Join us for a live, hour-plus Q&A session with Lyndon LaRouche, Thursday night at 9PM Eastern. Each week Mr. LaRouche engages with activists, supporters and people just like you to examine the fundamental issues and challenges underlying the social, economic and political turmoil of our day. Don’t miss this week: Glass-Steagall in the Senate, the Murder of Greece and more.

NASA: “One of the final images taken before New Horizons made it’s closest approach to Pluto on 15 July 2015.”

At 7:49 a.m. EDT July 14th, the New Horizons spacecraft will make its closest approach to Pluto—a fly-by that takes it a mere 7,700-odd miles from the surface of the dwarf planet—ending a 3 billion-mile journey, that took 9.5 years to make. Until now, the most sophisticated ground-based telescopes, and even the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, only revealed a fuzzy ball. Everything we will learn about Pluto will be new. Residing in the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of the planets, Pluto is the largest in a class of trans-Neptunian objects, which followed a different evolutionary path than the eight bodies now considered as the Solar System’s planets. Although it had been proposed that this icy cold and dark world would be featureless, the opposite is being revealed.

Over the past week, as New Horizons came closer to Pluto, scientists could discern dark spots and dark features, indicating an active geological past; they noted that they were able to observe nitrogen escaping from the atmosphere of Pluto from farther away than they had expected, which could indicate the source is stronger, or the escape from Pluto is stronger; they discovered that there are methane and hydrogen in Pluto’s polar ice cap; and that the small body is actually larger than they had been able to see from a distance, through its atmosphere. These are observations and hints. The measurements from the suite of seven scientific instruments on board New Horizons, which will be delivered to Earth over the next year, should help provide some answers, and raise more questions.

Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, which is half the size of Pluto, are considered a two-planet system, as they rotate around a common center of gravity, “like a pair of figure skaters, clasping hands.” Charon is, itself, turning out to be a world with intriguing characteristics, including craters, a dark north polar region, and a chasm in its southern hemisphere that is longer and deeper than the Grand Canyon. Fourteen minutes after skimming above Pluto, New Horizons will zip past Charon, and then look back. Both Pluto and Charon will then be observed from the dark side, opposite the Sun-facing side, as New Horizons proceeds to farther reaches.

Although the Pluto fly-by will be just before 8 a.m., the spacecraft will not start sending data back to Earth immediately, but instead complete its scientific mission. Then it will interrupt its science observations for 15 minutes, and turn itself around to point its antenna toward Earth and send back engineering data. It takes 4.5 hours for transmissions from Pluto reach NASA’s Deep Space Network. All told, it will not be until nearly 9 p.m., that the scientists and engineers will find out if New Horizons is in good health and survived its Pluto encounter. They hope to start to have data coming back to Earth the day after the fly-by but it will be a trickle, due to the very low data rate by which it can transmit. 

The plan Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was brutalized into accepting from the country’s creditors, has created a huge popular backlash which calls into question whether the policy can be implemented. The sense of rage in the Greek population is clear. Former diplomat, and member of the EPAM People’s United Front, Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos told Russian broadcast agency RT that the agreement was unacceptable and could not be implemented. He said he fears that the situation could get violent.

The defense minister and leader of Tsipras’ coalition partner Independent Greeks Party, Panos Kammenos, spoke to Reuters after meeting with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras: “‘The prime minister of this country was faced with a coup staged by Germany and other countries, this deal introduced many new issues … we cannot agree with it.'”

Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis denounced the agreement in no uncertain terms. He told Australian Radio:

Comparing the agreement to the 1967 military coup d’état, he said,

Varoufakis revealed that he had drafted very preliminary plans in case of a forced Grexit, but it was feared that once known, the plans would become a self-fulfilling prophecy playing into the hands of those who want Greece out.

There is opposition being expressed throughout Tsipras’ Syriza Party; it is reported that 32 Syriza MPs, including four ministers, have distanced themselves from the agreement.

Labor Minister Panos Skourletis, a former spokesman for Syriza, told state television the government will need “borrowed votes from the opposition” in order to pass the new austerity measures demanded by creditors. Kathimerini quotes him as saying,  “I cannot see how we can avoid elections in 2015. … It’s unnatural: We believe in something different than what we’ve been forced to sign with a gun pointed to our head.

The Iskra website, which speaks for Syriza’s Left Platform led by Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, charged that “After 17 hours of ‘negotiations,’ the leaders of Eurozone states reached a humiliating agreement for Greece and the Greek people,” as a “debt colony” in a “German-supervised EU.”

The Syriza parliamentary faction is to meet Today.

Yesterday was a day of shame for Europe, said Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who as Schiller Institute Founder has led the campaign to bring Europe into the BRICS-allied nations. The EU now exists only as a monstrous construct, Zepp-LaRouche said in a conference call yesterday; she cited Financial Times senior columnist Wolfgang Munchau, who wrote on Monday morning, “Greece’s creditors have destroyed the Eurozone.”

The European Union “plan” for Greece is yet another criminal, evilly intended, and grossly incompetent action by what passes for the leaders of Europe. After cutting off all liquidity to the Greek banking system by European Central Bank action, in effect collapsing Greece’s payments system, it forced a looting agreement on Greece that will directly seize its infrastructure and banks, impose deeper austerity to dramatically worsen depression which is already killing and sickening large numbers, and force a regime change. The economy has already collapsed by 25%, unemployment is 27%, youth unemployment 65%, etc.

This insane and virtually Nazi “solution” for Greece is most dramatically demonstrated by its intention to increase Greece’s absolutely unpayable debt pile—already at over 350 billion Euros and 180% of its Gross Domestic Product—by another 86 billion Euros to 225% of GDP! In addition, according to Eurogroup president Joeren Diysselbloem yesterday, the plan will take “airplanes, airports, infrastructures, and most certainly banks,” and put them in a “fund” to be sold off under control of the European Commission, for Greece’s creditors, from Germany to the vulture funds.

During the Nazi occupation of Greece in WWII, Hitler compelled a “forced loan” from Greece to Nazi Germany — still unrepaid. Now Chancellor Merkel compels “forced payments” of unpayable debts, which arose from a massive 2010-12 bailout of London and European banks.

This morning’s “plan” is based on a huge public lie, attempting to claim that just because that debt is unpayable, does not mean any of it should be written down.

The document reads:

The truth is that the London-centered megabanks are bankrupt despite the massive bailouts, are deep in trillions of euros of derivatives bets on the debts of Europe’s superindebted countries, and therefore will not stand for any debt writedown. That is why those debts are unpayable; the only way out is Glass-Steagall reorganization of those banks to let the speculative units fail. The debt writedowns could occur, as they did for Germany in 1953 to launch its “Wirtschaftswunder.”

EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche said again today: “The claims against Greece are fake, The British Empire institutions issued fraudulent debt to bail out banks, and said Greece owed it! These guys are really Nazis.”

The new “plan” calls for a series of tax increases including raising the value added tax, reforming pensions and eliminating supplements for the poorest pensioners, and labor reforms. It calls for the establishment of a 50 billion Euro fund comprised of state assets slated for privatization. This is despite the fact that the International Monetary Fund in the recent debt sustainability report stat that such a figure is pure fantasy.

These measures all have to passed as laws — laws reviewed in advance by “European institutions” — by the Greek Parliament by Wednesday, July 15. Until then the European Central Bank will not restart even emergency liquidity operations to the Greek banks, which remain closed.

In a statement released after the end of the talks Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said the deal was extremely tough, but that it was agreed upon to prevent the “financial asphyxiation and the collapse of the financial system—this was planned to the last detail — having recently been designed to perfection, and in the process of being implemented.”

But as noted, this asphyxiation will continue, as blackmail, at least until after the Parliament legislates the “plan.”