ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

British Empire Jailed Lyndon LaRouche Thirty Years Ago: That Same Apparatus Is Now Aimed at President Trump

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s January 26, 2019 interview with the founder of the Schiller Institutes, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our weekly webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s Jan. 26, 2019.

We’re having a re-emergence, or not so much a re-emergence as a reassertion of the neo-con faction in Washington, now with their sights set on a regime-change coup in Venezuela—some of the same people who were involved with the Bush family, going back to Iran-Contra and other operations. Helga, what’s the significance of this in terms of the global strategic situation?

Venezuela: New Crisis Hot Spot

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: With the successful Russian intervention in Syria and President Trump’s decision to U.S. troops out of Syria, that crisis spot has been defused. Since the real aim of the war party is to cause a confrontation with Russia and China, it appears that the war party has shifted its assault to Venezuela. From the standpoint of international law, what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others are demanding is completely illegal. Pompeo went to the Organization of American States (OAS) to demand full support for Juan Guaidó as President of Venezuela. It’s not a question of liking or not liking President Nicolas Maduro—he is the President of Venezuela. This is a classical regime-change operation and it was completely rejected by Russia, by China, by India, by President López Obrador from Mexico, by Uruguay—even the Brazilian military has flatly refused to involve any Brazil troops.

This is now a highly dangerous situation. It could lead to a civil war, which is why all reasonable parties are calling for dialogue. This move in Venezuela has the potential to lead to a U.S. confrontation with Russia and China. Even more important, the assault on international law, is really, the biggest problem.

Just to give you a sense of it: Somebody stated clearly—if you demand that the head of the National Assembly, Guaidó, should be recognized as President, by the same token, President Maduro could say the Yellow Vests are the legitimate government of France, and not Emmanuel Macron. Once you start doing these kinds of things, much more will go haywire politically, internationally, than the supporters of such actions may expect. This is really a very, very dangerous development.

It’s also pretty transparent. Even the economic commentator on the official first channel of German TV said “this has nothing to do with democracy or human rights. It’s all about oil.” Now while that is not the whole story, because it’s the larger global confrontation between the old and the new paradigm, oil for sure is also a factor in this situation.

This will all accelerate the process of discrediting the present neo-liberal order, because the methods with which they operate are becoming clearer to everybody, in every corner of the world.

Schlanger: You mentioned that geopolitics is a major feature of this. It’s not surprising, then, that the “usual suspects”—Britain and France—endorsed this regime change. I don’t know whether other countries have been heard from yet, but as you mentioned, Uruguay, Mexico, and Brazil, are very much opposed to this. I think it’s important to note that it’s the old Bush crowd that’s coming forward now, attempting to take over policy, certainly in this case.

Missile Defense Review

Let’s look at the neo-con danger. The 2019 National Intelligence Strategy (NIS), released January 22, is quite a chilling document. What was the reaction from the Russians and the Chinese to being named, again, as adversaries?

Zepp-LaRouche: The 2019 Missile Defense Review (MDR), released January 17 by the Department of Defense (DOD), raises the idea of militarizing space, which was denounced very clearly by the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Russian response was that this once again shows that instead of going for dialogue, there is a very clear intention to “ensure U.S. domination in space.” That response makes an inaccurate and mistaken reference to President Reagan’s “Strategic Defense initiative” (SDI), which was, as we’ve discussed many times in this program, a much more complicated issue involving a grand design to finally overcome “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) with a superior conception, namely, Mutually Assured Survival.

We can see that the tensions in the international strategic situation remain extremely high, and the situation is therefore extremely dangerous.

George Soros: China the Biggest Threat

Schlanger: There was the recent appearance of the almost 90-year-old George Soros at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he sent out—I think you could say—”marching orders” directed at confronting China and Russia and getting rid of Trump. What do you make of Soros’s appearance there?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think that most people would agree with me that he is the ugly face of neo-liberal capitalism, if you ever have seen one.

But what he said there is quite interesting, because he lumps together President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. What he said is that China is not only an autocratic government, but they are wealthy and economically powerful, and they have now developed “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) to such a degree that they are capable of imposing their system. He added that Xi Jinping, therefore, is the biggest threat to Soros’s conception of an “open society”—the idea that everything goes, the so-called “liberal values of the West.”

This is quite incredible. The Chinese reaction to this was to say that it doesn’t deserve a response—if somebody so obviously turns black into white and white into black, it doesn’t deserve a rebuttal.

I think the Russian reaction to Soros’ speech was also very interesting: It was the Minister for Economic Development, Maxim Oreshkin, who said, well, the United States has nobody to blame but themselves. Look at what this “open society” conception did to the United States in the last 30 years, a society with falling income, tripling of health care costs, and general cultural decay. Then that is the result of this-called open society.

And I think this is really the problem, because this open society conception is a nothing but a synonym for everything that has gone wrong. This is what Lavrov calls the “post-Christian values of the Western system”; or what some people defend as “Western values.” But if you look at these “values,” what you see is moral rot and decay. Soros made quite a picture of himself there in Davos, and I think he is really the synonym for everything that is wrong with the West.

Schlanger: It’s also the case that Soros has been a life-long operative of this British Imperial system. Besides his ugly face, it is the British Imperial system that’s disguised under the philosophical cover of being an open society.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes! I think that’s quite true!

Roger Stone: Latest Mueller Target

Schlanger: As for the British, there have been a number of exposés recently. Just yesterday, there was the incredible arrest of Roger Stone, who’s accused by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of lying to Congress, and yet, his pre-dawn arrest was carried out with a huge corps of FBI agents, and with a pre-alerted CNN camera crew there to film it. This is overkill! Do you think people can begin to see the desperation of Mueller’s apparatus, with the way Roger Stone was treated?

Zepp-LaRouche: The renowned Constitutional law scholar, Alan Dershowitz, issued a statement that is very much to the point, saying that the entire aim of such heavy-handed action—as was done in the case of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen—threatening close associates or former close associates of Trump with so much trouble, threatening long jail times, ruining them financially, bankrupting them through legal fees, is all an effort to turn them against Trump. Now, Roger Stone has declared that he will absolutely not lie against Trump, and I think he’s a man of honor and will not do that, for sure. But I think it is also very clear that Mueller’s “investigation” is creating an environment of complete McCarthyism and terror which is really absolutely incredible.

For their part, the Russians sometimes provide really good humor. For example, in the context of the coup attempt in Venezuela, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented that it worth thinking about the fact that the United States is paranoid about somebody interfering in its elections, even though it has no proof of that, and yet now the United States is trying to rule the fates of other peoples. In Venezuela there will be no need for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to determine that there is foreign meddling in the situation. That is, indeed, very true. And I think Roger Stone is absolutely right when he said that he’s not guilty. He’s now free on bail. Dershowitz also said that all of Roger Stone’s alleged crimes were not related to Trump in the 2016 campaign. Even more to the point, almost all of the crimes that Mueller has indicted people for are crimes that resulted from his investigation: false statements, tampering with the witnesses, obstruction of justice. It’s all orchestrated. It’s time for people to think seriously and really understand that this now must be stopped.

Schlanger: Dershowitz made an additional interesting point about these all being “process crimes,” that is, they have nothing to do with the Russiagate story—the narrative of Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion with Russia. These “process crimes,” have to do with people reacting to being put under pressure by Mueller. Dershowitz said, perhaps the way Mueller is approaching things, and the way the prosecutors are approaching things, is witness tampering—by threatening people with bankruptcy, as in the case of Roger Stone, who has millions of dollars in legal fees; the same with Manafort. When people are no longer able to fight, some end up submitting—or that’s the prosecutorial theory.

This has to be stopped in the United States. At a meeting last night, people who understood this, told me it reminded them of the period of the Stasi in East Germany, or the Nazis! This kind of pre-dawn raid, in which someone is dragged out of his bed and charged with completely frivolous charges.

The other area of desperation that we should take up now is what’s happening with the financial system. There are new reports coming out on derivatives, and on inequality—what have you been looking at, Helga, in terms of the ongoing financial crisis?

Financial Time Bombs

Zepp-LaRouche: The powder keg is ready to blow. On January 25, the Bank of England issued a report saying that the amount of outstanding leveraged loans is not $1.3 trillion, as the most commonly cited estimate, but—oops!—$2.2 trillion, almost double! And that this is “comparable to” the U.S. subprime mortgage amount prior to the subprime crisis in 2007, which triggered the big financial crash and recession of 2007-2009. The only difference today is that all the instruments of the central banks have been used up.

There is another report that the Federal Reserve cannot continue with their incremental interest rate increases, because the situation might blow at any moment. The report claims that the Federal Reserve will keep the total amount of quantitative easing money at about $4 trillion, because they cannot afford to continue tightening up, even if it’s only very marginally. We are sitting on a time bomb.

Belt & Road Initiative

Compare the effort to keep this absolutely bankrupt system going with the steady development of the Belt and Road Initiative. Czech Republic President Milos Zeman is now welcoming the Belt and Road Initiative, hoping that Czechia will be a bridge to Western Europe for the Belt and Road Initiative.

Officials from the much-slandered Sri Lanka,— the world was flooded with claims about Sri Lanka being caught in the Chinese debt trap in its port development project. The new reports are that this port is beautiful; this is the best port. This will mean that Sri Lanka will be a hub for the whole South Asian development.

Interestingly, there are even good developments in France. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is presently visiting France, participating in various bilateral institutional meetings. Together with his French hosts he celebrated the exchange of Chinese and French students in the 1920s, among them, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

From France, Wang Yi traveled to Rome, where he participated in the 9th meeting of the Joint Italy-China Government Committee.

Michele Geraci, Undersecretary of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, again praised the collaboration of China and Italy, especially in the development of African projects, saying that Italy should be concerned, not about the thousand refugees coming now, but about the 20 million young Africans who will come if Italy does not pursue the development of the African continent together with China. Geraci praised the recent Memorandum of Understanding between Italy and China. He also called for Chinese investment in the United States, overcoming America’s trade deficit by China buying commercial airplanes from the United States, but even more importantly by China making large-scale capital investments in infrastructure development in the United States.

In all of these constructive approaches, you can see that if people decide on the new paradigm of economic cooperation, of win-win projects, things do move in the right direction.

China also just issued—in Davos, actually—a statement that all this talk about China slowing down the world economy because it had only 6.6% growth in the past year, is completely false; that, in fact, China remains on a path of steady growth, and that the problem lies in the Western, neo-liberal—the Soros-model, if you want, so to speak—not in the Belt and Road Initiative.

Two paradigms in complete contrast. I can only say again: The Schiller Institute is absolutely committed to increasing the knowledge and understanding of people in the United States and Europe about the real nature of the Chinese model. It is absolutely the opposite of what Soros said in Davos.

A Just and Prosperous World Economy

The accusation that China is using “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) to control its population is rather ludicrous, given the massive use of AI in the surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Great Britain—and beyond those agencies, the United States and European governments broadly use the same kind of artificial Intelligence.

AI algorithms are used to predict crime, with preprogrammed racial bias—these algorithms are developed based on the idea that there will be more crime from minorities. Governments also use surveillance data to determine creditworthiness, and other such things. It’s really complete hypocrisy!

The question is, to what end are you using these things. That comes down to the question of the image of man that underlies your actions and use of your technologies. I think the West at this point, is not looking so good by comparison.

Schlanger: Let us not forget, China has reduced the number of people who are poor by 800 million in the last two decades and intends to reach a point soon in which there will be no one under the poverty line.

And you mentioned in an earlier show, the recent Oxfam report provides a striking contrast—looking at the enormous wealth accumulated by multibillionaires. Did you take a closer look at this Oxfam report, Helga?

Billionaires

Zepp-LaRouche: Last year, according to the Oxfam International report, published January 21, there were 26 multi-billionaires in the world who own as much as half of the rest of the human population. These billionaires are accumulating $2.5 billion more per day, while half of the world population is losing $500 million per day; the richest 26 individuals own $1.4 trillion—as much as 3.8 billion other people.

I think this absolutely perverse. It’s not just that these people have amassed so much money and power, which is really perverse and abnormal, but such a disparity in wealth is also very dangerous. It can lead to unpredictable consequences. More and more parts of society, almost the entire population in United States and most of Europe, are completely alienated from their governments and are losing all trust in leading institutions.

And since I jokingly mentioned already that the Yellow Vests could be recognized as the legitimate government of France—look at Brexit, look at the vote for President Trump and the new Italian government that has rejected these perverse conditions. The Yellow Vests phenomenon in France is a similar rejection. It is really leading to a condition in which this famous Western model is being rejected by more and more people, because they recognize that the present establishment could not care less about the common good of the people. I think this figure of 26 billionaires owning as much as half of the human population is really the giveaway of what’s wrong with this system.

30th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Imprisonment

Schlanger: Let’s come back to something we were talking about earlier, the corrupt operations that are run outside of official channels, the so-called “secret government,” that is, in fact, British meddling in the United States. Tomorrow, January 27th, is a very important anniversary of something that was done under the direction of George Herbert Walker Bush, who was acting at the behest of the British. Please say more about that, Helga, because it has a special, personal meaning for you.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. The 27th of January 1989—thirty years ago—that was the day my husband and a number of his associates were put in prison with lengthy sentences for crimes they never committed. This was the biggest atrocity in the legal history of the United States: This is not only my view, but it was expressed publicly by Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, who, on his own, came to the defense of my husband, simply because he thought that his railroading was the biggest case of injustice in the entire history of the United States. Because it was not only aimed to destroy a political leader and his movement—Ramsey Clark said it was aimed to do both those things—but it was especially an effort to extinguish a birthplace, a cradle of beautiful ideas, ideas to bring solutions to the problems of the world.

Now, I think the biggest crime was not just what was done to my husband and his colleagues. That was terrible, and the people who did that will have a place in history and in Hell. The biggest crime was that the American people were denied the access to those solutions.

I would absolutely make the point that the imprisonment of Lyndon LaRouche has resulted in the miserable condition in which the United States finds itself today, what Maxim Oreshkin, the Russian Minister for Economic Development, spoke about at Davos, relating to the “open society” and the neo-liberal model. The United States today is I think the only so-called “advanced country” where the longevity of its citizens is going down! Probably the most telling parameter for an economic collapse of a country, is when its people’s life-expectancy goes down. This has now happened for the second year in a row.

The United States today is wracked with an epidemic of drugs and an increasing suicide rate. It’s a very dire situation: one just has to look at the collapsing infrastructure in the United States. President Trump, despite his best intention has not yet been able to remedy any of this, simply because the adversity he continues to face from the Democrats and the neo-cons in his own party. He has been stifled, especially because of this relentless coup operation by Mueller.

Barbara Boyd has pointed out, in an extremely important three-part series of articles about this whole complex, that the apparatus which went after my husband and his colleagues in the 1980s, the apparatus which covered up the Saudi role—in cooperation with corrupt elements in the United States—in the cover-up of 9/11, and the apparatus that is going after Trump today, are all run by the same people.

All this must be remedied, justice must be served. I have said many times that President Trump should do what he announced he would do: Declassify all the documents relating to the British aspect of the Christopher Steele dossier, and this coup against him.

Reopen Assassination Investigations

I think the call to re-investigate the four assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., which was issued recently by 60 prominent Americans, including the children of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, is also a very important initiative.

My colleague Dennis Small wrote a very beautiful statement, calling for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche at this thirtieth anniversary.

I appeal to all of you who are watching this program: Help us to make the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche an international campaign—it will put under scrutiny the same apparatus that is the problem today, the same apparatus that, if successful in its endeavors, will bring about confrontation with Russia and China.

Please sign this appeal for the exoneration of my husband and his associates. I think this is the most important thing you can do for the future of humanity, for peace, and for the honor of my husband.

Schlanger: Helga, thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till next week.