Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 44, October 30, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Trump’s Crash Program for COVID Vaccine Is Being Sabotaged by Renegade Democratic ‘Health’ Establishment

- EDITORIAL War and Peace Are on the Ballot: A Memo to the Anti-War Folks Who Can’t Decide How To Vote by Tony Papert

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 44, October 30, 2020

- I. Donald Trump: the Best Democrat Since John F. Kennedy

- BINNEY, WIEBE, AND BOYD PRESS AVAILABILITY For the Rescue of the Nation, the Committees of Correspondence in Action

- While Biden Crime Family Wants More Payoffs, Trump Builds Nation, Ready To Dump ‘Green Steal’ by Brian Lantz

- THE FRIDAY, APRIL 18 MESSAGE! Start with Our U.S. Economy by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (2014)

- The Alaska-to-Alberta Railway The Year We Walk through the Door to the World Land-Bridge, or the Lost Chance of 2020? by Robert Hux and Marcia Merry Baker

- II. Science and Development

- DIALOGUE WITH HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE War or Peace Depends on Individuals Acting for the Common Good

- Ibero-America and Caribbean Choose To Look to the Stars To Build a Future by Cynthia R. Rush

- Southeast Asia Rejects Mike Pompeo, Not the United States by Mike Billington

President Trump’s Leadership in

The Battle for a COVID-19 Vaccine

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

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Elke Fimmen

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

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

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Rainer Apel

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EDITORIAL

Trump’s Crash Program for COVID Vaccine Is Being Sabotaged by Renegade Democratic ‘Health’ Establishment

C-SPAN

C-SPAN

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden square off in the second presidential campaign debate, this one hosted by NBC’s Kristen Welker.

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Oct. 24—Thursday evening’s debate of the presidential candidates began on a hopeful note. The moderator, Kristen Welker, gave President Donald Trump “two and one-half minutes without interruption” to address the COVID-19 crisis. Trump opened with America’s scientific crash program, Operation Warp Speed, and its amazing progress in developing a vaccine to be available within weeks. Welker, as if allergic or immune to optimistic thought, immediately forgot her own instructions and interrupted: Would he “guarantee” the vaccine? And what vaccines? Trump said it was not a guaranteed matter, but it would be here by the end of the year. He emphasized that the military had made all the logistical arrangements for a rapid deployment. (Gen. Gustave Perna is the chief operating officer and logistical co-head of Operation Warp Speed, while Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief advisor, is the scientific co-head.)

In contrast to Welker’s deaf response, Dr. Robert Wachter, the Chair of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and a furious critic of the Trump Administration’s pandemic response, had an honest, if very reluctant response recorded in the Oct. 21 Washington Post and other media:

Going from where we were in January and February—where we are going to be hit by this tsunami—to very likely having a vaccine, or more than one vaccine, that is proven safe and effective within a year, is staggeringly impressive, and would only have happened with strong and effective federal action.

Wachter called the vaccine mobilization “nearly flawless,” although he told the Washington Post he found the words difficult to say.

Wachter’s response is honest. It contrasts with the deliberate sabotage of vaccine development attempted by politicized doctors who see totally unnecessary deaths as an acceptable collateral consequence of maintaining the total lie that President Trump is responsible for all deaths by COVID. These “doctors” have delayed vaccine deployment until after the November election amidst a totally predictable spike in virus infections, because of their personal hatred of Donald Trump. How many unnecessary deaths will ultimately result from this genocidal campaign against our nation’s infirm and elderly?

Pfizer began Phase 3 trials on July 27 and indicated on September 3 that it was on track to deliver excellent results no later than mid-October, that is, before the election. Egged on by New York Times and Washington Post warnings of a Trump “October Surprise,” one Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist at California’s Scripps Research Institute with a big Twitter following, swung into action. Topol has been the media’s go-to guy for months for “authoritative” medical objections to Trump’s program. His argument has been that, if it is fast—that is, a crash program—it is suspect; hence, no one need pay attention to the “emergency” part of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

In September, Topol led a campaign accusing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) head Stephen Hahn of being a tool of Trump in the push for a vaccine, and calling upon him to resign. He targeted and enlisted board members of Pfizer. This led to a series of phone calls between Topol and Hahn, which Topol describes as rather chummy: “I went from way negative to way positive.” He now calls Hahn a “friend,” who has had to withstand tremendous pressure from Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar.

Hahn consented to a change in policy in mid-to-late September, whereby any vaccine EUA approval would be delayed for an extra two months after the successful assessment of the Phase 3 trial. Peter Marks, the man at FDA who must approve the vaccine, has been fully on board with this deadly scam. Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, and others are leading the campaign against any vaccine for which Donald Trump could get credit. These are the conceits of the same oligarchs who cheered Obama’s death panels or who, like Michael Bloomberg, called for triage of the elderly completely out of medical treatment because “it will bankrupt us.”

EDITORIAL

War and Peace Are on the Ballot:

A Memo to the Anti-War Folks

Who Can’t Decide How To Vote

by Tony Papert

CC/Sarah Burris

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

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Oct. 20—No one who has seen it will ever forget Hillary Clinton’s uncontrollable chortling over the sodomy-murder of Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, ordered by Obama and French President Hollande in October, 2011. “We came, we saw, he died!” she guffawed, mimicking the words of Julius Caesar, whose successor Tiberius crucified Christ.

Hillary’s moral insanity must force us to remember two things: first, that the Obama-Biden administration was a war administration, whose record of launching bloody, no-win “forever wars” was only rivalled in American history by the preceding Bush-Cheney administration. Obama continued the bloody and useless Afghanistan War throughout both his terms in office. In March 2011, he unleashed a NATO bombing campaign against Libya which only ended with Qaddafi’s torture-murder in October. But, although the NATO bombings have stopped, Obama’s Libya war continues today. The country is still at war and in bloody chaos almost a decade later.

Then, in August 2011, Obama triggered the Syria war with his demand that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Under Obama’s orders, the CIA armed and trained terrorist armies, including bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, to try to overthrow the Syrian government. By 2012, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen. Michael Flynn had warned Obama that his policies were deliberately building up the terrorist group ISIS, which burst on the world with seizures of Iraqi cities and huge, mass atrocities in 2014. (Flynn disclosed this in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2015.) No wonder Obama fired Gen. Flynn, and then, years later, held a White House meeting on January 5, 2017, to frame him up and get him fired as Trump’s National Security Advisor.

In the Fall of 2013, Obama was only stopped from launching massive bombing raids against Syria (after a false-flag chemical attack there), by patriotic elements in the Pentagon and the vocal protests of millions of Americans—and after Britain’s House of Commons voted against it. But Obama’s Syria war still continues today, although on a reduced scale, since Russia started helping Syria against the terrorists in 2015.

In 2014, Obama launched a coup in Ukraine, on Russia’s border, using actual Nazis as his allies, and risking nuclear war with Russia. Obama’s war in Ukraine continues today—intimately linked with the “Russiagate” hoax used to attempt to overthrow President Trump.

Obama’s wars have spread chaos across the map and caused hecatombs of deaths. The Middle East and much of Europe are flooded with refugees. Was Lyndon LaRouche wrong to compare him with Hitler?

Hillary’s cackling over Qaddafi’s murder must also remind us of one other thing. It reminds us of the “Pol Pots in pantsuits,” the super-sadistic women who served as Obama’s uber-generals, such as Susan Rice, Michele Flournoy, Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter (her real name), and of course Hillary herself. Never having been to war themselves, they nevertheless told us when and where to go to war, and told our generals how to fight. Now if somehow Biden were elected, no one expects he will actually function as President. Instead, power will be in the hands of this group, as part of an unelected government of “experts.” As the leaders of the Washington swamp, otherwise known as the “interagency,” they will lead us into genocidal wars once more. This time it may come to an early war against China, as British historian Niall Ferguson has forecast, or against Russia.

What Choice Is There?

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is only the first President since Ronald Reagan who has not started any new foreign wars. On the contrary, he has sought to bring U.S. troops back home—thus infuriating the media, the civilian and military permanent bureaucracy, and majorities of both parties in Congress. The President rejects “forever wars,” or “no-win wars,” as do the so-called “deplorables” who elected him. (Those whose children go abroad to fight in those wars are called “deplorables” by some in our professional classes—whose own children remain here in college.) Anti-Trump war hawk John Bolton complained recently that rather than starting new wars, Donald Trump in his second term will be more likely to make peace with old enemies.

Who is it, what is the “interest group,” that insists that we fight these wars and others like them? President Trump has echoed President Eisenhower’s warning against the “military-industrial complex.” Yes, indeed, our retired generals and former congressional staffers are getting rich through the “revolving door” between government service and the defense contractors. But there is much more to it than that.

By its nature, the United States is a Republic. And it still has that character within its people and institutions, despite the corruption which has largely overtaken us since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and then the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But although ours was the first nation in history expressly founded as a Republic, the Republican tradition in European history is far older than the United States; it can be traced back through Plato, and further back through the Ionian thinkers who preceded him almost three thousand years ago. It was their ideas, especially as developed later through Christianity, which shaped our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

From its inception, Republicanism, with its concept of man as a creative being in the image of God the creator, confronted oligarchism, or imperialism, as its deadly enemy. (Other names for it are slave society or serfdom. Or Bidenism.) When our American farmers and workmen defeated the world’s most powerful military at Yorktown in 1781, we opened a new chapter in this very old story—as yet another chapter will be opened this November 3.

The problem of war in recorded history has been that empires have used wars, especially long wars, to weaken and destroy the nation-state. The Roman Empire kept the peoples on its borders in a state of continual warfare against each other and itself. The British Empire first rose to world pre-eminence by using the Seven Years War (1754-63), what we call the French and Indian War, to cause all its Continental European rivals to destroy each other. Then Britain intended our Civil War to reduce the United States to a number of squabbling ministates. Britain triggered World War I, again, to cause the Continental powers to destroy each other, in which it succeeded, even though Britain itself was almost destroyed. Britain’s original objectives for what became World War II were similar.

Franklin Roosevelt intended a post-war world without empire, but his untimely death, and his successor Truman’s acquiescence to Britain, aborted Roosevelt’s plans.

The post-World War II version of the British Empire, especially after 1971, was a financial empire centered in the City of London and its Wall Street colony. When President Kennedy threatened a robust revival through his space and infrastructural programs, Britain extended its project to assassinate France’s Charles de Gaulle, into an assassination of Kennedy. Thereafter his space program was wound down, and the United States was inveigled into Viet Nam through Britain’s proconsul for Southeast Asia. We have never yet recovered from Viet Nam, but it was only the first of many such needless, wasting wars to come.

Thus, the targets of decades of America’s no-win, endless wars have not only been the poor Third World countries that were invaded, but the United States itself—and, in another respect, Russia and China. The Americans who have hatched these war schemes have been working against our country’s interests on behalf of a foreign power, whether wittingly or not.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 44, October 30, 2020

Cover This Week

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump visits the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland on March 3, 2020.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP’S LEADERSHIP IN THE BATTLE FOR A COVID-19 VACCINE

2 EDITORIAL

Trump’s Crash Program for COVID Vaccine Is Being Sabotaged by Renegade Democratic ‘Health’ Establishment

4 EDITORIAL

War and Peace Are on the Ballot: A Memo to the Anti-War Folks Who Can’t Decide How to Vote

by Tony Papert

I. DONALD TRUMP: THE BEST DEMOCRAT SINCE JOHN F. KENNEDY

7 BINNEY, WIEBE, AND BOYD PRESS AVAILABILITY

For the Rescue of the Nation, the Committees of Correspondence in Action

9 While Biden Crime Family Wants More Payoffs, Trump Builds Nation, Ready To Dump ‘Green Steal’

by Brian Lantz

15 THE FRIDAY, APRIL 18 MESSAGE!

Start with Our U.S. Economy

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

April 18, 2014

20 The Alaska-to-Alberta Railway: The Year We Walk Through the Door to the World Land-Bridge, or the Lost Chance of 2020?

by Robert Hux and Marcia Merry Baker

II. SCIENCE AND DEVELOPMENT

27 DIALOGUE WITH HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

War or Peace Depends on Individuals Acting for the Common Good

33 Ibero-America and Caribbean Choose to Look to the Stars to Build a Future

by Cynthia R. Rush

38 Southeast Asia Rejects Mike Pompeo, Not the United States

by Michael Billington

I. Donald Trump: the Best Democrat Since John F. Kennedy

BINNEY, WIEBE, AND BOYD PRESS AVAILABILITY

For the Rescue of the Nation, the Committees of Correspondence in Action

LaRouchePAC-TV

Participants in the October 20 press availability, sponsored by the LaRouche PAC. Clockwise from upper left: Dennis Speed, Moderator; William Binney, former Technical Director at the National Security Agency; Barbara Boyd, LaRouche PAC; and J. Kirk Wiebe, a former Senior Analyst at the National Security Agency.

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The October 20 discussion with former National Security Agency Analyst J. Kirk Wiebe, the NSA’s former Technical Director, William Binney, and LPAC’s Barbara Boyd, was a partial realization of the idea of the Committees of Correspondence in action, a “proof of principle.”

Several of the participants were persons who have recently had their own internet presence—sometimes reaching millions—challenged by the less-than-subtle suppression now being engaged in by DARPA-crafted extensions of the Military-Intelligence complex, which you know as Facebook and Twitter. More such will happen if not stopped now.

To that end, those assembled made clear, in their respective questions and presentations, how they viewed the importance this mobilization effort, not only of Wiebe and Binney, but of LaRouche PAC as a forum for this discussion and the dissemination of intelligence capable of changing the direction of the national discourse in a matter of days.

For example, one of the last comments came from a moderator of a Reddit platform, who remarked that he was one of the few moderators who ever uses his own name. This shows the actual level of fear, much of it justified, which exists among those intelligent enough to discover and investigate the actual way that the cultural warfare apparatus of the United States and Europe has worked, including on them, particularly with respect to the Presidential race of 2020.

Kirk Wiebe’s deep displeasure at that moderator’s resolution to sit out the presidential election, to not vote, as he had done in 2016, was palpable. Wiebe’s insistence that, if viewed from the standpoint of the Constitution, there was no comparison between the two candidates, was not a denunciation of the moderator, but an attempt to make him confront the significance of his own critique of the present social moment.

In Wiebe’s opening remarks, he said that,

Civil wars begin as vehement, visceral disagreements about essential things. The question is whether we are to be a Constitutional Republic—can we keep it?

If we cherish the knowledge that the American people are due to make a decision when they vote in this November election—I hate to think how many votes have been cast [already] without the benefit of the truth being known about one of the two candidates for President this year.

Wiebe identified this as information warfare, part of an orchestrated plan to deny truth.

Several participants have had, or presently have platforms that reach millions of people. The purpose of today’s discussion was to provide content to the participants that they could immediately use in their own joint “united front” work with us.

One of them had something posted before the end of the session. Tim Canova, a First Amendment lawyer who ran a 2016 Congressional campaign against Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former Democratic National Committee (DNC) head, was literally on his way to teach a class, and got on both to listen to the opening remarks and to express his appreciation for everything we were doing, and particularly to Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney.

A Nazi Lawyers’ Coup

Several of the interventions of Barbara Boyd were launched for the purpose of filling out many of the salient points made by Binney and Wiebe in their responses to the individuals who asked questions or made comments. In her opening presentation, Boyd spoke about what she termed the 2020 “lawyers’ coup” being run in the bowels of the elections process by 600 lawyers, operating, whether they realize it or not, in the shadow of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. She said that coups come out of an effort to change a culture, and the machinations of an elite that tries to control public dialogue.

Boyd added that the February 27, 1933 Reichstag fire was a staged event to produce a certain result. Schmitt had said that the way you can shift a culture is in the jaws of an extraordinary situation, like a financial crisis. You attack the perceived norms of the society. Article 33 of Germany’s constitution at the time, stated that under certain conditions the law can just be thrown out.

She said that the Reichstag fire was the incident used to put Hitler into power. After that, they deployed for a revolution in thought. The first thing that happened was a revision of the German criminal code to punish what amounted to thought crimes. The Nazi regime was initially democratic. “We govern by plebiscite” was the fig-leaf used to impose a thoroughgoing dictatorship, both in Germany as well as in Austria and other nations. Today, we see a “billionaires to the barricades” coup by the elites who despise the working class, whom they call “the deplorables.”

Human Creativity Can Triumph

There was a particularly pregnant-with-possibility discussion between Daniel Estulin and Bill Binney, about how to wreak havoc in the intelligence community by training hundreds or thousands of young people on how to devise various forms of encryption that could flood the “universal surveillance system” and drive the Panopticon’s authorities crazy. This sounded suspiciously like the kind of tactic that the late Rev. James Bevel might have devised to confound a dictatorship which, like all dictatorships, lacks a sense of humor. Binney became visibly happy at the prospect of moving the conflict to a battlefield in which he is a unique master.

If we can convince people that there is something they can do, which they could never have done before, that is, to change the course of history by activating the nation to defend the Presidency, they will do it.

While Biden Crime Family Wants More Payoffs,

Trump Builds Nation, Ready To Dump ‘Green Steal’

by Brian Lantz

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump tours Whirlpool Corp. manufacturing plant in Clyde, Ohio, with VP for Integrated Supply Chain & Quality Jim Keppler, and talks with employees, August 6, 2020.

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Oct. 22—At a White House press briefing on July 14, 2020, President Trump commented:

When I first saw the Green New Deal, I thought it was a joke. I said, “This will never go anywhere.” Now they’re trying to impose it. This will destroy our country and make us non-competitive with other countries.

In fact, the threat is actually much worse. Look at the hollowed-out economy that the nation and President Trump have inherited from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and their bankster friends in the City of London, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the regular attendees at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Obama/Biden/Harris would steal even more. Real economic progress rests on technologically progressive alterations of nature, based on discovery of new scientific principles. With that in mind, forget about money. Let’s look at the interventions into the physical economy that the President has made in his first term.

Trump: The Best ‘Democrat’ Since JFK

Despite the resounding economic success of the FDR economic recovery program that began in 1933, and despite JFK’s successful Apollo program that took us to the Moon, most economists and politicians today understand very little about how and why crash programs work as economic drivers—or, what even qualifies as a crash program. After 50 years, President Donald Trump has revived precisely this “Apollo spirit” in science, both to crush COVID-19 and take mankind back to the Moon and beyond. It is the method which produces vast new discoveries in basic science and new technologies because the mandate of the mission requires discovery itself. In the Apollo program, for example, almost all of the necessary discoveries made to facilitate getting to the Moon, were completely unknown at the beginning of the mission.

Look at Project Warp Speed, the crash project that the President has mobilized to develop vaccines and antivirals to defeat COVID-19. Even the New York Times has been forced to admit that it has substantially altered expectations. The cavalry is coming in the form of vaccines and antivirals, and the pandemic will end, much, much sooner than their methodologically challenged statistical models predicted, or their Malthusian mass death desires demanded. President Trump knows about crash programs and acted on that knowledge. The concept is simply beyond the mental powers of a Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, who govern as if following a paint-by-the-numbers scheme dictated by their oligarchical controllers.

Look at the Artemis program. For the first time since Apollo, Americans are going back to the Moon to colonize and industrialize it, using it as the jumping off point for a voyage to Mars. How much will be discovered in the process? Fusion power, the promised, unlimited energy resource of the future, which the Artemis program is advancing for propulsion in space in particular, and which will give us the capability to green all of Earth’s deserts, is just part of the future this program builds for future generations. Obama and Biden killed manned space exploration. We became dependent on Russia for even going to the International Space Station. Obama once remarked that quite simply, we “don’t need no fancy fusion energy.”

Over the next four years we will make the U.S. the manufacturing superpower of the world. America will land the first woman on the Moon, and the United States will be the first nation to land an astronaut on Mars.

—President Donald Trump, speaking at a Florida campaign rally, October 12, 2020

USACE

Artist’s rendition of a second Poe-sized lock (far left) to replace two of the older locks (center and right) in the Soo Locks system, the only passage between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes.

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New Advanced Infrastructure Platforms: Platforms for Economic Development

Look also at what President Trump has done in the area of infrastructure despite the resistance he has faced in Congress and from Wall Street. Consider the New Lock at the Soo Locks in Michigan, enabling ships to reliably travel between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes. Approximately 80 million tons of commercial commodities pass through the Soo Locks annually. The second phase of the billion-dollar Soo Locks expansion is now scheduled to start in the Spring of 2021. A 2015 Department of Homeland Security study on impacts of an unexpected Soo Locks closure showed that the deteriorating Soo Locks are a nationally critical infrastructure. On the verge of breakdown, the Great Lakes Navigation System is a critical node essential to U.S. manufacturing and National Security. There are many more examples.

The Trump Administration awarded $3.8 billion in BUILD grants and $3.4 billion in Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) grants to communities across the country. Of that, they have awarded $2.9 billion to the so-called “fly-over states” and $960 million to Opportunity Zones. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now investing $371 million to build and improve critical electric infrastructure across 11 states. Alterations to the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) aim to reduce approval time for highways alone by 70%.

President Trump has been clear that he wants to invest trillions of dollars more in productive national infrastructure, and is fighting budget-cutting “green scissors” Democrats and Republicans in Congress to get this done. Not enough? So true. But in a second term, following the late-economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s well-known proposal for a national bank and national credit, drawing on the examples of Lincoln’s Greenback policy and FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Trump can launch a massive national infrastructure program—provided his supporters force the implementation of his intent by demanding it of Congress. The intent of Biden and Harris is completely different. They serve an elite intent on imposing the Green New Deal and further deindustrializing the United States. Their infrastructure consists of wind farms, solar panels, and retrofitted buildings.

All creation is a mine, and every man a miner.

—Abraham Lincoln

For decades, our nation’s mining resources have been padlocked by so-called environmental regulations and other means, for the purpose of the Banksters’ gaming of global prices based on shortages, while consolidating resources into cartels they control. This is the Bush/Obama/Biden legacy.

Now, President Trump is intent on rebuilding our mining industry and cutting dependence of cartel-controlled supply chains, to in-turn build advanced domestic manufacturing and advanced energy technology. In 2019, the President invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to designate the entire supply chain for rare earths (e.g., for alloys and electronics) as “essential to the national defense” under the DPA, allowing for more funding in the rare earths space. And “there is more coming,” the President has said.

Rare earth elements (REE), which occur naturally, have unique properties that make them essential for certain new technologies. REEs include 17 elements—for example, cerium and yttrium—having similar chemical properties, which give them the ability to discharge and accept electrons, making them essential components for many modern-day electronic, optical, magnetic, and catalytic uses. Under Obama/Biden, the U.S. Geological Survey’s annual report on mineral production showed that U.S. manufacturing was not using any of the rare earth oxides that we produce, because what was coming out of the Mountain Pass project in California was being shipped to China. Now, there are a half-dozen rare earth mining projects in development, gaining new investment and also U.S. government support.

CC/Lars Hammer

On June 4, President Trump signed an executive order to expedite Federal permitting of mining projects, providing raw materials to rebuild and expand the nation’s infrastructure. Shown: open-pit mining in Minnesota’s Iron Range.

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Following through, at a September 30 rally in Minnesota—a mining state, whose Iron Range is the source of 75% of total U.S. iron ore production—Trump announced a new Executive Order to expedite Federal permitting of mining projects. He told the people at the rally,

I took another historic step for your state when I signed an executive order providing billions of dollars to jump-start the production of critical and other minerals, which will create countless jobs and are so important for our country. A critical issue in this election is the future of the Minnesota Iron Range. You know what, that’s why I’m here.

The Duluth Complex alone holds the world’s second largest copper deposit (34% of U.S. resources), the third largest nickel deposit (95% of U.S. resources), and the second largest platinum-group metals deposit (75% of U.S. resources). Other untapped resources include titanium and manganese, the latter now almost entirely imported. According to the American Geosciences Institute, in 2018, the United States was completely dependent on imports for at least the following 18 mineral commodities: arsenic, asbestos, cesium, fluorspar, gallium, natural graphite, indium, manganese, natural sheet mica, nepheline syenite, niobium, rare earths, rubidium, scandium, strontium, tantalum, thorium, and vanadium.

For idle factories and idle workers profit no man.

—Franklin Roosevelt

Powering the Buildup

On September 28, 2018, President Trump signed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act of 2017, intent on speeding the development of advanced reactors in the United States by eliminating several of the financial and technological barriers standing in the way of nuclear innovation. Going further, the Trump Administration, through the Department of Energy, has catalyzed the development of modular nuclear reactors such as that of NuScale Power, LLC, which can be mass produced, rapidly configured to specific requirements for energy and desalination, and exported to markets around the world. NuScale Power, the only company thus far to have Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval for its small modular reactor (SMR) design, has gotten a letter of intent from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) for its readiness to support a potential South African contract for 12 NuScale modules for a 2,500 MW project in South Africa.

DoE

The core of the Advanced Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. The reactor is used to test nuclear fuels and reactor materials, such as those envisioned by the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act signed by President Trump.

CC/OSU

NuScale Power was recently granted approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its small, but high energy-flux dense modular nuclear reactor design.

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The Trump Administration had moved decisively to end the Obama Administration’s ban on financing nuclear power development projects abroad. Likewise, the development of SMRs is advancing for continuous, 24/7 energy in unmanned and manned space exploration.

President Trump has also moved to overhaul Obama-era regulations intended to shut down modern and clean coal-fired power plants, which must be online to ensure the rapid development of a U.S. manufacturing renaissance. As well, in 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a proposal that would limit the power of states to block pipelines and other energy projects. Currently, our nation does not have the electricity production capacity to power the U.S. industrial economy of even the 1970s, which the Trump Administration is working to address.

“We will make America into the manufacturing superpower of the world,” said President Trump on October 14, addressing the Economic Club of New York. President Trump is bent on moving mountains to do this, and one of those mountains is providing the level of energy necessary to fuel this manufacturing revival.

The Obama/Biden Horror Show

You can thank Wall Street and the City of London, along with George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for the wrecking of the U.S. economy. Now, Joe Biden has revealed “his” plan to “bring back” the U.S. economy, but it is more of the same. It would mean increased poverty and a greater hollowing-out of our producer capacities. It is essentially the Bernie Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) “Green New Deal”—which, in fact, is actually the City of London and Wall Street’s Green New Swindle.

Joe Biden will do to oil and natural gas what Obama did to coal. He would shutter entire sources of energy, to go backwards to a medieval era reliance on the wind and Sun, driving up energy prices and sinking the world further into misery. Biden also says he is going to enact $2 trillion in new taxes to buy hot-shot insulation for 2 million homes and 4 million other buildings, and put wind turbines and solar panels everywhere, along with “light rail” and bicycle lanes, and electric cars. Consider: this really amounts to paying people to dig holes and fill them in. How much can those jobs pay, really?

Pixabay/Albrecht Fietz

The Biden nightmare: a huge photovoltaic power installation. Because of its low energy-flux density, this technology is incapable of powering a great manufacturing power.

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The swindle here is to con people into believing that service jobs can be substituted for productive jobs—productive jobs being those that make necessary, physical changes to nature for man. The source of this wealth, as physical economist Lyndon LaRouche developed the concept, is the unique, God-given creative powers in each individual. That creativity is applied in fields such as industry, mining, advanced manufacturing, and agriculture. It is driven by new scientific breakthroughs that increase the power of that very labor.

A healthy economy needs to have roughly 50% of the labor force employed as productive operatives, and about 5% employed in scientific and technological research and development, with the economy operating in a technologically progressive mode, producing the technologically-improving capital and consumer goods required by the domestic population, and available for export and trade. That requires major, ongoing cycles of physical capital investment, by which the economy is bootstrapped upwards. These are the investments that Wall Street and the British financial empire have not and will not make. They are committed to keeping their feudal power through green fascist impoverishment and stupefying people via education based solely on identity politics and an internet and social media regime which rewards irrationality, depravity, and stupidity.

In the Biden swindle, people are going to be employed in building up to 500,000 charging stations for the new electric cars they are going to be mandated to buy, in order to do away with oil and gasoline by 2035 at the latest. Biden further says he is going to “generate clean, American-made [sic] electricity to achieve a carbon pollution–free power sector by 2035.” But with wind and solar power, we are going to have less electric power, not more—unless we completely cover 100,000 square miles with nothing but solar panels and wind turbines and back-up gas-turbine electric plants. So, there won’t be enough power for those charging stations, as California is finding out right now—and we will have to use a lot less electricity for all other purposes.

In other words, this “growth” is cancerous growth, with products and jobs which do not even pay for themselves. There will be no gear-up of the energy production required for a manufacturing renaissance.

White House/Joyce N. Boghosian

President Donald Trump speaks with students and unionists on April 10, 2019 in Crosby, Texas.

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Overthrowing ‘The Tyranny of Money’

We have been living already with the hellish consequences of the Bush/Obama/Biden policies. Globalist policies of “financialization”—post-industrialization, “free trade,” and globalization—have created diseased and highly distorted conditions. Over the last generation, the energy and electricity consumption per capita and per square kilometer within the United States never accurately reflected the capital and consumer goods production processes which would sustain the U.S. economy and our citizens. Instead of capital intensive, technologically progressive, and high energy-flux dense modes of production within the United States, outsourcing to underdeveloped countries shifted production to lower technology, less capital intensive and lower energy-flux dense production—what is colloquially referred to as a cheap labor policy.

For a “quick buck,” the Davos crowd’s policies have not only exploited impoverished and desperate populations globally, but have also been detrimental to the majority inside the United States. The notions of a “consumer society” and a “services economy” have shown themselves to be economic disasters, leaving large sections of the U.S. territory and population in economic ruin.

NASA

NASA’s 22nd graduating class of astronauts, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, January 10, 2020.

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Against that backdrop, think again about President Trump’s promise—again—on October 12, 2020:

Over the next four years we will make the U.S. the manufacturing superpower of the world. America will land the first woman on the Moon, and the United States will be the first nation to land an astronaut on Mars.

—President Donald Trump, speaking at a

Florida campaign rally, October 12, 2020

He is promising to kick over the Banksters’ entire scheme, which dates from August 15, 1971. That is why they have tried to make him the personification of evil; that is why they are spending their ill-gotten millions, in reality stolen from the poor, working, and middle classes, to buy your vote.

For more on the science of physical economy, see Ben Deniston’s six-part series, “Reversing the Devastation of Globalization.”

Watch the videos and sign the petition to exonerate LaRouche

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April 18, 2014

THE FRIDAY, APRIL 18 MESSAGE!

Start with Our U.S. Economy

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in EIR, Vol. 41, No. 17, April 25, 2014, pp. 27-31.

If the United States were suddenly freed from the grip of the present Barack Obama Administration, there would be the immediate possibility of both halting the presently growing threat of a global thermonuclear war now building up. This could not be a reasonable possibility unless the United States of America, itself, were freed from the grip of the present economic policies of that Obama administration. An appropriately immediate change in U.S.A. domestic economic policy would be an adequate foundation for an immediate change to that net effect, not only within the U.S.A., but also globally.

The essentials of that change in U.S.A. economic policy are, therefore, now presented here, as follows, for presentation on this present date. The implications are, immediately global, economic, and globally strategic in their implications, as follows.

A succinct, but indispensable report of the facts, is:

The U.S.A. Economic Reform!

The post-1492 A.D. foundations of a new republic in North America had been lain with the founding and development of the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the leadership of the Winthrops and Mathers; the economic and related advances made by that colony had supplied a leading edge of economic and cultural development for the colony, and also for related improvements in the political and economic systems in Europe. However, the Dutch imperialists had crushed that Colony, which was later rebuilt, at the personal prompting of Cotton Mather and the genius of the Benjamin Franklin who had been mustered to a role of leadership in politics, economics, and science under the rising leadership of Franklin within both North America and in influence within Europe.

The founding of the United States, despite the evil practices of the British Empire, then, as now, had repeatedly inspired European nations, and others, to regain the rights which founding principles of the United States had stipulated, and otherwise implied.

The foundations of that United States, under Benjamin Franklin, and General-and-President George Washington, were lain under the economics genius of the Franklin successor, and original founder of the economic policy of the American system of political economy, under Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Secretary (and General officer) Hamilton, had inspired related progress in the effort to free Europe from the evil grip of the rising British imperial tyranny which dominates Europe’s nations to the present day. Worse, with the British ouster of Germany’s Chancellor Bismarck, that same British empire and its Dutch accomplices, had set into motion a pattern of virtually perpetual warfare and imperial tyranny throughout most of the world as a whole, up through the present day of warfare in Europe and beyond, up through the present moment.

The following facts of history must be taken into account:

With the death of the Benjamin Franklin who had, in effect, led the process of creation of the then future United States, the leading intellectual authority for the policies of the young United States had been, chiefly, the original Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, one of the world’s most accomplished geniuses in the matters of economic policy which the trans-Atlantic nations have actually experienced. Hamilton’s policies had been revived and continued by Secretary of State and, later, President of the United States, John Quincy Adams.

This memorial stone (below) was placed where “the patriot, soldier, statesman, and jurist Alexander Hamilton” (above) was felled by assassin Aaron Burr. The root of the chronic British corruption of the Presidency of the United States, LaRouche writes, is properly to be located in the fact and implications of the assassination of Hamilton, by Burr.

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However, British agents, such as the professional British assassin Aaron Burr, had financed a takeover of the Presidency of the United States under British-owned scoundrels such as Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. That latter pair had controlled the Presidency of the United States under the direction of British imperial banking interests operating through implicitly treasonous circles associated with Wall Street financial corruption of the United States’ institutions, then, as now.

Later, a close follower of John Quincy Adams, President Abraham Lincoln, had rescued the United States from a succession of British agents led by the British Empire’s leading agent and spy, Aaron Burr, who had seized control over the United States, once again, through buying up treasonous Presidents such as Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Similarly, the United States, once victorious against the British Empire’s attempted seizure of power over the United States, was shattered by the British-directed and financed assassination of President Abraham Lincoln: and so matters have gone repeatedly, excepting under a relative handful of worthy U.S. Presidents who were not either fools or outrightly agents of the British Empire and its interests.

Since then, we have enjoyed a number of truly honorable, even great Presidents of the United States, but with the successful assassination of a great President, William McKinley, and McKinley’s replacement by a British-trained agent, Theodore Roosevelt, and scoundrels and virtual traitors such as Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, only the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, saved the United States, and the world at large from a virtual state of Hell into which the election of Harry S Truman sold the virtual soul of the United States, despite the devotion of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the soon martyred John F. Kennedy. Since the assassination of President Kennedy, despite the personal role of Presidents Ronald Reagan and William Clinton, the United States had been sent down the road toward Hell under such as the scions of the Bush, Cheney, and Obama breeds.

What, then, is our excuse for the United States’ own frequent departure from the genius represented by Benjamin Franklin, President George Washington, and Treasury Secretary Hamilton? Simply, Hamilton was assassinated by a paid British assassin, Aaron Burr (who had funded the Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren Presidencies’ establishment). However, that could not have happened but for the earlier corruption expressed by Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. There had been two excellent Presidents, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, but since the ouster of John Quincy Adams from the Presidency, the honest Presidents had been quickly assassinated; this had continued, until the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, who was, himself, assassinated by the actions and agents of the British Empire, itself.

The crucial fact is, that most of the Presidents of the United States were in opposition to the Federal Constitution of the United States, and betrayed the vital interest of the United States for the sake of local interests within the states, for which the State of New York (especially the British and other Manhattan banks there) was a leading feature, i.e., Wall Street, then, as now.

What, then, has been the root of the chronic British corruption of the Presidency of the United States this far? The answer to that question is properly to be located in the fact and implications of the assassination of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, by the professional British assassin, Aaron Burr. Assassinations aside, the name of the general body of the implicitly treasonous corruption, was “sectionalism”: the division of the states of the United States according to local interests, in spite of essentially contrary national interests. The name of that corruption was “states’ rights.” The issue was clearly defined during Alexander Hamilton’s tenure as Secretary of the Treasury.

Now, our United States is in the throes of a general economic breakdown-crisis, a crisis which must be recognized as, largely a product of the British imperial control over the United States which has been largely dependent upon the British monetarist interests’ control over the U.S.A.’s own “Wall Street” management.

The following remarks presented here, by me go directly to the core of the presently mortal threats to both a general peace among nations, and to the threats of the virtual extinction of the United States itself.

Alexander Hamilton Now

From the time of Alexander Hamilton’s assassination by the British spy and assassination agent Aaron Burr, the United States had lost an entire aspect of its national sovereignty, until the fortunate advent of the Presidencies of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. With the fresh takeover of the U.S. Presidency through the role of the financial backing of the British agents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the United States had, de facto, lost its actual sovereignty, through the elections of witting British agents in the Presidency, or by the assassinations of those suspected of patriotism, until the election of President Abraham Lincoln.

With Lincoln’s assassination by, explicitly, the named agents of the British empire, the U.S. Presidencies vacillated with shifts from some heroes, such as Grant and Garfield and then, to opportunists or worse. The last truly great President, prior to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been the assassinated hero William McKinley. Apart from the President Harding who died of poisoning (allegedly from eating oysters) during a railway crossing of the Great American Desert, only one decent President served until President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after the assassination of President William McKinley. After Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and the assassinated John F. Kennedy, no decent presidents served until Presidents Ronald Reagan and William Clinton, and none since. Thus, in the main, throughout the history of the United States, the Presidency has been dominated by the effect of fewer honest Presidents than British-promoted scoundrels.[fn_1]

The difference has lain with the factor of corruption rooted in the practice of “states’ rights,” as through the mechanisms of the elements of the U.S. Congress identified with the members of the Senate and House of Representatives: often the Senate, as is notable from the cases of the pro-slavery states, and related kinds of influences.

The most notable feature of the states’ rights feature of the U.S. political system, has been centered (to a relatively lesser degree) in New England, but chiefly in Britain-dominated Wall Street connections. The concentration of relatively great financial wealth in the channels of British-influenced U.S. financial affairs, has remained the chief route of moral and other political corruption of the United States since the assassination of the Alexander Hamilton, who, following the demise of Benjamin Franklin, had been the efficient constitutional voice of the economic principles of the United States.

On the better side of the news, on this account, whenever the United States enjoyed the benefit of a government dominated by the Hamilton tradition, as under John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, or similarly inclined Presidents, the United States has tended to be its own true self; under other conditions, the results tended to be implicitly Wall Street influences. So, international money-flows have dominated the economy and, to a great degree, the policy-making of the U.S. Federal and also state governments.

Alexander Hamilton’s Genius

However:

Once Hamilton’s four official principles of economy were actually put in place, now, the United States could, now, quickly regain its originally intended constitutional principle, that done through the belated four great principles of the U.S. Federal Constitution set forth by Treasury Secretary Hamilton under his term in office.

Hamilton’s measures installed while Secretary of the Treasury, are four in total. Three of these are customarily referenced by relevant scholars of our Federal Constitution: (1) “Report on Public Credit;” (2) “Report on A National Bank;” (4) “On the Subject of Manufactures.” The most crucial, for the defense of our national system of government, was, however, the third, (3) “Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank.” It was the latter, the “Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank” which prompted British agent Aaron Burr’s assassination of Alexander Hamilton: over the so-called “states right” exception to the Federal Constitution. Every evil of our national practice since the passage of the Constitution, has been a result of the treasonous “states’ right” dogma of interpretation, as by President John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the enemy, Aaron Burr’s puppets, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, in particular.

The defects of the Presidency, including the selection of bad Presidents, have been premised, essentially on the inherent violation of the Federal Constitution accomplished through the pitting of the authority of the individual States of the United States, against the Federal Constitution itself. The directly British-directed assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, is an outstanding case, as was the assassination of President William McKinley in favor of the Confederacy-trained President Theodore Roosevelt, a typical case, as was the case of the evil Woodrow Wilson, and of Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Harry S Truman. Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are of the same treasonous genre-in-fact.

Time to Make Things Right, at Last

The time has long passed, when we could have made right the evil injustices which sundry enemies of our United States, from without, or within, have left behind them. Our only recourse available now, is to fix, for the future, whatever have been wrong in the past. The practical task before us, presently, is: how might we, nonetheless, do something now, to remedy the hurts and atrocities from the past, even with respect to the already deceased? What moral principle meets the challenge of a shameful past?

On that account, we must consider, first of all, what justice, in the name of repair, might be afforded to those who have been cruelly injured by bad law, especially those who have lost the stuffing to defend themselves against presently continuing injustices, persons who have lost the will to fight for their own rights, or those of their fellow-citizens?

The only sufficient reply to such questions as that, is: How do we make right, what had otherwise been going wrong? How can we nourish our cheated fellow-citizens, adults, but, most urgently the saving of the minds and morals of the under-aged? How can we bring justice, where there has been injustice? How might we bring those who have seen injustice, to see real justice born again? How does one right what Hitler and also the British empire did against the Jews who suffered under Hitler and his like still today?

There is an actual remedy for such errors of the past. The answer lies in the nature of the purpose of mankind’s having existed as a species of its specific nature: the progress of the human species from the failures of the past, to the immortality of the future mankind which actually progresses.

We are, usually, sadly mistaken, by attributing the meaning of human life to what has been experienced in human life lived so far, when, in fact, the meaning of the individual human life is expressed in the consequences of a human life already lived. That is to say, the future outcome of that life which had been lived. It is precisely that distinction of human life which distinguishes mankind from the beasts. The objective to be served is the increase of the productive powers of future labor achieved through those creative actions which enable the future society to realize the gains of future humanity which the earlier society could not have achieved: the specifically creative powers unique to the progressively higher achievement of future mankind, than the past generations.

The only true purpose of the present life, is to create a future mankind of greater powers for achievement, in principle, relative to the relative failures buried in the past. That is the only true measure of any person’s, or any society’s meaningful existence as a worthy member of the human species.

The Explanation:

That is the true principle of the human species, which distinguishes the human being from all of the beasts.

The standard for performance of the member of the human species, is to increase the relative energy-flux density of performance per capita and unit of passage of time of one generation to the next successor. If mankind fails to evolve into the equivalent, in performance, from a less productive generation to a more productive one, that society tends to have failed in meeting its required achievements. Thus, neglect the increase of the energy-flux density of the human individual’s typical performance, from less productive, to more productive in terms of energy-flux density (to greater power for productivity), and society would have failed to meet the moral standard of the human species. The “green” doctrine is, therefore, to be damned as being intrinsically evil.

Indeed, the trend downward of mankind’s progress since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, reflects a moral degeneration of the relevant sections of the human population in the relevant region of the human society as a whole, a relative unfitness to lead society’s policy-shaping, and the degeneration of that sector of mankind relative to the others.

Thus, the British Queen is clearly to be defined as intrinsically evil, as, similarly, those sections of American and European society whose characteristic is to resist an efficient increase of the energy-flux density of mankind generally, which is to say a “beastly” section of the human species in the large.

[fn_1] In general, assassinated U.S. Presidents were usually heroes of our republic, and had been selected for such treatment, for precisely that reason: including President John F. Kennedy, his brother virtually nominated for President, and President Ronald Reagan, who survived the attack. [back to text for fn_1]

Visit the LaRouche Legacy Foundation Website

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The Alaska-to-Alberta Railway

The Year We Walk through the Door to the World Land-Bridge, or the Lost Chance of 2020?

by Robert Hux and Marcia Merry Baker

Alberta to Alaska Railway

A2A

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Oct. 25—The perspective of a World Land-Bridge linking the United States and Russia across the Bering Strait crossed an important threshold towards realization on September 29, 2020, when President Donald Trump issued a Presidential Border Crossing permit for the Alaska-Alberta Railway Development Corporation (A2A Rail) to lay track across the border between Alaska and Canada. This is a crucial step for the construction of a rail line that can change the world.

The Alaska-Alberta rail link to the lower 48 states can help break the log jam towards the realization of the century-old idea of a continuous network of railroad development corridors extending from the far northwest of the North American continent down through Mexico and Central America, all the way to the southern tip of the South America continent, including the concept of connecting this line into Eurasia and Africa by crossing the Bering Strait, linking up Alaska and Chukotka, Russia. But these plans have always been thwarted, though the Alaska Railroad was first commissioned in 1914.

In recent decades, the perspective of international rail connectivity has been advanced in proposals for a worldwide Land-Bridge network of priority rail corridors for development, as laid out in reports calling for a “New Silk Road,” commissioned by the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute.

In a more limited way, the main impetus for the new Alaska-Canada rail link has come from the desire to open a new transport corridor to northern Pacific Ocean ports for the export to Asia of United States and Canadian resources and products.

World Land-Bridge in the Western Hemisphere.

EIR

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We will indicate some key aspects of the A2A Rail immediately below, including the tremendous benefits it will provide to both the United States and Canada. Then we can return to the World Land-Bridge and the economic principles that will guide its build-out and its potential.

Alberta to Alaska Railway

Mead Treadwell, Vice Chair of A2A Rail and a former Lieutenant Governor of Alaska (2010-2014), told residents of Tok, Alaska at an internet-public meeting on September 28, 2020, that the revival of the idea of an Alaska-Canada Rail connection over the last decade was due to a huge “constraint on oil development and transportation in Alberta, and a number of other commodities that could not get to the west coast.”

As reported in a previous article, the government of Alberta decided to pay for a study at the Van Horne Institute on the feasibility of building a railway for transporting bitumen, petroleum products, and minerals from northern Alberta (Fort McMurray) to the deep-water ports of Alaska.

According to Treadwell, when the VHI study was published in 2015, one of the people who read it was Sean McCoshen, an investor and financier who has built infrastructure, including grain terminals, all over North America. McCoshen decided to invest in the project creating the Alberta Railway Development Corporation (A2A Rail), a U.S. company with offices in Calgary, Alberta, Anchorage, Alaska and Washington, D.C., which he owns and funds. John Falcetta, Vice President of Freight Rail Canada for AECOM from 2011 to the present, was brought in as CEO and President of A2A Rail in the early phases.

As presently envisioned, the A2A Railway will be a heavy-haul, standard-gauge railway capable of dual-direction transport of many kinds of freight, including bulk commodities (such as bitumen, sulfur, potash, grains, minerals, etc.), as well as containerized goods, and passengers. The proposed 1,600-mile (2,570 kilometer) route connects the North American railroad system through northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Alaska, where it links up with the existing Alaska Railroad leading south to Alaska’s deep-water ports.

By lowering the cost of transportation in northwest Canada and Alaska, while cutting trans-Pacific Ocean shipping times for Canadian and American products and resources by up to four days, the A2A Rail corridor promises to open up some of the most geographically isolated and sparsely populated regions on the planet. The railway will become an economic development corridor, bringing in consumer goods and fuel, creating jobs and improved standards of living, while laying the foundation for the growth of new cities in these remote northern regions. Construction of the A2A Rail corridor, according to the most optimistic estimates, is anticipated to be completed by 2025, with the railway becoming fully operational in 2026. Soft construction is ready to commence this year. However, there are many stages of work ahead for the project on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.

With President Donald Trump issuing the Presidential Border Crossing Permit to A2A Rail, an important milestone has been reached.

A2A/Tim Stevens

The A2A Rail corridor will bring economic development to the region. It is anticipated to be completed by 2025.

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For Much More than Petroleum

In June 2019, A2A Rail signed a Master Agreement of Cooperation with the Alaska Railroad Corporation (ARRC) to upgrade and extend the Alaska Railroad mainline from Seward to North Pole, and build from there the 1,600-mile (2570 km) connection to the Canadian railroads in northern Alberta that serve the lower 48 states. A2A Rail and ARRC are to cooperate in the process of getting the rights of way, doing the engineering design specifics, and getting financing.

A2A Rail proposes to move 1-1.5 million barrels per day of bitumen in its solid, undiluted form all the way to Port MacKenzie for export, Treadwell says. The plan involves a USD 17 billion (CAD 22 billion) single-tracked railroad with sidings that would allow trains to travel in both directions from Fort McMurray to Delta Junction, and then continue on the single-tracked Alaska Railroad to Alaska’s deep-water ports at Anchorage, Whittier, Seward, and Port MacKenzie. It would require switching yards, water and wastewater facilities, power lines, and fiber optic cable, in addition to the completion of the 32-mile (51 km) railroad linking Port MacKenzie to the Alaska Railroad near Houston, Alaska. The feasibility of building a 270-mile (435 km) rail link from Delta Junction to the Port of Valdez is also being studied.

A2A

The proposed 2,570 km route of the A2A will connect at Delta Junction, Alaska to an upgraded Alaska Railroad mainline leading south to Alaska’s deep-water ports; and at Fort McMurray, Alberta, to existing Canadian railways that serve the lower 48 states.

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The projected cost is in the range of USD 17 billion (CAD 22 billion), for a system A2A Rail describes as “dual-direction, 24-hour-a-day operation,” equipped with the latest technologies for safety, including Positive Train Control, heat detectors for mechanical faults, and fiber optics for continuous communication and monitoring of the railway’s integrity. For reduced fuel consumption and improved safety, the plan calls for the average vertical gradient not to exceed 1%, and curvature not to exceed 5%. To date, Mr. McCoshen has spent over USD 100 million through the pre-feasibility, feasibility, and detailed engineering phases of the project.

In July 2020, A2A Rail commissioned the Omaha, Nebraska-based international engineering firm, HDR Engineering, Inc., to begin a detailed land surveying along the Alberta segment of the railway’s proposed route. At the same time, A2A Rail and HDR have begun consultation with communities and First Nations along the proposed route. The first such internet-based public meetings on the proposed rail corridor were organized by A2A Rail with residents of Delta Junction and Tok, Alaska on September 9 and 28, 2020 respectively.

In his presentation to Tok residents, A2A Rail Vice Chairman Mead Treadwell indicated that when up to full capacity, the railway will run 8 to 10 unit trains carrying bulk commodities per day, each unit train consisting of two locomotives and 96 cars in the front, followed by three locomotives, 96 cars in the middle, and two locomotives in the back, giving a total unit train length of 11,700 feet (3,566 meters). A2A Rail will operate as a heavy-haul, standard-gauge railway capable of carrying a wide variety of cargo, including general cargo (boxes, crates, drums, etc.), bulk dry and liquid cargo (grain, potash, sulfur, bitumen, gravel, propane, oil, minerals, wine, vegetable oils, etc.), bulk cargo (machinery, bundled steel, lumber, etc.), refrigerated cargo (fruit, fish, meat, vegetables, dairy products, etc.), roll-on/roll-off cargo (cars, trucks, semi-trailer trucks, etc.), container cargo, and passenger cargo.

A2A Rail will also offer the U.S. Military options for moving cargo through Alaska, or to installations such as Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Wainwright, Fort Greely, Clear Air Force Station, and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Treadwell said.

Responding to a question from Delta Junction residents on the timeline for when the railway would be completed, A2A Rail Vice Chairman Treadwell indicated that they are eager to resolve any issues over exactly where the railway will go with everyone who will be affected, at the same time as they complete the engineering studies, which he expects can be done in the next two years.

Pixabay/Jim Black

A view of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which brings oil from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, south to the ice-free port of Valdez.

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Next Steps

The next step—meeting the requirements for an Environmental Impact Statement submission to the regulatory agencies in the United States and Canada and engagement with Indigenous Peoples, Agencies, and other interested parties—Treadwell expects to take another two years, in both cases. Treadwell estimates 3-4 years for permitting, and another 3-4 years for construction. “It could be 8 years from now when we are in operation,” he said. As part of the permitting process, the railway must also secure approval from the Canadian Transportation Agency and the U.S. Surface Transportation Board.

Once all the initial steps in the process are completed and funding sources secured, construction on the USD 17 billion (CAD 22 billion) project will start by constructing rail from North Pole, Alaska. From there the railway will be extended southeast, passing through Delta Junction, continuing southeast through several small settlements to the Alaska-Yukon border. The new rail line enters Yukon to the north of Whitehorse, passing near the settlements of Pelly Crossing, Carmacks, Faro, Ross River and Watson Lake.

At this point, rather than crossing into British Columbia and on to Fort Nelson, as proposed in the 2015 Van Horne Institute study, the proposed route stays near the southern border of Yukon as it moves east, crossing into the Northwest Territories near Fort Liard. Continuing east to the northeast corner of British Columbia, the route heads southeast into Alberta through Fort Mackay to Fort McMurray, the present northern terminus of a CN Rail line connecting into the North American railroad system.

Using conventional economic metrics, A2A Rail estimates that the project will create over 28,000 jobs in the impacted states and provinces/territories (18,000 of them in Canada). The economic growth spurred by the project is expected to result in an approximate increase of USD 60 billion in cumulative GDP in Alaska, Alberta, Yukon, and Northwest Territories (NWT) by 2040. Average incomes in areas along the rail route are expected to increase by up to 40%.

Planetary Implications of the Bering Strait Connection

Seen from an intercontinental and planetary perspective, however, President Trump’s green light to the Alaska-Alberta Railway has much greater implications involving moving ahead in the larger strategic economic sphere, with continuous rail connections from inland North America all the way into Eurasia. The concrete actions of many individuals who have moved this perspective of an Alaska-Canada rail link towards realization foreshadow the possibility of a new paradigm of friendship, diplomacy and mutually beneficial trade, the possibility of a Bering Strait tunnel connection to Russia becoming very feasible. In turn, this opens up the vast World Land-Bridge span from Africa, through Eurasia, and all the way to South America, via North and Central America.

EIRNS/Rachel Douglas

Lyndon LaRouche submitted a paper to the April 2007 Moscow conference, “A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait.” Shown, Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche arriving in Moscow.

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The importance and history of this perspective have been promoted for decades by Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche. In May 2007, LaRouche spoke of it in Moscow, when he was a featured guest at the Academy of Sciences. A month earlier, his paper, “The World’s Political Map Changes: Mendeleyev Would Have Agreed,” was delivered by an associate at a Moscow conference on “A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait.” LaRouche began the paper with these words: “The intention to create a trans-Siberian rail system, implicitly extended across the Bering Strait, to North America, dates implicitly from the visit of Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev to the 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. …”

LaRouche’s paper, and other reports from relevant Moscow meetings that year, are included in a 2007 LaRouche PAC pamphlet, “LaRouche Trip to Moscow: A Strategy for War Avoidance.”

Former Alaska Governor Walter Hickle spoke out strongly at a Moscow Megaprojects Conference in April in 2007, in favor of “big projects as the alternative to war,” and in particular, of the Bering Strait tunnel and the benefits of Russia-U.S. collaboration. They “together will change the world.”

FORUM International

Former Alaska Governor Walter Hickel promotes the Bering Strait tunnel, at a Moscow conference on “A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait,” April 25, 2007.

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Specific requirements for the rail grid needed to connect Canada and Alaska for the Bering Strait tunnel link to Eurasia were spelled out in several fora by the late Hal B.H. Cooper, Jr., P.E., advisor to the Schiller Institute on the World Land-Bridge.[fn_1] Cooper prepared a feasibility study for the Canadian Arctic Railway, a private company seeking to build the missing links. And he also studied what was necessary on the Russian side in Siberia. He presented this concept to the Alaska legislature, and in November 2002, he presented it in Novosibirsk at the Siberian State Transport University, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary conference on Railroad Transportation Developments in Siberia.

Figure 1

Proposed Alaska-Canada Rail Corridor

J. Craig Thorpe, 2002

Artist’s concept, showing a proposed rail, highway, utilities, and pipeline corridor near Lake Kluane, Yukon. Commissioned by Cooper Consulting for the Canadian Arctic Railway Company, which proposes to provide the missing links to connect Canada and Alaska to the proposed Bering Strait tunnel.

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Cooper’s artist’s view of the new Alaska-Canada rail corridor in the Yukon is shown in Figure 1.

The Role of Energy-Flux Density

President Trump’s launching of the Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024 and to develop the lunar industries to support later human missions to Mars, all done in collaboration with international partners, as has been proposed, taken together with Trump’s signing of the Presidential Border-Crossing Permit for A2A Rail, has even greater implications.

How will what we learn on the Moon change what we think about running things back here on Earth? Unlike on Earth, where 85% of the primary energy (not just electricity) that we depend on comes from fossil fuels, there are no fossil fuels on the Moon, for as far as we know it never had a biosphere. Establishing human settlements on the Moon, including growing food there eventually, means we will be creating a biosphere. In the process, we will rediscover the indispensable role for the existence of our lunar inhabitants of a much-maligned molecule: carbon dioxide. Perhaps as mankind ventures out to the Moon and farther reaches of the Solar System, the significance of a startling recent scientific discovery will be more generally recognized.

In a 2017 research paper, two scientists, Karl Zeller and Ned Nikolov, demonstrated that, based upon all the relevant NASA data, the surface temperatures of the moons and other planetary bodies in the Solar System can be accurately predicted based on only two factors: the amount of solar radiation and the atmospheric pressure at the moon or planetary body’s surface. Their results strongly suggest that the so-called greenhouse gases have nothing to do with it!

Our lunar inhabitants cannot generate electricity from large amounts of water flowing downhill, nor depend on wind turbines or solar panels, particularly during the 14-day lunar night. But they will have access to uranium and thorium, which could generate electricity and high-temperature heat for processing lunar resources, and the possibility one day of using helium-3 extracted from the lunar regolith to generate vast amounts of energy in thermonuclear fusion reactors.

Armed with these new insights, what do we say to those Canadians, or Americans, who might not see the tremendous possibilities of the Alaska-Alberta Railway? You have to ask, what kind of world we will be living in 30 years from now, in 2050, when the world could have 10.0 billion people, with the vast majority living in Asia (5.55 billion) and Africa (2.61 billion)? What role will the people expected to be living in Canada (49 million), the United States (400 million) and Mexico (170 million) play in the future world economy?[fn_2]

The A2A Rail project and the Bering Strait connection to the World Land-Bridge will pull the entirety of the populations of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the other nations of the Americas into a generation-long mission to bring about a technological upshift in the economy globally. By linking the network of rail development corridors spanning the Americas with Eurasia across the Bering Strait rail tunnel, we eliminate the huge delays due to slow, outmoded, and vastly overburdened marine shipping routes, and gain direct and rapid access to the regions of Eurasia and Africa which will be the key to the growth of the world economy. The very great volume of rail traffic expected through the Bering Strait Rail tunnel will require double-tracking and electrification of the rail lines, allowing locomotives capable of higher speeds, and there is also the possibility of eventually implementing magnetic levitation rail.

While fossil fuels will continue to be a core part of the world’s primary energy consumption for at least a generation or more into the future, we will require a massive expansion in the use of energy sources of much higher energy-flux density, such as nuclear fission, and as soon as possible, thermonuclear fusion. Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which are currently being developed in the United States, Russia, China, and other countries, including Canada, will be able to be produced serially on assembly lines in any economy which can assemble automobiles. They could provide the basis for running an electrified A2A rail line, in addition to providing power for the mines, industries, and growing towns and cities that will develop along the rail corridor.

One of the developers that may be closest to deploying an SMR is NuScale Power, whose 60 MWe integral pressurized-water SMR has received an approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as funding from the U.S. government to accelerate commercial development of the technology. In Canada, the premiers of Ontario, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, and Alberta have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate in the development of SMRs. On the longer time span of a decade or so ahead, several of the SMR technologies undergoing pre-licensing vendor design review by Canada’s nuclear regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, are expected to be deployed as first-of-a-kind units.

Escaping the Trap of Geopolitics

Finally, the White House green light for the A2A Rail joint Canada-United States infrastructure project has special significance beyond its obvious transportation merits. It signals the spirit of cooperative foreign relations in projects of mutual benefit, as opposed to the prevalent and worsening bent towards confrontation in foreign relations, and the lack of cooperation on great projects. Historically, a major example of collaboration between Canada and the United States on infrastructure is the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Another great example is the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which was proposed in the 1960s and enjoyed strong bi-national support, but was thwarted by anti-infrastructure financial interests, centered in Wall Street and the City of London. The NAWAPA project would have diverted about 10% of the runoff from river basins in the northwest of the continent often subject to excessive precipitation and flooding. The primary areas of water collection were to have been selected rivers in Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, British Columbia, and northern Alberta. The project was to redirect the water south into the arid western parts of the United States and Mexico, as well as southeast into the drought-prone areas on the Canadian Prairies and the Great Lakes (as may be required periodically to maintain adequate water levels for maritime shipping).

The principle of cross-border, mutually beneficial projects was most recently put on the world agenda in 2013 with the announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by Chinese President Xi Jinping. To date, some 80 nations are collaborating in overland and maritime corridors and centers of development across Eurasia, Africa, and points in Central and South America.

In 2017, in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, he supported friendship diplomacy with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, consistent with what could have materialized in infrastructure projects abroad and in North America, upshifting the economic platform for the world. For example, there were new pipeline and chemical manufacturing projects under discussion between the United States and China. Similarly, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected in October 2015, there was a clear intent to build upon Canada’s significant, positive ties historically with China, and there was a potential for Canada to cooperate with China on the BRI.

There were even clear indications in 2016 that the Trudeau government was intent on having Canada cooperate with Russia in establishing the “Arctic Bridge” shipping route between the deep-water Port of Churchill, Manitoba and Murmansk, Russia. For more on this, see the section titled, “Canada-Gateway to the Americas,” in the previously cited report.

Instead, however, all such diplomacy and projects have been dropped. We have seen more than 30 months of attacks on the U.S. Presidency, in the form of accusations of Russian collusion, impeachment, and now racism. And at the same time, U.S. foreign policy, led at present by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has come to be guided by the British playbook of opposing cooperation, and instead playing nations against each other. U.S. policy denounces the BRI and related initiatives as Chinese “expansionism.” U.S. military deployments are being increased accordingly—as we see in the Arctic.

It is precisely for these reasons that the founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has been insisting over the course of this year that we need an “international chorus” of nations, institutions, and prominent individuals who, despite how improbable such a development may seem, support the demand that it is of the highest urgency that Presidents Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping hold a summit, or series of summits, in person or otherwise, to reach agreements on how to resolve the manifold crises presently threatening civilization. Therefore, as against the current very dangerous geopolitical trend, the singular White House approval for the A2A Rail project is welcome on all counts.

[fn_1] See Richard Freeman’s interview with Hal Cooper in EIR, May 11, 2007, “Bering Strait Conference Marked ‘Major Phase Shift’.” [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] United Nations World Population Prospects 2019, Vol. 1, Table A10, “Total Population at Mid-Year by Region, Subregion and Area, Upper 95% Prediction Interval.” [back to text for fn_2]

II. Science and Development

DIALOGUE WITH HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

War or Peace Depends on Individuals Acting for the Common Good

Left: Gage Skidmore; right: CSIS

Unprecedented censorship by Facebook and Twitter of the New York Post’s exposé of Joe and Hunter Biden’s corruption in Ukraine, covers up a major crime of the presidential candidate of the Democratic party, only weeks before the election.

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This is the edited transcript of the October 20 broadcast of the weekly Schiller Institute interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Subheads and embedded links have been added. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: It’s less than two weeks to the U.S. election. The situation is really quite wild. There is a public debate tonight between the two candidates. There is also the recent breakout of the story around Hunter Biden’s laptop. Why don’t we start there, because this gets to the censorship of the story, why they’re censoring it, and why this is so important, involving Ukraine and Joe Biden. What are your thoughts about that?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think what we are looking at is Gleichschaltung [synchronization as in Nazi Germany] of the U.S. mainstream media, meaning that they’re all marching in lockstep in complete censorship of this scandal. And I think that should really wake up the world. Because people are looking at the U.S. election from the standpoint of what the media report, but if you read the European media, for example, you have little references to this scandal, but absolutely not the importance of it.

On October 20, the LaRouche PAC hosted a webcast featuring two National Security Agency whistleblowers, Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney, and LaRouche PAC’s Barbara Boyd and Dennis Speed, in which they warned that civil war in the United States has already begun. That was Kirk Wiebe saying that. He said the fact that the effort was so blatant to suppress an article in the New York Post—covering this obvious corrupt behavior of Biden when he was Vice President, in relation to his effort to suppress the Burisma investigation by Ukraine—that that forebodes the intent of the establishment to go for complete vote fraud, and that everything really depends on getting the story out before the election. I think this is really important for the international audience to understand.

What is at stake here? You had an impeachment against President Trump, with the false accusation that he would have withheld money from Ukraine if they would not cover up his involvement. Now, the reality is, exactly the opposite happened! What they accused Trump of having done in the impeachment, is what Biden actually did! When he was Vice President, his son Hunter Biden was on the board of this oil firm Burisma, and this was clearly a money laundering job, because Hunter Biden had no qualification for his job; as a matter of fact, he was known to have been using drugs and all kinds of other things.

Joe Biden put pressure on the Ukrainian government at the time to kick out the prosecutor general [Viktor Shokin] to stop the investigation of Burisma for corruption. He threatened to withhold $1 billion payment for buying arms from the United States, if this would not happen. They capitulated and Shokin was kicked out.

C-SPAN

John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence: No evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is a Russian story

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This is unbelievable. The New York Post had run that story. There is absolutely every reason to think this is an authentic story. The Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said there is absolutely no evidence that it was a Russian story, as immediately claimed by the usual suspects like John Brennan and James Clapper. So, you have a story which then is suppressed by Twitter and Facebook in a blatant effort to censor the covering of a major crime of the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party.

If the U.S. voters knew about this, maybe they would have second thoughts about giving their vote to Biden. This is literally a blatant effort to censor the truth from coming out. It should be obvious that what is at stake here is not just a question of who wins the election, but the question is, will the United States remain a republic, or is it going to be an empire basically run on the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain as the de facto unipolar British Empire? The implication of that is gigantic, and I think everything depends on getting that story out.

We held a press availability which has had a lot of viewers already, so you should spread it as far as you can.

What is really at stake here is the question of war and peace. There is no question about that with the agenda of Biden bringing back the entire war party machine—and you just look at the cast of characters and what they have said about Russia and China—so I think everything depends really on getting this story out before the election.

Will NATO and the ‘Quad’ Contain China?

Schlanger: Helga, one aspect of this is this push to move NATO into the Indo-Pacific region, as it’s called, with the establishment of a “Quad” [the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Countries, Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.]. Why would NATO have a policy for the containment of China?

Zepp-LaRouche: It is the question of which paradigm is going to come out of this situation on top. With the financial crisis; the escalation of the pandemic practically everywhere except China; an incredible famine in Africa; and a collapsing physical economy, it is very clear that these people have only one aim in mind, to contain Russia, to contain China. As we have seen in the recent, extremely risky, maneuvers at the Russian border,—fighter jets almost colliding with Russian jets, and the same going on, on the Chinese border—it really is encirclement, and the tone is getting rougher. So, the effort to expand NATO into the Pacific, into the Indo-Pacific, and get India into a confrontation course against China in particular, is really the geopolitical game which contains the seeds of World War III.

DoD/Brandy N. Mejia

Dr. Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense.

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Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will go to New Delhi on October 26-27, and there are also maneuvers, to which India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invited the Quad countries. So this is definitely something one should keep in mind, especially with the provocations around Taiwan, where China is again and again insisting that according to the One China policy, it will not allow Taiwan to be made independent, or be used as a tool to confront China. This is really very, very dangerous.

Conference on European-Chinese Relations

Schlanger: You participated in a conference yesterday on European-Chinese relations. It sounded like a very interesting discussion of Confucianism. Can you give us an overview of what was discussed and how the conference went?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think this was really an important event: “China and the West Face to Face: Rivalry or Cooperation.” It was cosponsored by the Schiller Institute and a Spanish think tank, Cátedra China. The Minister Counsellor of the Chinese Embassy in Madrid, Yao Fei, spoke; then the President of Cátedra China Marcelo Muñoz; then Michele Geraci from Italy; Jacques Cheminade from France; myself; and one other person from Cátedra China, Dr. Ángel Álvarez. Thirty countries participated.

This is an important issue in Germany, and in France, Spain, Italy, because Pompeo is putting maximum pressure on all of these countries, that they must break with China, and that is clearly not feasible because it would completely ruin the economies of European nations that have massive trade with China. But more fundamentally, it’s about how to relate to a rising country? Can you live with such a country? What is the intention of China?

Schiller Institute

Marcelo Muñoz, President of Cátedra China (left), and Yao Fei, Minister Counsellor of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China to Spain (right), two of the major speakers at a conference on European-Chinese relations, co-sponsored by the Schiller Institute and Cátedra China.

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Marcelo Muñoz, who is the President of Cátedra China, gave a speech that I really would like everybody to read. He said: What people don’t understand in the West is that China and the West are two completely different civilizations. China knows quite some bit about Europe and about the West, but the West knows almost nothing about China. And then he quoted Leibniz saying that China is even another planet. He gave a very dense presentation about how China is the only continuous nation and civilization over 5,000 years, with a Confucian-based system for 2,300 years; and that it had been the world leader in technology until the 15th century. Many inventions were made by China. And for China to come back and resume a role on the stage of history is just something quite natural, because it had that role for thousands of years.

I really think this was very, very interesting. And I focussed my presentation on the differences, but also the similarities concerning universal principles as they are expressed by Friedrich Schiller and Confucius.

I want to emphasize one aspect that came up in the discussion: namely, the main difference, which was pointed out by many speakers, is that the Chinese tradition puts a priority on community, on the collective, rather than the rights of the individual. And that is deeply embedded in Chinese history. In the discussion, the question came up, “Is Confucianism actually furthering creativity, or is it restricting it?” I’m absolutely of the opinion that it is furthering creativity. The Chinese central authorities a few days ago issued new guidelines, which I find very interesting for the West to think about, that the arts—poetry, drama, opera, painting, dance—all will have the same importance in the curriculum as the so-called MINT subjects (Mathematics, Information Technology, Natural Sciences and Technology); the MINT subjects being the natural sciences, where China is already in a leading position in the PISA rating (OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment). China wants education in the aesthetic areas to be as important as in these natural sciences by 2022.

That is the approach taken by Confucius, who developed his whole philosophy in answer to a period of increasing chaos in China, and that was also why Leibniz, in the 17th century, was so excited about Confucius, because he was looking at the 150 years of religious wars in Europe, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, and recognized that the aesthetic education is the only way to get people back to the pathway of reason and emotional development.

This is the kind of dialogue that is urgently needed, and not the kind of “enemy image” and demonization of China and Russia, of Putin, and of Trump, that we have seen in the recent period. We need to find out about the other culture and really understand it in depth, and then new horizons will open up.

China Moves Ahead in Science

Schlanger: The other aspect of this, though, Helga, is that China is moving ahead in a number of areas in science as well. What do you have on what the Chinese are doing in energy and space?

Zepp-LaRouche: Certain developments are in one sense joyful, but as a German, I’m naturally also a little bit upset about it, because some technologies that were developed in Germany, like the maglev, the Chinese are now building test runs for it, and it will go 600 km/h; they already have the so-called slow maglev, which was developed by the German firm Bögl; they will use that for urban traffic, which goes up to 150 km/h, for inner urban transport. While Germany is collapsing, closing down its steel plants, China is moving in the right way and developing.

They already have the most modern transport system in the world, more than 30,000 km of fast, conventional trains, connecting all the major cities. So that clearly is a sign that they know what is good for the common good, because they have a large population of 1.4 billion people, who want to travel to their families over the holiday periods. If you want to move such large masses of people, you need a good transport system, and that’s exactly what they built.

Hans Bonnenberg

The late Professor Rudolf Schulten. As Director of the Institute of Reactor Development of the Nuclear Research Center in Jülich, Germany, he was the main developer of the pebble bed nuclear reactor design.

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Another technology China is building that was developed in Germany, in Jülich—by Professor Rudolf Schulten, an old acquaintance of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche and me—is the high-temperature reactor. It’s still a test reactor, but it’s supposed to become a commercial reactor soon. That is clearly one more step forward in nuclear technology, and China will be the first country in the world to have it.

In our event yesterday, Minister Counsellor Dr. Yao Fei emphasized that China still has some underdeveloped areas, in the west and in the interior, and therefore they are still in a sense a developing country, but they also have already very clearly reached number-one status in several fields. That should not be felt as a threat, because they are not threatening anybody. The Minister Counsellor yesterday reiterated that the Belt and Road Initiative is open to everyone: Every country in the world can join and work together on a win-win basis. So that is an offer there to be taken.

The Navalny and Skripal Affairs

Schlanger: One of the craziest things that’s coming out now, is the use of the Navalny affair to go after the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This not only targets Russia, but also Germany, and all of Europe, with new sanctions being imposed. What can you tell us about that?

Evgeny Feldman

Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader, sponsored by people linked to the Integrity Initiative, a British intelligence psywar institute.

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Zepp-LaRouche: The Alexei Navalny business is so clearly an orchestrated affair: If you look at the people who are sponsoring Navalny, they are all oligarchs, some linked to the Integrity Initiative in Great Britain, a British intelligence psywar institute, which has so-called “clusters of influence” in every country around the world, involved in anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda. They are sponsoring Navalny. The whole affair is extremely dubious, because the findings of the doctors in the hospital in Omsk, reveal no sign of Novichok; the Charité Hospital in Berlin at first said there was no Novichok, and only when samples were brought to a military lab of the Bundeswehr, were traces of Novichok claimed to have been found. However, everybody knows, if it would have been Novichok, Navalny would have been dead within 10 minutes.

The whole thing is completely questionable. It really looks like a classical British intelligence operation, of the same type as the Sergei and Yulia Skripal affair [in March 2018]. Unfortunately, the EU immediately moved in, and said that it will implement sanctions. Now, naturally, targetting Nord Stream 2 targets the independence and sovereignty of Europe. This is quite serious. Hopefully, we will see some resistance to it. This goes to the very self-interest of European nations.

Mobilization to Save Africa from Mass Famine

Schlanger: I want to come to something that you started bringing up very early this year, which is the situation of famine in Africa, facing 30-70 million people. David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN’s World Food Programme, has been fighting to get aid. Interestingly, President Donald Trump has increased aid to the World Food Programme, but it’s still not enough.

I wonder if you can just summarize the developments around the situation and also the importance of looking to major infrastructure projects as the solution to the problem in the future?

WFP

David Beasley, Executive Director of the UN’s World Food Programme, has received far less funding for food than is needed in the current famine. As a result, over 7 million people have died this year, so far.

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Zepp-LaRouche: Already this year 7 million people have died, which was not necessary, because Beasley had warned of it a year ago! He demanded that he needed EU5.8 billion and he only got EU1.4 billion. In a subsequent speech, Beasley said of the world’s more than 2,000 billionaires, if they would each give a certain amount, they wouldn’t miss a meal, and that is so obvious.

If this is not remedied with a short-term airlift this year, as the Leader of LaRouche South Africa, Phillip Tsokolibane, has urgently appealed to Trump for, but also appealed in general to the world, then 30 million more people are in acute danger of dying—and that is not necessary! It’s one thing if you have a natural catastrophe where you can’t do anything about it; but to increase the food shipments to Africa, to double food production would be very, very easy.

We are campaigning around that, that you need to have a short-term mobilization. The interests of the farmers who are threatened by the cartels to go bankrupt—for them to have more food production based on a parity price; to double food production also in light of a growing world population, is an absolute need. The developing countries urgently need the food; it would be in the interest of the Europeans to help, because if this is not solved, Europe will have the largest migration wave ever. By 2050 the African population alone is likely to grow to 2.5 billion people. We need to double food production in light of this development.

Bonifica SpA

A map of Transaqua, a giant infrastructural development program proposed for the heart of Africa. It will transform life for millions in the region by refilling Lake Chad and providing inland shipping, large-scale irrigation for food production, and hydroelectric power for industrialization.

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Then there is the Transaqua project, which we have talked about on this program several times, but let me just restate it. This is the idea to refill Lake Chad, which has dried out to be only 10% of its original volume. The Sahel zone is, as a consequence, an area of instability, hunger, and social strife, leaving ground for terrorism and so forth. Lake Chad could be refilled by taking 3-4% of the water volume of the tributaries of the Congo River, bringing this water which now is going into the Atlantic. It doesn’t hurt anybody to take this 3% and bring it through a system of canals and waterways into Lake Chad.

This project would immediately give the opportunity for inland shipping, for large-scale irrigation of agricultural areas, for [hydropower] for industrial parks. You would put an infrastructure development program into the heart of Africa, which would positively affect 12 countries, especially in the Lake Chad region, which is one of the key areas of migration and horror. So that should be put on the agenda immediately.

We will escalate our mobilization. We will put out the call of Tsokolibane for this program, “A Matter of Life and Death—Call for International Mobilization of Food Resources to Fight Starvation in Africa.”

Schlanger: Helga, when we meet again next week, it will be just days before the U.S. election. I think it would be very useful for all of our viewers to go to the LaRouche PAC site and look at the video from October 20 of Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe, “ ‘We Are Now In a Civil War’ (with Regard to the Hunter Biden Censorship).”

Is there anything else you want to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: This is a moment in which people are really tested: Can they look, in shaping the future—can they mobilize themselves to be part of the solution? The best way of doing it, is to become part of the Schiller Institute and help us in our efforts.

Schlanger: OK, Helga, thank you. And I’ll see you next week!

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week.

Ibero-America and Caribbean Choose

To Look to the Stars To Build a Future

by Cynthia R. Rush

Top left: Government of Mexico; right: CONAE/Manuel Mazzanti

Top left: Marcelo Ebrard, Foreign Secretary of Mexico. Bottom left: Felipe Solá, Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Right: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 carries Argentina’s SAOCOM 1B satellite into orbit, August 30, 2020.

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Oct. 25—In a beautiful expression of scientific and technological optimism, on October 9 the foreign ministers of Argentina and Mexico, Felipe Solá and Marcelo Ebrard respectively, signed a “Declaration on the Constitution of a Regional Mechanism for Cooperation in Space,” leading to the creation of a Latin American-Caribbean Space Agency (ALCE). Signed virtually during the celebration of the United Nations’ World Space Week October 4-10, the declaration states it intends to create a platform “to invite the rest of the membership of CELAC,” the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, to become part of this effort. The idea of creating a regional space agency is not a new one; but today, when the forging of a new economic and security architecture is particularly urgent, given the global financial collapse and threat of war, the proposal is very timely.

That Argentina and Mexico are spearheading this initiative—Mexico is the president pro-tem of CELAC—is also significant. Argentine President Alberto Fernández and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO as he is known, are political allies in opposing the neoliberal world order and the geopolitical ravings and regime-change threats of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the region. AMLO’s positive relationship with President Donald Trump also likely serves as a useful channel for Fernández’s communications with the White House, as he grapples with a daunting economic crisis and upcoming negotiations with the IMF. For both leaders, the defense of sovereignty, including scientific and technological sovereignty, is primary.

Announced in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it has triggered, this bold initiative has nonetheless sparked great enthusiasm. Governments, scientific sectors, and academic institutions are hopeful that this new platform can serve as a science driver for the region’s economic and scientific development, including in the field of medicine, especially for young people who are inspired by the idea of space exploration.

By coordinating activities with the relevant Ibero-American and Caribbean nations, the new entity is intended “to operate as a catalyst for regional efforts, privileging the development of space-related projects,” whose numbers will be increased “by attracting the talent of Latin American and Caribbean youth,” the joint declaration states. The new agency will also serve as an impetus for U.S., European, Russian, Chinese, and Indian space agencies to expand their already significant cooperation with governments, and state and private institutions involved in satellite production and other space-related activities.

EIRNS

Fostering cooperation and coordination in space science will bring a scientific renaissance to all of Ibero-America and the Caribbean. Shown on the map of Belt and Road corridors are the two excellent launch sites nearest the Equator: Kourou, French Guinea and Alcantara, Brazil.

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A Game-Changer for the Region?

It is precisely this kind of concerted international effort in the area of advanced science that will be crucial to creating the needed science driver for the entire region, engaging a downtrodden labor force in the effort and inspiring youth.

Volume II of the Schiller Institute’s report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” emphasizes as an example that “fostering a renaissance of coordinated space launches and other space science activities at the two existing launch sites nearest to the Equator”—the European Space Agency’s site at Kourou, French Guiana and the Brazilian Space Agency’s site at Alcantara, Brazil—”could be a game-changer for all of Ibero-America and the Caribbean.”

With the exception of Cuba, which has space cooperation and satellite agreements with Russia, Caribbean nations generally have not yet developed space programs, but there is great interest in doing so, seen in the October 2018 founding of the Caribbean Space Society. The Schiller report suggests that because of its significant oil and petrochemical activity, and the training this has provided to a stratum of local workers, Trinidad & Tobago possesses a labor force “most suited to rapid participation in this area of scientific endeavor.”

The Colonials are Getting Uppity

As both Solá and Ebrard emphasized, the plan to create a regional space agency contradicts the idea that poor or developing countries shouldn’t even think about investing in space exploration or scientific development. Remember Barack Obama’s disgusting advice to African nations not to dream of adopting advanced technology lest it cause the planet to “burn up”? Rather, as Solá put it, the development of space activities is a “factor in development,” adding that the joint declaration “is a message to the world: a region that is a bit backward globally, thinking in terms of other regions of the world, makes an effort to change and to send a different message … to the rest of the world.”

Diego Hurtado, Argentina’s Secretary of Policy and Planning in Science, Technology and Innovation, put it this way: “We see [the space sector] as an ‘industrializing’ industry … understanding that the space sector is a great vector for building capacities for our economic sector.”

Marcelo Ebrard emphasized that Mexico firmly believes that the sharing of knowledge and expanding capabilities in the fields of science and technology are “fundamental for the economic and social development of our nations, aside from strengthening the integration and autonomy of Latin America and the Caribbean in the world.” This initiative, he said, “in essence means that we don’t resign ourselves to being a continent … [that plays] a secondary role in anything.” Rather, “we aspire to have a more relevant role on behalf of our nations, and that’s what the commitment and the resolution mean.” British geopoliticians and Malthusian depopulation fanatics would say that the colonials are getting rather uppity with such ideas.

CONAE

Argentine workers assemble the SAOCOM 1B satellite, launched August 30, 2020 from Cape Canaveral. CONAE has been invited to participate in the Artemis program.

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Intelligent Cooperation in the Midst of Pandemic

As the current president pro-tem of CELAC, Mexico had put forward the proposal for a regional space agency as the first point of its 2020 Working Plan, which was then agreed upon during a Latin American-Caribbean Conference on Space held last July. Marcelo Ebrard explained following the October 9 ceremony that it was unclear whether the signing of the declaration could even take place because of the pandemic; but what the pandemic has proved, he said, is that cooperation “is not only desirable, but also the most intelligent and practical way” to proceed. He celebrated that even in the midst of a pandemic, “we’ve reactivated CELAC!” an entity which has been particularly important in promoting cooperation between China and Latin America and the Caribbean in various fields, including science and technology.

Along with Brazil, Argentina has the most advanced space program in Ibero-America, dating back to the latter part of the 19th century, when American System astronomer Benjamin Althorpe Gould, who had studied in Germany under Carl Gauss, arrived in the city of Córdoba in 1870 to build the National Observatory, at the same time that a group of German scientists linked to Alexander Von Humboldt’s scientific tradition arrived to transform Córdoba’s National University into an institution of scientific excellence spanning many fields of study. These interventions, from two different continents, had a lasting effect on the development of Argentine science.

In the early decades of the 20th century, German, Italian and other European scientists and aeronautics experts worked alongside their Argentine counterparts to build indigenous aeronautical and rocket technology that rivaled that of more advanced nations.

Argentina’s National Space Activities Commission (CONAE), whose director Raúl Kulichevsky attended the October 9 ceremony, is respected internationally for its achievements, and has worked closely with NASA on a number of occasions, most recently with SpaceX’s August 31 launching of Argentina’s SAOCOM-1B satellite from Cape Canaveral. In a March 2019 meeting with Kulichevsky, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine invited CONAE to participate in the Artemis program, to return humans to the Moon in 2024.

Argentina thus brings valuable experience to the plan to create a regional space agency, even as it rebuilds the aerospace capabilities—including the development of a satellite rocket launcher and ramping up of its “Access to Space” program—that neoliberal President Mauricio Macri completely shut down during his 2015-2019 presidency.

But as EIR’s Marsha Freeman documents in her excellent article, “Ibero-America Needs a Space Agency!” (21st Century Science and Technology, Spring 2002, pp. 31-54), several Ibero-American nations—Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Mexico among them—have an impressive history of pioneering in space, some dating back to the latter part of the 19th century, a history characterized by intense international scientific cooperation involving the U.S., Germany, and other nations. In the 1990s, the international non-proliferation mafia succeeded in shutting down some of the region’s most significant achievements in advanced rocket technology, such as Argentina’s Condor rocket, lying that they were really nuclear weapons programs. But it didn’t squelch these nations’ desire to have space programs or cancel the inspiration of young people to reach for the stars.

Left: AEXA; right: LATCOSMOS

Left: Logo of the Mexican Space Agency. Right: Logo of the Space Development Plan for the Latin American and Caribbean Regions.

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Today, every country in South America, with the exception of Uruguay, has either a state-sponsored space agency, or a privately-funded equivalent, such as Ecuador’s Civil Space Agency (EXA). In Central America, the Costa Rican Legislative Assembly is currently debating the creation of a national space agency, while on September 25, a majority of members of the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) approved a resolution to create a Central American Space Agency (AECA). While this resolution isn’t binding on member governments, it creates impetus for the summit of Heads of State and Government of the Central American Integration System (SICA) to approve the agency’s creation.

International Collaboration

Exemplary of the ferment in the region was the First Russia-Latin America Space Cooperation Forum for Central America and the Caribbean, which also took place during World Space Week on October 6 and included members of Parlacen, Russian government authorities, and even Russian astronauts Ivan Vagner and Anatoli Ivanishin, speaking from the International Space Station, Sputnik reported October 12.

Young people also participated in the First Central American and Caribbean Youth Conversation with Russian cosmonauts. Nicaraguan legislator Daniel Ortega Reyes, head of Parlacen’s international affairs committee, who is promoting the creation of a Central American space agency, told Sputnik that “all children who live in Central America and the Caribbean have dreamed of, and know about space. They’ve all wanted to be astronauts, cosmonauts and say ‘I want to do [space] travel.’ It’s a dream.” Now, he added, young people in the region rightly believe that this dream is possible, “unlike previous decades in which space was beyond all possible desires.”

Russia’s involvement also includes sponsoring a Central American Space Academy, based in Guatemala, with an educational program focused on aerospace science for the region’s children and youth. The program was elaborated by the State University of Southwestern Russia and its Center for Scientific-Technical and Innovative Cooperation with Ibero-American Countries. Center Director Nikolai Frolov reports that the goal is to physically open the new Academy on Russian Cosmonaut Day next April, but if the pandemic persists, classes will begin remotely, probably beginning in January 2021. Course material has already been translated into Spanish and classes will be transmitted remotely from Moscow. According to the Russian embassy in Guatemala, those who complete the Academy’s educational program may be eligible for scholarships offered by the Russian Federation to continue their studies at Russian universities.

The plan to create a Costa Rican space agency is particularly interesting, given that nation’s impressive educational and institutional capabilities, including the Costa Rica Institute of Technology’s space lab (SETEC) and several top-notch university programs. The many missions aboard the Space Shuttle of Costa Rican astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz has been a constant source of inspiration for the nation’s scientific community as well as its youth.

In an interview with Canadian Bruce James Callow, coauthor of the book To the Stars: Costa Rica in NASA, congresswoman Aida Montiel, who introduced the bill for the creation of a national space agency, explained that the agency’s key purpose will be to “create agreements and strategic alliances with public and private organizations such as NASA and other space agencies around the world.” A space center to be created by the new agency, located in Liberia, Guanacaste province, in northwestern Costa Rica, she said, will position this region “as a cluster specialized in aerospace research and development. It will be unique in Costa Rica and Central America.”

EXA

Commander Ronnie Nader, the father of Ecuador’s first satellites and Ecuador’s first astronaut, has flown seven space missions.

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A Private Latin American Space Mission

Costa Rica’s SETEC space lab is also involved in what will be the first privately financed and organized Latin American Space Mission, taking place under the aegis of LATCOSMOS, an initiative of Ecuador’s private EXA agency, and adopted by the International Astronautical Federation’s Latin American and Caribbean Regional Group (GRULAC). EXA is financing the project, which will include four Latin American scientists/astronauts—commanded by Ecuador’s Ronnie Nader, and including Adolfo Chávez of Costa Rica’s SETEC Lab and Technology Institute, Alberto Ramírez, a leading space engineer and professor from Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), and Margot Solberg, a science educator based in Quito, Ecuador.

Nader is an experienced astronaut, having flown seven space missions, and is also father of Ecuador’s first satellites. He was trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia under the auspices of the Ecuadorian Air Force. In comments to India’s Financial Express October 9, he explained that the purpose of the mission, for which a date hasn’t yet been set, is to “demonstrate that Latin America can undertake joint space missions.”

The mission involves a brief trip to suborbital space aboard the New Shephard reusable vertical takeoff and landing vehicle produced by the Blue Origin company. During the 10-minute flight, each of the crew will perform experiments related to microgravity before returning to Earth. “We want to make history with this first Latin American mission to demonstrate capability and unity, while carrying out technical and scientific goals,” the www.tec.ac.cr website reported Nader as saying on September 24.

Nader emphasized that the biggest challenge for the astronauts will be once they land back on Earth, because “they are going to inspire youth by example. They will demonstrate Latin American unity—that we’re capable of leaving aside our differences and be bold enough to do great things.” As the four individuals chosen for this mission are also educators, Nader pointed out that “for a kid who has an astronaut in front of him, someone who flew in space—that can change his life.” Costa Rican astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz’s several NASA Space Shuttle flights “were an inspiration for an entire generation,” Nader emphasized. “I always say that for a generation of Costa Ricans, it was our ‘Apollo’ moment.”

Southeast Asia Rejects Mike Pompeo, Not the United States

by Mike Billington

DoS/Ronny Przysucha

U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo.

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Oct. 23—Although President Donald Trump has adopted a critical attitude towards China over the past few months, it should be clear to anyone who is thinking critically that his switch away from referring to Xi Jinping as a “great leader of a great nation,” to holding China responsible for the disastrous impact of the coronavirus on the health and the economy of the United States, does not in any way include the wholesale denunciation of China voiced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

Even while referring to the “China virus,” the President has repeatedly praised China’s actions to carry through the agreements of the U.S.-China trade deal, to resolve the massive trade deficit created by the “globalists” of previous administrations. He also fulsomely praised the recently retired U.S. Ambassador to China, Iowa’s former Governor Terry Branstad, and repeated Branstad’s admiration for President Xi.

Pompeo, the messianic believer in the rapture, is spending every waking hour trying to provoke a war with China, as well as with Russia. Pompeo has acted not as a diplomat, as his office calls for, but as if he had assumed presidential powers—in fact, beyond the presidency, to the role of a warlord. If this insane campaign is not stopped, the President’s efforts to restore America to its historic mission as the “city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop famously said in 1630, will be sabotaged, and worse, the world will continue to descend into chaos and possible war.

Mike Pompeo’s ASEAN Campaign

Secretary Pompeo spent the first week of August calling nearly every Foreign Minister of the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). His message was clear: if you want to be friends with the United States, you must immediately stop your extensive and increasing cooperation with China, keep Huawei and ZTE out of your 5G plans, stop all cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and stop all projects with Chinese companies, especially those which have been sanctioned by the United States. The terms “malign actions” and “authoritarian dictatorship” filled the discussions.

Then, on September 10, Pompeo spoke (virtually) to a meeting of the ASEAN foreign ministers. In a speech, which was a classic case of geopolitical projection, Pompeo described China as a “bully,” claiming that China does not respect “sovereignty” or the “territorial integrity enshrined in the ASEAN Charter.” He bragged that the U.S. had sanctioned two dozen major Chinese companies for their “aggression” in building new islands on shoals in the South China Sea. He then instructed the foreign ministers to “Reconsider business dealings with the very state-owned companies that bully ASEAN coastal states in the South China Sea. Don’t let the Chinese Communist Party walk all over us and our people.”

Pompeo proceeded to report back to the American people on the ASEAN meeting, not only exaggerating, but totally falsifying the response of the ASEAN members to his effort to build an anti-China alliance. His press statement, posted on the State Department website on September 11, reads:

We also underscore our commitment to speak out in the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s escalating aggression and threats to sovereign nations’ ability to make free choices. We stand with our ASEAN partners as we insist on the rule of law and respect for sovereignty in the South China Sea, where Beijing has pursued aggressive campaigns of coercion and environmental devastation. We stand for transparency and respect in the Mekong region, where the CCP has abetted arms and narcotics trafficking and unilaterally manipulated upstream dams, exacerbating an historic drought. And we stand for open and rules-based economic growth, in contrast to the opaque and predatory business practices of Beijing’s state-owned actors, such as China Communications Construction Company.

DoS

Dino Patti Djalal, former Indonesian Ambassador to the U.S.: “No Southeast Asian government has responded to—let alone applauded—the call to oppose or isolate China.”

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South East Asia Rejects Pompeo, Not the U.S.

Let us review the actual response to Pompeo from the ASEAN nations and look at the historic transformation of the ASEAN economies as a result of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and related investments in infrastructure and industrial development across the region.

Dino Patti Djalal, the former Ambassador to the U.S. from Indonesia, and widely considered by the U.S. foreign policy community to be one of America’s closest friends from Southeast Asia, published a commentary on October 15 in The Diplomat titled “Why Trump’s Anti-China Policy Falls on Deaf Ears in Southeast Asia.” Dino is clear that Pompeo is the “hitman” for the anti-China campaign, even if he does not take note that Trump does not hold the same extreme view.

Dino quotes Pompeo saying that “securing our freedom from the CCP is the mission of our time, and America is in a perfect position to lead.” He also notes that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (Pompeo’s closest collaborator since their time together at West Point) called China “the biggest threat to world order.”

But, Dino continues:

In Southeast Asia, the Trump administration’s anti-China advocacy is not likely to find a receptive audience. Indeed, a number of government officials that I have spoken to in Southeast Asia have indicated that the Trump administration is out of touch with the diplomatic reality on the ground. Southeast Asians, true to their culture, are of course too polite to say this to the Americans and tend to respond with a smirk on their face. But it should be noticed that no Southeast Asian government has responded to—let alone applauded—the Trump administration’s call to oppose or isolate China.

Dino cites several core reasons for this: The U.S.-China conflict “does not connect with their real-time interest”; China is a “solution provider to their COVID-19 crisis”; they see China as “an important remedy for their economic predicament,” noting that ASEAN trade with China, about $650 billion annually, is nearly double that with the U.S.; while the Pompeo policy is full of ideological preaching about democracy and “our values,” China has—

de-ideologized its foreign policy since the 1980s. No one seriously believes that China’s political intention is to turn Southeast Asian nations to communism …, but rather about strategic acceptance, economic engagement and political influence.

Nor do ASEAN countries have the “intention, will, interest or resources” to meddle with China’s sovereign political system; and finally, Dino asserts, were any ASEAN country or the group as a whole to join any kind of anti-China bloc, ASEAN would “immediately lose its prized ‘centrality’ …, the notion that ASEAN can embrace and be accepted by all the major powers and other players in the region, and thus play a central role in bringing everyone to the table.”

Presidential Communications Operations Office/TOTO LOZANO/PPD

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte insists on sovereignty: “We must stand on our own feet. If we can’t, we have no business being a Republic.” Here, President Duterte (center left) is with his Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, (center right).

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The Philippines

But ASEAN nations are not interested in joining an anti-U.S. bloc either—rather, they are in general agreement with President Trump’s emphasis on sovereignty, that each nation must act first on behalf of the fundamental interests of its own citizens. The Philippines is the central country in this regard, having been essentially a U.S. colony for nearly 50 years before Franklin Roosevelt negotiated its independence. Before the 2016 election of President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines was essentially run from Wall Street and Washington, through the family and friends of the U.S. puppet Cory Aquino, who were placed in power by the 1986 coup against the nationalist leader Ferdinand Marcos by the neocon Secretary of State George Shultz and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.

Duterte was elected in total opposition to that gang, much as Trump was elected in opposition to the established leaders of both political parties—both Bush and Obama oligarchs. Duterte’s first steps were to denounce Barack Obama and his “pivot” to Asia, open relations with China and Russia, and threaten to ban the U.S. military altogether from the country. But with Trump’s election later that year, he welcomed Trump’s approach to establishing friendly relations with Russia and China, breaking up the British imperial division of the world into warring blocs.

But the imperial bombast of Pompeo and Esper has spoiled that. Duterte has again moved to remove all U.S. military forces, ordering the end of the Visiting Forces Agreement with the U.S. early in 2020, although that order has been put on hold due to the severe impact of the pandemic in the Philippines. Duterte has banned any Philippine participation in the provocative “Freedom of Navigation” voyages through contested territories by the U.S. Navy, and refused feelers to allow the U.S. to re-establish Subic Bay as a U.S. military base (the site used for much of the air and sea operations during the Viet Nam War). Duterte said that allowing such a base, “will ensure, if war breaks out—because there would be an atomic arsenal brought in—this will ensure the extinction of the Filipino race.”

Duterte made clear his country’s rejection of taking sides, saying in February that the nation must “stand on its own feet. If we can’t, we have no business being a Republic. You might as well choose. We can be a territory of the Americans or we can be a province of China.”

In October, Duterte lifted a moratorium on the exploration for oil and gas in the South China Sea, a moratorium imposed in 2014 by the former Aquino government, in collaboration with Obama, who had organized a fake “international tribunal,” with no participation of China. That Obama-Aquino tribunal ruled in 2016 against China’s historical claims in the South China Sea. The lifting of the moratorium enables Duterte and China to reopen three joint development projects in the contested regions, and more projects are under discussion.

Duterte has also rejected Pompeo’s demand to keep Huawei and ZTE out of the nation’s development of a 5G network. And on September 8, the Philippines’ Defense Secretary, Delfin Lorenzana, announced that he had signed a deal with Dito Telecommunity, jointly owned by Philippine companies and China Telecom, to build cellphone towers inside Philippine military bases, dismissing complaints from Pompeo’s anti-China assets.

Government promo

In response to Pompeo’s announcement of sanctions against the China Communications Construction Company, President Duterte approved it for the construction, with local partners, of a new international airport for Manila.Shown, an artist’s rendition of the proposed Sangley Point International Airport, across Manila Bay from Manila.

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In August, Pompeo launched another of his unilateral sanctions attacks, targeting especially China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), one of China’s largest construction firms, deeply involved in Belt and Road Initiative construction around the world. Pompeo’s spokesman accused CCCC of the horrible crime of building islands in the South China Sea, imposed sanctions, and added that the U.S. would—

encourage all sorts of parties and institutions and governments around the world to assess risk and reconsider business deals with the sort of predatory Chinese state-owned enterprises that we’ve identified here, to include CCCC and its subsidiaries that have been so central to the militarization and coercion in the South China Sea.

The State Department has in fact threatened countries around the world that they will lose U.S. support and could even be sanctioned if they do not cut off projects involving CCCC.

Duterte responded immediately, announcing approval on September 1 for CCCC, with local partners, to build a new international airport for Manila, the Sangley Point International Airport, 20 minutes from downtown Manila, to be built on reclaimed land in Manila Bay—a $10.2 billion project. Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque told the press: “The President was clear: he will not follow the directives of the Americans, because we are a free and independent nation, and we need investors from China.”

Debunking the ‘Debt Trap’ Meme

Malaysia was one of the prime examples used by the anti-China campaigners to claim that the Belt and Road Initiative was a “debt trap,” loading countries up with debt for “white elephant” infrastructure projects, of the sort that the IMF and western financial institutions declared were “inappropriate” for the stage of development of poor nations. Under the extremely corrupt government of Najib Razak (2009-2018), large contracts were signed with Chinese companies to build a rail line connecting the east coast with the west coast and southern Thailand, several major real estate projects, and much more. When Najib was overthrown by a coalition headed by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad in 2018, Mahathir put several of the projects on hold while the corruption of the Najib regime was investigated.

The international anti-China mob was delighted, and Mahathir, whom most of the western financial institutions had earlier despised for his courage in confronting them during the “Asia crisis” of 1997-98, suddenly considered him a great hero, for supposedly standing up to the “malign actions” of the Chinese. Much to their dismay, Mahathir traveled to China, and negotiated a new contract, reducing the cost of the East Coast Rail Link by one-third. He said he was “grateful to the Chinese government for recognizing the Malaysian government’s financial position and predicament.” The project is being built by the same CCCC that Pompeo has sanctioned.

More recently, in October 2019, Mahathir set up a “China Special Channel” (CSC) as the single window for all investment opportunities from China. Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said that the CSC would “focus on attracting and supporting Chinese companies and global multinational corporations located in China looking to set up new bases in order to expand into Southeast Asia.”

During the recent visit of Foreign Minister Wang Yi to Malaysia, the two nations agreed to continue working towards a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea, and that it should not be a ground for major power competition “teeming with warships.”

Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen had a different response regarding the “debt trap” charge, when his country was accused of becoming a colony of China:

When some people see China build roads, provide grants and loans to Cambodia to build roads, they say that Cambodia is a satellite country of China, and that Cambodia chooses China over this superpower or that superpower, But I want to ask them—if China doesn’t build this road or this bridge, who builds it instead?

He said that if someone could prove that some other country would do it instead of China, he would be glad to step down. Japan and South Korea had built some infrastructure, he added, “but China built thousands of kilometers of roads in the country.”

BRI has not been stopped by Pompeo. A tunnel under construction in Indonesia.

CGTN

Chinese construction of a high-speed rail line in Indonesia, April 19, 2020.

Gunawan Kartapranata

The proposed high-speed railway system in Java, Indonesia. Phase 1 will connect Jakarta with Bandung, then continue east to Surabaya.

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Indonesia, the largest economy in ASEAN, has been the recipient of huge infrastructure investments from China—government officials have noted that virtually every infrastructure project in the country has a Chinese name associated with it. In 2019, China doubled its investments in Indonesia to $4.7 billion, replacing Japan as the second largest foreign investor after Singapore. The investments are entirely in capital intensive sectors, large infrastructure and manufacturing. Over one million jobs were created for Indonesians in 2019, mostly in transportation and telecom.

Indonesian Investment Minister Luhut Pandjaitan, speaking in January at a China Business Forum, said: “If you look at the amount of investment from China, it is a lot. But some people still say, ‘debt trap, debt trap.’ We are not that stupid, you know.” Not only has Indonesia kept its debt-to-GDP ratio below 30%, but the country’s foreign debt to China, at $17.7 billion, makes China only its fourth largest country creditor! The point is, China’s investments focus on areas that will increase the productivity of the nation as a whole, not the refinancing of old debt or merely extractive industries, which are almost always subject to manipulation by the international financial speculators.

That is one reason that the People’s Bank of China and Bank Indonesia signed an agreement on September 30 to promote “the use of local currencies for trade and direct investment settlement,” to use direct exchange-rate quotations and interbank trading between the yuan and the rupiah.

RFA

Map of the Laos-China railway currently under construction in Laos. The Thai segment has not yet been built.

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In Laos, the railroad being built by China in this poor and landlocked country is an incredible engineering feat. More than half of the 414 km rail line is tunnels or bridges, and is expected to open in December 2021. Eventually, this will become the core of the Kunming-to-Singapore rail connection. The Laos project is to be finished by December 2021 at the cost of $6 billion.

RFA

A promotional poster for the 414-kilometer Laos-China railway that promises to transform Laos from a landlocked to a land-linked country.

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Naturally, the China hawks are screaming “debt trap,” and indeed the global economic recession due in part to the coronavirus has caused short-term debt problems for the small, poor nation, and the government is negotiating with China to restructure the debt. But the transformation taking place in this country—subjected to the destruction of modern warfare for years during the Indochina war and kept in poverty and backwardness ever since by the western financial institutions—is inspiring. Only degenerate Greenies and bankers who glory in the primitive backwardness of third world nations could not recognize this.

So also, a transformation is taking place in the more advanced nation of Thailand, where China is also building railroads—both a section connecting Bangkok to the Eastern Economic Corridor along the coast to Cambodia, and the first section of a rail connection north to Laos, to eventually link up with the Laos railroad to Kunming, China. Chinese direct investment in Thailand increased five-fold in 2019, to $8.6 billion, making China the leading foreign investor for the first time. China is also cooperating with Thailand to connect the Eastern Economic Corridor to the Greater Bay Area development zone in the Pearl River estuary, linking Guangdong, Macao and Hong Kong.

Thailand, like all of the ASEAN nations, is ignoring Pompeo’s demand to cut off Huawei, which has been by far the leading developer of the region’s telecom capacities and is far ahead of other tech companies in 5G development. Huawei is building a 5G Innovation Center in Thailand. Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha expressed his appreciation for Huawei’s work in Thailand, saying that Thailand will become the region’s digital technology leader.

CMEC

The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor.

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Myanmar is another case that debunks the “debt trap” lies. Although the huge Myitsone Dam project begun by China in 2009 was suspended in 2011 under popular pressure backed by the international anti-development NGOs, Myanmar and China completed two pipelines in 2013 and 2017 for oil and gas, from the Kyaukphyu on Myanmar’s western coast to Kunming, allowing China to bypass the Malacca Strait in bringing Persian Gulf oil and gas to China. In January 2020, President Xi Jinping visited Myanmar, signing a contract to develop a modern deep-water port in Kyaukphyu as well as a Special Economic Zone. He furthered plans for rail and industrial projects along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), which follows the pipeline route from Yangon to Kyaukphyu, with a “Y” link from Mandalay to Yangon.

COVID-19 Diplomacy

Perhaps more than anything else at this moment of severe economic dislocation in the region caused by the pandemic, China’s assistance in combating COVID-19 is seen as one of the most important reasons that the ASEAN nations are not responding to Pompeo’s geopolitical effort to isolate and stop China’s development. Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with ASEAN leaders—some in China and some during a tour of the region—in the first weeks of October.

In every case, China’s assistance, not only in medical supplies, but also in helping to build indigenous pharmaceutical and related health facilities is deeply appreciated. Indonesian Investment Minister Luhut, referenced above, met with Wang Yi in China, visiting three major Chinese pharmaceutical firms, arranging both for the delivery of millions of doses of vaccines to begin in November and for help in making Indonesia a hub for pharmaceutical production for ASEAN and beyond. Similar projects are underway in Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, while Xi Jinping pledged that any vaccine developed in China would be considered a “global public good.”

Malaysian Prime Minster Muhyiddin Yassin noted that Malaysia is also part of the WHO’s Covax Vaccination Plan aimed at making any COVID-19 vaccine available everywhere, but added that a downside of the international initiative was its requirement for countries “to fork out a large amount of money before we can get a vaccine for our use.”

I will close with words of Dino Patti Djalal from his article that I quoted above. He writes that ASEAN relations are far from “problem free,” noting issues over the South China Sea, Chinese labor, illegal fishing, and others. But “over the years, Southeast Asian governments have learned to engage China in a complex yet growing multi-dimensional relationship in which these differences can be managed.”

As to relations with the U.S., Dino writes that after the presidential election in the United States, the U.S. will need to change Pompeo’s—

strategic messaging to the region, [focusing instead on the] development needs of the countries in the region. … It should ease up on the obsessive ideological crusade. It should focus more on soft power than hard power. … And it should not go around scolding countries that want to build good relations with China. … Today, Southeast Asia wants to get along with the U.S. and China, but they also want the U.S. and China to get along, at least in their region. Is that too much to ask?