ZEPP-LAROUCHE ON FRIDAY WEBCAST
Wake Up, Americans!
Your Constitution Is Being Trashed!
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Live from Germany, Helga Zepp-LaRouche was the guest on the LaRouche PAC Friday Webcast of Aug. 4. This transcript has been edited.
Host Jason Ross: Hi there! This is Friday, August 4, 2017, and you are joining us for our regular Friday Webcast here at larouchepac.com. I’m Jason Ross—I’ll be the host today—and I’m very happy that this week, we are joined by special guest Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who is on with us via video from Germany. Hi there, Helga.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Hello. How are you?
Ross: Good! For the show today, as a brief bit of set-up before we get to Helga, this week we saw Donald Trump sign the sanctions bill that had been passed by the House and the Senate—H.R. 3364—which targets Iran, North Korea, and Russia with sanctions. Part of this bill claims, as a given, that Russia interfered with the U.S. election; part of the bill says that the United States will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia; and it would tie the President’s hands in having foreign policy actions passed by the House and the Senate rather than through the Executive Branch. Donald Trump signed the bill this week, issuing a signing statement about the parts of the bill that he finds to be unconstitutional. Trump tweeted just yesterday that “Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time and dangerous low. A very dangerous low. You can thank Congress for this.”
Russia responded by calling for the expulsion of a certain number of U.S. diplomats to reach the level of Russian diplomats in the United States; something similar to what President Obama had done with Russian diplomats and Russian diplomatic property. What this means overall, is that it’s really increasing the pressure on U.S.-Russian relations, and making it very difficult for Trump to follow through on one of his campaign promises, which was the potential of reaching a detente with Russia. As he had famously said, “It’s not bad to get along with Russia; that’s a good thing.”
So, Helga, I’d like to bring you on to provide your view of this. I know that your husband, Lyndon LaRouche, has said that if this coup against Trump succeeds, this puts the threat of nuclear war very much on the table. Could you tell us your view of the situation?
Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think this is not just a Senate vote, or a Congress vote. This is about the President in American history since its founding. Because it completely overturns the American Constitution, which gives the power to define foreign policy to the President, and the Constitution has a separation of powers. Now, under the bill that was voted, after the Congress and the Senate voted by an overwhelming majority to impose sanctions, if President Trump wanted to undo that, he would supposedly have to send a letter to the Congress, and the Congress would have to respond in 30 days to either approve it or oppose it.
That is Congress hijacking the power to define foreign policy from the President! I think the American people had better wake up to the fact that what is being taken away is the American Constitution. I would think that every American patriot who loves America—and I know the American people are generally very patriotic—they have to understand this moment. Because they just can not let this go. It has so many implications.
The VIPS Memorandum
My husband, Lyndon LaRouche, said that if this is allowed to stick, then we are back to the immediate confrontation against Russia— and also China—as we were with the Obama administration and the control of the neocons, who had controlled United States policy for two terms of George W. Bush and two terms of Obama. It was these neocons who were completely upset that somebody not belonging to the system—like Donald Trump—won the election.
I remember very well that on the 21st of January, the British weekly magazine, The Spectator, had a headline saying, it’s just a question of whether Trump will be gotten out of office by impeachment, by a coup, or by assassination. The motion towards impeachment is fully under way, as you know. It has just been revealed that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has a grand jury, which was supposed to be secret, but a leaker again leaked it to The Guardian and other media. So the aim there is clearly to advocate some story showing ties of Trump or his team to Russia.
Now let me just be very emphatic. The truth about this matter has to be gotten out. It is historically of the highest significance that the organization of the VIPS—the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity—former high-ranking intelligence officials from various intelligence agencies of the United States, about a week ago addressed a memorandum to President Trump in which they established, based on their indisputable expertise, forensic evidence that there was no Russian hack. Instead, there was insider leaking; someone downloaded the data from the DNC computers and then masqueraded the whole affair as if it had been done by the Russians.
To investigate this and to examine these findings in the VIPS memorandum—that is the most important way to derail this coup. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has already commented on the VIPS memorandum. I think we must mobilize the American population to demand that the Congress invite the VIPS representatives to testify, to present their evidence, and indeed support the efforts of such people as Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA), who is investigating who did the unmasking, who are the leakers. Senator Grassley’s efforts to do likewise must be supported. In general, I think this Congress has completely discredited itself. The approval rating of the Congress right now, according to the latest polls, is just 10%; I think this is also an historic low.
The British Empire Is the Conspiracy
But I think it now depends on the American people; and you should find all kinds of organizations and institutions representing the people, backing up President Trump. Justice has to be done; the leakers have to be investigated; and the truth has to be re-established. This is of the highest strategic importance. This is not just an internal American affair—I think the Russian characterizations, that this is an internal fight, are not correct. I think this is something much more sinister.
The former weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who was a weapons inspector during the Iraq War, made a very profound characterization. He said, you have complete unison in the U.S. media, the FBI, and other U.S. intelligence agencies, and near unanimity in both houses of Congress; how do you get such complete—in German you would say Gleichschaltung—how do you get such a completely univocal performance? Ritter raises the question that this points to a much broader conspiracy going on in American society. I know that people normally get completely unnerved when you mention the word “conspiracy,” but I don’t think there is another word to characterize what is happening.
You have what people nowadays call the “Deep State” trying to undo the election of an American President, but you have the British role in all of this. I think that there is an effort by the British Empire, having re-established control over U.S. institutions, to go back to what we had once with the neocons in 1992—the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the United States should never allow another country or another group of countries to bypass the military-political or military power of the United States. Now, that was the coup of the neocons after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they proceeded to try to establish a unipolar world. I think that is exactly expressed in what the Congress did with the sanctions, and by implication it means going back to the confrontation with Russia, and naturally the Thucydides trap in the relationship with China.
This is the warpath. It has incredible implications. I just want to mention a couple of them. First of all, Russian Prime Minister Medvedev reacted much more sharply than President Putin. He said this ends the hope for an improvement in the relationship between the United States and Russia. Then there were various commentaries in Chinese publications that offered China’s help to Russia against the effects of the sanctions and also said this will just mean a much closer relationship between Russia and China, and that together we will have deterrence against the United States. Now that is not what the Chinese want; they have offered cooperation, for the United States to join the Belt and Road Initiative, but that is what it leads to.
Russia Sanctions a Dangerous Boomerang
There are two other side-effects of this. One is the relationship with Europe, because the sanctions primarily target Russian natural gas delivery and the idea of building another pipeline, Nord Stream 2, which Germany needs, because the oil supply from Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, is very tricky because of the unstable situation there. The oil reserves in the North Sea are being depleted. But because the United States insists that it has extraterritorial command, obviously the sanctions will hit all firms that produce materials or perform construction work for any energy project with the Russians. This is completely impossible. It will also target, for example, European investors in the United States: If they do business with Russia, they could be expropriated in the United States, or their capital frozen, or the like. This is causing havoc.
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U.S. Senate votes on bill targeting Iran, North Korea, and Russia with sanctions.
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The European Union and the German government have already said that they will consider countermeasures, that this may lead to trade war. Amazingly, one spokesman in a leading think tank that is close to the German government has just said this will backfire, because why should countries which are targetted by the sanctions help to implement them? So, he predicts that this will be a boomerang for the Americans; but naturally, a very dangerous one. Also, various German industrial associations came out and said this is completely unacceptable.
More fundamentally, it brings up the question of international law. Why would the United States think that U.S. law can be applied all over the world? This is a violation of international law, and therefore this is an unprecedented crisis. It has, as I said, implications for the American Constitution, for international law, for the relationship with Russia and China; it can break apart the alliance with Europe for the first time. So, I think people really must understand, this must be undone.
Ross: Could you say more for our viewers about what you see as the limitations of the “Deep State” or Cold War idea? In other words, what is really pushing this opposition to cooperation with Russia and what can we do about it?
Financial Blow-Out, Nuclear Extinction
Zepp-LaRouche: I think it is a remnant of geopolitics. Geopolitics is the idea that a group of nations, or one nation which has a fundamental interest against another nation or another group of nations, and if need be, can fight for this with wars of aggression. It was that thinking which led to two world wars in the 20th Century, and obviously, if we don’t overcome this in the age of thermonuclear weapons, what we are talking about is the danger of extinction of the human race if it comes to war. We are much closer to this than most people even wish to recognize.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated between 1989 and 1991, there was the possibility to have a lasting, peaceful order. Communism had been defeated, and we proposed at that time the Eurasian Land-Bridge; we were already calling it the New Silk Road. It was the idea of establishing a new paradigm of cooperation in the interest of all participating countries. That policy would have changed the course of history. But at that time there was Margaret Thatcher, and you had Bush, Sr., and Mitterrand.
They decided to prevent Russia from ever coming up again—to reduce the Soviet Union, which was a superpower, to a Russia which would just be a raw materials-producing Third World country. They decided that, instead of having a world order of peace, let’s go back to the old Anglo-American policy of running the world as an empire; let’s impose a unipolar order on the world. That was the policy of the 1990s, of the early 2000s; it was the idea of ruling through regime change, color revolution. This was the policy of the wars based on lies in Afghanistan, Iraq, the murder of Qaddafi; these policies have destroyed the Middle East. They have caused the refugee crisis; they almost triggered the collapse of the European Union, because there is no union, as became clear in the course of the refugee crisis.
So this policy is now about to explode. Alan Greenspan, of all people—the person who again and again warned of irrational exuberance—just came out and said there is another bond bubble blow-out coming, and it will trigger a collapse of the stock market. This empire is collapsing, and that is why I think there is such desperation to prevent the rise of China; even though China has offered a completely different model, not based on geopolitics but based on “win-win” cooperation, in which all nations cooperating with the New Silk Road Belt and Road Initiative would profit.
Defend the American Revolution!
I think what’s really in question here is, do we go back to the British Empire? And people who know American history, know very well that the British Empire never gave up the idea of reconquering the United States. George III lost his marbles at the time of the American Revolution, and the British tried to win America back—first in the War of 1812, then in the Civil War, in which the British Empire was allied with the Confederacy. They financed the Confederacy through the East Coast banks. Then after that, the British realized it could not be done militarily, so then they tried to subvert the American establishment and persuade the leading American families to run the world as an empire based on the Anglo-American special relationship.
If you look at the whole operation against Trump, which really started long before Trump had won the election—it was British Intelligence which started the dossiers fabricating the intelligence. But it was then helped by the U.S. intelligence agencies, whose structure still came from the Obama period. “Deep State” is too short a formulation, because it does not express that this is a British coup. The collusion is not with Russia; the collusion is with this British Empire. Americans have to understand that their entire revolution is at stake; the Constitution—which is still one of the most fantastic documents in terms of constitutions in the world—is in total danger. It is already taken over, and the American people must undo that.
