Author: Alicia

Last December, the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen led a project “physics for refugees,” addressed to children and youth in about 20 refugee locations all over Germany. Every week a physical experiment was conducted in these places by 500 volunteers, and replicated by the youth. Also, they invented an internet-based “physical advent calendar,” where YouTube experiments were presented without giving the answer. With assistance of volunteers, these experiments were repeated and the solutions sent in.

The project has been supported by the Federal government and will be continued in another form in 2016. The main aim is to give children a chance to concentrate on something other than the immediate reality in the refugee locations, to show them that they are very much welcome, and to encourage them to be involved in playful physical experimentation. On their website, it says, “Physical phenomena are universal and global. To conduct experiments, no specific language, religion or a special place is necessary. They are the same for all people on Earth, regardless of where you are, what language you speak or which religion you belong to. Physics is exciting, enjoyable, instructive — and experimenting generates self-confidence. Physics is fun … and is everywhere!”

The DPG obliges itself and its members by its constitution “to stand for freedom, tolerance, truthfulness and dignity and to be aware, that those active in science are in a very special high grade responsible for the formation of human life as a whole. Therefore we decided, in this present acute situation, to offer Physics for Refugees, to engage especially children and youth after their long escape journey, by combining instructive and exciting entertainment.”

Volunteers report how experimenting “awakens the spirit of research” and that language barriers can be very easily overcome. The special effect of the project is the “learning effect — on both sides!”

The South African ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has charged the United States with organizing in South Africa for regime change. This follows President Zuma’s State of the Nation Address on Feb. 11, in which he defended his policy of aligning with China and the BRICS, and pointed out that Chinese investment in South Africa means jobs.

EIR foresaw, in its July 25, 2014 issue, that the trans-Atlantic system would go to any length to stop South Africa from participating in the BRICS and from expanding its nuclear power production by building more plants. Subsequent analyses—published  in EIR on Jan. 16, 2015, and by LaRouche South Africa leader Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane on the News24 website in South Africa on June 24, 2015—provided increasing detail on some of the regime-change plans. The latter was so explosive, that someone (possibly from the U.S. side) caused it to be pulled within 24 hours.

Last Friday, Feb. 19, according to Independent Online, the ANC Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, told a rally in Pretoria that “the ANC knew of regular meetings at the U.S embassy in Pretoria which were about ‘mobilisation for regime change.’ The ANC was also aware of a programme that involved taking young people to the U.S. for six weeks and on return, planting them ‘everywhere,’ including universities.”

The program Mantashe was referring to is the Mandela Washington Fellowship program, launched by Obama in 2014 at the time of his so-called African Leadership Summit in Washington.

According to News24, Mantashe charged that the meetings in the embassy took place daily.

“We will elevate this matter to a formal level,” ANC spokesman Keith Khoza said on Saturday.

U.S. Ambassador Patrick Gaspard responded with contemptuous tweets, notably including this one on Feb. 19: “I’m so disappointed as I always imagined that if I organized a coup it would look like Mardi Gras — food, music, dance.” Another of Gaspard’s tweets: “You get a coup d’état and you get a coup d’état and you get a coup d’état! Everybody gets a coup!!!!” According to Independent Online, “on Saturday, Weekend Argus tried to speak to Gaspard, but a U.S. embassy spokeswoman said his tweets sufficiently conveyed his response.”

Bolivia’s Planning Minister Rene Orellana reported Feb. 19 that Peru’s Deputy Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Alurralde had contacted him, requesting a ministerial-level meeting to discuss establishing a company to manage the Bioceanic Central Railway Corridor (CFBC), the daily La Razón reported Feb. 20. When built, the CFBC will traverse South America from the Brazilian port of Santos on the Atlantic, across Bolivia to Peru’s Pacific Coast port of Ilo.

At the same time, a meeting between a delegation from Brazil’s Planning Ministry and Bolivia’s Public Works and Planning ministries is scheduled to occur today in Santa Cruz for three days, to discuss the technical, economic, and financial feasibility of the CFBC megaproject. Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff has said she supports the CFBC project as “complementary” to the northern bioceanic route financed by China, which would go from Brazil to Peru, excluding Bolivia. But Evo Morales has been organizing very aggressively for the CFBC route—far more than Peru or Brazil—emphasizing its enormous economic benefits for countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile, all located in South America’s middle and southern regions.

Crucial here, is that, in the midst of a global financial meltdown, the discussion on regional integration is continuing, destabilizations and economic crises of the participating countries notwithstanding. On Feb. 18, Ernesto Samper, the Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), was in Bolivia and announced that Unasur has committed itself “to supporting the bioceanic railroad that will extend from Peru, passing through central Bolivia, to the port of Santos in Brazil.” Bolivia’s Public Works Minister Milton Claros reported that Unasur’s South American Infrastructure and Planning Council (Cosiplan), has identified the CFBC as one of the regional entity’s priority projects. Both Claros and Planning Minister Orellana met privately with Samper to discuss the project in greater detail.

Parts of last week’s Kommersant interview with Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin, have been published in English by Russia Beyond the Headlines. In that interview, Churkin said that Syrian President Assad’s statement of last week, that he would fight until complete victory is achieved, conflicts with Russia’s goals in Syria.

Churkin went on to say, that Russia’s military strategy in Syria is aimed at the defeat of terrorism and that Russia believes that this will make a political settlement possible.

“The most intransigent oppositionists, who are supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are still convinced that they can ‘break’ Damascus,” he said. “This was one of the reasons for continuing the conflict. Now, I hope, they and those who support them will understand that a political settlement is necessary. The Americans have already understood this.” He noted that the oppositionists continue to say that the sooner Assad leaves, the better, but the U.S. has moved away from that position since the beginning of the Russian military intervention.

RBTH also published in English the Kommersant article accompanying the Churkin interview, which reports — quoting a number of Moscow-based experts — that Moscow and Damascus seriously disagree on the way forward.

“Bashar Assad’s latest statements prove that Moscow and Damascus’ positions on key issues concerning Syria’s regulation seriously diverge,” Kommersant reports. “Moscow is calling on Damascus to accept the political solution within the framework of the Geneva process, while Damascus prefers to use force combined with ‘local truces.’ In the opinion of many experts interviewed by Kommersant, Bashar Assad’s chosen course not only hinders Russia from converting its military successes in Syria into political dividends, but also threatens to further aggravate Russia’s relations with the West and the Arabic world.”

Another step in the process of ending the Mideast’s “permanent war and terrorism,” a further step agreed between the Russian Foreign Minister and the U.S. Secretary of State, will now be discussed by Russian President Putin with Barack Obama. But Obama knows nothing but to denounce Putin — who has “miniaturized” him — and to try, unsuccessfully, to organize Asia in a confrontation against China.

There is only one path, by which the war and terrorism which George W. Bush and Obama unleashed on the Mideast and North Africa can be ended. That is Putin’s “flank” begun with his intervention in Syria last September, and the prospect of China’s “New Silk Road” bringing great projects and economic development through that region. That path is also Germany’s only way out of a refugee crisis Europe cannot handle.

But the United States has a President determined to continue to play at the British imperial policy of wars and drone assassinations, and geopolitical plots to “surround” China and Russia, even to provoke war with them. The Obama who does not think the United States needs a lunar or planetary space program, or a fusion power program, and doesn’t think a President needs Congressional authorization for disastrous wars.

It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means at the White House…

Against the leaderships of China, Russia, India, Obama in office belittles the United States and brings it into disrepute; he must be removed.

And the candidates running for that office ignore and deny economic, political, and military reality as if they had been specially chosen — by Wall Street — to do so. Thirty or 40 years ago, no American would have believed that this collection of Presidential candidates could ever be “all there is.”

The United States does have leaders whose grasp of human reality and whose determination to better it, is capable of looking into the future as the leaderships of the BRICS powers do. One is LaRouche Democrat Kesha Rogers of Texas, twice winning Democratic Congressional nominations to “Save NASA; Impeach Obama,” and now leading a national mobilization to restore the U.S. space program and the nation’s scientific culture.

Her colleagues in the LaRouchePAC National Policy Committee have all conducted equally important campaigns, like Rachel Brown Brinkley’s campaigns against Rep. Barney Frank which put restoring Glass-Steagall on the national map beginning in 2010; Michael Steger’s campaign for a real “produce water” solution to the great western drought.

Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, over decades, have actually created, as a worldwide reality, what is now known as China’s New Silk Road, or World Landbridge program of economic development. They have laid down the markers on how to fight British-Saudi “jihadist” terrorism, and the drug traffic which has funded it, in parallel to Putin’s largely successful 20-year war against that scourge.

They know what a “win-win” policy actually is.

A very small leadership force, but capable, if you back them, getting Obama out, of shutting down the collapsing Wall Street casino, of getting the successful policies of President Franklin Roosevelt applied to a real economic recovery. A small force, but capable, like successful national leaderships, of thinking of a better future for the human species.

Sign me up, I’m with you.

China’s Global Times Friday editorially called the US bluff in the South China Sea, and said China would not back down, but would face the US threat head on.

The editorial in the official paper of the CPC said: “How the PLA deploys weapons and the defense levels should be determined by the threat level from external military forces. If the US military stages a real threat and a miitary clash is looming, the PLA may feel propelled to deploy more powerful weapons.”

On calling the bluff — not something commonly seen in the official press — the Global Times states: “China holds firm strategic initiatives in the South China Sea, and the US has no actual effective tools to contain China in the waters. It is best at rhetoric [rhetorical] offense, so we must reason with it head-on.”

As to the SAM’s in the Xisha (Paracel) Islands, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Thursday that “China has been deploying national defense facilities on Xisha Island for decades, it is nothing new.” On Friday Hong Lei was more direct: “Patrols by US military aircraft and navy vessels as well as its joint military drills with regional partners are behind escalated tensions in the South China Sea. That’s the real militarization of the South China Sea.”

Even the Wall Street Journal Friday acknowledged that “China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia have for decades stationed military hardware and personnel on the islands and reefs they control.”

The timing of the “revelation” of SAMs on China’s most developed island in the South China Sea, therefore, is self-evidently a fraud aimed at justifying Obama’s massive build up of forces around CHina.

The Chambers of Commerce and Industry (IHK) in Saxony are loudly demanding sanctions against Russia must be ended this year. In a position paper made public Feb. 15 in Dresden, they also emphasized: “It is clear that we need Russia as an important economic and strategic partner for the solution of global challenges. The conflict situation in the Near East, to name only one example, cannot be solved without Russia. A new Cold War serves neither the solution of current conflicts, nor free trade and the Saxon economy. Russia is and remains an integral part of the European economic space and the European security architecture.”

Underlining the potential damage to Saxon machine-tool production facilities, given the Mittelstand’s longstanding ties with Russia, the IHK heads of Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz are demanding that the Saxon state government immediately start an initiative for ending sanctions in the Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament which is comprised of all the state governments. Saxony’s exports to Russia, much of it machine-tool goods, have collapsed by 25%.

Throughout Germany, industry is demanding the sanctions be ended, not merely because of obvious business interests, but also to establish strategic cooperation with Russia. After Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble’s Jan. 21 call at Davos for Marshall Plan-scale investments in the Middle East and Africa, he gave an interview days later calling for closer cooperation with Russia.

Also on Feb. 15, Mario Ohoven, head of the German Association for Small and Medium-Sized Business (BVMW) addressed 3,000 guests in Berlin at the BVMW New Year reception, where he called the sanctions against Russia “utterly false.” Gerd Mueller, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, who is spearheading the Marshall Plan initiative, also spoke at the event. 

A very insightful article in the “Indian Punchline” blog by M.K. Bhadrakumar, notes the stark contrast between the conflict in Syria, and the arrival in Tehran of the first Chinese train along that new link of the Silk Road Belt. Under the headline, “A Silk Road Train in Times of a New Cold War,” he writes: “Two days after the international Syria Support Group met in Munich, the Middle East witnessed an extraordinary event — the arrival on Monday in Tehran of a freight train carrying 32 containers after a long journey of over 10,000 kilometers originating from China’s eastern province of Zhejiang. The journey took 14 days — at an average of 700 kilometers per day, through the steppes of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. It’s hard to tell which is going to be more crucial for world politics in an enduring way — Syrian conflict or the first Silk Road train to the Middle East from China. In immediate terms, it could well be that the conflict in Syria and the war with the Islamic State dominate world attention, but from a historical perspective, the Silk Road train will stand out as a milestone beating the Islamic State by a mile….

“Can it be that the United States has missed the plot? Take a look at the Silk Road train. China has tested the efficacy of freighting a consignment to Iran in a time frame of a fortnight, which is 30 days less that what a sea voyage is presently taking from Shanghai to the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran. And this is the first attempt at an overland rail route. Trust Beijing to upgrade the infrastructure to make the route faster and cheaper,” Bhadrakumar writes. He also notes that China is also building a high-speed rail line between Tehran and the eastern city of Mashhad.

He then comments again on the total failure of the U.S. policymakers to get the message, citing Graham Fuller’s Feb. 13 article, “NATO America’s Misguided Instrument of Leadership” “American strategy seems fundamentally stuck in defensive mode against rising powers. Such powers indeed do challenge American aspirations for continued hegemony. But a defensive posture robs us of our vision and spirit; it represents a basically negative orientation, like King Canute on the beach trying to stop the encroaching tide. Worse, American military power — and the budget keeps rising — seems to have become the default U.S. response to most foreign challenges. The Pentagon has put the State Department out of business.” Then he notes that NATO in particular symbolizes this myopic orientation.

“So while Washington focuses on building defensive military structures, bases and arrangements overseas against Russia and China, we are being rapidly outflanked by a whole array of new economic plans, visions, projects for a new continental infrastructure and institutional developments that span Eurasia. These developments are indeed spearheaded by China and Russia. But they are not fundamentally defensive or military in nature, but rather represent the creation of a new international order from which we have either opted out or even oppose. Meanwhile, obsession with NATO and military alliances as the major vehicle of U.S. military policy after the Cold War, is a chief reason we are losing out in that new order.”

by Tony Papert

Those of you old enough to have enjoyed that television series of Walter Cronkite’s, have by now witnessed the sorts of sudden, dramatic and profound reversals of history which you would never have believed possible just short decades ago. In 1945, this country came out of World War II as the greatest industrial, scientific and military power the world had ever seen. Those of you who are about 70 years of age, as I am, had never seen it any other way than as just that. The earlier, painful and laborious climb out of the last Great Depression, under Franklin Roosevelt, we had to learn about much later. And in our earlier days, that grim picture of the United States of the 1930s, had no real resemblance to the country we thought we knew.

Now we Americans find ourselves in the midst of a live replay of the Fall of the Roman Empire,—and you are indeed there! But it’s not just something we are looking at,—we’re right in the middle of it. Nor is that yet the end of it. “The times change, and we change with them,” as the French saying has it. We are in it, but equally it is also inside us. The rot of the British Empire, from which we Americans once fought our way to freedom,—but, alas, only briefly and episodically,—has returned, and now we are drowning in it. Now we see with the founder of our system, Alexander Hamilton, that the rotten decay of that British Empire is a moral decay,—and we can see just that moral rottenness inside each one of our fellow-Americans, and inside ourselves.

As Lyndon LaRouche has pointed out in detail, one side of the British-led corruption and destruction of the 20th-21st Century United States, was the dictatorship over science, and then consequently over thought in general, exercised by Britain’s Lord Bertrand Russell. Russell decreed that all of physical science must be reduced to mere mathematics, and fiercely persecuted Albert Einstein as the genius who disagreed and would never accept that dictum. Russell has succeeded,—a visit to any so-called “scientific” classroom should convince you of this. As Russell understood it would, this decortication of science has forced a dumbing-down of all thought. Americans have become thoroughly stupefied, just as our earlier great genius Edgar Allan Poe had foreseen these effects. This is why he fought to his last breath against what he decried as mathematical thinking, and against all of the imperial culture exuded from London.

Another side of the British reconquest of the United States was our humiliating domination by the (British-spawned) FBI of the unspeakable J. Edgar Hoover, from the time of the 1944 election, while Roosevelt was still alive, and through to the present. Because of the fear that was bred into Americans, no history of this reign of terror seems to have been written; the most truthful thing I have seen on it, has been LaRouchePAC’s interview with former Congressman Cornelius Gallagher. For decades, the FBI administered a caste-system throughout the United States, in which only the upper, the “security-cleared” caste, could get decent jobs, or often even any jobs. The lower, non-security cleared caste, was left to pick through the garbage, regardless of their skills.

The red-purges of Hollywood and the movie industry have been covered in print and on the screen, but no one bothers to add that the same thing was going on throughout the rest of the country as well. When President John F. Kennedy began to return to Roosevelt’s tradition in the new era of the 1960s, he was assassinated by,—guess what?—the FBI, on behalf of the British Empire. Then the FBI fired the shot that killed Jack Kennedy’s younger brother Bobby, whom Hoover hated, on the eve of his winning the Democratic nomination for President, which meant that he would have been elected President.

Then later, President Reagan, newly-elected in 1980, was being guided by Lyndon LaRouche, along with a team of Franklin Roosevelt veterans, towards returning to the Roosevelt tradition in a new form appropriate for a new era. But Bush family circles staged an assassination-attempt,—aided by an FBI coverup. Vice-President Bush took over much control from the severely-wounded President. And the British-FBI apparatus framed and imprisoned LaRouche, and, once he was in prison, seized control of his association.

Now we are in a new and totally different world. China has sprung back from its ten-year long “Cultural Revolution,” a British-inspired genocidal campaign against all its intellectuals. As happens throughout all of history, the world owes much to one man, Deng Xiaoping, for this historic reversal. China has risen up to the point that its unprecedented “New Silk Road” policy and its pioneering space program are inspiring all of sentient humanity, as John Kennedy inspired them in his time. Just as unbelievably, just as unforeseen to anyone beyond Lyndon LaRouche and a few others, Russia has risen up from its British-steered self-destruction of the 1990s, more costly even than World War II to the country that lost the most in World War II. Russia is now a world strategic leader under Vladimir Putin.

Who expected this a few short years ago?

The United States and the entire trans-Atlantic region, which is to say the British Empire, has dug itself into a deep hole. Those who would pull us out must face the facts as they really are, if they are to prepare themselves to create the new facts which destiny requires. Like Kesha Rogers, they must draw inspiration from China’s space program, and the victories won by Russia, China and the BRICS nations. The prospect of the conquest of space and the Galaxy is required for humanity, and required to re-inspire the American people. In that context, the prompt removal of Barack Obama from the Presidency now, will unleash a surge of optimism which will make it possible to take other immediate necessary steps.

I’m interested, tell me more

On Tuesday at the U.N. Security Council (UNSC), Turkey’s shelling of Syrian territory was taken up, at the request of Russia, and the Council unanimously urged Turkey to stop its attacks. At the closed-door session, Council members received a briefing on Turkey’s violations of Syrian sovereignty. Afterward, the UNSC Chairman, Venezuelan Ambassador Rafael Ramirez, told reporters, as cited by TASS, that, “All members of the Security Council…agreed to ask for Turkey to comply with international law.” The Council affirmed its commitment to the Munich agreement.

Ramirez said that, “UN Security Council members are concerned with the Turkish attacks on a number of Syrian regions…” He spoke specifically against attacks on the Kurds. “One of the issues expressed by some countries, including Venezuela, is that the Kurdish people have to be included in the discussion…Something that is important—the Kurds are fighting against the terrorist groups on the ground, and this is an important factor for everybody…”

Russian leadership in defending sovereignty and international law is evident in the UNSC process. Last week, the Syrian government had sent letters to the Council, reporting on Turkey’s attacks on Kurdish militia forces inside Syria, and charging that Turkey was violating Syria’s sovereignty. On Monday, Russia made the request for this matter to be put on the Council’s agenda.

The Russian Foreign Ministry released a statement Feb. 15, saying that Russia sees the Turkish action, “as direct support for international terrorism in violation of corresponding UN Security Council resolutions and the commitments that Turkey assumed as a member of the International Syria Support Group in Vienna, New York and Munich.” Therefore, “Russia will support the initiative to put this issue on the agenda of the UN Security Council, which should provide an unambiguous assessment of Turkey’s provocative policy that is threatening peace and security in the Middle East and beyond it.”

Obama brought leaders of the ten ASEAN nations to Sunnylands, California, for a two-day Summit starting Monday. The build-up for the event hyped the urgency that ASEAN speak with a common voice against China’s “bullying” and “aggression” in the South China Sea. As a Global Times editorial Tuesday reported: “Washington has reiterated that the summit is not targeted at China. It is perhaps not because it does not want to, but because it dares not, for it knows if it does so, many Southeast Asian leaders would not attend at all.”

Nonetheless, Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, told reporters Monday: “We will be continuing to work with our ASEAN partners on a potential statement that we might issue together.”

Obama is also pushing for more members of the anti-China, self-destructive TPP, and some countries are considering it. On this, the Global Times editorial says: “The TPP is considered to be partly aimed at China. But if more ASEAN countries join the TPP, it will not help the TPP isolate China, but it will only complicate the issue. China has long been ASEAN’s largest trading partner.”

China trade with ASEAN was $480 billion in 2014 — more than twice ASEAN trade with the US. The Maritime Silk Road and the AIIB are offering both additional development and stability to the region.

Obama’s offer to ASEAN is pathetic. He will announce a plan to set up “innovation” centers within the US Embassies in Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia, part of his ASEAN-US Connect program. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, told the Straits Times: “That’s what the US has to offer. I went to Laos in October. We are never going to invest as much in infrastructure in Laos as China or Japan, but we can bring a quality of investment and capacity building.”

Obama did manage to get in a round of golf at Sunnylands, Monday morning, “with three high school friends.” It was not reported whether or not they also got high, just like the good old days in Hawaii.