Category: Aggregated

In addition to re-airing the April 2016 segment of 60 Minutes on the 28 pages fight, CBS TV Miami’s Jim DeFede conducted a ten-minute interview on Sunday with Sen. Bob Graham, in which Graham delivered one of the sharpest indictments yet of the Saudi Royal Family. Asked to comment on the now infamous paragraph in the final report of the 9/11 Commission, which said there was no evidence of high-level Saudi Monarchy or government support for the 9/11 hijackers, Graham said “I strongly disagree.” He explained that he believed that it went “to the top of the pyramid” and that such an “attack on an ally” could not have been carried out without such top-down approval. He reviewed the fact that the hijackers spoke no English, had no previous travel to the United States and were not particularly well-educated. They had to have received help from inside the United States and that help had to have come from outside the country. “I think it points a very strong finger to Saudi Arabia as the ultimate source,” Graham declared.

Asked by DeFede to comment on a recent letter by Sen. Bill Nelson to President Obama, reporting that he had read the 28 pages and “intelligence reports that debunk them,” Graham said that all of the documentation still classified should come out publicly. He cited the fact that a Federal Judge in Ft. Lauderdale is reviewing 80,000 pages of FBI documents from the Tampa field office on a Sarasota investigation into a wealthy Saudi family that had ties to Mohammed Atta and several other hijackers who spent months in the area.

Graham said that if the 28 pages are made public, he will call for a full-scale re-assessment of the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, noting that Saudi Arabia is the number one arms purchaser in the world, with much of the sales coming from the United States. “Do we want to sell arms to a country that was our enemy in the run-up to 9/11?”

Graham called Saudi Arabia a “perfidious, unreliable ally,” emphasizing that the Saudi Monarchy’s “primary goal is survival. They are an absolute monarchy” that is obsessed with how to prevent the kind of Iran-style coup that overthrew the Shah.

Graham referenced the JASTA bill, noting that the 9/11 families have been in court for years against the Saudi Monarchy, but have had the cases dismissed, due to issues of sovereign immunity and the courts finding that the plaintiffs lacked evidence of Saudi Royal involvement. That evidence, Graham noted, “is locked up.”

The third of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve symposia on “Ending Too Big To Fail” was planned for two densely academic panels on bank capitalization levels, by scholars of the Peterson Institute in Washington, but became a debate on Glass-Steagall, due to two interventions by EIR representatives.

See more on Glass Stegall

There are two distinct Federal Reserve “stories” currently: the utter failure of the non-viable zero-interest monetary policy of the Fed, ECB, Bank of Japan, and BoE in the real world; and the somewhat Ivory Tower bank-regulation debate on “ending too big to fail” being run by Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari.

At this symposium Kashkari, as luncheon speaker, was completely surrounded by Peterson Institute speakers and a largely IMF/Treasury/Federal Reserve audience of about 60. Their discussion of the impact of various levels of capital in large banks was so arcane that when EIR first intervened to say that Glass-Steagall was the only historically allowed solution to this debate, the moderator had to translate “Glass-Steagall” as “structural reform” for the panelists before they responded.

Kashkari’s speech, however, thoroughly rejected the bail-in policy — “it has caused something of a bank panic in Europe this year” — and said the Wall Street banks still need to be broken up in some way, and that the decision had to be made this year. Trying to “resolve” one of the big Wall Street banks in crisis, he remarked, was “like trying to disassemble an aircraft carrier at sea in a hurricane.” Following this, interventions demanding Glass-Steagall by EIR and by a retired Federal Reserve economist in the audience turned the second panel entirely into a Glass-Steagall debate. A number of U.S. and foreign contacts were made as a result.

Privately Kashkari received a full briefing on the necessity of a Hamiltonian credit policy to replace the Federal Reserve’s failed policy, which is sinking the economy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Poland, Sunday, for a three-day visit, following his highly successful visit to Serbia. In an article published in the leading Polish newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, on June 17, Xi referred to Copernicus, Madame Curie, and Chopin as Poles who have made great contributions to mankind’s progress, and who are known and respected in China. He also noted the Polish Jesuit priest and scientist Michal Boym (a loner who tried to defend the last Ming Emperor in the 1640s against the Manchurian Qing, but who also published works on Asian flora and fauna).

Xi praised Poland’s historic collaboration with China, one of the first to recognize the PRC, and the first Central Asia country to join the AIIB. China and Poland are each other’s leading trading partners in their respective regions, with two-way trade of over $17 billion in 2015. There are five Confucius Institutes in Poland, and Xi said that a growing number of Chinese universities are teaching the Polish language.

He pointed out that Poland is on the crossroads of the New Silk Road and the ancient Amber Road (the north-south trade route from St. Petersburg and the Baltic nations through Poland to Venice), and that several Chinese rail routes to Europe either terminate in, or pass through, Poland.

Xi and President Andrzej Duta signed about 40 deals and MOUs on Monday, mostly in construction, raw materials, energy, finance, and science. Duta said he hoped that Poland would be China’s “gateway to Europe,” pointing both to the Gdansk port and the land ports for the rail connections.

Xi and Duta welcomed a train arriving in Warsaw on Monday from China. Polish freight group PKP Cargo operates 20 trains per week between Poland and China, each trip taking 11-14 days, twice as fast as ship and far cheaper than air.

Xi and Duta agreed to upgrade their relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”

It is notable that, although Poland has been pulled into Obama’s geopolitical military confrontation with Russia, neither Russia nor China view the world geopolitically, but rather as win-win relationships with all nations — what Helga Zepp-LaRouche calls the common aims of mankind. Thus Xi is going next to Tashkent for an SCO summit, where he will meet with Vladimir Putin, and Putin will go on to Beijing after the SCO for a state visit to China.

According to a posting, Sunday, on Zerohedge, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s criticism of NATO’s warmongering was a surprise, because it came from a completely unexpected direction.

ZH shows that Steinmeier hit the nail on the head by quoting the CFR’s Stephen Sestanovich, who tweeted,

Bloomberg News sees Steinmeier’s statement as evidence of a split in the German government coalition.

said Juergen Hardt, the foreign-policy spokesman of Merkel’s parliamentary faction, in a statement on Sunday. Steinmeier’s comments could lead to “misunderstandings or even glee in Moscow,” he said. The public dispute between Merkel’s CDU and Steinemeier, whose SPD is the junior partner in the coalition

On top of this comes Gerhard Schroeder, the former chancellor, also of the SPD. Schroeder, in a June 18 interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, warned NATO that its policies could lead to a new arms race with Russia, saying that they “will help neither to mitigate conflicts with Russia nor restore good relations.” He ridiculed the idea that Russia “may be nurturing a plan to invade NATO-countries,” stressing that the notion is completely out of touch with the real state of affairs. Schroeder also praised Steinmeier’s call to lift the sanctions on Russia gradually. He also argued that it’s inappropriate for Germany top participate in the NATO military build-up in the Baltic states, particularly as the 75th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa—Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941—comes on June 22.