EDITORIAL
Defeat Obama’s Policies Now, Forget November 8
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—The next two weeks will be far more decisive than the Nov. 8 election for the future of the United States, and for mankind.
These two weeks will witness a march of three successive international summit meetings in Asia, which will establish the new reality that China, Russia, and India—not Obama and NATO—are creating and shaping that future.
And the United States will not be the same after the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the first in which the real foreign sponsors of those terror attacks stand exposed. The terrible folly of the Bush-Obama wars which followed from those attacks has thus been made clear, as has the humanity of Russian President Putin’s immediate actions of solidarity with the United States at that time. In the next two weeks, New York will deal with these revelations through the powerful series of choral memorials all over the city by the Schiller Institute.
There are strong strategic shifts underway. Putin has overturned the U.S./European assumptions about fighting terrorism in Southwest Asia, winning Turkey to his approach, and now winning leading voices even in Germany. The policy of China, Russia, and India of building land-bridges and corridors of new infrastructure across Eurasia and Africa has become more powerful than Obama’s attempts to provoke Russia by war and “issue rules” to China.
All Obama’s poisoned efforts to make China the enemy of the 10 ASEAN nations, have wound up with China more influential in ASEAN, than before. Its annual meeting—after this weekend’s Eastern Economic Forum and then the G20 meeting in Hangzhou, China—will be the third of the powerful summits focussed on restoring growth and productivity to the world economy, after the last decade’s collapse triggered by Wall Street.
And Obama’s anti-China “trade agreements,” Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), are being pronounced dead even by their former supporters. If our forces escalate over these two weeks, there is a better chance that Congress will soon pass Glass-Steagall back into law, than Obama’s TTP or TTIP.
The new financial architecture, and “world land-bridge” infrastructure great projects aimed at by these summits, have been promoted by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche over four decades.
Will they force acceptance of Glass-Steagall bank regulation and the writeoff of the financial nuclear bomb of financial derivatives?
That requires that we escalate our mobilization now, for what Lyndon LaRouche called his Four Cardinal Laws: Glass-Steagall; national credit banks; technological advance through infrastructure-building; advancing the scientific frontiers of deep space exploration and fusion power development.
There is a limitless potential for mankind’s economic growth and development of creative capabilities. Obama’s White House will likely oppose that new paradigm at the G20 summit. It is our responsibility to change that.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Russia Expanding, Modernizing Its Strategic Defenses
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—The Russians are aiming to teach the United States how it feels to have foreign military forces as close to American territory, as NATO forces are to Russia’s.
Last week, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the Russian Defense Ministry plans to establish a coastal defense division in Chukotka, directly across the Bering Sea from Alaska by 2018. This is part of a plan of defense “to ensure control of the closed sea zones of the Kuril Islands and the Bering Strait; cover the routes of Pacific Fleet forces’ deployment in the Far Eastern and Northern sea zones, and increase the combat viability of naval strategic nuclear forces” operating in the area. In other words, the new division will help ensure the defense of Russia’s sparsely populated eastern coast.
On a different, but not unrelated front, Sputnik, citing a report in Gazeta.ru, reports that the modernization of Russia’s early warning radar system is well advanced. This includes testing of the advanced A-235 Nudol anti-ballistic missile system, and the deployment of the warning system’s radio electronic components—the Voronezh-type radar systems.
There are three types of Voronezh radars: the Voronezh M, Voronezh-DM, operating in the VHF and UHF frequency ranges (radars operating in these frequency ranges are reported to be able to detect stealth aircraft), and the Voronezh-VP “high potential” system, which Sputnik reports is to be operating in the EHF (extremely high frequency range). The system’s range is 4,500-6,000 km, and it is capable of detecting objects at a height of up to 4,000 km. The system is capable of tracking up to 500 objects simultaneously.
Deploying the Voronezh radar stations will make it possible to protect Russia’s northwestern, southwestern, southeastern and southern areas from potential missile threats, according to Gazeta.ru.
Are China and Russia Headed To Formal Military Cooperation?
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—According to Sputnik, an article in the Russian journal Regnum suggests that Russian participation in joint naval maneuvers with the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea next month indicates a move away from neutrality by Russia in the South China Sea territorial dispute.
Beijing now needs certain landmark gestures from Moscow which would demonstrate that Russia has changed its neutral position regarding those disputes, to one close to the Chinese. For this, diplomatic rhetoric is not enough; so joint military exercises are, therefore, the “best gesture” for all observers.
At the same time, China has announced that it will provide military support to Syria, a move badly needed by Russia. “Joining the conflicts on the ‘right’ side ensures the cracking of isolation: Russia’s isolation in the Syrian conflict and China’s isolation in the South China Sea conflict,” says Regnum.
Die Welt, Experts on Syria: Putin Changed the Whole Geometry
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—With the expert analysis of two leading German military figures, the Aug. 28 Welt am Sonntag reported that the two most basic postulates on Syria of the Obama White House and NATO are being proven wrong. “Peace with Assad?” is the headline of the item, and its summary: “Turkey invades Syria; this is agreed to by Russia and the Assad regime. Thus could be seen a complete change of course, which is denied by the West—still.”
Die Welt’s Sunday edition interviews at length Wolfgang Ischinger, head of the annual Munich Security Conference and a leading German conservative military thinker, who says, “I think the Turkish about-face on Assad [accepting his continuation in power for now] is comprehensible. And I am urging that the West find it comprehensible. The facts are simple. We cannot ignore them.” Thus Ischinger calls “a failed plan,” the first postulate and “red line” of Obama, Cameron, NATO: that Assad must go.
Russian President Vladimir Putin holds the levers in the situation, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seeking to join him, Die Welt observes. It also quotes German Gen. Harald Kujat (ret.), a former Chairman of the Military Committee of NATO (2002-05), who demolishes the other postulate of Obama and his ilk: That there is “no military solution” in Syria. Kujat observes that this is false, and that in fact all the powers involved have been seeking a military solution, beginning with the U.S.-U.K. seizing on the Kurdish militias and on the so-called “moderate rebel forces,” and Erdogan’s seizing upon al Nusra and al-Qaeda.
There are no “moderate rebel forces” any longer, Kujat insists, “if there ever were any.” The idea of a “negotiated solution” based on Assad being forced out, was therefore entirely a house of cards, a recipe for chaos, he says, “a war of each against all.” More importantly, Putin changed the situation fundamentally when Russia intervened last Sept. 30, seeking a military solution against all the terrorist groups, with Assad’s own welcoming government as Russia’s “forces on the ground.”
The lengthy and detailed survey by Thorsten Jungholt, by pointing to the basic shift in strategic alignment brought about by Putin, clearly made waves in Germany. The next day’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung tried to counter it with an editorial claiming that Turkey still wants Assad “to disappear” now. That lie is contradicted by the Turkish Foreign Minister’s own recent, public statements, and merely shows the degree of disturbance Welt am Sonntag’s report of the new reality has caused.
NEW WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER
Kazakhstan Invites Poland To Work with Russia and Join China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev is urging Polish President Andrzej Duda to get past his grievances with Russia, and become part of China’s global One Belt, One Road initiative, by agreeing to establish transit flows through Russia.
Speaking Aug. 23 at the Polish-Kazakh Economic Forum, Russia Beyond The Headlines reported today, Nazarbayev suggested to President Duda, “Let us propose an initiative today: turn to Russia, and start to work out a tripartite agreement at least on transport.” Nazarbayev noted that transportation is the “tough question” in terms of economic cooperation between the two countries—“how to get from Kazakhstan to Poland and back. Traditional communication is through Russia.”
The point, he said, is not just for Kazakhstan and Poland to trade more effectively with each other. “The main thing for both parties is not to miss the opportunity to become part of a global transit route from Asia to Europe, which China wants to implement.” The northern rail and road corridor envisioned by the Silk Road passes through Kazakhstan and Russia to Europe; to the Baltic Sea at St. Petersburg, RBTH explained. From Russia, the western link will pass through Belarus and Poland to Germany and the Netherlands.
As indicated by President Xi Jinping’s visit to Warsaw in June, China is anxious for Poland’s cooperation. The shortest land route from Asia to Europe lies through Kazakhstan and Poland. “The Silk Road may be a uniting link for which it is worth forgetting old grievances. Such a large-scale project will also have an influence on any possible political reconciliation between Russia and Poland,” RBTH commented. Poland would reap tangible benefits from its participation in the project, garnering increased revenue from greater transit flows, and maintaining its role as the land gateway to Europe.
Russia To Present $6.5 Billion Far East Transport Corridor at Eastern Economic Forum
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—Alexander Vasilyev, CEO of the Russian Samarga-Holding Co., announced today that his company plans to build a new $6.5 billion transport corridor that will allow for a faster connection between the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Pacific Ocean, Sputnik reported today.
In a presentation to stakeholders, Vasilyev reported that the transport corridor will link the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk with the mouth of the Samarga River, through a 380-km-long railroad. When completed in 2025, the Samarga corridor is expected to cut 500 km from the existing freight traffic route, which must go a long distance north from Khabarovsk to reach an ocean port.
“This transport corridor will be able to serve most of the ports of the Russian Far East, as well as Japan, China and Korea,” Vasilyev said. It will also provide a more efficient connection between Russia’s Far East and Europe.
According to Sputnik, the project includes the construction of a logistical terminal at a railway station in Khabarovsk, and a new $3.1 billion port at the mouth of the Samarga River, due east from Khabarovsk. Global Times reports that the port will handle an annual cargo volume of up to 80 million tons, and will allow cargo to be ferried more easily to neighboring Far Eastern nations. A town with an estimated population of 50,000 will also be built around the port.
“We think the construction of the logistics terminal, port, and railway will have a synergistic effect on the whole economy of the Far Eastern Federal District,” Vasilyev said. On Friday of this week, he will be presenting the project to potential investors at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. “Investors in China, South Korea, and Japan are looking for infrastructure projects of this size,” he told Sputnik.
Sept. 6-8 ASEAN Summit To Solidify China Ties, Role In Silk Road
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—The 28th Annual ASEAN Summit will follow immediately after the G20 meeting in China, with many world leaders also participating in aspects of the many associated summits during the three days in Vientiane, Laos.
Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith, as ASEAN Chairman, will preside over 11 summits, including the 28th and 29th ASEAN Summits (the 29th is a retreat for the ASEAN leaders); summits between ASEAN and China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, the UN, India and the United States; the 19th ASEAN+3 Summit (Japan, South Korea and China); and the 11th East Asia Summit (10 ASEAN Member States, China, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and United States).
The ASEAN chairmanship will pass to the Philippines for the coming year. With Western leaders in a state of panic over the new Duterte government’s turn towards China; rejection of Obama’s war policy; his no-holds-barred war on drugs; his open attack on the American Ambassador for subversion of his country; his rejection of the Paris Climate fraud, and more, it will be a most interesting year for ASEAN.
In fact, it was the Philippines under past President Aquino, a puppet of Obama and Wall Street, which prevented unity on important issues for ASEAN, by constantly retailing Obama’s lies and confrontational policies towards China. The most important side-event this year will be the ASEAN-China Summit. Duterte stated publically last week that he will not raise the South China Sea issue at the ASEAN Summit and related summits, other than discussing “face to face” in planned bilateral meetings between Beijing and Manila.
China and ASEAN will release two documents at the summit regarding the negotiation of a Code of Conduct (COC) for the South China Sea, worked out at a pre-meeting of senior diplomats from China and the ten ASEAN countries on Aug. 15-16 in Inner Mongolia. These are guidelines on the establishment of a senior officials’ hotline in response to maritime emergencies, and a joint statement on applications of the Code for Unplanned Encounters (CUEs) in the South China Sea. The diplomats also agreed to quicken the pace of meetings toward establishing the COC.
China is also sponsoring the 13th China-ASEAN Expo from Sept. 11-14 in the southern city of Nanning. More than 2,000 companies are expected to attend the Expo. Exhibition halls will be established for Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. China is ASEAN’s largest trade partner, and ASEAN has been China’s third largest partner since 2010. Mutual trade volume was nearly $472 billion in 2015.
Obama will be making the first visit to Laos by an American President for the East Asian Summit. South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye will also attend.
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
What’s Hillary Clinton’s Election Got To Do with It? Economy Is Busted
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—Following Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s speech at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming bankers’ meeting Aug. 26, former Rep. Barney Frank strongly warned Yellen and the Fed not to raise interest rates before Election Day. Raising specters of a potential crash, Frank said that a rate hike at the Fed’s September meeting would “destabilize the financial markets,” “roil the waters of the economy,” and used other, similar phrases of alarm.
“Barney Bailout” Frank is not only the Congress’s “expert” author of both the TARP bailout and the Dodd-Frank legislation; he is also the Hillary Clinton campaign advisor who, according to Clinton, advised her on her “better than Glass-Steagall” plans to regulate Wall Street, and on how to argue against restoring Glass-Steagall. He himself is certainly well-appreciated by the Wall Street banks.
But it makes no sense to claim that Frank merely means, “Wait until Hillary Clinton is elected, then raise rates.”
As desperate as the Fed governors may be to show they’re different from the central banks of Europe, Britain, and Japan, whose economies all are prostrate, Obama’s economy is also collapsed, and his “recovery” has broken down. The Commerce Department’s estimates of 1.2% GDP growth over the past 12 months, are being lowered to a flat 1%; the Third Quarter underway does not seem to be any higher. Durable goods orders have declined at about a 5% annual pace for the past two years. Federal Reserve district banks are continuing to report manufacturing indices in contractionary range nearly every month.
Barney Frank also knows enough about the financial derivatives bubble to know that when he repeatedly stated, in 2007, that the derivatives did not represent any systemic problem, he was wrong. And he knows that the Bank for International Settlements’ new report on derivatives clearinghouses—a product of Dodd-Frank—found those clearinghouses unable to prevent a leveraged collapse of derivatives in case of default by a significant financial party.
Clinton aside, Barney Bailout is warning the Fed the U.S. economy and markets aren’t ready, even after just under eight years of zero rates, for them to be raised without a financial crash resulting.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Imperial Trade Deals Being Rejected
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—After 14 rounds of negotiations spanning three years, the latest in July, Germany’s Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Sunday that talks on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) had essentially failed. Appearing on Germany’s ZDF channel, Gabriel told the host, “In my opinion, the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it.”
Matthias Fekl, France’s Minister of State for Foreign Trade, Tourism, and French Nationals Abroad, quickly seconded Gabriel’s comments on CNBC today: “We completely agree with Gabriel.” He added that France is prepared to stop negotiating in September. In May, French President François Hollande had stated that France would “never accept” the deal in its present form.
Since the United States has adopted a “take it or leave it” (no changes allowed) attitude in the negotiations, and the Europeans are refusing to buckle under, the deal may well be doomed. As Gabriel reportedly told the German Tagesspiegel, “The negotiations with the U.S.A have de facto failed because we Europeans did not want to subject ourselves to American demands,” adding, “Things are not moving on that front.”
In the United States, the TPP (TTIP’s cousin, the Trans-Pacific Partnership) is also facing a dim future, with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell telling an audience of farmers in his home state of Kentucky last week, there were “serious flaws” in the deal, and that he would leave it to “the next Administration” to deal with, since “the politics of trade have become rather toxic.” McConnell had already announced there would be no vote before the election.
Desperate to have something besides war and destruction in his “legacy,” Obama is refusing to admit defeat. An Aug. 22 New York Times article claims that Obama is sending out his “heavy hitters”—Secretary of State John Kerry, and military proponents such as Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter; retired Adm. Michael Mullen, Adm. Harry Harris Jr., and former Sen. William Cohen, who also served as former President Clinton’s Defense Secretary, on a nationwide tour, beginning in September, to sell the snake oil to the public.
By his choice of last-ditch hucksters for the TTP, Obama is tacitly but clearly admitting this “trade agreement” is a military tool—against China.
OTHER:
Bolivia Destabilization Has the Stench of Project Democracy Coup
Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—In the aftermath of the Aug. 25 murder of Bolivia’s Deputy Interior Minister by striking miners, and subsequent revelations of miners’ plans to destabilize the country, government officials have pointed to various agencies in the Project Democracy stable as behind the attempts to bring down President Evo Morales’s government.
Interviewed in Buenos Aires by Contexto Aug. 26, Vice-President Alvaro García Linera named the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and various U.S. and European NGOs as agents of “imperialist intervention,” whose goal in Bolivia has, for years, been regime change. And “They don’t back off,” he said: “If it’s not the NED, some U.S. or European NGO appears to do the same job.” USAID was expelled, he noted, but NGOs came in to take its place. We may be a small, humble country, he said, but we have dignity, and we won’t tolerate this.
On July 30, Minister to the Presidency Juan Ramon Quintana published a book, Bolivia Leaks, based on 2,000 declassified State Department documents released by WikiLeaks, including correspondence from the U.S. Embassy in La Paz from 2006 to 2010. The book documents the Embassy’s role, and particularly that of Ambassador Philip Goldberg—now ambassador to the Philippines—who was expelled from the country in 2008, because of his blatant attempts to mobilize an opposition coup against Morales. The book also documents the role of USAID, the NED, the National Democratic Institute, and International Republican Institute, among others.
The right-wing, Miami-based Inter-American Institute for Democracy (IID), financed by the NED, published “A Strategic Plan for Bolivia” last October, detailing a 22-point plan to destabilize the country, and ensure that Morales lost the February 2016 referendum to permit him to run for a third term in 2019. The plan proposed sowing social unrest; using the media and political opposition, and waging campaigns to discredit government officials, including Morales, by charging them with corruption. Most revealing was the IID’s demand that the NED and affiliated agencies increase their funding for the political opposition and “pro-democracy” NGOs to insure Morales’s loss in the February referendum. Implementation of elements of that plan in fact contributed to Morales’s loss in the referendum, although by a very slim margin of 2 percentage points.
