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Join Lyndon LaRouche and members of the LaRouchePAC policy committee today at 1pm Eastern, for a discussion of the worlds leading topics.

Two leading German figures and a Maryland Democrat, considering a presidential run, have stepped into the dangerous trans-Atlantic political vacuum to bring about a fundamental shift in the direction of policy, to avert a potential world war and an otherwise imminent collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system.

Given the magnitude of the current global crisis, and the prominence of their interventions, American statesman Lyndon LaRouche has given his full, unequivocal endorsement to their actions, and has called for a full mobilization of support behind their efforts to avert a global calamity.

On Thursday, March 12, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier delivered a powerful war-avoidance message to a Washington, D.C. audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Steinmeier’s blunt language and his diplomatic, but harsh criticism of the Obama Administration’s plans to provide lethal aid to the Ukraine government, was unprecedented. No recent German Foreign Minister has dared to make such strong and public criticisms of US foreign and national security policy, particularly in such a prominent venue as the CSIS headquarters. Steinmeier had met the previous day with Secretary of State John Kerry and with National Security Advisor Dr. Susan Rice, and no doubt delivered an even more blunt message in those private talks.

Steinmeier began his CSIS talk with a frank assessment of the global crisis, warning: “We are facing a multitude of crises around the globe which, to somebody from my generation, seems unprecedented in their density and in their shocking violence.”

Turning to the Ukraine crisis, Steinmeier declared: “We must look beyond this conflict to our future relationship with Moscow. That means we must not cease to engage Russia, using the last existing channels of communication, to explore a potential off-ramp and—for the future—to explore paths to a more cooperative relationship.”

Steinmeier explicitly rejected the idea of arming Ukraine, warning that this would only escalate the crisis beyond control:

He later reiterated: “It might take only days to spark a crisis but it could well take years to resolve it. In diplomacy, even more than in real life, tenacity is a virtue!…To us in Europe, Russia will always be our biggest neighbor… It is no secret that, as regards to Russia, trust is at its lowest point. But we need to find a new basis for an engagement, even if it takes years or decades.”

Steinmeier’s sharp intervention against the Obama Administration arming Ukraine was buttressed by one of Germany’s leading elder statesmen, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. In an interview with the mass German tabloid Bildzeitung on March 12, Schmidt warned that any further escalation in Ukraine could escalate “even into a real hot war.” Schmidt then touched on one of the most sensitive issues with Russia: The eastward expansion of the EU and NATO, which he traced all the way back to the original Maastricht Treaty of the early 1990s, which was the basis for the expansion into the territory of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. “We are not obliged to like Putin’s policy,” he told the paper. “But we have to understand it against the background of history and take it seriously.”

Lyndon LaRouche emphasized the significance of the intervention of these two prominent German political figures directly into the growing danger of war in the center of Eurasia. “Their actions can actually change the direction of history at a moment when the immediate issue on the table is war or peace, chaos or recovery.”

The same quality of intervention has been launched by former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who has called for the immediate reinstatement of the 1933 Glass Steagall Act, which would break up the too-big-to-fail banks into separate commercial and investment banks. O’Malley, who is considering a run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, has been touring the country and giving interviews, all on the theme of Glass Steagall.

Typical of his powerful intervention was his March 12 interview on MSNBC, in which he told host Joe Scarborough:

Lyndon LaRouche has called for a full mobilization in support of O’Malley’s demand that the Glass Steagall fight be the defining issue in the upcoming elections. LaRouche said: “We are not talking about 2016, we need Glass Steagall now, before the entire trans-Atlantic financial system comes crashing down and we are faced with the immediate threat of global war or a descent into absolute chaos and hell.”

Likewise, the recent actions of German statesmen Steinmeir and Schmidt are the only route to “genuine war avoidance,” LaRouche emphasized. “A conflict with Russia, such as that being pushed from inside the Obama White House, is not a limited war. It is general war, leading to thermonuclear war of extinction. It must be stopped, and the Steinmeier and Schmidt interventions can prove to be vital.”

Image: Imperial War Museum, London

Two leading German figures and a Maryland Democrat, considering a presidential run, have stepped into the dangerous trans-Atlantic political vacuum to bring about a fundamental shift in the direction of policy, to avert a potential world war and an otherwise imminent collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system.

Given the magnitude of the current global crisis, and the prominence of their interventions, American statesman Lyndon LaRouche has given his full, unequivocal endorsement to their actions, and has called for a full mobilization of support behind their efforts to avert a global calamity.

On Thursday, March 12, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier delivered a powerful war-avoidance message to a Washington, D.C. audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Steinmeier’s blunt language and his diplomatic, but harsh criticism of the Obama Administration’s plans to provide lethal aid to the Ukraine government, was unprecedented. No recent German Foreign Minister has dared to make such strong and public criticisms of US foreign and national security policy, particularly in such a prominent venue as the CSIS headquarters. Steinmeier had met the previous day with Secretary of State John Kerry and with National Security Advisor Dr. Susan Rice, and no doubt delivered an even more blunt message in those private talks.

Steinmeier began his CSIS talk with a frank assessment of the global crisis, warning: “We are facing a multitude of crises around the globe which, to somebody from my generation, seems unprecedented in their density and in their shocking violence.”

Turning to the Ukraine crisis, Steinmeier declared: “We must look beyond this conflict to our future relationship with Moscow. That means we must not cease to engage Russia, using the last existing channels of communication, to explore a potential off-ramp and—for the future—to explore paths to a more cooperative relationship.”

Steinmeier explicitly rejected the idea of arming Ukraine, warning that this would only escalate the crisis beyond control:

He later reiterated: “It might take only days to spark a crisis but it could well take years to resolve it. In diplomacy, even more than in real life, tenacity is a virtue!…To us in Europe, Russia will always be our biggest neighbor… It is no secret that, as regards to Russia, trust is at its lowest point. But we need to find a new basis for an engagement, even if it takes years or decades.”

Steinmeier’s sharp intervention against the Obama Administration arming Ukraine was buttressed by one of Germany’s leading elder statesmen, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. In an interview with the mass German tabloid Bildzeitung on March 12, Schmidt warned that any further escalation in Ukraine could escalate “even into a real hot war.” Schmidt then touched on one of the most sensitive issues with Russia: The eastward expansion of the EU and NATO, which he traced all the way back to the original Maastricht Treaty of the early 1990s, which was the basis for the expansion into the territory of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. “We are not obliged to like Putin’s policy,” he told the paper. “But we have to understand it against the background of history and take it seriously.”

Lyndon LaRouche emphasized the significance of the intervention of these two prominent German political figures directly into the growing danger of war in the center of Eurasia. “Their actions can actually change the direction of history at a moment when the immediate issue on the table is war or peace, chaos or recovery.”

The same quality of intervention has been launched by former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who has called for the immediate reinstatement of the 1933 Glass Steagall Act, which would break up the too-big-to-fail banks into separate commercial and investment banks. O’Malley, who is considering a run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, has been touring the country and giving interviews, all on the theme of Glass Steagall.

Typical of his powerful intervention was his March 12 interview on MSNBC, in which he told host Joe Scarborough:

Lyndon LaRouche has called for a full mobilization in support of O’Malley’s demand that the Glass Steagall fight be the defining issue in the upcoming elections. LaRouche said: “We are not talking about 2016, we need Glass Steagall now, before the entire trans-Atlantic financial system comes crashing down and we are faced with the immediate threat of global war or a descent into absolute chaos and hell.”

Likewise, the recent actions of German statesmen Steinmeir and Schmidt are the only route to “genuine war avoidance,” LaRouche emphasized. “A conflict with Russia, such as that being pushed from inside the Obama White House, is not a limited war. It is general war, leading to thermonuclear war of extinction. It must be stopped, and the Steinmeier and Schmidt interventions can prove to be vital.”

Image: Imperial War Museum, London

Our webcast has now concluded, as always, thanks for joining us. Be sure to tune in next Friday at 8PM Eastern.

Transcript now available. You’ll need to tune in at 8pm Eastern to find out what you need to know. LaRouchePAC brings you the most truthful weekly broadcast on the internet. Tune in tonight.

MEGAN BEETS: Good evening. Today is Friday, March 13th, 2015, and I’d like to welcome everyone to our regular Friday evening broadcast on larouchepac.com. My name is Megan Beets, and I’m joined tonight in the studio by Jason Ross of the LaRouche PAC Science Team, and Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review.

The three of us have been in discussion with both Helga and Lyndon LaRouche over the course of the day, so the answers that you hear will reflect their outlook on the current world strategic situation.

So, I’m going to begin with tonight’s institutional question, which reads as follows:

“Mr. LaRouche, the series of Chinese and BRICS initiatives around the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the AIIB, the BRICS New Development Bank, the Silk Road Fund, etc. has sparked a global debate over the economic future of the planet. This issue was highlighted when, during the APEC summit in Beijing last year, China’s President Xi Jinping invited the United States to join the AIIB. Now, in the last 48 hours, the British have announced their intention to join the AIIB, and the Obama Administration immediately came out attacking the British decision.

“You, Mr. LaRouche, have long highlighted the bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is a further factor highlighting the significance of the BRICS initiatives. Mr. LaRouche, in your view, what is the appropriate U.S. role in Eurasian development?”

So, I’d like to ask Jeff to come to the podium to deliver Mr. LaRouche’s response.

JEFFREY STEINBERG: The first thing that Mr. LaRouche said in response to this question was that you’ve got to immediately cancel every policy associated with the last two Presidencies, namely the Presidency of George W. Bush and the current Presidency of Barack Obama. And we’ve got to start by going back to the policies that were last reflected in the period of the Clinton Presidency, prior to the time that the British Monarchy launched and successfully carried out the operation to destroy the Clinton Presidency in its final several years. And of course, the hallmark and motive behind that action initiated by the British Crown, carried out by people like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, was the fact that in response to the 1997-1998 crisis that began in Asia but was in fact a manifestation of the beginnings of the breakdown of the entire global financial system, President Clinton at that time began explicitly talking about a major overhaul of the world financial architecture.

And during that period, Mr. LaRouche was already deeply involved in promoting the need for a New Bretton Woods conference, a return to some of the cornerstone principles of Franklin Roosevelt as he envisioned the revitalization of the world economy and the restructuring of the global financial system in 1944, as the Second World War was clearly about to be a victory for the Allied forces.

Now, I want to begin, however, by referencing a number of developments over the last several days that both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche consider to be extremely significant, and you’ll see where they very much relate to the question that we’re dealing with right now.

Over the past several days, you’ve had three leading elder statesmen, if you will—experienced politicians from the United States and Western Europe, particularly Germany—coming out with dramatic statements attacking the entire underpinning of the policies coming out of the Obama Administration.

First of all, you have former Maryland Governor, former Baltimore Mayor as well, Martin O’Malley, who has basically thrown his hat into the ring as a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and has been touring the country, and has given a series of interviews on major TV shows as well. He was out in Iowa, he’ll be in New Hampshire, and he was interviewed on MSNBC on Thursday morning. And the fundamental point that he made, is that the defining issue for the 2016 Presidential elections is the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.

Now, of course, the 2016 Presidential elections are a long way off, but the fact is that today, now, at this moment, at this critical moment, putting the issue of Glass-Steagall immediately back on the table is absolutely central to any kind of productive engagement that the United States can have in Eurasia, in the Asia-Pacific region, and frankly here in the United States as well, where there is absolutely no economic recovery, and we are at a point where once again the too-big-to-fail banks are on the verge of a major blowout.

I want to read a few quotes from O’Malley, and then also reference some of the recent comments by two leading senior German statesmen, the current German Foreign Minister Steinmeier, and also the former German Chancellor and very clearly qualified elder statesman Helmut Schmidt, who is 92 or 93 years old, but still extremely vocal and active.

So, first, with Martin O’Malley. He was interviewed, as I said, yesterday morning on MSNBC, and he was asked to address some of the leading issues that he considers vital for the future of the country. He said, and this is a quote:

“Our problems are not going to solve themselves. Many of the things that we did to disconnect the hard work of American workers from the productivity of corporations are things that we did. So these are things we brought upon ourselves. We’d like to pretend that the economy blew in here on some sort of Gulf Stream or Jet Stream. But the fact is, we make these rules. And we can make better rules in order to restore that link between hard work and the opportunity to get ahead….

“One thing that would [be vital—JS], would be to re-instate Glass-Steagall. For 70 years, we prevented banks from gambling with our money, and wrecking our economy and running roughshod over the common good that we share as a people; and having a stable and good economy. Everybody—I mean on both sides of the aisle—I mean, so many people say we should do that, and yet it remains undone. And some people in my own party are holding themselves out as promoting some sort of a Dodd-Frank Lite—’We don’t want to offend anyone on Wall Street, so let us not talk honestly about how we can rein in this excessive behavior.’

“Because one of the things we haven’t talked about too much, is that for all of the pain from the home foreclosures and the job losses, the concentration of wealth after each of these last two busts on the stock market actually increased! In other words, while other people lost homes, the people at the top came out even further ahead.”

So, Mr. LaRouche emphasized that there should be total support—active, aggressive support for the ideas that O’Malley has injected into this early phase of the Presidential debate. The bottom line is that Congress needs to pass Glass-Steagall immediately. It’s the only measure that will adequately deal with the looming blowout of the entire trans-Atlantic system. And only by reinstating Glass-Steagall now, can we put the United States in the position to play a constructive role in the new paradigm of economic development that has been put forward under Chinese leadership in particular by the BRICS countries.

So, the United States, yes, must join the BRICS. But in order to do that, we must first repudiate all of the ongoing policies that are carry-overs from the Bush-Cheney Administration in through the Obama Administration. If we don’t do that, we are facing the imminent prospect of global war, even thermonuclear war.

And these were the issues that were addressed over the last several days by German Foreign Minister Steinmeier and by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Now, again I’ve got some relevant quotes here from both of them. Steinmeier was here in Washington yesterday, and spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said,

“It is obvious to me that” the continuation and expansion of U.S. and European sanctions against Russia and the eastern Ukrainians “would expand the conflict, and would move the crisis to a new phase and beyond the point of no return…. What we need,” he said, “is strategic patience. If we insist on resolving the crisis immediately, we may set it back. As often in diplomacy, a crisis can start in days, but it may require decades to end.”

He was not only referring to the threat of sanctions, but he was referring as well to the continuing U.S. plans to provide lethal aid to the Ukrainian government—an action that would actually escalate the bloodshed. And of course the problem that very few people in the West are willing to address, is the Victoria Nuland problem: the fact that we have installed a government that is rife with neo-Nazis from the Bandera movement into power in Kiev, and they are the driving force behind the war danger. To put weapons, even so-called “defensive” weapons, into their hands would be a recipe for expanding the war and leading almost inexorably to a direct U.S.-Russia confrontation, and that would mean thermonuclear war.

So, Steinmeier continued. He said,

“We must be aware that Russia raises in some countries of Europe some long historical memories which we have to understand. But Russia will always be our biggest neighbor and German foreign policy can only work in and through Europe.”

So, he was very clear, and Helmut Schmidt was even clearer. Schmidt gave an interview to the widely-read German tabloid newspaper Bild-Zeitung, and subsequently published a bylined article in the much more prestigious weekly publication out of his home-down of Hamburg, Die Zeit. In Bild-Zeitung, Helmut Schmidt warned that if the West failed to note Putin’s real concerns—his legitimate concerns—the conflict in Ukraine could escalate “even into a real hot war.” He said Putin is less concerned about Ukraine, Poland, or Lithuania, than about neighbors China, Pakistan, Central Asia, and that basically this provocation against Putin is leading the world in a very dangerous direction.

Now, I think, more broadly what we’re seeing is an emergence of certain leading senior figures in the trans-Atlantic establishment who have genuine diplomatic experience in the pre-Bush, pre-Obama period, and who are coming out now, because they see the incompetence and insanity coming from this Administration and from certain quarters in Europe, that must be defeated and must be stopped.

Mr. LaRouche emphasized that we’ve reached the point where there can no longer be a toleration for the continuation of the policies of the Obama Administration, which, in all crucial strategic areas, have been actually a continuation of the war policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration that preceded Obama. In the case of Obama, immediate impeachment is the only solution. Otherwise, people are running the risk that a continuation of this Administration represents a threat of general war, even thermonuclear war.

So, those are some of the critical factors. Yes, the United States can play an enormously constructive role in the Asia-Pacific region, in Eurasia more broadly, but it means a complete abandonment of the policies that have dominated Washington, both in the Executive branch and on Capitol Hill, for the last 14 years—really the last 16 years, because the end of the Clinton Presidency really can be dated back to 1998, when the British Monarchy unleashed an all-out assault which led to Clinton’s impeachment and essentially the curtailing of exactly the kind of direction that Clinton was moving in in a step-by-step fashion when he talked about the need for a “new global financial architecture.”

So, we’ve got to go back to that, and the first step is cancelling all of the Bush and Obama policies, and removing Obama from office before we go any steps further down the path to direct confrontation with Russia.

BEETS: So, by way of a follow-up question, I’d like to pick up on two aspects of what you just addressed, Jeff, the first being more on the role of these elder statesmen, and the second being the issue of Bill Clinton.

Now, on the first—the issue of the senior officials such as Steinmeier and Schmidt in Germany, their action of weighing in and intervening into the world strategic situation in the way that they have—there’s obviously been a pattern of this over the past few weeks, not in Germany only, but emphatically coming from the United States. For example, on Feb. 11th, Jack Matlock, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union under President Reagan, warned in a speech in Washington, D.C. emphatically against the lie that Russia is nothing but a regional power to be dealt with as such, and also against the current Administration’s policies, and said emphatically that these will lead to nothing but a new war. A similar warning came from two former Senators just a few weeks prior to that, Sen. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, who in 1991 together authored the legislation for U.S.-Russian cooperation in securing our two nations’ nuclear arsenals. A similar warning also came from William Polk, who is a veteran of the State Department, and who served as a member of President John F. Kennedy’s three-man crisis-management team during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Polk warns that we as a nation are walking into just such a Cuban Missile Crisis, in reverse, today.

Now in our discussion earlier today with Mr. LaRouche, he underscored what has been expressed by some of these senior circles in the United States, as an extremely dangerous lack of understanding on the part of the younger generations, meaning the generations that are currently in positions of power, and additionally, the generations which are upcoming and preparing to take positions of power.

So I’d like to ask you to elaborate on that. But also in that context, I’d also like to ask you to address something which is not at all unrelated, which is what was done to President Clinton. And again, Mr. LaRouche was very emphatic about the fact that the attack on Clinton, and the demotion of President Clinton, was directed by the British Empire, and was a key inflection point in bringing us up to where we are today. So Jeff, I’d ask if you could develop that point further, since I think a lot of our viewers may not be familiar with that history in detail.

STEINBERG: As I said a few moments ago, for all intents and purposes, the British Monarchy, using a well-known asset, ostensibly deployed into Washington as a journalist, but really a high-level intelligence operative on behalf of the British Crown, named Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, was deployed to bring down the Clinton Presidency, and it didn’t begin in 1998, it began a number of years earlier. Virtually as soon as President Clinton took office, he immediately became a target. People may remember that at one point, around 1995, there were very serious and credible threats to President Clinton and to the First Family. In fact, a small plane crashed into one of the windows of the White House. There were snipers directing fire at the White House.

There was a genuine freak-out over the fact that Clinton had been elected President. It was during the early years of the Clinton Presidency, that Lyndon LaRouche was let out of jail. Had George H.W. Bush been re-elected in 1992, there is no doubt whatsoever that Mr. LaRouche would have remained in jail, the victim of what Ramsey Clark called one of the biggest political frame-ups that he had ever seen.

So Clinton for many reasons stood out as a President who had both the intellectual capacity and the understanding of the nature of the British Empire and the Wall Street problem, to take action, particularly as the financial system began to go through the first series of major shocks, with the 1997-1998 crises that nominally took place in Asian countries — you had Malaysia, you had South Korea, and ultimately, in 1998, the major default crisis in Russia; but these were all symptomatic of the fact that the entire de-regulated global financial system had been effectively turned into one gigantic gambling den.

And in 1998, not only did President Clinton address a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York — sort of, if you will, going into the belly of the Wall Street beast — and announcing that he was looking at measures that would curb the flow of short-term capital that was purely speculative, and was wreaking havoc on many critical countries around the globe. When he delivered that speech, and then followed it up by announcing that he was forming a group of countries to deliberate on a new economic and financial order, what became the Group of 22 — it was a combination of advance-sector and leading developing-sector countries that did in fact have a series of meetings in Washington, D.C. — all of that represented an escalation-point for the British Crown to go all-out to bring down the Clinton Presidency.

But it’s important to understand, what was the motive, what was the issue behind which that attack was launched. Forget about Monica Lewinsky and all of the sort of stories that will begin to be churned up again, now for fairly obvious reasons as we go into the next Presidential cycle. The British targetted President Clinton for one and only one reason. He represented the potential for a U.S. President to return back to the kinds of policies that were last seen in the United States with Franklin Roosevelt, and then we saw glimmers of a return to those policies again in the thousand days of the John F. Kennedy Presidency.

Clinton was no fan of the British. He made very early on, that he was far more interested in developing a clear strategic partnership with Germany, and in fact he had a series of meetings with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and later Gerhard Schröder, that represented an impulse towards forming a different set of relations.

Now in reviewing this and discussing this, one of the points that Mr. LaRouche made this afternoon, is that there is a clear reference point in recent European history, for the kinds of policies that are necessary if we are going to get ourselves out of this economic and war-danger mess that we’re in very deeply right now. You have to go back to Europe of the 1950s and ’60s — the period when you had Charles de Gaulle in power in France, when you had Konrad Adenauer in Germany, and when you had first Eisenhower but then more importantly John Kennedy in the United States. There was a clear commitment on the part of these leaders for not only an economic revival, but for a policy that would bring an immediate end to the Cold War. De Gaulle famously talked about one integrated Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals — in other words, a Europe that incorporated Russia fully as a leading strategic partner, and as an integral part of European policy and European culture.

So, unfortunately there are very few leading politicians today who are young and active figures, who have even a glimmer of those policies and of the kinds of personalities of leadership that we had at that time.

So what we’re dealing with right now, is a crisis that has a number of dimensions. One of the dimensions is the immediate crisis — the war danger, the imminent collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system. And we’ve seen in the statements by Helmut Schmidt, by Steinmeier, by O’Malley, by some of the other elder diplomats that Megan just cited, and invoking of those policies.

But there’s a deeper issue as well. The current generation of new, emerging political leaders, and even more so, the generation that will step into those positions 20 or 20 years from now, is pathetically undereducated, has no sense of world history, of world culture, and on a much more profound level, really does not understand what it is that differentiates man from the beasts. And so this is an issue that is of profound concern to Mr. LaRouche and for starters, if we’re going to get anywhere in terms of bringing the United States back into harmony with the BRICS process and with any potential, viable future for mankind, we’ve got to start by returning to the point, prior to the British Empire’s takedown of the Clinton Presidency.

I should say that, interestingly, in an interview that O’Malley gave today to Salon magazine, he noted that he had had a number of discussions with Bill Clinton and that Bill Clinton, he said, was well aware, that after his Presidency had been virtually taken away from him, one of the worst mistakes that he had made under the gun of the British Empire attack, was allowing the repeal of Glass-Steagall. And of course, it was largely an action of Wall Street and an action of the Congress, where the real heart of that treachery occurred. But it’s notable that that O’Malley specifically says, ironically, both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich have stated to him directly, that the worst mistake was the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

So let’s start by going back, to reinstating Glass-Steagall immediately, and just simply looking to reverse and negate every significant policy that occurred in the aftermath of that.

Of course, Clinton remained in office through till January of 2001, and I think it’s important to remember another incident. Clinton very much wanted to establish a solid foundation of relations between the United States and Russia. And when Mr [yevgeni]. Primakov was briefly the Prime Minister of Russia in 1999, President Clinton very much wanted to have a face-to-face meeting with Primakov. Prior to that he had maintained a certain dialogue with Mr. LaRouche about Russian policy which was an extremely important background process. But the actual management day to day of the U.S.-Russian relationship was unfortunately in the hands of Al Gore and Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had been previously the prime minister of Russia.

So with Primakov’s accession to Prime Minister, it afforded an opportunity for a genuine and fundamental reset of the U.S.-Russia relationship, and President Clinton very much wanted to pursue that opportunity. And unfortunately, as Primakov literally was in the air, flying from Moscow to Washington, Vice President Gore got Primakov on the phone and said, we are about to start bombing Serbia, and I suspect you will not want to be on American soil when that happens. And literally, Primakov’s plane was turned around.

He went back to Moscow, and the efforts of President Clinton to restore some semblance of U.S.-Russian genuine cooperation were scuttled. I think that’s indicative of the fact that he no longer was really in possession of his own Presidency at that point. And that’s the period of the repeal of Glass-Steagall. And so, back to 1998, back to that effort to establish a new, just world economic order.

Today, we are far more advanced in that process because of the initiatives coming out of China and the other BRICS countries. So let’s realign the United States with that process and then we’ve got to really address the deeper issue of how are we going to educate the never several generations of leaders, so we don’t find ourselves continuously facing a profound crisis that could be literally a crisis of extinction for mankind.

BEETS: Well, I think that what you just brought up about the absolute urgency of reversing the degeneration in the thinking of our citizens, really begins to get at the more fundamental issue of the crisis in civilization itself, which is the loss of identity within mankind, and particularly the citizens of the United States of the sense of the difference between man and beast.

Now, this past Wednesday, we had on the weekly New Paradigm Show, which Mr. LaRouche placed a certain emphasis on, because, as he put it in discussion later that day, it provided “a different view of things which is crucially different than most people would assume.” Mr. LaRouche said, “The problem is the idiocy of presuming that mankind is an animal. Practically all assumptions made in science and in other circles by and large, define mankind as nothing but another animal, perhaps a more elegant animal, perhaps a more talented animal, but still, a mere animal. And most people of the United States live as animals, not as human beings. That’s the crucial problem. That is the key to the demoralization of the American citizen, that they believe that they have to triumph as animals, or by an animal form of existence.”

I’d like to invite Jason to the podium to give him a chance to address this.

JASON ROSS: Thanks. There’s a couple of ways to get at this, and let bring up what those two are, and then we’ll pursue one of them. In looking at what it is that distinguishes human being beings from animals, we can take the approach of looking at the behavior of the human species as a phenomenon. In other words, as we study physics, as we study biology, we can study what is the human species do, how does it behave? We can look at it as if from the outside, even though, of course, we’re not outside ourselves. That’s one aspect.

The other aspect is of getting inside what the process is, whereby human beings create this uniquely human character; getting inside that process of making a discovery. So about a month ago on this show, we went through an example of Kepler and how he had created a new concept. This time we’re going to take the other side of things, and look at what the human species does, from Vernadsky’s standpoint, to understand what is it that most characterizes the species.

So, there’s a couple of different ways of this connection between mankind and the universe, to be explored. In one respect, you could look at what occurs in the work of a scientist. This is a person who, if they’re successful at discovering something new, has created a new understanding about the universe that changes our power in it, allows us to do new things, has increased our understanding. They’ve discovered something. They’ve directly, through the use of their mind, come into coherence, with a new aspect of how the universe operates, an aspect that the mind can understand.

If there wasn’t a coherence between our minds and the universe, then how could thoughts have any power over it? The fact that we change how we live from generation to generation, I think, makes it very clear that the power of the mind is in coherence with an actual physical principle in nature. If not, how would it have an effect?

Another aspect: Look at political leaders. We’ve been looking recently, as Megan went through last week, in the case of Joan of Arc, who — she didn’t have votes, she didn’t have a political position, she didn’t have a powerful lobbying firm, she didn’t receive large amounts of corporate contributions, you know, she didn’t do any of these things. But as a person who made a decision to be the person who was going to make sure that France was saved from the English, at that time, she changed history.

She was a person. Dr. Martin Luther King, was a person. You are a person. Lyndon LaRouche is a person. In all of these cases, although there are backgrounds to them; take the case of LaRouche, for example — he didn’t have a movement, he didn’t just come out of the blue. After World War II, he made a decision based on what he recognized was his unique knowledge about the economy, and the responsibility that went with, and that also drove that discovery, to make sure that the U.S. didn’t go down a track which he recognized very early on, was going to be one of an economic collapse and as he later saw, would create fascism inside the United States.

He did it, as an individual person, he’s changed history. Joan of Arc changed history. Martin Luther King changed history. Individual people can reshape the direction that the world goes.

Now, individuals wanting to do that today, of course it would be foolish to ignore the possibilities of what’s been created and just go off on their own; but individual human beings are able to shape the direction of humanity, just as we see in science, people are able to change the direction of humanity by increasing our power in nature.

So, let’s take a look and focus now, on the personalities and world, of Vernadsky and of Cusa.

Vladimir Vernadsky was a Russian-Ukrainian scientist, who regulars to our website I think are somewhat familiar with. He lived around the time of the late 1800s through into World War II. And he was adamant that the cosmos of Newton was holding thought back. What he meant by that, and he pointed it out in detail, was how Isaac Newton had laid out some groundwork ideas for science. One of them was there was a universe outside of us, and then there was us, who are investigating it, and that there was an independence between them. Although our minds might understand the universe, they didn’t actually exist in it, there was a distinction.

The other aspects of what he had done, were to take concepts that were alive before and kill them: Two in particular, those of space and time, which Newton turned, instead of having any characteristics of their own, to basically being a box in which things occur — space; and time which flows on without any characteristics of its own.

So Vernadsky pointed out the possibility of making discoveries that were biological discoveries, of making discoveries that where about how the human species operated, and that science should be free to make those kinds of breakthroughs, develop those kinds of concepts without feeling obliged to explain them in terms of chemistry, something like that.

So I’ll give an example, and there’s much more on this on the show from Wednesday, as Megan had said, so this won’t be complete or anything; but in a very provocative paper Vernadsky wrote in 1930, called The Study of Life and the New Physics, he points out how the concepts of space, time, energy and matter are all different for a scientist in the year 1929, than they had been in the year 1900. Vernadsky asks, “are these concepts enough to explain everything?” and also, as he’s pointed out, these concepts aren’t fixed, and we shouldn’t expect them to remain fixed into the future as well.

To fill that out a bit, the work of Einstein removed the independence of space and time. Einstein showed that not only was space not flat, it was actually curved, due to gravitational effects; he showed that processes in time could unfold at different rates depending on the motion of two different systems; and he showed that there was no independence between time and space. There’s no “moment in time” that is the same moment in time across all of space.

He gave examples with moving trains and things like this, which showed that the idea of whether two things were at the same time, depended upon the motion of who it was that was trying to determine that. That two things could be at the same time for one person and yet appear to be at different times to another observer.

Newton was out the window.

So what this means — we don’t need to dwell on the specifics of what Einstein had done, but Vernadsky’s point about this is that what seemed to be the most basic concepts you could even imagine, space and time, had totally different meanings after a period of only 30 years!

He brought up how energy and matter had totally changed their meanings over 30 years. Again thanks to the work of Einstein and Max Planck, energy and matter were no longer separate. Einstein’s famous formula e=mc 2 described a process that we see in nuclear physics, where mass and energy can be turned into each other: That’s what occurs in nuclear power. We found out that energy came in pieces. This is from the work of Planck and Einstein, again.

So, if the most basic concepts that we use to understand things are changing over time, what does it mean to develop new knowledge? It doesn’t mean to create a new idea, that can be expressed in the world that already exists, because what if the language itself has to change, as these words, space, time, energy and matter have already changed?

So I think that the very important point that Vernadsky’s getting at with this, is that these concepts, in one way reflect things about the universe outside of us, but also their mental apparatus. There’s the scientific apparatus of the mind, there are tools that we use to change our power over nature, to do new things, to use nuclear power, to use electricity, etc. That these thoughts, these discoveries, don’t occur in the abstract. They don’t occur in a sort of spaceless time. They occur in the work of human beings, they’re made by human minds. Science is a human thing. It doesn’t occur out there on its own. People make it happen.

So, one of the other implications of this, is that, although there’s no independence between space and time any more, there’s still, in the process of discovery, a way to step outside of that — let’s get back to that in a minute.

First, let’s say a couple of things about Nicholas of Cusa. Now, Cusa, who lived in the 1400s, he did it all, really: He created modern science, he was working with the Vatican on an attempt to bridge the separation between the churches, between the Orthodox Churches and the Church of Rome, and in doing this work, he took issue with, and really demolished, the central feature of Aristotle’s thinking. That central feature, that feature of logic, was that you can’t have opposites. Something can’t both be a certain way and not be that way at the same time. You can’t have A and not-A. It’s one or the other.

And Cusa developed why it was that in any uniquely human thought, any new thought, that concept was always violated. He did it first by looking at God, and expressing how our ability to understand God required us to develop specific ways that we didn’t understand that. He wrote that, it was by bringing people to a very specific kind of darkness, that you would have an idea of what the light was.

To give just a couple of examples, he remarked that God was a maximum, which nothing was opposed, not even a minimum. What does that mean? A light to which darkness is not opposed. What’s that?

So, by combining opposites, a new idea can be created, and that’s what Johannes Kepler had done, by showing how opposite interpretations of geometry forced astronomy into physics, and not trying to explain everything in terms of math and circles and geometry.

It’s what Cusa had used in his work on uniting the religions, in his work On the Peace of Faith, he expressed his belief that rather than fighting among the different rites of various religions, that the true religion could express itself — let me get this quote — that the truest religion could express itself in a way that would be clear, based on reason itself, that it should be reasonable that we should be able to come to understand these things.

So, I’d like to not say much more about this. It’s difficult to go through the whole thing in a short period of time, and I refer people also to Wednesday; but I think it’s very important to point out that this characteristic of ourselves, of being about to create things that artificial intelligence could never create: for example, what Kepler had done, basically, he was asked a question and he tried to answer the question that other astronomers tried to answer, what is the eccentricity of Mars’s orbit? How far away are all these points from each other, how big are the circles, etc? He showed that that didn’t have an answer, and that it couldn’t.

How would a computer asked that question, reveal to the programmer, that they should think in a different way? And then provide an entirely new concept and a language that it didn’t have to express anything with? It’s not possible.

So this distinction between human beings and computers is definitely challenged today by people who are fretting about artificial intelligence taking over — you know, robots becoming more intelligent than people, like this is going to occur tomorrow and it’s going to be terrible, because the robots’ll realize they don’t need us, etc. You really don’t have to worry about those things! It can’t possibly happen.

What makes people susceptible to those kinds of worries is not having an idea of what discovery is in the first place, so you think a computer might even be able to do it.

So, the joy of discovery, of going back through the work of these people, of working on music, of really getting into great art, you get a sense that’s very refreshing, not just in the emotional sense of having a great joy in doing, but also it enlivens in the mind that sense of universality that we all have in common as people, both across space and across time.

You know, Lyndon LaRouche speaks about a “simultaneity of eternity.” Think about that, the “simultaneity of eternity,” that all moments in the past and the future somehow have a simultaneity. Cusa spoke about a “timeless time” in the experience of the human being, where as we take on historical challenges, as we take on scientific challenges, as we work on things of this sort, we recognize a universality in sharing things not only with people in different parts of the world, we recognize we’re all human; the feeling of discovery isn’t something that has a particular — it has a cultural flavor to it, but that knowledge that exists now as a power, is something certainly universal to all people.

And it also takes us out of time. When we do that, we’re in the same time as Kepler, we’re in the same time, in the same direction as Ben Franklin, for example.

I’d like to read the conclusion of the ending of a paper — you’ll find

“Contrary to Aristotle’s view that opposites could not co-exist, or the logician’s view that all conclusions exist inherently in the original premises, Cusa maintained the primacy of the process of discovery itself, whereby contradictions drive the mind to hypothesize a new concept, not derivable from the past—a conclusion that defies the premises, rather than following from them. Cusa held that it was through this process, of knowing through specific ignorance, that one could come the closest to seeing God. Resolving paradoxes through developing new metaphors for understanding is not a technique for arriving at physical truths: this process is the truest substance of nature.”

As we saw, there isn’t an actual “space” it makes sense to talk about, there isn’t an actual “time” that makes sense to talk about in nature. Those concepts had changed in just three decades at the beginning of the last century.

“Every human being is born with the potential to apply this process of discovery: to exist in the efficient immortality of discovering principles and applying them for the betterment of society, where betterment is seen in increasing the capability of fellow people to participate in this most characteristically human of behaviors.

“The creation of such a society, free from the oligarchism that currently threatens global thermonuclear warfare, is the most beautiful, the most human, and the most urgently pressing task facing mankind today.”

And I hope it’s a task that we’ll all be taking up.

BEETS: Thank you very much Jason. And with that, I’d like bring a conclusion to tonight’s broadcast. I’d like to thank both Jeff and Jason for joining me here, tonight. Thank you all for watching. Stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good night.

Steinmeier Warns Against Arming Ukraine
Former German Chancellor Schmidt: Ukraine Conflict Might Turn into Hot War

Transcript now available. Jeff Steinberg, counterintelligence director of EIR Magazine, joins us this evening at 8pm Eastern, to discuss what you need to know about world events and the future of mankind.

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening, it’s March 6, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I would like to welcome you to our weekly webcast from larouchepac.com. Tonight I’m joined in the studio by Jeffrey Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review and by Megan Beets from the LaRouche PAC Basement Science Team. And the three of us had a chance to meet with both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche earlier this afternoon. So the remarks you hear tonight will directly reflect what both of their outlooks on the current situation is.

So I’m just going to begin with our institutional question for the evening, Jeff, and read it, and you can deliver what Mr. LaRouche’s response was to this. It reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche, with the actions of the Eurozone finance ministers and the European Central Bank, it is clear that a showdown is nearing over whether or not Greece will remain within the Economic and Monetary Union [emu]. Regardless of that outcome, Greece is facing an urgent need to rebuild the real economy, create meaningful jobs, particularly for the youth population with 50% unemployment, and set a future course of long-term development. What are your recommendations to the Greek government, and how can they meet these urgent challenges? Thank you.”

JEFFREY STEINBERG: As Matt said, we had a very extensive discussion with both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche just a few hours ago, and Mr. LaRouche had a very, very precise response to this institutional question, and I took fairly copious notes, so what I’m going to read to you, are Mr. LaRouche’s comments. These are not a transcript, these are not verbatim, but I think they capture the precise essence of what he had to say.

He said, the real bankruptcy is in the London-Wall Street trans-Atlantic system as a whole. The question being asked by Russia and many other nations today, is whether the Europeans and the United States under Obama can survive their own foolishness, or whether their actions will lead to world war, and a possibility of general extermination. Queen Elizabeth and her circles may appreciate the idea of general war, but I don’t. Greece, fortunately, does have a place. They can join the other club. They can become a part of the BRICS process. A growing part of the world is breaking from the Anglo-American interests, and this is now including a majority of nations of South and Central America and the Caribbean. Of course, this also includes many nations of Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa.

So Mr. LaRouche continued. He said, to put it in blunt terms, the EMU is bluffing in the case of Greece. They’re attempting to blackmail Greece. This is very foolish for Western Europe and the United States. Greece has a unique and close relationship with Russia, as well as with China, and this is their gateway into the BRICS alternative.

What we are seeing in the confrontation with Greece, as well as the confrontation with Russia, is a last, desperate effort to bluff. The danger is, that at the end of this bluff, is nuclear war. The challenge for most Americans, is that they cannot conceive of the insanity that is driving this policy of bluff and provocation. They cannot conceive, for the most part, that anyone is willing to risk the suicidal extermination of mankind. This is insanity beyond comprehension, yet this is what we are dealing with in the case of Obama, the British, and other desperate forces.

Now, Greece has a long history as a maritime power. It goes all the way back to the period after Zeus was killed. Greece has a maritime characteristic, and that is the basis for Greece becoming an integral part of the BRICS paradigm. China is already looking at Greece as a key Mediterranean terminus of the New Silk Road.

It looks like the Greeks are being force to leave the European system. I say, it is in Greece’s interest to leave. The European system is hopelessly bankrupt. The European system is disintegrating. Greece can take the lead in breaking up a system that has been rotten and destructive from the outset. By leaving the Eurozone, Greece can expose the fraud. That’s how you beat them: expose the fact that they are a bunch of bankrupt bluffers and fakers. Their system is disintegrating, and all they have left is the threat of war. Obama is the same thing, part of the same bankrupt system. Obama’s fraud against Russia can lead to the destruction of the human species. Stick with Obama, and you get a free ticket to extermination.

Now, let me just add, that last year Executive Intelligence Review, working primarily through our European bureaus, produced a proposal, a Marshall Plan for the Mediterranean region, which covered Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the countries of the Maghreb region of Africa stretching all the way to Egypt, and up into the Eastern Mediterranean coastal region and beyond. And this is a critical piece of what is now becoming a potential integrated part of the Chinese-initiated New Silk Road/Maritime Silk Road, which does represent a viable future for mankind. So Greece for historical as well as current strategic reasons has unique opportunity to call the bluff of the European Central Bank and the Eurozone finance ministers, walk away from the euro, knowing that this will provide the opportunity for the other countries in the Mediterranean region, Italy, Spain, Portugal, stretching all the way up to Ireland.

This will bring about the end of a bankrupt system and force the issue in the right way, and will call the bluff on those people who are not only promoting a further looting genocide of Greece and the other Mediterranean countries, but are actually taking measures that could lead to a war of extermination.

OGDEN: Thank you, Jeff. Now, I think what you can tell from what Jeff just reviewed from Mr. LaRouche, what Mr. LaRouche emphasized during our discussion earlier this afternoon with him, was that his job, and our job generally, is to say what most people are too terrified to say, or even to think about. And in an environment which is completely dominated at this point by total wartime propaganda, you can really see very clearly the fact that the role that LaRouche PAC plays in this regard is absolutely crucial.

I think that the most clear example of that from this week was what Mr. LaRouche did in the aftermath of the murder of Boris Nemtsov. And what Mr. LaRouche said in denouncing the attempted frameup of President Vladimir Putin of Russia in regards to the murder of Boris Nemtsov, and asking the obvious question, which was, who stands to gain from the killing of Nemtsov? Whose benefit was this killing in? Clearly not Vladimir Putin’s. And it’s very clear, that this is being used to just continue to feed the absolute hysteria around what I think you could probably call the “Nuland narrative.” Victoria Nuland herself was on Capitol Hill this past week, along with Mikheil Saakashvili, the former, disgraced President of Georgia, who’s now an advisor to the Poroshenko government in Ukraine; Garry Kasparov; former Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, several other think-tankers, all of whom were testifying in front of the House and the Senate, beating the drums for nuclear war against Russia. And now you’ve got John Boehner, plus ten other leadership members of the House of Representatives, circulating a letter demanding the immediate provision of lethal arms to the Kiev, Ukrainian government forces.

Now, following Mr. LaRouche’s denunciation of the attempted frameup of Putin, around the Nemtsov case, you’ve had a number of other very prominent people who have begun to echo his point in the past several days, pointing out that this operation has all the hallmarks of a set-up job, an attempt to try to precipitate a regime-change operation against Putin, against the Putin government, inside Russia.

And, I think, quite significantly, President Putin himself is on record warning about just such a provocation, already back in 2012, at which point he was running for President. And, speaking as a candidate at that time—this is in 2012—he was asked about the role of provocateurs in destabilizing the situation inside Russia, and he said the following. This is a quote:

“The people you mentioned really want some kind of clashes; they are pushing for that, and are even prepared to sacrifice somebody and blame the authorities. I know this method and these tactics. For a decade there have been attempts to use them, especially abroad. This is true, and I know about it. They are even looking for a so-called sacrificial lamb, somebody famous. They would off him — excuse me for the expression — and then blame the authorities. People over there are capable of anything. I’m not exaggerating. I hope that those who sincerely want to see improvements in the situation in the country and are exercising their right to criticize and demonstrate, will not fall for this, but everybody should be aware of it.”

So, I think that’s very clear, and extremely prescient, and obviously applies directly to the situation around the tragic murder of Mr. Nemtsov. And, President Putin reiterated this, in a speech he delivered, I think on Wednesday, the day before yesterday, to the Interior Ministry, where he said that the “audacious murder of Boris Nemtsov, right in the center of Moscow, was a politically motivated crime,” and he warned about attempts to use what he called the “color revolution technology,” the aim of which he said “is to provoke civil conflict and strike a blow at our country’s constitutional foundations, and ultimately, even at our sovereignty.”

So, Mr. LaRouche’s point about this, earlier today, was that what we’re seeing here, is the last-ditch desperate efforts of Obama and other representatives of a thoroughly bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system, who are reflecting what he called a degree of “Zeusian insanity,” which goes beyond the comprehension of most of the average citizens of the United States. He said that this is being driven by the knowledge that their entire system is bankrupt, and they can’t hold it together any longer. And, that this is the key factor that you have to take into account, both when it comes to what’s happening with Russia, as well as the situation with Greece.

So, Jeff, I just wanted to ask, what more do we know about the specific circumstances surrounding this latest escalation against Russia? What are the other factors that have to be acknowledged that are occurring simultaneously? And, what are the necessary steps that we must take to prevent this escalation towards a third world war?

STEINBERG: Sometime back, President Putin said—I don’t remember the precise venue, but I remember the point he was making—he said, if there wasn’t the Ukraine crisis, which the West is blaming on Russia, they would have either invented one, or come up with another excuse, because the real target in this entire exercise, is Russia, and, secondarily, China.

Now, look at the situation on the ground in eastern Ukraine. By and large, the agreement worked out among the four Normandy heads of State—Putin, Poroshenko, Hollande, and Merkel—has been implemented, particularly on the part of the pro-Russian forces. The Luhansk and Donestsk Republics have pulled back most of their heavy equipment, as specified by the most recent Minsk agreement. In fact, if anybody is significantly lagging behind, it’s the Ukrainian forces, because some of the battalions that have been must brutal in the east of Ukraine, are not part of the regular Ukrainian army, but are part of these Right Sector-dominated militias that are run by local oligarchs, and they’ve openly come out and said that they have no intention of abiding by the Minsk agreements.

So, in a certain very real sense, Ukraine itself is not the issue that it was, even several weeks ago, yet, the targetting of Russia, the targetting of Putin, is escalating dramatically, and it’s no longer related to Ukraine; it’s a direct, immediate, provocation, directed against Russia.

Yesterday, four NATO battle ships entered the Black Sea for extensive maneuvers that will involve a number a number of the NATO countries that are right in the Black Sea region: Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey. And, the Russians’ response has been to say that Russia will conduct certain air maneuvers that are direct rehearsals for suppressing exactly the kind of NATO deployment that’s being exercised right now. There are other Russian maneuvers going on, of several thousand troops in the Western District within a very close distance to the Ukraine border.

So, what we have here, is a situation, in which the direct tensions between the United States and NATO on the one side, and Russia on the other, are intensifying at a point when the level of actual trust and communication between the top leaders of the United States and Russia is at an all-time low. During some of the darkest moments of the Cold War, when people were frightened about the prospect of nuclear war; during the 13 days in 1962 of the Cuban Missile Crisis; during the period in the immediate aftermath of Russia rejecting, under [yuri] Andropov, President Reagan’s proposal for collaboration on the Strategic Defense Initiative—these were periods where there was a grave fear that we were very close to the edge of thermonuclear war.

Those situations pale in comparison, with the danger that we face right at this moment. Number one, the relationship between President Obama and Putin is virtually nonexistent. The fact that President Obama, early in his Presidency, send Michael McFaul, a known agitator, whose career track record, whose academic credentials, centered around color-revolution regime change, was sent to Moscow, as the U.S. Ambassador, was a very clear message that President Obama intended to have no relationship whatsoever, no collaboration, no deliberation whatsoever, with President Putin of Russia.

And, the situation has gone from bad to worse. McFaul was named this week, explicitly, by one of the Greek strategic analysts [Ilias Iliopoulos], who wrote about the Nemtsov assassination. And he said, that Nemtsov was a perfect target for those in the West running the color revolution against Russia. And, among the reasons that Nemtsov was such a viable target, was number one, he posed absolutely no threat to Putin. Nemtsov had been part of the 1990s apparatus that looted Russia blind from the inside, in conjunction with the British. Nemtsov was associated with Yeltsin, with [boris] Berezovsky, with [anatoly] Chubais, and was considered to be somebody who was widely despised inside Russia. So, he posed absolutely no threat to President Putin, but, was in contact directly with Ambassador Mike McFaul, when he was still in Moscow. So he’s a perfect target to be the fall-guy, for McFaul, Victoria Nuland, and the British apparatus that have been behind the scenes, a driving factor in pushing this war confrontation with Russia. The British House of Lords this week produced what’s being billed as the most comprehensive study yet, of the events leading up to and following the Maidan Square coup in Ukraine. And needless to say, the House of Lords places 100% of the blame on Putin and on Russia.

So, the British are in the middle of attempting to escalate the provocations between Obama, who they’ve got in their hip pocket, and the Russians. It’s very reminiscent of how the British played the Germany under Hitler game with the Soviet Union in the Second World War.

Now, the Russians are not about to succumb to the bluff and the threat. The chief of operations of the Russian strategic force, their triad of nuclear weapons capabilities, which they’ve modernized tremendously since 2008, gave a statement this past week, which was widely publicized in Russia, and picked up around the world. And he said very clearly: Any kind of action that is directed against Russia that aims at regime change, that is an attempt to force Russia to back down, will be responded to with a strategic strike.

He recognized and explicitly pointed out that there is a new, evolving NATO doctrine which is based on the idea that it is possible to carry out limited nuclear war, restricted to the immediate vicinity of the center of Eurasia, directed against Russia, perhaps at some point directed against China and India. But these ideas were circulating around in the early years of the Cold War: You had the RAND Corp., you had Herman Kahn, famously at the Hudson Institute, talking about 54 steps of escalation of nuclear conflict before you got to a full-scale thermonuclear war.

This madness was disproven at the time. The danger is that back then, it was a bunch of academic fantasy-life, on government payroll. But today, we’re in a situation where the United States is going through a modernization of the 180 tactical nuclear weapons that are forward based in Europe, directed against Russia. They’re being expanded in range, there are new guidance systems that are more accurate. The idea is that somehow or other, by reducing the payload to where it is a less extreme nuclear explosion, that somehow or other the Russians will respond in a limited fashion and you can have a contained notion of nuclear war.

Well, the Russians just blew that whole idea out of the water, with the statement by the operations chief of their strategic force who said no way! If there is any kind of limited strike against Russia, the Russian response will be an immediate, total strategic retaliation. Which means that the people who are pushing the provocations against Russia, who are willing to take a desperate bluff, are running the risk, whatever in their demented minds they think they’re provoking, of triggering a general thermonuclear war of extermination. That’s the danger.

And you have a desperation, that’s drive by the fact that this entire London-centered, Wall Street-centered, trans-Atlantic financial system is hopelessly bankrupt. Greece has put a punctuation mark on that, and has greatly reduced the timeframe in which the showdown will take place.

And secondly, you have this insane notion being promoted, once again, that some kind of utopian fantasy of limited nuclear war, of population reduction that can be geographically circumscribed in the center of Eurasia and will not affect the United States, will not affect other peripheral areas, this idea, is the greatest danger in the current strategic situation, because the world, the real world doesn’t operate on those kinds of insane utopian ideas. And if one side tries to actually put them to a test, when they’re bluff is called, then the likelihood is that the Russian response will lead to the kind of war of extinction that very few people here in this country, or even around the world in other parts of the world, are capable of conceiving.

This is why you’re getting an outpouring of certain senior diplomats, people like Jack Matlock, who have been repeatedly warning, echoing what Mr. LaRouche has been warning about for the last several years, that we’re not facing some kind of limited conflict, but we’re facing the imminent danger of a war of extinction.

So that’s the situation. There are clearly leading people at the top of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are aware of these dangers, who are concerned about them, who’ve maintained lines of communication with their Russia and Chinese counterparts as an effort to try to avoid the worst happening. But the problem is, that, when you have a President of the United States under the thumb of the British, and driven by this desperation, there are dangerous limitations even on what the Joint Chiefs of Staff are capable of preventing from happening.

So that’s where we are right now, and the Nemtsov assassination was another indication that we’re moving precariously close to this showdown moment.

OGDEN: Thank you, Jeff. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we’re also joined tonight by Megan Beets, whom I’m sure most of you are familiar with. I don’t want to say too much before handing the podium over to her, but I just want to emphasize again the point that Mr. LaRouche was making this afternoon and what Jeff just elaborated. That even though most Americans will tend to underestimate this factor, the key element which is driving this threat of thermonuclear war right now, is the fact that we’re not dealing with so-called “rational” actors. A rational person would not think in this way. But the psychology of that oligarchical principle, which we’re dealing with when it comes to the current representatives of this trans-Atlantic system, you’re seeing an element of Zeusian insanity — that was the way Mr. LaRouche put it — in the face of the challenge, an existential challenge, that they see to their power, which is coming from the BRICS and allied nations at this time. It’s an oligarchical psychology that will tend to lead towards the genocidal destruction of a large portion of the human race if it’s not stopped.

And Mr. LaRouche emphasized that this is something that we’ve seen as a recurring factor throughout European history. You know, it’s only through the recognition of the oligarchical principle of a real force of evil, and the commitment to not allow this to occur, that civilization has been saved before in the past, and that civilization can be saved again now. The example that Mr. LaRouche has been citing quite a bit recently, is the connection between Joan of Arc and Nicholas of Cusa. And he’s been emphasizing that, despite the killing of Joan of Arc by her enemies, it was this event which contributed significantly to crystallizing what we now know as the European Renaissance, which was born out of the efforts of Nicholas of Cusa.

And what Mr. LaRouche emphasized today is that this is a history that very few people know anything about, but it’s very significant, not only from the standpoint of allowing people to understand what the true creative forces are that move, and shape history, which is something that Benjamin Deniston elaborated quite extensively at the conclusion of last week’s broadcast, but it’s also, in order to answer the question, what is it going to take, to crystallize a Renaissance around what the BRICS and other nations represent today, this new, emerging system.

So I’m going to give Megan Beets a chance to address this subject.

MEGAN BEETS: Thanks, Matt. I want to start just by reading something Mr. LaRouche had to say on exactly this question, the fact that we are facing the total collapse of the Zeusian system and thereby the freedom for mankind to consider the more fundamental question, which is, what is the meaning of mankind? So he said:

“Mankind is located, his identity is located in what he or she contributes, to the future of mankind; not how long they live, but what they contribute to the future. And people who are serious, order their lives on the basis of realizing a necessary improvement to the existence and persistence of their lives, their own lives. It does not lie in any other simple explanation. All people die, all men and women die. They will eventually die, so what’s the meaning of their life? The meaning of their life is what they contribute, to the future of mankind…. And it’s the people who create something which contributes to mankind’s future, is the meaning of mankind’s existence.”

In 1431, Joan of Arc is burned at the stake, at the age of 19, after a grossly corrupt one-year imprisonment, torture and trial at the hands of the rotten French lackeys of the proto-British Empire and their Venetian sponsors. These were the people who believed in the system of Zeus and that if they just carried out their lackey tasks, such as this corrupt trial and torture of Joan of Arc, that they might perhaps survive, themselves.

This empire was so terrified of this 19-year-old woman, that they burned her twice, in order to ensure that there was nothing left of her body. However, when the news of her case, of her trial and of her death, reached the ongoing Catholic Church council, the Council of Basel, which frankly many of her judges and murderers later began to attend, when the news of her death reached that Council of Basel, a process was set into motion by the spark which was the mission of her life, which ignited those as the circles of the great Nicholas of Cusa, to mobilize against the evil in society, which had killed her.

Now, during that council, Cusa wrote in a document that he produced for the Council in 1433, contrary to the Zeusian faction in attendance on the true nature of government, which is really a treatise on the true nature of mankind and natural law. So Cusa writes in his Concordantia Catholica,

“”Therefore, since all are by nature free, every governance—whether it consists in a written law, or in living law in the person of a prince … can only come from the agreement and consent of the subjects. For, if men are by nature equal in power and equally free, the true, properly ordered authority of one common ruler, who is their equal in power, can only be constituted by the election and consent of the others, and law is also established by consent.”

So this is two years after the murder of Joan of Arc.

Now, let me back up a little bit and talk a little bit about Joan of Arc and what she did, and why the Zeusian system was so terrified of her. By the year 1420, this is 11 years before her death, France was on the verge of disintegration. In 1337, about 85 years earlier, the crown of France had been seized by Edward III, King of England. This unleashed over 100 years of warfare, of economic destruction and collapse, of mercenary armies roaming France, fighting the English and fighting each other. By 1347, between the years 1347 and 1351, four years later, a quarter of the population of Europe was wiped out by the plague. In 1418, the Queen of France turned and became a traitor to France, fully ceding France’s sovereignty to the English, and she placed an English King on the throne of France, disinheriting her own son, the Dauphin [Charles VII].

So this is the Europe into which Joan of Arc is born in 1412 in a tiny village in the north of France. In 1429, when Joan is 17 years old, when the resistance within France who were still loyal to the Dauphin and to the idea of France as a nation was near collapse, Joan of Arc and her faction convinced the Dauphin, the rightful King of France, to give her, a young shepherdess, the weapons and the troops which would be necessary to raise the English siege of the city of Orléans, the last bastion of the French resistance to the English takeover. When Joan of Arc arrived at Orléans at the head of the French army, leading the hardened veterans of France’s wars, who had failed time and again to relive France of the attacks from the English, Joan sent a letter to the English to warn them of what she intended for them; which I would like to read in full because it’s her words, and I think it hopefully will give people a sense of the kind of passion involved in her mission. So this is the letter she sent to the English commanders:

“Jesus Maria.

“King of England, and you, duke of Bedford, you call yourself regent of the kingdom of France, you, William de la Pole, Sir John Talbot, and you, Sir Thomas Scales, who call yourself lieutenant of the aforesaid duke of Bedford, render your account to the King of Heaven. Surrender to the Maid, who is sent from God, the King of Heaven, the keys to all the good cities that you have taken and violated in France. She has come here from God to proclaim the blood royal. She is entirely ready to make peace, if you are willing to settle accounts with her, provided that you give up France and pay for having occupied her. And those among you, archers, companions-at-arms, gentlemen, and others who are before the city of Orléans, go back to your own countries, for God’s sake. And if you do not do so, wait for the word of the Maid who will come visit you briefly, to your great damage. If you do not do so, I am commander of the armies, and in whatever place I shall meet your French allies, I shall make them leave it, whether they wish to or not; and if they will not obey, I shall have them all killed. I am sent from God, the King of Heaven, to chase you out of all France, body for body. And if they wish to obey, I shall have mercy on them. And have no other opinion, for you shall never hold the kingdom of France from God, the King of Heaven, the son of St. Mary; but King Charles, the true heir, will hold it; for God, the King of Heaven, wishes it so and has revealed through the Maid, and he will enter Paris with a goodly company. If you do not wish to believe this message from God through the Maid, then wherever we find you we will strike you there, and make a great uproar greater than any made in France for a thousand years, if you do not come to terms. And believe firmly that the King of Heaven will send the Maid more force than you will ever know how to achieve with all of your assaults on her and on her good men-at-arms; and in the exchange of blows we shall see who has better right from the King of Heaven. You, duke of Bedford, the Maid prays you and requests that you cause no more destruction. If you will settle your account, you can join her company, in which the French will achieve the finest feat in Christendom. And give answer, if you wish to make peace in the city of Orléans; and if you do not do so, be mindful soon of your great damages.”

Now, Joan leads the armies on a three-day siege of what had been a month-long attack on Orléans, and what she did was the impossible: She forced the English to surrender. From Orléans, Joan led the armies of France, and her King to the historic cathedral at Reims and crowned him the King of France.

Now, she was later betrayed by that King, and she was captured in battle in May of 1430, and she was sold as a prisoner to the English. And she was burned alive by the English and their French lackeys who thought that they could eliminate her, by burning her body, to save their own skins. However, what Joan of Arc unleashed by her mission and by her victory against the evil which killed her, is something which is not locatable within the bounds of the actions that she took during her own mortal life. The process that was unleashed, which was led by Nicholas of Cusa, took what Joan of Arc represented as a mission and her passion for the freedom and the sovereignty of the people of France as a nation, and made this a mission to free all of mankind from the Zeusian empire, and to crush the evil in society which burned her alive.

So, in 1435, four years later, the Pope that Cusa worked with, helped to organize the Congress of Arras, which was attended by Cusa’s collaborators, including the future Pope Pius II, and by September of that year had organized a reunification of the warring factions within France to unite against the English occupation. Two years later, Cusa left the Council of Basel as an emissary sent by the Pope to Constantinople, to Byzantium, and his mission was to bring back the representatives of Byzantium to what became the Council of Florence, the shadow of the Dome of Brunelleschi, for the reunification of the Eastern and Western Churches, which had been split since 1055. Cusa succeeded in this great mission and he brought back 700 representatives of Byzantium, including the Byzantine emperor, including the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and including especially, the complete works of Plato, which had never been seen by the West. And in 1440, just a couple of years later, Cosimo dei Medici was inspired to mobilize a complete translation project of the works of Plato and establishing the Platonic Academy in Florence.

So what was set into motion by Cusa, was what became a complete transformation of society. This led in 1461, into the establishment of the first commonwealth nation-state under King Louis XI of France who is the son of the King who was crowned by Joan of Arc. Now, just preceding that, between 1450 and 1456, you had a second trial of Joan of Arc, which was a trial of rehabilitation, exonerating her and condemning instead her judges, and exposing the evil of what had been done to Joan in the name of the Church.

Now, this Renaissance process, which was the beginnings of what eventually became the American republic, was also the foundation of the later work and passionate commitment of Johannes Kepler, to establish the human mind in its true and central position in the Solar System, in his discovery of the harmonic organization of the Solar System, and the capability of the mind of man, any man, as Cusa put it in his Concordantia Catholica, of the equality of all men on the principle of creativity.

So this comes back to what I opened with in quoting Mr. LaRouche on the issue of the meaning of mankind, the meaning of life, the mission of mankind, and the fact that the meaning of life, as opposed to what’s imposed by the beliefs of this empire system that the world has been suffering under, since the assassination of President Kennedy in the United States and its aftermath, the meaning of life is in being truly human, in the creative process which, long after your death, establishes a continuing process of the further perfection and uplifting of the powers and capabilities of the human species, and changing, even after the death of one’s mortal body, the meaning of mankind as a species.

So this fulfilling of the mission of Joan of Arc, which is not quite complete, was taken up by a very small handful of leaders in what became the Renaissance, led by Cusa. And the question before all of us today, is, will we respond to the horrors of the potential of nuclear war, and the horrors of the potential extermination of the human species — will we respond as the faction of Cusa responded to the horrors of what was done with Joan of Arc, and create something in mankind based on this spark of potential with the BRICS process, which has never been seen before?

OGDEN: Thank you very much, Megan. With that said, we’re going to bring a conclusion to our broadcast here tonight. I want to thank everybody who tuned in tonight for watching our webcast. I want to thank Megan for joining us, and I want to thank Jeff Steinberg for being with us tonight.

Please, stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good night.

Our webcast has now concluded, as always, thanks for joining us. Be sure to tune in next Friday at 8PM Eastern.

Join LaRouchePAC for our weekly webcast tonight at 8PM Eastern for a live discussion of the current strategic issues and their remedies, featuring the latest analysis from Lyndon LaRouche. Guests will include Jeffrey Steinberg, Dennis Small, and Benjamin Deniston.

Join LaRouchePAC for our weekly webcast tonight at 8PM Eastern for a live discussion of the current strategic issues and their remedies, featuring the latest analysis from Lyndon LaRouche. Guests will include Jeffrey Steinberg, Dennis Small, and Benjamin Deniston.

Join LaRouchePAC Science team members Megan Beets, Ben Deniston and Jason Ross for a discussion of the leading issues in Science, at 11:00 Eastern. 

Join us today at 1PM, for the weekly discussion with the LaRouchePAC Policy committee.

Transcript Now Available—Join us today at 1PM, for the weekly discussion with the LaRouchePAC Policy committee.

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good afternoon, today is February 23rd, 2015. I’d like to welcome all of you to our weekly discussion with the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee. We’re broadcasting today over Google Hangouts On Air. I’m joined via video by Bill Roberts in Detroit, Michigan; Dave Christie in Seattle, Washington; Kesha Rogers in Houston, Texas; Mr. LaRouche is joining us live today. Michael Steger is joining is from San Francisco, California; and Rachel Brinkley is joining us from Boston, Massachusetts. And as you can see, here in the studio, I’m joined by Diane Sare, and also a special guest today, Megan Beets from the LaRouche PAC Basement Scientific Team.

So, Lyn, I’m going to give you a chance to begin our discussion, today.

LYNDON LAROUCHE: Okay, fine. Well, I think the point is that Megan Beets’s presence there is an indication which people should find easily interpreted. The point is, in the period past, we have moved our organization from the autumn section of last year, into Manhattan. This was absolutely necessary, and what we’ve done is move our whole operation out of local organizations, with one qualification. We have people in California, people in two locations, which are significant; we have in Texas a case like that. So therefore, our conception is that the entire organization, the national organization and beyond, of our association, is now put into place, that Manhattan is the center, Alexander Hamilton, is the center of the policy of the United States for us, for our organization. And therefore, we want to shift everything in that direction. We don’t want to be fiddling around in some local-yokel situation in that. Which means that we will be featured internationally through Manhattan. And that is already working. It’s working effectively; we may like to improve it a lot but it is already working. And so, that’s the change.

We also for that reason have a new member, essentially, attending here. We will be doing that again. We want to have one, integrated organization, based on locality, Manhattan, and the whole organization in the United States is based on that orientation. And by doing so, we actually greatly improve the mental capabilities of the our organization. And that’s the difference, that’s the change.

We find that, for example, some people from the Basement Team, which is now, really, we’re trying to integrate the Basement Team more clearly with the whole operation, and so therefore, we’re creating a new way of defining what our policymaking processes are, and we’re not going out and begging for some recognition from some local-yokel area, we are now dictating for anybody who cares, the principles on which this organization has always been intended, even though sometimes people made mistakes, and misrepresented our operation.

So we’re back in business, on an international basis. We are located with our identity in the United States, centered in the area of Manhattan, and we are doing business accordingly. It’s a fresh, nice way to work and live.

OGDEN: Diane, you might want to say something about this rally that we held in Manhattan yesterday at Columbus Circle. There were, I think, close to 40 or 50 people there.

DIANE SARE: Yes, and that was even with a very fierce blizzard beginning at the end. It was actually joined and augmented by a group of Russian- and Ukrainian-Americans who had been demonstrating in front of the Ukrainian consulate because it’s the one-year anniversary of this violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government in the Maidan movement, which some idiots in our U.S. government, like Senator Menendez, who I saw yesterday called a “peaceful democratic movement,” with molotov cocktails and swastikas.

But at any rate, they had a protest and came and joined us. And what we were really hitting and fighting to get across is the relationship between the bankruptcy of Wall Street and London, this whole rotten, British Empire system, that that is of a piece with the drive by the British Empire to plunge us into thermonuclear war. And what I found particularly interesting at this Columbus Circle location, and I realized that the resonance had been different, because of course the other rallies have been at Wall Street, so therefore, they were not as responsive to our attacks on Wall Street! [laughter] But here, Bob Baker, who just came up from Virginia, said that the passersby were almost reverential, that people were very engaged. We got out close to 1500 pieces of literature, which means many, many of the people were stopping and engaging. They particularly loved the music, and I definitely had a sense, there is a resonance, that there is a really deep hatred, in the American people, in the people of New York for this Wall Street scum. I spoke with one guy who is a retired banker who lives in that very affluent area right around Columbus Circle, and he said that most of the people in his building are criminals. So that’s their view.

And, anyway, I think it’s just indicative of how this thing can grow and the ways that it can grow, which we don’t know yet. It’s just clear that it’s there. And yeah, there were about 40 or so of us out there, in spite of the blizzard. And then after that, went to a class given by Dennis Speed, which took up some of these questions — I mean, the Kepler question first and foremost as a challenge to the participants, and then their own thinking, in terms of how they can be not observers, but be engaged, be acting on the stage of history, which is really the key.

So there will be more to come. Where there this week, is of course, it’s not just the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, but it’s the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. So the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, the Chinese Foreign Minister [Wang Yi] is in town — anyway, there’s a lot happening in New York, and we’re making sure to get our material into the hands of the appropriate dignitaries from around the world through their missions and so on.

OGDEN: I think this intervention couldn’t be more timely. The news from this morning is that the Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine, who’s currently in Canada, gave an interview with the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., and he said: We are preparing for full-scale war against Russia, and the world must not be afraid of joining Ukraine, quote, “in the fight against a nuclear power.” So I don’t think there’s any way of interpreting that, other than …

LAROUCHE: Blood.

OGDEN: Right.

RACHEL BRINKLEY: What we seeing is a lot of increasing hotspots and violence around the world, and that’s what we’re going to see until the situation changes, because there really are no other options in this financial power. Many of the hotspots, I mean, they’re actually losing. You know there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine, the eastern Ukrainian military overcame the Ukrainian military, but is that going to stop the war drive? Likely not. We’re likely to see it continue, unless we actually change the paradigm, and this is what we’ve been discussing, that we have to supersede this failed system and failed idea of man, for a higher idea of man; and that this is the concepts that were discussed in the European Renaissance, which I think we can discuss a bit. But Cusa and Kepler, as we have discussed, and maybe Megan wants to add some things about this, but the idea of the universe and human society as a lawful, knowable principle in the idea of man in the image of the Creator, and that that was the concept applied for a scientific revolution by Kepler, and that this was not separate from the establishment of the culture of the United States. In fact, our great patriot Benjamin Franklin was a known collaborator of the followers of Kepler in Europe, and in fact, had a correspondence with Kästner who sent a young person over to meet with Franklin who was supposed to bring him a copy of Kepler’s Harmonice Mundi, which we’ve been discussing, just to give you a sense that there wasn’t actually a disconnect; that while Franklin was battling in the British Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act, he was simultaneously battling the concepts of Newton, and for Cusa and for Kepler, and Leibniz’s conception of the universe. So that is the cultural standard which this country really represents.

LAROUCHE: Yeah.

MEGAN BEETS: Well, I can just add on that, over the weekend in some discussions, Mr. LaRouche said very emphatically that anything good in the world that’s occurring right now goes back to the standard of the U.S. republic, which comes out of the efforts of Nicholas of Cusa and the Renaissance tradition, which was carried forward by Leibniz and some of the history you just referenced, Rachel. And I think the thing that people really have to take in, is that there is no solution to the world crisis, which is going to come out of some rearrangement, or some revival of old principles. You’re at a point where everything current in civilization has broken down and what’s required, is an entirely new conception of mankind itself. The only way the world’s going to come out of this is by making a collaborative discovery, of a new meaning to mankind. And obviously we see that with the leadership being taken by China in the space program, which really does go, in a very direct way, back to the legacy Nicholas of Cusa, who in the middle of the dark ages, battling the Venetian empire, and trying to establish a new system for Europe, was spending his time and efforts deriving a completely new idea of what the nature of the human mind was: The relationship of man’s mind to the mind of the Creator, and how it was that man’s mind could come to know — hypothesize and know, valid principles and base his existence upon that.

And then, you had Kepler, his follower, take up that concept and put it into practice, and achieve a discovery of the Solar System which had never been experienced before and which unleashed a total revolution in mankind. And obviously inspired, as you’ve pointed out, Rachel, inspired the kind of movement that led to our U.S. republic. And I just think, and people today have to realize that that’s the kind of legacy that exists in the United States, that’s the meaning of our republic, that’s our identity, and we can’t get caught in fighting any kind of lower battle, or being drawn away into fighting and bickering over some kind of lower conception of what we’re really doing.

DAVE CHRISTIE: Yeah, well, I think it also goes to the core of this whole question of sovereignty as well, because if you look at Kepler and the mission before mankind, sovereignty is no longer going to be seen from the standpoint of the old geopolitics, but rather, and I think the question of space exploration goes right to the core of that, because how could you have some limited idea of geopolitical control of space — I mean, what’re you going to do? Divide up the Moon amongst the major powers, or something? It becomes a little ridiculous when you think about it.

But I think more importantly, when you actually engage nations into the kind of level of cooperation that’s required around space exploration, then you are getting into the type of creative upshift that is needed amongst mankind right now, to respond to where we’re at in the human civilization. And just as a reflection point, today China is going to be chairing a meeting at the United Nations, which, this is the 70th year of its founding, and I think when that was founded, it was really in the wake of the aftermath of World War II and the discussion amongst the United Nations, how do we take a world which was going to be freed from the colonial system, and how do you have a dialogue amongst nations that would discuss the problems of economic development in the wake of being freed from this colonial policy?

And in a sense, that’s the fundamental discussion right now — this is the situation with Greece. The same kind of dictatorship through the banking system, and the kind of debt slavery that Greece is dealing with now, it’s the same policies of the colonial system back in the founding of the United Nations. And I want to just make one quick point on this: Lavrov apparently in a speech today, did very much hit on the notion of what is the actual concept of the United Nations? Are we just going to allow the larger powers to dictate what the world is doing, which was what Lavrov was getting at; he hit at the question of the overriding of sovereignty in the case of Serbia, Libya, Iraq; he also then said that these kind of regime-change operations is what’s going on in Ukraine right now.

So I think in some ways, is because we haven’t freed ourselves from the grips of the British Empire, this colonial system, you know, 70 years later, we’re having the same discussion. But really, it’s only through the Kepler notion of bringing nations into collaboration around space exploration as the key example, where you can get a new concept of sovereignty that is not rooted in this geopolitical/colonial outlook.

LAROUCHE: Good.

MICHAEL STEGER: I think you can take MacArthur’s speech in 1945, on the USS Missouri, and there he references the need for a “spiritual recrudescence of mankind.” And he points out that military alliances had failed to maintain the peace. And you see that explicitly this postwar period that those military alliances were the cause and the creation of an empire to create this kind of conflict of mankind. But what I was provoked by was going back to — you look at, that this same problem existed for the last 2500 years. You go back to the wars that brought down Greece, and the Peloponnesian War, and you see the same type of problem laid out and the same traps that were set. But the problem is, people look at this and they see these military alliances, they what they perceive as cultural conflicts as the cause, and they’re not.

And you have to think, where was the insight? Where was the leadership in that process, and you look back at Greece, you see the playwright Aeschylus, and you see his play Prometheus Bound and you see an identification where the failure of civilization exists, is this question of what mankind truly is. And the same insights were made by Socrates and by Plato later, after the wars had destroyed much of Greece. And the questions today that I think Lyn’s been pointing out and been so emphatic about, is that what we see with Kepler and with Cusa is that we see a reconception of what mankind is in the universe: That Kepler gave mankind the power of the human mind, to grasp the universe itself. And that really is the way we resolve this conflict mankind’s been facing for over 2,000 years — it’s the same thing MacArthur identified; it’s the same thing Lyn’s been laying out, really since this time period, this Promethean conception presented by Kepler: How do we escape this sense of geopolitical alliances, competition for resources, dividing into political parties, or nations, or cultures, these kind types of false divisions, rather than Kepler’s conception of a unified human species.

LAROUCHE: Yeah.

OGDEN: Well, going back to what you said, Megan, I absolutely think about the standard, that you cannot go below the standard of what Kepler discovered as your principle. As Rachel brought up, the role of Benjamin Franklin was crucial in the American Revolution; without Benjamin Franklin and later Alexander Hamilton, we never would have won the American Revolution, because they insisted on raising the standard and keeping the standard at the very highest level, which was the question of what makes man different from the beast? And Lyn, I know you’ve pointed out that after the destruction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the cultural level of the colonies had actually sunk, had declined. And it was only because Benjamin Franklin was going back and reviving the legacy of Cusa of and Kepler that was embedded in that Massachusetts Bay Colony when it was originally founded with John Winthrop, that he was able to raise what the American Revolution was being fought over, not something pragmatic or practical, not some sort of just political issue, not something cheap, but the real issue, which was the nature of man versus what the oligarchical principle wished to impose on the American colonies of that time.

So, Lyn, you said on Saturday, we can’t go for the “El Cheapo” issues. You have to keep the standard at the very highest level, and I think the example of Benjamin Franklin is perfect.

LAROUCHE: It is perfect. You just take his case. Here he was in the Boston area, and he fled from there, and was told to flee from there by his supporter. And he went through quite a bit of travel there and got down into Pennsylvania and there he set up shop and he created new conceptions in his own time, his own youth. He created the conceptions on which the United States Constitution became a reality.

Now, that’s the point: You have to rely upon people who are of that character, not the opportunists, not the fellow who’s trying to make his way ahead in a career. Franklin was not really after a career, when you take all the things he did from his youth on, and he was actually a creative force, and became an internationally creative force, so that’s what’s to be remembered. He was a creative force for the world, in his time. Without Franklin, you would not have had the United States. And then you had those who followed Franklin, you know, following him, that’s exactly what the model is.

We’ve have very few in our history, — the United States has very, very few competent Presidents. In recent times, we have almost no competence in our Presidency! We had a few people who regret what the United States is not, and that’s probably the best thoughts they can have. I’ve gone through that experience myself; you know, I’ve had a few ups and downs of being at the top of the business and of being pushed around. But that’s the way this thing goes. But that’s what we have to deal with. We have to understand things that way.

We are fighting and we don’t base ourselves on recognition as such; we don’t say, “Ahhh! You’re the guy that’s selected to be President today.” Now, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. The history of the Presidential system of the United States as such, that most of the Presidents weren’t worth anything, or less than worth anything! And we have, that’s the state situation right now. We have almost eight terms completed of a recent Presidency set, and these guys have contributed nothing good to the United States, but quite the contrary, they have destroyed the United States, more and more, during these eight terms of office than ever before. And that’s the greatest problem that we face inside the United States: Our Presidency for eight terms is worse, much worse than nothing.

BILL ROBERTS: To bring it back to the question of Benjamin Franklin, he was — Franklin actually had a network of young people, and they were attacking Newton, they were attacking Hobbes, this idea of the survival of the fittest, I mean these were people who were producing a fight against the Newtonian, oligarchical ideas of Europe. And it’s very important that what we’re doing is that, we are developing the capacity within Americans to identify with what that American culture is. Not a set of opinions, not set of beliefs, but actually a capacity to identify, for people to identify within themselves, the creative capacity to actually overturn [crosstalk], to actually identify with that capacity of mankind which I think Rachel raised from the outset of this show, a new cultural capacity.

Because you see, in the absence of this, when people look at the crisis, they see it as a crisis, “oh, this is the Greek crisis, this is the Ukrainian crisis”; or even within the United States it breaks down the same way, “oh, this is this city’s crisis, this state’s crisis.” And that’s how Wall Street has been very effective at picking off individual countries and localities through this method of promoting this sort of Confederate ideology, of a war of each against all. And unless you have a capacity within the individual to identify a higher idea of man, a higher cultural idea of man, people will continue to be pulled into knee-jerk reactions of that type.

LAROUCHE: I would just say one thing on this. Look, the issue here, we have moved our organization back into what its tradition really was. That’s what we’ve done, and no longer do we tolerate the idea that there are local areas which are a confederation of local areas. And I said shut that down! And what we did is, we made the policy was, we make Manhattan, Alexander Hamilton’s Manhattan, is the center of our United States for us, and our policies are based accordingly. And the dribblings of our policy are also made the same way.

And it’s our giving life to Manhattan, or that role of Manhattan, as we are doing, and we are from the area of New York, we’re doing everything possible to make New York what it really was, or what it is in its best terms, and that is to be the leadership, to provide the leadership for bringing the world together.

We’ve now entered a new period. The idea of particular states and potencies of that type, is over! What we have now, China has only a set a standard for this thing; what’s happened with China, China has now moved into space. And China is moving in the direction of Kepler’s discoveries, and based on Kepler’s discoveries. So therefore, even though, on the planet we now have different nations which are accustomed to different languages or uses of language systems, we now say, “OK, that’s all right. We can all have your little different ways of doing things in local areas. That’s all right. But we’re going to integrate the United States under Kepler, and that’s the point.” Because it’s Kepler’s work — who defined a principle on which the Solar System is actually based. And without Kepler’s concept, you don’t have an orderly Solar System.

We’ve got to think in those terms. And that’s what we’re doing. We, in the United States, we who base ourselves as an organization in terms of the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, as a follower of the great leaders who founded our nation, and that’s what we’re supposed to do. We are supposed to, as our organization, set a standard to challenge people, to bring about an integration of work, within the United States, and to extend that out to other parts of the world.

Our affinities are to places like China. China is the nation of the world that has come up again, today; with South America, the BRICS nations and so forth, they’re all important. We wish to integrate that process. Not in the old way, but to integrate it on the basis that they’re doing their job, and our job is being done by sharing the experience with them. We’re now creating a unity of mankind in the Solar System. And we have different departments, but the departments are all seeking to maintain the fruits of their achievement in a single principle, the principle of humanity.

KESHA ROGERS: I think it’s very important when you just said that we have to return the United States to the principle on which it was founded on, when you think about the fact that there’s a certain truth and a discovery process to that, that really gets at the conception of the nature of man as not an animal. And my point in saying that is that, what you have been discussing on the “Manhattan project” as the rallying point to unify the nation against this states’ rights, Confederacy type policy — I mean, there are still a lot of people out there and I can tell you from living here in Texas and in the South, that think that the history of Northern aggression and states’ rights, is something that is acceptable and is something that can be seen as, well, this is my right to believe in this. It’s my right — you like national policy, I like states’ rights policy, I like the government out of my business.

And my point in bringing this up is that it gets to a more fundamental question on the nature of, what is man? What is… [interruption]

OGDEN: Kesha, I think we lost you for a moment. Your audio just cut out.

BRINKLEY: It seems like she lost her connection. Maybe she’ll come back in a second.

But just one thing about this question of the Chinese and Kepler, is it was — you know, Kepler dies 400 years ago, but he’s still moving the Chinese off the planet. His mind and his ideas are still moving…

ROGERS: [audio/video cuts back in] … human beings are not animals. It comes with a conception that is really defined within the terms of the universe as a whole.

OGDEN: Rachel, go ahead and continue.

BRINKLEY: OK. I think Kesha dropped off.

Just the point that Kepler, as I mentioned, died 400 years ago, but he’s still moving mankind, his ideas, his existence is still moving mankind off the planet, through the United States to China; when the space program was developed under Kennedy, under NASA, and now it’s being moved to a new level by the Chinese. But this was the pathway of the idea and you get a sense of that quality of immortality through a new idea, which is totally manifest in the Chinese actions on the basis of Kepler’s discovery.

SARE: And in stark contrast, I would just say, the culture of the United States has become so deeply degraded. I mean, if you think about what are the front-running moving, for example, these things, whatever it is, “40 shades of chartreuse,” I mean deeply hideous. And Americans, because they have become demoralized because they’ve been cowardly and stopped — see as soon as you become a coward, then your mind is not your own any more and you become malleable for all kinds of insanity. And I think part of the reason why these developments of the BRICS or what the Chinese are doing with the space program are so blacked out the U.S. media is because Americans would get a glimmer of a quality of fight, a quality of defiance which is very American, and it would really spread. And they are terrified of that, which is why, even at this late date, we have such a great potential to win, probably greater than most of us realize, although our enemies are certainly aware of it. And I just think it’s very important to bear in mind what has been brought to bear on crushing the American identity and commitment to truth and a certain defiant, revolutionary quality.

LAROUCHE: Well, I could intervene on one thing, that what’s happened is we’ve turned the United States into a Bush League. Look at the history of our Presidencies and look at the cases of Presidents who did try and do a job, and got tumbled out of their position of control, of leadership. I’ve had quite some little experience with that.

You know, I was working with, some of our Presidents I was very close to, and they got jumbled. And once, you know, Bill Clinton was humiliated by the British Queen, and I don’t know why anybody would want to be a British Queen, but anyway, the point is, we have not had a competent Presidency, since that period, except for Bill.

Bill was the only President, has been recently, the only President that did any significant good. All the rest have specialized in doing very, very bad things! And we live under a remain of bad Presidents! People who are not fit to be President, but they happen to be there. We had two Presidencies, a total of eight years each in office, and we haven’t had anything good, coming out of those Presidencies during that entire period. We will pray for the day, that there is no longer a Bush or an Obama in sight for the Presidency or anything like that. That’s the issue. And when we understand that, then we understand why our citizens for four terms under these crooked Presidents, rotten Presidents! The Bush League! And then you got more Bushes in there. And Moses should have really finished the job, burning off these Bushes, but that’s what’s happened to us.

And we had bad Presidents very early on, people who were opportunists of one kind of another. We had two good Presidents, very good Presidents during a period of the better part of a decade. But — and then we got Lincoln. And then we got a few other good Presidents. But most of the time, the United States has been under the yoke, of the British Empire, and it still is today. And we want to get rid of that British Empire because we know that without getting rid of that British Empire and everything like the Bush League stuff and so forth, we don’t have a chance of having a real United States.

We don’t have a population that really stands up, with clear ideas and strong terms of action. We just have to fight for this thing.

OGDEN: You mentioned Lincoln, this really was the direct legacy of Benjamin Franklin in a very specific way. I had been provoked earlier, you had mentioned Ben Franklin’s international role, which was obviously absolutely significant in winning the American Revolution, including not only his relationships with France and others, but very much his relationship with Russia. He had been the one who worked out the League of Armed Neutrality with Catherine the Great, but also his scientific relationship with such people as Lomonosov and others. And it was Ben Franklin who directly selected John Quincy Adams to be our first Ambassador to Russia. And then, of course, John Quincy Adams was the direct mentor of Abraham Lincoln at the time that they overlapped in the United States Congress.

And then, you look at the role that Russia played in supporting Lincoln during the Civil War, against the British who were taking the side of the Confederacy at that time. And it’s really very clear that the small handful of great presidents that we have had, have all come out of the legacy of what both Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton represented, that their influence during the life was immense. But the influence that they’ve continued to radiate after their death has been even more significant. And Rachel, you were bringing up the exact same thing about Kepler.

BRINKLEY: And Franklin Roosevelt adhered his philosophy to Alexander Hamilton, so going back to that same intellectual tradition and dialogue amongst our great leaders.

BEETS: I think all of this does really does go to the issue of passion. And you know, you bring up the idea of much longer, sort of eternal power of the human being who acts according to the principle of mind. And I think it really does speak to what we need today, because there’s a certain kind of leap of faith, which isn’t really a leap of faith, it’s a certain act of passion to act for that which has not yet been experienced, but which is true. And that’s exactly what Kepler did in his discovery of the Solar System. Nobody had “experienced” the Solar System — they had experienced the observations of planets. Nobody had ever experienced a physical astronomy: And Kepler put his life on the line to fight to harness and control the Solar System for man. But it’s the kind of act of passion to insist upon the truth of that which doesn’t yet exist for mankind, and to place the meaning of your life there. And we see that in all these great figures, in Franklin, in Kepler, in Lyn, in what you’ve done with your life. And it’s that kind of real passion that is required today.

STEGER: Yeah, that same passion you see in people like Hamilton and John Quincy Adams. They were shaping a nation for the first time, in a completely new way. It was a new idea that had never existed before. Cusa had put it forward, people following Cusa, Franklin, but they had to put it now to a real framework. They had to demonstrate that mankind under a higher conception of what man was, would prosper, would develop and would advance beyond anything previously conceived. And both of them, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams — John Quincy Adams’ foreign policy was clearly, he was aware that you could not have the same problems mankind had faced for the last 2500 years. That the same problems that had basically burdened mankind of geopolitical competition, that these questions had to be freed and it had to be towards a collaboration and towards a unity. And Hamilton had the same conception for the nation.

And I think it’s interestingly, Lyn, that this is really what you’ve been fighting for, with the organization and for the United States, and even for our discussion — I mean, the collaboration with the Basement in the scientific questions, and the questions of policy for the whole country, that this is a critical part of what we have to introduce now into the American policy process.

I mean, we have to shape the Presidency now! This idea of Jeb Bush is intolerable! And I think some people have pointed that out, but this is really Satanic that they would even bring this up! [LaRouche laughs] I mean, this guy’s — he’s the Satanic kid picking his nose in the back of the class, and he should be relegated to that, for the rest of his life.

LAROUCHE: [laughs] He should be directed to somewhere else, whereever that is!

CHRISTIE: You know, he was one of the signers of the Project for a New American Century, which in its founding document did cite the antiquated notion of John Quincy Adams, who railed against going out in pursuit against monsters to destroy. And of course, now, we see with the neo-conservative policy, not only are we out in search of monsters to destroy, but it’s being done by monsters like Victoria Nuland — or maybe more accurately, the Cookie Monster, who openly backs coups in nations.

But you see that real continuity through the Bush clan, now through Obama, and this is what we’re dealing with as long as we let Wall Street run foreign policy through these types of agents.

LAROUCHE: Yeah!

STEGER: You know, this thing you mentioned at the beginning with Lavrov at the United Nations, this is the same conception, it’s a new idea of mankind, that Roosevelt had in shaping in the United Nations, that China now has in their space program, or what the D.C. bureau chief of the China Daily made the point: China doesn’t have military alliances or allies, but it has friends. And its friends are according to a win-win policy of collaboration of development. That’s a Kepler conception of mankind. And that’s what we have to look at as defining a new paradigm for mankind to go into, and that Megan, you just developed. It’s clear, this conception does not exist in anyone’s experience. It has to be conceived of in the mind, and it has to be brought forth through a collaboration towards a mission in that sense.

And that really is — people are unaware even what a mission is! This culture is so depraved, you know what they think a mission is, is a sex position! [laughter]

CHRISTIE: Well, just to reemphasize again, because I think this thing that Lavrov had said a month or two go on the 85th birthday of Yevgeni Primakov, where he said this idea that, before there was the BRICS, there was the “RIC” [Russia-India-China strategic triangle] of what Primakov had said, which frankly was a development, Lyn, of obviously what you and Helga had done with your work and bringing the world together in the fall of the Soviet Union or the fall of the communist system, which could have been the beginning of a new era sovereign nations but who are oriented around the common aims of mankind, and that was what the original idea of the RIC was; and if I’m not mistaken, Primakov’s announcement of that as a policy, of Russia-India-China, the RIC before the BRICS came on later, was around the same year that the Project for a New American Century was formed. And if you look at that target list of nations, of Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran, all the way up to the so-called human rights abuses of China, which was in the founding document of this Project for a New American Century, you see this is the same target list that Lavrov mentioned this morning. So this is what this crowd represents.

LAROUCHE: Look, let me intervene on this thing, because it’s something which I know probably better than most people alive today. What happened was that, I was framed up and out of business, so to speak. But we had some friends, and I did my job, and the job came at a certain point, where I was out of the jug, and I went into Russia. Because Helga was one of the ways I got into Russia; she’d been already doing the work. And but I had quite a play in Russia for a while there, when Russia was going through its agony. And Russia went through various agonies, and I shared some of the agonies with them; and I had an opportunity, the opportunity was the President of the United States at that time, Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton was the last decent President we’ve experienced so far. And when he was ruined by the order of the Queen of England. It was a setup by the Queen of England, and her staff. The usual kind of thing. And so they discredited him, they set him up — they set him up with a woman of uncertain virtues, or lack of virtues. And when Bill Clinton was downgraded by this thing, we lost, we lost everything that Russia had accomplished up to that point.

Remember that I had been called in to duty by the leaders of Russia at that time. I was familiar with them, I had worked, I talked with them and so forth and so on. We were trying to find a solution, for a global solution for mankind generally. We had a meeting, and the people at the meeting were all the leading Russian figures of that time. And they turned to me at the end of the meeting, and said, “You have to do this; you have to set the standard.” And I, “OK, I’ll do it.” And what I was doing was actually responding to an option which Bill Clinton responded to, was adopting. Bill never talked to me openly, never represented me openly. He represented me in a different way. And we were going for this policy to solve the Russian problem, the Russian financial problem; they played a gambling role, and we had the ability to do that. Bill was going for a new system, and the British Empire and Wall Street just killed him, killed his policy.

As a result of that, we have not had, as decent Presidency of the United States, since what Bill was subjected to, by almost everyone. But especially the Republican Party! The Republican Party was the instrument used by the Queen, in order to destroy the United States dignity and its ability, and never forget that! Never lose sight of that! It was the Queen that did it, and it was the Republican Party who did it, and they were working for the Queen of England! And there are a lot of things about some Republicans, or certain types of Republicans, who tend to be the Queen’s own stooges. And therefore, we have to understand that Bill Clinton was the last competent President that the United States has ever had, during this whole period. Because it was the discrediting of him that led to all the things that were done by the Congress and others, that screwed up our system. And the Bush family, of course, was a key feature in this. You don’t want a Bush anywhere. Bushes are for burning, as Moses would tell you.

And this is the history: We have not had a decent President, since Bill Clinton, not really, since he was disgraced. And right at that point, everything that we had built up, as a system to protect the American people in their rights, their economic rights in particular, and related things, was destroyed! And has been destroyed! And our job is to get it back.

I’ve been involved with Presidents, or Presidential circles or similar kinds of people, for some time. And I can attest, with great authority, and great certainty, that we have been almost destroyed. And Bill Clinton was our last chance. And since Bill Clinton was disgraced, the way he was done, and what was done to the system of the United States, after that, while Bill was still President, we have not had an honest Presidency since that time.

BRINKLEY: I think you made the point that it was a Bush associate that was behind the attempted assassination of Reagan as well?

LAROUCHE: Yes. That’s how it worked.

I was there. Why was I framed up? By the Republicans, by the wild Republicans. They framed me up. But you know, I had a certain kind of authority and resolution, and therefore, I couldn’t be exactly crushed out of existence. And I’m still doing things now, or proposing things now, that I was doing back then.

I became a significant figure in the beginning of the 1970s, and from that point on, I was on the way up in terms of leadership. It was always a rocky road, but it was there, and I was proposed and supported by a President of the United States, otherwise I could not have done what I did in the name of the United States. And I’m still that person. I’m a little bit old, a little weary sometimes, but I have not lost any of that. And that’s the reality of the situation.

What I’m looking for is always, I mean, considering my age — I’ve come into the 90 class — that I’m looking for people who like my wife, who is an exemplary person — I look at the people who are going to succeed me, not that I want be succeeded, but I will be succeeded, one way or the other, and therefore, I have a mission to perform. And that mission is based on a long history of my years. And that’s where we are now. And I think, by going back into the New York City area, and saying: Cut out this silly, absolutely childish notion, of local organizations as semi-independent! Get rid of that crap! Unify our organization, and unify our organization for the purpose of unifying forces inside the United States and beyond.

And that’s why I push what I do. I’m an old guy, as people would say. I do have certain memories, which are very important, and we’re trying to rebuild that kind of thing, again now. And I think that if we were not doing what we are doing now — we, we! us! — if we were not doing what we’re doing now, I don’t think the United States would have a chance, of coming out of this alive. Because we’re on the edge, with the aid of Wall Street and London, we’re on the verge of a thermonuclear war. We’re very close to it. If we can get Obama thrown out of office, and his team out of office, we might have a chance of avoiding the extermination of the human species. But you’ve got to do that. Otherwise you don’t have much chance of outliving a full-throated thermonuclear war! And I’m doing everything I can, within my very limited capabilities to do this now, to get New York City functioning, in the tradition of the United States, the Hamilton tradition, and maybe we can save civilization. That’s what we’re doing, and that’s what we should consider ourself as doing.

OGDEN: Well, I think that’s very clearly stated. I’d invite anybody to add anything that they think is necessary, but if not, I think I’m going to bring a conclusion to our discussion here, today. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us. And thanks a lot Lyn — we were happy that you could be part of the discussion today.

And please stay tuned to larouchepac.com.

Tune in for our live webcast featuring Jeffrey Steinberg tonight at 8PM Eastern.

Transcript Now Available—Join Jeffrey Steinberg, Jason Ross and host Matthew Ogden, for tonight’s LaRouchePAC Webcast. They will be discussing the showdown between Greece and the bankrupt global financial system, the threat of Thermonuclear War, and many other pressing issues.

Transcript Now Available

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening; it’s February 20, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I would like to welcome you to our weekly webcast here from larouchepac.com. I’m joined in the studio today by Jeffrey Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review and Jason Ross from the LaRouche PAC Basement Team. And the three of us had occasion to meet with both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche earlier this afternoon. Now the first question tonight is going to be our institutional question for the evening, which is on the subject of the developments happening in Greece; and it reads as follows:

“The German and Greek finance ministers held talks with IMF and Eurogroup chiefs ahead of a meeting of Eurozone finance ministers which happened today. The talks were aimed at striking a deal on the request made on Thursday by Greece for a new six-month bail-out. Germany rejected the request, despite it being welcomed by the European Commission. The existing bail-out deal expires at the end of the month, and Greece could run out of money without a new accord. Mr. LaRouche, what is your advice for the Greek government?”

And I’d like to ask Jeff to come to the podium to address this.

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thanks, Matt. We did have an opportunity to speak at some length this afternoon with Mr. LaRouche, and at that time we did not yet have the results of the meeting that took place between the Greek government and the Eurozone finance ministers [eurogroup] this afternoon. What came out of that meeting was basically a decision to kick the can down the road.

The decision was to not make a decision at all; and in effect, the request, the terms presented by the Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis, were accepted, with the difference being that since Germany rejected a six-month extension of the existing arrangements with major modifications — meaning cancellation of the austerity requirements — they changed it now to four months rather than six. But the basic point is that, nothing was settled; nothing was resolved, and there are certain very fundamental things that must be understood to properly gauge the significance of this showdown that’s not going on.

The first point that Mr. LaRouche emphasized, is that there is no legitimate Greek debt to the Troika. When you do a detailed analysis of how those debts were established and incurred, you realize that virtually none of the money that was supposedly provided to the Greek government actually went to Greece. The money went directly from the Troika into the hands of the major European banks that were the creditors of loans that were, from the very outset, illegitimate, and had nothing to do with any kind of recovery of Greece — full employment, job creation, any of the kinds of things that a normal legitimate loan would go towards. And this is not the only instance where this kind of looting under the guise of debt was carried out.

Greece is, in fact, only one of the more recent examples of what has been a persistent and long-term pattern of behavior by the IMF and more recently by the European Central Bank. And so, you have a persistent history — a track record — of sovereign governments being blackmailed and threatened with financial warfare, and succumbing to conditionalities that were intended to create fraudulent debt, and loot countries of their most basic rights to develop.

That’s the situation here; there are many, many details that could be fleshed out and in fact, indeed there should be a thorough criminal investigation into the circumstances around which this fraudulent debt was established in the first place. We know that there were significant international players — Goldman Sachs, Crédit Suisse, Deutsche Bank — a whole collection of U.S.- and European-based hedge funds which basically took short positions on Greek government debt to jack up the risk premiums, jack up the payments that had to be made to roll over those debts, and created a synthetic mountain of illegitimate debt. So, while the Greek government has come out and openly said that there has to be a debt renegotiation, a write-down, Mr. LaRouche’s point is much more dramatic than that. His point is simply that the debt is criminal, the debt is illegitimate; there is no legitimate reason for Greece to pay a penny.

And in fact, the best course of action for Greece is to force a default, a write-off of that entire debt, and move at that point towards an investment policy that actually begins the process of rebuilding the Greek economy. The Greek economy is facing 40% to 50% unemployment by official statistics. The collapse of household savings, the collapse of the real economy of Greece, has been an extraordinary scandal over a number of years. It preceded the Troika deal, but the Troika deal was merely the icing on the cake of a prolonged period of looting of Greece. So, you’ve got to have a completely different approach.

And the reality of the situation — we’ve discussed this over the recent weeks here on the LaRouche weekly webcast — is that it’s not Greece that is bankrupt. Greece can simply stand its ground and say, this debt is illegitimate; we’re not going to pay it, there’s no justification for paying it. But the bigger issue is that the entire banking system of the trans-Atlantic region is hopelessly and irreversibly bankrupt. That’s why you have the phenomenon of certain European financial officials like Schäuble, the Finance Minister of Germany, being absolutely hysterical about the need to maintain a hardline against Greece. The simple reason being that they are caught up in a massive criminal Ponzi scheme that’s now about to blow up in their faces. If the Greek situation is simply put on hold for the next four months, as has been apparently agreed to at this meeting today — and it needs to be ratified on Monday — the fact of the matter is that there are many, many other triggers that could bring about a blow-out of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system long before this Greek question comes up. So, there is no legitimate Greek debt; that issue should be put squarely on the table.

The entire banking system of the trans-Atlantic region is irreversibly and hopelessly bankrupt; and the only recourse — which is part of what Greece is calling for — is the convening of a conference like the 1953 London debt conference to write off the entire fraudulent debt, the gambling debt. Isolate out the legitimate commercial banking debts, work out a method of payment; but cancel the entire $1.7-$1.9 quadrillion derivatives and related financial swindle gambling bubble. Put that out of the way, and redirect credit towards the rebuilding of the real economy, starting in the trans-Atlantic region, where the collapse has been most pronounced. The danger we’re dealing with — and I know we’ll be taking this issue up separately a bit later in this broadcast — is that it’s the bankruptcy of the system; it’s the hysteria over that crisis coming to a head, that is the main factor driving the world toward a war centered around the Ukraine crisis, but which could easily become a thermonuclear war confrontation with Russia.

So the hysteria over the fact that London and Wall Street are doomed, is the principal reason why you have the kinds of provocations that are leading us dangerously close to war. Now, given the current circumstances, Greece has another escape avenue; a viable alternative to the death and bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic system, and that’s the BRICS countries. This week, you’ve had a high level delegation from the [chinese] PLA Navy doing a port-of-call visit to the Greek port of Piraeus. And the Chinese have made very clear that they’re prepared to invest in the real economy of Greece. They see the port of Piraeus as a terminus on the Mediterranean for the entire Chinese Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road.

So Greece has enormous potential in a universe defined by the kinds of policies that have been adopted by the BRICS countries — namely, cooperation for real physical, economic development, scientific development and technological advancement, and cooperation among these leading nations. So, there is an alternative; the alternative is coming together in a system centered around the BRICS initiatives. And already half of humanity is being drawn into that alternative. So, it’s time to basically put the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system to rest; and the fear around Greece is that the actions that have been taken by the Greek people — they cast out the government that had cut the suicidal deal with the Troika. They brought in the Syriza-centered government, and now they’ve made it clear; the austerity policy is unacceptable, paying this fraudulent debt is not in the cards. And so therefore, this is one of the factors that is putting this entire situation into a real moment of existential showdown.

So, the European governments punted for four months; nothing was resolved today, but yet the same issues remain on the table, and will have to be resolved at some point in the very near future, one way or the other. It’s either an alliance with the BRICS countries, a writing-off of the gambling debt all together, and an alliance with the BRICS, or war. And the kind of war we’re talking about is a war of extinction.

OGDEN: Well, I think in light of what you went through with the situation in Greece, it couldn’t be more clear that what we’re dealing here in terms of Wall Street, the City of London and so forth, are not banks in any conventional sense of the word, but rather, front companies for what’s really a huge international network of organized crime; an organized crime ring.

And this was identified in exactly those terms earlier this week by a woman who was the former chief of protocol for UBS in France — a woman named Stephanie Gibaud — who is currently collaborating with the Argentine government in prosecuting crimes that were committed by UBS. And she did an interview with the press down there in Argentina in which she said, “We have to understand that what we’re dealing here is a {criminal} industry. That the entire thing is one dirty business; and that all the kinds of tax evasion schemes by UBS, now HSBC, and so forth that are coming under investigation, these are not some kind of aberrations.

These are not some sort of illegal operations that the banks engaged in on the sidelines of what were otherwise legitimate business practices, normal business. But what these actually are is the only reason why these banks even exist; and she made the point “You have to understand that this is the primary business of offshore banking; and that efforts by these chief executives to scapegoat lower level employees every time they get caught committing illegal acts” she called “disgusting” and that it’s these executives themselves who are the heavyweights. And they are the ones who belong in jail.

Now obviously, this is the polar opposite of what Obama’s policy, Eric Holder’s policy — now we see Loretta Lynch’s policy has been — that these bankers, these chief executives so-called, are too big to jail. And that to prosecute these banks would threaten the entire financial system. Now, I don’t think you could really make it more clear that if our financial system depends on non-prosecution of criminal acts, that means that this financial system itself is a criminal enterprise. Now this is really coming to a head right now with the Senate confirmation hearings over Loretta Lynch, who is Obama’s nominee to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General.

And there’s been a hold that’s been placed on this nomination by Senator Grassley, I believe; Senator Vitter has a whole list of very relevant questions that she needs to answer, which pertain to why she [lynch] wittingly neglected to prosecute gross crimes committed by HSBC — which by the way, stands for The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation — the historic British opium bank. And I have an Exhibit A here. (shows a copy of Dope, Inc.) I think Jeff can elaborate on the situation a little bit, since he’s uniquely qualified, since he’s literally the one who write the book on HSBC. This is called Dope, Inc., which originally was released in the 1970s, has been updated continually ever since. As you can see here, the subtitle is “Britain’s Opium War Against the World.”

I think there’s also a much broader aspect to this, which I know, Jeff, you can elaborate more in depth; which coincides a lot with what we’ve been discussing recently, pertaining to the 28 pages. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was the Levin-Coburn Committee, published an entire investigative report on HSBC a few years ago — this is Exhibit B. (Displays copy of Levin-Coburn report) As you can see, this is just one volume of a very extensive report which was titled U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History. And it contained an entire chapter which was called “Saudi Arabia and Terrorist Financing.”

Now, this connection has been even more clear and explicit in the past week, now that you’ve had the exposé that among the account holders that were exposed at HSBC’s branch at Switzerland was none other than Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States during 9/11, whose bank account at this branch of HSBC was an active account at the time 9/11 occurred, and persisted well after 9/11. Also, a number of the other account holders were members of the so-called “Golden Chain.”

I’ll let Jeff elaborate on that. But my question is, Jeff, with all of this taken together, there’s obviously been extensive coverage in the recent weeks around the 28 pages, the role of Saudi Arabia in financing terrorism. But what I’d like to ask you to address is not only this entire criminality of the banking system itself, but also, how can this HSBC angle potentially open up the story in regards to allowing people to understand the true role that the British play as the ringleaders of this entire apparatus, and what the true extent of the criminality we’re dealing with here actually represents.

STEINBERG: I think the problem here starts at the White House. In contrast to what happened during the 1930s from the moment that Franklin Roosevelt came in as President, he proudly declared that he was happy to be the enemy of the “financial royalists” — meaning Wall Street and London in particular. And you had the Pecora Commission back in 1933. A number of leading bankers did in fact go to jail; and it was only on the basis of acting against their criminality that you had the ability to push through things like the Glass-Steagall Act.

Now, the situation today is one in which the magnitude of criminality of the too-big-to-fail banking system is light years beyond what existed back in the 1920s and into the 1930s. The entire international too-big-to-fail bank apparatus is one gigantic criminal enterprise. I’ll tell you a brief anecdote. Going back quite a number of years, there was a Congressman from Texas — Henry Gonzalez, now deceased — who was the chairman of the House Banking Committee. And he wanted to find out — this was in the mid-1990s — whether or not there was any complicity on the part of certain American banks in laundering drug money and being involved in facilitating terrorist funding. And he had a number of his staff people who had appropriately high security clearances make some inquiries with U.S. government agencies.

And one of those staff people told me, that, you know, well, I can’t give you the details, the details are classified, but I was completely shocked to find out that there’s knowledge within the U.S. government, that every single one of the big Wall Street banks is engaged in fierce competition among themselves for the business of well-known and well-documented drug cartels and other international criminal and terrorist syndicates. That goes back 20 years ago. The situation has become profoundly more devastating and now, as I say, we’re looking at a situation in which the Obama Administration not only looked the other way or turned the other cheek — they had an explicit doctrine, it was actually codified in a letter by Attorney General Eric Holder, called “the Holder letter,” which basically said that all of the “too big to fail” bankers are to be given a free ride. Were there to be a prosecution of them, then this would result in a collapse of the entire system.

Now, I mean, that concept in itself is completely fraudulent. There’s no basis for making that argument. But that’s been the basis, systematically, since the beginning of the Obama administration, and things were not much better under the Bush-Cheney administration at all. But in the case of Obama, you have one instance after another, where major New York and London banks have been caught in massive criminal activity, and in one case after another, the Department of Justice signed what are called “deferred prosecution agreements.” In other words, if you promise that you won’t do it again, you will be slapped on the wrist, given a civil fine, which is a tiny fraction of the massive profits garnered from engaging in international criminal fraud.

And, as long as you don’t get caught again, then you don’t go to jail. In the case of HSBC — and as Matt indicated, HSBC was for decades, for centuries, known as The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation — it was openly established in the second half of the 19th century as the central clearinghouse bank for the British opium trade in China, in India, and in other parts of the Far East. And so, this is a bank that from its earliest inception, has been involved at the center of some of the biggest criminal activity in the world. So back in 2012, as the result of several whistleblowers coming forward, there was a Senate investigation into HSBC, and the report that Matt just showed you — over 300 pages — documented the fact that HSBC was responsible for laundering 60 to 80% of all of the drug cartel — Mexican, Colombian — money, into the United States, through corresponding relationships between HSBC Mexico City and HSBC New York.

The Indian government is investigating evidence that HSBC in Dubai and Mumbai was responsible for laundering the money that was used to finance the 2008 Mumbai attack, the mass killing spree carried out by jihadist terrorists tied to a notorious diamond and drug smuggler named Dawood Ibrahim. So everywhere you look, there is evidence dripping from the trees about the criminality of HSBC. So in 2012, the Senate produced this report. The report documented what had been presented by the authors from EIR of the book Dope, Inc., beginning in 1979. When Senator Levin was asked, what would he recommend, will there be criminal prosecutions, he said: Well, number one, I do agree that bankers at the top of this criminal syndicate should be prosecuted and should go to jail.

But he said, my own view is, it’s much more important, that banks that are engaged in this kind of criminal activity should immediately have their charters removed so that they can no longer do business here in the United States. And he said, all I can do as a Senator, is pass the evidence that we’ve accumulated on to the Department of Justice. And that’s exactly what was done. Now, it turns out, that prior to the investigation by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, a whistleblower from the Swiss private bank branch of HSBC, basically confiscated extensive computer records, and passed them on to the French authorities, who in turn, later shared them with both British and American and other law enforcement agencies.

The evidence was that HSBC was carrying out tens of billions of dollars in illegal tax evasion for something like a thousand citizens from virtually every country around the world — Prince Bandar being one of them. And so, that information was already in the hands of U.S. federal prosecutors when they considered what to do about the Senate evidence of HSBC’s laundering drug money, and colluding with the Al Rajhi Bank in Saudi Arabia to help finance al-Qaeda. And, the person who was in charge of negotiating the sentence and making the decision about whether to criminally prosecute, is Loretta Lynch, who was and still remains the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

And Loretta Lynch is now President Obama’s nominee for Attorney General. She basically cut — I wouldn’t even call it a sweetheart deal — it was far worse than that. You had bankers involved in poisoning the streets of the United States with cocaine, with heroin, with marijuana, who were basically given a free pass to stay out of jail by the woman who is now being put forward to be the top law enforcement official in the United States. This is typical of this Obama Administration. The President lied to the families, the victims of 9/11, and told them that he would declassify the 28 pages. He never had any intention of doing that, and that’s why six years into his Presidency, it hasn’t happened. Every major banker that has been subject to criminal prosecution was given the same kind of deferred prosecution deal, and the banks paid fines that were tiny fractions of the profits they made. HSBC paid $1.9 billion in fines for the issue of the drug-money laundering that they carried out over a period of decades.

So to the average citizen who’s impoverished, $1.9 billion sounds like a lot of money, and sounds like a big punishment. But fact, it’s chump change compared to the massive profits that HSBC makes off of the illegal drug trade, the profits they make off of evading taxes for wealthy citizens of every country in the world. So, this is what we’re dealing with. The entire international banking system, when you get to the level of the too-big-to-fail banks, is one gigantic criminal syndicate. And, you know, if you’re going to deal with the Mafia, if you’re going to borrow money from the Mafia, don’t expect that you’re going to be able to walk on two legs for very long, if you’re lucky.

And that’s what you’re dealing with, with the current leadership of this too-big-to-fail banking system, centered in the trans-Atlantic region, particularly centered on Wall Street and in London. The only reason that I’m not standing here for three hours, going through case by case of HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, is because there are no serious Federal investigations that have gone on, and there have been no criminal prosecutions. Going all the way back to the savings and loan scandal that was not all that long ago — the late ’80s, early ’90s — over 1,000 bankers, small-scale bankers, none of them big Wall Street players, went to jail for criminal fraud that’s small scale compared to what’s been going on on behalf of these major international banks. So no wonder they are in a desperate plight right now.

Their gambling debts are coming due, they’re unpayable, and now you’ve got a very large, and very appropriate target: You have HSBC, the oldest and biggest dope-money laundering bank on this planet, and HSBC is now being exposed for such a wide range of criminality, that anybody who dares to be involved in the cover-up is going to go down. So the Senate has indeed temporarily put a hold on Loretta Lynch’s nomination for Attorney General. Today, there were interviews with a number of the HSBC whistleblowers. Senator Vitter has submitted nine questions to Loretta Lynch, all pertaining to her role in the decision to not criminally prosecute HSBC and until those questions are answered fully, basically she’s not going to be put up to a vote for her nomination.

So this is an issue that is now right in the forefront, and it’s very much related to what’s going on in Greece and in other places around the world. The simple fact of the matter is, that not only is the Greek debt completely illegitimate and unpayable and it should {not} be paid, but now we’ve got a clear picture of the international criminal banking syndicate that imposed that debt in the first place. You’re dealing with a global, white collar mafia and that system has got to be shut down if there is any prospect of both avoiding war and having a serious economic recovery in the trans-Atlantic region.

JASON ROSS: All right, this’ll be the third and final question for the evening and it’s about Ukraine. Last weekend the Normandy Four, meaning Russian President Putin, Ukrainian Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Hollande, they hammered out an agreement in Minsk with provisions for a ceasefire, and a multistep program towards calming down the situation in eastern Ukraine towards a survivable peace. The ageement’s for the most part been largely upheld, thanks in part to the continuing efforts of those leaders, however, some of the directly Nazi groupings in Ukraine, supporters of Bandera, the Right Sector, etc., they’ve warned that they will not accept the Minsk agreement and that they will continue to fight, independent of whatever Kiev may say.

LaRouche warned last weekend that,

Other leading voices also spoke to the urgency of ending the threat of war. For example Edward Lozansky, the President of American University of Moscow, a signer to the BRICS petition of the Schiller Institute, he coauthored an op-ed stating that the Minsk agreement provides,
“a brief, fragile window of opportunity for the world to step back from the brink of a nuclear confrontation that would destroy the entire northern hemisphere of the Earth.”

And he concluded by warning that,
“It is not too late for the voices of reason and sanity to be heard. But the alarms on the Doomsday Clock are already ringing.”

Another voice, our former ambassador to the Soviet Union, James Matlock, he spoke last Wednesday at the National Press Club about the incredible danger of full thermonuclear war with Russia. He said: “As I see debates now as to whether the U.S.should supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, I wonder what is going on.

He said,

He detailed some recent history. He said, after 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to call, he gave support to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, he gave Russia’s vote at the United Nations, he removed a base in Cuba. The U.S., in return, walked out of the ABM Treaty, which he said was “the basis of all out arms control treaties.” NATO was expanded, and ABM systems are being placed in eastern Europe, supposedly aimed at Iran, which of course, is nonsense. Matlock contrasted Reagan’s attitude of respect for the people of the Soviet Union, and the need to cooperate for the good of the world to avoid extinction, to the last 15 years of a reckless push for unipolarity.

Now, on Ukraine, over the weekend, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnynk appeared on a very popular German television where he was questioned about some photos. It was a photo of a band of SS rune-bearing, swastika-displaying thugs, being part of the Ukrainian security structure. The ambassador, a little bit flustered, said that such forces, as the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, etc., he said they were needed to fight against the Russian army. (Sound familiar?) And he said that there’s no need to worry, because these forces are under the control of Kiev. The host said, are you willing to bet your right arm, that they’re not doing anything bad? So in this whole situation, the question has been posed: Will Russia feel the need to react preemptively, before the balance is totally overthrown? So, I’d like to ask you a few questions: First, if you could comment and help us make sense of this, and help us understand what can we do? How can we internalize this threat, and act on it in a useful way? What do we do?

STEINBERG: In the discussion with Mr. LaRouche and Mrs. LaRouche this afternoon, we went back to the fact that you’ve got to pull this whole picture that we’ve been discussing all evening tonight, together. Let’s not forget that the trigger event for the coup d’état, the Nuland Nazi coup d’état that was carried out between November 2013 and February 2014 in Kiev, the so-called Maidan revolution, was triggered by the fact that the legitimately elected President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, came to the conclusion, in fact a very wise conclusion, that it was a bad idea for Ukraine to sign the Eastern partnership agreement wedding it economically to a European Union that we now see very clearly is completely bankrupt, is collapsing economically, and is sitting on top of an absolutely enormous, criminal, unpayable financial bubble. It was when Ukraine refused to be drawn in, to the European Union/NATO web that was to be used against Russia, that all Hell broke loose.

And so, we’re dealing with a situation right now, where there are very few legitimate options left. Right now, because of the fact that President Obama has played the role that he’s played, and has allowed Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, to run wild and to give full U.S. backing to these neo-Nazis from the Right Sector, from the Svoboda Party, who are now part of militias that are running rampant all over Ukraine, under control not of the government, but under the control of oligarchs, who’ve been in some cases appointed regional governors, you’ve got a situation where the role of the Obama administration in fomenting this situation, means that the only way that you can genuinely have a real, serious war-avoidance, war-prevention policy, is by bringing this administration to an end, by removing President Obama from office.

Or, at least curtailing his ability to operate, to such an extent that he serves out the next few years as literally a captive in the White House. Now, the first step in that is that Nuland has got to be removed. She’s got to be taken away from the position where she can run around and carry out the kinds of provocations that she carried out. She was running around the Maidan square with these neo-Nazis openly celebrating the overthrow of a legitimately elected government. She boasted in December of 2013 at the National Press Club in Washington, that the U.S. had so far spend $5 billion, in efforts at regime change in Ukraine, and now they were all coming to fruition.

So unless you remove some of the major sources of the danger of war, then that situation is going to persist. It’s the bankruptcy of the British Wall Street, trans-Atlantic financial system that’s creating the desperation that’s driving this situation towards a war. Now, what has happened in the recent weeks, what led to the agreements that were reached a week ago in Minsk, is the fact that certain European leaders, initially Hollande in France and later, begrudgingly, Merkel in Germany, at least came to realize that the consequences of continuing with these U.S.-led provocations against Russia, was a danger of exactly the kind of thermonuclear extinction that Ambassador Jack Matlock warned about last week at the Press Club. So, we’re at a critical moment right now. There was an agreement reached between Hollande, Merkel, Putin, and Poroshenko, that they would work to de-escalate the immediate crisis on the ground inside eastern Ukraine.

Almost instantly, the Right Sector battalions, the armed paramilitary battalions of this neo-Nazi apparatus, the legacy of Stepan Bandera-Hitler collaboration during World War II, immediately said, we reject the ceasefire, we will continue to fight at all costs. So you’ve got a difficult situation on the ground, but you’ve got the four heads of state recognizing the immediate danger and the potential consequences of a further escalation, leading towards a general war and a thermonuclear war. So this is an extremely fragile situation, and you’ve got to be willing to take decisive actions. President Obama has provided a recipe of impeachable crimes, that he could be brought down for. Just this past week, when the Europeans were struggling to deal with this crisis in Greece, Jack Lew, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, put in a call to top officials of the Greek government and directly threatened them, that if they did not capitulate to the demands of the Troika and the Germans and others in Europe, to continue to go with the murderous policy of austerity, real genocide policy, that there would be a price to pay coming from the U.S.

You’ve got Obama, basically providing aid and comfort through Victoria Nuland, to outright neo-Nazis. You’ve got the crimes of the illegal wars that were carried out from Libya onward, that were not approved by Congress. So now, finally, big deal, President Obama is actually going to Congress to get authorization, after the fact, for what’s going on in Iraq and Syria. So all of these things are right there, on the table. The American people are to a very large extent, clueless, about the magnitude of the danger that the world is facing, because we’ve gone through four successive Presidential terms, two under Bush and Cheney, and now almost two full terms under Obama, in which the United States has been a driving factor towards a global confrontation that could very well go thermonuclear around this Ukraine crisis. So you have the European leaders frankly scared to death, because they’re on the front lines of a conflict that could lead to nuclear Armageddon.

And don’t forget, there are large numbers of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons throughout western Europe right now, and they are being modernized and updated, with longer-range capability, with greater accuracy, so Europe is not immune from a thermonuclear conflict involving the U.S. and Russia: All of mankind is wiped out if this happens. And the Ukraine situation, like the Greek situation, are just indicative of the fact that the existing trans-Atlantic system has reached a point of absolute breakdown. And if the desperate people in charge of that situation have their way, they will potentially bring down the entire mankind with them. You have the alternative in the BRICS. You have the alternative in the trans-Atlantic region to align with the BRICS. But certain very critical things have to happen right up front:

We cannot have another two years of an Obama Presidency, with any credible expectation of coming out of that process alive. So the starting point right now, immediately, on Ukraine, is force the removal of Victoria Nuland. Wash the U.S. hands of collusion with neo-Nazis that are on the cutting edge of trying to provoke world war. And by doing that and by taking other steps to either remove Obama from office, or greatly restrict his mobility, essentially rendering him powerless as President for the duration of his term in office, we can avoid war. If we don’t do those simple things, if we don’t do those critical things, then there is all bets off for the survival of mankind over this next immediate period ahead.

OGDEN: Thank you very much. Let me just say in conclusion, if you haven’t seen it yet, the live coverage that LaRouche PAC did of the Schiller Institute conference up in New York City last week, which featured a keynote address by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, very thorough, very important, this is archived on the LaRouche PAC website, and we encourage you to watch it in full, but also circulate it as widely as you can. This is part of the ongoing “Manhattan project” of the LaRouche movement focussing on New York City.

Also last night Helga LaRouche was featured on the LaRouche PAC activists’ call, which a weekly telephone conference call of close activists from all over the United States with LaRouche PAC, and one of her major points of emphasis was to continue the circulation of the petition which was mentioned earlier this in broadcast “The United States and Europe Must Have the Courage To Reject Geopolitics and Collaborate with the BRICS.” This petition continues to circulate and accumulate signatures, very high-level, prominent individuals from both inside the United States and internationally, and it is having an effect, especially, particularly from the standpoint that this represents a growing voice of sanity from within the United States, that nations around the world can see.

But we need you, who are watching this broadcast, to do everything you can to continue the circulation of this, continue doing outreach on your own part, reaching out to people from all different communities, universities, business communities, diplomatic circles, politicians, everybody that you can think of, and use this petition to mass effect. So that’s what I wanted to say in conclusion to our broadcast. Thank you very much for tuning in. I’d like to thank Jeffrey Steinberg for joining us here, tonight, and thank you very much, Jason, for being a part of our show. So please stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good night.