Helga Zepp-LaRouche Addresses Beijing Ceremony To Launch ‘CGTN Think Tank’

Dec. 9, 2019 (EIRNS)—CGTN (China Global Television Network), the CPC-run English-language video network, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, founded the “CGTN Think Tank” as part of the third annual CGTN Global Media Summit, with over 300 people from the world’s political, business, media and technology circles. The new think tank will have “cooperative relationships with 50 renowned think tanks worldwide, with goals to offer insights on world development and promote communication among different cultures,” according to a statement from CGTN covered in Xinhua.

Among the founding members at the event was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, introduced as the “Founder and President of the Schiller Institute.” Other prominent members include the heads of institutions dedicated to a dialogue of civilizations, Chambers of Commerce, and other similar institutions. Among them is Alexander Lukin, the Director of the Center for East Asia and SCO Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a prominent member of the Valdai Club.

Here is the address of Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche to the founding in Beijing of the CGTN Think Tank:

“I think we are experiencing the end of an epoch. The neoliberal system is not sustainable, and the whole world stands before the urgent decision, to either implement in the short term a new credit system, a new Bretton Woods system, or look at the danger of an uncontrollable collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system.

“It was clearly premature when [Francis] Fukuyama, at the end of the Soviet Union, declared the end of history, because we see the opposite happening right now. The effort to impose a unipolar world, to impose the neoliberal system around the world, which meant shock therapy for Russia—which was the intention: to turn a superpower into a raw materials-producing Third World country; to think that by getting China into the WTO, China would automatically adopt the democratic liberal system.

“This went along with the deregulation of the financial markets, the idea that maximizing profit for the speculators would be a main aim of the economy, which obviously increased the gap between the rich and the poor.

“This went along with color revolutions, regime change, humanitarian-interventionist wars, and all of that had a first high point in the systemic crisis of 2008.

“Instead of eliminating the root causes of that crisis, the trans-Atlantic powers continued the same system with bailouts, quantitative easing, zero interest-rate policy, negative interest-rate policy; and now we are at the point of distributing helicopter money. This went along with massive austerity against the population, both in the so-called advanced sector and in the developing sector.

“This has led to a complete global backlash, which has expressed itself in the Brexit, the election of President Donald Trump, the Yellow Vests phenomenon in France. The mass strike against neoliberalism is taking place right now in Chile, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon—the entire Arab world is in a global revolt.

“Now, this requires an urgent need to reorganize the entire trans-Atlantic financial system through bankruptcy reorganization. We need to urgently impose a global Glass-Steagall system of banking separation, go to a New Bretton Woods system, establishing a credit system which focuses on the industrialization of the developing sector. And the only solution will be that the United States—and there I disagree with Mr. [Martin] Jacques—and Europe have to be brought to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative in the industrialization of Africa, in the reconstruction of Southwest Asia. We have to have a common development strategy for the entire Eurasian continent, the two Americas, Africa.

“If we extend the Belt and Road Initiative in such a way into a global World Land-Bridge conception, we also have the basis to replace the obsolete NATO. Not only is NATO brain-dead, but it is obsolete, because it no longer expresses the self-interest of its member countries. Now, once we have a global Belt and Road Initiative cooperation, we can also create a new international security architecture.

“And while people may think that this is a utopian conception, I am saying it is the only way out of an existential crisis for all of humanity. I think it requires a new thinking, a thinking from the standpoint of a New Paradigm, a new system of international relations among nations, and looking at the present crisis from the standpoint of the future. We have to think how should mankind be in a hundred years from now. We should have thermonuclear fusion, we should have international space cooperation, and if we have that kind of a view, then we can attack the problems of the present world in a completely different mode.”