ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Business-As-Usual Is Deadly:
We Must Elevate the Quality of Strategic Deliberation

We present here an edited transcript of excerpts from the Schiller Institute’s weekly “Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche” of August 27, 2020, with Harley Schlanger. The video of the full webcast may be found here.

Harley Schlanger: There are a number of things going on that deserve attention, but the most important is the upcoming Schiller Institute conference on September 5th and September 6th. Helga, I think that’s a good place to start. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the conference?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: This conference will try to elevate the discussion to a different, higher, plane. Look at all the different crises which are accumulating and expanding. We have a pandemic. We have an economic collapse. We have an extremely dangerous escalation of confrontation between the U.S. and China; but also, really, with Russia. There is the danger that this all will go completely out of control.

This conference is a critical part of the effort to establish a new paradigm—to discuss the need to have a completely new economic system, a credit system, a New Bretton Woods system, to reestablish the idea of worldwide economic development with the World Land-Bridge, to establish the idea of a world health system. Key is the dialogue of civilizations, the only basis upon which the world and the different nations of the world can work together and have a future of peace, and not of war. So this is designed to be a very important intervention, to also inspire some of the discussions at the UN General Assembly. We are especially focused on the P-5 Summit called for by President Putin, a summit of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council.

I urge you to find the time to be part of this conference. If you register, you will have access to live translation into many languages, and be able to participate in the Q&A. Reserve those dates, September 5 and 6: It is going to be the most important event, at least of this period.

Schlanger: This will be an online conference. More information is available on the website of the Schiller Institute, which is the sponsor of the conference.

Helga, we’ve seen the U.S. party conventions unfolding. Mostly what we learned from the Democratic Convention is that most of the Democrats there hate Donald Trump. The Republican Convention has had some interesting developments, both in terms of what’s been said there, and the reaction to it. What’s your impression from what you’ve seen so far?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, the bad thing to start off with was this unbelievably bellicose speech which was made by Pompeo, from Jerusalem. He had nothing better to do than to attack the “aggressive policies of the Communist Party of China” for “spreading death”—the language was just so provocative. So this was bad.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul, on the other side, was in stark contrast to that. He pointed out that the Trump Administration is the first since the Reagan Administration that did not start a new war, and President Trump on the contrary has been trying to implement his policy of ending the endless wars.

The Democrats, in their comments about this convention, really show that they have lost it. Hillary Clinton, for sure, lost it, after she lost the election in 2016, and she can’t, somehow, overcome it. She gave the advice to Biden, to under no circumstances concede the election until the last vote is counted—all this idea that there will be a turmoil around the ballots, the absentee ballots, that Trump will refuse to leave the White House even if he loses the election. This discussion by these two colonels [Nagl and Yingling], that the military should remove President Trump from office, which was then countered by the Pentagon. But we have preparations under way in the direction of having a big Constitutional crisis, come Election Day.

The Democrats are clearly playing that game. And then, Pelosi, used unbelievable language. She said, “the enemy of the state” is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These Democrats really have lost it. They are the war party, they’re relentless in their attempts to get Trump out of the White House, one way or another.

Melania made a quite interesting speech, for which she got a lot of appreciation, except from the London Guardian, which naturally cannot say anything positive about the Trumps.

Schlanger: You mentioned the Rand Paul statement against the endless wars. It’s clear that Biden intends to continue these wars. Now, one of the problems on the ending of the wars, is Pompeo, who, as you pointed out, is clearly aligning himself with Biden and the war party as a whole. The military confrontations in the Gulf of Bohai—what’s the latest going on there, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think this confrontation policy by the U.S. military in the Pacific, in the South China Sea, and in the north of China, is reaching a very dangerous dimension, we could have another U-2 moment. There was an incident in which a U.S. spy plane flew into the no-fly zone where the PLA had a drill in the north of China, with live ammunition. This was a clear provocation, a violation of Chinese airspace. The Chinese reacted almost immediately, sending two missiles from two different locations to the South China Sea, where, in the recent period, the presence of both U.S. military planes and also U.S. military vessels has been increasing.

It is quite visible that the faction in the United States that does want to decouple from China economically, are fully on their way. The U.S. put out a list of 24 Chinese firms involved in different aspects of construction in these artificial islands in the South China Sea region and will be putting sanctions on them. That means that any firm cooperating with them will be hit by these economic effects. There is no way that can end well. The U.S. and Chinese economies are so dependent on each other, so intermingled. The U.S. and China need to cooperate in all fields, especially in fighting the pandemic, developing vaccines, and distributing them all over the world.

Schlanger: We also have the stunt pulled by Secretary of State Pompeo, demanding that the UN Security Council snap back the sanctions against Iran. This was rejected by virtually everyone on the UN Security Council. Pompeo said it doesn’t matter, we’re going to go it alone.

What signal does this send to the world?

Zepp-LaRouche: On this snapback vote, that’s just incredible. Everybody agrees that the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] agreement with Iran was useful, productive. It did get Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency was just in Iran and inspected all the relevant sites. They have found no indication that Iran was not complying. Everybody agrees that this was a very important agreement, and everybody wants to keep it.

Pompeo, after being defeated in the UN vote, wrote this letter. Now we have a situation in which Russia, China, also Germany, Great Britain, France, and eight other countries, all are saying they disagree with the U.S. position. Pompeo will not back down, unless he’s told to do so by Trump. He is planning to go ahead with it. Note that Pompeo announced this deadline of 30 days, on August 20th, if you project that 30 days you get into the second half of September, which is exactly when the UN General Assembly starts to work in earnest. I think they start on September 15th. Soon after, the heads of state will come and give speeches, virtual or otherwise.

This is clearly designed to create a major crisis in the middle of this process, and ruin the chances of this P-5 summit which is being promoted by Putin. That summit is urgently necessary. President Trump, President Xi, and President Putin need to all meet, and also Macron and Boris Johnson, but especially the first three Presidents. They have to get over this confrontation and geopolitical nightmare, which we see playing out right now.

So, I cannot predict what will happen, but you cannot sanction the whole world without causing reactions by all of these countries. So this is a no-win policy, unless you are trying to create chaos and havoc for some ulterior motive, and that’s what it looks like Pompeo is really up to.

Schlanger: I want to come back to one thing on the sanctions question against China, and the decoupling question: Is it possible that people like Wilbur Ross and Navarro and the people pushing this hard line against China are unaware of the damage to the U.S. economy if there is a decoupling with China?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, it puts into question their economic understanding, for sure, because many of the companies which are hit by the sanctions are really American companies and the U.S. buyer will have to pay the price.

I think the idea to go back to two blocs is just not going to work, or it will not work to the advantage of the U.S. and Europe, because, if you look at the figures right now, the only country which managed to have a growth rate, is China, in the first half of this year. Great Britain had a collapse of the GDP by 20%; France almost 14%; Germany, about 10%; U.S. about 10%. But China had a growth rate I think of 3%, but it’s a growth rate. It’s not what it used to be, but I think it’s very clear that they have managed to deal with all of this much better.

This is really going backwards in history. We should look forward and have a policy of solving the many problems, including world hunger, together. The World Food Program just put out a report a couple of weeks ago, an urgent warning, that in order to deal with the famine, which is in part escalated by the pandemic, they would need $5 billion. If you think about the trillions which were pumped into the system by the central banks since last September, $5 billion is really, almost peanuts. And what did the World Food Program get? $750 million, and they just issued an urgent call that they need, urgently, $4 billion, or otherwise a lot of people will die of hunger.

So we have these real problems, and I think we should all lose patience with these geopolitical games, because it goes to the detriment of a lot of people who lose their lives as a result of it.

Schlanger: One of those geopolitical games is almost so predictable, that, as we’re moving toward the possibility of a P-5 summit, we have another so-called Russian “poisoning”—the so-called Navalny case. What do you make of this, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, this is almost a classical case. It’s the same script as the Skripal incident and all the stories about other people who were supposedly murdered by Putin. There is no proof. Navalny always gets characterized as the big critic of the Kremlin, but really, he is a relatively unimportant, right-wing, populist nationalist. He’s not exactly somebody who has any standing in Russia, whatsoever, but he’s being played, again and again, by the Western media as the big opponent of Putin.

He had some kind of trouble. On a flight from Tomsk in Siberia en route to Moscow, he fell unconscious. They had to divert the plane to Omsk. He went to the hospital there; then there was this big story that he was poisoned. Eventually a plane was organized from Germany with a medical team: They flew him into the Charité Clinic in Berlin where he is being treated now.

Now, the doctors just said that they found a substance in his blood which could be poisoning, but it’s the substance which also belongs to certain medications which you have to take for diabetes, and all kinds of other things. So the statement by the Charité is actually not totally affirmative that it was poisoning at all, but naturally, all the media go with it.

There are a couple of questions which should be asked. Who is paying for all of this, because to have a chartered medical plane and a whole team of doctors on standby for quite some time, costs a small fortune, so the question is, who is organizing that? This is all part of creating the environment where you can keep the confrontation, the demonization against Russia, against China. This is all a preparation for World War III, if it’s not being stopped.

Schlanger: Finally, in terms of some of the political situations, we have the outbreak of riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a shooting of an African American man by police. It appears as though a major part of the Democratic program is to paint Trump as a racist and unleash chaos in the American cities. But they never talk about the other part of this, the unemployment, the poverty—how would you address this question of so-called “social justice”?

Zepp-LaRouche: Our program, which is what my late husband had designed, is the Four Laws: You have to stop the speculation and the casinos with Glass-Steagall, you have to have banking separation; you have to go back to a Hamiltonian National Bank; and then you have to issue long-term, low interest credit for investment. The United States needs urgently investment in infrastructure; a fast train system is urgently needed to connect all major cities, to bring real development into the undeveloped areas, and have the people who are now sort of the “Forgotten Man” participate in that.

I think if President Trump would use his election campaign,—obviously, he cannot get it really done now, because the Democrats will sabotage everything that he proposes—but if he would now announce a real industrialization program for the time after the election, or find some way of moving this into the public eye, I think that that could cool down the situation.

So I think what is needed is really the LaRouche program for the United States: We want to create 50 million productive jobs. There are enough people who would cooperate with President Trump for a real program, especially if it would be a worldwide program, including bringing development into Africa, into Latin America, but also, especially the United States.

What we are trying to do is to discuss these ideas: This will be also a big part of the September 5-6 conference of the Schiller Institute, how to reindustrialize the United States, how to overcome this terrible underdevelopment in many developing countries, which shouldn’t be called “developing countries” because they’re not developing; they’re, indeed, having an incredible crisis right now.

We have to bring together an alliance of forces worldwide to say that we need a new, just world economic order, which allows the survival of every human being and every nation on this planet. If you agree with that approach, attend this conference on September 5th and 6th. Become a member of the Schiller Institute. Get active with us, because this is a period in which the decision of war and peace, of having a future of humanity or self-annihilation, is upon us.

Schlanger: So Helga, I guess that’s what we have for this week, and we’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till next week.