Author: Alicia

It was with a great deal of pride that China’s President Xi Jinping addressed the official opening of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It was in October 2013 in Jakarta, one month after President Xi launched a groundbreaking proposal for a Silk Road Economic Belt, that he proposed the AIIB. While it was not quite clear at the time just how much support the AIIB would garner, the infrastructure needs of the world were so great that not even the attempts by the Obama Administration to discourage even European countries from joining, could dent the groundswell of support, from even outside Asia, and it now encompasses as founding members 57 nations from Asia and around the world. “The founding and opening of the AIIB also means a great deal to the reform of the global economic governance system,” Xi told the delegates. “It is consistent with the evolving trend of the global economic landscape and will help make the global economic governance system more just, equitable and effective.”

“The founding and opening of the AIIB will effectively boost investment to support infrastructure development in Asia,” Xi said. “It will serve to channel more resources, particularly private investment, into infrastructure projects to promote regional connectivity and economic integration. It will bring along a better investment environment and more job opportunities and trigger greater medium- to long-term development potential on the part of developing members in Asia. This, in turn, will give impetus to economic growth in Asia and the wider world.

“The demand for infrastructure is enormous.Institutions for infrastructure investment, old or new, have much to offer each other, and may well work together through joint financing, knowledge sharing and capacity building. They may engage each other in benign competition, learn from and reinforce each other, and move forward in tandem. This is a way to allow multilateral development institutions to contribute more to infrastructure connectivity and sustainable economic development in the region.

“While developing countries make the mainstay of the AIIB membership, the institution also attracts a large number of developed members. Such a unique strength makes it a bridge and a bond to facilitate both South-South cooperation and North-South cooperation,” Xi said. The opening of the AIIB also gives the lie to the Western financial media, which in the wake of the stock market turmoil, have been spewing out doomsday scenarios about the Asian economy. President Xi also announced that China would invest an additional $50 million in the capital of the AIIB. Interviewed by Chinese media, the international delegates to the AIIB opening conference, including visiting foreign ministers, expressed great optimism over the opportunities ahead with the launching of this institution. Even the Philippines, which is still locked in a bitter maritime boundary dispute with China, has felt the need to take part in the development policy which the founding of the AIIB portends.

As Wall Street plummets, the LPAC Policy Committee convenes–just a few blocks away–with a message of unity and leadership.

The US and the world are facing an immediate grave danger.  The State of the Union address demonstrated that Obama is completely out of control, Lyndon LaRouche said today.  The speech was a total fraud, and anyone accepting Obama’s lies is opening the United States up for total destruction.  On behalf of the British, Obama is ready to blow up the United States altogether.  This is an immediate option.  The Wall Street issue is actually a cover for the fact that the United States as a whole is being set up for genocide.  This is the British policy of genocide, and the current Pope has been thoroughly suckered into this British genocide scheme.

It’s not just Obama who’s doing the killing; Obama is only the lead dog.  It’s the British,— the British Empire.

And of course people are frightened; maybe they’re not frightened enough.  But in any case, we have to say what we have to say.

This is the secret of the massive COP21 “climate-change” conference in Paris last November-December, with its estimated 50,000 participants representing 196 nations.  But no binding treaty could possibly be reached,— what was its purpose then? It was the mass-declaration of intention for this genocide.  It was to rally the troops for the scheduled “big kill.”  It was the Dance of Death.

And this Pope’s May, 2015 encyclical, calling for humankind to be sacrificed for the sake of the “climate,” was exactly the same thing.  This Pope has come under British direction and control; he’s being used by a British operation.  He’s committing crimes.

Worldwide terror attacks by the British-Saudi spawned ISIS are the same thing,— as in Paris, in California, and now in Jakarta,— the latter the first ISIS attack in Southeast Asia. The Tuesday, Jan 12 bombing in Istanbul, Turkey, whose Muslim Brotherhood-controlled government is friendly to ISIS, has been especially murky.  The victims were German tourists, and the German mass media openly cast doubt on the Turkish government’s account of their investigation.  And German television says that there is “no evidence” for the Turkish government’s claim that it has killed 200 ISIS militants across the border in Syria in retaliation.

The thrust of the genocide is aimed squarely at the trans-Atlantic region. But along with it goes the British threat to destroy Asia by war. This is what Obama is doing in the western Pacific; the Russians understand this completely.

I’m in, let’s stop Obama.

Is Frederich Schiller’s concept of beauty the key to solving the crisis we face today? The objective circumstances for creating a new paradigm are there—but how will we realize them without the moral courage which accompanies the awakening of a higher purpose within the population? Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Megan Beets discuss the importance of Friedrich Schiller as we face today’s dire world strategic situation.

Translations of Schiller’s works can be found here. To purchase Schiller Institute Schiller books, visit here.

“Sell everything except high quality bonds” because 2016 is going to be a “cataclysmic year,” the credit chief of the Queen’s own Royal Bank of Scotland wrote in a recent note to clients, according to a January 11 article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard published in the London Telegraph. RBS’s Andrew Roberts, while stupidly calling China the “epicenter” of what is actually a meltdown of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, forecast stock market plunges in the U.S. and the U.K. of up to 20%, an oil price that could hit as low as $16 per barrel (a 50% drop from Tuesday’s Brent crude price of just under $32), and that a panicked Fed and Bank of England will have to reverse field and start up with quantitative easing again in short order.

The ongoing carnage in commodities, and oil in particular, is on the mind of every speculative banker on the planet. Morgan Stanley is warning of a $20 per barrel price; Goldman Sachs says that oil storage tanks could soon reach a limit, which would “force an immediate halt to some production;” and a Barclay’s research note advises that “recent price declines for major commodities are now greater than in any crisis of the past 30 years, and speculative positioning much more negative than it was even in the depths of the financial crisis.” Bloomberg wire service characterized Monday’s oil trading as simply “madness,” and the Wall Street Journal warned that U.S. oil and gas producers are currently losing $2 billion per week, and that at current price levels—let alone the additional drops that are coming—fully one third of such oil and gas companies will go bankrupt over the course of this year.

But the meltdown did not originate in the oil and commodities markets, and it certainly doesn’t end there. The British housing market is also about to implode, as noted by the Telegraph in a Jan. 10 piece headlined “UK house prices set to crash as global asset prices unravel.” They write that the global asset meltdown has already struck commodities and stocks, and it will soon slam the housing sector, which they describe as a “ticking time bomb.” A big problem in the British housing bubble is what they call “buy-to-let,” i.e. people who have bought housing units not to live in them, but to rent them to others while speculating on what they hope will be an unending asset bubble—much like the “flipping” phenomenon and the sub-prime mortgages in the U.S. in the mid-2000s. “A survey of landlords suggested 200,000 plan to exit the sector. The rapid growth of buy-to-let during the past decade looks set to be slammed into reverse.” And this will intersect a related bubble: “U.K. households are simply drowning in about 40 billion pounds of debt, according to the latest figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility.”

And then there is increasingly panicked capital flight as fear of bail-in expropriations set in—both from carry trade destinations such as Brazil back to the U.S. and Europe; and within Europe from southern tier countries Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc., into German and Dutch banks. But those banks are not lending out those increased funds, not to consumers or businesses, and not even to fellow banks on the interbank overnight market. Instead they are parking the funds at the ECB, where they earn a negative interest rate.

The British policy response to the ongoing meltdown is, predictably, to kill people with bail-in looting, as we have documented on larouchepac.com. 

At a forum celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the National Committee on US-China Relations, in which four former U.S. defense secretaries were doing a “look-back” on the US-China relationship during their tenures, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the president of the Schiller Institute, brought a dose of reality to what was becoming a much-too-comfortable exchange of views between colleagues, such as might have occurred on the deck of the Titanic before it hit the iceberg. The secretaries were Harold Brown, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, and (by video) William Perry. While the nuclear weapons issue had not been broached, especially by Perry, who has previously expressed great concern over the danger of nuclear proliferation and the danger of nuclear conflict with Russia, there was not the sense of urgency corresponding to the reality we face today.

While the moderator, NCUSCR chairman Steve Orlins, was doing his best to find someone other than Helga to ask the first question, she succeeded in getting the floor. Helga introduced herself as the president of the Schiller Institute.

“There are many military experts internationally who are saying that we are closer to nuclear war than at the height of the Cold War period, due to a variety of reasons,” she said. “Now, if that would happen by accident or otherwise, it would lead to the elimination of mankind. There are many other destabilizing factors. One is that the World Bank just said that we are in front of the perfect political storm because of the new financial crash. The EU is about to detonate over the refugee crisis.” We have ISIS.

Here a rather impatient Orlins interrupted Helga, “What is your question?” he asked.

Helga replied: “My question is, why can we not make a new paradigm where we answer President Xi Jinping’s offer which he made to President Obama at the APEC meeting in 2014, that the United States should cooperate in a win-win strategy with the New Silk Road? And in his New Year’s Address he again said we must build a community of the common destiny of mankind. Why can’t we build an international security architecture based on common economic cooperation?”

First to reply was Harold Brown, who had been Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense.

“I think we have,” he said. “I think that things would be much worse if there weren’t economic cooperation,  but to say you are in favor of peace and cooperation is just the very first step. The mechanics of the details are everything.”

Then Bill Cohen wanted to reply. Cohen said he wanted Perry to talk about this issue, but would comment on his own behalf. “I think we have become too lax in our concern about nuclear weapons,” he said. “I go back to Churchill, who said that one day we would return to the Stone Age on the gleaming wings of science. I think what we are seeing with the proliferation of nuclear weapons — Pakistan is building more and more, North Korea is building more, Iran certainly may be building more in the not-too-distant future. So I think this existential threat has to cause us, as well as climate change, to really think or rethink about how we are going to survive on this planet. Because I believe the threat of the spread of nuclear weapons is much greater today, because more and more individuals and radical groups are trying to get their hands on them. So I would put that in the context of an overall architecture, that we have to be concerned about, perhaps more than before, because we had rational governments dealing with this issue, coming even to the point of brinkmanship and possible extinction.”

Orlins then focused the discussion on terrorism, and ignored Cohen’s suggestion that Perry make his own comments on the issue.  The forum was aired live on C-Span. See the full exchange here. 

The World Bank on Jan. 10 followed the IMF in forecasting a dramatic slowdown in the world economy in 2016, and a former U.S. Treasury Secretary wrote in the Washington Post, “Why the Fed Needs To Prepare For the Worst Right Now.” Although these warnings underlined the fraudulent character of Barack Obama’s planned “economic recovery” speech Tuesday night, they blindly ignore the actual issue of the worsening financial collapse, and the solution to it.

Last week the IMF acknowledged that total world trade had actually shrunk from the last half of 2014 to that of 2015. In this report, the World Bank said that the world economy could be hit by a “perfect storm” in 2016, and a severe recession, if a slowdown in the biggest emerging markets were “heightened by severe market stress,” as when the Federal Reserve set off “taper tantrum” by prematurely announced the end of quantitative easing in 2013.

By pointing to this relatively minor Fed episode — a brief day in the park compared to the market crashes hitting now — the World Bank was indicating its fear that the Fed, having started to raise interest rates, will have to lower them again, causing panic throughout financial markets.

But more importantly, it was denying reality: “market stresses” in the U.S. and European financial systems are not a possible “heightening factor” in a developing sector slowdown; these now-plunging trans-Atlantic debt markets have been the cause of slowing down growth in the BRICS countries in particlar.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers’ column in the Post is a plain warning that the market gyrations since Jan. 1 are the signal of a coming economic plunge, and that the Fed must be ready to take action “against the worst.” Summers here doesn’t say what action; but he obviously means going back down to zero or even negative interest rates, and resuming QE money-printing for the banks.

That is complete folly. If Alexander Hamilton were alive tofsy, he would consider a U.S. central banker who proposed to print money and give it to bankrupt bank speculators, to be a dangerous idiot. The problem is bad debts, worthless bank assets, which have no means of repayment coming to them. The solution is to shut down the Wall Street institutions loaded with those worthless assets, and then replace the economy’s “lost money” with Federal credit directed to productivity and new productive employment.

It’s essential to be clear before Barack Obama gives his last State of the Union Tuesday night, that it will be a fraud and a lie.

Obama will claim to have brought about an “American economic recovery.” He will trash China, whose economy is growing and spreading growth in a way the U.S. economy is not, and Russia, the British geopolitical target for war.

The American people’s reply should be, “Stop this bullshit.”

The trans-Atlantic financial system has gone into a rolling crash. It was finally triggered on Jan. 1 by the imposition of “bank bail-ins”—better called “expropriations on behalf of bankrupt banks”—which was legislated by Obama and Rep. Barney Frank in order to prevent the re-enactment of Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act.

The effects of this “bank bail-in” policy have already reached the stage of severe austerity and impoverishment in Italy, in Spain and Portugal and Cyprus. They will soon reach the stage of killing large number of people in Europe and the United States.

Wages are falling. Oil and commodity debt is blowing out. Exports and imports are both falling; world trade is dropping. The World Bank warns of a “dramatic slowdown” and an “economic perfect storm” in 2016. The “great job growth” Obama will claim is this: lots of low-wage or part-time jobs being taken by older people who can’t afford to retire or even to work one job at 60; the middle-aged workers immediately behind them, who used to earn good wages, losing employment, month after month, and killing themselves with drugs, suicides, alcohol.

Obama will lie about his immigration policy as well, and about managing wars: He is in fact a President of perpetual, illegal, unconstitutional, disastrous wars which spread terrorism and refugee flight; and of drone wars in which he personally, weekly chooses the people to assassinate.

But his biggest big lie will be about “recovery.” Washington media and Congress are coddling him while all financial media carry warnings, “Crash ahead: Prepare for the worst, right away.”

If a President informed by EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche’s economics were in office, the problem would be solved. The problem is worthless “assets,” banks loaded with bad debts. The Wall Street casino must be shut down, immediately. Take a lesson from President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and ’40s. Wall Street is the problem, shut it down. Then create a fund of national credit to replace the “lost money” with productive employment and new economic productivity.

Obama’s lies on Tuesday night should be called out in advance; and they should lead to his being dumped, fast. Or this collapse will get much worse and more deadly than 2008.

In an exclusive, broad-ranging interview with Germany’s leading mass-tabloid Bildzeitung, published today but conducted on Jan. 5 in Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in a decisive way against British geopolitics, which were directed particularly against Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and continue to be today, to ensure permanent East-West conflict and war, instead of unity and cooperation through such initiatives as the “One Belt One Road” initiative advanced by BRICS member China and its allies, and Lyndon and Helga LaRouche’s World Land Bridge.

Asked by Bild’s interviewers, “What did we do wrong?” after the end of the Cold War, Putin replied, “we did not overcome Europe’s division: 25 years ago the Berlin Wall fell, but Europe’s division was not overcome, invisible walls simply moved to the East,” he said. “This created the foundation for mutual reproaches, misunderstanding, and crises in the future.” Then Putin revealed that he had reviewed the documents and transcripts of the discussions that took place in 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell, particularly the remarks of Egon Bahr, “already the patriarch of German politics” and a “wise old German.” Then-German Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Soviet leaders Gorbachev, and Mr. Falin, of the Russian Communist Party’s Central Committee, also participated. Putin underscored that he and Gerhard Schroeder are still good friends.

President Putin reported that Bahr said on June 26, 1990: “If while uniting Germany we do not take decisive steps to overcome the division of Europe into hostile blocs, the developments can take such an unfavourable turn that the USSR will be doomed to international isolation.” Bahr spoke about the necessity to create a new alliance in the center of Europe, the Russian President explained. “Europe should not go to NATO. The whole of Central Europe, either with East Germany or without it, should have formed a separate alliance with participation of both the Soviet Union and the United States. And then he says: ‘NATO as an organisation, at least its military structures, must not extend to include Central Europe.'”

Bahr, Putin added, was “convinced that it was necessary to change the format radically, move away from the times of the Cold War. But we did nothing.” Now, “what Mr. Bahr warned about—that’s what has happened.” The whole of Europe was not united, as Bahr recommended, and instead, “NATO started moving eastward and expanded.”

The Russian President touched again on the NATO question, and the not-unrelated matter of terrorism, which Putin said, “was also used as a means of fighting against Russia” in the 1990’s.

“If anyone had listened to Gerhard Schroeder, to [then-French President] Jacques Chirac, to me, perhaps there would have been none of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, as there would have been no upsurge of terrorism in Iraq, Libya, or other countries in the Middle East,” Putin went on. “We are faced with common threats, and we still want all countries, both in Europe and the whole world, to join their efforts to combat these threats, and we are still striving for this. I refer not only to terrorism, but also to crime, trafficking in persons, environmental protection, and many other common challenges. Yet this does not mean that it is us who should agree with everything that others decide on these or other matters. Furthermore, if someone is not happy with our stance, they could find a better option than declaring us an enemy every time. Would not it be better to listen to us, to critically reflect on what we say, to agree to something and to look for a common solutions?”

Putin’s discussion of Russia’s relationship with Germany is instructive. Despite everything that has occurred over the past decade, and efforts to “upset our relations through mass media and anti-Russia rhetoric,” relations remain close, because both nations’ people feel an affinity toward each other. Russian-German economic and strategic cooperation produced benefits for both nations, creating jobs, people-to-people and cultural cooperation, setting up the St. Petersburg Dialogue forum, among other things. And, he emphasized, Germany and Russia worked together to try “to prevent negative developments in the Middle East in Iraq, together.”

The “foolish and harmful” sanctions imposed on Russia have hurt both nations, Putin pointed out: trade volume in dollars had dropped by 50%, and many of the jobs created by Russian-German cooperation have been lost. Yet, Putin underscored, “we will overcome the difficulties we are facing today,” as there are still many avenues for cooperation in many areas. Chancellor Merkel and Putin have met regularly at various events,” he said. “I think I met her seven times, and had 20 telephone conversations with her in 2015. …so the relations are still developing, thank God, and I hope they will develop further.”

See the full interview here.

The only real surprise regarding the financial markets after the first week of 2016, is that people are acting surprised that a meltdown is underway. Lyndon LaRouche had certainly given ample, and repeated, warning, through this publication and elsewhere, that this was going to happen—for anyone who cared to listen.

To the report that the Dow dropped 6.5% this week, as part of a $4 trillion wipe-out of the value of global equities, add the fact that mutual funds saw the biggest weekly outflow of cash since September 2015, with $8.8 billion fleeing mainly from U.S.-based stock funds. Oil ended up losing 10% on the week, with Goldman Sachs saying a much bigger blood-letting is required: oil could hit $20 per barrel, they said in a note yesterday. Their argument is that, over the last year the world has been producing 1.5 million bpd more than is consumed, and that producers are not yet ready to slash production at current prices—so better drive them down further.

The implementation of “bail-in” across the European Union on Jan. 1 has had what should have been the expected result—a total freezing up of the bond market. And not only bank bonds, which are now subject to confiscation in the coming bank crises, but even corporate bonds. Not a single major financial bond was successfully issued in Europe last week. What will happen today?

Bail-in is also the law of the land in the United States, since the fraudulent Dodd-Frank bill was implemented by Obama. Far from “reining in” Wall Street, Dodd-Frank was in fact written by Wall Street, in order to prevent a restoration of Glass-Steagall, while permitting unrestricted gambling, leading to the now total bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic banking system.

Although Glass-Steagall is now the central issue in the Presidential campaign in the U.S., it is a farce. For any candidate to promise to implement Glass-Steagall after the election, is a criminal diversion from the economic and strategic collapse now upon us. Only the immediate implementation of Glass-Steagall—within the next few weeks at most—can prevent the collapse of the Western financial system as a whole, and the immediate danger of global war being driven by that collapse.

Such an immediate solution is indeed possible, LaRouche noted today. The minds of the citizens can be radically transformed in such a moment of crisis—“in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye”—if they are provided access to a vision of creativity, of Classical art and Classical science, which has been virtually eliminated in the degeneration of our culture. That must be our task.