Author: Alicia

On Feb. 1, French cable TV “Canal+” broadcast a trenchant, 50-minute exposé of the fascists behind the Maiden coup, by respected journalist Paul Moreira, “Ukraine, the Masks of the Revolution,” on a program called “Spécial Investigation.”

It is a well-done investigation on the neo-fascist movements which made the Maidan revolution possible, and which are still operating in security functions, separate from the police or military forces of the country, and are “tolerated” by the Ukrainian government and by its foreign protectors. Moreira exposes, one-by-one, the Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, and Svoboda, as extreme-right violent movements. He shows how, just months after Maidan, the Right Sector took over the role of border patrol between Ukraine and Crimea, explicitly to provoke a famine in Crimea, by blockading all trade from coming in. One can see long lines of trucks waiting to come in, but nobody dares to do anything, because the militias are armed. He focuses very much on the Odessa massacre, featuring shocking footage showing in detail how more than 40 pro-Russian Ukrainians were eliminated at the Trade Union House of Odessa.

President Piotr Poroshenko is not mentioned at all. At the end, Moreira shows a meeting which took place in Kiev in September 2015, which brought together the Americans and Europeans who supported the revolution. Moreira asks himself whether they voluntarily ignored the militias, and says, “Here, the money-people play world war games.”

Lawrence Summers is targeted in the program; Summers says, “We are not performing charity; Ukraine is an essential front-line of our military interests.” David Petraeus is shown pleading for anti-tank weapons for the Kiev army. Stanley McChrystal is interviewed on the sidelines of the Kiev meeting as an experienced military figure who dealt with out-of-control army corps in Afghanistan. Asked what has to be done to cope with the militias, he responds that they have to be made professional and connected to the government. After a second question, he flees. Victoria Nuland is shown at the same meeting saying that the U.S. military aid had a significant impact on the battlefield. She is also shown being questioned by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), and acknowledging the presence of “ugly” forces in Maidan.

The documentary concludes that the Maidan revolution wouldn’t have been possible without these neo-fascist groups. Horrifying, new, filmed material of the bestiality of the fascists is shown, and the American and European aid that was given to these Nazis. There were several major press-outlets featured in the documentary, and Le Monde exposed itself as a collaborationist publication by attacking the documentary. The Ukrainian Embassy in Paris, in a hysterical gesture, put pressure on the TV network to cancel it, but failed.

Sputnik News reports that Canal+ will rebroadcast the documentary on Feb. 8.       

The talk in Frankfurt, London, and as far away as Australia, is that Deutsche Bank is headed to be the next “big one” to fail — and that may come a lot sooner than people think. Germany’s leading financial daily Handelsblatt runs the headline, “Deutsche Bank in Free Fall,” writing that the bank’s shares have lost one-third of their value since the beginning of the year; that this is only the beginning of February; and that the bank took a loss of EU6.8 billion for 2015. Everyone seems to know that the bank is buried under of a mountain of fines, including $2.5 billion levied by U.S. and British authorities for its part in rigging benchmark interest rates. This figure could rise to $12 billion because of other pending cases on illegal activities.

The bank’s shares, trading at EU177 prior to the crisis, collapsed to EU30 by the end of 2015, and on Feb. 2, they hit an all-time low of EU15.54 euros. An article in Australia’s Financial Review points out that the shares are “trading on a price-to-book valuation of 0.34 times, which implies the market thinks that almost 70% of its loans are impaired and some nasty news is just around the corner.”

All this has eaten into Deutsche Bank’s notoriously low capital holdings. It seems the only way it can raise capital is through issuing CoCos, or contingent convertible, bonds. The CoCos are the bail-in bonds whose payout is made only when the stock price exceeds a certain amount. More important, if the bank gets into trouble, the bonds are converted into stock; i.e., bailed in. Deutsche Bank’s CoCos are being “kicked around in the gutter” and are trading at about 85 cents, and falling. Still, the bank hopes to sell EU4 billion worth, although no one is holding his breath.

Financial Review cites Paul Schulte, the Chief Executive of SGI Research, who warned that the bank is not only sitting on a mountain of bad assets dating from the previous crisis, but is holding “a large book of commodity-related derivatives that are under stress from the collapses in most commodity prices.” (Oh, really! Everyone knows that Deutsche Bank has the world’s largest portfolio of derivatives.)

Deutsche Bank is not alone, opines Schulte:  “This has been brewing under everyone’s nose, because while people thought that the problem was periphery banks in Ireland or Spain, the actual problem is that Deutsche Bank, and the French banks with lots of toxic debt in commodities, are over-stretched; badly run; have no sense of risk management, and are organs of state capitalism.”

While Deutsche Bank shares have fallen by 30%, those of Citi have sunk by 22%; Goldman Sachs -16%; JP Morgan -14%; Morgan Stanley -23%; Bank of America Merrill Lynch -22%; and Credit Suisse -22%. 

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Washington, this morning, in which he previewed the administration’s defense budget request for 2017. It could be characterized as a budget for World War III, for, while he said he wanted to avoid conflict with Russia and China, the top priorities in the budget are preparation for war with Russia and China.

In the speech (according to the text provided by the Pentagon), Carter lists Russia and China as the top two challenges, followed by North Korea, Iran, and then ISIS.

“Key to our approach is being able to deter our most advanced competitors,” he said. Therefore, “We will be prepared for a high-end enemy…,” meaning Russia and China, which he called “our most stressing competitors.” The Defense Department, therefore, “has elevated their importance in our defense planning and budgeting.”

To counter Russia, the administration will be requesting $3.4 billion for the so-called European Reassurance Initiative, way up from $789 million, to fund more rotational forces in Europe, more training and exercises, more pre-positioned equipment, all of which, “by the end of 2017 will let us rapidly form a highly capable combined-arms ground force that can respond theater-wide if necessary.”

For the war on ISIS, the budget will ask for $7.5 billion, 50 percent more than in 2016. Part of this will go to buying 45,000 more guided bombs and rockets to replace those that have already been expended.

Not mentioned by Carter but nonetheless a crucial part of the budget is the nuclear enterprise. The plan calls for $13 billion for a new ballistic missile submarine over the next five years, to replace the current fleet of Ohio-class submarines. Of that amount, $4 billion will be spent on research and development, and the rest on procurement of long-lead items so that construction of the first new boats can begin in 2021.

The Pentagon’s plan will also underscore the need to fund all three legs of the U.S. strategic deterrent “triad” — not only the new submarines but also new nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and a new bomber for the Air Force, an unnamed source told Reuters.

The single largest contributor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign has been revealed to be none other than the Wall Street hedge fund mogul— or, as Lyndon LaRouche referred to him, the “British agent of financial destruction”—George Soros. As revealed in year-end campaign filings made to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Soros contributed a whopping $6 million to the Clinton-supporting super PAC Priorities USA Action in the last six months of 2015, or almost 25% of the $25 million the PAC raised in that period. Soros’s gift was a significant increase from the $1 million he gave in the first half of 2015 period, which, along with another $1 million donation to the Clinton-backing American Bridge 21st Century, brought the annual total of Soros’ push for Clinton, to $8 million.

Wall Street does like Hillary for President; clearly the City of London likes her even more.

This new-found generosity is a marked shift for Soros, who basically sat out the 2012 election, after “becoming dissatisfied” with British agent Barack Obama, giving Priorities USA only $1 million for that election year. At that time, Soros had sent an email—conveniently revealed just last month—to Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, saying he “regretted” his support for Obama at the time, and that he wished he would have backed Hillary. Possibly the best case of “20/20 hindsight” ever, or, more likely, “20/20 FOREsight.”

If America is to survive, and not be pushed into depression or war, it must wrest itself from this British imperial parasite, and that within the coming days and months, not sometime after we select a new President late this year. The entire British trans-Atlantic financial system is crashing, now, and needs to be severed and buried. We do not need their money in our politics, nor their ideas in our institutions.

One week after London agent and international drug-pusher George Soros announced he was taking a large short position against China’s currency, a veritable horde of “prestigious” hedge fund managers have dropped everything to join the attack.

They might have been looking for a reason to drop everything and go to war with Soros: what Bloomberg called “Top investors Kyle Bass, David Tepper and Bill Ackman” have all been top losers of investors’ money in the past year. Ackman has made bets on price-gouging pharmaceutical companies which have lost him plenty. Bass, after acknowledging his “worst year in a decade,” has sold off 85% of the assets of his Hayman Capital Management Fund, to throw everything into attacking the Chinese yuan. And there are at least a half-dozen other large funds following Soros into battle, including Carlyle, Nexus, and others.

Recall that just one year ago, the lying Soros shouted that Europe needed a “$20 billion war chest for war against Russia” (in Ukraine). Now, he thinks that cooperation with Russia in Syria may be necessary, but is going to war with China over its currency.

This attack is, in effect where not by intention, a war against China’s “win-win” New Silk Road investments in infrastructure across Eurasia, Africa, and South America. The hedge funds are trying to accelerate capital flight from China — already at least $600 billion net in 2015 — and make it spend more of its foreign reserves to keep the currency stable and control that flight. The more reserves it must spend this way, the more difficult its massive infrastructure and development lending.

The Chinese government and People’s Bank of China are, however, quite ready and armed for this battle with Soros et al., and have said, “They will lose.” In the first week of the attack, the yuan’s value has actually risen slightly against the dollar. The PBOC has reinstituted capital controls, and recently stopped Hong Kong-based speculation against its economy by a ferocious liquidity squeeze on yuan trading by (British-origin) Hong Kong banks. Soros and company think they will do better, but may short themselves into a trap. It is to be hoped their 2015 losses were nothing compared to those they are walking into now.

Even the top politicians of America, the governors and Members of Congress, have begun showing signs of extreme concern at the epidemic of heroin abuse and addiction which is afflicting the United States from coast to coast.

Combined with the abuse of prescription painkillers and the rampant spread of marijuana use since Obama effectively made it legal, this drug epidemic is helping drive a terrible American phenomenon. Death rates have been rising across the population during the last two U.S. presidencies, a tragic development unheard-of in developed nations. Horrified scholars are finding their studies showing that Americans at all ages have been killing themselves, since the turn of this century, in a mass epidemic of hopelessness spiked by drugs.

No individual has provided more funds, for more decades, for the campaigns to legalize illegal drugs, and spread their use, than the hedge fund manager and British “regime-change” agent George Soros.

Soros was the biggest funder of Barack Obama to the Presidency. Monday he was revealed to be by far the biggest supporter of Hillary Clinton, running for President on Obama’s war-and-Wall Street “legacy.” Soros gave Clinton’s leading superpac, Priorities U.S.A., millions—between one-quarter and one-third of all the money it raised in the last six months.

The world’s top drug pusher is trying to drive Hillary into the White House. This, while also leading a swarm of hedge funds in a sudden attack on China’s currency reserves, which are the basis for its international lending for needed infrastructure development all over Eurasia, Africa, and South America.

There is a profound difference between nations like China—developing and providing development worldwide—and the European nations, Japan, and the United States. The trans-Atlantic countries are now economic and moral failures; for decades, they have been without any national mission—such as, for example, missions both China and India have, in the two most creative and fastest-advancing space programs on the planet.

Such missions are the vehicles through which nations mobilize their most priceless wealth: the human creativity by which mankind creates its future. The United States was losing its space mission for decades; Barack Obama finally killed it.

LaRouchePAC’s leader in Texas, Kesha Rogers, famous for her “Save NASA; Impeach Obama” campaigns, has launched a new mobilization to bring the space mission back.

That kind of creative mission is the basis for shaping a new presidency. Hillary is disqualified; Obama has to be dumped.

I’m interested, tell me more

Start your week off with a kick—join us every week at 1PM est for a live discussion with Lyndon LaRouche and the LPAC Policy Committee.

The official Communist Party paper Global Times published a lead editorial today warning that the US is preparing for war, nuclear war, against China, and called for China to “accelerate its speed of building up strategic strike capabilities, including a nuclear second-strike capability.”

Titled “Build up defense to thwart US provocation,” the editorial references the US deployment of a warship within the 12 mile limit of one of its islands in the Xisha (Paracel) islands on Jan. 30, noting that this is not an unoccupied island, nor an artificially created island as in cases of the US provocations in the Nansha (Spratly) islands, but rather the Zhongjian Island is “under China’s actual control, and China has released the territorial sea baseline of the Xisha Islands, including Zhongjian Island. Therefore, the US provocation this time is more vicious.”

The Obama Administration used the excuse, in the case of entering the 12 mile territorial limit of the island artificially created by China, that the UNCLOS does not recognize territorial sovereignty around such islands. This is clearly not the case in the case of Zhongjian, and explicitly demonstrates the lie of Obama’s claim that he does not take sides in the territorial claims themselves. The fact that about 90% of the trade which passes through China’s claimed territory of the South China Sea (the “nine-dash line”) is with China itself demonstrates that it is China alone that must be concerned about “freedom of navigation” from the US provocations and the ongoing US military occupation of the Philippines.

The Global Times editorial also notes that “China’s military strength still significantly lags behind that of the US. If the US is ready for a face-off in the South China Sea, it can quickly gather its military strength despite the far distance…. China’s military budget only takes up 2 percent of its GDP, much lower than the US figure of 4 percent.” 

They conclude with the above call for a military build up to prepare a response to a nuclear assault from the US.

The Obama Administration has joined with the British in escalating a personal smear campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin, along with their escalating military threats which have brought the world to the edge of thermonuclear confrontation. Russian officials and national security experts have noticed, and are discussing the matter openly.

On Jan. 31, The National Interest magazine published an article by four well-known Russian think-tank analysts under the headline “How to Avoid War With Russia.” The four authors, Andrey Bezrukov, Mikhail Mamonov, Sergey Markedonov and Andrey Sushentsov, asserted that the US grand strategy for the 21st century is to contain China, and as part of this strategy, Washington aims to keep Russia down, forcing Moscow to join an alliance with Washington against a Beijing that will threaten Russian interests. The authors note that Russia has already devised an asymmetric response to this insane US strategy, by launching the flanking military operation in Syria, and by aligning with China in such formations as the BRICS.

In a similar vein, Sputnik News reported Jan. 30 that Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov—a senior Russian strategist and head of the Academy for Geopolitical Problems—has called for Russia to modify its new national security strategy and military doctrine to counter the most recent Obama Administration strategies that target Russia as the greatest threat to Europe. “Situations change and the country changes as well,” Gen. Ivashov told Zvezda TV. “So, the national military doctrine evolves. I think changes to the doctrine have been prompted by the fact that the US adopted the new Strategy of National Security in February 2015 and then the new Military Doctrine in July, which have significantly changed the US’s military policy.” Ivashov argued that the US has rejected the idea of multipolar cooperation, and continues to assert its unipolar dogma. “According to its doctrine, the US will use military force to protect its national interests. But its interests know no limits around the world. Washington says it will deploy its troops and engage in armed conflicts to protect its interests.” 

Lyndon LaRouche sharply warned on Sunday evening that “the world is on the edge of general thermonuclear warfare, and it’s coming essentially from Britain and from Obama. Obama is an agent of the British imperial system, and always has been, and they are now moving to launch general thermonuclear war. They are on the very edge of pushing it over the edge, right now, especially in Europe.”

LaRouche said that he has been following international developments closely, and over recent weeks it has become evident that the dying British imperial system is driving for war, now, engineered by their agent Obama as a showdown between the United States and NATO, against Russia and China. We are at a break-point in history, in which action must be taken promptly to prevent such a nightmare from playing out.

“That is the message which ought to be presented to anyone who is not stupid,” LaRouche said. “And we should be acting to stall and prevent the launching of such a war. Unless they are deterred from going ahead with what they are obviously signaling to do quickly, you are headed for thermonuclear war, and mass death throughout the planet. The point is: Can we prevent that thing, which has already been set into motion? Can we prevent that from being carried forward? That’s the only important question at the moment.”

The LaRouche movement today introduced a major change in this strategic situation, with the call to arms issued by LPAC Policy Committee member Kesha Rogers, former two-time Democratic congressional candidate from Texas, to revive NASA from the hell that Obama’s policies have condemned it to, get the United States back in space, and engage in win-win cooperation with Russia and China, in particular China’s intention to land a mission on the dark side of the moon by 2020.

2014 LaRouche Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, Kesha Rogers, outside the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

That campaign can also play a decisive role in returning sanity to the institution Presidency of the United States, which is currently in the hands of a deranged murderer, who seems to think he can back down Russia and China with threats of thermonuclear confrontation, or an actual war.

That change cannot wait until November 2016. Obama has to be removed from power now. That can be done, and a functioning institution of the Presidency revived, by cracking open what is now a rigged Democratic presidential race. Sink Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s pro-Obama candidacies, and launch a viable policy discussion around the campaign of Martin O’Malley—the only candidate who has spoken out seriously about returning to Glass-Steagall to stop Wall Street’s deadly policies, and who has otherwise demonstrated qualities that qualify him for the Presidency.

Simultaneously, it is necessary to immediately shut down Wall Street and the entire speculative trans-Atlantic financial system, since it is that system’s bankruptcy which is the driving force for war. The entire trans-Atlantic system came within a hair’s breadth of collapsing this past week with the banking crisis in Italy, and it can detonate at any moment—and almost anywhere. That system must be buried, so that the United States can return to the economic growth policies we had under Franklin Roosevelt, and which were also reflected in Kennedy’s space program.

“The space program is the secret of the mechanism by which we could bring the United states, and other parts of the world, into a recovery,” Lyndon LaRouche stated on Jan. 30. Once such a policy goes into effect, “you’re going to see the beginning of a real revolution in space. So let’s do it!”