EDITORIAL
Calls for Investigation of Mueller’s Crimes Escalate
Oct. 15 (EIRNS)—The battle over the presidency of the United States is becoming the core battle which will determine the fate of civilization as we know it. We are experiencing historical changes in the world, as the financial empire centered in London and New York teeters toward catastrophic collapse. The financial lords are no longer able to restrain their own players from warning that the collapse is imminent, as former German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said last week in reflecting on the mass of liquidity papering over the escalating debt bubble—which he himself helped create. The only escape lies in President Trump fully implementing the policies he has enunciated: Glass-Steagall reorganization of the financial system while writing off the artificial debts and generating new credits for the real economy; fully joining the New Silk Road process of directing national and international credit into true nation building, including within the United States; renewing the American dedication to the frontiers of human knowledge, through a revived space program, full-scale nuclear power production and escalation of fusion power research. These concepts, which Lyndon LaRouche has promoted through his Four Laws, are both within reach, and urgent.
Against this, the British and their assets in the U.S. are frantically trying to oust Trump from office, which is the only way they believe the momentum for a true paradigm change can be stopped. Over the past week, the LaRouche Political Action Committee has distributed our 32-page dossier exposing the crimes of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to nearly all members of Congress. Immediately the rumor mills and leak outlets began chattering about proposals to take on Mueller directly. On Friday, 19 U.S. Congressmen sent an open letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees calling for immediate Congressional hearings into the “possible conflict of interest and allegations of political bias” of Mueller. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes are both waging fights with the intelligence community for blocking their efforts to investigate the role of former MI6 agent Christopher Steele in launching the entire Russia-gate scam against the President. Maximum pressure from the American people is required to escalate this resistance to the attempted coup against the nation coming from London.
The U.S. mass media are in full support of this British-instigated coup, peddling claims that the President is unfit for office, with several calling for Article 25 of the Constitution to be invoked to remove him from office on the grounds of mental disability. It must be noted that these same press were silent when President Obama committed crimes against humanity in the destruction of Libya and Syria, in league with al Qaeda, or when he turned the nation’s policy making over to drug-running financial institutions, and legalized the use of mind-destroying drugs.
Today, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared on CNN and CBS Sunday talk shows, expressing his total disgust with the petty, degrading garbage that fills the 24-hour news cycle in the United States, while ignoring the world-historical changes taking place worldwide, which deserve and demand full attention. When pushed to attack the President, he responded: “The President’s a very unconventional person, as we all know, in terms of how he communicates, how he likes to create action-forcing events. And so the President often takes steps to force an action when he feels things are just not moving.” He expressed his full support for Trump and his policies, refuting the lies about his being undermined by the President.
The danger lies in people getting caught up in this 24-hour news cycle, and failing to see that we are living through a change in the long arc of history. Such moments of fundamental change, leading either towards a new, global renaissance, or to catastrophic chaos and war, are dangerous, but are also moments of opportunity, in which people are able to overcome prejudices and political laziness to contemplate universal ideas—what Shelley identified as “intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.” This is how we must address our fellow man in this precious moment.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Tillerson Rejects Media Lies and Hysteria on CNN and CBS Sunday Broadcasts
Oct. 15 (EIRNS)—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went on the CNN and CBS Sunday talk shows this morning, calmly refuting and ridiculing the hysteria against President Trump.
Tillerson told CBS: “There is absolute alignment between the State Department, the other departments in the cabinet, and the President’s objectives. The President’s a very unconventional person, as we all know, in terms of how he communicates; how he likes to create action-forcing events. And so the President often takes steps to force an action when he feels things are just not moving.”
Tillerson clarified the new Iran policy on CBS, that Trump had not pulled out of the nuclear deal, and is not necessarily demanding it be changed: “But it doesn’t mean we cannot undertake negotiations to address the areas of concern, which are the ballistic missile program, the sunset provisions, ex priori provisions, and perhaps lay a second agreement down alongside of this agreement.” This is the first reference to a “second agreement” by the Administration.
CNN host Jake Tapper was fixated on Sen. Robert Corker’s claim that Trump was undermining Tillerson, and that Tillerson was privately complaining about it. “I’m not playing,” Tillerson rebutted to Tapper, after Tapper asked if Tillerson had called the President “a moron.” “These are the games of Washington. These are the destructive games of this town. I’m not dignifying the question with an answer, Jake, and I’m a little surprised that you want to spend so much time on it when there are so many issues around the world.”
Tapper asked what he thought about Corker saying Trump had “castrated” Tillerson. Tillerson smiled and said, “I checked, I’m fully intact.”
Tillerson made a point of addressing Trump’s relations with China, just weeks before the President’s historic visit to Beijing. “We have very, very good open channels with the Chinese. The President has a great relationship with President Xi. I have a great relationship with the state councillor [Yang Jiechi]. There is clarity around what we are attempting to do with North Korea and how we are working with China to achieve the outcome in North Korea that we all want. So there is no confusion among the people that matter.” On the issue of negotiations with the North, he said the President was in full accord to “maintain those diplomatic efforts. As I have commented to others, our diplomatic efforts will continue until the first bomb is dropped.”
President Trump Insists, What’s Most Important Is To Rebuild Puerto Rico’s Electricity Infrastructure
Oct. 13 (EIRNS)—In a tweet this morning, and comments in the afternoon while boarding Marine 1, President Trump reiterated his support and admiration for the people of Puerto Rico, and stressed that the “most important to rebuild” is the power plants. The generating plants were not in good shape before the Hurricane Maria, he said, and they “owed $9 billion, and were in bankruptcy.” “We have to help them get the plants rebuilt,” he stressed.
The level of outright lying in the press and in the Congress about what Trump is actually saying about Puerto Rico is disgusting, although not surprising.
Asked about the issue of the island’s debt, Trump said that there is a lot of business investment in Puerto Rico, but “the government comes before” the private investment.
Trump Begins To Dismantle Obamacare
Oct. 13 (EIRNS)—President Trump on Thursday began using executive powers to shut down parts of Obamacare, although the changes are minor and no alternative to the disastrous health care condition in the country has been proposed.
First, Trump signed an order tweaking three aspects of the bill: allowing small businesses and groups to combine across state lines to negotiate a health plan; allowing short-term plans for people between jobs; and allowing insurance companies to sell policies without the mandated coverage demanded by Obamacare, thus making it cheaper.
He then released a policy which reads: “Based on guidance from the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is no appropriation for cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies under Obamacare. In light of this analysis, the Government cannot lawfully make the cost-sharing reduction payments…. The bailout of insurance companies through these unlawful payments is yet another example of how the previous administration abused taxpayer dollars and skirted the law to prop up a broken system.”
This has been a longstanding fight that was in the courts, as members of Congress challenged the Obama Administration over the fact that these “cost-sharing reductions” (CSRs—payments directly to the insurance companies to make up for losses on mandated policies to the poor) are a government expenditure not appropriated by Congress as required by law.
In August, the Congressional Budget Office reported that ending the payments would raise the number of uninsured Americans by about 1 million in 2018 but would then start lowering the number of uninsured by about 1 million a year starting in 2020.
Simply tinkering with the insurance fiasco does not solve the problem, which is the lack of health care delivery capacity to meet the needs of the population, and being sure they get the care: That was the principle of the 1946 Hill-Burton hospital-building policy, which must be restored as part of the emergency measures under LaRouche’s Four Laws.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
U.S. Military Exercises with South Korea and Japanese Militaries
Oct. 14 (EIRNS)—The U.S. military in the Western Pacific is in the midst of a series of military exercises with South Korea and Japan, increasing tensions with North Korea in the weeks before President Trump makes his first journey to Asia, set for next month. The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its escort ships are scheduled to participate in a joint maritime exercise with the South Korean Navy this week, in the waters off the Korean Peninsula. According to a release issued by the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, the exercise will run from Oct. 17-20 “to promote communications, interoperability, and partnership in the 7th Fleet area of operations.” In addition, the USS Michigan, a former Ohio class ballistic missile submarine converted to carry Tomahawk cruise missiles and Navy SEALs, put into port in Busan, South Korea on Oct. 13, and the USS Tucson, a Los Angeles class nuclear-powered attack submarine, paid a visit to the port of Chinhae on Oct. 11. Before arriving off Korea, the Reagan strike group also participated in an exercise with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, an exercise which also saw U.S. B-1B bombers flying from Guam link up with fighter jets from both the Japanese and South Korean air forces.
Whether or not North Korea will conduct another missile test during the U.S.-South Korean exercise is not yet clear, but, according to the New York Times, a researcher at the Institute for American Studies at the North Korean Foreign Ministry warned that all this military activity could compel the North to take military counteraction. “We have already warned several times that we will take counteractions for self-defense, including a salvo of missiles into waters near the U.S. territory of Guam,” the researcher, identified as Kim Kwang-hak, told the official KCNA on Oct. 13. “The U.S. military action hardens our determination that the U.S. should be tamed with fire and lets us take our hand closer to the ‘trigger’ for taking the toughest countermeasure.”
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
Threatened Financial Crisis? It’s Not China, Stupid!
Oct. 13 (EIRNS)—Warnings about the coming financial collapse are not news any longer. However, the IMF and others have attempted to shift the blame of the coming crash on China, listing the Chinese corporate debt as possible trigger of a global collapse.
Two Chinese scholars wrote a rebuttal of such an allegation in an article in the Global Times Oct. 11, reprinted by Sputnik International on Oct. 12. Under the headline “China’s Debt Problem Should Not Be Overestimated,” Li Shigang and Cao Yujin from the China Academy of Macroeconomic Research makes the point that the so-called Chinese debt is (a) indeed decreasing (b) backed by sound assets—i.e., it is related to the real economy.
“Unlike other countries, China holds a lot of high-quality assets, in areas such as infrastructure, and it has stable cash flows that can serve as a buffer against its debt load. Both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and local governments have assets that are either profitable or that can be directly monetized. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s net sovereign assets were worth more than 100 trillion yuan ($15.18 trillion) as of 2015, and the net assets of government departments were estimated to surpass 20 trillion yuan. This indicates that the Chinese government has sufficient net assets to cope with its high debt load. “
If you want something really to worry about, look at the financial bubble created by Western central banks. “Much closer attention actually needs to be paid to global debt risks,” the two Chinese scholars wrote. “With major developed economies opting to implement quantitative easing policies after the global financial crisis, borrowing skyrocketed. Data from the Institute of International Finance showed that global debt hit a new record of $217 trillion by the end of 2016, or 327% of GDP.”
Yesterday the German DAX stock market index reached an historical high of 13,000 points. In contrast with China, there are no “high-quality assets” to back those values. That is a bubble pumped by the European Central Bank’s cheap money and looting, which is waiting to burst.
The Debt from Belt and Road vs. Speculative Debt in the West
Oct. 13 (EIRNS)—Chinese economist Wei Shang-jin, the former chief economist at the Asia Development Bank, issued a strong “Economic Case for China’s Belt and Road” in the Project Syndicate website today. Wei notes that some in the West claim that China has a financial bubble which is about to burst and could bring down the world financial system. Hogwash, he counters.
Wei writes: “Critics worry that China may be so focused on expanding its geopolitical influence, in order to compete with the likes of the United States and Japan, that it may pursue projects that make little economic sense. But, if a few conditions are met, the economic case for the initiative is strong.”
When large-scale infrastructure investment like China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) builds ports, roads, schools, hospitals, and power plants and grids, Wei writes, “the initiative could function much like America’s post-1945 Marshall Plan, which is universally lauded for its contribution to the reconstruction and economic recovery of war-ravaged Europe.”
He writes that China had $4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves in 2013, “which were earning a very low dollar return (less than 1% a year). In terms of China’s own currency, the returns were negative, given the expected appreciation of the renminbi against the U.S. dollar at the time.”
Therefore, “Belt and Road investments are not particularly costly for China, particularly when their far-reaching potential benefits are taken into account…. In particular, because efficiency is not the primary consideration, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) might pursue low-return projects. Nonetheless, while the Belt and Road Initiative is clearly driven partly by strategic objectives, a cost-benefit analysis shows that the economic case is also very strong.”
He continues that such win-win policies are of great benefit to the real economies of China, the U.S. and others (as the Caterpillar company executives recently said regarding their burst in sales of construction equipment along the Belt and Road). “A decade after the global financial crisis erupted,” Wei writes, “recovery remains weak and tentative in much of the world. Bold, large-scale infrastructure investments can provide much-needed short-run stimulus to global aggregate demand…. In the longer term, the new infrastructure will ease logistical bottlenecks, reducing the costs of production inputs. The result will be higher productivity and faster global growth.”
He concludes: “In an era when some of the world’s most influential countries are turning inward, talking about erecting trade barriers and constructing border walls, the world needs initiatives focused on building bridges and roads, both literal and figurative initiatives like the Belt and Road strategy.”
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Germany’s Free Democrats Want Russia Back in the G7/G8, ‘Talk To Putin, not About Him’
Oct. 14 (EIRNS)—As a first deadline to know anything about the future German government is set for mid-end January, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) continues to push the Russia policy issue in the debate, breaking the consensus and shaping a perspective for German foreign policy.
FDP head Christian Lindner said in an interview with the Austrian daily Die Presse that he wants Russian President Vladimir Putin back at the G7/G8 table.
Yes, we must be ready to strengthen sanctions if Russia behaves badly, he agrees, but “there is a lack of will for dialogue. We cannot make everything depend on Crimea. The violation of international law cannot be accepted. But this is the most difficult conflict and this is the last issue where things can move. Therefore I propose that the dialogue be intensified and that Putin be invited back to the G7 table and that we talk to him instead of about him,” Lindner said.
Lindner also said that the FDP has drawn a red line in the government negotiations, and that is “the socialization of debt, the creation of new money bags” in the EU. This means “No to 20% of [French President] Macron’s ideas, which weaken instead of strengthening Europe.”
Lindner said that he would have pursued a different strategy in the 2015 Greek crisis: “With the reintroduction of the drachma, Greece would have more easily recovered inside the EU. Mrs. Merkel has unfortunately corrected what Mr. Schäuble and the other European Finance Ministers had already decided.” (To be precise: It was Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who flew in from Washington to make sure that Greece stayed in the euro.)
Lindner’s deputy, Wolfgang Kubicki, reiterated the FDP opposition to sanctions against Russia, and said in an interview with Der Spiegelthat the FDP is not in a hurry to form the government. Negotiations for a “Jamaica coalition”—the Christian Democracy, Free Democrats, and Greens—won’t be over before mid-end January, he said.
Russian Economic Development Minister Meets with U.S. Business Leaders in Washington
Oct. 14 (EIRNS)—Russian Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin held a working breakfast meeting in Washington yesterday with the U.S. Russian Business Council. Following the meeting, according to TASS, Oreshkin told reporters: “The U.S. business is optimistic and looks for new opportunities of business development. Certainly, they are pleased to have open contacts with the government.”
RT reported that Oreshkin, in Washington to attend the Fall annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, also said that Russian and American business relations are steadily improving despite diplomatic disputes. “In the past years there is a lot of political noise happening, but if you look in the hard data, you will find Russian-American relations are not that bad,” Oreshkin said, pointing to the fact that U.S. investment in Russia is rising.
Among the U.S. business leaders attending were those representing Cargill, Dow Chemical, Mars, Caterpillar and others.
Chinese Builder Contracted To Build Central Business District in Egypt’s New Cairo
Oct. 13 (EIRNS)—China State Construction Engineering Corp. Vice President Zheng Xuexuan and Egyptian Housing Minister Mostafa Madbouly, in the presence of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Chinese Ambassador to Egypt Song Aiguo, signed a $3 billion contract on Oct. 11 to build New Cairo’s Central Business District (CBD), Xinhua reported on Oct. 12.
The Central Business District, in Egypt’s proposed new administrative capital, New Cairo, is located about 50 km east of Cairo and would occupy an area of a half-square km. The CBD includes a 345-meter high skyscraper—the tallest building in Africa, 12 business complexes, 5 residential buildings and 2 hotels, Xinhua reported. The construction of Egypt’s new administrative capital is a national mega-project that is designed to gradually expand over an area of 700 square km.
During the ceremony to sign the contract, Ambassador Song told Xinhua that the deal is important in three ways. “First, finalizing the deal, whose initial signing was witnessed by Chinese President Xi Jinping and President el-Sisi during Xi’s first state visit to Egypt in January 2016, manifests the depth of the China-Egypt cooperation. Second, it is part of the China-Egypt cooperation within the framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Third, the project has symbolic significance as it will be a long-lasting sign of the China-Egypt friendship for next generations to come,” Song said.
Egypt was one of the five “BRICS Plus” nations that China invited to attend the Xiamen BRICS summit in September, along with Mexico, Guinea, Thailand, and Tajikistan.
SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Japan and Indonesia Plan Ship-Based Power Generation in Indonesian Islands
Oct. 15 (EIRNS)—According to Yomiuri Shimbun today, the Japanese and Indonesian governments will research a plan to provide power to Indonesian islands through ships that generate electricity using liquefied natural gas (LNG). “The Japanese and Indonesian governments are considering deploying power-generating ships to around a dozen islands in eastern Indonesia that have poorly developed electricity networks,” the sources said. The ships would be equipped with LNG tanks, power-generating turbines and other equipment. While a ship is anchored, LNG would be brought by tankers from storage depots in Indonesia. LNG will be gasified onboard to generate electricity for transmission to the onshore grid via undersea cable.
Indonesian archipelago has about 13,000 islands. Most of them are very thinly populated and the development of those islands has remained muted due to lack of steady power as one of the prime reasons.
According to a Nov. 23, 2016 article in the Nikkei Asian Review, a Japanese company, Modec, has developed such ships. “The 300 meter-long LNG power generation ships will be offered in versions ranging from 84 MW to 720 MW. A 250 MW system could meet the needs of roughly 150,000 people and will cost a total of some ¥40 billion ($360 million), including design, materials procurement and constructions.”
Pope Francis To Speak with Crew Aboard International Space Station This Month
Oct. 13 (EIRNS)—The Vatican announced this week that Pope Francis is scheduled to talk to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Oct. 26th. The current crew is made up of three Americans, two Russians, and Italian flight engineer Paolo Nespoli.
Popes have played an important role in space exploration. In 1956, when the annual International Astronautical Congress was held in Rome, Pope Pius XII said: “The Lord, who has anchored an insatiable desire in man’s heart, the desire for knowledge, had no intention of setting a limit to inquiry when He said ‘Ye shall have dominion over the Earth’ (Genesis I, 28). It is all creation which He has entrusted to man and which He has given to the human mind to penetrate it and thus to recognize more and more the infinite greatness of its Creator.
“While up to now man has felt himself banned on Earth, so to speak, he has had to be satisfied with fragments of information which come from the universe, it appears now that the opportunity has come to put aside the barriers and arrive at new truths and new knowledge which God has given to the Earth in abundance.”
Pope Paul VI watched the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 manned lunar landing on television as it was taking place, and met with the crew and their wives at the Vatican three months after the mission.
Pope Benedict XVI was the first Pope to speak with astronauts in space, when he made a phone call to the ISS crew in 2011.
One can hope that Pope Francis follows in this tradition, placing man’s exploration of the cosmos as part of humanity’s mission of creation.
OTHER
British Empire’s Economist Warns, Beware the ‘World’s Most Powerful Man,’ Xi Jinping
Oct. 13 (EIRNS)—The Oct. 14-20 issue of The Economist, a leading voice of the British Empire, has dropped any pretense at sanity with a cover story entitled: “The World’s Most Powerful Man: Xi Jinping Has More Clout than Donald Trump. The World Should Be Wary.”
One can imagine the nonsense that follows. It is equally an attack against President Trump as against President Xi. Some examples:
—“The United States is still the world’s most powerful country, but its leader is weaker at home and less effective abroad than any of his recent predecessors, not least because he scorns the values and alliances that underpin American influence. The president of the world’s largest authoritarian state, by contrast, walks with swagger abroad. His grip on China is tighter than any leaders since Mao. And whereas Mao’s China was chaotic and miserably poor, Mr. Xi’s is a dominant engine of global growth. His clout will soon be on full display [at the 19th Party Conference]…. More skeptical observers might ask whether Mr. Xi will use his extraordinary power for good or ill.”
—“Xi presents himself as an apostle of peace and friendship, a voice of reason in a confused and troubled world. Mr. Trump’s failings have made this much easier. At [the World Economic Forum in] Davos in January Mr. Xi promised the global elite that he would be a champion of globalization, free trade and the Paris accord on climate change. Members of his audience were delighted and relieved. At least, they thought, one great power was willing to stand up for what was right, even if Mr. Trump (then President-elect) would not.”
—With the Belt and Road, they write, “hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese money are to be invested abroad in railways, ports, power stations and other infrastructure that will help vast swathes of the world to prosper. That is the kind of leadership America has not shown since the post-war days of the Marshall Plan in western Europe (which was considerably smaller).”
—“Unlike Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President, Mr. Xi is not a global troublemaker who seeks to subvert democracy and destabilize the West…. At home, Mr. Xi’s instincts are at least as illiberal as those of his Russian counterpart. He believes that even a little political permissiveness could prove not only his own undoing, but that of his regime. The fate of the Soviet Union haunts him, and that insecurity has consequences. He mistrusts not only the enemies his purges have created but also China’s fast-growing, smartphone-wielding middle class, and the shoots of civil society that were sprouting when he took over. He seems determined to tighten control over Chinese society, not least by enhancing the state’s powers of surveillance, and to keep the commanding heights of the economy firmly under the party’s thumb. All this will make China less rich than it should be, and a more stifling place to live. Human-rights abuses have grown worse under Mr. Xi, with barely a murmur of complaint from other world leaders.”
—“Mr. Xi may think that concentrating more or less unchecked power over 1.4 billion Chinese in the hands of one man is, to borrow one of his favorite terms, the ‘new normal’ of Chinese politics. But it is not normal; it is dangerous…. The world does not want an isolationist United States or a dictatorship in China. Alas, it may get both.”
Imagine what the Lords of London will think if Trump and Xi truly join forces in the New Silk Road.
