ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Prosecutors Focus on British-Obama Russiagate Perpetrators as War Party Goes Wild

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s New Paradigm Webcast of May 9, 2019. A video of this webcast is available.

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

We’re moving through a very perilous moment in history. In recent weeks, we’ve seen on the one side tremendous opportunities, especially following the Trump-Putin telephone discussion. But at the same time, threats are being thrown out from people like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, heating up the hotspots. Helga, why don’t we start with some of these hotspots, because these have the potential danger of launching wars, by accident or intention. Maybe we should start with the Iran situation.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, I think what Pompeo is doing, and Bolton, is really creating a situation of potential, devastating confrontation, which not only includes Iran. As we’ve always said in the past, a military confrontation with Iran does have the potential of escalating into a big war.

About a year ago, people may remember, the United States unilaterally cancelled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement with Iran, which was originally signed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. So, the U.S. withdrew, and then it increased the sanctions, which have created quite massive problems for the Iranian economy.

More recently, the U.S. put the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the terror list, which is one cause for an escalation. In a counter-move, Iran’s Supreme Security Council declared the United States a “terrorist government,” while calling US CENTCOM, all the U.S. troops in the region in Southwest Asia, a terrorist group as well.

So that already means a complete powder keg. And now, Bolton, in his capacity as National Security Advisor—in an action which is really not his job—ordered this U.S. aircraft carrier group with a whole bunch of other warships to leave the Mediterranean and head for the Persian Gulf. So this is a high-profile situation.

Now, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani responded to that. Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly (Parliament) met and decided that Iran would reduce its obligations according to the nuclear agreement treaty, and Rouhani issued a 60-day ultimatum to the Europeans to fulfill their commitments according to the JCPOA. He claimed that the Europeans did not hold out against the pressure coming from the United States, and that is absolutely true, because all the German firms which had invested with Iran, practically withdrew, and most of the other Europeans as well. So the Europeans, despite their initial statements that they would not capitulate, they did, de facto. So the big question is, what will they do in the next 60 days? Obviously, if Iran goes back to developing nuclear weapons this would become a pretext for more moves.

So this is really, very, very dangerous. And I think this is definitely a neo-con policy. Unfortunately Trump seems to be on that line right now. The whole thing was escalated about ten days ago, when the national security team of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington, met with Bolton’s team. That is where the line came from that Iran is an immediate threat to the United States and its allies.

Pompeo Runs Amok

Meanwhile Pompeo was in Finland talking to the Arctic Council, where he made an absolutely unbelievable attack on China—really beyond the beyond, comparing it to the 1930s, the implication that China is now like the Nazis! I mean, really an unbelievable tone.

Pompeo was then supposed to come to Germany and meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. He just told them he wouldn’t come because of an “international security matter,” without telling them what it was. And then he turns up in Iraq, to put pressure on the Iraqi government because of Iran, and then the German government found out he was in Iraq, and from there he went on to Great Britain.

Now, I think this is a kind of confrontational behavior, which, for sure,— I mean, it’s not even clear that it was Trump who told Pompeo to not come to Germany. But this is the kind of behavior which makes it very difficult, and I think Trump is not well-advised to keep these neo-cons around him, because Trump has said repeatedly, he almost says it every day in some tweet, he wants to have good relations with Russia and China, and then the entire intelligence community, which was just caught red-handed in a coup attempt against his administration, comes out with this absolutely violent, anti-China line, and the neo-cons in his administration, namely Bolton, Pompeo, and Vice President Mike Pence to a certain extent, are doing everything possible to heat up these crisis spots so that any kind of serious policy for Trump is impossible.

This is an untenable situation. Either Trump succeeds in improving the U.S. relationship with Russia and China, and then every other crisis can be settled, or these neo-cons have the upper hand, and the Trump Presidency will not succeed in what it set out to do.

Schlanger: It was just announced today that Pompeo will be heading to Moscow next week, for a follow-up meeting with Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister. They had met in Finland and at least there was one hilarious scene where Lavrov was asked by CNN whether he and Pompeo discussed the problems of “Russian meddling.” And Lavrov said, “Some call your company CNN ‘fake news,’ and now you are asking a fake question.” But these are very dangerous signs. We’ll see what happens when Pompeo goes to Moscow.

But as you said, this is going against the general tenor of what Trump is doing.

More Details of British Role in Coup

I think, Helga, the other thing that has to be seen in this context, is that the war push is coming precisely at a moment that the people who are doing it, are being exposed for their role in setting up Russiagate. There have been several tweets and news stories coming out. Why don’t you take up this Freedom of Information (FOIA) report, which shows again that Christopher Steele was at the center of operations, long before the timeline that people have talked about?

Zepp-LaRouche: The British involvement in the coup attempt against Trump is now coming out in greater detail. Before I go into this story about the new revelations, in light of that, I find it really incredible that after Trump tweeted several times that it was the British who were involved, Pompeo then, following his visit to Iraq, went to Great Britain. He met with Prime Minister Theresa May and her Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and gave the 2019 “Margaret Thatcher Lecture” at the Centre for Policy Studies in which he praised the “special relationship” with Great Britain, said it’s vital, it’s vibrant.

He put pressure on the British—well—he put pressure on the British that they should not go with the Huawei G5 network; Hunt answered to that pressure by saying that the U.K. would never do anything which would not be in the interests of the Five Eyes colleagues. But to praise the special relationship with Great Britain at a moment when the British were caught red-handed in a coup attempt against the U.S. President, is really an incredible thing.

And the same goes for Obama’s former Vice President and now Democratic Party pre-candidate for President, Joe Biden, who, by the way, made an unbelievable “Freudian slip”: At a fundraiser in Columbia, South Carolina, he said that he got a call from “Margaret Thatcher” urging him to run against Trump. Saying he realized later that he had misspoken, he said, “No, no, it was Theresa May who called me.” So this is incredible, here you have Theresa May calling on a Democrat to run against Trump.

This is obviously, completely in the line with the House of Lords report of December 2018, “U.K. Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order,” Dec. 5, 2018, where they said that the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States would not survive a second term of Trump. The Brits are openly trying to meddle again, and continuously, in the internal affairs of the United States. I think this is really something absolutely unbelievable.

Now, coming to these new revelations, they are really a bombshell. In an FOIA lawsuit, a conservative group got documents which prove, absolutely, that the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Victoria Nuland, Kathleen Kavalec, met in October 2016 with Christopher Steele, that is, one month before the election and ten days before FBI Director James Comey made his brief to the FISA Court for the okay to surveil Trump and the Trump campaign. So Kavalec met with Steele, and in this meeting, Christopher Steele made it very, very clear that he had political motives for manipulating the situation against Trump. He demanded that the infamous dossier—his dossier—be published before the election, obviously to smear Trump in the public view.

So this is now coming out, and that is proof that the entire Obama Administration knew the character of this operation. Even the Washington newspaper The Hill states that this is the first time that it’s out with public proof.

This will hopefully have a big backfire effect, because again and again, this is an unprecedented scandal in the history of the United States. Trump has said that many times himself, and one can only hope that the consequences will be felt by those people who initiated all of this.

Binney: It Wasn’t the Russians

Schlanger: And we’re taking an initiative now to make sure that the picture is clear. We’re circulating a letter calling for William Binney, the former Technical Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), to appear before Congress, to expose the fraud of “Russian meddling.” Helga, you mentioned all the insanity that’s going on. The Democrats and the Republicans continue to say that Russia meddled, that Russia’s going to meddle again, that nothing is being done to stop Russian meddling. And this keeps getting in the way of Trump getting together with Putin.

One sign of a little bit of sanity from the Republican side was the comments from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), which are something you thought were fairly important.

Zepp-LaRouche: The situation is clearly heating up for the 2020 election campaign. The face of the radical wing of the Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is being pushed by the media as if she were the most important thing. However, more reasonable Democrats realize that if they only focus on the attack on Trump and impeachment, it may not go well with the voters. So, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and McConnell are saying it’s time to move on and work together on important issues, like infrastructure.

But I think the hysteria in the United States is really unbelievable in terms of how brainwashed people can become when this party conflict dominates everything. I think the warning of George Washington at the end of his second term, that political parties are a bad thing, is really true, and a bipartisan approach to the massive global challenges, is really absolutely required, because otherwise, there will never be any infrastructure built, and the new financial dangers are also hanging over us. So I think this is really too much at this point.

Schlanger: Our viewers can go to the LaRouche PAC website and get this letter, “Former NSA Technical Director William Binney Must Testify Before Congress—Expose the Big Lie that Russia Hacked the DNC E-Mails,” by William F. Wertz, Jr., about bringing Binney to testify. There are already groups that are going to congressional meetings with this letter to demand that this lie that’s still there in the Mueller Report, be expunged.

All-Important U.S.-China Relationship

Now, Helga, the other really hot issue in Washington right now, is the trade talks with China. A Chinese delegation is coming in, but the whole thing became muddled when the President said the Chinese backtracked on their agreements, and that he, Trump, will assess new tariffs as of Friday, if there’s not a full agreement. And this occurs as there’s an escalation of the anti-China rhetoric. How do you see this thing unfolding?

Zepp-LaRouche: I don’t know what will happen, because the positive tone coming from both Trump and the Chinese of a couple of weeks ago has been unfortunately replaced. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer claimed that the Chinese took back some agreements, not referring to exactly what they were. The Chinese are trying to save the situation. Vice Premier Liu He, the chief economics person in China, is in Washington right now. However, the Chinese Commerce Ministry said that if Trump goes for these tariffs, increasing for $200 billion from 10% to 25%,—and he also said that there are another $325 billion he would consider to put new tariffs on—the Commerce Ministry said it would answer that with countermeasures.

That obviously would really be a very bad escalation. And it remains true that in my view, the most important strategic issue is, will the United States respond to the rise of China, which cannot be stopped by peaceful means, will it try to contain China and cause a really strategic, big confrontation—that would be a catastrophe for all of humanity. This has been stated also, repeatedly, in the Chinese media, that they regard the U.S.-China relationship as the most important, because these are the two largest economies, and if they work together it will be good for the whole world. If they clash, it will be a potential catastrophe for the whole world. So we have to see.

I still hope that the original idea of Trump—he called Xi Jinping many times, his “friend” and praised the great culture of China, at least in the past—that that original impulse will come through. But it seems the entire intelligence community in the United States is on a “yellow peril” rampage.

We talked about this last week, but I want to state again: The unbelievable report by this Kiron Skinner, who is the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, her unbelievable diatribe calling China the first “non-Caucasian” nation confronting the United States is a little bit funny coming from an Afro-American woman. But it’s the same idea of “the Chinese are an inferior grouping,” and as I said, this goes back to the old “yellow peril” scare of the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry answered very strongly to that, and so also did Global Times, basically saying the State Department seems to be governed by an ideology that China used to have 2,000 years ago, when people thought everyone who was not Chinese was a barbarian, but that China overcame such a backward view a very long time ago; but the U.S. State Department seems to be still on that line.

The Anti-China Hysteria and the Reality

Now, I think this is a really a very dangerous situation, because, if you look at the overall dynamic in the world, you have the new paradigm being centered around China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which China keeps emphasizing is a force of great good in the world, it’s a gift from China to the whole world, because it offers a win-win cooperation to all other countries. That there were 150 nations represented at the second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on April 25-27, attests to the fact that all these countries see it in their own interest to participate in this new paradigm of cooperation.

And the geopolitical factions of the Western world are trying to contain that. I don’t think it will be possible, at least not in any peaceful way. All of Europe is moving in the direction of the New Silk Road, even Chancellor Merkel, who was very slow on the learning curve, concerning the New Silk Road, was recently in Hamburg, and met with a school class visiting a modern terminal in Hamburg harbor, and she praised the New Silk Road as a very positive initiative.

So I think there is clearly motion in the direction of reason and cooperation, and overcoming geopolitics. But this anti-China hysteria, which is being fueled by the same forces who were involved in the coup against Trump,— they are obviously trying to poison the well, and poison the atmosphere.

I can only again reiterate: Do not fall for such propaganda. Form your own opinion of what China is actually doing in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia. Why are these countries all saying that China is fulfilling something which the West for decades did not: Overcoming poverty, overcoming underdevelopment?

So I think it’s really important to take off the geopolitical spectacles, because they can only lead to a disaster.

Schlanger: And hand-in-hand with the geopolitical spectacles is neo-liberal economic policy. We were talking before about this report—it’s been reported that there were 643 income-millionaires at Deutsche Bank—a bank which had its stock fall to about $7 a share in the last couple of days. So the question of the economy leads directly to this geopolitical question: The people who are pushing these wars are the same ones who are saying we have to stick with the old paradigm, the neo-liberal economics, the austerity, the World Bank, the IMF, those old rules—and China is breaking that.

Helga it really does bring up the issue: What is the real solution? Yes, geopolitics has to end, but there’s also an economic side and that’s very much connected with the life’s work of your husband.

Pecora-Style Hearings for Wall Street

Zepp-LaRouche: What you mentioned about Deutsche Bank is a real outrage, because if you have 643 millionaires as employees of Deutsche Bank, the richest one, or the one who made the most money, is a guy called Garth Ritchie, the head of the investment banking department—he made 8.6 million euro in 2018 alone! That is why all the shareholders lost a lot of money; these are all derivatives traders who make that amount of money.

I think this requires a Pecora Commission: Because this kind of excessive profit-making at the expense of the common good, is exactly what was investigated by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the Pecora Commission, following the big crash of the 1930s. A new crash is hanging over our heads as an imminent danger, and could be triggered by any number of developments.

So I think we should really restate where we are: The U.S. economy is not in the best shape. You cannot go by the stock market. My late husband warned many, many times that if you go by the stock market, this is a complete illusion; you have to look at the real economy. The real economy in the United States is in terrible shape! You have the homeless: There are videos out in Seattle which are horrifying; the homelessness in San Francisco, in Los Angeles. The condition of the infrastructure: tunnels breaking down, bridges being unsafe.

The United States needs urgently, as do most European countries, a completely different approach. The austerity policy in Europe has led to a situation in which the Greek population has become completely impoverished, with the structural reforms imposed by the EU, in Greece, pensions were cut for most people by 60%. This is robbery. This is absolute theft, and the EU Commission is defending that.

We are just involved in a specific case, where a Greek ambassador protested to the EU Commission, demanding that these cuts be compensated, and the EU Commission answered in a long letter that this was all for the good of the Greek economy. Now, that’s completely nonsense! If you look at the real living standard of the population, the poor people, the people who are thrown out of the middle class, has been increasing as a result of the neo-liberal paradigm of the last decades.

Implement LaRouche’s Four Laws

So what we need in Western Europe, but especially also in the United States, is the exact implementation of the Four Laws proposed by Lyndon LaRouche on June 8, 2014: Glass-Steagall—and there was an interesting comment, by the way, on CGTN, the Chinese international TV network, of a Western economist who said the economic problems of the West and of the United States, are not due to China, but they are due to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and what that caused to happen in the 2008 crisis. I think this is a very important point. So, we need to go back to Glass-Steagall. We need to have a separation of the banks: The state has to protect the commercial side of the banking system; the derivatives traders and speculators have to take their losses without having access to taxpayers’ money.

Then, you need new credit institutions, because there will not be enough liquidity. You need a National Bank in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, and then you need an international credit system, a New Bretton Woods system to provide long-term, low-interest credit for international projects and investments in the United States, and European countries and in developing countries as well. And then, you need a crash program for fusion energy development, for space cooperation, to increase the productivity of the economy.

You need this entire package. We need more public debate about that. I think people are so confused by secondary issues, but people want to have security about their future: This was the reason for the Brexit vote, this is what is behind the Italian situation with the new government there, which has been in place for a year or so, but they were voted in because the EU policies were rejected. This is an ongoing fight in France with the Yellow Vests. And this is why a bipartisan concentration on such a recovery program in the United States is the only chance.

So I think it’s really up to you, our viewers and readers, to mobilize around these questions and put political pressure on all elected officials, including, but not limited to those in Congress. Help us create a great environment in which Trump can go back to his original intention, because he has said many times, he wants to build the infrastructure. But with the kind of hysteria which is being hyped up by some parts of the Democrats, the neo-cons in the Republican Party, and the mainstream media, it makes it very hard for him to do this: So, we need a public debate and intervention, so this is why you should join with us, become a member of the Schiller Institute, get into contact with us, and become active, because it’s our future which is at stake.

Schlanger: I think that’s a very clear summary of the situation. And as we see the neo-cons and the neoliberals going crazy, the thing they fear the most is that Trump will go with something along the lines of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Power agreement for a New Bretton Woods, which would end their paradigm.

So, Helga, thanks for joining us this week, and we’ll be back next week.

A New ‘Exonerate LaRouche’ Pamphlet

Zepp-LaRouche: We will soon be putting out a new pamphlet on the exoneration of my husband, which I want you to focus your attention on. This is a very important document, because it goes into the absolutely unbelievable violation of all laws in the United States: This is the worst case in the history of the United States, as Ramsey Clark has said repeatedly.

The pamphlet has all the endorsements from around the world, and condolences from when Lyn died. So, if you want to really get a sense of what has gone wrong in the history of the United States and what is required to remedy it—namely to join the fight for the exoneration of my husband—please get to our website, get this pamphlet, and help us to distribute it as widely as possible. Join the campaign for the exoneration of my husband, because this is the best you can do for yourself, the United States, and the world.

Schlanger: With that, now, we’ll see you next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: OK, next week.