this was originally proposed [in 1912] by a very good, very bright German, Alfred Wegener. He was an excellent scientist, but because he was not trained in geology, he was just dismissed out of hand, especially by American geologists. I remember, even when I was a graduate student in the early ’60s, he was still being dismissed. But he was completely right. And now, nobody would even think to question continental drift, it’s a real fact. But it wasn’t easy for the first proposers and first disciples to make headway: You didn’t get tenure in the 1950s, for example, if you believed in continental drift.

Coming back to your question: People don’t like to admit that CO_2 is a benefit to the world. It actually, clearly is. The geological history is completely clear, and I think the most compelling thing is that if you go to greenhouse operators, they routinely double, triple, quadruple the amount of CO_2 in their greenhouses, not because they’re involved in the debate over climate, but because they want to make money! And if you grow cucumbers or if you grow decorative flowers in a greenhouse with more CO_2, you get a better product, and you get a better price. You have to pay for the CO_2—it’s not cheap—but it’s a good investment.

And so, here we are, getting this free CO_2 that’s enriching the entire planet, and we should be very grateful for that. But of course, it doesn’t fit the narrative. What can I say? It’s the human condition.

Pursuing Science in Africa and Among All Youth

Ross: A question from New York for Dr. Korsaga: “The great historian and physicist, Cheikh Anta Diop, wrote in his 1978 short book on Africa that advanced technologies such as thermonuclear fusion must be pursued in African nations, and that astronomical observatories and elements of space exploration are needed to be put on line as rapidly as possible, to allow African states to enter the 21st century on the same footing as other parts of the world.

This did not occur. In what way do you think we must act to encourage, in particular young people—the people that Professor Happer and others expect to make the new breakthroughs—despite the many hardships that may exist?”

Korsaga: Thank you for this question. It’s an interesting one. What I can say is, we have to encourage them even as we need to create more opportunities. We also need to let them know the importance of these sciences, these scientific programs for Africa, for the development of Africa, and the impact of these in Africa.

And what I also want to add, is when you study space science, astronomy and others, even if it does not have the same kind of immediate impact as different kinds of studies, there is, for example, when a student enters an astronomy program, that student will have to develop competence in engineering, mathematics, and physics. All those skills are useful for the development for the country in many sectors. So I think we need to give all this information to young people in Africa, to let them know the importance and the positive impact of these scientific studies.

The Galactic Modulation of Earth’s Weather

Megan Beets: Hi, Dr. Happer! Earlier in the presentation that Jason, Ben and I gave, we discussed some of the common threats to the planet, including space weather events like solar coronal mass ejections, asteroid strikes and so forth. As part of my presentation, I raised the fact that our planet is in a galactic system.

I specifically wanted to ask you about Earth’s weather system. Nir Shaviv, Henrik Svensmark, and others have demonstrated that cycles of our Solar System’s motion through the galaxy and galactic cosmic rays in the atmosphere play a big role in modulating our weather. Could you say a little bit more about that? And also, do you have any thoughts on why that outlook is so rejected and resisted today?

Happer: I’m a big admirer of Henrik Svensmark and Nir Shaviv. They’ve done absolutely very beautiful work, very interesting work. They’re still working hard on actual experiments to see how cloud nuclei form in the atmosphere in response to cosmic rays. So they don’t just make theories, they actually do measurements. As they have pointed out, the Earth and the Solar System drift in and out of the spiral arms of our galaxy and this modulates cosmic ray backgrounds on a long-term basis over maybe tens of millions of years. And there’s some evidence that that has played a role in the climate of the Earth, if you take these very long periods into account.

If you don’t know about their work, I do recommend it to you. Nir Shaviv in particular has written some very accessible summaries of the ideas. It’s good physics, good astronomy—and, they may be right! I don’t know whether they’re right or not, but it looks better than many of the establishment theories of what is controlling climate, which are clearly not working very well.

We Learn from International Cooperation

Ross: Dr. Happer, the next question that came in for you is a combined topic about national science objectives: This is sort of three questions put together. One is that Trump has called for international collaboration in space exploration as the U.S. plans to return to the Moon by 2024. U.S.-Russian cooperation in space science has had a long and productive history. Recently, Putin has outlined a bold plan for multi-nation work to finally realize thermonuclear fusion as an inexhaustible energy source, says the questioner, and they’d like to know what the pathway is to realize those potentials?

I’ll combine that with another question, about the social role of science and of scientists.

Another question was about Trump’s approach to science and how it may be related to the work of, I believe his paternal uncle, Prof. John G. Trump, who was at MIT doing work during World War II. If you have any thoughts—those are sort of two different questions there—about the cultural aspect of a commitment to science, and how we could learn from working with others internationally?

Happer: I think international collaboration, to the extent that it provides career paths for young people, is very good. For example, the Russians did us in the United States a big favor by launching Sputnik, because science was languishing until that point, and it woke many people in the U.S. up to realize that there are a lot of smart people all over the world, not just in the United States, not just in Europe. There were smart people in Russia and China, even Africa. So, it was time for us to pull up our bootstraps and start moving again.

I think programs like this that inspire young people are important, programs that give them a career path forward, something they can do that gives them some self-respect. I’m convinced that we will solve a number of problems because of the young people of the future having smart ideas, good ideas, and these accidents that I mentioned before. They don’t have to come just to young people, but they often do. So having some kind of a goal, even if you don’t reach the goal, often it doesn’t matter, because you’ve discovered something else that you didn’t expect to discover. And perhaps the type of joint efforts on controlled fusion or on space exploration with other countries will help us to do that. I’m all in favor of that.

IN MEMORIAM

James Beggs, 1926-2020:

A Leader in Space Exploration

by Marsha Freeman

NASA

James Beggs

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May 10—James Beggs was appointed NASA’s sixth Administrator by President Ronald Reagan and assumed the position in July 1981. His major responsibility was to oversee the new Space Shuttle system. During his tenure as Administrator, from 1981 to 1985, he oversaw 22 Space Shuttle missions. But his concern was to point the space agency toward the future. Following Wernher von Braun’s program, he said, the “next logical step,” after creating the transportation infrastructure of the Space Shuttle, was a permanently manned space station. From there we would go back to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond.

James Beggs’ tenure at NASA was abruptly interrupted when, on December 2, 1985, the Department of Justice handed down indictments of Beggs and three former colleagues, for work done a decade before he was NASA Administrator. Reportedly pressured by the White House, Beggs took a leave of absence from NASA. A month later, he was not at the helm when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off, killing all seven astronauts on board.

After all of the charges against Beggs and the other defendants were dropped, Beggs established a consulting firm and became a vocal public advocate for a far-sighted space program. He did a great deal of public speaking and joined citizens’ organizations that supported NASA and the space industry.

James Beggs believed that space technology should be available to all countries, and that NASA should cooperate with all space-faring nations, “even the Soviet Union.” In remarks at the Lunar Bases conference in Washington, D.C. in October 1985, Beggs said:

We expect our friends and allies to accept President Reagan’s invitation to join with us in developing the space station.... An internationally developed lunar base might prove an irresistible lure to the Soviets. And if they were to join with us, I believe that it would certainly enhance the prospects for peace in the world and in space.

The Next Logical Step

In a talk in London for the Wilbur and Orville Wright Memorial Lecture on December 1984, Beggs presented a sweeping description of the future:

The advanced technologies we will employ on the Space Station will spur scientific exploration of the Solar System and the universe by both manned and unmanned vehicles. They will invigorate Earth applications and the study of Earth as a global system. And they will stimulate sustained research and development on innovative systems and techniques.

We will be able to use the microgravity environment to develop any number of promising manufacturing enterprises, such as making pure crystals for electronic components, new alloys for industry and new medicines to help fight such diseases as cancer, diabetes, and hemophilia.

NASA/Paolo Nespoli

The International Space Station and the docked Space Shuttle Endeavour, taken from Soyuz TMA-20 on May 23, 2011.

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The Space Station will grow and evolve as new needs develop, and the effort will span decades. It will be the largest and most difficult international project of the space age. By learning to work together on a project of this scope, we will be laying the groundwork for even more extensive joint efforts in the future.

Today we go into space routinely and dream of returning to the Moon and going to Mars to build permanent human settlements. As President Reagan said at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland back in August: Each technological breakthrough enables us to work from a higher plateau of knowledge.

And I believe that as we continue to ascend those plateaus, we will continue to unleash the energy, creativity and imagination that break the barriers to progress and allow free people to go as high as their aspirations will take them.

Beggs had taken the NASA job in 1981 based on his agreement with the President that NASA would have new initiatives like the Space Station. President Reagan’s outlook on the future of space cohered with that of Beggs. And Beggs was also a strong supporter of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, which he reasoned could not be developed without a close relationship with a strong civilian space program. Beggs brought Gen. James Abrahamson into NASA. Gen. Abrahamson was redeployed to head the new SDI program.

Less than a year after he became NASA Administrator, Beggs told this author in an interview that the space station was “the next logical step” in man’s exploration of space, “to proceed to bring things step by step to commercial reality.” “You should be able to work in space and work the problems out,” he asserted. Beggs repeatedly outlined the exciting future missions the space station would enable, and its scientific utility.

In his State of the Union address in January 1984, President Reagan endorsed Administrator Beggs’ proposal, and tasked NASA to build an Earth-orbiting space station within a decade. In a pamphlet he wrote, titled, Space Station: The Next Logical Step, Beggs outlined that the facilities of the space station would include co-orbiting unmanned platforms for experiments, facilities for repairing equipment, an Orbiting Maneuvering Vehicle for EVAs, and more.

But the space station, and all of NASA’s other planned future missions, did not proceed unopposed. In his talk in London in 1984, Beggs described “nay-sayers and disbelievers who have ignored imagination,” and its role as the “wellspring of the fundamental human drive to explore, to find new knowledge, and settle new frontiers.” The two examples of “nay-sayers” he used were the British Luddites and the Club of Rome: “The fundamental error made by the Luddites, the Club of Rome, indeed, by the Malthusians and others who have shared their philosophy, is one of forgetfulness. They forgot to remember that the human imagination is not finite.”

As he often did, Beggs engaged Shakespeare to speak for him. In a 1987 Commentary in Space Times, Beggs wrote:

As we approach the third millennium, we have never had greater opportunities. I believe our greatest achievements in space lie ahead; the only hazard is a lack of will. As Shakespeare wrote in Measure for Measure, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

What Blew Up Challenger

On the early morning of January 28, 1986 James Beggs was at NASA headquarters in Washington, even though he was on a “leave of absence,” thanks to the indictment the previous month. The Space Shuttle Challenger was on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Knowing the temperature was unusually low at the Cape, colleagues asked Beggs if he thought the Shuttle would launch. “Brrrr. It’s too cold,” was the Administrator’s reply.

NASA

Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, killing its crew of seven astronauts.

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William Graham, with no experience in aerospace or anything related, was appointed deputy to Beggs against Beggs’ disapproval. When the indictments forced Beggs “on leave,” Graham became acting Administrator. When it became necessary for a decision, whether or not to launch Challenger that cold morning, Graham was nowhere to be found. Beggs later said it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Thus it was not an O-ring that caused the Shuttle accident—ultimately it was the Justice Department.

In his Commentary in the Sept.-Oct. 1987 issue of the Space Times, Beggs wrote: “One of the devastating results of the Challenger accident is that our momentum has slowed. We must move to regain it.”

As U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, 1983-86, William Weld was a central figure in the October 1986 Boston indictments of Lyndon LaRouche and his associates. (Another key figure in prosecuting LaRouche was Robert Mueller III, who announced the LaRouche indictments on October 7 as Acting U.S. Attorney, Weld having just been made head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in Washington.) LaRouche had informally advised Reagan’s National Security Council concerning his conception of the Strategic Defense Initiative, announced by President Reagan in March 1983. When the Boston prosecutions did not produce guilty verdicts, Weld had LaRouche and associates prosecuted again in Federal Court in Alexandria, Virginia just outside the nation’s Capital.

Gage Skidmore

William Weld

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On June 19, 1987, all charges were dropped against Beggs and his co-defendants, when William Weld could not sensibly explain why 82 boxes (!) of exculpatory material that the defense had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act had been overlooked by the prosecution. In a June 22 press conference in Washington, D.C. when Weld was asked if the government should apologize to Beggs, Weld said he would “decline the invitation to embrace the language of apology” because the Department acted in good faith! He said that the Department did not find the 82 boxes of exculpatory material because of bureaucratic lapses.

The following year, when he was leaving office, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, in a hand-delivered letter, offered Beggs “a profound apology on behalf of the Federal government and the Department.” It was reported that President Reagan apologized to Beggs in a phone call. NASA’s slap in the face to the Justice Department came two years later, when Beggs received the agency’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, honored for his contributions to space and aeronautics.

Beggs never wavered in his optimism for the future, and in that he represented the best of the World War II generation to which he belonged. James Beggs passed away on April 23, at the age of 94.

IV. The Coming Revolution in Science

August 23, 1998

The Reciprocity of Extremes:

The Astrophysics of

Gurwitsch Radiation

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note:This article first appeared in the fall 1998 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology magazine.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

“If a principle of action corresponding to Gurwitsch Radiation exists in this universe, what does that principle thus prove about the nature of the universe itself?” Above, the Andromeda galaxy. Below is Gurwitsch’s onion experiment, which demonstrated that mitogenetic radiation from one onion root increased cell divisions in a second onion root.

A.G. Gurwitsch, Das Problem der Zellteilung

(The Problem of Cell Division), 1926

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In my experience with relevant circles, both in oral exchanges and written works, the most frequent, and often most devastating flaw in the mental life shown among today’s ostensibly best-educated science professionals, is a stubborn refusal to accept what ought to be the most obvious, and persisting challenges to their customary assumptions. Typical of the type of such problem met from among professionals of various specialties, is an axiomatic problem from the domain of one of the most significant, if relatively lesser known branches of science. I refer to a matter from the domain of biology. I focus upon what should be perceived as the most obvious of the implications of the most elementary experimental definition of Gurwitsch Radiation.[fn_1] For my purposes here, I simplify the argument to be made, by defining the issue immediately at hand more narrowly: “the Riemannian implications of Gurwitsch Radiation.”

The setting within which the discussion is situated, is the same topic which has dominated my philosophical and related concerns for six decades. It was, notably, the basis for my attacks against Professor Norbert Wiener’s hoax, so-called “information theory,” five decades ago; it has been the centerpiece of all my own original discoveries and their development and application, since that time. During the recent two decades, it has become, for readers of my published work, the most frequently recurring theme of my published work. Thus, no science professional presently familiar with my life’s work, will fail to recognize the theme.

Although I had been occupied by related topics from the work of Vladimir Vernadsky, Nicolas Rashevsky, and others since the middle to late 1940s, the work of Alexander Gurwitsch was first brought to my attention, about a decade and a half ago, by my associate Jonathan Tennenbaum. The latter contact startled me; Gurwitsch’s discovery agreed with the related work of Vernadsky in the most remarkable degree. The reports on Gurwitsch’s work by Professor Fritz-Albert Popp, were our initial point of reference. As a result, in light of the important bearing that work has on the entire domain of optical biophysics, researches into the area of Gurwitsch’s discoveries became an integral feature of my own and the Fusion Energy Foundation’s (FEF) work on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) during the middle of the 1980s. Since the U.S. Department of Justice’s fraudulent bankrupting of FEF’s Fusion magazine, in 1987, continued interest in Gurwitsch’s important contributions to biology has been revived by Fusion quarterly magazines in Germany and France, and 21st Century Science and Technology. The point of reference for the present treatment of the latter topic, is a report on that subject appearing, as a series, in Vol 11, Nos. 2 and 3, summer and fall, 1998 of 21st Century Science and Technology quarterly, in which a report by a Gurwitsch associate, Michael Lipkind, is featured.[fn_2]

Gurwitsch Radiation is an area of crucial experimental issues, which poses, implicitly, some of the most fundamental questions of epistemology for science as a whole. Not only does Gurwitsch’s and related argument and evidence imply such questions; it is impossible to resolve the crucial-experimental issues except by designs of experiments which address that epistemological issue most directly.

On those and related accounts, the theme within which the discussion of Gurwitsch Radiation is properly situated, is the following. Since Plato, the most elementary mathematical conception of all scientific thought, has been, as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Kepler emphasized this principle, the challenge of recognizing both the distinction in axiomatic principles of ordering, between living and non-living processes, and the still-deeper implications of the existence of such a distinction within a universe which must be coherent throughout. The very concept of Gurwitsch Radiation poses precisely this topic as typical, axiomatically, of the leading issue of all known problems of mathematical physics.

To sum up the relevant setting in which my own comment on Gurwitsch Radiation is situated, restate the situating argument in the following terms.

Humanity’s present knowledge of the universe recognizes three axiomatically distinct qualities of ordering of processes. We recognize the ostensibly “entropic” ordering usually associated with non-living processes. Secondly, we recognize the “anti-entropic” ordering of living processes. Finally, we recognize that the archeological-historical record of willfully-ordered increases of the potential relative population-density of cultures, places the quality of “anti-entropy” of human cognitive processes apart from, and beyond the quality of ordering of all other living processes. As Plato argued, and as Johannes Kepler was the first to give generality to a fourth point respecting these orderings; as this is demonstrated by the fact that the lawful ordering of the Solar System as a whole is also anti-entropic principles, the ordering of the universe as a whole, is underlain by an anti-entropic principle.

By correlating increases in society’s potential relative population-density with the impact upon productivity of scientific, technological, and Classical-cultural forms of progress, I have made two points bearing upon the fundamental questions of physical science. First, that those forms of cognition which correspond to crucially-experimentally validated discoveries of physical principle, are expressed as the transmission of increased anti-entropy from the cognitive processes of the individual human mind, to man’s increased power over the universe, as such increase of power is expressed in percapita and per-square-kilometer terms. Secondly, as the relevant work of both Plato and Kepler imply, the ostensibly geometrical characteristics of the process correspond to continuing, successive such increases of power, and therefore coincide with the fundamental, lawful characteristics of the universe as a whole. This, by implication, situates the process of development of higher living species within a Riemannian form of multiply-connected manifold.

From this standpoint, we must begin our epistemological investigation into the matter of Gurwitsch Radiation, by acknowledging four distinct ordering principles in nature. First, the apparently entropic characteristics commonly attributed to so-called “non-living” processes. Second, the contrasting, characteristically anti-entropic ordering of living processes. Third, another anti-entropic characteristic, unique to human cognition, by means of which mankind is enabled to increase the power of its species within, and over the universe at large. Fourth, the anti-entropic ordering principle, as Plato and Kepler argue some of the relevant evidence, which subsumes the potential of man’s cognitive powers to increase our species’ power over the universe. To restate the latter point: the ordering principle which corresponds to the successful expression of man’s anti-entropic development of his cognitive potentials.

Portrait of Kepler: Jan van der Heyden; portrait of Gauss: New York Public Library

Clockwise, from top left: Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464); Johannes Kepler (1571-1630); Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866); Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

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If we situate the discussion of the evidence bearing upon Gurwitsch Radiation, two general conclusions, of relatively axiomatic authority, must govern our reading of that evidence. First, that the evidence of typically crucial phenomena of Gurwitsch Radiation compels us to direct the investigation of living processes’ distinguishing characteristics, on the assumption that these are governed by the notion of a Keplerian form of interaction between living and non-living processes. Second, that the global ordering of development within and among living species, as underlain by the implications of such Gurwitsch-Radiation effects, must be coherent with the notion of a Riemannian form of multiply-connected manifold. Thirdly, that both of these engage no less than the four distinct types of characteristic ordering which I have listed above.

In the practical experience of today’s putatively educated strata, the sundry ironies of the proposition which I have thus just restated, are expressed in two interconnected ways.

The more immediate obstacle thrown up as objection against Gurwitsch’s experimental principle, reflects the fact that we are living presently in a global culture whose most educated professional strata are miseducated, predominantly, and thoroughly polluted by reductionist ideologies. These ideologies are, in the first instance, the intellectual and moral degeneracy taught by the writings of Aristotle; in the second case, we have the more radically degenerate, more popular of today’s reductionist cults, of empiricism and its radical-positivist offshoots. Relative to the issues implicit in the central fact of Gurwitsch Radiation, the leading obstacle to a rational view of Gurwitsch Radiation, among mathematicians and science professionals today, is the popularity of the common, empiricist dogma of Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Augustin Cauchy, et al., that the physical universe must be regarded as linear in the infinitesimally small. That latter assumption precludes any serious consideration of the nature of the fundamental principle upon which the mathematical “possibility” for the existence of life depends.

The second obstacle is the failure of even many of those otherwise opposed to reductionist ideologies, to recognize the relevance of a crucial connection between the founding of modern experimental physical science by Nicholas of Cusa, and that original discovery by Johannes Kepler which sets Kepler’s elementary view of modular functions above and beyond all other, earlier followers of Plato’s study of the Golden Section. Expressing this issue in the form of a question: If a principle of action corresponding to Gurwitsch Radiation exists in this universe, what does that principle thus prove about the nature of the universe itself?

The first obstacle is only generally noted, as it must be, to put the sillier, commonplace objections to my argument to one side. The issues posed by a Riemannian reading of Gurwitsch Radiation, prompt us to focus upon the crucial distinction between the notion of an anti-entropic ordering, as pervading, for example, Plato’s Timaeus, and the higher standpoint which emerged, beginning Cusa’s De docta ignorantia, with the emergence of the process leading into the development of modern hypergeometric methods, by, successively, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, most notably. Cusa’s discovery that the generation of circular action was of a higher cardinality than Archimedes had assumed, marks the point of conceptualization, which separates the higher mathematical-physical standpoint of modern hypergeometry, as distinguished qualitatively from the level of such followers of Plato as Archimedes. It is among the implications of that latter distinction that the axiomatic implications of Gurwitsch Radiation are lodged.

A Discussion of Cusa’s Point

To begin the relevant discussion, take as a point of reference, the conventional standpoint of scientific opinion today, the heuristic view expressed in action by the cooks working in science’s kitchens, that the “universe began” in some relatively simpler form, out of which successively higher forms of existence were generated. Some of those “cooks,” a minority, go further. The latter insist, that a global directedness of such successive development of higher forms, is implicitly adducible even in considering the most rudimentary of those forms conceivable. This latter is the standpoint impressed upon us by Johannes Kepler’s and Carl Gauss’s approach to astrophysics, the standpoint implicit in the general notion of the Gauss-Riemann form of a multiply-connected manifold.

That “evolutionary” view of the universe flows directly from the methods of modern experimental-physical progress. The point of reference should be identified as follows.

We have two points of reference. On the one side, looking outward toward the presently known boundaries of astrophysics, we must situate ourselves, as observers at a point on the surface of the Earth, with respect to all those motions within the universe, within which the Earth, and our moving position, as observers, on it, are situated. On the other side, we must situate the action with which we are dealing in respect to all of those motions which intersect it, from the most distant smallness of microphysics. What most of the “cooks” of science have failed to do, is to recognize what should be acknowledged as an unavoidable implication of the interaction among the mutually distinct, interacting, cohabiting types of ordering (processes). Whether many among the “cooks” acknowledge that fact, or not, until now, in each and all of these observations, we must take into account the role of multiple-connectedness among ostensibly not-living, living, and cognitive processes, and, also, we must situate the multiply-connected relationship among those four qualities of processes (“non-living,” living, cognitive, universal) within the including, defining framework of the universe as a whole.

Cusa’s discovery, that circular action represented a higher cardinality than the Classical Greeks, including Archimedes, had located within the bounds of irrational-number orderings, broke the mathematical barriers standing in the way of the subsequent emergence of hypergeometry. Kepler’s response to the impact of his predecessors Cusa, Pacioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, carried us to the beginning of a general notion of physical hypergeometries, as shown most clearly by the implications of the elliptical orbit of Mars. The progress from Cusa’s proof of the higher (“transcendental”) cardinality of circular action, led, thus, to the standpoint established by Kepler’s approach to the problems of a multiply-connected manifold. Kepler’s work took the notion of the transcendental and still higher-order cardinalities, out of the formal-mathematical domain of the Golden Section, into the higher domain of physics. It was Kepler who, with his grasp of the implications of Mars’ elliptic orbit, contributed the crucial first step into that higher domain of investigation. In that sense, it was Kepler who made possible the defining of the physical, as distinct from merely formal-mathematical, meaning of the source of the distinction between non-living and living processes.

All of the axiomatic issues respecting interactions between living and non-living processes are situated, in an elementary way, within that framework of epistemological reference which is implicitly provided by, chiefly, the further development of the notion of multiply-connected manifolds, by, chiefly, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann.

A Synopsis of the Point

Let us assign a special implication for Gurwitsch’s use of the notion of a biological field.

For our first approximation, here, let us employ the term, field, in its included sense, as a term of distinction employed to present the conception, that the distinctions among the orderings of living and non-living processes, the interactions of such orderings, and the interactions of all with the implicitly Keplerian ordering of the universe as a whole, represent orderings which each designate a distinct field. Let us go further, to include all four of those general types we have listed above, among the interacting fields.

As in the case of Cusa’s proof, that circular action is elementarily transcendental, rather than simply algebraic, the distinctions in ordering which separate one type of field from another, are congruent with the differences among such types to be recognized in terms of what Gottfried Leibniz defined as the characteristically non-constant (non-linear) curvature of processes in their infinitesimally small intervals of action. From the standpoint of elementary epistemology, these “non-linear” differences must necessarily correspond to what modern convention would oblige us to describe as relatively “very strong forces,” acting with global effects, upon the infinitesimally small.

These “forces,” which are expressed with global effects, must be located experimentally among the smallnesses of the microphysical scale. These are epistemological conclusions, not reflections of speculative guesswork. These “forces” are subtended as the interactions between fields, as we have, for the moment, assigned a special meaning to the term field. We have, thus, the “strong forces” which reflect the stresses of interaction between ostensible living and non-living processes, or the impact on both of the universal, or “Keplerian” field.

This notion of “strong forces” has two principal implications for our discussion. First, when one of the fields, as we have assigned special usage to that term here, “imposes its will,” as expressed by its distinctive ordering principle, on another, there is a “bending” action exerted by the one field on the intersected field. It is as if the geometry of the universe represented by the latter were altered to conform, as subordinated, to the geometry of the universe represented by the former. Second, the notion of such “imposition of will” brings us to Leibniz’s overlapping notions of analysis situs and monadology, as this was explored fruitfully by Lazare Carnot and other associates of Gaspard Monge.

To wit: from the standpoint of the thus-perplexed mathematical formalist, what is the form of action expressed by the relationship of multi-connectedness, as that relationship is integral to the Gauss-Riemann notions of a multiply-connected manifold, as the astrophysical manifold? This defines a set of questions which may be posed in mathematical terms of the complex domain, but the answers are to be found in the domain of crucial-experimental physics. To wit: the undiscovered portions of the reach of the multiple-connectedness of the universe as a whole, both in the astrophysical large and microphysical small, are acting efficiently upon the subject-matter of our inquiry into a lesser domain of multiple-connectedness. Thus, from this vantage-point, by definition of the case: The “non-linear” discrepancy yet to be measured, is reflected for measurement into the ever more extreme, yet to be discovered remotenesses of the infinitesimally small.

With certain qualifications, each distinct living species and associated, subsumed type, must also be considered a field in such a multiply-connected domain. The crucial qualification, is the interdependency pervading the living biosphere in its present state. The existence of the representative of the individual species must necessarily (epistemologically speaking) depend upon not merely the superimposition of one such field upon another, but a reciprocal kind of interdependency.

That completes the statement of the general point I wish to introduce at this time.

[fn_1] Gurwitsch radiation, or mitogenetic radiation, is weak electromagnetic radiation from cells that can trigger the growth of other cells. See, “Twenty Years of Mitogenetic Radiation: Emergence, Development, and Perspectives,” by Alexander Gurwitsch and Lydia Gurwitsch, 21st Century Science & Technology, Fall 1999. https://21sci-tech.com/Articles_2010/weak_forces/20_Years_Mitogenic_Radiation.pdf   [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] LaRouche’s article, “Remarks on Gurwitsch’s Method,” is reprinted in EIR Vol. 47, No. 19, May 8, 2020, pp. 40-48. https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2020/2020_10-19/2020-19/45-50_4719-lar.pdf. [back to text for fn_2]