SCHILLER INSTITUTE BERLIN CONFERENCE
Projects Will Develop, Link Eurasia
To the Americas
Oct. 9—As we reported last week, the Schiller Institute held an international conference on Sept. 25 in Berlin, Germany, titled "Rebuilding the World Economy—NAWAPA, the Bering Strait, and the Eurasian Land-Bridge."
The conference was sparked by efforts of Lyndon LaRouche and the "Basement Team" of young scientists working under his direction, on the scientific requirements to revive the world's physical economy. At the forefront of their investigations is the commitment to define an expanded version of the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a project developed in 1964 by The Ralph M. Parsons Co., but never implemented. The green cultural "paradigm shift" began to set in during the late 1960s, branding industry and development as "bad for the environment"; during the same period, President Nixon and the British pulled the plug on the Bretton Woods financial system, ushering in the past 40 years of insane financial speculation that culminated in the current systemic breakdown crisis.
Schiller Institute president and founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented some of this history in her speech, which we summarized at length in last week's issue. She said that the world today would be in quite a different situation, had the great projects that engineers worked out completely many years ago, such as NAWAPA, Transaqua, and the Eurasian Land-Bridge, been implemented. Hundreds of millions of people would have been spared malnutrition, poverty, and war.
She emphasized that the only hope for the United States is to re-enact President Franklin Roosevelt's Glass-Steagall Law, which was repealed in 1999; this would immediately dry up the speculative frenzy. Then, a Four-Power Alliance of the United States, Russia, China, and India would convene to shape a New Bretton Woods system, based not on money, but on government-issued credit for productive priorities. This would allow the reconstruction of the world economy to be financed. The financial system now, she said, is so bankrupt, that an uncontrolled disintegration of the dollar is likely, with a global chain reaction that would first hit the Eurozone.
If the trans-Atlantic system crashes, Zepp-LaRouche explained, China, Russia, Latin America, and Africa will also be dragged into the abyss. A new dark age of the entire planet would thus be inevitable.
After her keynote address, other speakers elaborated some of the projects that are already on the drawing boards, waiting for the political will and financing to proceed. We publish two of them below. First, is U.S. engineer Dr. Hal Cooper's presentation on the long-proposed construction of a tunnel and railway across the Bering Strait, linking the Eurasian and North American continents. This is a project which he has promoted for many years. Second, is Russian geologist Dr. Sergei Cherkasov's slide show on Siberian development—past, present, and future. Dr. Cherkasov is a scientific coordinator at the Vernadsky State Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
