Author: Alicia

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.

In May, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard gave an interview to the financial web daily, La Tribune, decrying the absence of any financial reform since the crash in 2007, which he said has created the conditions for a new and probable “financial explosion.” Mr. Rocard calls for the reenactment of Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act, and also attacks the liberalism that reigns in particular at the European Commission and among the countries of Northern Europe. He falls short, however, of dumping the idea of a European economic government, always put forth by the very liberals he attacks.

Rocard went back to the 2009 crash

Rocard concluded that the

In a rather dramatic appeal, mailed out on Aug. 25 to members of the Bundestag, which contrasts starkly with the otherwise rather academic discussion among anti-war groups, the German Freidenkerverband (Free Thinkers Association) in Berlin warns against the acute threat of nuclear war. The appeal calls on people to sign up to support the campaign.

Jürgen Todenhöfer, former CDU Bundestag member (1972-1990), has issued a damning “Open Letter to the War Politicians of the World.” He states, “Through decades of a policy of war and exploitation, you have pushed millions of people in the Middle East and Africa into misery. Because of you, refugees have to flee all over the world.” The full letter is translated below.

Todenhöfer issued this the day after his Aug. 25 appearance on the popular “Maischberger” TV talkshow where he stated straightforwardly that the chaos in the region “was a part of the strategy of the U.S. which they started with their bombing of Afghanistan, against Iraq, Libya … and the results couldn’t be worse.”

He said on TV, “We know in the meantime that it is part of an American strategy of divide and rule”: Iraq was consciously divided up, Syria falls apart into several states. He then reported on former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen. Michael Flynn’s statement that, “it was a willful decision.”

The broadcast itself then became chaotic, after studio guest, former ARD-TV Middle East expert Ulrich Kienzle, protested, “That is a conspiracy theory, … the Americans couldn’t be so dumb.” Kienzle seems oblivious to the public scandal around Benghazi and Hillary Clinton, and her role in fulfilling President Obama’s escalation of that war policy.

Todenhöfer’s Open Letter charged that leaders don’t change their policies and “only deal with the symptoms. And because of that the security situation gets more dangerous and chaotic by the day. More and more wars, waves of terror and refugee crises will determine the future of our planet.” He called for bringing the “war politicians” before the International Criminal Court, “and each of your political followers should in fact take care of at least 100 refugee families.” He called for a mass movement against these policies: “As once Gandhi did—in non-violence, in civil disobedience. We should create new movements and parties. Movements for justice and humanity.” RT Deutsch has covered his Open Letter. His Facebook page is getting a massive response.

As tensions build over the expected 800,000 refugees coming into Germany this year, and with extremists and neo-Nazi agents provocateurs trying to provoke violence, Todenhöfer has called for decisive action against extremists.

Toedenhöfer’s letter translated into English, a companion message, and a biographical sketch, as posted on the Coop News’ Coop Anti-War Berlin, follow.

Open Letter to the War Politicians of the World
by Jürgen Todenhöfer, German journalist, former media manager and politician

Jürgen Todenhöfer is a German journalist, former media manager and politician. From 1972 to 1990 he was a member of parliament for the Christian Democrats (CDU). He was one of Germany’s most arduous supporters of the U.S.-sponsored Mujahideen and their guerrilla war against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Several times he traveled to combat zones with Afghan Mujahideen groups. From 1987 to 2008 he served on the board of the media group Burda. After 2001 Todenhöfer became an outspoken critic of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has published several books about visits he made to war zones. In recent years he did two interviews with Syria’s President Assad and in 2015 he was the first German journalist to visit the “Islamic State.”

Thursday’s stock-market “bump” was nothing but a bail-out operation to try to fool everybody. We should denounce it: it’s a bail-UP operation. Just as one example: while stock trading, or stock pumping was going on on Thursday, the Department of Commerce revised second-quarter Gross National Product growth up from a 2.3% annual rate to 3.7%. At the same time, Gross National Income, which should be exactly equal, increased only at a 0.6% annual rate.

This phony stock boom is going to be temporary. It’s only a temporary effect; it can’t be anything else; it’s a fraud. Because what they did, is they just pumped things up artificially, and pretended there was improvement. They also lied that it was China that has collapsed,— although many people are not stupid enough to believe that.

Today, tomorrow, and every day from now on, we must pre-empt Wall Street throughout the day. We can’t just sit there and let Wall Street say things; we have to pre-empt and close down Wall Street.

We have to prevent the Wall Street crash from annihilating the national economy. If we allow Wall Street any control over the economy, there will be a complete breakdown of the US economy. We can’t just sit there and let Wall Street make claims: instead, we have to pre-empt and close down Wall Street. Force the issue back to the Presidency. The US Government must act to insure the protection of the US economy from Wall Street.

Shut down Wall Street, and defend the US economy from the Wall Street people. Lyndon LaRouche is signalling this throughout the nation— and everyone who stands with him is signalling the same thing.

There is an obvious parallel between today and the crisis of Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office,— with the exception that then, Roosevelt had solved the problem. But not only is the present collapse worse than that of 1933,— but the present team only knows how to make it still worse and worse.

Roosevelt actually brought about a solution. The problem is that Franklin Roosevelt’s intentions were frustrated by the Wall Street faction immediately after his death,— even before his death.

The present Administration is not only a failed effort to replay what Franklin Roosevelt did; this thing is utterly incompetent. It threatens the extinction of the human species. Obama’s policies in particular, represent a threat to the existence of the human species. That’s the thing to say; it is that.

There is a crisis today which does have a comparable feature, but there is a great difference. From the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s term, everything was good. Whereas from the beginning of Obama, everything has been increasingly bad. The US government must do what Franklin Roosevelt would do if he were alive today; it must act against Wall Street as Franklin Roosevelt did.

Tell me more, I’d like updates.

Thursday’s stock-market “bump” was nothing but a bail-out operation to try to fool everybody. We should denounce it: it’s a bail-UP operation. Just as one example: while stock trading, or stock pumping was going on on Thursday, the Department of Commerce revised second-quarter Gross National Product growth up from a 2.3% annual rate to 3.7%. At the same time, Gross National Income, which should be exactly equal, increased only at a 0.6% annual rate.

This phony stock boom is going to be temporary. It’s only a temporary effect; it can’t be anything else; it’s a fraud. Because what they did, is they just pumped things up artificially, and pretended there was improvement. They also lied that it was China that has collapsed,— although many people are not stupid enough to believe that.

Today, tomorrow, and every day from now on, we must pre-empt Wall Street throughout the day. We can’t just sit there and let Wall Street say things; we have to pre-empt and close down Wall Street.

We have to prevent the Wall Street crash from annihilating the national economy. If we allow Wall Street any control over the economy, there will be a complete breakdown of the US economy. We can’t just sit there and let Wall Street make claims: instead, we have to pre-empt and close down Wall Street. Force the issue back to the Presidency. The US Government must act to insure the protection of the US economy from Wall Street.

Shut down Wall Street, and defend the US economy from the Wall Street people. Lyndon LaRouche is signalling this throughout the nation— and everyone who stands with him is signalling the same thing.

There is an obvious parallel between today and the crisis of Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office,— with the exception that then, Roosevelt had solved the problem. But not only is the present collapse worse than that of 1933,— but the present team only knows how to make it still worse and worse.

Roosevelt actually brought about a solution. The problem is that Franklin Roosevelt’s intentions were frustrated by the Wall Street faction immediately after his death,— even before his death.

The present Administration is not only a failed effort to replay what Franklin Roosevelt did; this thing is utterly incompetent. It threatens the extinction of the human species. Obama’s policies in particular, represent a threat to the existence of the human species. That’s the thing to say; it is that.

There is a crisis today which does have a comparable feature, but there is a great difference. From the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s term, everything was good. Whereas from the beginning of Obama, everything has been increasingly bad. The US government must do what Franklin Roosevelt would do if he were alive today; it must act against Wall Street as Franklin Roosevelt did.

Tell me more, I’d like updates.

The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), in a report released Aug. 24, has found that the United Nations-backed ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ carbon-trading scheme has increased what it targeted as pollution. In addition, it has been riddled with pervasive fraud and fraudulent profits. This is more fully exposed in EIR‘s forthcoming special report, “The Global Warming Scare Is Population Reduction, Not Science.”

The SEI found that the UN plan — part of the Kyoto Accords — was supposed to combat global warming but instead has resulted in the release of more than half a billion additional tons of greenhouse gases. And after studying the issuance of 872 million tradeable “carbon offsets” — allowing the holders to produce more carbon emissions because they had supposedly invested in reducing “carbon pollution” somewhere in the world — SEI found “significant issues” with three-quarters of the offsets, indicating broadscale fraud.

From the standpoint of anti-carbon environmentalists like SEI, the Kyoto and European Union carbon-trading schemes have “seriously undermined global climate action…. 600 million more tons of carbon dioxide have been emitted than if the scheme had not been in place,” says the report.

From the standpoint of the biosphere, and particularly its flora of all kinds, a reasonable observer could see this as an unintentional benefit conferred by incompetent senior environmentalist planners and Wall Street and London speculators. More carbon emissions, more vegetative growth.

But unfortunately, all those extra emissions contain more than carbon dioxide. “For some companies [on the buying end of carbon-offsets trading], buying the right to pollute with offsets is often cheaper than refurbishing their own polluting facilities — like coal-fired power plants or chemical plants that can emit greenhouse gases more dangerous than carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxides, for example. Thus honest pollution control legislation, going back to the 1960s and ’70s, has been set back.”

And those who sell the offsets get to do so by “funding offsets elsewhere, like cleaning up combustible piles of abandoned coal mine waste. In theory, this will keep the total emissions under goals set by the European Union, but the plan only works if the offsets make a legitimate reduction in emissions.” The SEI study found most do not.

Wall Street earns fees from it all. Lucas Ross of Friends of the Earth said Aug. 25, “This is another nail in the coffin for Wall Street’s climate solution.” 

In an interview for “India Business Report” on BBC World News on Aug. 25, India’s Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan said, “Every adverse development in the global economy works through financial markets first, then trade later…. But you have to be careful about attributing everything to China. There are a number of concerns about when interest rates will normalize around the world, and there are also questions about whether some markets are just too high,” he told BBC.

Rajan, who is under pressure from the Modi government to lower interest rates in order to help the Indian economy to develop faster, said, “The real stimulus for economic revival should come from the governments through growth-oriented reform processes, and not through monetary policy stimulus…. I have been a little concerned about the immense burden for action that is falling on Central Banks, and I think it is quite legitimate for Central Banks to say at some point, ‘we can’t carry the burden ourselves; in fact, we may not have the tools to do everything that is asked of us,'” Rajan said.  “Don’t keep asking us [central banks] to do more, because at some point, we get into territory where the consequences may be more bad than good, if we actually act,” he added.

“In my country, I’m faced with traditional central bank problems like inflation, so we still have a handle to work with those. But in some other countries, you are faced with problems which are maybe way beyond what the central bank is capable of addressing —  such as demographic change, deep changes in productivity — and those are probably best dealt with other tools,” Rajan said. 

The Dow Jones “miraculously” soared to a 600-point spike on Wednesday, after losses of nearly 2,000 points over the previous three trading days. This has once again raised the obvious question of whether the Fed intervened to prevent the continuing meltdown. Whether or not the Fed is drifting back towards an under-the-table QE, the reality is that Wall Street and London are finished and such one-day reversals are merely further signs of the absolute instability, derived from the fact that the trans-Atlantic gambling bubble is crashing and nothing can be done to alter that reality—save a full international Glass-Steagall bankruptcy reorganization.

Some leading voices are openly saying that the Fed has pumped liquidity into the gaping hole in the Wall Street dam. Paul Craig Roberts, former Treasury official under President Ronald Reagan and a leading Wall Street adversary, penned a column this week, charging that the Swiss National Bank is one of the concealed conduits for Fed intervention into global markets. Roberts wrote:

Back in July 2010, then-TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky testified before the Senate Banking Committee and informed an astonished group of legislators that the size of the bailout was not the $700 billion Congressionally-approved TARP, but was closer to $23.7 trillion. He provided the Senators with a list of all of the Fed and Treasury special discount windows that had been created to feed the bailout monster. Even before Dodd-Frank passage, the Fed had devised mechanisms for pumping money into the market through delegated broker dealers. This would tend to lend credibility to Roberts’ charges about the Swiss National Bank.

In the meantime, as Lyndon LaRouche asserted on Aug. 25 in discussions with colleagues, the patently absurd claim that China’s falling economy and currency devaluation was the cause of the market fall, has been discredited publicly. On Aug. 26, Nicholas Lardy penned a New York Times op-ed titled “False Alarm on a Crisis in China,” in which he tore apart the propaganda barrage claiming that China—as opposed to the trans-Atlantic region—was in a financial and economic free-fall.

Lardy wrote that “the popular narrative is not well supported by the facts. There is little evidence that China’s economy is slowing significantly from the 7-percent pace reported by the government for the first part of the year. Wage growth is running at about 10 percent annually; the pace of creation of nonagricultural jobs is stronger than in any recent year; both real disposable income and consumption expenditures of Chinese households are growing strongly. It is not the picture of an economy heading for a hard landing.” Neither Lardy nor any other sane economist could say the same for the trans-Atlantic region.