Author: Alicia

By Helga Zepp-LaRouche, chairwoman of the German political party Civil Rights Movement Solidarity (BüSo), written for the newspaper Neue Solidarität and translated from German.

The great waves of hysteria in die-hard Atlanticist circles and the mass media, which were already sweeping in before the U.S. election, have reached an unprecedented scale since Trump’s victory, and give us clinical insight into the mental state and understanding of democracy of these people. Evidently they would rather have a President Hillary Clinton and a Third World War resulting from her announced Syria policy, than the potential improvement of Russian-American relations, which is indispensable for establishing world peace and achieving positive solutions for Syria and Ukraine.

It is truly remarkable: After the repudiated President Obama managed to find three days to stay at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, and to dine and talk with his friend Angela Merkel, and then to hold a mini-summit of the self-appointed European “Six,” the two of them decided—along with the other heads of state—to prolong the sanctions against Russia for another year. These not-so-secure others were French President Francois Hollande (7% approval rating), Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (the likely loser in an Italian referendum on Dec. 4), Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy (interim head of state of a minority government), and the hapless British Prime Minister Theresa May. It is doubtful that they will contribute to cohesion in the EU with this move to make themselves a virtual Directorate of the European Union, and then decree a policy which half of the EU member countries oppose.

This self-anointed “Six” have obviously not yet grasped that their variant of neoliberal policy, based on confrontation with Russia and China, was voted out in the Brexit vote in June and in the recent presidential election in the United States. They have not understood that a situation has developed in the trans-Atlantic world that is evoked in the American Declaration of Independence: namely, that if governments have become “destructive” “of the ends” of their mandate—specifically, to guarantee the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—then it is the right of the people, indeed it is their “their duty” to alter or abolish such a government. The “long train of abuses and usurpations” elaborated in the Declaration of Independence corresponds exactly to what those people whom Hillary Clinton so contemptuously called the “basket of deplorables,” have endured under Obama’s policies—abuses and usurpations which they did not want continued under a President Hillary Clinton.

The self-anointed Six, and above all, the utterly crazed members of the media, who themselves do not shrink from issuing threats against Trump, disguised as humor, are so imprisoned in their own ideology that they cannot grasp the natural-law dimension of this revolution.

Yet the New York Times on Nov. 18 published an article on its front page with the headline “Trump-Size Idea for a New President: Build Something Inspiring.” The Times stated correctly that Trump can only unite the country if he brings on line investments in great infrastructure projects, the likes of which have been totally ignored over the last decades. He must build modern versions of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, and Lincoln Tunnel. Then the “newspaper of record” enumerated Roosevelt’s most important projects. But the article is, of course, far behind the program of Lyndon LaRouche, who in 2015 published a proposal to build the New Silk Road in the United States—a program of large-scale infrastructure building and reindustrialization—which would integrate the United States into the World Land-Bridge.

The APEC Summit

Meanwhile, the “win-win cooperation” for development of the New Silk Road is going forward in giant steps. It is the dominant theme at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima, the Peruvian capital, on Nov. 19-20, in which Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, are participating and at which they are also holding bilateral meetings. Abe had met with President-elect Trump beforehand, and attested to his admirable leadership qualities.

President Xi had paid state visits to Ecuador and Chile prior to the APEC Summit, and has a state visit scheduled in Peru afterwards. President Xi and Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa agreed on a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” between their two nations, which involves regular, wide-ranging exchange and cooperation on a broad range of issues. Among them are strengthened productive investment, the development of economic and trade relations, economic cooperation, and cooperation in science and technology. China has already provided generous aid for the reconstruction of buildings and grounds which were destroyed in the severe earthquake in April of this year.

President Correa gave eloquent thanks to China in which he stressed that the two countries were of a like mind. China wants to place its economy on the foundation of innovation; Ecuador seeks to progress from being an exporter of goods to being a knowledge-based economy. Without Chinese financing and technology transfer, it would be impossible. In a joint declaration, they pledged to work together for the realization of great projects in the areas of oil, gas, mining, infrastructure, water, water management, communications, the financial sector, agriculture, petrochemical production, shipbuilding, metallurgy, paper production, and the construction of a new science city. In his speech, President Correa stressed that President Xi’s state visit was the most important event in the history of Ecuador. Can you imagine Chancellor Merkel going to Greece with such a program? Probably not. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble turns red when a journalist asks about partial debt relief—as he did at a bankers’ conference in Frankfurt—and then pontificates about the Greeks having lived beyond their means. This, after the Troika’s austerity policy has driven 45 percent of Greeks below the poverty line. The policy of the trans-Atlantic sector is not “win-win,” but “lose-lose”—unless, of course, one is a banker or a corporate executive. Now that Obama’s free trade deal for Asia, the TPP, is now as dead as the TTIP deal for the Atlantic region, it is the Chinese-designed, inclusive Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) and the Regional Comprehensive Partnership (RCEP) that are on the agenda.

In answer to irresponsible media articles about these trade agreements, official Russian and Chinese spokesmen stressed that they are in no way intended to shut out or isolate the United States. Xinhua quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang saying that China would not seize a leading role in either the FTAAP or the RCEP, and that the trade agreements are proposed for working together, not against one another. The contrast with Obama’s “the United States makes the rules” could not be clearer.

Another important subject of discussion at the APEC conference is the construction of the bioceanic railroad from Brazil to Peru, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which will also be built with China’s help, and whose construction is an important step toward the infrastructural development of the Latin American continent.

The contrast between the two paradigms, between the “win-win perspective” of the New Silk Road, versus the “Western community of values” of Obama and Merkel, could not be more obvious. In the first, nations work for the mutual advantage of their common development. In the latter, there is much talk of democracy, freedom, and human rights, but a deafening silence on drone strikes, regime change against legitimate governments with the aid of terrorist groups, total surveillance, and life-shortening austerity policies.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

It is high time that Germany freed itself from the grip of the fantasy of imperial dominance, be it dictated from Washington and London, or the derivative of “More Europe.” Mankind’s future can only lie in a completely new paradigm that serves the interests of one mankind and respects international law—a paradigm through which the creative potential of every human being on this planet can be developed. And that is exactly why we need to cooperate with the New Silk Road.

Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche delivered the following keynote address to the XXIII National Congress of the Association of Economists of Peru, held in Pucallpa, Ucayali, in the Amazon region of Peru. The title of the Nov. 17-19 congress is “The Peru-Brazil Bioceanic Train: Impact on the Economy of the Amazon Region and the Country,” and Zepp-LaRouche’s presentation, delivered at the opening session on Nov. 17, was on “The New Silk Road Concept, Facing the Collapse of the World Financial System.” The Peruvian Economists’ congress was timed to coincide with the Nov. 19-20 APEC summit in Lima, Peru, with the expected participation of numerous heads of states, including China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The Washington Times reported Tuesday that President-elect Donald  Trump is considering resurrecting the plan for joint military operations with Russia against the Al Nusra terrorist group. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had worked out the agreement last September, after months of negotiations, but it was almost immediately sabotaged by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s Pentagon with the bombing of Syrian troops in eastern Syria less than a week after the agreement went into effect.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top national security advisor to Trump, is said to be advising Trump to push for a new era of U.S.-Russian military cooperation.

“We were ready to go, and we can be ready to go again,” one U.S. defense official said.

A State Department official said on background that the “Obama plan” (actually the Kerry-Lavrov plan), which in September called for the creation of a Geneva-based Joint Integration Center staffed by Russian and U.S. military officials, likely would be presented to the incoming administration. The State Department has, in fact, confirmed at least twice in the past week, that discussions between U.S. and Russian officers have been ongoing in Geneva despite the failure of the agreement, itself. The official stressed to the Times, however, that no one knows whether Trump and his yet-to-be named national security team will embrace the plan.

“It’s all speculation at this point,” said the official, adding that it was unclear “whether they’re going to keep the strategy as it is, tweak it, revise it, or do away with it completely.”

Following the discussions of potentially fundamentally new U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China economic relations by president-elect Donald Trump with the Russian and Chinese presidents, this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) conference in Peru may see the replacement of Obama’s failed TPP “trade deal” with a new trade agreement initiated by China with 19 other countries including Trump’s United States. The steady building of a new economic paradigm around the “win-win” great infrastructure projects of the New Silk Road, will take another major step forward. This is what the United States must join with a new national credit institution, conquering Wall Street with a new Glass-Steagall Act.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who will speak to the Peruvian Economists Association national conference on the eve of the APEC conference, gave this send-off to New York State activists heading to Washington to demand Glass-Steagall:

“First of all, I want to say hello to you. Obviously, this is a very important intervention, because the election result in the United States, which many people did not anticipate, is really part of a global process. All the explanations given by the U.S. media are, for the most part, a coverup, or some phony explanation, like this was the FBI who cost Hillary the election, and so forth and so on.

“What really is going on strategically, is that the masses of the population of the trans-Atlantic sector — in Europe and the United States in particular — have really had it with an Establishment which has consistently acted against their interests. What they call the “flyover states” — the people in those states are not represented by the trans-Atlantic establishment. They know that because for them, the living and working conditions in the last decade, one can say, but really in the last 50 years, have become worse and worse. People have to work more jobs and cannot make ends meet. They have many cases where their sons, and sometimes even their daughters, have gone to Iraq five times in a row, to come home completely broken. So people have have experienced that life is just getting worse for them, and they do not have any hope in the Washington/New York establishment.

“And you had the same phenomenon in the Brexit vote in Great Britain in June; which also was not just the refugees, and not just the obvious issues, even if they play a certain catalyzing role; but it was the same fundamental sense of injustice, and that there is simply no longer government which takes care of the common good. And whatever explanations they now come up with, this will not go away until the situation is remedied, and good government is reestablished in the United States and Europe and other parts of the world.

“The immediate next point at which the same resentment probably will show, is in the referendum in Italy — where, on the Fourth of December, they will have a referendum on the change in the constitution which, as the sentiment now goes, will also be a vote against the Renzi government. He promised, first, that he would resign; now he says he doesn’t want to resign: In any case, this process will continue until a remedy has been put in.

“Now, obviously, the Trump victory is an open question, because it’s not yet clear what his presidency will become; but as Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized almost every day since the vote, this is not a local U.S. affair. This is a global issue; it’s an international question.

“One major reason Trump won the election is because, especially in the last period, he had emphasized that Hillary Clinton would mean World War III because of her policy concerning Syria, because she … was proposing a head-on confrontation with Russia. That was absolutely to the point, because we were on a very, very dangerous road to a confrontation with Russia and with China.

“Trump, during the election campaign, had said repeatedly that he would have a different attitude toward Russia. And since he has been elected, he has been on the phone with Putin, and with Xi Jinping, and in both cases, said that he would work to improve the relations between the United States and Russia and with China, respectively. Now, that is obviously extremely important; and the other extremely important question is: Will he carry through with his promise on Glass-Steagall, especially in his speech in Charlotte, where he reiterated that he would implement Glass-Steagall?

“This really is the key. Because only if one terminates the casino economy, which is really the cause for war, can the situation really be brought back in shape. All the progressives — Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, even [nancy] Pelosi — have already said that they would cooperate with Trump if he will go for this infrastructure/job creation/Glass-Steagall economic program.

“We should give him the benefit of the doubt; but we should also be aware that the entire Wall Street crowd, the neo-Cons in the Republican Party will do everything not to have that. Therefore, we have to have this intervention to really educate the Congress and the Senate on what is really at stake. The whole world is now looking — really holding their breath — over the question, will there be a change in American policy for the better?

“Hopefully, there will. But it requires each measure. Glass-Steagall as an absolute precondition, without which nothing else will work; but that is not enough. Because we are not talking just about a banking reform. We are talking about a completely new paradigm in the economic system. And that has to be defined by the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche, which everyone should really make sure that they understand when doing this kind of lobbying work.

“Because Lyndon LaRouche has stressed that the key thing is to increase the productivity of the labor force. Because of neo-liberal, or monetarist policies of the last decades, this productivity has gone down, in the trans-Atlantic sector, below the break-even point. This is why we need a national bank, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton; we need a national credit policy; we need an international credit system, a new Bretton Woods System; and we obviously need a `win-win’ cooperation of all nations on building the New Silk Road — also inside the United States — to become a world land-bridge.

“Extremely important is the fourth of the Four Laws, which says that you cannot get an increase in productivity in the economy, unless you go for a crash program of fusion power; and an international program for cooperation for space research. Because only if you do these kinds of avant garde leaps in productivity — fusion technology brings you to a completely different economic platform. With the fusion torch, you will be able to have energy security for the whole planet; you will have raw materials security because you will be able to use any waste, separate out different isotopes, and reconstitute out new raw materials by putting the isotopes together in the way required.

“So it’s a gigantic technological leap. And the same thing goes for space technology, because it will have the same impact as during the Apollo Program, when every investment in space technology, in rockets, in other new materials, brought 14 cents back for every cent of investment. And everything from computer chips to Teflon cookware, to all kinds of benefits, occurred as biproducts of space research.

“And to get the world economy out of its present condition, especially in the trans-Atlantic sector, you need that kind of reorientation towards scientific and technological progress, increases in energy flux density. And all of this Green ideology — which is really a no-development ideology — has to be replaced; and the world has to go back in the direction where the real physical laws of the physical universe are the criteria for truth, and not some ideology.”

President Xi Jinping spoke with President-elect Donald Trump by phone Sunday evening, during which the Chinese President congratulated Trump on his victory. The Chinese President told Trump that as China-U.S. cooperation faces important opportunities and has huge potential, the two countries need to strengthen coordination, advance their respective economic development and global economic growth, and expand exchanges and cooperation in various fields so as to bring more benefits to the two peoples and promote the smooth development of China-U.S. relations.

“As the biggest developing country and the biggest developed country respectively, and as the top two economies of the world, there are many things in which China and the United States can and should cooperate,” Xi told the President-elect. “I attach great importance to China-U.S. relations and am ready to work with the U.S. side to carry forward bilateral ties and to better benefit the two peoples and the rest of the world,” Xi said.

For his part, Trump thanked Xi for the congratulations and said that he agreed with Xi on his views about U.S.-China relations.

“China is a great and important country with eye-catching development prospects,” Trump said, according to Chinese state media, quoted by CN. “The United States and China can achieve mutual benefits and win-win results. I would love to work with you to enhance the cooperation between US and China. I am sure the Sino-US relations will achieve better development.”

The two also agreed to maintain close contact, establish a good working relationship, and meet at an early date to exchange views on bilateral ties and other issues of common concern.

Similarly, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking in Ankara Sunday, said, “We want to improve our relations under the Trump Administration.”

by David Shavin

Monday, November 14th, 2016, marks the 300th anniversary of the death of the universal genius, Gottfried Leibniz.

The death of Gottfried Leibniz marks the single greatest event in the consolidation of ‘Venetian’-imperial power in Great Britain, an event that made the American Revolution necessary. Four years earlier, in 1712, Leibniz stood as the key advisor to Russia’s Peter the Great; the newly-appointed Imperial Privy Councilor to Emperor Charles VI; the longtime strategist and teacher of the heir-apparent of Great Britain, Sophie of Hanover; the key philosopher and diplomat for Duke Anton Ulrich, in his attempts to end the sectarian strife of Christian Europe and reunify the churches; and the recognized leader at the frontiers of science – and especially one with the epistemological talent for how to push forward those frontiers. He had set up a national scientific academy in Berlin, had initiated one in Vienna, and was laying the groundwork for the same in St. Petersburg. He had major scientific, diplomatic and epistemological inroads into the French Court and into China.

The intensive assault upon Leibniz, from 1712 until his death in 1716, was that of a desperate imperial faction, hell-bent upon silencing his voice. England’s King George I, who was nearby Leibniz’s Hanover at the time of his death, made it clear that one should not even be seen at Leibniz’s funeral – despite the obvious fact that Leibniz had been the chief counselor for his mother’s court for decades. King George I, the II, and the III would spend the next half-century enforcing a lockdown of Leibniz’s writings, until 1766 – 250 years ago! – when Benjamin Franklin met in Hanover with Leibniz’s intellectual descendants, and deliberated over Leibniz’s concept of happiness (‘Felicitas’). In brief, the world was created, bent toward happiness. That is, the necessities of life required new, qualitative scientific revolutions to define whole new bases of ‘resources’, lest society fall into a war of each against all for shrinking resources, a Malthusian – that is, a genocidal – crisis. The world was created where the necessities of life required the freedom of man to deliberate over the created world, to make those creative scientific revolutions, and steer it into a closer representation of the Creator. That man was capable of acting in the image of God (and was not wired as an automaton, to do so); that his free choice to do what was necessary brought him nearer in focus with the image of God – this was the definition of happiness. Any other choice by the Creator as to how to create would not have been a happy choice. Franklin’s deliberations of 1766 would be echoed in the concept of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” at the core of the new experiment introduced into the world in 1776.

Of the few today who pretend to know something of this Founding Father of America, most of what they think they know is somehow wrapped up in the manufactured controversy between Leibniz and Isaac Newton, as to who first discovered the calculus. It is true that in 1712/3, the Royal Society of Great Britain issued a ruling that Leibniz had plagiarized Isaac Newton. However, Leibniz never thought his ‘analysis situs’ method reduced to the number manipulations of Newton, and never had any interest in taking credit for what Newton was involved in. Further, the infamous 1713 ‘ruling’ was written by the claimant, Isaac Newton himself. Newton courageously decided in favor of himself, and then put forward, anonymously, the ‘ruling’ as the deliberations of an objective body. (The following year, Newton would go on to publish, surprisingly, a favorable review of the 1713 ruling – but, of course, this review was again presented as that of an anonymous bystander. Wells Fargo Bank could take lessons from the master!) In 1713, a year before assuming power, George I was already stabbing in the back both his mother, Sophie, and her philosopher-statesman, Leibniz. George wrote to the Emperor, using the language of the Royal Society report, in an attempt to force the Austro-Hungarian Empire to sever relations with Leibniz and his Academy of Science project.

Much more could be said, as an indication of the naked politics behind the ‘invention-of-the-calculus’ controversy; but what is missing from that contrived squabble is what Leibniz was actually doing, which Newton never even contemplated doing. Leibniz took very seriously that man was made in the living image of God; that the world was created, as per Plato, with a moral arc bent toward the Good; and that science flowed from the investigation of the healthy interplay of the Maximum (God) and the Minimum (Man). Johannes Kepler’s ‘subjective’ hypothesis that the solar system would have been composed along harmonic lines, along the same causal principles by which we sing and hear and think, was anathema to Newton, but was at the core of Leibniz’s classical identity. An honest investigation of one’s own most cherished and deepest thought processes was at the core of ‘objective’ scientific revolutions. This emotional and moral nature of fundamental scientific work was in stark contrast to the pretense of ‘objectivity’ of the hard-core materialists.

Helga and Lyndon LaRouche delivering their analysis of the U.S. presidential elections.

Leibniz came dangerously close to pulling off a strategic miracle for Western Civilization, one that would have left the world a much different place – where more developed and less developed nations realized their harmonic underpinnings; where such childhood diseases of imperialism, ‘power politics’, geopolitics et al, had gone the way of smallpox. Today, the strategic miracle of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche’s relentless, scientific optimism, e.g., in their “EurAsian LandBridge” concept, has found expression in the seemingly miraculous birth of intelligent nation-building, centered around China’s “Silk Road” grand strategy. This development has caught a morally and intellectually bankrupt Western elite completely offguard.

No better appreciation of November 14th, 2016 could be imagined than to honor Leibniz by thinking and acting on a level that would make Leibniz smile.

Check out our New Paradigm series on Leibniz’s genius and how it is still so relevant today.

While Hillary Clinton now blames FBI Director James Comey’s investigation of her emails for her loss, sane Democrats realize that it was her refusal to fight Wall Street to improve the the living standards of workers, unemployed, minorities, and rural voters, all with plummeting life expectancies, that explains it.

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), who ran the Democratic Party in Michigan, heart of the industrial Midwest for years, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post Nov. 10, where she said “I said Clinton was in trouble with the voters I represent [but] I was the ‘crazy’ one. I predicted that Hillary Clinton was in trouble in Michigan during the Democratic primary. I noted we could see a Trump presidency [but] they said, ‘That’s Debbie. It’s hyperbole. She’s nuts.'”

Dingell said, “Michigan voters strongly supported Bernie Sanders in the primary. That result didn’t surprise me, but it did infuriate me that Clinton and her team didn’t show up until the weekend before the primary, when it suddenly became clear they had a problem…. [bernie] Sanders was in my district 10 times during the primary,” (talking about economic issues and Glass-Steagall, and taking down Wall Street.) “How would any sane person not predict how this one would go? It was fixable for the General Election,” but she went to Arizona, instead of to the Midwest industrial heartland. Bill Clinton reportedly strenuously opposed Hillary’s mistake of not campaigning in the Midwest, and went there alone to campaign several times. No Democratic Presidential candidate had lost Michigan for 28 years.

In an article making frequent reference to Bernie Sanders’ book, Our Revolution, David Weigel writes, “The more important the issue is to large numbers of people, the less interesting it is to corporate media…. Sanders had been saying the same thing about the oligarchy for 30 years, and suddenly found the 14 million voters agreed with him. In his book, Sanders points to his prophetic comment in one of the early debates, where he tried to talk about economics: ‘The middle class of this country is collapsing. Enough about her emails!’ to no avail.” Weigel says for the media, politicians like Sanders were characters in a larger story about how Clinton would take power. Sanders says: “I was gently faulted for having excessive ‘message discipline,’ for spending too much time discussing real issues. Boring.” On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” today, Sanders said, “If Mr. Trump has the courage to take on Wall Street, I will work with him, issue by issue…. The Democrats have become the party that raises billions of dollars from wealthy people and puts ads on television.”

The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald hits the liberals in an op-ed in Sunday’s Post also. “Trump will have vast powers, thanks to Obama. We have a President-elect with authoritarian tendencies assuming a presidency that has never been more powerful. When liberals opposed all the `executive powers’ given to Bush and Obama, the ‘tactic of last resort’ used to be to ask them to think about how one day, these powers could be in the hands of someone other than a benevolent, worthy progressive — rather a right-wing authoritarian. That day has arrived.”