Kirk Meighoo Features Helga Zepp-LaRouche in New Podcast Series

Aug. 17, 2020 (EIRNS)—Kirk Meighoo’s hour-long interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche on Aug. 14, “Rebuilding Economies in a Post-Lockdown World,” was the third in a series on a new podcast platform, “A Story Club: Global Politics.” Meighoo began his interview: “Welcome to Season 1, Episode 3 of ‘A Story Club of Global Politics.’ This is a unique venture, streaming simultaneously from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, Dehra Dun in India, and San Francisco in the United States. We speak with people around the world to get a deep understanding of politics and political events at both a global and local level. We go beyond the soundbites and the spin to get insiders’ perspectives and understanding that you won’t get anywhere else....

“The global economy is sick right now. The unprecedented lockdowns occurring simultaneously across the world have thrown many people out of work, stopped international travel, hindered trade, closed entire industries, and increased money printing debt and government cash disbursements around the world. Where is this all leading to, and what is the ‘new normal’ that the world is being asked to accept? Is the old normal something we want to return to, or is there a better alternative?

“Today, we have the founder and President of the international Schiller Institute in Germany as I mentioned, to discuss these issues. She and her organization have been involved in these issues very intimately at the highest level for many decades....

“Can you tell our audience, who might not know about the Schiller Institute or your work, a bit more of your background, the work of your institute, particularly as it relates to issues of reconstructing the global economy?”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: “To be very brief, I was a journalist after my high school, then I started to study in Berlin. Then I had the opportunity to become a journalist, and had a trip to China in the middle of the Cultural Revolution on a cargo ship. This is important, because when you travel with a cargo ship, you get to see the world from a perspective which is not like a cruise ship. I got to see Africa and parts of countries in Africa and some countries in Asia, including China, from the standpoint of the working people. The misery people lived through, and this is why when I came back from this journey, which was almost three-quarters of a year, I found that the only person at that time—1971—who was speaking about the need to industrialize the developing countries was Lyndon LaRouche. Naturally, he was not yet my husband at the time, but I found him through lectures in Berlin. He had actually the vision to overcome the poverty and underdevelopment of the developing countries of all continents. I thought that that was exactly what I had come to the conclusion had to be done, so I joined his organization. He started to develop development programs, very concretely for the industrialization of Africa, which we published in 1976. In 1975, he proposed a replacement for the IMF, which was called the ‘International Development Bank,’ which was the idea to provide long-term, low-interest credit for well-defined projects which would have overcome the poverty in the underdeveloped world. This is what we have been doing continuously. We worked on an ‘Oasis Plan’ for Southwest Asia, on a development plan for Latin America, for the 40-year development of India, a 50-year development plan for the Pacific Basin.

“When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we already had a plan to connect the industrial populations centered in Europe with those of Asia, which we called the Eurasian Land-Bridge. That proposal I could present in a conference in China in 1996, and at that time China already was committed to make such a Eurasian Land-Bridge development a long-term strategic perspective of China by 2010. But then came the Asia crisis in 1997, and all these plans got halted.

“So, in the meantime in the beginning of the 1980s, I founded the Schiller Institute, which was devoted to the idea of implementing the new world economic order in combination with a Renaissance of Classical cultures. The reason I chose the name Friedrich Schiller, who was a very famous German poet, is because he has the most beautiful image of man: that every man can become a beautiful soul, a genius, through the aesthetical education.

“This is what the Schiller Institute set out to do. We kept making these development plans; we had literally—if you look at our website, you will find that we had thousands of events. Seminars, conferences on five continents. So, when Xi Jinping, the President of China, in 2013 announced the New Silk Road, we were extremely happy. Here you had now a very important country proposing and doing the same kind of economic plans which we had campaigned for, for all these decades.”