EDITORIAL
Obama Is Escalating the Drive for War on China and Russia, and Must Be Removed from Office, Now!
April 3 (EIRNS)—The LaRouche Political Action Committee posted afive-minute video which is of a “must see” quality for the growing number of Americans, and other concerned citizens of the world, who recognize the insanity of President Obama in driving the nation to military confrontation with Russia and China, one which if not stopped, will result in a near-term global thermonuclear war. LaRouche’s remarks from his March 31st “Fireside Chat” are interspersed with statements from China, Russia, and from NATO Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove, this past week, demonstrating the severity of the crisis. The video is titled, “LaRouche: Obama Wants War with China,” also available on YouTube.
The slightly edited transcript:
Lyndon LaRouche: I would say that right now we’re going through, not a simple place of what we’ve had before, but we are going into a more deeply rooted crisis situation, throughout not only the United States, but throughout much of the planet. We’re on the edge of a threatened launching of war against China, and implicitly also Putin, China in particular—and the threats are becoming very serious.
Hong Lei (Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman): Installing the THAAD system has extended far beyond the defense needs against North Korea, and will cause direct harm to China’s strategic and security interests, as well as the regional balance.
LaRouche: If these threats were to be carried out, the immediate effect would be a general thermonuclear war fought throughout the entire planet.
That’s what the facts are, because if Putin were knocked out, and if China was being hit directly, by Obama’s directions, you would have the worst general warfare on the planet Earth that has ever occurred, that we have ever experienced. That’s where we are.
Gen. Philip Breedlove (NATO Commander): We are prepared to fight and win if we have to … our focus will expand from assurance to deterrence, including measures that vastly improve our overall readiness. To the east and north we face a resurgent and aggressive Russia, and as we have continued to witness these last two years, Russia continues to seek to extend its influence on its periphery and beyond.
LaRouche: If we were not to intervene, now, and Obama were to act as he intends to act right now … as a matter of fact, Obama has already set into motion a general thermonuclear war throughout the planet. Now, the question whether he’ll succeed in doing that or not, is another question, but the fact is, he’s doing it. And he’s putting military forces, a lot of it, into it. And that’s the intention.
Sergei Glazyev (Economist and advisor to President Vladimir Putin): As always happens in a changing world economic order, the country that is losing its leadership tries to unleash a world war for control over the periphery…. The State Department and the White House [continue] to look at the world through the prism of both the Cold War and British confrontations with Russia and Germany in the nineteenth century, and now the U.S. is unleashing another world war.
LaRouche: As of now, the trans-Atlantic community, of the planet, is a disaster. Everything that we had beforehand has just crashed; we’re losing everything.
So we have two things: Get Obama out of there, right away. Right away! Leave in him in there, he’s going to go for a thermonuclear war! So you’ve got to get him out of there. Once you do that, take that step, then you have to take reconstructionist kinds of measures, and those measures are possible, they’re feasible.
And then, once you’ve thrown Obama out of office, you’re going to have to do some reorganizing of the political structure of the Congress and so forth; and you’re going to have to find people who are willing to step forward, being able to look at the things that we could do, or could have done. That would mean we would go with the kind of program which is just exactly like is being by China! The China that Obama intends to destroy.
So what we would want to do, is simply take the same thing that we had with the space program; revive the space program, because we’re going to have to do a lot of spatial discovery work, on space work. And it will be very important and very rich, and without doing it, without using it, you’re not going to succeed. So you have no alternative on this one. But if an enterprise like that has that kind of a commitment and is prepared to present it, I would say, “praise them. we need ’em!” And back ‘em up.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Russian Economist Glazyev: ‘Now the U.S. Is Unleashing Another World War’
April 1 (EIRNS)—Sergei Glazyev, prominent Russian economist and advisor to President Vladimir Putin on regional economic integration, charged the United States with “unleashing another world war” to defend the collapsing trans-Atlantic financial system. In a lengthy interview published on March 29 by the online Russian newspaperLenta.ru (whose English translation was published by Russia Insider), Glazyev said the key to resolving the crisis is to “pursue our priority development strategy… and pursue Eurasian integration.”
Glazyev said that the White House and others in Washington are “continuing to look at the world through the prism of both the Cold War and British confrontations with Russia and Germany in the 19th century, and now the U.S. is unleashing another world war. The combination of the objective problems of the American financial oligarchy, and the strange mindset of American geopoliticians threatens a world conflict.”
He explained that, “the economic entities that dominate in the U.S., serving a financial oligarchy, have destabilized the American monetary and financial system, which defaults about twice a year. The causes of the global financial crisis of 2008 have not disappeared and the American debt bubble—financial pyramids composed of derivatives and the national debt—are still growing…. This process cannot continue indefinitely.”
As for the drive for war, Glazyev said, “As always happens in a changing world economic order, the country that is losing its leadership tries to unleash a world war for control over the periphery…. The American political establishment has been brought up on the chimeras of 19th century geopoliticians…. The main question back then was how to ruin the Russian Empire, and they still look at the world through the eyes of the 19th century hawks, when Great Britain tried to save its hegemony by starting the First World War.”
Glazyev proposed that, to answer this threat, “we need to build a broad anti-military coalition, pursue our priority development strategy, recover our financial and economic sovereignty and pursue Eurasian integration. To prevent war, we need to realize the President’s goal of a common development area from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It is very important to convince our European partners as well as our partners in the Far East and in the South that we need to cooperate, not by blackmailing or threatening them, but through mutually beneficial projects, joining our economic potential while respecting the sovereignty of each state.”
British Empire Launches Slander Campaign against China’s Xi Jinping
April 1 (EIRNS)—After the systematic campaigns launched against two of the important leaders of the BRICS nations, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff—not to mention the non-stop vilification of Russian President Vladimir Putin—the City of London and the Obama Administration are now targeting China’s Xi Jinping. In the cover article in the April 2-8, 2016 issue of The Economist entitled “Beware the Cult of Xi,” the weekly compares the Chinese leader with Mao Zedong during the worst period of the Cultural Revolution. “But Mr. Xi does not need to be as extreme as Mao for his concentration of power to cause harm,” The Economistwrites. “He has been fighting dissent with even more ruthlessness than he has been waging war on graft. Not since the dark days after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 has there been such a sweeping crackdown on critics of the party. Internet censors have been busy deleting messages posted on social media by outraged citizens in response to the vaccine scandal. These have included posts reminding Mr. Xi of his words in 2013 about the party’s fitness to rule. Police have also been investigating the appearance early in March of an anonymous letter on a government-affiliated website calling on Mr. Xi to resign (raising, among several transgressions, the personality cult and his stifling of the media).”
The reference to the “anonymous letter,” which included a barely-disguised death threat against the Chinese leader, is quite revealing. While the letter is said to have been written, and may well have been, by Communist Party “dissidents,” it raises the question of the involvement of “outside interests,” i.e. British intelligence interests. The recent “defection” to the United States of Ling Jihua, a top official in the Hu Jintao government, whose return to stand trial for corruption has been demanded by the Chinese government, has no doubt provided a good deal of intelligence to U.S. agencies and their allies about the internal situation in China and in the Communist Party, information which could well be utilized in such a “fifth column” operation as this.
The apocryphal letter, which was played up prominently on the front page of today’s Washington Post and British daily Guardian, just as Obama and Xi were meeting in Washington at the Nuclear Security Summit, includes the following threat: “For the party cause, for the long-term peace and stability of the country, and for your own personal safety and that of your family, we ask you to resign from all positions.” Lyndon LaRouche commented that such a threat from an obscure source is “not a respectable item,” and is clearly an Obama operation against the Chinese leader.
London and Wall Street Unleash Insane Assault on Putin
April 3 (EIRNS)—The Guardian and PBS Frontline, representing the City of London, the Royal Family, Wall Street and its Canadian partners, are unleashing a pack of wild innuendos supposedly proving that Russian President Putin is a kleptomaniac, and that this is why he has turned Russia into a dictatorship.
The Guardian’s version was released today, the Frontline version is scheduled for April 5. The Guardian lead sentence begins: “A network of secret offshore deals and vast loans worth $2 billion has laid a trail to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.” The London-based daily carefully places phrases such as, “that is not illegal” here and there, followed by, “but experts say that this could be a means of…” then naming some crime or another. They observe that Putin’s name never appears in any of the leaked documents they’ve seen, but add that, “the documents suggest Putin’s family has benefitted from this money—his friends’ fortunes appear his to spend.”
Included in the Guardian’s article is the statement made last week by Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s official spokesman, when he revealed the ludicrous list of questions sent to Putin for the articles, adding that Western intelligence agencies were behind the attacks, aimed at the destabilization of upcoming elections, and calling them an “undisguised, paid-for hack job.”
At the UN, Russia Charges Turkey with Supplying Weapons and Munitions to ISIS
April 2 (EIRNS)—Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin delivered a letter to the UN Security Council in which he charged that Turkey is a prime supplier of weapons and other materials to ISIS inside Syria, using NGOs which are connected to the Turkish National Intelligence organization. “Between 11 and 21 January 2016, Turkish intelligence officers supplied Jabhat al-Sham terrorists with 7.62mm and 12.7mm ammunition and with rounds for RPG-7 grenade launchers,” the document says, reports TASS. “On 25 January 2016, the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms financed a shipment of equipment and food (approximately 55 tons) to ISIL terrorists.” The letter names three Turkish NGOs that are used to smuggle weapons, munitions, food, industrial chemicals, and other materials to ISIS into Syria, sometimes in the guise of humanitarian supplies. “Total supplies to terrorists through Turkey were as follows in 2015: 2,500 tons of ammonium nitrate (worth approximately $788,700); 456 tons of potassium nitrate ($468,700); 75 tons of aluminium powder ($496,500); sodium nitrate ($19,400); glycerine ($102,500); and nitric acid ($34,000),” Churkin wrote in his letter.
Not surprisingly, Turkey has rejected the Russian charge. In an email to the Associated Press, a spokesman for Turkey’s UN Mission claimed Russia’s letter was “an attempt to overshadow the civilian deaths, havoc and destruction in Syria caused by the military operations of the Russian Federation, the regime’s staunchest ally.”
NATO Commander General Breedlove Continues Drive for NATO-Russia Confrontation
April 1 (EIRNS)—NATO Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove was in Riga, Latvia yesterday, where he repeated his assertion of the day before in Vilnius that NATO has to go from a “reassurance” posture to a “deterrence” posture in response to a “resurgent and aggressive Russia.”
“We are prepared to fight and win if we have to. … Our focus will expand from assurance to deterrence, including measures that vastly improve our overall readiness,” Breedlove said following talks with Baltic region NATO commanders, reports Defense News. “To the east and north we face a resurgent and aggressive Russia, and as we have continued to witness these last two years, Russia continues to seek to extend its influence on its periphery and beyond.” Part of the NATO response, Breedlove noted, is the plan to put an armored brigade in Eastern Europe and the Baltics beginning early next year.
Lyndon LaRouche today called Breedlove’s remarks “very, verystupid.”
Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko, warned that the NATO military buildup to which Breedlove is referring worsens the military situation along NATO’s eastern frontier. “A surplus armored brigade, which is said to consolidate NATO’s eastern flank, runs counter to the letter and spirit of the Russia-NATO Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security,” Grushko told Izvestiain an interview, reported TASS. “NATO took a pledge to refrain from an additional deployment of considerable combat forces permanently under its provisions and we’ve said more than once that an indefinite rotation is in no way different from permanent deployment.”
In Washington, there is a relatively sane strain of analysis that agrees with Grushko. In a column in the National Interest on March 30, former CIA analyst Paul Pillar writes that the Russians do have a case that NATO’s military buildup in Eastern Europe violates the NATO-Russia Founding Act and that making the troop presence rotational doesn’t change that fact. “De facto reneging on previous understandings ought to worry anyone concerned about U.S. credibility,” he writes. “And we should remember how much difference Russian cooperation, or lack of it, can make in dealing with problems such as the war in Syria.”
Look for a ‘Third Force’ Behind Nagorno-Karabakh Flare-Up, Russia Charges
April 3 (EIRNS)—The flare-up of deadly fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, that erupted on the morning of April 2, is being driven by a third force, leading Russians have reported. Most reports on the recent violence treat the conflict, which has been unresolved since at least 1994, as if it were organic to the region, but in today’s world, that is unlikely. Russia has an airbase in northern Armenia which it recently reinforced and about which Turkey has been complaining. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, before he left Washington where he was attending the Nuclear Security Summit, declared that “we will support Azerbaijan to the end.”
Deputy Speaker of the Russian State Duma Sergei Zheleznyak, attributed the renewed outbreak of violence to a “third force,” without explicitly naming Turkey or the Saudis. “It is clear that the force that continues to fan the flames of war in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus—dissatisfied with the peacekeeping and counter-terror success of Russia and our allies in Syria—is interested in the rapid exacerbation of the protracted conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region,” he wrote on his Facebook page, yesterday.
According to Zheleznyak, “neither Azerbaijan nor Armenia essentially need this exacerbation now.” He noted that “there is every likelihood that this provocation has been organized by a third force,” adding that “information on its presence is beginning to leak out.” He indicated that, in the mountains, it is sufficient to have only a few trained individuals to provoke “retaliatory” actions by either side. “That’s why the Russian President and our government agencies urge Armenia and Azerbaijan to cease fire and not to allow to draw them into someone else’s insidious game, as long as it is still possible,” he noted, adding that “Russia will do its utmost to defuse tensions in the Caucasus.”
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Obama’s Hypocrisy on Nuclear Weapons Exposed
April 2 (EIRNS)—While the mainstream press in the United States is fawning over Obama’s just-concluded Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), his actual policy of pushing the world toward nuclear war is being exposed in several locations internationally.
Spiegel Online carries a commentary by Markus Becker cited by Sputnik titled, “Nuclear Summit: The Failed Vision of a Nuclear Free World.” The subhead reads, “Barack Obama invites the world to Nuclear Security Summit. But with his vision to abolish nuclear weapons, the U.S. President has largely failed. Instead, threatened a new arms race.” Becker calls Obama’s modernization of nuclear weapons the biggest mistake Obama has made and, “All in all, the world is now further away from being free of nuclear weapons than seven years ago…and Obama himself is also to blame for it.”
On April 1 the Asia Times ran a piece by M.K. Bhadrakumar, India’s former Ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey, titled, “Obama’s Nuclear Legacy Is a Mirage,” in which he ridicules Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and blasts Obama’s nuclear weapons strategy. He attacks Obama for circumventing the UN, antagonizing Russia, provoking China and modernizing U.S. nuclear weapons. “Astonishingly enough,” Bhadrakumar says, “American pundits have begun strategizing a ‘winnable nuclear war.’ Under Obama’s watch, conditions are being created for the first time for a world war involving combatants who possess nuclear weapons, where the rules of engagement are being rewritten in such a way that if a war breaks out, the use of nuclear weapons becomes a high probability.
“In sum, it is this ‘second nuclear age’ that constitutes President Obama’s true nuclear legacy. The NSS is a mirage. What a legacy for an extraordinary statesman who insists he abhors all wars!”
Germany To Sponsor a Germany-U.S.-Russia Parliamentary Meeting
April 3 (EIRNS)—Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the International Committee of the Russian Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said that representatives from upper and lower houses of the U.S. Congress and Russian Federal Assembly might hold a meeting this summer, either in June or July, according to Sputnik.
“The first expanded contact between the Russian and U.S. lawmakers is slated for early May in Berlin at the trilateral parliamentary meeting, Germany-Russia-the United States,” Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the State Duma, the lower house wrote on his Twitter account.
Meanwhile, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) met with Kosachev and others at an inter-parliamentary meeting in Moscow this week, expressing his disgust with the lying anti-Russian propaganda that dominates the U.S. media and political discourse. Kosachev thanked Rohrabacher for his efforts to restore the inter-parliamentary discussions between the countries, “This with all certainty was not a result of the Russian initiative. We have always committed to the most wide and open dialogue,” Kosachev said. “We consider it a very important source for solving common problems and search for joint solutions.”
Rohrabacher remarked that, “the children of our countries will pay for the stupidity of what is going on in our relations,” and ridiculed the U.S. leadership which calls Russia the greatest threat to the United States.
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
In Spain, Suicides Now Outnumber Road Deaths
April 1 (EIRNS)—The only growth sector in the trans-Atlantic world is suicide. For the first time, suicides in Spain have outnumbered road deaths. The country’s National Statistics Institute (INE) reported that in 2014, there were 3,910 individuals who took their own lives, twice as many as died in road accidents; the number of suicides is also the highest on record since the agency began to release this information in 1980.
Road deaths have been decreasing because of tougher enforcement of laws and the introduction of the point system for drivers’ licenses, which suspends or cancels licenses after a given number of driver infractions. By contrast, suicide has now become the leading cause of unnatural death. The INE also revealed that a total of 395,830 people died in Spain in 2014, or 5,411 more than in 2013. Of these, 96.2% died of natural causes. 1,873 were traffic fatalities and 3,910 by suicide.
Of course, the causes of the greater number of suicides has everything to do with the economic austerity forced on Spain by the European bailout of its banks. Greece, Italy, Portugal and other nations have all suffered increases in suicide as part of their bailout austerity policies.
Except for the region of Catalonia, there are virtually no suicide prevention programs in Spain.
NEW WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER
China’s Agreements on the Development of the Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal
April 1 (EIRNS)—One of the key issues discussed during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s March 28-30 visit to the Czech Republic was the Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal, which would connect the Danube with the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Relevant Czech sources report that an agreement was signed between the Sino Hydro Corp. Ltd., represented by Xiong Lixin, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors, and DOE Europe SE represented by Jan Vlcek, senior partner. The agreement reportedly entails drafting a study for the “Analytical Phase of the Construction of the Canal ‘Oder, Elbe, and Danube.’ ”
More specifically, it involves a proposal to build a multimodal logistics center at Hodonin, a city which lies in the southeast corner of the Czech Republic near the border with Slovakia. From there, a canal would be built for a link with the Danube. This would require building a 82 km. canal, most of which would go through Slovakia. Another 5 km. of the Morava River lying in Austria would also have to be used to make the connection into the Danube. The €1 billion project would include building the logistics center and a canal port at a cost of €300 million and the canal at a cost of €700 million. Of course, there have been no funds yet committed to the project, only a study. The cost of such a canal would be equivalent, per kilometer, to the cost of building a highway; in this case no more than three locks would have to be built.
This would be a big plus for the Czech Republic, as for the first time it would be connected to a waterway that leads outside the country, thus reducing transport cost, particularly for bulk cargo. The project would require cooperation with Slovakia and Austria and serve as the first phase of the overall project.
SCIENCE & INFRASTRUCTURE
Iran Plans Expansion of Its Nuclear Power Program
April 3 (EIRNS)—Speaking to officials in Tehran, Atomic Energy Organization of Iran President Ali Akbar Salehi announced that the Russians will soon start building the second nuclear power plant in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr, reporting that “based on the contract with Russia, the construction work should have started in the past Iranian year (ended on March 19), but due to some technical problems and differences on features, Tehran and Moscow will kick off the work after reaching shared viewpoints,” Fars News Agency reported.
According to Fars, Salehi told the officials, “we are considering construction of two small 100-MW power plants.” Russia has already built a 1,000-megawatt power plant in Bushehr, operating under the full supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which reached its maximum power generation capacity in August 2012.
