by Kesha Rogers

There, in the stars, lies the long awaited Age of Reason, when our species sheds at last the cultural residue of the beast. – Lyndon LaRouche

In less than three weeks the most critical international conference since the inauguration of President Donald Trump – the Beijing Belt and Road summit – will convene. On May 14 and 15, the leaders and heads of state from twenty-eight nations will gather, joined by representatives from one hundred and ten countries, industry leaders, business leaders, and others. It has already been announced that Russia’s President Putin will be the highest guest of honor at the conference.

During the last three years, an invitation has been repeatedly extended to the United States to take up the offer of Chinese President Xi Jinping for “win-win” cooperation, to join in the great economic development perspective of the Belt and Road, for the benefit of all nations involved. This offer was first made to former President Obama in 2014, but was summarily rejected by the British-run Wall Street stooge who was then occupying the White House. Obama chose geo-political confrontation over working with China and other nations for the good of mankind.

Now a new opportunity has presented itself. President Trump has expressed serious interest and already taken initial steps toward developing a friendly working relationship with China, as was demonstrated in his recent discussions with President Xi in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Again, the offer of “win-win” peaceful cooperation has been put forth, this time to President Trump. The opportunity now before the United States is very real. Were America to seize this opportunity, the murderous banking and financial looting policies of London and Wall Street might be replaced with a future of expanded economic opportunity, peace and scientific progress. Those are the implications for accepting China’s offer to join in a commitment to the common aims of mankind through “win-win cooperation.” Were President Trump to announce his intention to attend the Belt and Road conference in May, this alone would be a singular action that could well shift the entire global situation.

Not least in importance, by opening up a greater collaboration with the nations of the Belt and Road, a great impetus will be delivered and a greatly enhanced potential will be unleashed for joint efforts in science, particularly cooperative work toward the exploration and development of space. With full U.S. participation, a leap for all of mankind in space exploration becomes immediately and rapidly possible.

The Optimism of Space

On Monday, April 24, President Trump spoke with astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). He was joined in the oval office by his daughter Ivanka and astronaut Kate Rubins, and together they spoke with NASA ISS Commander Peggy Whitson and Col. Jack Fisher. The dialogue between the ISS and the President was broadcast live into hundreds of class rooms and space facilities around the United States and was streamed and viewed world-wide as well. The President honored Commander Whitson for her great achievements as the first female commander of the ISS, as well as having spent more time in space than any other American astronaut. Their discussion touched on several topics, including a report from Whitson about the need to understand how microgravity works in space and how it effects the human body. She also reported that they are studying the question of long-duration space missions and the technological advancements that will be required. There are currently over two hundred scientific experiments ongoing aboard the space station.

Col. Fisher stressed the critical importance for international cooperation in space exploration. He talked about his trip to the ISS aboard the Soyuz with his Russian counterpart, veteran Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin. Col. Fisher said, “The international space station is, by far, the best example of international cooperation and what we can do when we work together in the history of humanity.” Both American astronauts were explicit concerning the optimism and inspiration which they have taken from their participation in this mission. This was demonstrated most beautifully by Col. Fisher’s when he said, “I would say to all the students that are watching, the time to get excited is now. If you aren’t studying science and math, you might want to think about that because our future in the stars starts now…. And we’re going to find a permanent foothold in the stars for humanity if we do that.”

The Role of Visionary

On March 25 of this year the Schiller Institute extraordinary conference, in Berlin, Germany, to honor the one hundredth anniversary of the great space pioneer Krafft Ehricke. Under the banner of “Krafft Ehricke’s Vision for the Future of Mankind,” Ehricke’s prime thesis that there are no limitations to the progress of mankind in the universe was celebrated and discussed. As if a divine hand had intervened, on the very same day of that conference, President Trump gave his truly inspiring national address in which he declared, after the signing of the NASA authorization act, “With this legislation, we renew our national commitment to NASA’s mission of exploration and discovery. And we continue a tradition that is as old as mankind. We look to the heavens with wonder and curiosity.”

If we are to take up this challenge today it is of paramount importance that every American fully grasp the critical importance that this effort, on behalf of all mankind, is the necessary future. It must also be a shared commitment. All nations – all of humanity – shall benefit from the cooperation among nations for the peaceful use and development of outerspace. This is the ultimate “win-win” solution for all nations. This can be realized through the application of what Lyndon LaRouche has termed “Crash Programs,” i.e., “the tight integration of the most advanced, most fundamental scientific research with the production and development of new technologies in a general way, such that there is no organizational separation between the most fundamental scientific research and production in general.”

The Time to Act

Many initiatives are already underway. On Saturday, April 22, China celebrated its second annual national space day by carrying out the docking of the Tianzhou 1 supply ship docking with China’s Tianzhou 2 space lab, 240 miles above the earth. Two days later China celebrated the anniversary of China’s first space satellite on April 24, 1970, on the very same day that President Trump spoke with the astronauts aboard the international space station

A full participation by the United States in the upcoming Beijing Belt and Road summit would have the immediate effect of advancing this progress dramatically. This is just what is needed. A new future beckons, one wherein the legacy of war, zero-growth and cultural decay will become a memory. Bold action now will make the difference.

The United States and the trans-Atlantic financial system are right now plunging towards a financial blowout bigger than that of 2007-08. Today’s corporate debt bubble, at $14 trillion, is bigger than the $11 trillion mortgage bubble of 2007-08, and the 20% level of defaults projected for these debts today, is far greater than that actually experienced in mortgages a decade ago. We are already into “The Big Short,” where Wall Street is lending money to suckers to help them buy up its securitized worthless debts–and then betting against its own customers.

The hysteria exhibited in Wall Street’s daily public freakouts against Glass-Steagall, reflects the banks’ awareness of the coming blowout.

Nothing like the present situation has ever been experienced anywhere before. Put another way, nothing in the present world situation bears any comparison whatever even to that of 2007-08 financial crisis, for example.

Consider another unprecedented moment in human history.

NASA Mission Controller Gene Kranz, who went on to be the key Mission Controller for Apollo 13, described in his book, “Failure is Not an Option,” published in 2009, how his boss, the legendary Mission Controller Chris Kraft, had walked up to his desk just two weeks after Kranz had first joined NASA at Langley in 1960. Kraft said, “Everyone else is tied up. You’re all I’ve got. We’re coming up on our first Redstone launch. I’d like you to go down to the Cape, get with the test conductors and write a countdown. Then write some mission rules. When you finish give me a call and we’ll come down and start training.”

“The shock on my face must have registered,” Kranz wrote, “as Kraft continued, `I’ll tell Paul Johnson to meet you at Mercury Control and give you a hand.’ When Kraft talked, his eyes never left mine.”

“My days as an observer were over, my chance to get up to speed ended…. From my work, most recently at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, I knew about flying, systems, procedures and checklists. I could figure out what a countdown should contain. Mission rules were different. There had never before been such a mission in U.S. history—I would just have to give it a shot. Since there were no books written on the actual methodology of space flight, we had to write them as we went along.”

And it is just so for us at this moment.

There is no book which tells us what we must do now.

We do know that the crash must be pre-empted by an in-depth mobilization of the population—just like a mobilization for war, but in this case, a mobilization for the economy in depth. The only approximating comparison is Franklin Roosevelt’s “100 Days” program, and this time we will require the scientific precision expressed in the most successful of FDR’s economic mobilization, perhaps best exemplified in the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is still considered a miracle for its time.

Lyndon LaRouche spelled out what this means in his “Four New Laws” of June 2014. That statement opens with the following:

“The economy of the United States of America, and also that of the trans-Atlantic political-economic regions of the planet, are now under the immediate, mortal danger of a general, physical-economic, chain-reaction breakdown-crisis of that region of this planet as a whole. The name for that direct breakdown-crisis throughout those indicated regions of the planet, is the presently ongoing introduction of a general “Bail-in” action under the several, or more governments of that region: the effect on those regions, will be comparable to the physical-economic collapse of the post-“World War I” general collapse of the economy of the German Weimar Republic: but, this time, hitting, first, the entirety of the nation-state economies of the trans-Atlantic region, rather than some defeated economies within Europe.
“A chain-reaction collapse, to this effect, is already accelerating with an effect on the money-systems of the nations of that region. The present acceleration of a “Bail-in” policy throughout the trans-Atlantic region, as underway now, means mass-death suddenly hitting the populations of all nations within that trans-Atlantic region: whether directly, or by “overflow.”

“The effects of this already prepared action by the monetarist interests of that so-designated region, unless stopped virtually now, will produce, in effect, an accelerating rate of genocide throughout that indicated portion of the planet immediately, but, also, with catastrophic “side effects” of comparable significance in the Eurasian regions.”

Mr. LaRouche continued the development of this thought in dialogue with colleagues recently.

“The United States and other nations have an intrinsic power of economy, as has been shown in super-high growth-rate impulses in certain periods, as with FDR, JFK, and in the industrial revolution based on Lincoln’s policies.

“But then the thieves came and shut it down, and each time spread the myth that this, their speculative practices, is the way the system really works. That’s a myth! It doesn’t work that way. What we have to do is what the LaRouchePAC and the broader LaRouche movement is doing in the Manhattan region, i.e. awakening the souls of fellow American’s, among others, through the beauty of the American System.

“We are actually creating a force of economic creativity. What we have done with the music, with the concerts, the choruses throughout the city, is an example of real economic creativity. What is required is the generation of a process of development. Then we do not have a real crisis, since the population is then the solution not the problem. We may have an embarrassment. You may have lost money! You may have lost your job on Wall St., but the system itself, if treated properly, will work.

“It is time to support reality, and economic reality has to be installed. If in the face of this crisis, we install the proper reality, if we place value on that which has real value, the population, the future populations, then we don’t have a problem. Then the gates of prosperity will open sooner or later. The problem in economies is when economies are being destroyed, as with our nation today, by the hand of the British and their Wall St. types.

“If you look at it the way I look at it, we have the gates of prosperity looking at us. But we’ve got to maintain them—that’s the difference.”

EIR One-Minute short: As one of the last remaining living veterans of WWII, Lyndon LaRouche has dedicated his life to fighting to keep alive Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of the post-colonial, post-imperial world which those Allied soldiers fought to bring about. As FDR famously told Winston Churchill, as documented by Roosevelt’s son Elliot in his book As He Saw It: “I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.” And as Winston Churchill correctly accused FDR: “Mr. President, I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire! Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it.” And as Elliot Roosevelt continues: “In saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.” Today, the opportunity to finally fulfill FDR’s vision of freeing nations (including the United States, now) from the British Empire, can be achieved by President Trump accepting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s offer to join the New Silk Road, establishing a new system of peace and mutual benefit through global great projects and economic development.