Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 39, September 25, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Warning: Military Coup Threat Against President Trump Rose with New War Plans Against Russia and China

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 39, September 25, 2020

- I. Why We Fight

- Jacobin Terror Aims at D.C. by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (August 24, 2001)

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST We Must Keep Fighting for a Summit, As the War Hawks Are Going All-Out To Prevent It!

- SITREP U.S.A., PART III Why We Fight by Barbara Boyd

- II. The Belt & Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge

- Schiller Institute Labor Day Conference Opening Remarks by Lyndon LaRouche and Dennis Speed

- Dennis Small The LaRouche Program for the Planet:1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs

- Dr. Natalia Vitrenko Irreconcilable Problems Are PushingThe World Towards Catastrophe

- Michele Geraci Helping the West Understand China Today

- Hassan Daud Butt The Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Harbinger of Sustainable Growth

- Marcelo Muñoz One Belt, One Road: A Project for the 21st Century

- Dr. Björn Peters The Quest for Clean and Cheap Energy

- Panel 3: First Discussion Session

- Dennis Speed A New Health Platform A Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

- Joycelyn Elders, M.D. Turning from the Course of Division Toward a More Perfect Union

- Rep. Jim Evans Mississippi: Now A Four-Way Pandemic

- Dr. Shirley Evers-Manly, RN Nurses With a Global Perspective

- Chief Leon Frazier Law Enforcement and the Community Must Come Together To Survive This Pandemic

- Erica Muhammad A Community COVID Task Force

- H.E. Ambassador Ayikoi Otoo Expanding the Health System in Ghana: 101 New Hospitals Planned Nationwide

- Marlette Kyssama-Nsona Health Security—Africa Has to Build a Continental Health Program: The Case of the Republic of the Congo

- Panel 3: Second Discussion Session

Traitors Plot Military Coup

Against President Trump

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

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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

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Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

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United States: Debra Freeman

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EDITORIAL

Warning:

Military Coup Threat Against President Trump Rose with New

War Plans Against Russia and China

Sept. 14—Former Virginia State Senator, Col. Richard Black (USA ret.), delivered an explicit warning in public presentations on Sept. 5 and again Sept. 12, that senior U.S. military officers are considering a military coup against President Donald Trump because he opposes American wars and has pushed withdrawals from them. Colonel Black was backed up on webcasts of the LaRouche movement, by former NSA experts Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe opposing a cover-up of the events surrounding the 9/11 attacks.

Black denounced the coup planning and spoke about the indications of that planning. He cited:

• Known conversations between then Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis, USMC (ret.) and then Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, in which Mattis told Coats the time would come for them to “take collective action” against Trump.

• A blatant call for a military coup in an open letter to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, by retired Colonels John Nagl and Paul Yingling on the website Defense One.

• The open refusal of generals around Defense Secretary Mark Esper to carry out Trump’s directives to withdraw troops overseas, or keep order in American cities.

• Retired senior officers violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice in their public remarks about the President.

• An article rehearsing a military coup in outrageous detail in an Australian-British blog, The Conversation.

Investigation reveals that the British blog published a detailed planning document for a military coup against Trump in September 2017, by a professor at the known British intelligence center, the University of St. Andrews, but that writer, in his article, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Could There Be a Military Coup in the U.S.?” cited two other such pieces.

One of those other pieces excites additional suspicion: Published in Foreign Policy on January 30, 2017, just 10 days after Trump’s inauguration, and written by Georgetown Law Professor Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon aide to Michèle Flournoy, former Bush State Department advisor, 1999-2000; the article suggested Trump’s removal by a military coup. Today, Professor Brooks is also co-founder and head of the so-called Transition Integrity Project, which in June 2020 ran a war game of the 2020 election by a “bipartisan group of over 100 current and former senior government and campaign leaders and other experts” participating. Under Brooks’ direction, that war game found that any outcome other than a landslide victory for Joe Biden would throw America into chaos.

Shortly after September 2017, when the British blog published its detailed plan of events of a coup against Trump, the Pentagon started issuing, in winter 2017-2018, new national defense strategy documents which made Russia and China major strategic adversaries of the United States—clearly at odds with the President’s own repeated statement that “good relations with Russia and China are a good thing.”

While President Donald Trump has stated this principle again as recently as his Michigan rally last week, Pentagon strategy documents and top generals have become virulent nuclear power confrontationists, and not only in documents—they are carrying out war exercises all around Russia and China. In this fall of 2020, American and NATO aircraft are staging repeated air exercises that come within a few miles of Russia’s northwestern and southwestern borders, conducting target acquisitions and mock attacks inside Russia.

See also the “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge: January 19, 2018.”

There is no indication from President Trump’s public statements or policies that he approves the conduct of constant surveillance and air war games over the borders of Russia, for example. Are we reliving JFK’s 1962, when the top Pentagon brass kept demanding to attack and invade Cuba even while President John Kennedy was achieving the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from that country? Kennedy’s moderation, in the eyes of the warhawks planning wars from Cuba to Vietnam, probably had him removed by assassination a year later.

Now Is Our Time To Act

The long attempt to oust President Trump by some form of coup—including a possibly “uncallable” 2020 election—could now be taking the shape of a military coup in order to launch a war or wars of incalculable consequences for the American population and the world.

The British Conversation blog post said, “the plotters of an American military coup would need to deny them information on what’s happening, and just as importantly to deny any would-be loyalists the time or ability to act.”

Now is all our time to act. In his remarks on September 12, Col. Black said:

I think the most important thing we can do right now is to shine the spotlight on what is going on in the Pentagon, how absolutely poisonous the atmosphere has become....

I think it comes down to organizations like this, publications like this, that publicize and get the word out early enough....

It is very, very important that this talk about the potential for a military coup, spread across the country. If it does, I think it throws a steel rod in the turning wheels of the Pentagon ... and I think it will block a coup, if one is seriously being contemplated, as I suspect it is.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 39, September 25, 2020

Cover This Week

President Donald Trump disembarks from Air Force One at Philadelphia International Airport, September 15, 2020.

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TRAITORS PLOT MILITARY COUP AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP

2 EDITORIAL

Warning: Military Coup Threat Against President Trump Rose with New War Plans Against Russia and China

I. WHY WE FIGHT

5 Jacobin Terror Aims at D.C.

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

August 24, 2001

8 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

We Must Keep Fighting for a Summit, As the War Hawks Are Going All-Out To Prevent It!

12 SITREP U.S.A., PART III

Why We Fight

by Barbara Boyd

II. THE BELT & ROAD BECOMES THE WORLD LAND-BRIDGE

Schiller Institute Conference on the Internet

September 5-6, 2020

War Drive Toward Armageddon or

A New Paradigm Among Sovereign Nations United

by the Common Aims of Mankind?

PANEL 3

The Belt and Road Initiative

Becomes the World Land-Bridge:

FDR’s Unfinished Business

21 Opening Remarks

by Lyndon LaRouche and Dennis Speed

22 The LaRouche Program for the Planet: 1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs

by Dennis Small

26 Irreconcilable Problems Are Pushing the World Towards Catastrophe

by Dr. Natalia Vitrenko

29 Helping the West Understand China Today

by Michele Geraci

31 The Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Harbinger of Sustainable Growth

by Hassan Daud Butt

33 One Belt, One Road: A Project for the 21st Century

by Marcelo Muñoz

35 The Quest for Clean and Cheap Energy

by Dr. Björn Peters

37 First Discussion Session

43 A New Health Platform—A Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

by Dennis Speed

43 Turning from the Course of Division Toward a More Perfect Union

by Joycelyn Elders, M.D.

45 Mississippi: Now A Four-Way Pandemic

by Rep. Jim Evans

47 Nurses with a Global Perspective

by Dr. Shirley Evers-Manly, RN

48 Law Enforcement and the Community Must Come Together To Survive This Pandemic

by Chief Leon Frazier

50 A Community COVID Task Force

by Erica Muhammad

51 Expanding the Health System in Ghana: 101 New Hospitals Planned Nationwide

by H.E. Ambassador Ayikoi Otoo

52 Health Security—Africa Has to Build a Continental Health Program: The Case of the Republic of the Congo

by Marlette Kyssama-Nsona

54 Second Discussion Session

I. Why We Fight

August 24, 2001

Jacobin Terror Aims at D.C.

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in EIR Vol. 28, No. 34, September 7, 2001, pp. 72-74. It had been previously circulated by the LaRouche in 2004 presidential campaign committee on August 24, 2001.

This statement was circulated as a leaflet, being part of Lyndon LaRouche’s forecast and warning of what soon became 9/11/2001. He had earlier warned explicitly of a “Reichstag Fire” terrorist incident, which would be used to enable George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to establish emergency rule, i.e. dictatorship, just as Hitler used the hoked-up attempt to set fire to the German parliament in 1933. Today, the same Jacobin forces of 2001 are being deployed to aid an attempted coup against a legitimately elected President. But the resonance is extraordinary.

All reports from reliable sources indicate that the international terrorist movement which surfaced at Seattle, mobilized itself at Porto Alegre, Brazil, and created bloody violence at Genoa, Italy, is now taking aim at the U.S. nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. It is extremely important that those elements of U.S. organized labor who have permitted their organizations to be entangled in sympathy for this terrorist gang, break openly from the operations already being prepared for the terrorist-style riots now aimed at both the District of Columbia and areas of the adjoining states.

Two leading points are to be made about that present new wave of international terrorism.

First, the hard core of the organizers of the present terrorist operations represent the fourth generation of a series which began its existence as an organized international movement of terrorism, during the middle-to-late 1960s, the anti-nuclear terrorist rampage of the late 1970s, and the terrorist wave of the mid-1980s. As typified by the case of Tony Negri, and the role of the Basque terrorist organization ETA, there is no break in the continuity of the hard-core leadership of these terrorist forces over the period from its exploitation of the anti-Vietnam War setting of the late 1960s, to the present day.

Second, to understand the very high level of control over and backing of these terrorist actions, even from high-level circles in governments, we must think back to the Jacobin Terror first launched from Jeremy Bentham’s London on July 14, 1789. For this occasion, facing some well-documented facts from real history, in place of the usual university textbook fairytales, will be most helpful in assisting relevant authorities to defend the security of Washington, D.C. and its environs.

Why the Bastille Was Stormed

With the victory over the British monarchy, by the allied U.S. and French forces at Yorktown, the danger most feared by that monarchy and its anti-republican sympathizers, such as the Physiocrats and the Duke of Orlea@aans, in France, was the fear that France would adopt a constitutional reform of its monarchy based upon the same principles expressed by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and 1787 draft of the U.S. Federal Constitution. The orchestration of the storming of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789, was the detonator for a coup d’état which suppressed the constitution adopted under the leadership of Lafayette and Jean Sylvain Bailly.

At the moment that coup occurred, the only prisoners remaining in the Bastille were a few mental cases, held while awaiting their transfer to mental institutions. The mob which assembled before the Bastille was organized and armed by Benjamin Franklin’s old adversary, the Duke of Orleans, and was staged by the Duke on behalf of a political campaign to have the father of the notorious Madame de Staël, former French finance minister and Swiss banker Jacques Necker, appointed as Prime Minister of France.

Pierre Gabriel Berthault, 1800

To understand the high level of control over today’s terrorist actions, think back to the Jacobin Terror launched from Jeremy Bentham’s London, with the storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789. Below, Black Bloc anarchists hurl stones and tear gas canisters back at the police in Genoa, during the G8 Summit in Genoa, in July 2001.

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On orders from the backers of the Duke’s plot, the commander of the Bastille fired upon the mob organized by the Duke. In due course, the prison guards surrendered, ostensibly confident that since they were tools of the Duke, he would arrange for their secure passage. To silence the tongues of those guards, the mob removed the guards’ heads. At that point, the mob moved off, bearing the poor babbling lunatics on the shoulders of those at the head of this procession, carrying the heads of the decapitated guards on pikes, and bearing a bust of Jacques Necker, their candidate for Prime Minister, at the head of the procession.

Bailly, the co-leader of the adoption of the constitution, was killed on the initiative of the terrorist Marat, who, together with the terrorist Danton, had been personally housed and trained by the British Foreign Office’s Jeremy Bentham, in London, and dispatched to France to make the speeches and implement the policies of that British Foreign Office “secret committee” then directed by Bentham. Lafayette was sent into an Austrian dungeon at Olmütz, on orders from London. The hope of a France with a durable quality of republican constitution, matching that drafted under the leadership of Bailly and Lafayette, had to wait until the defeat of Napoleon III, and, such notable subsequent achievements as the constitution of the Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle.

The role of the British monarchy and its French Physiocratic and other accomplices, in orchestrating the 1783-1794 crisis in France, has many precedents in earlier history, back to the infamous role of the cult of Dionysus in ancient times. Also, we should not forget, the way the Balkan wars were orchestrated to bring about World War I, or the way in which irregular warfare was used by the opposing NATO and Soviet powers during the time leading into the break-up of the Warsaw Pact. As I emphasized, in endorsing, in 1986, the importance of Professor Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte’s book Modern Irregular Warfare (Der Moderne Kleinkrieg, 1972), a vast repertoire of methods of “irregular warfare,” including assassinations and allegedly spontaneous terrorism, are standard practices for “warfare conducted by other means.”

This was the case of the terrorist facets of the civil disturbances of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and again, as at Seattle, Genoa, and threatening Washington, today.

War in a Financial Collapse

The world is presently gripped by the biggest, most deep-going, most deadly financial and monetary crisis since Europe of the middle to late Fourteenth Century. We are in a period in which economic and related circumstances have made the idea of regular modern warfare a sick joke, in which regional and other “little wars,” terrorism, political assassinations, and other forms of destabilization, are leading items on the agendas of many of the strategic planners. The financial and monetary crisis in its presently advanced stage, drives desperate political forces to the brink, desperate political forces who would rather drive civilization itself to the brink, than tolerate the changes in financial and monetary institutions which the present crisis-situation demands.

Washington, D.C. has become a very shabby sort of world power, but it is still the leading world power. Any movement which would terrify official Washington and its environs into fleeing under its beds, would be a major strategic threat to the peace of the world at large, just as the Jacobin Terror of 1789-94 led fatefully to those Napoleonic wars which dominated Europe until the conclusion of that Vienna Congress which sowed the seeds of the later catastrophes to come.

Please Do Not Be Just Another Fool!

The reason many trade-unionists, for example, have allowed themselves to play the fool in the matter of the continuity of the Seattle, Genoa, and projected Washington D.C. terrorist riots, is their affliction with the mental disease known as “single-issuism.” I refer to the same lunacy which prompts a crazed individual to conduct a terrorist form of attack on an abortion clinic. The mental disorder in such cases, springs from the folly of not fighting for positive solutions, rather than purely negative protest against some isolated aspect of the total situation to be faced.

As I have taught on all relevant occasions, whether in physical science, in economics, or in personal life, the word “principle” should never be used to express anything but the equivalent of a universal physical principle. The only thing really worth fighting for, is the outcome of your having lived, your nation having existed in your lifetime. What is important is what we transmit to become the reality of the generations yet unborn. In what we do to that effect, lies our true personal identity, our only fundamental issue of universal principle.

The most depraved of all “single-issue” politics and other tactics, is the brainless practice of making an alliance with the devil himself, if the devil is doing something unpleasant to someone we have identified as an enemy of the moment.

I pick on trade-unionists, only to illustrate the same point which could be made for many other parts of society.

Some trade-unionists rationalize their toleration of the terrorists because of an argument which runs more or less as follows: 1.) The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other forms of globalization are robbing American working people of their jobs and income. 2.) The terrorists who surfaced at Seattle, Teddy Goldsmith’s Porto Alegre conference, and the Genoa riots, “say they are fighting against globalization.” 3.) Those terrorists are part of a very big and powerful movement. 4.) Therefore we should sympathize with them, even condone our union’s working with them.

Fact: 1.) The most passionate supporter of NAFTA inside the leadership of the Democratic Party was the same Vice-President Al Gore who attacked Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamed savagely, at Kuala Lumpur, as part of Gore’s defense of both super-globalizer George Soros and total globalization of the international market. 2.) Therefore, the AFL-CIO supported Al Gore’s pre-candidacy for President of the U.S.!

Eugene V. Debs was not so foolish as those AFL-CIO leaders of 1999-2001. He warned: It is better to vote for what you want, and lose, than vote for what you do not want, and win. In the case of Al Gore, the AFL-CIO voted for what it did not want, Al Gore’s pro-globalization policy, and won Gore’s nomination. But, in so doing, they betrayed everything which their grandchildren would have considered a decent outcome of that campaign. They voted for Gore and won globalization. As a result, they could lose everything.

What opportunistic trade-union leaders overlook, is that the intention behind those high-level circles backing the deployment of terrorists into Seattle, Genoa, and Washington, is to provoke the establishment of something like a fascist police-state rule in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. We know what happens to trade-union interests under such circumstances.

The only sane standard for political and related behavior, is to adopt an intention whose result will not be something of which your great-grandchildren should be ashamed, but of which they should be proud. Labor and others should pull out all support from the intended terrorist deployment into Washington, D.C.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

We Must Keep Fighting for a Summit, As the War Hawks Are Going All-Out To Prevent It!

We present here an edited transcript of excerpts from the Schiller Institute’s weekly “Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche” of September 16, 2020. The video of the full webcast may be found here.

USAF/Jennifer Zima

Provocative flights of U.S. bombers and fighters along the Russian and Chinese borders have increased recently. Here, midair refueling of a B-52, September 16, 2020.

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Harley Schlanger: Helga, we’re now less than two months away from the U.S. election. While everything seems to be up in the air, there are crises everywhere. One of the things that’s hardly discussed at all, except by you, and also by President Trump, is the war danger. He’s been making a number of statements about this, but for the most part, the provocative actions of some people on his staff, such as [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo and others, are not really making it into the media. What’s your assessment about where things stand, and this increasing danger of war?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The strategic situation is one of total confrontation on the side of the war party and its British and neocon elements in the United States, against Russia and China. And also [EU Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen in her speech about the state of the European Union did not hold much back in this respect, falling in line with Pompeo. I think between now and the U.S. election, we have to expect an escalation of tension.

There has been talk about a military coup in the United States. I think people should really be on high alert. There has been an increase of provocative flights of B-52 bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, and fighter jets along the Russian and Chinese borders in recent weeks. There were intercepts, all extremely risky maneuvers, and there has been a characterization of Russia and China as adversaries from various U.S. military commanders.

The climate is so thoroughly poisoned. I think people really have to understand that between now and November 3, there is the danger that these things could go out of control. That is why we are pushing so hard to get a summit, on the level of the presidents of the United States, Russia, and China, at a minimum, or the P-5 permanent five members of the UN Security Council. We have to get out of this geopolitical confrontation that can get out of control. And if it does, it may be too late.

Schlanger: This last Saturday, we had an event where we focused on Lyndon LaRouche’s prescient forecast from January 2001, where he warned of a “Reichstag Fire” event, and then on September 11, 2001, he was pointing to the “inside job,” the fact that the security services had to be involved in it. I think when you put that together with retired Col. Richard Black’s warnings of a coup, then it becomes clear that there’s an element of the U.S. military security forces, some of the same people who were behind the Russiagate coup, who are directly committed to war. I’d like to hear your thoughts are on that.

Zepp-LaRouche: I would advise people to watch the program you mentioned, because nowhere else do you find such a condensed assessment of the security situation in which we find ourselves.

DoS/Ron Przysucha

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo claimed to the Atlantic Council on September 15, that he had succeeded in turning the countries of Africa, ASEAN, and Eastern Europe away from China.

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What is operating right now in NATO, from the British defense secretary, from Pompeo, and from [U.S, Defense Secretary Mark] Esper, and some others, including various military commanders in the United States, is, the reactivation of Dick Cheney’s policy. That’s the policy of the neocons, the Project for a New American Century, which was developed during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It was fully laid out by Cheney in 1992. He claimed that the United States would never allow any country or any bloc of countries to ever surpass the United States economically, politically, or technologically.

When China’s New Silk Road developments started to gain momentum in 2017, after four years of almost silence on the side of the mainstream media and the major think tanks, we saw, all of a sudden, a coordinated attack on the Belt and Road Initiative, calling China an adversary. And the military doctrine of the United States is becoming more oriented towards total containment of China.

I think that that is now operational. Listen to what Pompeo had to say yesterday, in a speech before the completely Anglophile Atlantic Council. People should listen to that.

He didn’t talk about the 1,000-year Reich, but he did talk about a 100-year system of containment of China, saying that the tide is turning, that Africa, ASEAN, Eastern European countries are all turning away from China. That is completely false. His efforts—devoting almost all his time to containing China—are not getting anywhere in those regions.

So I think this is really a very dangerous development. Take that together with what Colonel Black said on Saturday, referring to the open letter to General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, posted on a website called Defense One last month, in which two colonels had called on the U.S. military to make a military coup if President Trump would refuse to concede and leave the White House in case he has an election defeat, and that the military should take him out.

Colonel Black said that there is an ongoing discussion in the U.S. military exactly along these lines, and he was warned about it. This is what President Trump has referred to repeatedly—the last time on Labor Day—as the “military-industrial complex,” a formulation first used by President Eisenhower, by saying these are the people who like to be involved in the endless wars. So it is this military-industrial complex, which is in a direct confrontation with the elected President of the United States. And the issue is war and peace: President Trump has said repeatedly he wants to bring the troops home, he wants to end the endless wars.

Schlanger: There seemed to be some momentum toward a summit—maybe it was just with Trump and Putin, perhaps with the P5—but that has pretty much been scuttled with respect to a meeting at the time of the UN General Assembly. How do you see that? Is there any potential that this could be pulled together before the election?

Zepp-LaRouche: There are many experts who try to tell us that given the absolutely out-of-control situation, that this is not going to happen before the U.S. election. You could easily say, “Yeah, these people are right, given the fact that because of coronavirus, Putin is not going to the General Assembly; he only will address it by video.” Such experts say that when we have such a provocative atmosphere, with the Navalny case, with these overflights in the Black Sea and Baltic Sea region, and flights near the Russian and Chinese borders, that the atmosphere does not exist. Smarter people have encouraged us to keep fighting for a heads of state summit, saying it’s the only reasonable way to go.

Schiller Institute

Col. Richard H. Black (USA ret.), left, told the Schiller Institute’s September 5-6 conference that Pentagon discussions of a military coup against President Trump must come under the spotlight, while Kirk Wiebe (right) revealed that a group at NSA did know that 9/11 was about to happen, but its work was suppressed by NSA Director Hayden.

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My biggest concern is, given that there is this talk about a coup, that you have all this incredible tension around the day of the election. Hillary Clinton has said that under no circumstances should Joe Biden concede the election result on November 3; this could go on for days, maybe weeks, before the result is clear. Then there is the danger of more riots in the streets and under those conditions, you easily could have a situation where the domestic situation gets completely wild and out of control, and then, under those conditions you have the danger of some incident getting out of control.

I’m not optimistic that a summit will happen, but I’m still calling on all of you to help, to join this mobilization, and I wouldn’t be saying that if I were not convinced that we are really sitting on a completely explosive powder keg. People are asleep; the peace movement does not exist, or if it exists, it’s for sure not very efficient, and most politicians seem to be completely unaware, uninterested, focused on completely ridiculous issues. I’m really calling on you to join the Schiller Institute in this mobilization to demand a summit, because I cannot see any other avenue by which we get out of this very, very dangerous situation.

Schlanger: Colonel Black, in his speech at the Schiller Institute event on September 5, said that what’s necessary is for a spotlight to be shone on this, and for people to speak out. Helga, how can this work in this politicized and polarized situation where people are afraid?

Zepp-LaRouche: One thing that people can do is they can help us to put pressure on the parliaments around the world to investigate not only what Colonel Black said, but especially what Kirk Wiebe said, namely, that the NSA [U.S. National Security Agency] had the information about the upcoming 9/11 before it happened. Now, that’s an incredible statement, but Wiebe and [former NSA Technical Director William] Binney were working in the NSA, they were in contact with all the people who had the evidence; they had it themselves. And when they warned the then chief of the NSA Michael Hayden, he suppressed it.

Now this is a serious charge: This has ramifications not only for the United States, because it led to the Patriot Act, it led to all these interventionist wars, wars that have, according to a study from one of the U.S. universities, caused up to 58 million refugees! The strategic situation has worsened so incredibly, that I think every parliamentarian and every parliament has the right to say, we want to find out, is that true? Was the September 11 attack known about ahead of time? And I think that that is something everybody can help to do: spread this information, get media, alternative media, social media, investigative journalists who still have some honor to pick up the story.

The other thing that people can do, well before the U.S. election, is to bring out the whole scandal that there was no Russiagate, that this was an operation of British intelligence. Bring out the story of September 11, the real story behind it, and blow up the coup! That is the one thing that will obviously change the situation.

CGTN

Endless interventionist wars have produced an estimated 58 million refugees. Here, children evacuating the Moria refugee camp, Europe’s largest, on the Greek island of Lesbos, after fires destroyed the camp September 8-9, 2020.

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Schlanger: Helga, you’ve been discussing this for years: What gives you the strength to think that this can be turned around?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think you have to have a vision of where the world should be. My vision of what the world should become is that every person on this planet should have the right to a long life, healthcare, enough food, enough clean water, enough study to develop his or her creative potential, and these things come about only through creating economic conditions that enable it.

That is why I joined the organization of my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, many years ago, because he was the only one who advocated the industrial development of the developing countries, in the 1970s, picking up on what Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended the Bretton Woods system to become.

I think the perspective we have developed over the last, really, half-century—a new world economic system, seen clearly in the idea of the New Silk Road becoming the World Land-Bridge—that is the program we need. We need peace by collaborating with Russia and China. The United States must be part of that—but we also have to industrialize Southwest Asia and Africa. Other countries need to be included, parts of Eastern Europe, and parts of the Balkans. We really have to change this policy of the privilege of a few, to which Ursula von der Leyen clearly belongs. We don’t need politicians like her. She is the incarnation of what’s wrong with Europe. So we should really work to get an alternative.

Schlanger: Well, for 40-50 years the LaRouche organization has not only pointed out the enemies of mankind, but it has also presented solutions. I would urge people to watch the video from last weekend’s LaRouchePAC town hall on Saturday, September 12. So Helga, thanks for joining us again today, and we’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week.

Watch the videos and sign the petition to exonerate LaRouche

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SITREP U.S.A., PART III

Why We Fight

by Barbara Boyd

White House

On September 17, President Donald Trump delivered an extraordinary defense of that which made America exceptional, and declared an open cultural war to bring back to life the intellect and spirit of the American Revolution.

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Sept. 20—In celebration of Constitution Day, September 17, President Donald Trump delivered an extraordinary defense of that which makes America exceptional and declared an open cultural war to bring back to life the intellect and spirit of the American Revolution. If the coup against the United States is to be defeated and the nation to be reunited, the President has just specified the most essential weapon.

Celebrating the same event, Attorney General William Barr, now the subject of daily character assassinations by the seditionists seeking the overthrow of Trump and the Republic, delivered a low key, but nonetheless scathing attack on a Justice Department which in recent decades has largely abandoned its charge to “do justice.” Barr called those who participated in such atrocities as the Mueller investigation, amoral “headhunters.”

DoJ

Attorney General William Barr (shown) and John Durham must not delay in bringing their investigations to bear in prosecutions of those engaged in the long-standing insurrectionist operations against the President.

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These speeches occurred before the death of legendary Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, September 18th. As Democrats pledge that they will never concede the election and Barack Obama’s retired generals advocate and map a military coup to replace Trump, they are simultaneously saying, right out of the gate, that if the President appoints Ginsburg’s replacement and the Senate confirms Trump’s appointee, there will be “war in the streets.”

Refuse Fascism, one of the coordinating arms for the present street riots in the U.S., was already planning for national demonstrations and riots starting September 21. They now say that the death of RBG, as Justice Ginsburg was affectionately known, should clear anyone of any delusions about the Constitution or the lack of necessity for overthrowing the government of the United States.

The RESIST effort to paralyze the Supreme Court, the highest court in the third branch of our government—at this point in the ongoing insurrection, with a contested election looming—should be obvious in its intent to destabilize the country. Simultaneously, the Democrats and their oligarchic funders are also advancing an agenda that includes packing the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, making Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states, and otherwise supporting secessionist movements aimed at dismantling the American Republic into something resembling a European parliament composed of squabbling confederated city states, controlled top down by the globalist financial elites.

LaRouche PAC

Former Virginia State Senator Col. Richard H. Black (USA ret.).

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On September 12, 2020, Colonel Richard H. Black (ret.), decorated combat veteran and former chief of the Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon, detailed aspects of a planned military coup against the President as the culmination of the continuing insurrection and sedition against the Trump Presidency.

Other aspects of that plot have now become clearer as we place the activities of the Transition Integrity Project against the chronology of the military side of the coup against Donald Trump dating from first suggestions of the use of military force in January of 2017.

Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly examined the conditions for conducting a successful countercoup or counterinsurgency. Culture is the most essential weapon in such a campaign and the President’s recent speech indicates that he now understands that also. We will examine the President’s speech in the context of a 1988 piece by LaRouche on this topic: “The Impact of the American Ideology Upon the Failures of U.S. Strategy.”

We will then take these ideas up in the context of the present pre- and post-election deployments of the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and related organizations. That examination demonstrates that it is entirely plausible that the recent riots were, in part, an exercise determining whether the “street forces” could reliably perform their intended roles in a coup and to establish firm lines of coordination and communication. This would explain the silence of the Harris/Biden campaign as parts of major cities burned and their bizarre description of these events as “peaceful protests.”

The Elements of Conducting a Countercoup

Like all great works by LaRouche, there are aspects of this work which are framed by the strategic realities of the time. This was a founding document for what LaRouche called a necessary “Anti-Bolshevist Resistance,” within the dynamics of the still ongoing Cold War.

In the paper, LaRouche emphasized that both the Soviet and Chinese economies of the time were on the verge of physical economic collapse, so that even were the United States to be reduced to the status of a Soviet client state, the actual danger faced by the world was that of a New Dark Age, brought on by the fact that globalist financial policies of looting and primitive accumulation, instigated by the actual evil Empire—the modern Anglo-Dutch one—could never produce the constantly expanding economy required to support the world’s population. Today, that same imperial entity, functioning, as LaRouche later said, like a slime-mold, employs a dangerous strategy of tensions betwixt and between the U.S., Russia, and China, to prevent the type of cooperation which could end their imperial rule, risking a war fatal to the human race.

These neo-Malthusians propose to preserve their power by wiping out whole populations, based on a resource war of attrition, and actual wars and the total information-control deemed necessary to police and subdue the populations which remain. This, they have widely and incessantly lied and propagandized, will be necessary to confront catastrophic climate change, a “scientific fact” wholly as fraudulent as the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. in 1986.

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In this piece, LaRouche examined the concept of a “People’s War” such as that which the President is presently implicitly proposing as a countercoup. He makes the following critical points which I have applied to the present:

1. Warfare is essentially a matter of political will, with respect to which weapons are but the material means for the expression of that will. People’s War, LaRouche said, is approximately 1% lethal conflict and 99% cultural war. The most fundamental question in any countercoup, such as that which is proposed now, is the task of separating the actual armed insurgent forces from their actual and potential political base. It this can be done successfully, the insurgents can be effectively mopped up.

2. Success in this venture is a cultural question. In the case of the United States, can the revolutionary identity of the American people—situated, as the President said, in 1,000 years of Judeo-Christian civilization, and the Renaissance—be successfully captured and resurrected? Or, are we stuck with the Satanism and hedonism which attacked us after World War II in the form of pragmatism and classic British liberalism, and then morphed, like a deadly virus, into the 1960s rock-drug-sex counterculture, destroying our will to fight against those who would destroy us. The 1960s belief systems and ideologies are what you see on the street now. The New Left is in the institutions and in the board rooms and a whole generation of children has been educated based on these synthetic ideologies. Donald Trump is the first President to ever take this on directly, if incompletely. Winning wholly depends on whether the people take up the same ideas calmly, strategically, with the future of the next 50 years in mind, and with complete and total attention and focus.

3. The most fundamental principle of People’s War, LaRouche said, can be found in the following from President Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, memorializing those who had recently fallen on that battlefield:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

LoC

President Abraham Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address, at the dedication of Soldiers’ National Cemetery, on November 19, 1863.

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Sun Yat-sen used the same three-part principle, LaRouche says, namely, “of the people, by the people, and for the people” in shaping the Kuomintang in China. “Call it the idea of freedom achieved through the creation and defense of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Call it the determination that such political creations should prosper and to be defended at any price,” LaRouche notes.

4. In looking at the present military plans for a coup, for which the present street violence now being waged against us must be seen as a dry run, the most important force to focus on is the political insurgency that is infecting the military of which the Antifa and terrorist elements are but mere auxiliaries. If you can neutralize the forces of cultural warfare by undermining the political will of the non-military political/cultural insurgency, an armed military insurgency cannot prevail. Friedrich Schiller’s historical studies in preparation for writing his Wallenstein, LaRouche says, are a full exposition of what you need to understand here.

5. The relevant characteristic for winning People’s War is the cultural penetration of virtually the entire range of public and private institutions of a society. The objective of our penetration is to turn these institutions against the adversary, either to transform them into vehicles for the furtherance of our policies or simply to neutralize their effectiveness as instruments of the adversary’s policies.

6. Patriotism, a simple defense of present institutions under attack, cannot supply the quality of political will required now. The quality of courage needed now means finding deep within oneself a cause which is worth more to you than mortal life itself. It is the lack of this quality which defines cowardice under the conditions in which we find ourselves now.

7. Like the President, LaRouche finds his best allies in the founders and the cultural conditions which existed when the Constitution was adopted. The ratification of the U.S. Federal constitution was accomplished by the circulation of the Federalist Papers and their debate and assimilation by a developed citizenry known at the time as the North American Latin farmer. The population of that time had twice the literacy rate, twice the physical productivity, and an average of twice the income of our adversary, the British. Earlier American patriots could look within themselves to find values worth more to each than life itself. But no more, LaRouche notes. Today, only a minority finds such values and those values are diluted.

8. The primary cause for the moral degeneration is the influence of the New Left and the correlated radical rock-drug-sex counterculture in shaping the way the majority of the population responded to the Viet Nam war experience.

9. LaRouche goes on to identify the Frankfurt School and the spread of outright Satanism through the New Left and counterculture as the key ideologies which must be understood, confronted, and superseded by reintroducing Americans to the classical principles of science, reason, and individual freedom directed at accomplishing the common good—the cultural matrix which must be again brought into being:

The New Left was launched in western Europe with key social democratic sponsorship during the second half of the 1960s ... it was not developed as a mass-based insurgency until the 1963-1965 interval. The radical rock-drug-sex counterculture was imported from the Satanist Aleister Crowley’s circles in Britain. The two combined [the New Left and the counterculture] did not emerge as a reshaping of the cultural matrix of the population until the 1968-1970 period, culminating in the 1969 countercultural “rainbow coalition” and Earth Day 1970.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

“Earth Day” in New York City, April 22, 1980.

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By 1967-68, the crash program features of NASA had been taken down, “consumerism” had been introduced as a hegemonic idea, and post-industrial utopianism replaced the fundamental cultural driver of scientific and technological progress.

10. LaRouche writes that the Frankfurt School’s primary intellectual, Georg Lukacs, had found the culture of western Christian civilization largely resistant to the spread of Bolshevism. To spread Bolshevism, Lukacs argued, the “cultural matrix of western Christian civilization must be destroyed.” Western civilization, LaRouche states, had been developed around the idea of an “inner-directed individual, the individual who is controlled by reason.” This, the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno identified as the “authoritarian” personality, which would inevitably become totalitarian or fascist. This, of course, is the primary defamation hurled at Donald Trump. According to Critical Race Theory, it is the central component of “whiteness.”

The Frankfurt School’s Georg Lukacs (left) worked to destroy the cultural matrix of western Christian civilization, while his associate, Theodore Adorno (right), identified as an “authoritarian personality” anyone who dared to oppose their authority.

CC/Einar Kvaran

Antifa demonstrators at the Trump Campaign rally in Phoenix, August 22, 2017.

Wikimedia Commons

“Whether it is the mob on the street, or the ‘cancel culture’ in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully you into abandoning your values, your heritage, and your way of life.” —Donald Trump.

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11. So, to unite the country, we have to put our shoulders to the wheel and rapidly recreate the cultural matrix of the Latin farmer, the high language and scientific imaginations of Poe, Longfellow, James Fenimore Cooper, Shakespeare, and Schiller, and the “harmony of interest” envisioned by Henry Carey. We need to reintroduce the fundamental idea that the human mind shares in the divine by the capacity to discover and understand the fundamental laws of the universe and create new laws and forms of “nature.” This, indeed, is the premise of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A.

President’s Trump’s Speech

In that context, let’s revisit the President’s speech. If you don’t hear the words of Lyndon LaRouche resonating here, you are not listening. President Trump declared that the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were what makes this country “exceptional.” The Constitution was “the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization ... the product of centuries of tradition, wisdom, and experience. No political document has done more to advance the human condition or propel the engine of progress,” the President began.

He then outlined the recent attacks on the very ideals embodied in those documents by:

These radicals, aided and abetted by liberal politicians, establishment media, and even large corporations.

Whether it is the mob on the street, or the “cancel culture” in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their way of life.

We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny. We will reclaim our history and our country for citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed.

The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we come from, and what we believe.... The left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.

White House

President Trump speaks at the U.S. National Archives on Constitution Day, September 17, 2020.

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The President went on to attack “Critical Race Theory,” that Frankfurt School invention, which is at the center of the synthetic ideologies driving the present riots—ideologies that permeate the nation’s schools and have been used to brainwash an entire generation. He noted:

A perfect example of Critical Race Theory was recently published by the Smithsonian Institution. This document alleged that concepts such as hard work, rational thinking, the nuclear family, and belief in God were not values that unite all Americans, but were, instead aspects of “whiteness.”

He said that the proponents of this ideology were trying to impose a new segregation rather than striving for the “prize” envisioned by Martin Luther King—

“where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”... Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, and the crusade against American history, are toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.

Trump has banned Critical Race Theory diversity seminars in the federal government. They had been widely taught. He also announced in his speech an offensive to restart the teaching of actual American history.

The Transition Integrity Project and

the Military Coup

On Monday, September 13, Attorney General Barr let loose on the current propaganda barrage driving plans for a military coup. “You know, liberals project,” he told the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass. “You know—the president is going to stay in office and seize power and all that s—-? I’ve never heard of that crap. I mean, I’m the Attorney General. I would think I would have heard about it.”

In the same interview, Barr also warned that the current insurrection is resulting in the country approaching “near mob rule.”

The fake “bulls—” that Attorney General Barr was talking about—that Trump would not leave the White House if a Democrat won the election—has been the chief stock-in-trade of the Transition Integrity Project since its founding in December 2019, when it was clear that impeachment of the President would fail. TIP was founded by Rosa Brooks, currently teaching law at Georgetown University, and Dr. Nils Gilman, Vice-President of Programs at the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute. This “weaponized narrative” has been repeatedly amplified by the deliberate full-spectrum information warfare operation being run against the President in the mainstream media since July.

While it presents itself as “non-partisan,” the main funding for TIP comes from the Protect Democracy Project and United to Protect Democracy. Both of these TIP funders themselves were launched in January 2017 by former Obama Administration lawyers, including former Deputy White House Counsel Ian Bassin, with the explicit purpose of undermining the Trump Administration. The Berggruen Foundation, funded by Nicolas Berggruen, is a major transnational elite, futurist fascist outpost, planning the major transformation of the world which must occur, according to them, because of climate change, and, more recently, due to COVID. They publish the WorldPost in conjunction with the Washington Post.

Halifax International Security Forum

Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon official who served as an aide to chickenhawk Michèle Flournoy. Brooks founded the Transition Integrity Project.

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Rosa Brooks is a former Obama Pentagon official who served as an aide to Michèle Flournoy, the chicken-hawk Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2012. Flournoy, who also headed Barack Obama’s Defense Department transition, is slated to become Secretary of Defense in a Harris/Biden administration. Brooks has served as a fellow at Anne Marie Slaughter’s New America Foundation (Slaughter was Director of Policy Planning at State under Hillary Clinton) and a fellow at the joint project of New America and Arizona State University on “the future of war.” Brooks knows much about weaponized narratives as the New America/ASU project spends substantive efforts studying precisely this topic. Prior to her ascent to the Pentagon, Brooks served as counsel to the President of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and remains on the advisory board there. The fact that someone associated with Soros held a major post at the Pentagon is itself a testament to the security damage wrought by Barack Obama.

On January 30, 2017, Rosa Brooks authored an article in Foreign Policy magazine titled, conveniently, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.” She favored impeachment as an immediate tool, making the same unconstitutional claim echoed by her Democratic Party colleagues, that Congress could impeach “for any reason whatsoever.” She also cited invoking the 25th Amendment, a tactic which came into being when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tried to implement it following the firing of James Comey. Finally, Brooks cited a military coup.

On September 7, 2017, an Australia-based, worldwide university consortium publication, The Conversation, picked up the coup idea and filled it out in an article called “Thinking the Unthinkable: Could There Be a Military Coup in the US?” authored by Luke Foster Middup, an academic specializing in “civilian-military relationships” at the British spy training nest, the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. Nonetheless, the idea was in the background as impeachment was pursued through the bogus Robert Mueller inquisition and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment show trial in the House.

DoD/Gregory Jones

Michèle Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for Obama, is slated to become Secretary of Defense in a Harris/Biden administration.

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The Pentagon, to date, has remained largely unscathed in the investigations of the sedition against the President. Evelyn Farkas, an ally of Brooks and Flournoy and the inheritor of the Eurasia and Ukraine portfolio at the Pentagon through 2015, after Brooks and Flournoy left the building, caused a stir in March of 2017 when she mouthed off on MSNBC about funneling classified information about the U.S./British spying operation against Trump to Congress. Stefan Halper, the British/CIA/FBI spy deployed against the Trump Campaign, clearly was paid for his work through the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Michael Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, has filed papers in which sources attributed the felonious leak of the classified intercepts of calls between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, to the Pentagon, and the ONA.

There were, of course, atrocious leaks and damaging media stories each and every time President Trump tried to implement his campaign promise to end the endless wars by pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Germany. And, because of the enormous power of the Pentagon and the even more powerful private defense contractors, known colloquially as the Beltway Bandits, President Trump has only been partially successful in implementing his promise to bring the troops home and end deadly, dangerous, and self-defeating American campaigns abroad.

In addition, Trump’s corrupt Republican Party allies have thrown war hawk after war hawk at him for the key posts at State, Defense, National Security Advisor, and Director of National Intelligence—all of whom have openly conspired to thwart the President. Many of these people, like General James Mattis and former White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly, had longstanding personal relationships with each other before serving in the Trump Administration.

According to Bob Woodward’s recent book, former Defense Secretary James Mattis was telling former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats already in May 2019, that there would come a time when “some of us” would have to physically remove Trump from office. General Mattis, along with Obama’s Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Joseph Dunford, were the primary authors of the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which declares Russia and China “revisionist” powers subject to military suppression, and sets the stage for a very, very dangerous new Cold War in which mistakes or incompetence could too readily lead to nuclear war. Michèle Flournoy has declared her outright “love” for Mattis in articles reviewing war policies under Trump.

U.S. Army/Amber I. Smith

Gen. James Mattis (USMC ret.) is part of a seditious military faction that plans to put an end to the Republic by removing the President in a military coup.

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Mattis, a bachelor who promotes himself as the “warrior monk,” is a devotee of the corrupt and genocidal Roman Empire, daily reading the writings of the stoic monster, Marcus Aurelius. He has had a decades-long relationship with both the fascist Satanist George Shultz and the equally genocidal Henry Kissinger. He takes his military strategy from British cold warriors, most prominently from Colin Gray.

In June 2020, the nationwide riots hit full force in Washington, D.C., becoming so violent at points that the Secret Service evacuated the President to a secure bunker in the White House.

When Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley joined Trump in a walk to St. John’s Church, to honor that national landmark set on fire the previous night by arsonists, the press and the insurrection corps within the ranks of retired generals went wild. Trump’s proposed use of the military to quell the riots was met with equal disdain and public condemnations, by Generals Mattis, Colin Powell, John Allen, David Petraeus, and John Kelly. Current Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a Beltway Bandit most recently located at Raytheon, denounced the proposal to use active duty troops. Milley apologized publicly for appearing with the President at St. John’s Church. Mattis told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a key player in the Pentagon’s disinformation runup to the Iraq War, that President Trump was “a threat to the Constitution.”

At the very same time, in late June 2020, TIP conducted a tabletop exercise using establishment Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans to map out the realities of a potential coup d’état. This exercise received a calculated PR rollout and has been widely publicized, in order to establish it as normative in the public mind.

In the exercise, the governing assumption is that the President is an unscrupulous, authoritarian would-be dictator seeking to consolidate his power with a base composed of “white power” and “extremist” networks, who would need to be neutralized and eliminated post-election. The Biden forces are portrayed as pluralist defenders of democracy whose adherence to “norms” would result in the loss of the United States to Trump’s fascism, unless they radically change their behavior.

As has been widely covered, there are two constants in the results. The election outcome will not be decided on election day because of widespread mail-in voting, a fact that is already being brought into being on the ground through Democratic Party efforts to promote widespread mail-in voting and accompanying fraud. In addition, the Harris/Biden allies in Silicon Valley and in the media say they will refuse to call the result on election day. Secondly, whether Trump or Biden wins, according to the faux exercise, there will be widespread street violence. The scenario in which Trump wins has the Democrats refusing to concede, seeking to fix the electoral college or abolish it, making demands to pack the Supreme Court, to assure statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., and to allow western states to secede from the Union.

There are two major uncertainties in the scenario according to TIP: how the military will respond, and how much control the Democrats have over the street rioters. According to the official papers of the exercise, the June military response in Washington, D.C., in effect a generals’ revolt, was “reassuring.” With respect to the rioters, it is unclear how totally they can be controlled even if “mobilized.” The exercise counsels that the Democrats should work earnestly now on establishing even more direct connections with these groups to assure their performance. As Colonel Black pointed out in his presentation of actual coup planning, like that undertaken by the very same Pentagon and State Department actors in Ukraine, the street forces in this type of action merely serve as cover for trained military provocateurs who kill people and steer the action.

On August 11, 2020, in the wake of the July propaganda campaign about TIP’s exercise, Defense One, a magazine controlled by Democratic Party funder and New America associate David Bradley, published an article by retired colonels John Nagl and Paul Yingling blatantly calling for a military coup. Bradley also formerly owned The Atlantic, but sold his majority share to the Emerson Collective, an entity owned by Laureen Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs and a major force in Kamala Harris’ political career.

There was an immediate reflexive backlash to the call for the coup and Defense One followed up, on August 18, with a call to make this a matter of reasoned debate within the military, rather than a reflexive rejection. That article, if you can believe it, was authored by none other than Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College’s Centre for Joint Operations, Institute for Military Operations. A sociologist by training, his research focuses on military politics, the military profession and the conduct of war.

So, as might be expected, NATO has entered the fray. On September 4, 2020, The Atlantic further stoked the flames in this seditious campaign by running the completely fake claim, under Jeffrey Goldberg’s byline, that Donald Trump routinely disparages the troops as “suckers” and “losers.”

The reaction to all of this must be first and foremost an overwhelming electoral victory for Donald Trump, demoralizing the seditionists. This must be accompanied by a political program, based in Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws for economic recovery of the United States, which puts shovels in the ground and begins to turn on a massive economic recovery, with major emphasis put on large-scale infrastructure and rebuilding the nation’s cities. This undertaking, as Lyndon LaRouche specified, is not only necessary for the nation’s economic survival. It effectively separates the armed insurrectionists from their political allies. The cultural offensive identified by the President in his Constitution Day speech must also be immediately implemented—mobilized and taken out to every nook and cranny of the nation.

At the same time, the networks identified here must be put under full-scale surveillance and law enforcement scrutiny for the crime of sedition, including the retired generals and their allies in the Pentagon. Colonel Black’s warning must be circulated as if it were Paul Revere’s warning, revisited via the viral internet. The investigation of these insurrectionists must be a facet of what Attorney General Barr and John Durham have been considering with respect to the longstanding operation against this President. How far back does this actually go?

Nothing less will ensure the survival of not only this Republic but, also, given the clear and present danger posed by the perspective of the generals and chicken hawks like Michèle Flournoy, the world as a whole.

II. The Belt & Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge

Schiller Institute Labor Day Conference

War Drive Towards Armageddon or a

New Paradigm Among Sovereign Nations United by the Common Aims of Mankind?

September 5-6, 2020

PANEL 3

The Belt and Road Initiative Becomes the

World Land-Bridge: FDR’s Unfinished Business

Opening Remarks by Lyndon LaRouche and Dennis Speed

Schiller Institute

Dennis Speed

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Dennis Speed: Our conference is dedicated to Schiller Institute founding members Phil Rubinstein and Ted Andromidas, who both recently passed away. Many have lost loved ones, particularly in the last months as a result of the terrible pandemic as well as other reasons. We also dedicate this conference to them and, recognizing that this is the 75th anniversary year of the end of World War II, to the veterans and for that matter, the civilians, who died in that great conflict. We also dedicate this conference to the victims of the 9/11 attack.

Later this year, the Schiller Institute hopes to carry out, in whatever venue is necessary, its original intent to perform the Beethoven Missa Solemnis in their honor, which had been originally planned for this coming weekend.

Let us now go to a video of Lyndon LaRouche, a co-founder of the Schiller Institute, who passed away February 12, 2019. The video is from his visit to Brazil in 2002, when he was named an honorary citizen of São Paolo.

EIRNS

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. in São Paolo, Brazil, in 2002.

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Announcer: The ceremony at the City Council was only one of a series of meetings that Lyndon and Helga LaRouche held in the course of their week-long visit to Brazil. The visit began with a unique dialogue at a conference held in the auditorium of the Latin American Parliament, at an event sponsored by the São Paolo ADESG, which is the association of graduates of the prestigious Superior War College.

Lyndon LaRouche: We are now at a point that the existing definitions, axioms, and postulates of the system which has increasingly ruled the entire world, for the past 35 years, have now demonstrated themselves to be a catastrophic failure. And for reasons I shall indicate, we are now at the point, where we can not expect this system to last, in its present form, for longer than a few months. It might not even last another week.

What’s the solution? As I said at the outset, the problem today is denial. People are afraid. They’re afraid of power. They’re afraid of the power of the IMF. They’re afraid of the power of the United States. And therefore, they say, we have to play by the generally accepted rules among the nations of the IMF and by the United States. Therefore, when you try to solve a problem, you say, “We have to find a solution within the rules! You can’t violate the rules. You’ve got to find an alternative, within the rules.” But what I’ve indicated to you, there are no solutions within the rules!

This has been a long-term process of decadence, of culture and of economy. We no longer have the kind of leaders in politics we had 20 years ago, or earlier. Our people coming out of our universities do not have the competence of people coming out of universities a generation ago. We are in a decadent culture, a decadent system, which is destroying us! And you’re not going to find solutions in a system, which has shown that the definitions, axioms, and postulates of the system ensure destruction!

But people say, “But you’ve got to go by the rules!” What are the rules? The rules are precisely the axioms, the definitions, the postulates which have destroyed us!

Why can’t we change the rules? Aren’t we human beings? Don’t we represent nations which have the—Read the, you can get this out of the first chapter of Genesis: Are man and woman not made equally in the image of the Creator of the Universe, and endowed with these powers? Do not we have the authority, above anything on this planet, to change the rules?

We have the power. That’s what sovereignty means. Sovereignty means the power to make the rules by means of which we can survive. That doesn’t mean we can make any rules we want to. It means we have to have responsibility and competence; but we have the right to deliberate.

Dennis Small

The LaRouche Program for the Planet:

1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs

This is the edited transcription of Dennis Small’s presentation to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6, 2020. Mr. Small is Ibero-American Editor for Executive Intelligence Review. Subheads, and embedded links to source material, have been added.

Schiller Institute

Dennis Small

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As the title of this panel indicates, Franklin Delano Roosevelt left us—all of us—some unfinished business. So did Lyndon LaRouche.

In his famous January 6, 1941 State of the Union address, FDR spoke about the “future days” we were fighting for, in which four essential human freedoms would prevail—everywhere in the world. Here’s what he said:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

Note that FDR insisted that this mission was “attainable in our own time and generation.” It was attainable, but it has remained unfulfilled. It is FDR’s charge to the future we must now take up, not just for the United States, but for the entire planet. That is the agenda we bring before the required P-5 summit.

The Greatest Danger Since the Black Death

Mankind today is facing the greatest danger probably since the 14th Century Black Death: a possible war among nuclear-armed super-powers; a pandemic which continues its deadly march across the planet; a financial blowout that will vaporize $2 quadrillion of worthless financial paper quicker than you can count the number of zeros in quadrillion—it’s 15 zeros, by the way; a physical economic collapse that has thrown nearly half the planet’s labor force into de facto unemployment; and widespread cultural depravity and mass psychosis in broad swaths of the population in most countries—not unlike the flagellants and the hedonist fools of the 14th Century.

We are in the midst of a systemic collapse of an entire system. Institutions that people once relied on have ceased functioning. Entire populations have lost their moorings, and will not return to sanity, or safety, until a new system, with new institutions and values that work, is brought into existence—everywhere in the world. That is the intent of the LaRouche Plan for 1.5 billion new productive jobs for the world, emphatically including 50 million here in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic did not cause this crisis. It simply ripped the veil off what was already there, and had been created by 50 years of looting by City of London and Wall Street policies. Back in 1985, 35 years ago, in a paper titled “The Role of Economic Science in Projecting Pandemics as a Feature of Advanced Stages of Economic Breakdown,” Lyndon LaRouche warned:

The conditions for economically determined pandemics [were being created and had to be reversed]. We are most concerned with the effects on health, as the nutritional throughput per-capita falls below some relative biological minimum, and also the effect of collapse of sanitation and other relevant aspects of basic economic infrastructure upon the conditions of an undernourished population.

The Unemployment Factor

Let’s look at one, central feature of this problem—unemployment; real unemployment. Over the last 50 years of British free trade and globalization, high-skilled industrial jobs in the advanced sector have been increasingly replaced by the “gig economy,” and in the Third World, the so-called “informal sector” has taken over like a cancer. By and large, these are people who don’t actually produce anything useful—they hustle to make money, to barely survive from day to day. When the pandemic hit, the whole house of cards came crumbling down, and what people foolishly thought was “employment” (making money, as opposed to engaging in useful production) quickly became exposed as de facto unemployment.

Figure 1

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Look at Figure 1. We estimate that today there is a 46% real unemployment rate worldwide. That amounts to 1.6 billion human beings out of a world labor force of some 3.5 billion. In Africa there is a 65% unemployment rate—and 50% of the population live in poverty. In Ibero-America it isn’t much better; 42% unemployed. In the U.S. and Europe, real unemployment today stands at about 25%. In China, however, it is only 4%. China has also reduced its poverty phenomenally, lifting 850 million people out of poverty in 40 years, and they intend to get the remaining 30 million people out by the end of this year.

It would appear that China, at least, is completing some of FDR’s unfinished business.

This massive world unemployment of 1.5 billion is the single greatest loss of wealth, of real economic value, imaginable. Why?

What Is Economics?

Let’s start with economics. What is economics? Here’s a short definition, obtained by that fine art known as “Googling”:

The proper and prudent management of the scarce resources of a society, family or individual, with the objective of satisfying its material needs.

This is a gem, because it contains at least five gross scientific errors in just 23 words: resources aren’t scarce; national finances are not the same as a family budget; satisfying so-called “material needs” is just Benthamite hedonism in fancy clothes; and on and on. This goes hand-in-hand with the typical definition of “employment,” such as that provided by Professor Oscar Cooley of Ohio Northern University:

Employment signifies the state of anyone who is doing what, under the circumstances, he most wants to do. Such a person is fully employed.

Welcome to Economics 101 in pretty much every university in the world.

Compare that to LaRouche’s definition of physical economy:

The manner in which the human species utilizes its unique characteristic of creativity, to achieve the continuous successful reproduction of that characteristic in the physical universe.

In other words, in real physical economy, human creativity, per se, is both the input and the output of your production function. So how do you measure that? How do you guide your economic decisions? LaRouche explains that his own central discovery and advance in Leibniz’s science of physical economy, is to have established the causal relationship between advances in human creativity, in both physical sciences and classical culture as well, and measurable increases in what LaRouche calls “potential relative population-density.”

In Operation Juárez, LaRouche explains:

Economics is essentially a study of the principles by means of which a people is able to produce the material preconditions for its own continued existence. It is these physical-economic issues which are fundamental; monetary matters, such as currency, credit, banking, and debt, are a subordinate issue.... Therefore, we take as our first measurement in economic science a quantity we call potential relative population-density.

If you don’t have a sufficient rate of increase of creativity and resulting scientific and technological advances, you will not meet those material preconditions, and the power of your society to develop—its potential relative population-density—will fall further and further behind its actual population.

This is what has happened over the last 50 years, since the end of FDR’s Bretton Woods system in 1971. This is what has happened because LaRouche’s clear warnings and solutions were ignored, and he was then demonized when he was unjustly jailed in 1989. This is why we have a pandemic today, and why nearly a million people have died unnecessarily—from that cause alone.

How long must this criminal insanity go on?

Not only that. Prince Philip’s “Green” policies—which have taken over much of the world, including the U.S. Democratic Party—will make all of this far worse.

By de-nuclearizing and de-carbonizing the economy, they would reduce the human population to some 1.5 billion people. By decorticating it, using drugs, depraved culture and entertainment, and radical Jacobin violence of the sort we are witnessing in many U.S. cities today, they intend to wipe out the spark of human creativity itself—which alone can pull humanity back from the brink.

A Way Out

There is, of course, a way out—are we not human?!

We must launch a world recovery of the physical economy by putting the existing financial system through bankruptcy reorganization, and issuing state-backed credit to finance the creation of 1.5 billion new, productive jobs. Three months ago, LaRouche PAC issued a 30-page pamphlet detailing how this can be done, prepared by a national team of LaRouche movement organizers from Seattle, Houston, Detroit, and Virginia. Here is a broad outline of our proposals, for further elaboration.

Because we are facing a pandemic, we start with a crash program to create a world health system, consisting of viable national capabilities in every country in the world, to stop the COVID-19 pandemic dead in its tracks. What is needed is to return the United States to the standard of 4.5 hospital beds per thousand residents which was established by the 1946 Hill-Burton law (today the U.S. has dropped to 2.8), and we must bring the underdeveloped world up to an equivalent standard (most of which have today an average of less than 1 bed per thousand). This will require over 600,000 new hospital beds in the U.S., and a good 10 million worldwide. Which will, of course, require massive construction of new hospital facilities, adequate supplies of ventilators and other equipment, expanded staffing with doctors and nurses, and so on.

This is a daunting challenge, but it can be done with a crash global project, in which the more developed nations help provide engineering brigades to join with local capabilities in poorer counties to get the job done—and train millions of workers in the process. All this, of course, while we are in the process of developing as fast as we possibly can, with international cooperation, a vaccine which will make a serious dent in this pandemic’s reproduction capabilities.

The World Land-Bridge Network

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Health, Electricity, Water, and Rail

In health, we are talking about 6 million new jobs in the U.S. and 100 million globally. These are direct jobs. Health infrastructure, however, is not a stand-alone. You don’t plop a brand-new hospital in the middle of a desert, or an urban slum for that matter, without water and electricity. The electricity needs for the new hospitals alone rise to 100 gigawatts worldwide. But today over 1 billion people lack any electricity at all, so building out those requirements is going to employ another 10 million people. Nuclear energy, first fission and then fusion, has to be the area of world concentration to meet these needs, as we discussed in Panel 2 yesterday.

Fresh water is another vital aspect of infrastructure. FDR’s TVA is a model for such projects, including NAWAPA for North America, and Trans-Aqua for Africa —which alone will create some 5 million new jobs, out of the 20 million such water projects will directly create worldwide.

And then there is rail. High-speed rail and maglev rail especially, as the backbone of industrial corridors spanning the globe, as Lyndon LaRouche has long emphasized. China has built more high-speed rail lines than the rest of the world combined; they had 36,000 km as of August 2020. They intend to double that by 2035. In the U.S. we have exactly zero kilometers of high-speed rail. China has also played the central role in extending rail lines across Asia into Europe, and to Africa as well, where they are beginning this process as part of their Belt and Road Initiative.

The U.S. needs to build some 64,000 km of electrified, double-tracked rail lines; and the world rail requirement is of about 320,000 km. These must be linked by major projects such as a Bering Strait tunnel linking Alaska and Russia; a Darién Gap link to connect South America to Central and North America; the Sakhalin bridge to join Japan and Russia; a Gibraltar tunnel going from Spain to Africa; the Kra Canal in Thailand to vastly reduce shipping times and congestion in the Straits of Malacca; and so on. We estimate this will directly generate 1 million new productive jobs in the U.S., and 5 million worldwide.

Adding up just those major areas of infrastructure projects, we will be directly creating 15 million new jobs for the U.S., and 135 million for the world. But these are just the direct jobs. The total number of indirect jobs created will be vastly greater, anywhere from 4 to 10 times as many. Moreover, infrastructure projects, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or LaRouche’s comparable World Land-Bridge, produce productivity, so the overall power of the economy and labor force will be dramatically increased, in ways defying any simple mathematical measurement.

Shift the Internal Proportions of

the Labor Force

What we can say, is that the internal proportions of the labor force will shift dramatically over the next generation towards full employment in productive activity.

Unemployment will drop to some 2%; 50% of the labor force will be engaged in goods-producing industrial activity; and an additional 5% will be in the all-important category of R&D activities. As we discussed in yesterday’s exciting Panel 2, fusion and space exploration are among the key frontiers for coming decades.

This unending quest for universal physical principles is the real scientific driver of a global recovery program. And this is probably the most salient area for potential cooperation among the United States, China, Russia, India, and other space-faring nations.

None of this can be done by one country alone. China is the decisive partner for the U.S. in many of these endeavors; for example, the construction of a grid of high-speed rail lines. But neither can a world recovery be accomplished without the United States. The 50 million new productive jobs to be created in the U.S. may only be a small fraction, 3%, of the world total of 1.5 billion; but it is the decisive fraction, both in terms of physical economy as well as politically.

The U.S. and the Chinese cannot be decoupled from each other—at least not if we want the world to survive. Working together, we can embark on finally finishing FDR’s unfinished business.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is also why the full exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, and his ideas, is the key to global recovery. Thank you very much.

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko

Irreconcilable Problems Are Pushing

The World Towards Catastrophe

This is the edited transcription of the opening remarks by Natalia Vitrenko to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Dr. Vitrenko is a former member of parliament and was a candidate for president of Ukraine in 1999. Subheads have been added.

Schiller Institute

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko

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Dear conference participants, dear Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, I would like to thank the organizers of this conference, which is on a topic of extraordinary importance for the world community. And thank you for allowing me, a politician from Ukraine, the opportunity to speak.

Events in the world today cannot fail to alarm all people who care about the fate of their own country and of world civilization as a whole. We are facing an acute aggravation of irreconcilable contradictions. History teaches us that such contradictions are what lead to world wars. And if a Third World War comes, a nuclear war, that will indeed be Armageddon. How real is this possibility? Unfortunately, the facts stubbornly indicate that the threat is real.

First and foremost, the world right now has been left without any limitations whatsoever on strategic and tactical offensive weapons. In 2009, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1) expired. The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the U.S.A. and Russia has been terminated. This means that the United States can place mobile cruise missiles in European countries such as Romania and Poland.

Russia has stated that if these plans are implemented, it will deploy ground-launched cruise missiles of its own, and that not only the launch sites of these U.S. missiles would be destroyed, but also the places where the decisions would have been made to launch missiles against Russia. And this might be not only on European territory.

The treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), which came into effect on February 5, 2011, expires in 2021. Moscow’s call to extend it has met with no positive reaction from the Washington side. That means that in February of next year, the world will enter a new and completely unrestricted phase of the arms race. That constitutes a threat to provoke a Third World War.

In my view, that is exactly what NATO is preparing for. The NATO alliance has become a supranational agency, which brushes aside the UN Charter and international law, which would be the basis for defending just and peaceful ways of resolving any conflicts. In violation of all previous agreements, NATO is persistently approaching the borders of Russia. This is a huge geopolitical problem.

I would like to take this opportunity to propose that our conference should appeal to the leaders of the U.S.A. and Russia to extend the New START Treaty.

The Oligarchy

There are likewise irreconcilable contradictions between labor and capital (the impoverishment of working people, while the incomes of the oligarchy increase); between the leading capitalist countries and the Third World countries; between the developed countries’ requirements for natural resources (above all, energy) and their limited ability to supply them from their own territory. The global financial bubble of derivatives is growing, which means an increase, as well, of the threat that it will explode.

Let me give you some facts: According to data from Oxfam, 82% of all the wealth that is produced is in the hands of 1% of the people on the planet. Meanwhile, the incomes of the poorest part of the world’s population are not growing. There is stunning inequality among countries, as measured in GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity). World Bank statistics show that in 2018 this indicator was 60- to 70-fold lower in Niger and Burundi than in Switzerland and the U.S.A. ($1,100 and $700 per capita vs. $65,000 and $62,900, respectively).

A clear example of the rising clashes over energy resources is the U.S. pressure against building both the Nord Steam 2 and the South Stream pipelines. Nonetheless, the Americans keep on with the same refrain: the supremacy of law, the principles of free trade, and so on and so forth.

Regarding the threats to the world economy from the growth of national debts and of derivatives, suffice it to recall the warnings of our Lyndon LaRouche, about the monstrous social and economic consequences: the deaths of several billion people, if the derivatives bubble explodes.

It must be noted that the growth of tension in all these areas is taking place despite the work of powerful international institutions, which are supposed to prevent such conflicts, or at least settle them quickly and fairly. I mean the United Nations Organization, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). But international law is not working, and more and more issues on the world scene are being resolved by force. Various types of sanctions, insurgencies, and armed conflicts, “color revolutions” and coups d’état run from abroad: these all provide convincing confirmation that this is the case.

The main orchestrator and director of these processes is the United States. But if only, at least, they themselves were to exhibit unshakable might and stability on their own part! No, indeed! Today in the U.S.A., all the preconditions have come together for a destructive social explosion. The American Democrats have refined their “color revolution” techniques in various countries around the world. But after Hillary Clinton’s recent advice to U.S. Presidential candidate Joe Biden not to accept a victory by Trump under any circumstances, it became clear that a “color revolution” is being readied for the United States, as well. The battle-to-the-death between the Trump nationalists and the Democratic trans-nationalists could lead to a civil war and disintegration of the country. And that is an enormous problem for the world community.

Under these conditions, any strengthening of the power of Russia and China is like death for the U.S.A. This explains their persistent efforts to make Ukraine continue the war in the Donbas region and to install their own henchman in Belarus to replace Lukashenka.

Belarus

First, on Belarus, a country I know well, and visit practically every year.

On August 9, Alexander Lukashenka won a clear-cut victory in the presidential elections there. It was a victory he had earned, since during the 26 years of his Presidency, Belarus has revitalized its economy and is developing it well. And they have preserved the state-owned enterprises as a reliable base for solving social issues, public ownership of land, free health care, housing and utilities at affordable prices, culture, and sports. They have done this while integrating with Russia in the “Union State.”

Ukraine is a complete opposite. Here are the results:

During the past 26 years, the population of Belarus has shrunk by 5% (500,000 people), while Ukraine’s has fallen by 40% (20 million people). In Ukraine, we are now in the seventh year of bloody slaughter in the Donbas, where 15,000 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands wounded, and millions of people have been made refugees. Average GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity) in Belarus has increased 18 times over, during Lukashenka’s Presidency, while in Ukraine it had reached only 80% of its 1990 level by 2019. According to World Bank statistics for 2020, the national income per capita in Belarus was almost double that of Ukraine ($6,280 vs. $3,370 per capita). In Ukraine, however, the oligarchs have multiplied. These are billionaires and millionaires, who deposit their hundreds of millions of dollars of profit offshore or spend them on parasitical consumption.

The Belarusians know this and see it themselves. That is why 80% of an 84% turnout voted for the incumbent President. And then, suddenly, the completely unknown housewife Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who received 10% of the votes, declared herself the winner! There is no evidence for this, but the West is vehemently supporting her!

The explanation is simple: the U.S. and EU governments decided to dump Lukashenka and hand power to their puppet, in order to loot Belarus, force its people to their knees, and turn them into enemies of Russia. And as soon as Belarus is in the grip of NATO, its land, banks, factories, and infrastructure (just look at Ukraine) will be in the hands of foreign masters.

Just as in Ukraine, the engine of slander against Lukashenka, and throughout this “white revolution” in Belarus, is the Nazis. They have been trained, prepared, and generously financed by the West (the West has spent $6 billion on supporting the opposition), so that the Nazis have sprinkled their metastases throughout society. They are not yet visible. So far, you see women in white kerchiefs, with white flowers, peaceful demonstrations, songs, and performances.

We have already been through this. There are different nuances, but it’s the same hybrid war. Under the sheep’s clothing are concealed the fangs of a wolf, who uses slogans about concern for the Belarusian language to sow Russophobia and hatred of everything Russian. Using a slogan about national memory, they are preparing to rewrite history, making collaborationists into heroes, and trampling over the deeds of our fathers and grandfathers who defeated fascism.

Using a slogan about concern for business, they are preparing total privatization and the free sale of land. Using a slogan about the need for their own church, they are preparing to wipe out Orthodoxy. Using a slogan about concern for the welfare of Belarusians, they are pushing things towards war with Russia under NATO auspices and with American and EU money.

A Miracle To Prevent Armageddon

In that case, the fate of Ukraine awaits Belarus. Ukraine lost its ties with Russia, agreed to be the handmaid of the West and cannon fodder for NATO, and thus completely lost its sovereignty and is inexorably moving towards catastrophe. And it will drag the European community, at minimum, into the maelstrom of its problems.

After the orchestration of two revolutions, in 2004 and 2014, Ukraine has become a place of civil war, a destroyed economy, and the most destitute population in Europe. It is a country where Hitler’s henchmen have been rehabilitated and made into heroes; where Nazi bands rampage in the streets (under the protection of law enforcement); and where journalists and politicians are beaten or killed, and people are burned alive for political reasons (as happened in Odessa on May 2, 2014). Nobody is investigating any of this; nobody is punishing the culprits. Ukraine has essentially been transformed into a Nazi state, aimed towards war with Russia.

Today the same kind of coup, with the same goals, is being carried out in Belarus. Armenia and Kazakhstan will be next. The policy of the West, led by the U.S.A., is to drag the former republics of the U.S.S.R. into NATO, using fascist and nationalist parties and movements to do this.

Beyond any doubt, all this deepens the irreconcilable contradictions, increasing the threat of a Third World War. The American film “Armageddon” concluded:

In order to prevent a catastrophe, what’s needed is a miracle, or the joint efforts of the best of the best, together with the all the technological power created by mankind.

I think that our conference should initiate a Committee for the Salvation of World Civilization. I believe that Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the person worthy to head it up. And then we shall make our contribution to preventing Armageddon and saving humanity.

Michele Geraci

Helping the West Understand China Today

This is the edited transcription of the opening remarks by Michele Geraci to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Mr. Geraci is a former Italian Undersecretary of State for Economic Development. Subheads have been added.

Schiller Institute

Michele Geraci

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The first item that I would like to touch on is to give a little update on the situation between Italy and China following the signing of the MoU [memorandum of understanding] last year. We, being very objective, recognized that given all the issues that we heard until a few minutes ago for the world, including the pandemic, and the impossibility to travel, the progress has been relatively slow.

The political situation has also been charged; the rise of China, as we all know, is being perceived in Europe as more of a threat than an opportunity. The feeling that I have in my country is that a little bit, the government, a little bit, public opinion is shifting more into the conservative side of the equation, therefore, focussing more on the threat which prevents doing business; retrenching rather than looking forward to the opportunities.

I think it is not good progress. In a way, we have to excuse it because we have the pandemic. We have written off for the whole year, for example, the 50th anniversary of the diplomatic relationship between Italy and China, the year of culture and tourism that was supposed to be 2020, has all been moved to next year. So, as always, there is a crisis and there is an opportunity. We haven’t done much, but in a way, thanks to the lockdown and the impossibility to do anything, we have the excuse to say, we have not wasted time; we really could not have done any better.

China’s Model

The challenge is now, that if the world opens up again to a certain extent, we do not waste the second opportunity. So, this is the first thing I want to mention. I also want to leave with you, with the audience, with Helga, that everyone has a potential action point for practical things that need to be done.

Second point is that on the volume of infrastructure, the map that we saw before with the bridges and tunnels around the world is indeed in my view an extension of what China has done in its own economy. I have been lucky enough to live in China for 10 years, and I’ve seen the transformation of a whole society, pretty much based on a number of pillars. One is the management of the exchange rate, trade, and interest rates; so let’s say the finance part that has been kept managed by the government. And the other one has been the big investment in migration from rural to urban that has led to the development of transport and infrastructure. So, one of the key pillars of China’s successful development model over the last 40 years, has been infrastructure.

I am one of the big supporters to see this model being extended beyond the borders, and hence of course, the Belt and Road to Central Asia, in Southeast Asia, in Africa. And maybe we can go beyond the meaning of “initiative” that China is pushing per se, and look at the world as a place that needs to be connected.

Beyond Simple Reactions

Everything that we have said is very much in line with the initiative of individual member states; everyone would like to do infrastructure. It’s very much in line—and this is an important point—with the European Union. The European Union finally is starting to do something—not enough, but beyond the practical help that the European Union is doing in terms of recovery funds, issuing bonds. Materially, the amount of money is completely negligible, but the narrative within the member states seems to be changing and a push towards investment is taking hold.

Even public opinion, seeing the quality of local infrastructure, is pushing for government to act. As we know, in our liberal democracy, governments do not always lead. Sometimes—very often, unfortunately—they follow, because they need to follow electoral goals, of course. This puts in crisis a little bit the role of the markets and the state.

We are also debating where this line should be. How much of these new initiatives, how much of this cooperation with China and other countries for the development of Africa, for the development of Asia. Who should do it? Who are the actors, the agents? Where is the line between the government, or the state, and the markets? We seem to be looking at China with a little bit of suspicion and a little bit of admiration, because we do know that in China the line between state and market is moved where the state takes a bigger role.

Regardless of the statistics and privatization, we do know that the state is very much present there. We have seen the numbers, the results, GDP, poverty reduction has been mentioned now. We’re looking at China manufacturing, the faster race between China and the United States on semi-conductors, which is another theme. And we do look at it, worrying that maybe our market-driven model needs to be readjusted within the framework of a liberal democracy, of course. From an economic point of view, we need to find another mix. One potential way that we are looking at is liberal democracy with a bigger state intervention, but of a better quality than we had with the holding companies around Europe in the 1970s and ’80s before the privatization went ahead.

A Message from History

My third and last point is, in a way, an appeal to all China experts. I’m witnessing the same situation that happened in 1947 during the Dixie mission to China by the United States. A member of the U.S. contingent, Col. [David] Barrett, was reporting there was a civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, that the Communists were kind of getting the upper hand, probably winning. It could have even been a party with whom the United States should have discussed aid, because they were winning. And maybe for the future role of the Communist Party in China. So, the report was not quite taking sides, but looking at the Communists as a potential partner. Of course, this was unsuccessful. Col. Barrett was dismissed, he was demoted and delayed promotion. Why?—because this is what is happening now.

Experts on China are mistakenly taken for people who do propaganda that is pro-China. So, this is exactly what is happening in the West. People who narrate the achievements of China get misunderstood for the voice of the Chinese propaganda system, and they get dismissed. This is a big problem that we have. We do want to make sure that policymakers this time don’t make the same mistake that they made in 1947. They do listen. Because experts are here to tell what’s happening.

Always when I talk to my members of the Italian government, my current members of the Italian government always tell me, remember when Mr. Bill Gates would come rushing by to his office and say, “Steve Jobs has created a new Windows system better than ours.” He was exactly doing this, not to praise the achievements of Apple per se, but also to have some input in his workforce. Now, the population, if you bring it back to the state level, would react to that change, whether it’s a positive or a negative.

So, my second appeal is that—for people who engage in these areas of infrastructure development, railways, China, Asia—I think we need to make the voices heard and not misunderstood. We are informing—in my case, my people, my government, of what is happening. And the more we highlight the successes, the more people should listen.

This is why: This trade war between the United States and China should be looked at from a factual point of view. We all understand why this is happening; it would happen even if China were a democracy. It’s a commercial fight; a rising economy that needs to be dealt with. Maybe we did not see it coming over the last 20 years, let’s say since 2001 when China entered the WTO.

But export restrictions, restricting supply of components to China—semi-conductor technology and so on—of course has the risk that it would see China accelerate along its path of developing indigenous technology. And it would make China even less reliant on the foreign supplies. This is the tricky thing. The West may get some short-term gains, but if we then take into account the stock of goods that China has, the speed at which China may increase its research and development, actually the time gap that would leave China out of supplies may not be, if anything,— there may not even be such a time. But in one of the worst-case scenarios for China, it may be shorter, in the best case, than we expected.

So, we also need to be careful about this. And therefore, when we say China is doing this big advancement in the semi-conductor business, we are not just praising China per se. We are just warning that some tactic may not be as effective.

Hassan Daud Butt

The Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan

Economic Corridor: Harbinger of Sustainable Growth

This is the edited transcript of Hassan Daud Butt’s opening remarks to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Mr. Butt is a former Project Director of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and CEO of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Financial Board of Investment & Trade. Subheads have been added.

Schiller Institute

Hassan Daud Butt

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Ladies and Gentlemen, first of all, let me acknowledge the efforts of the organizers of this important event, and this brings all of us together to talk about something which is very important, especially for our region.

At this time, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to highlight that in the recent years, the global economic landscape has changed dramatically. The main driver of this change has been technology, credit liberalization, free capital movement, advances in communication and transport infrastructure, and the creation of cross-border supply chains. This, along with globalization, while on one hand brings various challenges, it also creates numerous opportunities.

However, I believe that the world should be connected and not flat. At this juncture, may I offer a beacon of hope for the participating states. The Belt and Road Initiative, initiated by His Excellency, President Xi Jinping, reflects the far-sighted economic vision of the Chinese leadership for opening gateways for cooperation amongst the countries along the Belt and Road. Connecting four major civilizations, the Initiative has offered a new development model, preaching mutual benefit and win-win cooperation. As we all know, the Initiative defines five major priorities starting from policy coordination, infrastructure connectivity, unimpeded trade, and financial integration, and of course, connecting people. This connectivity is the heart of the Belt and Road region, and is primarily about linking regions to the world, bringing prosperity and sustainable growth in Asia and beyond.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Belt and Road Initiative’s geographical scope is constantly expanding. I was lucky to participate in both of the Belt and Road Forums held in 2017 and 2019. I can see that this partnership is accounting for about 65% of the world’s population and around one-third of the world GDP. Therefore, it can play an important role in terms of economic prosperity in the challenging times that we are all living in.

Highway Network of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

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Ladies and Gentlemen, the Belt and Road construction should usher in a new sustainable human civilization and this can bring the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and of course, Pakistan, at the forefront.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is the iconic project of the Belt and Road Initiative. This is not me stating this; this was stated by [Chinese Foreign Minister] Mr. Wang Yi during his visit to Pakistan just recently. The government of Pakistan also considers the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as a long-term development project, as it has the potential to serve as a corridor with multiple doors, connecting China with Central Asia, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The government is expanding the scope of CPEC so that it becomes a gateway of prosperity. Not only linking Pakistan and China and creating job opportunities, it brings poverty reduction and alleviation, and development, and boosts sustainable industrial growth.

Socio-Economic Development

So, we are looking at socio-economic development through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Imran Khan Niazi, the scope of the project has been expanded to increase agriculture, socio-economic development, poverty alleviation, and healthcare, so that it can have its outreach to less-developed areas of our country.

As we speak, 22 projects worth USD $28 billion are in various stages of implementation, contributing to the development of Pakistan. While we enter the second phase, we are readying ourselves for the industrialization of Pakistan and looking at sustainable investment. The biggest dividend will be through the industrial cooperation creating opportunities for jobs and growth. The government is also taking steps to encourage private sector participation and creating an enabling environment that can reduce risk and create that full factor for investors to come.

I would also like to highlight that the special economic zone under CPEC is not just China-specific. It offers investment packages and liberal incentives for anyone to come and invest in Pakistan and the CPEC. Additionally, 15 energy projects in IPP (independent power producer) mode are being implemented to address the energy crisis of Pakistan. This is actually expanding our energy basket, and we are looking at ingenious sources of energy in the second phase of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

I would also like to highlight that the port city of Gwadar is the heart of CPEC, with the potential to become the trans-shipment hub for the region as its connectivity to western China, as well as providing the shortest route to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. This will, inshallah [if Allah wills it], boost our economy. CPEC will not only benefit the entirety of Pakistan, but it will also contribute to regional peace, stability, and prosperity.

CPEC is not the name of a single route, but a complete extensive package of cooperation, initiatives, projects, industrial parks, agricultural development, and certainly power generation, tourism, and financial cooperation.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Pakistan of today, under the leadership of Prime Minister Imran Khan, is moving towards the path of economic prosperity, and through CPEC, we are improving tourism, human resource development, transfer of knowledge and technology, besides developing rural advancement in the country, which is leading towards a true inclusive growth. The impact of such development initiatives is visible from the fact that Pakistan is transforming into a better place for foreign investors from other countries, including the Middle East and other areas, and China. I expect that our friends will come and look at Pakistan as a place suitable for their investment because of the large size of our population.

I strongly believe that for inclusive development, we need to work with our partner countries to develop on the success of the Belt and Road Initiative and create a solid foundation for deepening cooperation. That reminds me of Mr. Deng Xiaoping, who said that we will cross the river by touching the pebbles. The first phase of CPEC is over, and now we are progressing into the second phase of CPEC. As it is said, it does not matter how fast you are moving, as long as you are moving.

Marcelo Muñoz

One Belt, One Road: A Project for the 21st Century

This is the edited transcription of the opening remarks by Marcelo Muñoz to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Mr. Muñoz is the founder and President Emeritus of Cátedra China, Spain’s leading thinktank on China and the New Silk Road, as well as the dean of Spanish businessmen in China. Subheads have been added.

Schiller Institute

Marcelo Muñoz

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One Belt, One Road (OBOR) is the name that China has given to the project launched in 2013 and has scheduled to complete its first stage in 2049. Because of its extraordinary relevance, we will indicate some of its characteristics.

First, OBOR is a medium- to long-term project, which is something that is not very frequent in our western history, at least not these days when electoral short-termism prevails. In China’s history, on the other hand, it is very frequent. The Great Wall was built over a period of 2,000 years and almost 20 dynasties. The Grand Canal is still today, 14 centuries after it was built, the longest artificial canal in the world. And, in modern times, the Three Gorges Dam, or the South-North Water transfer project, which starts in the Himalayas and has three canals, each of which is 1,000 km long—the last of which will be inaugurated in 2050! That’s what thinking in the medium- to long-term means.

It is one of the basic characteristics of Confucian philosophy, which pervades all of Chinese civilization: the consideration of earlier generations and of those to come, as the historic continuity of the human person in society. The successive dynasties and the current Chinese government have governed from that Confucian perspective—governing for the next generations. This project has that scope: It penetrates into the entire 21st century, as we shall see.

Second, OBOR is the project of the re-emergence of China. Yes, China is re-emerging as an indispensable power. Because it was already the first economic and technological power for 2,000 years, as the detailed studies of A. Maddison and J. Needham show. And now it is returning to the international concert (or dis-concert) of powers, and it is coming back to stay.

This project aspires to be the expression of the weight of China in the current world, without aggressiveness or impositions: a project which is open to all countries that voluntarily wish to join or participate, at any level. In fact, there are already more than 130 countries that have signed agreements to join, among them various in the European Union, with the widespread hope that the European Union itself will sign on, despite the strong pressures from the Trump administration against that. Neither the U.S., nor Japan, nor India have joined. But the project continues: In fact, in only 7 years of being in operation, some 6 trillion dollars have already been invested in various endeavors.

Third, OBOR is the New Silk Road project. The historic Silk Road was, for over 1,600 years, the most traveled trade route for people and goods in the known world, with 15,000 km of land routes and some 20,000 km of maritime routes—to all of Asia, India, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Baghdad, Damascus, Byzantium, to all of Europe, West Africa, Indonesia. We can say, analogously, that it was a “global” trade route for 16 centuries—from the 2nd century BC until the 14th century. So much so, that the Middle Kingdom was, throughout those eras, the kingdom with the greatest volume of international trade. A curious fact: In the year 75 B.C., Julius Caesar appeared at the Roman Theater dressed in a tunic made from silk that had come from China.

OBOR Is the New Silk Road

But it was not only a trade route; it was also a cultural route. Throughout those centuries, different cultures, philosophies, religions and traditions traveled along its routes, as is shown in the mosaic of 56 ethnic groups that remained in China.

The New Silk Road re-emerges with all the economic, technological, cultural, and global potential that the 21st century offers.

Its goal is total connectivity among nations and blocs. First of all, the connectivity of land and maritime routes, but also digital connectivity, cultural, energy, economic, political, and environmental connectivity. In other words, China is offering all of its emerging potential for collaboration, co-investment and dialogue with all countries and blocs, without confrontation or imposition.

With regard to land, maritime and port connectivity, more than 50 projects and corridors have either been begun or are operational in China-Asia-Russia-Europe, with Southeast Asia, in Latin America and Africa—some making use of existing systems—and a multitude of maritime routes in all of the world’s seas. In the medium term, there are plans—although not yet project designs—for a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait, which would connect the entire Asian land network with the Pan-American network; a tunnel under the Gibraltar Strait which would connect the European and the African networks; and a number of other tunnels under the sea.

Digital connectivity has only begun, with various partial agreements between countries. Its potential is based on the development of the 5G wireless network, which has been very much slowed down by the opposition of the Trump Administration; on quantum information that China is developing; and on China’s powerful social networks.

Cultural connectivity is also on the march among governments, institutions and universities, as is economic, environmental and energy connectivity with bilateral and regional agreements.

Political connectivity is based on agreements with ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations], the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], the China-Africa Forum, summits with the European Union, and dozens of other multilateral institutions.

And the entire program is being made viable with financing from some 20 big international banks and funds, whose assets exceed $15 trillion. Not to mention that the disbursements already made to date in concrete projects underway is over $6 trillion.

Fourth, OBOR is the project that expresses China’s global presence. China has reemerged as a global power: It has “returned” to stay, in a solid and stable manner, in the international concert, and it wants to do so in harmony, in collaboration with all—open to understanding and dialogue, and doing so by setting in motion this macro-project of global connectivity in all fields, with all countries, peoples and blocs which accept it.

This program, this project, this approach is far from the image that is being transmitted of a China that intends to seize hegemony from others. China—and I have heard this hundreds of times from its politicians—does not aspire to be a super-power, nor is it interested in replacing any other power. It does want, and it aspires to participate in possible global governance, to the degree called for by its current and future position in the real world of the 21st century. That is the meaning and the goal of the entire OBOR, or New Silk Road project. Thank you very much.

Dr. Björn Peters

The Quest for Clean and Cheap Energy

This is the edited transcription of the opening remarks by Dr. Björn Peters to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Dr. Peters is a physicist, entrepreneur, and political advisor in the fields of energy, sustainability, and commodities.

Schiller Institute

Dr. Björn Peters

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Thank you very much for the invitation. What brought me probably to the invitation is that I’m an energy policy blogger and a specialist and expert in power station financing. These mechanisms work the same a little bit everywhere, and it cannot be stressed more, that the most important condition for development is cheap and clean energy.

Take the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals; all of them require cheap energy. So, the access to health, to clean water, to education, all is linked to cheap energy. The clean part of it—in Germany we have our very special solution to it, and I believe that it is a big topic in the U.S. at the moment, with California’s black-out, weather-induced black-outs. We haven’t had such situations in Europe yet, but we’re pursuing a similar strategy, and I’m deeply convinced that it won’t work. Let me briefly explain why.

Figure 1

Wind and Solar Power Production in Germany, August 2020

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Figure 1 provides the qualitative picture you need to understand. This is one month of power production. From left to right is August 1 to August 31. On the vertical axis is the power produced. The red line at the top is the amount of solar and wind energy we have installed in Germany. It’s far more than we actually need. The peak demand is about 85 GW or 85,000 MW in Germany.

The brown, top area of the three, is the load; it varies between relatively delimited values. The yellow one is the use of solar energy, and the blue is the use of wind energy. The yellow area, as you can see, follows the daily sunrise, so it varies between zero at night and its daytime maximums. Wind energy is more tricky. We do have a relatively constant energy requirement. Of course, over the day, we consume more energy. There is always a baseload.

Economically, Solar and Wind Don’t Work

The challenge is to bring solar and wind energy at times when we don’t have sun and wind. That is something that cannot be solved economically. There’s a lot of technical solutions that actually would work, but would take huge transmission lines. Somewhere on the globe, the Sun is always shining, sure, but you have to build exorbitantly long transmission lines. One can do it with storage, which doesn’t exist, and there are many other such things. But all of it would add an enormous cost to energy production. The dirty little secret of German energy production is that it is by far not as clean as we would like to have it, and in Germany, we have the most expensive power prices in the world nowadays.

If you can learn something from this story, it is that if you make yourself dependent on the weather for power production, you might end up with a very costly system, and nobody ever would copy the system because we need the energy to be cheap as well.

Now, there is a solution to it and that is nuclear energy. Nuclear can be built out limitlessly, so we have enough of it with uranium for millions of years if we take the modern reactors. There’s lots of technical innovation going on in the nuclear space, and this is for both fission and fusion reactors. Fusion is still in the research domain, while fission reactors—I believe China, Korea, and Russia have built very cost-effective ones. Even the new technological developments are out there, that we could use.

Two Challenges for Nuclear Energy Commercialization

The most important challenges are probably two: In the Western societies, there’s a large fraction of the population who are skeptical about nuclear energy. That is something communication-wise that we could address. And as a co-founder of the Nuclear Pride Coalition, which is a global network of civil associations and non-commercial organizations, we will organize many demonstrations across all continents. In this month of September, we have started already yesterday, it will go on the entire month. If you want to support nuclear energy, go look at the Nuclear Pride Coalition, and you might find ways to support us there.

The second challenge is funding, actually. We have lots of start-ups; there are about 50 start-ups that commercialize nuclear energy in the new generation. This is something where there is lots of potential still, but we need usually $1 billion or $2-3 billion to launch one single type of reactor.

So, that is the next challenge, but it will be done, and it will be done in the next decades or so. In fusion programs, there’s still lots of research going on, and I’m a little bit skeptical that we will see lots of fusion reactors in this century. There are a number of economical challenges there that are very hard to overcome. But we never know what technology breakthroughs we will get, so that is certainly something we can hope for, that in the long run, we will have limitless amounts of energy at very low cost. Again, this is one of the prerequisites to having worldwide human development and even ecological development.

To conclude, I believe this German energy transition has essentially failed. We wanted to do this in order to export our ideas about the ecology and the economy of this solar and wind business. We paid half of the world’s learning curve. Nowadays, solar is very cheap, but it has to be refined in order to make it usable when and where we need it. This is an issue that nuclear energy is not facing, so we need to find new ideas.

I’m currently working on a political theory that I call “Ecological Realism” to bring a new picture, a new strategy that we can follow and overcome the communication obstacles as well.

In my view, the future of nuclear energy hasn’t even begun. We have now 70 years or so of experience with it, but the golden era is still to come, and it will make energy in general and all forms of energy for mobility—not only power, but mobility processes—accessible essentially everywhere in the world.

Reach Dr. Björn Peters at info@peterscoll.de

Panel 3: First Discussion Session

The following is an edited transcript of the first of two discussion sessions during Panel 3 of the Schiller Institute conference on September 6.

The panelists were first asked by the Moderator, Dennis Speed, if they had any questions or observations to make about the presentations they had just heard, before taking questions from the audience.

Schiller Institute

Panel participants. Clockwise from upper left: Dennis Speed, Dennis Small, Dr. Natalia Vitrenko, Marcelo Muñoz, Hassan Daud Butt, Michele Geraci. At bottom is Dr. Björn Peters.

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Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think the potential in the New Silk Road/World Land-Bridge conception is really the most important issue. It’s the one vehicle that can overcome all the problems we have addressed. It’s a basis for peace, it’s a basis to overcome this pandemic and future pandemics. I think it is one of the most important tasks the Schiller Institute has set itself—to oppose these many wrong narratives. I want to thank all the panelists who spoke and hear what you have to say.

Dr. Marcelo Muñoz: I, along with, I’m sure, all of the speakers, would like to thank the Schiller Institute for this conference, because this is truly a conference which is not only international. We are meeting today as citizens and representatives of all five continents of the five major powers, and we are taking up issues of great significance and importance. We are also taking up issues with very different points of view, very distinct points of view, sometimes contradictory points of view. I agree with some of the speakers, and I disagree with other speakers, but this is part of the global dialogue which is required.

I believe that this is the global spirit which is required for the 21st century, to debate out ideas without dogmatism and with a wide openness to new concepts. I believe the breadth of criteria and the way things have been approached here is exactly the paradigm of how this kind of a global dialogue must be carried out in the 21st century, to find urgent solutions to the urgent problems we’re facing today.

I always like to present myself as a global citizen, and in fact, I sign my articles in that way, because even though we don’t yet realize this, we are in fact all global citizens. I have, over my 42 years of activity, living with China, and living so intensely, learned from China to look at the world not from the standpoint of each culture, not from the standpoint of each village, of each situation, but from a breadth of view which is required when taking up these global issues. That is the path that has to be taken, that is the only way to reach a solution. Without hate, without resentment, without the idea of confrontation. We actually have to have what is properly called a dialogue of cultures in the Greek sense of the word. A discussion of different points of view.

In summary—dear members of the Schiller Institute, dear leaders, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche—continue on the path that you are on, and congratulations.

Hassan Daud Butt: I want to highlight one fact from my own experience working on BRI projects for the last many years: CPEC [the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor] and BRI have almost a similar history. They both started in 2013, and in 2015, we were able to prepare our monographic study taking it forward all the way to 2030.

As we talk about energy, infrastructure, and connectivity in terms of roads and bridges, we sometimes ignore the fact that it is more about people-to-people connectivity, it’s more about culture, from hearing what Dr. Muñoz said about bringing the world together in terms of talking to each other, looking at problems.

I have seen in the debates that I’ve be involved in since the start of the pandemic, that anti-globalization forces have started to speak more than people like us who are talking about real integration. This is, as a matter of fact, probably leading to social-economic development, to develop this connectivity. Globalization, I believe, has taken more people out of poverty than any other initiative taken by mankind.

So, I think let’s all work together in a similar fashion; let’s raise our voices more about how it’s benefitting countries like Pakistan that are still on the path of getting stronger and more prosperous. The connectivity with the region will perhaps lead to even more economic growth and to peace and stability.

In the last almost one decade, we were talking about terrorism and factors impacting our economy because of that. Now, we are talking about regional connectivity, economic growth, agriculture, tourism, and people-to-people connectivity—not just with China, but with the rest of the participating countries. This provides opportunities to countries like Pakistan to talk about their growth and strengths. So, I would like to again acknowledge your effort in bringing us all together. It was wonderful to have heard from each one of the speakers so far.

Two questions for Dennis Small from Ellen Brown, President of the U.S. Public Banking Institute: First, The Davos World Economic Forum will be discussing what they have called the Great Reset at their January 2021 meeting, which apparently includes a proposal for a digital global currency of some kind. What are your thoughts on this? Are you proposing a global currency or global reserve currency? If so, who would issue it, and on what terms?

Second, What do you propose to do about Third World debt, particularly that debt that has been imposed by the IMF with conditionalities that are destroying Third World and some First World economies?

Dennis Small: First, let me take up the second question. The purpose of the IMF conditionalities on Third World debt is not to have the debt repaid. The purpose is to impose conditionalities that will prevent those countries from ever developing; that’s its intention. So, when you look at what the IMF has done in the past in Mexico, or Chile, or Nigeria and so on, and people say, “Oh, there’s a bad economic situation; that just shows that the IMF has failed.” No. It shows that the IMF was successful in doing exactly what it intended to do—prevent those nations from actually developing.

The debt is simply a ruse; it’s a lie; it’s a falsification; it’s something which I like to call “bankers’ arithmetic.” This was especially bad during the 1980s and 1990s. In the case of Ibero-America, at the beginning of 1980, their debt was $257 billion. Over the course of the next 15 years, from 1980 to 1994, they paid $417 billion, after they owed $257 billion. At the end of that time, having paid 1.5 times what they owed, they ended up owing $547 billion. That’s what I call “bankers’ arithmetic,” because the whole thing is a fraud and a scam, which is arranged through forced devaluations, changes in the terms of trade, and all of this kind of nonsense.

What should be done with the debt? It should be wiped out; it should simply be declared in total moratorium. It’s been paid over and over and over again. As Mr. Shylock discovered, in [Shakespeare’s play] The Merchant of Venice, when you have a choice between collecting a pound of flesh, and actual justice according to natural law, natural law must prevail. Not just in terms of the debt, but it actually takes us to the first question that was asked: what about a currency, will this be issued, who issues it, and so on.

The U.S. dollar is not the world reserve currency; it is not the most used currency. Not because the dollar is not so used, but because the dollar is not the currency of the United States of America. It is the currency of an international banking cabal which seized control of what was once the U.S. national currency, the dollar, in 1971, when President Richard Nixon foolishly took the dollar off gold and opened up the entire era where the dollar was no longer answering to U.S. domestic needs, but became the instrument of international speculation.

So, what has to be done with the United States—as with every country—is, you have to take control of your own currency again. You need an international arrangement to make that possible.

So, there’s no problem if the dollar of the United States actually helps function in that fashion, but it’s got to be based on the kind of global reorganization where the priority is placed on the kinds of great development projects which have been discussed here. The Belt and Road Initiative. If you take care of the physical economics side, then the monetary side will follow. If you try to go at this the other way, starting with monetary matters, you will end up in a complete dead end.

Let me just take the opportunity, if I may—this wasn’t asked, but I want to fold in another feature, which I think everyone has addressed in a different way, but which I think is really imperative in this situation. In that same speech that you heard of Lyndon LaRouche in Brazil, what happened in the very next segment of that recording, is that he connected this economic problem to the problem of war and peace. I’m going to read you three sentences:

But the problem is that under these conditions, you can hear the possibility of the Guns of August once again not far distant. Just as in the 1930s and 1940s, a world financial crisis led one country after the other on the road to war, and it was merely a matter of time.

Therefore, when you’re dealing with the economic crisis today, or the questions of free trade, do not look at these as some kind of an academic exercise in economics. We’re dealing with strategy in the highest, most profound sense. We’re dealing with a general threat to civilization as a whole, from which no nation is exempt.

I wanted to mention that and feature it, because I think every single one of my fellow panelists has, in fact, brought that same subject into this discussion.

Dr. Björn Peters: I want to add something of utmost importance to what Dennis Small just said. First of all, we are living in a relatively peaceful world at the moment. But since 30 years, nearly all of the wars have been led because of resources; most of them were energy resources. We have had oil wars in the Middle East, and resource wars a little bit everywhere.

The trick to overcome this, is actually cheap energy. Why? With cheap energy, you can utilize your resources more efficiently, and you can, for example, produce locally, synthetic fuels if you have an abundance of cheap energy. That can be done very economically.

The second aspect is that energy in physics is the counterpart to entropy. Entropy means disorder; we produce our entire system is based on producing waste. But if we have cheap energy, we can use the waste and extract all the commodities that are in there. We won’t do it as long as energy is expensive.

So, both aspects are of enormous importance, and that is something we really have to solve in our generation and in the next decades. We shouldn’t build too much on extracting more coal. I’ve heard the example of the Central African Congo, where 90% of the energy comes from charcoal; it’s the cheapest solution there. That means people go into the woodlands and chop down the trees and eliminate the natural resources that we need for species protection. So, everything comes down to cheap energy, and that is something we really need to solve in our generation.

A question from an Italian to Michele Geraci: What could be a valid example of direct cooperation, not competition, between Italy and China on global affairs? If we wish to build infrastructure inside a big advanced program that looks to the future as China, is it necessary to have an authoritarian system which makes the decisions without all kinds of opposition, as unfortunately happens here in Italy? How can we do so with the environmentalist regulations, etc., as we have in the U.S. How can that work?

Michele Geraci: I didn’t understand if the gentleman was asking if Italy did not have the means for the people to post decisions, or he was using Italy in opposition to the system in China, where indeed, the one party rules. Maybe that’s a follow-up.

In the meantime, the first one. Africa comes to mind, we do have very real problems in our country, in Italy, and I think even in Europe, to deal with the migration potential of people from Africa. We go around the problem without really solving it at the root.

And this is my opinion. I think the root of the problem is to offer Africa a development model, maybe different from the one we have seen before, maybe different from the failure we mentioned by the IMF, and really give a stable economic and social environment.

Now, in order to do that, we need investment, and this is what China can do. We need some capabilities, some skills, and this is where, for example, Italy and China will very much be able to cooperate, in exactly in those sectors in which Italy and China have know-how, and in which Africa needs it. I’m thinking of the energy development sector, the agricultural sector that goes from food production to agricultural machinery, in which Italy is very strong.

In the construction field, China and Italy have a very big company, so they can cooperate. Occasionally, the image of the two countries can be complementary. China may encounter some difficulties, but the presence of an Italian or a wider European entity with China, completing a project in Africa, could actually solve the problem and offer a second layer of guarantee to the host country so as to dissipate any potential worries.

These are the areas, and I mentioned energy of course, where the two countries cannot be competitors, but they can be partners in helping develop a solution to a problem. It’s not even a choice for Italy or Europe. We need to solve it, because the worry is not the ten thousand migrants arriving now. The worry is that Nigeria will have close to 400 million people. Poverty in Africa has been kept at 40%, and we really need to do something else. I say, China; I say Japan is also present in Africa, but is little known. Europe, and even the United States. We all need to cooperate in that region.

Then the second question, whether it’s possible to launch great projects in nations that have all of these various political parties and opposition.

No, it’s not possible. It is not possible at the level of efficiency and speed that is needed now. It was possible in the 1970s and ’80s, where time was slower. We had more political stability, more time to think. Now, we don’t have the luxury anymore, the frequency on the pull side of political change is very high, because there is still turmoil that is reflected in the election, the multi-party system means the parties need to chase votes before they can govern the country. The moment they begin governing, they immediately need to chase votes again for all sorts of local, regional, European elections.

We live in a high-frequency electoral mode that does not really allow for even medium-term planning, much less long-term planning. This can make a difference. This is why, for example, Germany may be better placed, given the long-standing position of Ms. Angela Merkel. Maybe France, with a four-year locked-in mandate for the President. To some extent the United States, too.

But if the gentleman was referring specifically to Italy, he probably knows as well as I do, that we are not capable of making those plans. This is not a democracy problem, it’s a problem in a country—Italy—where the effect of democracy gets in the way of the economic long-term plan.

A question for Dr. Muñoz: What can be done to help people in governments in the West understand China? As an example,in the Convivencia, there was the joint collaboration in Andalusia, Spain among the scholars of Judaism, Islam and Christianity in the 9th and 10th centuries.

Dr. Muñoz: There’s a lot of questions that are asked there. Let’s try to answer them. I’ll take a shot at it. Let’s do this by steps.

First of all, China cannot be understood if you look at it simply as a political system. China has an economic model which has been extremely successful for them. It’s very well-defined, it is the key to their Great Leap which they have taken, which has moved them from being the 120th economy in the world, to the number two economy today. This, I believe, is what people in the West are trying to silence. The economic model of China is not the same; it is very different from that of the West. In the West, it is the economic model of neo-liberalism. China’s model is not that at all.

Today it must be understood: China is not a communist country. This is always the word that is used in the West. I’ve lived through this personally; I’ve watched how they dismantled the entire Maoist apparatus going back to Deng Xiaoping in 1978. So, this has been a long process, but that is what has happened.

What is China’s economic policy? What is their economic system? It’s very complex to summarize briefly, but let’s put it this way: The state is the regulator of the economic policies and institutions of the country. The market economy in China today is governed in the following fashion: There are more than 90 million private businesses in China, and they have 71% of the economic participation in the country.

The other aspect of this is that it’s another civilization all together. They are a Confucian society, and that means the sense of collectivity is greater than that of the individual. This is the opposite of what we have in the West, and this Confucian aspect of society in China, its characteristic, affects all aspects of China—politically, economically, socially, culturally and otherwise.

This whole question of China —I have been absolutely passionate about this, ever since I discovered that China was an entirely other world. In fact, Leibniz called it another planet. This has an entirely different meaning in terms of the ethics, the morality, and so on, and I would like to propose this as an important subject for further discussion. This is a subject matter which I would propose for a discussion with the Schiller Institute in a conference such as this: Chinese civilization, Western civilization, and then of course, there are other civilizations as well.

So, in other words, two issues I would like to propose to the Schiller Institute for further discussion Are China’s civilization and the Chinese economic model. I just wanted to mention to people that, in fact, the subject of China’s civilization and Western civilization is the subject of my coming book on China. My fourth book, if I live long enough to be able to finish it.

Another subject matter that I don’t want to leave without at least mentioning, is that globalization is a fact today. But the way it is being carried out is not good at all. There are other ways of doing this; the question is, who’s going to lead it? That is the issue of the day, the most profound strategic issue of the day. Thank you.

Zepp-LaRouche: The contradiction Dr. Muñoz mentioned, that in the West you have more emphasis on the individual, and in China more on the priority of the common good, is not a new development. This goes back more than 2,000 years in Chinese history. If you study, for example, the imperial examination system, you can see that this was always part of China for more than 2,000 years.

I think part of the problem, from my point of view the major misunderstanding in the West, is not so much a misunderstanding. It is that China, with Chinese characteristics, represents values of a meritocracy, of a country oriented towards the common good. In the West, we have had that tradition. For example, in European humanism in the Renaissance, in the German Classical period, in German idealism, you had this same value orientation. The problem is, in the West we have moved away from that, and replaced this with liberal and neo-liberal ideas, which is a continuous process in which the common good is being neglected.

Therefore, I think a lot of what is being said about China is a willful lie, because the people who believe in the liberal system make all their money and all their privileges running the system as it is. They don’t like a force to be moral. I think that anybody who is not corrupt is a threat to their system.

This is a long story, but when I went in 1990 for the first time to Poland with our perspective of a New Silk Road, people said, “Oh! You are not corrupt? Then you are not reliable. We need corrupt people because then we know we can trust you.” So, I think there is a lot of lying in what is said about China; that is my deepest conviction.

Butt: I want to highlight several facts based on a practitioner’s standpoint. I worked for the last five years on the CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is by far the most efficient project I’ve seen. The Chinese project managers and the leadership who are working in our country for these projects, understand our system well. And also the same Western practices quite clearly. It is for us to know and understand the Chinese system and their way of doing things. This is not so difficult.

When I first went to China—and I lived there for several years—it was quite easy for me to understand the Confucius model, the Confucius philosophy and compare it with Islamic ideology and the rest of the Western world. I think there is an idea that could be taken over in terms of implementation of these projects. It is just the subtle differences that we need to understand.

We have had several issues while doing these projects at various levels. But as we went along in the last five to six years, we have seen that now the understanding of us about China and Chinese practices, also for China about Pakistan’s, that things have improved. It’s just about understanding each other and showing a kind of flexibility that the world needs to show toward each other.

A question from Professor Dr. Navid Akhtar in Pakistan, for Dennis Small: How do you see the economic interactions and strategic interests of associated but inter-linked countries along the BRI, other than China and the U.S., in the larger interests of world economic development? Moreover, will peace, fraternity, and economic development and sustainability across the world be possible without Asian and poor and under-developed countries? One poor brother or family may not impact you, but you still remain a limiting factor for the entire human family. Is this possible with some people still in poverty?

Small: The answer is: Is peace possible without prosperity? No! It is absolutely not possible. That’s what the last 50 years and more have shown. That was what I was emphasizing with Mr. LaRouche’s quote.

This is the issue of the Belt and Road; it is the way to bring peace with economic development. “Development is the new name for peace,” as Pope Paul VI said. There’s another interesting thing which he said. This may be apocryphal, but I’ve heard it is what he said, which is, “When you have more heads than hats, some people propose cutting off heads. I propose producing more hats.” I think that’s the fundamental issue here. The problem of war is a concept of man—the concept of man of each against all in warfare, the Hobbesian concept.

Unless that idea is replaced, unless that cultural issue is solved, unless we have an economic system which fosters and makes that concept of man possible, then we will be looking down the barrel of the gun toward war; and in this case, nuclear war. So, I think that’s the crucial question. The CPEC issue is crucial, because of the part of the world that it’s in. Extremely conflictive. The only way to bring peace, is through that. The Middle East is the exact same question, and so on around the world.

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko: Today, the world is hopefully not going to cross the line that separates us from the beginning of the Third World War. It was not by accident that I gave the example of Ukraine and Belarus as the countries that are being used to provoke such a war. The conflict is there. For example, in Crimea, the Ukrainian Constitution counts Crimea still as part of Ukraine, whereas the Russian Constitution states that Crimea is a Russian territory. That could cause a territorial war.

For seven years, I have been participating in the Schiller Institute conferences. And I’ve always been representing this part of humanity which is in war. It’s like a pendulum, with some in the world moving toward war. There’s China with its wonderful [Belt & Road] Initiative. We all have the same problem in the world; we have one planet, and we are risking to lose it. We need to preserve it.

As Dennis Small said, and of course, this comes from our Lyndon LaRouche, humanity needs to change; humanity needs to become different; humans need to become different: To stop seeking conflict, to stop seeking how to oppress or destroy your enemy or competitor, but instead we need to be peaceful. We need to seek collaboration, but the problem is that although we might want to seek that, at present, humanity as a whole doesn’t have it.

Today, the Minsk agreements are not being fulfilled; they’re being violated. The hawks of war in Ukraine are constantly feeling the so-called support of the United States, which is constantly doing everything in the way of so-called “help” to continue the war in Ukraine.

Now they’re trying to include Belarus in this massacre. They’re using the same scenario, only modified for Belarus. Like Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who is actually a nobody; nobody knows her in the country, but suddenly she becomes the leader of the nation. She just interfered in a very rude and unacceptable way in the internal affairs of Belarus. If these two countries—Belarus and Ukraine—start attacking Russia, it won’t be easy for anyone, including Europe or the whole world.

The United States has now officially declared that its main enemies are China and Russia. So, what is all of humanity to expect? A Third World War?

Our conference is important because of that. We must not leave here just wishing each other good luck and other good things.

We must create a committee aimed at saving the world civilization. This committee must include representatives from all continents, and every country of the world. We must send the results of our research and what we know to all the leaders of different countries, to the UN, and to all significant players around the world. Because we represent the people of our countries, and we are their voice. Then, we can know for sure, and we can imagine how the peaceful initiative of China will actually be accepted and received everywhere in the world by different countries, and the world will be transformed.

Any pandemic can be contained and defeated. If we unite our forces as humanity in the technical, scientific and other important areas, we can defeat any kind of pandemic together. Thank you so much. I’m so glad I was finally heard.

Speed: Yes, and so are we. That’s what we were missing. I knew that’s what it would be like if you could actually get through.

Dennis Speed

A New Health Platform

A Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

Schiller Institute

Dennis Speed

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A few months ago, Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites,” the idea of a completely new health platform, to address the pandemic that was already sweeping the world, itself only the harbinger of an even more horrible and terrifying future, which might wipe us out even before a thermonuclear war.

But there was another element to what she was concerned about. Seeing the social unrest throughout the United States, and throughout the world—social unrest legitimate in part because of poverty and because of racism and other things. The problem was in how to address that from the standpoint of the Schiller Institute.

Some of you know that the Schiller Institute’s Vice President was Amelia Boynton Robinson of Tuskegee, Alabama and Selma, Alabama. She was the Vice President of the Schiller Institute for 25 years; she was the woman who brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to Selma, Alabama back in 1963; she was beaten and left for dead on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in March 1965.

The idea of revolutionary, creative, nonviolent direct action is something that Helga had also embraced back in 1992, at a time when Lyndon LaRouche was in prison and the Rev. James Bevel ran a campaign on his behalf as his Vice President because Lyndon LaRouche was in jail at that time. The idea of fighting as a partisan for the truth is something of an American tradition, as it is also around the world.

The challenge in this case has been to think about how to bring together, people with different political outlooks or different views in various other ways, when we’re faced with something which may be an existential threat to humanity as a whole. Our panelists are with us today to speak to this challenge.

Joycelyn Elders, M.D.

Turning from the Course of Division

Toward a More Perfect Union

This is the edited transcript of the opening remarks by Joycelyn Elders to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Dr. Elders was Surgeon General of the United States, 1993-1994. Subheads have been added.

Schiller Institute

Joycelyn Elders, M.D.

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Thank you so much for this opportunity to address the Schiller Institute conferences. The conference today is to address a New Paradigm, united toward the common aims of humankind.

In a whirlwind of disasters, we’ve been barraged by a worldwide pandemic of the new virus, medical unpreparedness, shortage of PPEs, hospital space and medical personnel, government unpreparedness, economic recessions, unemployment, huge numbers of hungry, helpless people, and police brutality. We’re witnessing disparities in the U.S., and around the world, that we have tried for many years to wish away. We won’t be forgetting 2020 anytime soon.

It is as though all the trauma from the diseases surrounding us, and almost consuming us, have torn away the shackles from our eyes, and now we see with 2020 vision. How did we not see these disasters coming? The huge numbers of people are dissatisfied with disparities and inequities. They are now seeing with 2020 vision in all areas—economic, social justice, and medicine.

Whole countries have essentially shut down. The world’s people are on hold. Now all of those people on hold are wondering: What do we do in this new world?

So, what can we do?

We’ve done the groundwork already, when we looked at all areas of economics, social justice and medicine, all aspects of a person’s life, and labeled it “the social determinants of health.” We know that a person’s health is more than just a germ or an injured organ. Rather, health is determined by an interconnected system of all that is in a society. We know that the social determinants of health are facts, rather than a political stance.

We’ve not trained our people about the difference in belief and fact. Many do not seem to understand the importance of public health and welfare. A person is only as healthy as the least healthy and wealthy person. Healthcare and wealth must be extended to everyone for public health to be good. Every person in humankind needs the same things to be whole and healthy. The social determinants of health addresses these needs.

Of course we must address the pandemic of COVID-19 that is killing people all over the world. We’ve applied procedures and principles developed over centuries, and we know what to do about this infection. Discovering that it is airborne, we know to wear masks, to distance ourselves physically from others, to not gather in groups, to stay at home, to use Zoom. We are in the process of developing better tests and vaccines, and are slowly learning about treatments and existing medications that are effective in treating COVID 19.

This is a short-term solution to the immediate problem. The anxiety we feel, is from more than COVID 19. Most of us realize that disparities and inequities cost lives, that we are only as healthy as our least healthy person. Those who have money are just as vulnerable as those who have not. The higher castes are just as sick as the lower castes. We must change our health system, and to do so involves changing our social system.

But is this the right time to tackle a huge change in the middle of a pandemic?

Medical science can offer—I think we like to offer—better health and welfare systems to the whole world. We already know what needs to be done. The how-to-accomplish-this is still waiting. Many seem to be thinking about how to accomplish a great change.

The Coincidence of Opposites

After education, we must decide what to do next. We know our goal—a great change in our society to make the social determinants of health a realization for all. I think we all want to turn to developing public health systems that will be armies for equitable health and welfare. We need whole armies to bring about these changes. Helga LaRouche has called for the formation of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites. This initiative will establish an international chorus to advocate the creation of a kind of Apollo Project in world health care, as sudden, yet inspiring, as was John F. Kennedy’s seemingly impossible Moon Project.

And it isn’t as though we are proposing something new, as public health workers were abundant and were a fixture in much of the United States back in the 1860s. We are proposing that young people, worldwide, from high school, college, and post-college age groups, be incorporated into an international “health extension service,” which will supplement the inadequately staffed medical needs of governments worldwide.

As I said at an earlier Schiller Institute conference, when the idea of the Committee was first proposed by Helga, you have tiers of people, from the community healthcare workers, to their immediate supervisors, to people with some medical education, all the way up to nursing assistants, nurse practitioners, doctors, and right up to the highest level of super-specialist neurosurgeons. We often do too much specialized care, and we do not do enough basic public health care, to improve the health of our nation. A public health workforce would do far more to maintain our health, than 100 surgeons.

Public health workers in these public care health systems are not doctors or nurses. Giving out masks, taking temperatures, and even contact tracing and some diagnostics, does not require one to have a medical degree, or to go to school for 12 years. This would be a public health corps that could be interfaced with the Army Corps of Engineers, and many other agencies throughout a government. We need millions of public health workers in the United States, and the world need tens of millions.

This is one of the most efficient economic investments that can be made anywhere in the world, especially when millions are out of work. Public health systems in each country, connected into a global public healthcare system, could achieve better healthcare and better welfare for hundreds of millions of people.

The African Union has devised plans to tackle many aspects of a continent-wide health plan. Ethiopia and many other nations have successfully created a large number of community health workers and have developed entire curricula on how to teach community health workers. Much has been tested. The global concern for one another will be the beginning of a public healthcare system, because that is what public health does—care for one another’s welfare. To survive this, and future pandemics, we need to secure the freedom of health to all people, everywhere in the world. We need to all work together, no matter how opposite we are, from all over the world.

A Determined Boldness

It’s a tall order. The disparities in health, education, housing, work, and social areas must be not only addressed, but eliminated. Equity can be the word for 2020. We are striving toward an equitable world.

Today’s world health situation may be fearful, but need not be our fate. To say otherwise, is to speak falsely, and with fear. The world can turn from the course of division long enough to save tens of millions from death. To survive the surely oncoming pandemics, we need to secure the freedom of health to all people, everywhere in the world. We need to all work together no matter how opposite we are, from all over the world. That is what we mean by a coincidence of opposites—a higher alliance, based on the principles of malice toward no one, and charity toward all. That can ensure our durable survival, and health as a human race.

Perhaps, in the future, children will study the watershed year of 2020 and see that the outstanding event was not the pandemic and ensuing disasters, but that the world began to change to a better place for humankind.

We must be the leaders. In order to be the leaders, we must learn what the community needs, to make sure that we understand what’s going on, so that we can provide for them what must be provided. We have to educate and empower all the people, and educate and empower our youth, so that we can all be involved, and so we can all plan to do what we need to do to make a difference. We have to have what I call “determined boldness”—boldness to go out and meet the problems where they are, tackle them where they are, and do what we need to do to make a difference. We can do this. We know how, and we must get started. Thank you.

Rep. Jim Evans

Mississippi: Now A Four-Way Pandemic

These are the remarks of Rep. Jim Evans that were presented to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Mr. Evans was a Mississippi State Representative for 25 years.

Schiller Institute

Rep. Jim Evans

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I was the community engagement coordinator for the AFL-CIO; a member of the House of Representatives; President of the Jackson Advocate; President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and finally President of the Immigrants Rights Alliance and others. I began to retire from all of those, but I can’t retire from the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, because the abuse that they’re receiving is too great for me to leave in good conscience. I can’t retire till we do something about the maddening, sickening, disgusting, inhumane immigration situation we have in America. It is absolutely atrocious.

In Mississippi, we’ve always been really concerned about the social disparities in healthcare and how those economic disparities are fixed there. In Mississippi, we often say that we have a three-way pandemic all the time going on here: the pandemic of racism, the pandemic of poverty, and the pandemic of violence. And when you add the pandemic of COVID-19 to this, we now have a four-way pandemic. That means we’re boxed in and it’s time now for everybody to get up. So, we have to deal with the social disparities of healthcare.

Healthcare and Civil Rights

Dr. Robert Smith was the Civil Rights doctor who, when folks got beat in the head, cut, kicked around, and left for dead, he was the person that brought you back to health and he always did it for folks in the movement free of charge.

He’s still the doctor for Tougaloo College and Jackson State University, and he runs the healthcare center here in Mississippi which is now part of the Merit Healthcare Center. But Dr. Robert Smith is, really, we call him “Black Moses.” He is the number one person. He does more to deal with the disparities of healthcare in Mississippi than anybody that’s ever been here. So, all of his life, his whole practice, has been part of it. He was tending the wounds of Medgar Evers back in the early ’60s and all the folks around him. He’s been part of it all his life. He’s there still practicing medicine and making house calls.

The last report that I did in the last … you said 20 or 30 years, but I’m going to tell you in the last 5 years. I did this report 5 years ago, in which I laid out how many hospitals were closed down, and where they would be, because we were not expanding Medicare. The hospitals have to provide indigent care, and there was no way for them to get paid for it. I predicted that 23 hospitals in strategic areas would close down. All of them have been closed. We’ve had other similar closings. It’s not uncommon to be in Mississippi and drive 40 miles for an emergency room visit and when you get there, you find out that your hospital is closed. We’ve had people that have died in transport. Healthcare in Mississippi has deteriorated to the levels of the ’40s.

I’m saying all of us have to get together and realize that if we don’t stop this and declare a full fundamental war on poverty, that these conditions are not going to improve. And I think the conditions because of this COVID-19 have been exposed, but they’re deteriorating as well. It’s not enough to say we’re exposing the people that’s in them, but I think the conditions are worsening as well.

Visit the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website, larouchelegacyfoundation.org

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Dr. Shirley Evers-Manly, RN

Nurses With a Global Perspective

This is the edited transcription of remarks by Shirley Evers-Manly to the Schiller Institute Conference on September 6. Dr. Manley is the interim dean of Alcorn State University’s School of Nursing in Mississippi, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Black Nurses Association.

Schiller Institute

Dr. Shirley Evers-Manly, RN

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We started, when I was at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), we actually had a global health program, so we worked with a variety of nursing schools throughout the world, from Africa, to Asia, to Europe. When I left UCSF and became the Dean at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, we actually made a program in global health nursing. In that program, the students were able to learn about not only areas here and health disparities here in the United States, but also learn about global healthcare problems and health disparities in other countries.

We selected places to go based on our student population. And when you look at the student populations now in the universities and colleges all over the country, they’re very diverse, so we had students from Uganda, we had students from Nigeria, we had students from the Philippines, we had students from Malawi. Students from various parts of southern countries as well, like Mexico, and Brazil and those areas.

We selected areas to go, based on what type of crises were happening in the country at that particular year. We have gone to the Philippines because of the major hurricane in the Philippines; we’ve gone to Nigeria, we’ve gone to Ghana, Uganda; each Saturday in southern California, there’s a team of nurses, pharmacy students from University of Southern California, and also Charles Drew, that goes over to Tijuana every year and provides screenings for individuals there.

In the United States

Locally, here in the United States, one of our largest programs we provided, was to help the families in Michigan when they had the problem with the water in Flint, Michigan. We were able to donate over 10,000 bottles of water to individuals who were working with babies, because the babies can’t be bathed in the water, because the contamination would leach into the babies. So we provided diapers and baby wipes for that.

Most recently, we have worked with COVID and provided homeless individuals with safety kits, and food for those who have been isolated in their homes. So we worked with isolated seniors, we worked with homeless populations in southern California, you know there’s a large homeless population there, homeless populations in Washington, D.C. We’ve been in New York, where we started crisis lines: Because we want nurses to know that healthcare not only starts within the four walls of a hospital, but it starts in the communities where we live, work and play.

We can’t do that alone, however, so we have worked with social workers, we’ve worked with community health outreach workers, and we believe in some states, where they don’t have a community health outreach worker system or program, that it would be very beneficial; like, I’ve been in Mississippi, here in Natchez for just a month, they do not have community health outreach workers here, but this is a rural area.

And when you’re looking at some of the data about Mississippi, they compare it to Namibia. I’ve been in Namibia, and I said, the terrain is very much like Namibia! The difference is that there’s several more people that live in those areas. So when you have a rural area and your workforce cannot meet the demand, it becomes a problem. So we have to look at nurses, frontline workers, physicians, physician’s assistants, nurse practitioners, and go down to the level where we can work with the community health outreach workers who are trusted by the community. They know the community, they know where people are, they know that there’s a homeless population, they know that they live under the bridge, or wherever they may be. So we work with those individuals so we can be able to provide healthcare services to them as well.

Chief Leon Frazier

Law Enforcement and the Community

Must Come Together To Survive This Pandemic

This is the edited transcription of pre-recorded remarks, presented in the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Mr. Frazier is a former police chief of Tuskegee, Alabama. Subheads have been added.

Schiller Institute

Chief Leon Frazier in front of a photo of the 50th anniversary remembrance of the “Bloody Sunday” march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama. Amelia Robinson, not shown, is behind Chief Frazier.

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The one thing I would like to make clear: I’m Leon H.E. Frazier—Chief, because I’ve been in law enforcement for many moons and I retired as a police chief.

That job gave me a lot of knowledge, and it’s compounded my love for this nation. I love my people because of my grandmother and my mother, and all the other beautiful people who helped to make me who I am. And I love police, because if there were no police, as unlawful as my community is today with police, we would be on a slippery slope to chaos in this whole nation.

And so therefore, any time I’m confronted with anything, I always look at it from a law enforcement perspective, which means protection and service for real. And I look at it from a humanistic perspective, to say that this “me, myself, and I” perception that most of us have, has worked us into the mess that we’re in now, and if we don’t get up out of it, and start unifying, and thinking about “we” and being concerned about our sisters and brothers—and they’re not all black—then we are going to be forever be in a rut. It doesn’t matter whether you have a PhD degree, a Master’s degree, a BS degree, or no degree, we are all discombobulated, confused, and don’t have a clue as to what the next move ought to be.

Now: Don’t you think that this would be a time that we would think that we all need to come together now? Isn’t this a time that we ought to get off this “I am” big high horse that we’re on? Isn’t this the time that politicians ought to care about the people? Isn’t this the time that police ought to care about citizens?

But even more important, isn’t this the time the citizens ought to care about the police?

So, you see, we’re expecting too much from law enforcement, when we’re just too immoral ourselves. We lie, we steal, we kill, we take, and we do all of those other things that are not good in God’s eyesight. And, we expect then, though, the police to be perfect! “They are trained to be this or that.” No. I was never trained to let somebody spit on me and hit me upside my head and I should tolerate it. I was never trained, in all the 40-plus years that I was in law enforcement, to let somebody abuse me! So, now, I don’t expect no police officer to take abuse from no citizen, I don’t care whose son and daughter it is. But, by the same token, I don’t expect and accept no police officer to abuse and misuse nobody, I don’t care what their status of life.

So my thing is, rather than stay divided—and I knew the police were going to have to come into this thing sooner or later—the police were going to have to take some action, because I know how hard-headed some of our people are—they still congregate, they still socialize.

Matter of fact, Brother Scott called me, and we were talking, and Brother Scott said, “I’m worried about these people over here that’s having parties and acting like nothing’s going on!”

Reaching Out to the Community

“Right away,” I thought, “well, just be a matter of time before law enforcement is going to have to go in there and do something to try to save these people from themselves. So, do we do nothing? No. ’Cause Scott wouldn’t respect me no more, being as old as I am, I’ve got to do something. So what do you do?

Well, you use your talent, in law enforcement, your love for law enforcement, and you gather all of these guys together: police chiefs, sheriffs, etc. And then, you reach out to the community, to all of the leaders—quote/unquote on “leaders”—and you say, “Look, we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to generate a sense of respect and a sense of support, and a sense of safety among the people in the community. Because if the police have to go there three weeks from now, six weeks from now, and start arresting people, we’re going to have riots! ‘What you comin’ here for? You can’t tell me....’ ”

But, if we can get the government—that was utility boards, mayor of the city, and sheriff’s department—and all of the other powerful people in the community, to come together, put together a document that represents the whole government, then use police officers, now—right now—before we start panicking, and have them go door to door and circulate these to the people. We’ve got 5,000 printed. We’ve got about 4,000 distributed. And not only did we go with law enforcement, but we blended law enforcement with community organization! So now you see a unified effort.

So now, when we go to Miss Crocket’s house, or Miss Rogers’ house or Mr. Henderson’s house, now, three weeks early, if they have to be arrested because of a major party later on, the police officer would have to do the arresting, but could they blame the police for not caring nothing about them, and just trying to play police and law enforcement? No. We have to realize, because we could tell them, “Remember, four weeks ago, when we came by your house, and we gave you this document? It pointed out the city ordinance, it pointed out safety tips, it pointed out the state rules and regulations, it explained every aspect of what we were up against, to the best of our ability—you remember that day?”

“Yeah, I remember you came by, then.”

“Yeah, well shut up, then, because you should have paid attention. The Governor told you, other people in federal government told, your pastors told you ’cause they stopped doing church and told you to go home and protect yourself.”

So now, you couldn’t declare that the government didn’t care anything about the people, because the front running force of the government, law enforcement, was right there, saying, “People be careful. People be willing to understand something different. And people please take care of yourselves.”

So, that’s my testimony, that this is no time now for no separation; law enforcement people and community people must come together; church people, law enforcement people, must come together. And as a consequence, we must survive this pandemic together, because it is a whammy that is wreaking havoc on everything and everybody!

A Note from Dennis Speed

Our speaker takes us back to Tuskegee, and Amelia Boynton Robinson, and revolutionary, creative nonviolent direct action.

Tuskegee, Alabama is primarily known because of the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881. It was also the home of the Vice President of the Schiller Institute, Amelia Boynton Robinson.

When you talk about that institution, you talk about the idea of “pulling oneself up by your own bootstraps.” Sometimes that’s misunderstood, in terms of how it’s supposed to work. We had a kind of round table discussion with the former Mayor, Lucenia Dunn, the first Black woman mayor of Tuskegee; city councilwoman Norma Jackson; and Scott Muhammad, from whom we found out about this entire project.

Chief Frazier took care of Amelia Boynton Robinson at the end of her life. She died five years ago, in 2015, at the age of 104.

Erica Muhammad

A Community COVID Task Force

This is the edited transcription of the presentation by Erica Muhammad to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Her remarks conclude our progress report on the work done in America on the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites initiative by Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Schiller Institute

Erica Muhammad

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I just want to add to some of the things that we were able to do here in Macon County, Alabama. I work with Tuskegee University. You heard about the Community COVID Task Force. That is a major relationship that came out of our work dealing with the pandemic. But we also were able to work with the university in getting more testing in our area.

Throughout the Black Belt we’ve had virtually no testing at all. We’re lucky if we can having testing one day a month. So we don’t have accurate numbers, because we don’t have accurate testing, but we did get the university to agree to start manufacturing its own testing kits. And because they are a scientific university, they have the know-how in how to do that. TM46 (The Movement 46, organized by the Tuskegee Macon County Community Foundation) was able to actually offer testing where it didn’t exist, or where it existed in a way that was not very accessible. So that’s one thing that came out of our work in the community that’s very important, that could be reduplicated in other areas as well. And it is going to be increasingly easier to do, as the testing technology improves.

I want to also share a little bit about our health navigators. You know a little bit about our first outing, which was with our law enforcement community. Chief Frazier talked about that. We did a couple outings initially like that, but then we were able to recruit young people in Tuskegee, mostly graduate students or recent graduates of the university, and we created a health navigator team. They are peer educators, so that means they’re known by people in the community and that we will actually take COVID information door to door. Because we’re very aware that a lot of people just don’t even have the correct information. So being able to deliver that information is very critical.

An Epidemic of Loneliness

And then the other thing we discovered while going door to door, is that the quarantine is creating an epidemic of loneliness, and there’s a lack of human contact that’s just not being addressed. Now, there are ways that can be addressed, but if you don’t know that it’s a problem, you can’t come up with a way to solve that problem. When we take the navigators out, we’re very virus sensitive, so everybody is masked up and social distanced; we don’t go in the houses, but we make sure the residents get the information they need.

Another thing we were able to do through TM46, is work with our elected leaders and the task forces who are all of our elected leadership in the county. So some of that work includes public policy—but we’ve had policy in the county and we’ve had policy in the state, but it’s not always being practiced. So we found out that there’s also a lot of public relations that has to go on, in terms of why people don’t take this virus seriously.

There are so many different reasons why people don’t take this seriously. There’s a lot of rumors about it, that it might not really be a virus—it changes by the week. But what we saw is that we have these statistics of how many people are catching it, how many people are dying from it, and we realized that we don’t actually have faces to go with these statistics, so that’s one of the things we’re working on now, is being able to put a face to those people in our community who we have lost to this virus, and that really makes this real for people.

H.E. Ambassador Ayikoi Otoo

Expanding the Health System in Ghana:

101 New Hospitals Planned Nationwide

This is the edited transcription of opening remarks by Ayikoi Otoo to the Schiller Institute conference on September 6. Ambassador Otoo is Ghana’s High-Commissioner to Canada. Subheads are the author’s.

Schiller Institute

H.E. Ambassador Ayikoi Otoo

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Fellow panelists and distinguished participants:

Greetings to you all. My name is Ayikoi Otoo, and I am Ghana’s High Commissioner to Canada, based in Ottawa. I have participated in many Schiller Institute programs, and I’m pleased to be a panelist this time around. I thank the organizers who have invited me.

Ghana, where I come from, is a West African country south of the Sahara, and first obtained its independence from the British in 1957. At the time of independence, the British left Ghana with a huge infrastructure deficit, which successive governments have been fighting to improve. Amongst these deficits are energy, education facilities, roads, railways, international airports, health institutions, housing, etc. Of course in those days, ICT [information and communication technology] was not mainstream, but today Ghana has also been building its ICT infrastructure. By way of educational facilities, many secondary schools and polytechnical universities were built across the country by both the private and the public sector.

Progress in Health Care Delivery

Let me address the health sector, which I’ve been asked to speak about. Government recognizes that significant progress has been made in improving the health of Ghanaians. Life expectancy has improved to 60.5 years for men, and 62.5 for females, due to access to healthcare and nutrition. Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) compounds have increased in number. The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and investment health coverage hovers around 45% of the population.

Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African country to introduce NHIS in 2003, through an act of Parliament which became fully implemented in 2004. Under the National Health Insurance Scheme, every Ghanaian is required to enroll in a health insurance scheme. There are three teaching hospitals in Ghana, Tamale, Komfo Anoyke, and Korle-Bu, as well as a specialist hospital known as University of Ghana Medical Center, which opened to the public last year.

There are six COVID-19 testing laboratories in Ghana. The borders of Ghana opened on the 1st of September, and government announced that all passengers arriving in Ghana will be subject to rapid tests at centers located at the airports. Those who test positive for coronavirus are isolated for treatment. The Ghana East hospital, following the outbreak of COVID-19, was designated as an isolation center for the treatment of COVID-19 cases. Treatment in teaching and regional hospitals have also been set aside as isolation wards for treatment of COVID-19 patients. A new infectious diseases center was recently constructed within two months, and has become fully operational. Ghana’s COVID-19 deaths, as of August, stand at 217.

Despite progress made in healthcare delivery, government has noted challenges that need to be addressed, which include huge imbalances in geographical access to quality healthcare; inadequate and inequitable distribution of critical staff; increased cost of healthcare delivery; and poor quality of healthcare substance.

Though over the years, various governments have built many community healthcare centers, district hospitals, and poly-clinics, as well as tertiary and referral hospitals. Following the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, government announced its intention to build 88 regional hospitals. The government now intends rather to construct 101 hospitals with accommodation for doctors and assistants in districts without hospitals across the region. That is a huge boost to access to health delivery.

According to the Minister of Health, the division of health institutions by category, inter alia, clinics not providing a full range of services, usually reproductive and child health (RCH), basic curative services; health centers providing a full range of basic primary health care (PHC) services, clinical, public health and maternity services; poly-clinics providing an expanded range of PHC services much higher than a health center, but in terms of capacity, less than a district hospital; district hospitals providing full-range PHC services of the general hospital under the management of at least two general-duty doctors. These health facilities are a conscious effort by government to expand access to healthcare for Ghanaians across the country.

By way of funding, government wants to be careful not to add to the debt stock of the country, and therefore it is looking at flexible terms of funding such as private-public partnerships, build-operate-own-and-transfer, or concessionary loans. Government, through the Minister of Finance, is working out the modalities for the funding, and to date, nothing concrete has been announced as to the funding model. The only information out is that government is desirous of awarding the contract to Ghanaian contractors. I don’t think that has anything to do with funding; it ought to be stressed that the move is to prevent a situation where financiers bring in their own labor, depriving Ghanaian workers the opportunity to derive some benefits from the projects.

I shall be ready to share the funding model or regimen as soon as it is made public. I thank you all for your attention.

Marlette Kyssama-Nsona

Health Security—Africa Has to Build a Continental

Health Program: The Case of the Republic of the Congo

This is the edited transcription of the opening remarks by Marlette Kyssama-Nsona to the Schiller Institute conference on September 5. Ms. Kyssama-Nsona is a pharmacist, political executive of the Pan-African League-UMOJA and specialist in public health issues in the Republic of Congo. Subheads are the author’s.

Schiller Institute

Marlette Kyssama-Nsona

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Ladies and gentlemen: On behalf of the Pan-African League-UMOJA and on my own, I thank the Schiller Institute for having invited me to this panel, for an exchange on themes highly essential to the survival of the human species.

A Deadly Economic Model

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the peril that humanity, including wealthy nations, is in because of a predatory economic system whose sole objective is to capture and accumulate collective resources to the benefit of a handful of cosmocrats.

The people of Africa have experienced this peril for the last forty years. Indeed, since the 1980s, Africa has been under the yoke of an odious debt, which has become unsustainable, and of structural adjustment measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank for the sole purpose of repaying this debt, with the complicity of a local comprador elite.

Thus, in terms of public health, the consequences are disastrous:

• Over the last 30 years, budgets for public health programs have been cut. In the case of the Congo, the rate of execution of budgets devoted to health has fallen by nearly 7% over the last 10 years.

• According to the World Health Organization, per capita health spending is $6 per year, compared to the $30 required, according to the same source.

• The same is true for the general infrastructure and for the technical platform that has become obsolete. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the country had less than 5 respirators.

• The training and recruitment of medical and paramedical personnel is in the same condition: Congo has 0.3 doctors and 1.9 nurses and midwives per 10,000 inhabitants. In comparison, Cuba has 77.

• The part of the budget devoted to basic research and investment in research and development in the biomedical field has been reduced to a very small fraction. The Congo imports all its medicines.

• A social security system has not been subsidized for more than 30 years. As a result, there is no social protection; in the Congo to get treatment, one has to pay on the spot and it’s expensive. Thus, many families sell their land holdings to have a chance of allowing one of their members to recover their health, even if the outcome is often fatal. A session of chemotherapy can cost up to $600 in a public hospital, while the Congolese minimum wage is only $120. A Caesarean is worth up to $400! For example, in Congo, the maternal mortality rate is 780 deaths per 100,000 births, one of the highest in Africa.

However, the most perilous consequence is undoubtedly the weakening of the state which, in order to obey the diktats imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, finds itself stripped of its prerogatives, including the possibility of thinking and building a health system that conforms to the expectations of the population.

Here, the state has been replaced by NGOs, some of which act as Trojan horses for the multinational drug companies, without any overall conception, erratically and in a homeopathic dose. More like a wooden leg!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The free trade agreements concluded between our countries and the European Union have made Africa the recipient of diced meat and other poultry unfit for consumption. In the Congo, what we eat kills us! Because of high production costs, the average price of a locally produced chicken is $6, compared to $2 for an imported chicken. The issue of health is closely related to the food issue.

Levers to Build an Effective Health System

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We all know it: the globalist oligarchy operates by attacking the normative power of states. It is therefore necessary to rehabilitate the state, allowing it to recover all its instruments of sovereignty, so that it can fulfill its regalian functions, the most important of which is the protection of its population, and this involves denouncing the debt and the dictates imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. It is the responsibility of the state to think, implement and finance public health policies.

Moreover, Africa does not live in a vacuum! It is contributing to the collective effort by making available to humanity its millennial knowledge and its rich pharmacopoeia. African researchers, like other researchers around the world, reflect every day on the search for solutions.

Africa is an experimental field for many pharmaceutical companies to test a new medicine, or a new vaccine. It is therefore unacceptable that drugs, fruits of the patrimony of humanity, be made inaccessible to a part of this same humanity, because they are sold too expensive! It is necessary to put an end to the “patent” blackmail, operated by pharmaceutical laboratories which, far from fulfilling their primary mission, engage in speculation and have contempt for the collective well-being.

Conclusion

The world must take a vital turn. We need to get out of the financial economy, or else risk destruction for all. What was true yesterday only for the Third World, is now also true for the West. This is a responsibility our peoples must take up!

Panel 3: Second Discussion Session

Schiller Institute

Speakers in the second discussion of Panel 3. Top row from left: Dennis Speed, Dennis Small, Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Middle row from left: Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Dr. Shirley Evers-Manly, Marlette Kyssama-Nsona. Bottom row from left: Diane Sare, Dr. Björn Peters.

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The following is an edited transcript of the second of two discussion sessions during Panel 3 of the Schiller Institute Conference on September 6.

The panelists were first asked by the Moderator, Dennis Speed, if they had questions or observations to make about the presentations they had just heard, before he would take questions from the audience. Audience members with questions for any of the panelists, he said, should email them to questions@schillerinstitute.org, and, if not answered during this session, they would be forwarded to the panelists.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Some of our participants who are not so familiar with our work may have asked themselves, what have these problems to do with each other? What are the problems in Tuskegee, and the problems in Africa, and what others were talking about? This is also in part an answer to Natalia and her proposal for this committee. It is very clear that this whole society globally is really falling apart; it’s in a deep crisis. You have a strategic crisis, you have the health breakdown, you have the social tensions in the United States—to put it mildly.

Looking at that, I thought that the only conception which solves all of this is an idea of Nicholas of Cusa, a thinker of the 15th century, who said that if you have a systemic problem, you have to find a solution on a higher level than the level on which the problems were arising. This is, by the way, something which Einstein also talked about repeatedly. Cusanus developed the idea that the One, which human creativity can conceive, is of a higher priority and higher order or power, than the Many.

So, if all the Many agree to do something which solves the problem for all, then you can actually solve the problem. Right now, I think it’s very clear that you need a just new world economic order which addresses the problems of every part of the world, of every country. But you also need to overcome geopolitics; you need to overcome the supposed competition of countries, because they should be united by one cause.

The same thing goes for social tensions. I’m not now talking about the terrorist element, which is causing the violence and the destruction, but about people who, without taking benefit to their own personal lives, are generally concerned for the many people in the United States and even Europe who are not participating because they have never been integrated into the system.

The idea, therefore, is that we should build a movement, a Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites, which takes different elements and brings them together to jointly solve the problems for all, starting with the young people in the United States, many of whom are desperate. The suicide rate is very high, the drug addiction, the violence. In part, this all comes from people being full of despair, having no vision for the future, thinking that alcohol and drugs, and so forth, are the only ways to go.

The idea was to find people from different layers in the United States, especially in the medical and related professions, and get them to set up training programs for young people to help become assistants with the COVID pandemic. But then quickly team them up with corresponding hospitals and universities in Africa, because you need to address that problem at the same time.

It was Ms. Kyssama-Nsona who correctly pointed to the fact that you can’t separate health from food; you must team up with the farmers. We will hear from farmer leaders in our next panel. While a famine is going on, which will soon be threatening to kill hundreds of thousands of people per day, farmers are being destroyed and are being prevented from doubling and quadrupling their food production by cartels only interested in the system of profit.

The idea of the Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites is to build a mechanism to give a mission to young people who can be trained by the medical and related professionals to help in this crisis, and at the same time, link them up with their African—and also later other countries’—counterparts; linking them up with the farmers. By creating in the small a model to actually solve this problem by mobilizing lots of people who see the need, we create a model that can hopefully be adopted by governments at large. Obviously, a private effort like the one I’m talking about cannot solve the gigantic problem. But we can create a model of what governments should do, and that way also build a bridge to avoid having race riots, to avoid race tension, but instead to work together.

We have reached a point in human history where either we are able to make that mental leap of thinking the higher level of what unites us all, or we may not make it as a human species. That is really something I just wanted to give as a background for those who have not been discussing this idea. This idea that we have to get to a higher level of thinking, is key to solving this problem.

Marlette Kyssama-Nsona: The COVID-19 pandemic has already shown to humanity that humanity is in danger today. We have to face it. For most of the people in the world until now, things like pandemics and food crises were only for Africa, or some parts of Asia. But now we can see that we have these crises—pandemics, food crisis—all around the world.

We have a clear sense today that the choices which have been made since the Second World War, the economic choices that have been made, have been a total disaster. From Congo-Brazzaville, where I am, where we have a lot of problems, we were very astonished, it was unbelievable to us, to see this de-industrialization and the monetarization which have de-localized industry and jobs from Europe to Asia. Today, even Europeans were not able to have masks and be prepared for this pandemic. It was very shocking for us.

The accumulation of financial profits since World War II, with this pandemic, shows that we are all agreed—from the North and from the South—that the economic choices we have made were a total failure. Today, we know that humanity has failed with these financial and economic choices. It’s time now to go on the direction that we have started together, opening our minds to decide what kind of world we want tomorrow, next month, the next period. Everybody knows that today we have to save the human species. For me, we have to save the human species as a whole.

A question for Dr. Evers-Manly: You mentioned that you had worked in several countries, not only in Mississippi. You mentioned Namibia at one point, that you’d been there. What other countries did you work in, and what do you think are the important differences to figure out, if we are going to be able to stop the pandemic, given the differences in countries and health systems?

Dr. Shirley Evers-Manly: I’ve been in Ghana, both in the northern and eastern parts. I’ve been to Uganda; I’ve been to Morocco; the Philippines; to South Africa; Botswana; Zimbabwe. In looking at all of those countries, the one thing that I find that binds us together is that we have a strong sense of networking and communication in our communities. When you learn that networking, and you learn that communication, when we’re able to go out and work with the individuals on their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, then we’re able to help them develop a clinic, for example.

When we were in Zimbabwe, there were several infants dying from HIV/AIDS at the time. We helped build a clinic that’s still sustainable. We taught the children, among whom there were several foster children, whose parents had lost their lives because of HIV/AIDS. We taught them how to become community health outreach workers and CNAs [Certified Nursing Assistants] so they can learn how to take blood pressures.

We worked with the farmers so they can learn more about how to use the peanuts they grow. We worked with them in regard to how they can make peanut butter and all different types of things with peanuts, how they can sell the peanuts; going into farming and sustainability and food, but also bringing resources in. So, in learning those particular communities, helping them understand health for themselves, individually. What is our health going to be individually? Because we had no role models. Then, building on that and helping each of the communities.

I think we’re going to make an impact, especially now since COVID-19 has provided us with a level playing field. As one of the presenters said, all of us have had difficulties—access to food; all of us have had difficulty moving about. In San Francisco where I’ve lived, and Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., I’m close to all resources, but I couldn’t get there. In Mississippi, I’m not; I’m in a very rural part of Mississippi, but I can’t get there. But we learn from the things that we were taught when we were growing up. As I was sharing with the team last week, one of the things I really respect when I’m in Africa, is that everyone comes together to sit at the table to eat. But before they eat, they wash their hands, they pray collectively, and they eat as a family. We have lost that as a culture here, as we’ve become more industrialized.

As a former chief nursing officer of six hospitals on the East Coast and the West Coast—and everyone can look at our joint commission rates—hand hygiene is a major issue. So, I respect that in our African nations, that they do not forget to do that. Sometimes, looking back to move forward will help us in the crises that we’re having today.

For example, I was looking at the data as I’m trying to familiarize myself with Mississippi. Diabetes alone cost the state of Mississippi $180 billion. So, if we’re looking at improving our health status and being serious about that, and we keep talking about it, why do we still have food deserts? The state of Mississippi spent $180 billion on diabetes, so why can’t I have a choice of the type of drink? For example, they have sweet tea and they have extra sweet tea, right in the areas where there’s a major problem.

So, if we’re serious, and we’re not industrializing everything and industrializing health care, and we’re looking at the areas where we need to have appropriate health care access, the appropriate access to the right types of food, then I think we’re going to be where we are now.

We have heard many times in some of the education that I’ve done throughout my career in health care—from public health to providing health care in an acute care setting—that public health is a dinosaur, and we don’t need it. So, in some schools you don’t even get the public health education anymore. We have to really look back and probably go back to our foundations of health, of disease, of preventing disease, and look at society as we are now in this industrialized world to make sure we have the right foods, the right health care access, in the communities where we live, work, and play.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders: One thing that I’d like to add—it’s been said several times—but I think we need to start educating all over the world, early. We do too little, too late. What you brought up about what they do in African countries, we need to do more of.

So I really propose that we start early childhood education; make young people start early; that we begin to make sure that we involve public health; it’s more important. We can do more about saving lives and decreasing the spread of this COVID-19 virus by the simple things that are taught in public health. Simple things like washing our hands, wearing a face mask—not only to protect ourselves, but to protect all our friends and neighbors. Social distancing.

So we need to learn to respect others. But that’s true for the whole world. We need to stop the virus. I think much of that starts with education; we’re all trying to develop a vaccine; we’re all trying to develop good medicine. We all know that that’s important, and we all want it. Every country, every neighborhood, everybody should have it, but until we can work together, solve this problem together, we still have to do the simple things that we can all do, like handwashing, making sure we wear a mask, stay out of huge crowds, social distancing. These are things that everybody can do, that we can do now.

Until we get that vaccine, until we get that wonderful medication we all know we need, we’ve got to start now. I feel that everybody everywhere in the world has a right to health care, and we know that that’s not done everywhere.

A question from Daniel in France to Dennis Small: To establish the national sovereignty of each country and stop globalization, what do you think of a generalized Glass-Steagall anti-trust law for each country in the world? This way, a multi-national company will have to account for each national independent subsidiary without the possibility of playing with tax havens.

Dennis Small: Sure, but that’s only the very beginning. That alone will not be sufficient, because you have to staunch the flow of blood, but you also have to revive the patient. We have to—we have no choice—but to develop the productive powers of labor around the entire planet so that the potential relative population-density rises so that it’s above the actual population, or we will have mass genocide. That requires not simply a Glass-Steagall type of solution, but it actually requires, in addition to that, then creating the kinds of institutions to build the projects, to engage in the kinds of activities which we’ve been discussing here. All of this can be done; it’s absolutely feasible. But we have to have that approach to physical economy.

Let me again take the occasion to say that I really think the answer to this lies in the original proposal for this conference, which is to form an urgent chorus of voices to demand and insist that a meeting of the P-5 nations occur to address all of these crises immediately, so that they can be addressed. I found just an incredible similarity, or a congruence, of the proposals that were stated by Natalia Vitrenko, and I would like to second her call for forming that kind of a committee of everyone from the world, and the people on this webcast, to participate and get our respective nations on board.

What Dr. Elders was saying—I took some notes—we have to work together no matter how opposite we are, and we have to do this “everywhere in the world.” That’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s phrase. And, of course, Helga’s call for the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the formation of a chorus of voices. This must be a political mobilization of a chorus of voices internationally, to bring about the kind of change now, while we still can. The clock is ticking. Every one of these crises can destroy our very precious human species. So, we have to make sure that we turn this around now, and use this meeting here, as simply the platform, the stepping stone to what we have to bring about internationally.

That’s what has to be done, and of course, Glass-Steagall is a measure within all those types of procedures.

A question from Ricardo in California: It appears that any normal thinking person would agree with development everywhere in the world. The benefits to all are clear. The problem is, there exist forces in the world that seek to undermine this development. Isn’t this the real issue that needs to be addressed? Exposure and then removal of such obstacles?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, absolutely. In the discussion of an earlier panel, I made the point that the people, or the forces that want to keep the status quo of no development, are really the British Empire. Now, people tend to say the British Empire vanished at the latest when Hong Kong was given over to China for this current intermediate status in 1997. But the British Empire is not something which is located in London alone. It is what my late husband used to call a slime mold, which changes its form. The Roman Empire was an empire; then it went to Byzantium; it went to Venice; it went to the Anglo-Dutch Empire. Finally, it became the British Empire.

As I tried to develop yesterday, it is the subversion of the United States—and part of Europe, I must say—with that British conception, to run the world to the advantage of a small, privileged class of bankers, speculators, cartels. These are the people who like profit more; they don’t like investment in infrastructure because infrastructure is not profitable if you want to make 25% a year. You cannot finance a highway with tolls; it’s ridiculous. You cannot build a trans-African railway system like the Chinese have for China, and put a tollbooth every 50 kilometers.

So, the problem is, we have to get rid of that speculative class. This idea that you have to have a small elite of financiers and speculators who, at the expense of the populations of the world, make the gap between the rich and the poor wider and wider, that system has to stop. This is why we are putting so much urgent emphasis on this P-5 summit. If it’s not the P-5 summit, it should be only—as was yesterday discussed—the three most important countries; the United States, Russia, and China. Or with India; India right now is unfortunately on a wrong trajectory concerning the cooperation with China, so I’m not emphasizing India so much at this point. But we need the top governments to make the radical revolutionary changes to allow for the survival of all of humanity.

Will they do it? That is why we need this chorus of people who demand that the governments do it, because if the G-20 would be capable, they would have done it already. But within the G-20, I’m afraid, there are several countries who are part of this usury system, who will oppose such a change. This is what we have to think of, in terms of organizing really a mass movement, but not a mass movement of people who don’t know what they’re doing. We have to recruit a mass movement of leaders, of community leaders, of state leaders, of institutional leaders, of people who stand up in front of this crisis and say, “I will become part of the solution.”

That is what the Schiller Institute is trying to do. This is why, especially from April of this year, we conducted several international conferences in trying to bring together the alliance of forces. People normally are doing the good thing in their country, but they don’t know what is happening in other continents, while the oligarchy is absolutely working as an international force. Despite the fact that our forces are relatively weak, I think in a crisis situation like this, it is not what you normally would assume in terms of power. It’s the power of ideas.

Right now mankind needs to move to a completely different mode of thinking, of thinking of the one humanity first and then define national interest. I liked what Dr. Muñoz said earlier, that he signs all of his articles as being a world citizen. I really think that that is a very good idea, because you have to think as a world citizen. You can be and should be a patriot, but this should never be in contradiction with opening your heart for humanity as a whole.

We have to recruit a mass movement of people. I suggest that we should expand this Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites, and not just limit it to the health question, but to this effort. That the time has come to put the Coincidence of Opposites ahead.

A question for Dr. Evers-Manly: You are identified as being on the board of the National Black Nurses Association, therefore you probably have a national picture of nursing around the country. Despite the pandemic in the United States, we have heard that more and more hospitals are going into bankruptcy. Nurses, despite the need, are being furloughed.

Can you tell us why you think this is occurring, and how there can be a national call for saving as well as expanding U.S. medical infrastructure and skills?

Evers-Manly: I have to take a deep breath and really think about that question, because it’s a very critical question. I think it’s a question that can take further dialogue outside of this conference. The nurses are being furloughed because many of those nurses who are being furloughed are working in outpatient surgery, and the OR [“operating room”-for surgery]. As you recall, many of the surgeries were cancelled.

With that being said, we already knew as nurses that in 2020, which we’re in now, we were going to be short 1.2 million nurses across the country. New York, California, Texas being some of the highest areas where there’s a need for nursing. If you look at how the pandemic has been going, you can see where nurses have been leaving one state and going to another state to work in those hospitals. When they come back to their hospitals to work, to help out, they’re not getting their jobs back.

So, when you look at nursing, right now nurses are not working to the highest of their degree. RNs might not be working to the highest of their degree, the nurse practitioners are not working at the highest of their degrees. So, we have a lot that we need to discuss in regard to how nurses are used in the hospital setting.

The nurses that they need right now are nurses that are more used to working in ICUs or CCUs with respiratory problems. But you know, that’s how COVID first presented itself, was with respiratory issues. Now, we’re seeing it having an impact on all other issues. We have the issue where, in some hospitals, because some of the Medicare laws were lifted, people going to emergency rooms and being told, “Oh no, we’re going to turn you away; go to another place.”

Just recently in Detroit, somebody took their father to several different emergency rooms to try to get him admitted. That person wasn’t admitted, because they can say, “We don’t have enough ventilators, or we don’t have the PPE.” This person has COVID, and African-Americans in particular have other chronic conditions. So, if this person has COVID and diabetes or congestive heart failure, then we’re not going to do the care there that we need to do. We’re going to go to someone else.

So, there are so many different things that are happening, and I can share with you, as a chief nursing officer and as a dean, we turned thousands of applications away because we don’t have enough nurses to teach the next generation of nurses who are actually going to be in the hospitals. So yes, there’s a shortage of nurses, there’s a need for nurses; but at the same time, there’s hospitals that are furloughing nurses.

The other problem that we look at in regard to nursing is that when you go across the country, there are different models on what they feel patient ratios should be. So, that means a nurse taking care of a patient. California is the only state that has a law on how many patients a nurse can take care of; other states don’t. So, when you have one nurse taking care of five to seven patients, and some of them may be COVID patients, that becomes a problem. You have some hospitals that said, “We’re going to have nurses work with COVID patients only, and some nurses that don’t work with COVID patients, because they want to prevent the accidental spread of COVID.

That has to be looked at, because if I work in a radiation unit, for example, I can only work a certain number of hours, a certain number of times, so that my body can have a time to relax. Do we know, for workforce individuals in nursing—if they’re only working in COVID every day, 12-hour shifts, stressful hours, very difficult patients—what vulnerability do they have as nurses where we’re still hearing that there are problems with PPE?

I’m going into a lot of different areas to get things in quickly, to give the other panelists an opportunity to speak, but there are several different issues. There are several issues that we need to peel back, layer by layer, so we can address those issues for those nurses who are being furloughed.

Probably the more important thing is that, rather than the furloughing the nurses, as we’ve said, we have destroyed our public health system. There are not enough nurses in the public health system to even go out and check on isolated seniors. I know for a fact, when we were volunteering here in Los Angeles, we took food to one senior on Mother’s Day. That was the last time she was seen. When someone went to check on her again, she had died.

So how many people do we have for whom that has happened, who are isolated in their homes? As we think again about more rural areas, as when I shared that Mississippi is like Namibia—very big, spread out, and very rural—who’s checking on those individuals?

So, there’s a lot I’m very passionate about—I’m passionate that we’re looking at this, that we’re not laying off nurses, and that we’re not furloughing them. But that we’re using them in other areas, and that we really look at the policies and procedures for these frontline workers who are in the hospital taking care of COVID-positive patients, in addition to all the other patients that they still have, who have cardiovascular disease, or cancer who are on chemotherapy. They may say, “Go home. We can’t treat you at the hospital. You can’t stay overnight because we don’t want you to contract COVID.” But what are we doing with those patients?

Q: In the United States, we often get requests for contributions to programs that engage at a village level around the world. But some of us, at least, know they may help a few people, but will not generate what is necessary. How do the speakers see the interface between major infrastructure projects and village-level programs?

Kyssama-Nsona: In African culture, we have what we can call a kind of solidarity right, it’s like a civil right, but for solidarity. When we have a problem, each member of our community has to help another member if he or she has a problem. That’s in our African culture. As we have no state medical assistance, state protection, it is our culture which saves us. When we have an uncle, a cousin with a big medical problem, everybody is starting to bring the money necessary to help him have a remedy for his sickness. But with the degradation of the situation, because things are getting worse and worse in our country, even this cultural tradition has a tendency to disappear, because there are so many problems around everybody.

For example, you have to imagine that here in the Congo, even our farmers—people who have cattle, who are producers of wheat and different cereals—cannot live anymore from their production, because of the free trade policy. Everything which is imported is less expensive than what we are producing here with our farmers. Because of the financial system, today in our country farmers have to leave their land, and stop being farmers, because of this free trade policy.

The worst thing is that people are not only losing their production, they are losing their dignity. It’s very important for us in Africa to keep this dignity. We have to wait for NGOs, for example, to help us, so it’s a kind of an attack against our dignity. When poverty is created—because that’s the problem today—you can be sure that you will have conflicts and wars.

I want to really emphasize that we cannot separate health issues from food production. It’s not possible, because we have to have people in a healthy situation and be able to feed themselves. So, I really emphasize that it’s the same subject. We have to go to the roots of the subject, because today we are too much living on—awaiting—help from outside. We don’t need help; we have to go to the root of this problem, have a real health system and a real food production system.

Two related questions for Dr. Elders: Please speak to the issue of the Hill-Burton system [of so many hospital beds per 10,000 persons that had been standard in the United States prior to the 1970s], versus the current state of health care.

We heard the ambassador from Ghana discuss the national plan to build 101 hospitals there, including positioning those hospitals throughout the country, including in rural, less accessible areas. Can we use that example of thinking from Ghana to get Americans to bring back the Hill-Burton law?

Small: I’ll take up the question of Hill-Burton, and also some of these issues around the nursing shortage, and one additional point. We’ve just heard this anguished picture of a massive shortage of nurses in the United States, and people desperately need nurses. We are not getting the two sides together. It’s exactly the picture we’re going to hear this afternoon, where we have nations, entire countries, populations starving to death, and farms are being bankrupted. Maybe there’s a problem with the system.

Maybe there’s something fundamentally wrong when the central banks of the world, like the Federal Reserve of the United States, issue $4 trillion of credit; not for production, not for health, not for food, not for industry, not for technology, not for railroads, but to bail out the banking system. We’re in a systemic crisis. This system is dead; it’s over.

And it’s very possible that as the institutional collapse goes on and extends outwards, and people see no answer, see no remedy to those conditions, they may very well go stark raving mad before they die of hunger. That’s the problem that’s going on right now.

Our answer, our solution, the idea that is an answer, even before it’s fully implemented, is absolutely critical to the situation. In that regard, and in many others, I want to reiterate my concluding point from my remarks this morning, which is that we must obtain the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.

This is not simply a matter of personal interest, or one case of injustice. This is the man who provided not only the philosophical and scientific ideas to solve these problems. Ignoring of those solutions lies at the root of what we’re seeing today. But Lyndon LaRouche, as well, served as a kind of moral example, as a moral compass of what human beings should actually be. The idea of living for the common good. I dare to say that unless and until we in the United States in particular, bring about the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche with the help of that same chorus of voices internationally, unless and until that happens, we will not regain our own moral fitness to survive.

Dr. Elders: We’ve talked all morning, and we’ve talked about this virus that has kind of exposed our moral underbelly of what’s going on and all the problems that we see and encounter. But we’ve not talked about prevention—the most important thing we need to do. We could prevent this virus. We have 25 million people who have been exposed, and we probably could have stopped this had we educated and taught our communities, our young people, even our public health system and our doctors to make a difference.

We talked about money to build more hospitals; we may not need more hospitals. Why? If we prevent the problem from happening, we don’t need more beds and more people to take care of them, and more ventilators. What we need to do is teach our people how to be healthy, that’s what we were talking about, and I think Helga’s idea of teaching our young people what they can do in our communities to really begin to make a difference.

We need to reach out and be responsible; that’s what we as a world have really not done. We’ve got to educate and empower all of our people. We’re talking about the education of more doctors, more neurosurgeons; but we’ve got to educate and empower our young people to prevent this problem. If we did that, we wouldn’t need more ventilators, because the people could be educated and empowered on preventing the problem so that it wouldn’t spread so rapidly.

We’ve got to be the voice and vision for the poor and the powerless. Powerless people in need of powerful friends like ourselves. I think this group has tried to do it. We’ve got to be able to put that together, use it, and be the powerful voice, be the 2020 vision of this century. Talk about what we’ve lost, I heard you talk about that we don’t eat together anymore; we don’t visit together. We all know that that’s going on. Some countries still have it, but we’ve lost it.

But as we educate and reach out, we’ve got to do the things we need to do. We’ve got to learn to network. We talk to each other, and we talk to people like ourselves, but we don’t really network all over the country. We’ve got to use the tools of commitment. We’ve got to give of our time, our talent, and our connections; they will become our three tools. We’ve got to be involved. We’ve got to continue to do high-quality research, but we’ve got to invest in people, invest in public health. We’ve invested in the big things, like banks. But we’ve got to invest more in our people for the groundwork to be able to increase and make things better, if we’re going to really do the things we need to do.

We’ve got to take every opportunity we get. This virus has given us an opportunity to wake up. We’re awake; we’ll take every opportunity we get. As my husband, Oliver, who’s a coach and is sitting here with me, says, “Opportunity is like a single strand of hair on a bald-headed man. It only goes around once, and you’ve got to grab it when it’s there.” So, I think we have to go grab some of these opportunities that have been presenting themselves.

When are we going to do it? We’ve got to do it now. The opportunity is here; it’s now. I think we’ve got to grab that opportunity that’s presenting itself to be able to go and take up the things that Helga mentioned about founding this committee, getting it going, and everybody has got to be involved. Not just the people at the top; we’ve got to start at the bottom and go up, and get everybody involved if we really want to make a difference.

My husband wishes to recite a poem he wrote.

Oliver Elders:

It’s a human touch in this world that counts;

It’s the touch of your hand and mine.

That would mean more to a perishing soul

Than does bread, shelter, or wine.

Because shelter’s gone when the night is over,

And bread will last only a day.

But the touch of the hand and the sound of voice

Will remain in the soul always.

Keep doing what you’re doing; you’re great.

Q: In the spirit of the Coincidence of Opposites, what role could our virtual chorus singing and other music play in accompanying health volunteers and others to counterpose the beauty of their dedication and the music, to the ugliness of the COVID virus and racism?

Diane Sare: That poem actually just captured a little bit of what I would say. There will be much more on the panel coming after this, which I urge people to participate in. It will feature our farmers, as well as food for the soul: Classical culture.

On the virtual chorus: Our chorus did two performances on this 75th anniversary of VE Day in World War II: Tri Tankista, a Russian military song, which was seen as a generous gesture of friendship by people all over Russia. We got many comments. Then, a song from a cantata, Defend the Yellow River. This was quite a challenge. Our Chinese-American chorus members got quite a kick out of watching our non-Chinese-speaking chorus members struggle to learn this; especially since it was at a rather quick tempo. We sent that as a very important gift, given all of the really vicious anti-Chinese propaganda we are hearing in the United States. We wanted to express our appreciation for those people who helped to defeat fascism in World War II.

I have two ideas on healthcare and music. One is that singing and participating in musical performance is healthy. There is a reason that Einstein was a violinist. There are even bio-physical measurements of different connections in the brain that improve as a result of one’s engagement in Classical music.

As part of our economic platform, my colleague Renee Sigerson has proposed something like an FDR program, that we establish mandatory school music programs, which I think will transform the society.

We saw that in force in a particular hospital in Harlem. I’m not sure why it happened that way, but it is probably the case that many doctors and nurses are also musicians. In this hospital, as in many others across the world, under COVID quarantining, people are dying alone. They are in their worst, most desperate need and cannot draw on the strength of their loved ones and family members. Some were using iPads and cell phones to bring people into their rooms electronically.

In this desperate situation, a group of doctor-musicians—and some of them are really very fine musicians, really semi-professional—decided to conduct a chamber music concert right in the ICU, dedicated to the persons fighting this illness.

I just think that this is so important. It’s very challenging to all of us to miss that human touch right now. But there are certain things that exist in the mind, which is universal, and therefore, we can still reach each other. Perhaps even in a more important way than the physical touch.

Zepp-LaRouche: Some people may think that there is a contradiction between trying to solve the problem at large, and acting more directly where we can. I want to stress again that there is no such contradiction. We are trying to solve the problem at large by putting international pressure on the P-5 governments to take up the challenge and solve these problems, because they have the power to do it, if anybody has. It’s the strongest governments in the world, which could do it.

We must create pressure, an international chorus if you will, to demand that they do it, because there is simply nobody else who can change the system in time. Yesterday, I tried to express—and some other people on the panel also said—Mr. Sieff said we are 100 seconds before midnight with respect to the outbreak of a Third World War. I think it could be much closer, because every day you hear about new aircraft intercepts, new incidents, near incidents. So it’s really urgent that we concentrate on getting the system changed in the large, so to speak, from the top.

But there is no contradiction between that and trying to mobilize the effort that Dr. Elders and I have been talking about for two months now, about this Committee of Opposites to get the youth trained to team up hospitals and universities in the United States—and eventually in Europe—with hospitals and universities in African countries to try to replicate this model of teaching young people to be medical assistants.

In the beginning, it will be very simple things like teaching people how to wear masks in the right way, how to get access to these things, social distancing, all of these things. Eventually, it will become a little bit more ambitious, and they should get really trained. While that will not solve the big problem, I think such an effort is really crucial to show a way, in a moment like this, how you have to establish this higher level, be it in the small, or be it in the large.

I really urge all the participants of the panel and those who are listening and watching, to join this. We will succeed only if we multiply really big time in the shortest possible time. We have done quite a job since April, expanding into Latin America and Africa. We are trying to build up our forces in the United States and Europe. You saw by the international panelists, that we have resonance in many countries. But that has to be increased to become a chorus, which is in a certain sense, singing with such a strong voice that it can bring down buildings, it can sing down windows. If you have a laser-like voice, with a chorus of the whole world, you can change the system. That’s my firm belief.

So, I urge you all to help expand this effort. Listen to the next panel, because there you will hear that the farmers in the United States have the same problems that Ms. Nsona from the Republic of Congo was describing, and that we absolutely have to hook up our forces, because I believe that the problems are such that we can only solve it if we link up with all the people who have these problems or are victimized by the present system, in order to replace it with a human one.