Category: Aggregated

China hand Orville Schell, now running the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, ran a diatribe against Xi Jinping in the Wall Street Journal today, gloating that the market crash will force him to “temper Beijing’s current tendency toward arrogance, rigidity, belligerence, and diplomatic hectoring.” Posing a false construct of Xi trying to “seize and use power—to have China’s weaker neighbors genuflect and have the world respond more compliantly” (never mentioning, of course, the BRICS or the massive China-centered development projects around the world), Schell fantasizes that the market collapse in China is a “jarring wake-up call” which will force Xi to stop challenging the U.S.

Most importantly, Schell threatens a color revolution: “Yet the most important fallout may not be financial but psychological. In the China equation, a crack in the edifice of trust can corrode confidence in the party rule and threaten the legitimacy of the state—one of the leadership’s biggest fears.”

Lyndon LaRouche noted that Schell’s hysteria demonstrates the total panic on Wall Street, with Obama trying once again to bail out the bankrupt corpse of the Too Big To Fail banks, but also intent on dragging the rest of the world down with them.

Gianandrea Gaiani, an Italian military expert and the editor-in-chief of the magazine Analisi Difesa, in an interview with Sputnik, said that “There is no unified Europe,” pointing to wide differences over the Greek crisis, Ukraine, Russian sanctions, and the refugee disaster.

“There are many Europes,” Gaiani said. “There are the countries of the former Warsaw pact, which are concerned about the Russian threat due to their historic analogies with the clashes between Russia and Germany. There is Western Europe: France, Germany and Italy, which are dreaming of restoring their important relations with Russia without any embargos or sanctions.

“But these countries don’t have any political will to stand against the U.S…. Each European country is trying to play its own game, pretending to be a friend to the U.S., but pursuing its own interests with Russia.” He calls for Europe to unite with Russia and ignore U.S. objections.

In regard to the war on the Islamic State, Gaiani said: “I don’t see any desire from the U.S. to fight against IS. It’s ridiculous that they deploy their F-22s to Europe to fight against some Russian aircraft which flew somewhere above Lithuania and play Cold War. Instead, they would be better off sending more of those aircraft to the Middle East to fight against IS…. I don’t see any will, neither among Americans, nor Europeans. They are eager to convince us that our enemy is Russia. Thus I don’t see any capability of fighting IS, as there is no desire to do that. Now they are talking about the peacekeeping mission—the Blue Helmets in Libya. Nobody is going to bomb those terrorists who have already settled only 400 km away from our borders and threaten Italy directly.

“I think that Russia is an ideal partner in this conflict and its role in the coalition in the fight against IS is a serious one. Unlike the West, Russia wants to bring those countries which really fight IS into this—the governments of Syria and Iraq. Russians would have been ideal partners not because they are better than Americans, but because Russia fully acknowledges that the IS won’t stop in the Middle East, it would feed jihadists in the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Russian republics in the Caucasus. Russia, like us, is at the forefront of the fight against IS and it is in our common interest to stop it.” 

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

More and more people worldwide are profoundly worried over what only a few prominent people are saying publicly: NATO’s confrontation with Russia and China is ongoing, and set to escalate, so that a global thermonuclear war is almost inevitable, unless we dramatically change our political course. The worldwide stock market collapse which followed “Black Monday” wiped out around $5 trillion, which then almost immediately flowed again into the pockets of one gambler or another, after the central banks set their electronic printing presses into motion in grand style.

The ultimate meltdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system has been delayed in the short term by a gigantic dose of “quantitative easing”—the unconditional throwing about of “helicopter money,” as former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke called it. But it is in this impending financial crash of Wall Street and the City of London that the source of the acute war danger lies, and not in anything that Russia or China has done.

“Russia is preparing for a conflict with NATO, and NATO is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia,” says a recent study by the “European Leadership Network,” which comprises former European and Russian defense ministers and military experts. Indeed, the modernization of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, the establishment of U.S. BMD systems in Eastern Europe, and NATO’s first-strike doctrine permit no other conclusion. Russia and China in turn have reacted with the modernization of their own nuclear capacities and the development of supersonic missiles, which would knock out the NATO systems. If this war were to happen, there is a very high probability that mankind will be largely or totally obliterated.

The heart-wrenching refugee crisis which is currently playing out in Europe, and which has resulted from a series of wars based on lies, in Southwest Asia and North Africa, should be a warning shot across the bow for the whole world, that the entire system of the international community of peoples has collapsed. Every single one of the tens of thousands of people who have already drowned in the Mediterranean; every single one of the hundreds of thousands who are currently on the run, only to be potentially exposed to violence by right-wing terrorists; and every single one of the millions who have been uprooted and are now refugees, represents a thundering indictment of those responsible for these war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A New Direction

Where is the institution that can still intervene, virtually at the last minute? Where is the world court before which this great crime can be avenged? Are we, as mankind, collectively able to deflect from a course which is threatening to lead to our own destruction?

If there is any such institution at all, then it is the upcoming General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. A large number of heads of state and government will participate in this meeting from September 24 to October 1. Manhattan, during this time, will be the place where the fate of mankind will be debated before the eyes of the entire world and a vision for a better future can be agreed upon—or, to put it another way: The precondition will be set for whether we will have a future at all.

There is a solution to this existential crisis, but it must be located in a totally new paradigm; it must restore mankind’s identity as a creative species, and it must consciously herald a new era for mankind.

Lyndon LaRouche insisted in an emergency appeal issued August 26, that only the immediate introduction of Glass-Steagall banking separation—exactly as Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced it in 1933—can protect the real economy from the effects of the imminent financial meltdown. Wall Street is hopelessly bankrupt. Therefore an all-out mobilization is required to induce Congress to preemptively shut down Wall Street by passing the Glass-Steagall law. Because the crisis is global, the Glass-Steagall standard must be established internationally—i.e., the global financial system must be put through an orderly bankruptcy reorganization and a credit system established, in order to restore the necessary capital-intensive production in the real economy.

The total indebtedness of the global financial system, an estimated $2 quadrillions, of which around 90% is outstanding derivative contracts, is even less sustainable than Greece’s debt. Only if the casino economy is shut down—that is, the virtual and toxic part of the banking sector cancelled and the section of the banking system serving the real economy protected—can there be a recovery of the physical economy, thereby halting the dynamic toward war.

The Groundwork Has Been Laid

The UN General Assembly is probably the last opportunity for resolving upon such a reorganization. It is perhaps an historical coincidence that the assembly is occurring in Manhattan, and thus in the place where the first Treasury Secretary of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, established the American System of Economy and the principle of the National Bank. It was precisely in this Hamiltonian tradition that Franklin D. Roosevelt led America out of the Depression in the 1930s, with the Glass-Stegall law and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. This was also the model by which the Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau (Reconstruction Loan Corporation) rebuilt Germany out of the rubble after World War II, and made possible the German economic miracle.

Such an economic miracle is needed by many regions of the world today, and its realization is within our grasp. Chinese President Xi Jinping, since 2013, has been putting on the agenda the proposal for building the New Silk Road as a new model for economic cooperation among nations with a perspective of “win-win cooperation.”

Since no later than the Summit of the BRICS nations in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2014, an unprecedented dynamic of cooperation has developed among the BRICS nations, and those of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and even some Europeans, for the realization of long-overdue infrastructure projects: the Nicaragua Canal, a transcontinental railway between Brazil and Peru, several Pacific-to-Atlantic tunnels between Argentina and Chile, extensive cooperation in nuclear energy between the BRICS nations and developing countries, and joint space projects—to name a few. There has been an explosion of development, which had been blocked for decades. The construction of the New Suez Canal in only one year is symptomatic of the new spirit.

What is now demanded of the heads of state at the UN General Assembly, is their capacity to present a vision for mankind. The groundwork has been laid. The construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road—“One Belt, One Road”—and its integration with the Eurasian Union is in full swing. Many states in Asia, Latin America, and Africa are already advancing their development through cooperation with the BRICS countries. All the world’s problems could be solved, if this UN General Assembly succeeds in winning the European nations and the United States to cooperate with the BRICS countries, to build up the regions of the world that are currently breaking apart under conditions of war, starvation, water shortages, epidemics, and terrorism.

If this UN General Assembly succeeds, in the framework of the New Silk Road, which is becoming a World Land-Bridge linking peoples together, in adopting a common development perspective, primarily for Southwest Asia and Africa, but also for Central and South America—a perspective for which Russia, China, India, Iran, Egypt, Germany, France, Italy, other European nations, and the United States work together—then it would be relatively simple to overcome terrorism, so that people in these regions have a real perspective for their future, namely to rebuild their states economically. But also, therein lies the only chance for giving the people who are now fleeing from war and terror, hope in their homelands, and for stopping the new migration of many millions of people into an overburdened Europe or America.

Geopolitics, and the idea of solving conflicts through wars, which, in the age of thermonuclear weapons, will lead to the extermination of the human race, must be replaced with the idea of the common aims of mankind, for whose realization all nations on this planet must participate. If the heads of government and other representatives succeed in inspiring their nations with the spirit that they must now, at the moment of the greatest danger for the future survival of mankind, dare to step outside the well-worn pathways of the oligarchical rules of the game, and come to an agreement on the great mega-project for the future of mankind, then we can be confident in the courage to solve all, really all, the problems of today, and begin a new era of mankind—an era in which mankind will be truly human and bring our laws and activity here on Earth into harmony with the laws of the order of creation, the Cosmos.

Only in that way will we survive as a species. And by that standard will the heads of state meeting in Manhattan be measured. Because if mankind is going to have a history, it will be remembered either as a monsters, or as extraordinary individuals, who succeeded, at the decisive moment, to realize a passionate, tender love for mankind, and usher in a new phase of evolution.

Sign the petition: Call to Stop the Immediate Danger of World War III

This appeal was translated from German.