Category: Aggregated

In the days leading up to the Jan. 8-9 China-Celac Forum ministerial meeting in Beijing, government officials from 30 Latin American and Caribbean nations met with their Chinese counterparts to sign many bilateral agreements covering infrastructure development, industry, energy, tourism, science, and technology, among other areas.

In addition, the four heads of state who make up the Celac leadership “quartet”—Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Costa Rica’s Luis Solis, and Bahamas’s premier Perry Christie, all were official state guests of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and signed important bilateral agreements. Highlights include:

Venezuela: China will make $20 bn. available in investments in Venezuela, which is intended to help shore up Venezuela’s economy, battered by the oil price plunge and an offensive by the imperial Project Democracy apparatus to destabilize that nation. In a meeting between Xi and Nicolas Maduro, Xi said he hoped Venezuela would access the bilateral financing mechanisms already existing in the China-Venezuela High-Level Mixed Committee to channel more funds to energy, mining, agriculture, and industry. Maduro also invited China to participate in the next phase of bilateral cooperation and to explore new areas of cooperation, such as industry, energy, science-technology, and financing. Maduro met the heads of the China Development Bank and Bank of China, among other agencies, to “strengthen a series of financing deals approved on this visit,” Maduro said.

Ecuador: In meetings with Xi Jinping and other government officials, Rafael Correa, who will now take up the post of Celac’s President Pro-Tem for the coming year, concretized a $7.5 bn. credit line from China. Addressing the inaugural session today, Correa stressed that relations between the region and China will help bring about changes in the global order.

“The current order is not only unjust, but in many examples immoral. Some arbitrary organizations are not fair and have been used as political tools for a long period of time,” said Correa. He noted that China has huge cash resources, while Celac nations have both the natural and human resources China needs. Many agreements were signed.

Costa Rica: Agreements were signed between Xi and President Luis Solis in economic technology, special economic zones, animal inspection and quarantine, cultural exchange, and tourism, and they announced the creation of the China-Costa Rica Strategic Partnership of Equality, Mutual Trust and Win-Win Cooperation. Solis, who is an enthusiastic proponent of the inter-oceanic Nicaragua Canal, indicated his eagerness to receive Chinese investment to develop Costa Rica’s industry and infrastructure.

Bahamas: PM Perry Christie signed agreements for cooperation in infrastructure, investments, trade, culture, tourism, and sports.

The danger of general war—thermonuclear war—against Russia, coming from the Wall Street-City of London looming bankruptcy blowout, is clearly driving desperate actions from throughout that oligarchical apparatus. This has been reflected in the past 24 hours on both the financial and strategic warfare fronts.

First and foremost was the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris. This is a harbinger of further terrorist attacks of this nature, Lyndon LaRouche warned on Thursday.

“This is coming from London, and is part of the British drive for war. Their policy is massive population reduction, and the strategic deployment of terrorist assets must be understood in this context.”

LaRouche warned that the British will play both sides of the Islam/anti-Islam orchestration.

“Terrorism is terrorism, regardless of the specific label,” LaRouche asserted. “This will require some very serious and competent intelligence work to defeat this looming assault.”

LaRouche added that the Paris attacks must be seen as a warning of similar actions that will erupt elsewhere. He continued,

“Do not underestimate the importance of the press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday by Sen. Bob Graham and current Reps. Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch with the 9/11 families. They nailed the Saudi—really Anglo-Saudi top-down hand behind all serious global terrorism. This is a very significant expose of the top-down nature of the real terrorist threat.”

Indeed, evidence is already coming to the surface, indicating a clear British hand behind the terrorist attacks in Paris. On Thursday night, the Daily Telegraph revealed clear links between one of the Paris attackers and Abu Hamza, a longtime jihad recruiter based out of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London. Abu Hamza was convicted in a US Federal Court last year of terrorism sponsorship, but in his trial, his defense was that he was working on behalf of MI5, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.

The same desperation driving the new wave of 9/11-style terrorism is also driving Congressional Republican leaders to bend to Wall Street’s demands for immediate guarantees of unlimited taxpayer bailout of their totally bankrupt financial bubble. At the same time, they are also, as Lyndon LaRouche warned, pressing for vicious austerity measures targeted at America’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens—through cuts in Food Stamps, Social Security Disability and Veterans benefits. This is one and the same as the British policy of radical population reduction.

LaRouche recently forecasted that, in a very short period of time, the Republican leadership in the Congress will come to be hated as much as Obama.

House Republicans, responding to the continuing terror on Wall Street of a near-term blowout, tried on Wednesday to ram through yet another Wall Street bailout law—and they were defeated by a disciplined Democratic vote. Rather than exploit their majority in the House, Republicans used a rules procedure to bypass the House Financial Services Committee and call an instant vote on HR 37, a collection of financial deregulation measures, including a further two-year extension on the July 2017 deadline for banks to sell off their collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) and the elimination of all collateral requirements on derivatives contracts. All but 35 Democrats voted “no,” and the measure was defeated by six votes (the rule requires a 2/3 majority). Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Reps. Maxine Waters and Keith Ellison, were still furious at the Obama-Jamie Dimon swindle in December, lifting the ban on FDIC bailouts of commodity futures derivatives, and even Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi mobilized Democratic opposition.

While this was a limited, but useful, rear-guard victory, it betrays the continuing Wall Street hysteria, and opens the door for Lyndon LaRouche’s genuine solution: Bankrupt Wall Street by implementing his Four Cardinal Laws, starting with the reinstatement of the original Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.

In a similar act of desperation, Ukraine Prime Minister (Victoria Nuland’s “our man Yats”) Yatsenyuk was in Berlin on Thursday, meeting with German Chancellor Merkel and pressing for further confrontation with Russia, and particularly with President Putin. While French President Hollande has been pushing back against the continuing targeting of Russia and pressing for the Normandy Group of heads of state of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany to meet soon in Khazakstan to resolve the Ukraine crisis, Yatsenyuk delivered an in-your-face assault on Putin, accusing Russia of being behind the hacking into German government computers, and accusing Putin personally of deploying hordes of “bandits” into eastern Ukraine. Merkel made no effort to push back against Yatsenyuk’s outrageous provocations.

Back before the New Year, LaRouche was already warning that the very first days and weeks of 2015 would be a showdown moment on a global scale. Events of the last 48 hours illustrate just how accurate his warnings have been.

Democrats succeeded in stopping yet another Wall Street scam Jan. 7, when the new Republican leadership in the House tried to ram through a bill, HR 37, to postpone for another two years a part of the Volcker Rule which requires banks to get rid of their collatoralized loan obligations (CLOs, bundled securitized corporate debt). The Federal Reserve in December unilaterally extended the deadline for banks to dump their CLOs from 2015 until 2017. HR 37 would have extended that deadline until July 2019!

The Republican leadership brought the bill to the floor under special rules allowing it to go through without amendments, even though that process requires a 2/3 vote rather than a simple majority. They assumed they had enough Democrat votes, as they did before Christmas in passing the removal of Dodd-Frank Section 716, which had prohibited banks from dealing in derivatives with FDIC protected money. But Jan Shakowsky, Pelosi, and others mobilized to stop HR 37 by 6 votes, to the shock of the GOP leaders.

Only 35 Democrats supported the legislation. Huffington Post notes that in the past “pro-Wall Street bills often passed with 100 or more Democratic supporters,” showing an anti-Wall Street mood now taking hold. One Republican voted against: Walter Jones, of course.

The Huffington Post notes that “between 94 and 96 percent of the domestic CLO market is held by banks with at least $50 billion in assets, according to federal regulators, who value the market at between $84 billion and $105 billion.”

Obama rose to the occasion, showing his ability to lie outrageously. White House spokeswoman Jennifer Friedmann said Obama opposed the bill: “The President has been clear about his opposition to legislation that would weaken key consumer protections and provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act” — this, after Obama joined hands with Boehner and Jamie Dimon to scrap Dodd Frank’s Section 716 last month!

News media have now identified the three terrorists who killed a dozen people in a well-organized assault on the Paris offices of the neocon satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. They are Cherif and Said Kouachi, brothers both in their mid-30s, and Hamyd Mourad, 18. Mourad turned himself in to police late on Wednesday evening, but the search is still underway for the Kouachi brothers. Mourad claims that he was in school at the time of the Paris attacks and turned himself in to avoid being killed in a police raid.

French authorities have provided some details on Cherif Kouachi, who has been on French intelligence and police radar screens since 2005, when he was detained while attempting to leave France for Syria and Iraq, to join Al Qaeda in Iraq to fight against the American occupation. He was detained in jail for a period of time, then released. He was convicted in 2008 of being part of a terrorist recruiting cell in France on behalf of AQI. Though sentenced to three years in jail, he served no time at all, according to news reports on CNN late Thursday afternoon. A judge reduced his sentence from 3 years to 18 months, and he was allowed to go free, based on time served. This lenient treatment for a member of a terrorist recruiting cell, run by a well-known jihadist preacher named Farid Benyettou, raises questions about whether the younger Kouachi brother made a deal with authorities.

But far more serious “questions” were raised by a report appearing late on Thursday in the Daily Telegraph, identifying Cherif Kouachi as a protege of Abu Hamza, the Algerian-born jihadist recruiter who operated with impunity for years out of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London. Last year Abu Hamza was convicted of terrorist activities in a Federal Court in New York. At his trial, his key defense was that he worked for MI5, while recruiting jihadists in London. He is to be sentenced soon.

Late news reports in the New York Times reported that the older brother, Said Kouachi, had been in Yemen in 2011, trained at Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula camps in small arms and unit tactics.

An American intelligence official told the Times that the brothers were on American no-fly lists for a long time.

A Washington source told EIR on Wednesday that international intelligence agencies had been caught by surprise by the Paris attacks, because there was no “chatter” on any jihadist communications links about a pending attack. However, the Times reported that a recent issue of “Inspire” magazine of AQAP had called explicitly for attacks on Western targets and had singled out Charlie Hebdo’s editor Stephane Charbonnier for attack under the headline “A Bullet a Day Keeps the Infidel Away—Defend the Prophet Muhammad.” Josh Rogin reported in Bloomberg Thursday that another jihadist website had called for attacks on the home front in a French language posting under the headline “What Are You Waiting For?”