by Tony Papert

“When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships.”—Kepler

We’re looking at international operations. International factors are the most significant for us right now. Local reactions may be more limited.

Nations worldwide want to join, and will join with China in the long-term mission of mapping the moon, around China’s breakthrough mission to the far side of the Moon in 2018. The Moon is the necessary stepping-stone to all of space. As Krafft Ehricke said: “If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, he would have given man a moon.” But how could anyone doubt that the United States must be fully involved in this process, by which mankind’s future, even generations ahead, is being created right now, by those alive today? Indeed this is the very purpose of life. Does Obama insist that we’re not going back to the Moon? “Been there; done that?” That shows what must be done with Obama, where Obama must go and why.

The history of mankind’s space program, from its start in Germany, through all its intricate developments of the 20th Century, and on to its future in the 21st Century and far beyond, is a global issue which must be treated globally, grounded especially in the insights of its leading author, Krafft Ehricke, who worked closely with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, and fully shared their deep, total commitment.

The fuller understanding of this question in its full generality leads over into many other areas, which the poorly uneducated layman imagines he knows something about, but of which he knows nothing. Does he even know what a scientist is? Is a scientist someone who finds a better formula to represent so-called experimental results? No, not at all. And what is science?

We must have a broad understanding of mankind’s space program, its history and its future, in the kinds of broad terms in which Krafft Ehricke understood it. What are the issues which the back side of the Moon presents to us now, in terms of what the Solar system will signify for us later? We need to understand these in order to build up space policy into the future.

Continuing the study of what Krafft did during his life, first in Germany and then in the U.S., is a solid basis for future progress. The question he posed to Helga Zepp-LaRouche when he knew that he was soon to die, put all the connections together. That issue is still alive today.

More generally, we have to locate this aspect of history within the entire fabric of history. We’re not looking at just one aspect. We must take the entire compound fabric of history of the entire planet: THAT’S our responsibility. When people do that, they are forced to think that way, and they begin to produce that way.

Obama and what he represents must be removed,—by what means? We don’t know yet, but we have to dump him, or cause him to be dumped. If you don’t, you don’t know what may happen. He must be thrown out and clearly condemned, or else the possibility of saving civilization is in grave danger. He must be humiliated and eliminated from office. If we don’t, we’re in bad trouble.

We must move the process ahead; we can’t let the process control us. We have to drive the process forward and get the effect. This won’t come to you for free; you’ll have to win it.

The following speech was delivered by Schiller Institute representative Ulf Sandmark to a two-day conference in London to support the Yemeni people against the Anglo-American-Saudi imperial war. He was also interviewed for the conference, which was aired on Yemen TV.

by Ulf Sandmark, Economist, Schiller Institute, Sweden

I want to thank the organizers of this conference. I consider this a milestone conference in aiding Yemen to ascertain its sovereignty, especially as it coincided with the astounding 4 million demonstration in Sanaa yesterday. I am so impressed with the courage of the Yemeni people to risk demonstrating under the direct threat of the Anglo-American-Saudi bombardment.

It was the most heroic manifestation of the sovereignty of the Yemenite nation under its new governing council and its elected parliament. What we see, is a people who has stood up to liberate itself from the most brutal aggression. With this manifestation they have already made themselves a free people in their minds.

Yemen now could join the ongoing world revolution organized by the BRICS countries and their expanding number of allies. It is more than half the world population who have liberated themselves mentally from the Western globalist economic and military domination. The BRICS have set out to supersede the Anglo-American old world order, and started to build the world in a frantic pace. BRICS is realizing visionary infrastructure projects that was put on the agenda already by the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s and the Bandung conference. The centerpiece of these projects is the New Silk Road [Silk Road Economic Belt], connecting Eurasia overland, and the [21st Century] Maritime Silk Road, from China passing Yemen on its way to the New Suez Canal.

The BRICS does not wait. They build their own financial institutions, security organizations, infrastructure systems, industrial centers, technology and science. This means that the peace movements have a new way to stop all the geopolitical wars like the war against Yemen. We can make Europe and the U.S. join the New Silk Road project. This would make Europe and the U.S. into allies with BRICS and allies do not fight wars. The war-hawks can be bypassed and rendered impotent. At the same time, this giant project can put all our unemployed youth to produce the machines and other means necessary.

I am here to help found an international coalition to stop the war against Yemen, as we discussed yesterday in the workshop. The idea of my organization, the international Schiller Institute led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is to expand the ways to operate for peace with a policy for economic development. Building the New Silk road is the biggest peace project ever, building the peace by connecting nations in practice, physically with railroads, highways, canals and all kinds of infrastructure.

We want to supersede the geopolitical wars with a new paradigm of world relations, a multipolar world instead of the dying world under Anglo-American domination and financial bubbles. The new paradigm is formulated with the “win-win” concept of the Chinese President Xi Jinping, which is a concept for peaceful cooperation based on the revival of the wisdom of Kon Fu Tse [confucius]. It is opening the Silk Roads for a renewed dialogue of civilizations on the highest standpoint of philosophy, art and science, a dialogue where Yemen “the land of Wisdom,” will feel at home.

In only the last months, have Japan and the Philippines been recruited away from the war-hawks who have been pushing for nuclear confrontation in the South China Sea. Japan will start cooperating with the BRICS in giant projects in Russia’s Far East, in India and Indonesia. Turkey is being recruited by Russia and is stabilizing relations with Egypt, Israel, the Caucasus, the Turkish speaking Central Asia and probably with Syria. Russia also, very importantly, just blocked a new Saudi resolution in the UN Security Council against Yemen. Several Eastern European countries and also Greece are orienting to the New Silk Road and the BRICS, just like most of Africa and Ibero-America. Even here in London, the City wants to join in the Chinese currency trading and therefore there is a resistance here to those war-hawks who are risking nuclear war.

World Land-Bridge

This World Land-Bridge map describes how the New Silk Road plans to reach out to all continents. The link under Bering Strait will become a direct link between Russia and the U.S. to cement their peaceful cooperation and link the Americas to the New Silk Road. Together with the linking of Africa we will have a World Land-Bridge. And Africa can be linked both in Egypt, with Spain and Sicily, but most importantly for Yemen, under the Bab El Mandeb strait to Djibouti. This map has been compiled by the Schiller Institute out of different development and peace projects we have worked with during the last 40 years. It is part of a Special Report called The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land Bridge. This year we published the expanded Arabic translation of this report.

The Outstanding Fight For Hope in Yemen

Without hope there is no future. With a plan for the reconstruction of Yemen, the hope is made concrete to realize the potentials of the people of Yemen, its productive powers, its science and its rich heritage. The Schiller Institute is in contact with outstanding fighters in Yemen who are doing this in spite of the Anglo-American-Saudi bombardment. They have founded the Yemen Committee for the Coordination with BRICS. Each Tuesday they are courageously gathering in meetings in Sana’a to study and develop the plans for the reconstruction of Yemen.

Their leader Fouad Al-Ghaffari sent a video film as a greeting to the Schiller Institute conference in Berlin just two months ago. The video was the most moving display of courage and optimism of fighting for the highest values of mankind. I would like to end my presentation by sharing this video with you, showing his report of what they do to mobilize the hope and dignity of Yemen.

The Schiller Institute Berlin conference was deeply moved by this video and adopted the following resolution:

The conference of the Schiller Institute in Berlin on June 25-26 sends the most heartfelt greetings of support to the great nation of Yemen and the study group of Fouad Al-Ghaffari. Your courageous intellectual leadership, literally under the bombardment of satanic forces, has been an inspiration to thousands of people in the US, Latin America and Europe. We make a solemn oath to fight for the extension of the New Silk Road for the reconstruction of Yemen, so that the lives of the many men, women and children, who have been murdered, will be honored in a Renaissance of Yemen, which also will reconstruct the beautiful ancient cities and architecture. Yemen must and will become a pearl among the nations of Southwest Asia and the world very soon!

Thank you!

The policies of the European Central Bank have wrecked havoc on the entire European financial system, to the point that “the dead bank walking” Deutsche Bank and major European hedge funds are screaming for a change—before they crash and burn altogether. The Global Edition of Handelsblatt dated Aug. 23 featured an article on the consequences of the ECB’s negative interest rates and quantitative easing, quoting extensively from Deutsche Bank’s chief executive, John Cryan, who wrote a guest column on the eve of Handelsblatt’s Banking Summit in Frankfurt, which runs from Aug. 31 through Sept. 1. Cryan complained bitterly: “Monetary policy is now running counter to the aims of strengthening the economy and making the European banking system safer.” By forcing banks to pay interest on funds they deposit with the ECB, under mandatory increased reserve requirements, and by looting pensioners through the negative interest rates, Cryan charged that the ECB has made a terrible situation far worse. Cryan called for a drastic change in ECB policies, freely admitting that Deutsche Bank is going through a “painful restructuring and battling to keep the confidence of investors,” and the ECB policies are making it far more difficult.

Handelsblatt also quoted from a Cologne-based asset manager, Bert Flossbach, that central banks are “forced to resort to ever more aggressive policies to stop the financial system from collapsing, and that has made the markets totally dependent on central bank interventions.”

ECB executive board member and close Mario Draghi ally Benoit Coeure threatened that the ECB could take even more draconian actions, like further reducing negative interest rates, if governments in the eurozone don’t carry out deeper austerity measures and other “reforms.”

Hedge funds are also on the chopping block, due to the ECB’s negative interest rates. Forced to post collateral with the big European clearinghouses that manage the derivatives trade, they are now losing money on those deposits, which usually take the form of purchases of government bonds, now with negative interest rates, “which threaten to erode their main profit driver: the gap between their cost of funding and their revenue from lending,” Reuters warned Wednesday.

The panic of Deutsche Bank and some leading European hedge funds is reflective of a much deeper crisis, that goes far beyond 2008: the entire trans-Atlantic banking and financial system is drowning in worthless debt and engaging in the same gambling games that led to the 2008 blowout. And the remedies being peddled by the ECB and other central banks are accelerating the blowout.

On the eve of her Senate impeachment trial, which begins on Thursday, President Dilma Rousseff delivered the message to a “Meeting in Defense of Rights and Against the Coup” in Sao Paulo Tuesday and a similar rally in Brasilia Wednesday, that she will defend herself personally before the Senate, because the impeachment trial is a “parliamentary coup” which threatens democracy. It is also being used, she said, to impose vicious economic measures which the electorate would never support: freezing expenditures on education and health for 20 years, in violation of the Constitution; ripping up labor laws; cutting pensions and the minimum wage; and “the great privatizaton of the Nation’s wealth.”

The mood in patriotic layers of the country was expressed starkly at a “Public Act of Constitutional Resistance” held at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul on August 18, where leading legal scholars and others identified the so-called “Lava Jato” anti-corruption operation as “judicial fascism” premised on the precepts of the Nazi crown jurist, Carl Schmitt, whose purpose is to impose a colonial looting economic system upon the country, for which the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff is only the first step.

Former president of the Brazilian Lawyers Association (OAB) Marcelo Lavenere, told the overflow crowd at the Economics School auditorium, to be prepared to form a resistance movement like that which formed after the 1964 military coup, if the President is impeached. The media-driven “Lava Jato” operation, led by “pop-star” judges like Sergio Moro, is “the worst attack that Brazilian democracy has suffered in the last 100 years. It is worse than the ’64 coup,” Lavenere charged. Then we faced an enemy well-defined as an enemy, “and the military, at least, were not such sell-outs as [acting President] Michel Temer [and others] … who want to hand over all our resources to the international elites.”

Pedro Estevam Serrano, Constitutional Law Professor at Sao Paulo’s Catholic University, identified the media as the means by which the rich are being mobilized as “the rabble” who provide the social basis for “judicial facism” imposed through “Lava Jato.” Serrano, who has written a new book, “Coups and Authoritarianism in Latin America—a Brief Essay on the Judiciary as The Instrument of Exception,” cited Nazi Carl Schmitt’s theory that “the true sovereign is he who has the authority to establish the exception.” Serrano added: “who has that power today in Brazil is the judiciary.”

When President Obama rejected the idea of a single-payer Federal medical insurance program, and, instead, turned over the drafting of the Obamacare legislation to the big health insurance companies, he couldn’t imagine that the system was doomed from the start and might not survive his second term in office. But that is exactly where things stand today. Major health insurance providers, including United Healthcare and Aetna, have pulled out of most of the markets, and, according to a recent study by Kaiser Family Foundation, in five states and in a total of 664 counties around the United States, people will only have one health insurance option. And the Kaiser study was conducted before Aetna made its announcement, pulling out of Obamacare.

Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wyoming are the five states where there will be only one insurance provider available, and North Carolina and Kansas are almost down to just one company. Of the 664 single-insurer counties, 70 percent are in rural America, compounding an already collapsing health care infrastructure in these areas.

When President Obama was making his pitch for Obamacare before Congress, he told lawmakers: “My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition.”

While Tennessee is not even on the list of the states hit hardest by the pullout of big insurance companies from the Obamacare exchanges, the State Commissioner of Commerce and Insurance, Julie Mix McPeak, told the Tennessean recently that “I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse… and that all of our efforts are really focused on making sure we have as many [insurance policy] writers in the areas as possible, knowing that might be one. I’m doing everything I can to prevent a situation where that turns to zero.”Business Insider noted that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, the only statewide insurer, has asked for a whopping 62-percent increase in premiums they can charge in 2017, on top of a 36.3-percent hike already implemented this year. The other two large health insurers in Tennessee, Humana and Cigna, have both requested 40-percent premium hikes for 2017.

A week-long forum in Tehran on the “Silk Road Economic Belt” indicated great enthusiasm for this project, which is quickly catching on in the Middle East.

The conference was opened by Ahmad Mohammadi, the  head of the Iran-China Friendship Association. Mohammadi said the interaction between the two countries has long existed, but has taken new dimensions with the initiative.

“The proposal has been well received in Iran, and the Islamic republic is preparing to accept the proposal,” Mohammadi said. In order to implement the project, he said, the first step is to establish a secretariat of the project in China, adding that this can be followed by sessions of the secretariat with the representatives from the participation states.

Mohammed Reza Dashiri, the head of the international department of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said the Belt and Road is aimed at creating a friendly environment for a better neighborhood in terms of political, economical and security dimensions.

“The Islamic republic is determined to actively participate in the project, and believes that joining the plan would help the regional and international economic development,” Dahshiri said.

The China-proposed initiative could promote interaction between the Iranians and Chinese and can be a turning point with win-win venture in bilateral ties, Mohammad H. Emadi, advisor to Iran’s Agricultural Ministry, told Xinhua in an interview. The Belt and Road Initiative is “a new paradigm and a turning point in the relationship between Iran and China and among all central Asian states,” Emadi said.

“Since some financial sanctions by the West against Iran are still in place, it would be a good idea to develop mechanisms for transactions between Iran on the one hand and China and other countries involved in the initiative on the other,” said Mohsen Shariati Nia, a professor at Tehran Shahid Beheshti University. “In addition, the private sectors of both countries should engage in strategic cooperation and investment projects, so that short-term trade ties could grow into comprehensive economic interactions.” He said Iran’s role in the “Silk Road Initiative” should be more than a mere link between East and West. “Iran should play a key role as a partner of China, which will result in the strategic cooperation,” Shariati Nia said.

Concurrently with the conference, Tehran is also hosting a cultural festival called “2016 Experiencing China in Iran,” showcasing northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and featuring a photo exhibition, music and dance performances, and other cultural activities. 

Wednesday afternoon, after meeting with US Vice President Joe Biden, Turkish President Reccept Tayyip Erdogan announced that Syrian rebels, backed by Turkish artillery and tanks, took the Syrian border town of Jarabulus, on the Euphrates River, from ISIS. According to a Reuters report, the operation began at 4 AM local time, with US and Turkish air strikes against ISIS targets. The air strikes were apparently followed by the insertion of Turkish special forces into Syria and Turkish artillery strikes across the border. Turkish tanks reportedly crossed the border some hours later.

“The aim of the operation is to ensure border security and Syria’s territorial integrity while supporting the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State,” one military source told Reuters. The military operation was aimed at clearing the Turkish border of “terrorist elements,” halting a new wave of refugee flows, and delivering humanitarian aid to civilians in the region, the last significant town held by the jihadist group on the border with Turkey, state-run Anadolu Agency reported, according to Hurriyet. It also aimed at “prioritizing and supporting Syria’s territorial integrity,” it added.

The Turkish assault began hours before Biden arrived in Ankara to meet with Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. While the main agenda item for Biden’s visit is the Turkish demand for the extradition of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen for his alleged involvement in the failed July 15 coup attempt, the US relationship with the Syrian Kurdish PYD and its armed wing, the YPG, is also high on the list of Turkish concerns. Biden therefore promised that the YPG, which played a key role in the recent liberation from ISIS of Manbij, Syria, would not be allowed to stay west of the Euphrates River.

“They cannot and will not — under no circumstances — get American support if they do not keep that commitment,” Biden said during a joint press conference with Yildirim, yesterday, reports Hurriyet.

Both the Kurds and the Syrian Foreign Ministry have denounced the Turkish incursion as an act of aggression. A source in the Foreign Ministry told SANA that Syria condemns the incursion as a blatant violation of Syrian sovereignty and affirms that fighting terrorism isn’t done by ousting ISIS and replacing it with other terrorist organizations backed directly by Turkey. PYD leader Salih Muslim, in a twitter posting this morning, declared that  “Turkey is in Syrian Quagmire. will be defeated as Daish.”