EDITORIAL
Stop ‘Russiagate’—Let Trump, Xi, and Putin Build!
Sept. 10 (EIRNS)—Once again in the case of Texas, and the tremendous economic and human destruction of Hurricane Harvey, we find that truly comprehensive infrastructure projects to prevent such destruction were planned in the 1960s. This was JFK’s era of Apollo and the great western “TVA” called the North American Water and Power Alliance. These potentials were stopped, stripped of funds and commitment, by the eruption of British geopolitics in American policy—the Vietnam War. What are now called—under Britain’s Blair and Bush and Obama—“regime-change” wars, have ever since been the enemy of taking care of the general welfare in America. For the lack of new and bold infrastructure platforms which would have cost tens of billions, we have seen whole cities devastated by floods and hundreds of billions lost to the American economy.
This has coincided with Wall Street’s increasing dominance over American economic policy, up to and including a huge financial crash from which we have not recovered. It is not nature, but “greed and neglect” causing the hurricanes’ destruction.
Now, with serious leadership from President Donald Trump, an understanding of the need to rebuild has spread among Americans, along with a deeper sense. The poet Shelley, who was also a political writer, wrote that in times of crisis, many, people in large numbers may cease to think solely about themselves and their immediate families, and rather suddenly shift their passionate concern to helping others and to “the general good.” This is now having its effect in the United States, as seen in some recent political decisions and in the outlook of Americans more generally.
Part of this, is that they want “Russiagate” stopped, and stopped now. This flagrant British intelligence injection of a geopolitical scare, into what became virtually a new McCarthyism in America, must end.
EIR has contributed to ending it by a major public event in New York on Saturday burying the hoax of “Russia fixing our Presidential election.” Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, now demanding even communications from Air Force One as if the President were on the NSA’s terrorist enemies list, is defying the overwhelming will of the American people and keeps preparing to force a constitutional crisis. This must end. So must the transparent attempts at racial warfare, in which the hand of George Soros and the British, and the hand and hood of Mueller’s FBI, can be seen.
President Trump and Congress must proceed rapidly with economic rebuilding, conquering Wall Street with a new Glass-Steagall Act and issuing national credit in trillions for new infrastructure and productivity, new advances in science and manufacturing.
This is already being done across Asia and Africa by China, in clear strategic partnership with Russia; and the Belt and Road Initiative is where Trump’s United States will find partnership in credit and engineering of projects, and strategic cooperation to stop regional wars. It’s a new paradigm toward which President Trump has at times been drawn. It needs to become policy, and “Russiagate” must go.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
House Votes for Gateway Project Funds on Day of Trump’s Meeting
Sept. 10 (EIRNS)—The march to trillions in national credit for infrastructure may start with a single billion. On the day (Sept. 7) that President Trump met in the White House with 16 state and Federal elected officials from New York and New Jersey on the “Gateway Project,” the House of Representatives voted 260-159 to put $906 million for the Gateway Project into the Transportation Department budget. The vote followed by one day, Trump’s deal with Democratic leaders on hurricane recovery, government funding and temporary removal of the debt ceiling. That package was then passed into law Sept. 8.
The Gateway funding amendment was by two Republicans from New Jersey, Reps. Leonard Lance and Rodney Freylinghousen—the latter is Appropriations Committee Chairman.
The President’s support (through Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao) will be necessary to get this through the Senate. Rep. Albio Sires of NY, a Democrat, said after the White House meeting, “President Trump promised to do everything he could to get the project moving.” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) said “I’m optimistic this is going to move forward,” and Amtrak officials were expressing confidence. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said, “We really had an opportunity to lay it all out. We talked about how important it was to the economy. It was also important to get in a sense of urgency. There’s a real danger that the existing tunnels could collapse and not be usable.”
The White House discussion of the Gateway Project included specifying that designing and building the Portal Bridge and new Hudson tunnels should be a single project and single contract (“design-build”) in order to speed it up. Trump also indicated support for renovations to LaGuardia and Newark Airports and perhaps transit links between them.
Gateway involves multi-year construction of new rail projects with no new “user fee” cash flow—there is no PPP temptation here. But the project requires Federal grants and credits of at least $13-15 billion, at a pace of $3-4 billion/year. The only way to fund such projects is through a Federal capital budget in the way Lyndon LaRouche has defined it, well above the national infrastructure depreciation level which is over $100 billion/year.
The Representatives suddenly optimistic about Gateway should therefore be signing up to introduce a national bank for multi-trillion dollar credits for infrastructure and manufacturing into Congress, again on the “Hamiltonian” model outlined in LaRouche’s 2014 “four economic laws to save the nation.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Calls Russia Hacking Story a ‘Historic Con Job’
Sept. 8 (EIRNS)—In Sept. 6 remarks to Fox News, reported by Sputnik today, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), charged that the entire Russia “hacking” story is a “massive propaganda campaign” and “historic con job … one of the great political crimes against the American people in our history.”
Expressing total confidence that Russia had nothing to do with the alleged hacking of DNC computers, Rohrabacher asserted that the whole campaign was launched “to prevent our President from exercising the powers granted to him by the voters.” He pointed out that the U.S. intelligence community never carried out an independent forensic analysis of Guccifer 2.0, one of the sources that allegedly provided WikiLeaks with DNC emails, and instead hired the very dubious CrowdStrike company.
In its coverage, Sputnik references the “damning report” prepared by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) last January, showing that the source of the DNC emails was a leak, not Russian hackers. [See Jan. 17 memo to Obama, in ConsortiumNewsunder VIPS Memos.] Former NSA analyst Bill Binney is quoted arguing that the NSA would certainly have picked up any electronic transfer from Russia to WikiLeaks.
White House Opposes Violation of INF Treaty Demanded by Senate
Sept. 10 (EIRNS)—The White House clarified that it opposes violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, as demanded by a provision of the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 (S.1519). Fiscal 2018 runs from Oct. 1 2017 to Sept. 30 2018. The White House has issued a statement of administration policy objecting to numerous provisions in the Senate bill, including violation of the INF Treaty. The Senate bill would require the Department of Defense to develop a land-based cruise missile in violation of the INF treaty, in response to the false allegations of violations by Russia.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Some in Israel Seek To Drag U.S. into Planned Israeli War against Iran
Sept. 9 (EIRNS)—Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, a contender to be the next Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, and whose current assignment from Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman is to write Israel’s next defense policy paper, was in Washington this week, lobbying for direct U.S. backing of Israel’s planned war against Iran.
“We cannot fight Iran alone,” he told an audience at Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) on Sept. 7, reports Defense News. “They can affect us; we can affect them. It’s all about attrition. But if you want to gain something which is deeper, we cannot do it alone. This is a fact of life. It’s better to admit that.” The new Israeli policy document is expected to include a prescription for wherewithal to fight Iran. “This is new. We cannot allow ourselves not to prepare for direct confrontation with Iran,” he said. And this is where the U.S. would come in. “We don’t have expeditionary forces. There is no Marine Corps in Israel … this is beyond our capabilities. So what should we have? That’s a big question. That’s the classified part,” he said.
Golan frankly admitted that ISIS-style terrorism in Syria is something that Israel can live with, but not Iran, because it’s a fully formed state with real capabilities. “They have nice, academic infrastructure, impressive industry, good scientists and many talented young people. They are very similar to us, and because they are similar to us they are much, much more dangerous. And we can’t cope with them alone.”
“We can achieve decisive victory over Hezbollah, and we don’t need help from a single American soldier, but we cannot fight Iran alone,” Golan said. “I consider future cooperation with the U.S. much more important than anything we’ve had in the past.”
Regime-Change Advocate Forced To Eat It
Sept. 10 (EIRNS)—Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, a prominent proponent and supporter of overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has been forced to admit defeat, since this U.S. President had refused to play that British-directed game, which as this news service as demonstrated, was aimed at a U.S. confrontation with Russia.
In an Aug. 28 interview with the U.A.E. daily, The National, Ford acknowledged that President Bashar al-Assad has defeated the seven-year-old armed campaign to topple him and his regime. “The war is winding down little by little,” Ford admitted. “Assad has won and he will stay. He may never be held accountable, and Iran will be in Syria to stay. This is the new reality that we have to accept, and there isn’t much we can do about it.”
Ford was forced to accept the fact that the Syrian government would be able to gain full control over the entire country. He lamented that “The Syrian government cannot and will not accept local administrations or decentralization…. It might take two or four years, but they can’t accept other governments—local or foreign—to control these places.”
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
European Bankers Accuse ECB Head Draghi of Inflating the Bubble
Sept. 8 (EIRNS)—If the head of Deutsche Bank, which is sitting on a pile of €50 trillion derivative bets, says the European Central Bank (ECB) should raise interest rates, then the situation is quite serious. Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan accused the ECB of inflating a speculative bubble with its cheap money policy. “We are now seeing signs of bubbles in more and more parts of the capital market where we wouldn’t have expected them,” Cryan said in an interview with Bloomberg, and blaming the interest-rate policy as being partly responsible for the decline in earnings at European banks.
The ECB policy was also criticized at a bankers’ meeting yesterday in Frankfurt, headquarters of the ECB, where many asked for an end to the cheap money policy. German saving banks president Georg Fahrenschon demanded the ECB should stop “resubmitting again and again,” and expressed the hope that the ECB would “start in small steps” to normalize rates.
The head of Credit Unions and Raiffeisen banks (BVR) Uwe Fröhlich said that for the roughly 1,000 members of his association of cooperative banks, “it is clear that the ECB is going over the edge.”
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told the Frankfurt meeting that the ECB policy had helped to overcome the crisis, but it is now no longer required. “And therefore everyone in the world would like that possibly soon, we should go back to normalization.”
Also Isabel Schnabel (Wirtschaftsweise), Joerg Krämer (Commerzbank) and Axel Weber (UBS) said the longer it takes, the more difficult a tapering will be.
Calls for Bank Separation As Nordea Bank Leaves Sweden
STOCKHOLM, Sept. 8 (EIRNS)—The decision by the board of the biggest Scandinavian Bank, Nordea, to move its headquarters from Stockholm to Helsinki, led two newspapers to publish different versions of an article calling for bank separation. The bank board made the decision on Sept. 6th to move its headquarters with some 50-100 people to Finland, which brings it into the Eurozone’s Bank Union. It is still to be confirmed by the annual meeting of the Nordea Bank stockholders next year, and then to be implemented sometime after that. However, the decision by the arrogant Nordea leadership has met an uproar of good riddance among the general population, with the major trade unions preparing to pull out their members and money from the formerly state-owned bank.
Nordea expects to save some $1 billion in fees and taxes to the Swedish state, including to a minuscule bank resolution fund. They expect to come under the umbrella of the EU Bank Union, its bank resolution fund, and also to have “a levelled field of competition” with other European globally systemic banks, known as GSIFIs. However in the meantime, before their move, they will be remain still dependent on the Swedish state, where there will be absolutely no popular support for any bailout of Nordea.
An article by Ulf Sandmark and Mats Lönneblad, with its call for bank separation, which has been floating around the various desks of major Swedish newspapers’ op-ed editors, was finally published in two journals. A shorter version was published today in the regional newspaper Sundsvalls Tidning under the headline “Do Not Indebt Sweden for the Banks—How To Keep Calm in the (Coming) Panic!” The longer version of the op-ed was published Sept. 7 in the more important online financial newspaper Realtid.se, under the headline: “Do Not Mourn Nordea—Demand Bank Separation!”
The articles demonstrate the enormous risks of the banks in relation to Swedish GDP and points to how the riskier part of the banks, the derivatives, especially the level 3 derivatives, are considered a priority—of “systemic importance” to be saved— according to the EU regulations. Neither the minuscule bank resolution funds of Sweden, nor of the EU, can match these risks. The articles conclude that the only way to reduce risks is by separating the derivatives and other investment bank activities. The articles calls on all the parties in the Swedish parliament, that is just about to reconvene, to follow the example of the Left Party in demanding for bank separation.
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
At Eastern Economic Forum, Japan-Russia Relations Escalate
Sept. 9 (EIRNS)—Daisuke Kotegawa, former Japanese Finance Ministry official and Japan’s Executive Director at the IMF, attended the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok this past week. He told EIR that the relationship between Japan and Russia has reached a new high at the event. Of the 3,500 attendees at the Forum, fully 1,300 were from Japan, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and three of his ministers, and a large number of business leaders. There was concrete discussion of jointly building a rail connection between Russia and Japan—first from the Russian mainland to Sakhalin Island, and then from Sakhalin to Japan’s northern island, Hokkaido. Putin described the project as “absolutely global in nature,” and suggested it could be completed within three to five years.
Kotegawa said that the business leaders were extremely enthusiastic, perceiving that the political relations between the two countries—which have never signed a peace treaty to end World War II due to conflicting sovereignty claims over the four Kuril Islands (called the Northern Territories in Japan)—had so improved that they could begin to think freely of joint investment and development projects without concern for political problems interfering.
He said that China’s participation was significantly lower than last year, which was explained by the need to prepare for the CPC Central Committee meeting which will begin Oct. 18. Nonetheless, representatives from the northern provinces were there and concluded some agreements to expand cooperation with Russia in the Far East.
To his surprise, California Gov. Jerry Brown was invited to speak, at the welcoming ceremony, and on two panels: first at the Plenary Session, and then at a forum sponsored by the Valdai Club titled “The Russia-China-Japan-U.S. Quadrangle: Are There Opportunities for Cooperation?” As RT reports it, he said: “Relations between the U.S. and Russia aren’t at their best, but can become much better.”
Mr. Kotegawa asked a question from the floor (noting that he had studied at Stanford during Brown’s first round as Governor), referring to Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi’s recent change of tone toward President Trump, and asked Brown if he would mobilize Democrats to restore relations with Russia. Brown was enthusiastic, saying: “I would recall the mood in 1984-1985, when Russia was described as an evil empire, but very soon thereafter, there were the very important agreements between President Reagan and President Gorbachev.” Brown thanked Kotegawa for the question afterwards. (The video is available at https://forumvostok.ru/en/session-eef-2017/?session_id=2733; Mr. Kotegawa’s question begins at 1:18:32.)
When asked about the U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia in August, Brown said the American consul in Vladivostok showed him his speeches where he is urging more trade and investment with the United States. “So I know the sanctions are a very serious matter, but there [is] still room for trade, for understanding, and for cooperation. And I am looking in various ways to pioneer that positive path, at least from the point of view of California,” he said, as reported in RT.
Kotegawa also said that the speeches by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and from the new Mongolian President Khaltmaagiin Battulga, were excellent and well-received. He added that Abe, Putin and Battulga (who, like Putin, is a black belt in judo) attended a judo match after the Forum!
SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Mexican Earthquake Tragedy: Time To Forecast Natural Disasters
Sept. 10 (EIRNS)—Late August into early September has been a tumultuous time in our Solar System. The United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean are being slammed by intense hurricanes (Harvey, Katia, Irma, Jose). Prior to the hurricanes, the Sun released a series of explosive solar flares (including the largest in over a decade), launching bursts of plasma directly at the Earth and generating severe geomagnetic storms. In addition to the hurricanes, Mexico was rocked by the largest earthquake in over a century—a magnitude 8.1 quake 90 kilometers off the southwest coast.
These natural events remind us of mankind’s vulnerability to the hazards in our Solar System, and underscore the strategic reality of our times: nations must come together to defend Earth from these threats.
The magnitude 8.1 Chiapas earthquake has tragically taken about 100 lives (according to information available on Sept. 10). Thanks to electrical sensors and warning systems, many residents were given a warning a few tens of seconds before the earthquake waves reached them—providing just enough time to exit buildings, or find shelter. But what if we could provide hours, or even days of warning before major earthquakes strike?
For decades small groups of pioneering scientists have dedicated themselves to detecting, studying, and understanding precursor signals that appear in the hours, days, and weeks before the eruption of seismic events. These scientists have shown that various forms of electrical, electromagnetic, magnetic, thermal, and other anomalies and signals precede earthquakes, providing the basis for early warning systems that could save countless numbers of lives.
One of the leading pioneers in this area is Prof. Sergey Pulinets, who has presented his revolutionary work to EIR, the Schiller Institute, and LaRouche PAC. Professor Pulinets has collaborated with his colleague Prof. Dimitar Ouzounov in the development of their lithosphere-atmosphere-ionosphere coupling model. This model explains the physics behind earthquake precursor signals, and provides the theoretical framework for an earthquake early warning system.
After extensive study and demonstration, their team is ready to bring this work into active application—if governments are ready to step forward and support the development of earthquake early warning systems.
Presently the leadership of China, Russia, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the BRICS partnership is bringing the world closer to the new paradigm envisioned by Helga and Lyndon LaRouche. Strategically this means that these leading powers, including in Europe and the U.S.A., must abandon geopolitical ambitions, and engage in strategic collaboration to defend the Earth and all its inhabitants from the challenges that threaten all mankind.
