EDITORIAL
Mueller’s Indictments Change Nothing: His Trump Witchhunt Is Based on a British Fraud
Oct. 30 (EIRNS)—President Trump is about to leave for an Asia trip in which he will have major economic and security meetings with President Xi of China, Prime Minister Abe of Japan, and perhaps with President Putin of Russia. His repeatedly stated policy is that the United States should have good, productive relations with these nations.
That means we are now at the critical point in exposing the history and use of a British intelligence document—the “Steele dossier”—and a legal assassin—Robert Mueller—to try to blackmail Trump into treating Russia and China as the United States’ chief enemies.
Up to now, the British intelligence-originated blackmail, escalating to threats of impeachment, coup, even assassination, has failed to overawe the President’s intention to form cooperative relations of mutual benefit with those great powers. Not only peace in the Middle East and on the Korean Peninsula is involved; but also cooperative development of great infrastructure projects, space explorations, new sources of energy, in the United States as well as internationally.
It’s time to escalate to destroy the British dossier and the legal assassin.
Robert Mueller’s first indictments do not change this, even as deliberately and illegally leaked to frighten the children over Hallowe’en weekend. They were expected; they charge events well before President Trump even became a candidate, which don’t involve him; they are attempts to “stun” and intimidate.
More telling are the continuing revelations about the British dossier.
Not only Clinton’s but also Obama’s political committee paid a Washington law firm millions for “legal services” (i.e., deniability) which produced a fraudulent “dossier,” a rehash of prior faked claims from British intelligence about Donald Trump and Russians. Not only the dossier, but also the shadowy report on “hacking of DNC computers” was produced through the millions paid this law firm by Clinton and Obama.
Before this was known, Clinton, Obama, and the complicit media treated this British dossier as the smoking gun of the century. After these revelations, the dossier began to be called mere “opposition research “—so tertiary, no Obamacon or Clintonite will admit to knowing they paid millions for it!
But no: This British dossier was used by U.S. intelligence officials James Clapper, John Brennan and James Comey, in a January 6 meeting with President-elect Trump, to try to blackmail him into an anti-Russia—and anti-China—administration. This was what the vainglorious Comey called his “J. Edgar Hoover moment.” He deserved to be fired for it, as Hoover should have been fired by the Presidents he blackmailed with his “dossiers.”
The blackmail being rejected by Trump, the British dossier then had to be spread through the media, leading soon to the appointment of legal assassin Mueller, to remove Trump and restore City of London/Wall Street control over the Presidency.
More revelations will soon occur, with the House Intelligence Committee having gotten today the financial records of Fusion GPS, and about to get the FBI’s “Steele file” on how the British dossier was used and who else paid or got paid.
Everything depends on reaching out much further with EIR’s own anti-British dossier, “Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him.”
The potential reward is a real new paradigm of policy coming out of the Presidential trip to Asia. The work of a cooperative “Hamiltonian Bank” for infrastructure, joint space exploration and energy crash programs, and the Glass-Steagall reorganization of the banks for production can begin in earnest.
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Before Trump’s Visit, Global Times Says ‘China and America Can Be Great Together’
Oct. 30 (EIRNS)—With a little over a week to go before President Trump departs on Nov. 5 for Asia, Global Times columnist Zhao Minghao entitles his article today, “China, America Can Be Great Together.”
An adjunct fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, Zhao states that “The Belt and Road Initiative can boost Sino-U.S. relations, and better Asia-Pacific infrastructure will generate more space for trade.” China, he says, has made great progress in recent years, but also faces challenges. It has been proactive in diplomacy, defended its territorial sovereignty, and refused to compromise on its core interests.
“China has led international development and global governance to build a community of common destiny through initiating the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB),” policies that were reaffirmed by President Xi Jinping in his address to the recent CPC Congress, Zhao says. He asserts that while managing the relationship he calls “competitive coexistence” between the two powers may be increasingly difficult, in fact, since Trump took office, the bilateral relationship has become more stable. Presidents Trump and Xi have maintained “effective communications” and have worked to avoid trade war and prevent tensions on the Korean Peninsula from spiraling out of control.
Zhao’s essential point is that if there is to be enduring peace, however, there must be expanded bilateral cooperation. China’s rich middle class wants to buy American products and services, while “the U.S. can use Chinese companies to burnish its infrastructure.” Cooperation in the energy field, in liquefied natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power, looks good, he writes. Moreover, as Asia will need up to $26 trillion in infrastructure over the next 15 years, U.S. companies such as Bechtel Corp., Halliburton and Caterpillar will find ample opportunities for investment. General Electric has already signed deals with China’s Silk Road Fund on financing in power grid, and new energy and oil and gas sector development, which will create more jobs for U.S. workers.
New China-Europe ‘Silk Road’ Line Inaugurated in Azerbaijan
Oct. 30 (EIRNS)—There was great enthusiasm in Baku, Azerbaijan today as the president Ilham Aliyev, was joined by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili in a ceremony to inaugurate the new 826 km. Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, which was set to take off on its maiden trip to Europe. According to the Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah, the BTK is a “key link in the modern Silk Road Railway” that will carry goods between China and Western Europe. Initially, it is expected to carry almost 1 million passengers and 6.5 million tons of freight annually, but aims to transport up to 50 million tons a year when it reaches its full potential.
Also present at the ceremony was the U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Robert Cekuta, who said that the BTK railroad is an important part of the New Silk Road.
President Erdogan, who is also in Baku for a two-day visit commemorating the 25th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan, said at the ceremony that “Baku-Tbilisi-Kars is part of the Great Silk Road and it is important that we have implemented this project using our own funds”; most of the $1 billion of which came from Azerbaijan’s state oil fund, according to Reuters. Erdogan emphasized that the project will bring “peace, security, stability and prosperity and will contribute to the development of our countries.”
Daily Sabah points out that, as “one of the land routes in the scope of China’s One Belt, One Road initiative passes through Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the railway projects being launched in the context of the ‘Iron Silk Road’ have gained significance as they are connecting the regions.” The transportation from Georgia to Turkey is provided via a border tunnel, some 2,375 meters of which are within Turkey’s borders, while 2,070 meters are on the Georgian side.
The new line will reduce travel time from China to Europe to 15 days, twice as fast as the sea route, at half the cost of air freight. Trains can depart from Chinese cities, cross into Kazakhstan at the Khorgos Gateway, be transported across the Caspian Sea by ferry to the new port of Baku and then be loaded onto the BTK to head for Europe. President Aliyev said that several European countries are interested in the project and that his government is in talks with them. Kazakhstan is very interested in transporting goods via the BTK line.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Mueller Shoots, Media Raves, But Charges Again Implicate London
Oct. 30 (EIRNS)—On Monday, Robert Mueller fired his first salvo. He indicted Paul Manafort and his aide, Richard Gates, for Tax and Money Laundering conspiracies and reporting violations under both the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Foreign Bank Account Reporting Act; false statements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act; and false statements. All of the indictment counts involve the proceeds of Manafort’s lobbying activities on behalf of the government of Ukraine which was overthrown by the British and the Obama Administration in a coup led by neo-Nazis in 2014. At the same time, in order to avoid the charge that the Manafort/Gates indictment has nothing to do with Mueller’s mandate to investigate alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, Mueller unsealed the plea agreement of George Papadopoulos, a short-time foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. The Manafort indictment does not mention the campaign.
Papadopoulos pled guilty on Oct. 5, 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his efforts to set up meetings between the Trump campaign and Russia—meetings which never occurred. Papadopoulos bears a distinctly London pedigree, pointing once again at British meddling in the U.S. elections—specifically British and allied intelligence infiltrations of the Trump campaign—as a primary target for serious investigators.
Mueller’s shot and the accompanying media frenzy occurred as the House Intelligence Committee secured the bank records of Fusion GPS, the firm which hired MI6’s Orbis Intelligence and Christopher Steele to peddle trash for cash on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, the FBI will turn over its Christopher Steele file this week to the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which have been exploring the collusion of the British, the Clintons, the Obama Administration, and the FBI in attempting to first wreck Donald Trump’s political campaign and then his Presidency.
In short, the coup was beginning to implode on the eve of Trump’s potentially world-historic trip to China on Nov. 8-9, and action was needed. It came in the form of really old, corrupted news presented as new by Mueller and the media.
The Ukraine money laundering charges against Manafort first surfaced back in July and August of 2016 and are believed to originate in opposition research conducted for Clinton’s campaign involving Ukrainian intelligence agencies and other official NATO channels. The British began pushing for Donald Trump’s head in 2015, based on his perceived desire for friendly relations with Russia. Manafort ended up on the wrong side of the 2014 British/American neo-Nazi coup against President Viktor Yanukovych and has been a marked man ever since. Mueller picked up on an FBI investigation already underway against Manafort with a grand jury already hearing evidence in the Eastern District of Virginia. Since all of Manafort’s lobbying activities were conducted with Tony Podesta, brother of then-Democratic Party Chairman John Podesta, Mueller has also targeted Podesta, to avoid an inevitable selective prosecution motion to dismiss. Tony Podesta resigned from this lobbying firm today to fight the charges.
Mueller assigned his protégé, Andrew Weissmann, to Manafort’s case. Weissmann is known for multiple incidents of rabid prosecutorial misconduct during the Enron investigations and for using such tactics as fabricated indictments against family members to turn targets into willing prosecutorial witnesses. The indictment reads like a press release, leading with the charge of conspiracy against the United States. Typical of the effort to pressure Manafort to lie against the President, the prosecutors sought and the magistrate agreed to $10 million in bail for Manafort and house arrest in lieu of detention, and a $5 million bail for Gates with house arrest. This is unusually punitive in a white-collar case, particularly since Manafort has known he was going to be indicted and poses no risk of flight.
The Papadopoulos charges are steeped in London connections. They are based on interviews the FBI conducted with Papadopoulos in January and February of 2017; that is, before the firing of FBI Director Comey and before Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel.
Papadopoulos has degrees from DePaul University in Chicago, the University of London and the London School of Economics. He interned at some point at the rabidly anti-Russian, anti-China and very intelligence community connected Jamestown Foundation here in the United States. Following his advanced degrees, he was a research associate at the neo-con Hudson Institute for four years. Following his sojourn at Hudson he moved to London to work for the British company Energy Stream for four months, followed by work from November 2015 to April 2016 as the Director of the Center for International Energy and Natural Resource Law and Security, a division of the London Center for International Law Practice. He served as a foreign policy advisor to Ben Carson, whose foreign policy team was overseen in part by former CIA rogue Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, of Iran/Contra fame, and volunteered for Trump’s foreign policy team as an advisor in March of 2016.
According to the wild tale told in Papadopoulos’ plea agreement, bought wholesale by the news media, at the same time as he began volunteering for Trump he met a London professor named Joseph Mifsud who he represents as having deep ties to the Kremlin. Mifsud assured him that the Russians had thousands of emails of Hillary Clinton’s and dirt on her, at which point Papadopoulos started bombarding the Trump campaign with emails about setting up an official meeting with the Russians and writing Russian officials who he claimed were on board with this. No such meeting ever occurred. The account provided, however, is perfectly consistent with a British-directed entrapment campaign to ensnare Donald Trump in some sort of Russian scandal. It is also consistent with the dirty British Christopher Steele dossier.
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
It’s ‘Public Funding,’ but GOP Tax Folly Is No Infrastructure Source
Oct. 27 (EIRNS)—Showing that Wall Street thinking still rules in the Republican Party and in President Trump’s cabinet—if not in the Oval Office—Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao told the American Trucking Association Oct. 27, “Infrastructure legislation will have to wait until tax reform has been completed.”
“Tax reform by Thanksgiving” has now become the obsession of the Republican Party leadership, which is berating its caucus that Republicans will lose both Houses of Congress in 2018 without it. Moreover, major tax reform must be passed in the half-dozen or so legislative days available between now and Thanksgiving. A legislative outline is still two days away!
This feverish drive pushed by Wall Street and its Administration representatives, above all, is to lower the corporate tax rate from 35% (most larger corporations actually pay an average of 25% or so) to 20%. This will raise their profitability. Unsaid in public, is that the U.S. corporate sector is crushed by a $14 trillion unpayable debt bubble soon to implode, and higher profitability could delay this.
A knowledgeable Congressional source explained that with a budget resolution now passed which called for the loss of $1.5 trillion in Federal tax revenue over 10 years, Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady (R-TX) will introduce his tax legislation on Nov. 1. It will incorporate projections of tax cuts of $5.5 trillion, and tax increases of $4 trillion over 10 years, making a projected net loss of $1.5 trillion in revenue. In case of defeat for this “tax reform”—certainly likely—the fallback will be a “tax cut” of just $1.5 trillion over 10 years, and no offsetting increases.
The rumored big increase in tax funds into the Highway Trust Fund for transportation infrastructure will be very difficult to incorporate in this process. National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn discussed such a big Highway Trust Fund boost, including an increase in the Federal gasoline tax from 18.7¢ to 26¢ a gallon, with the Problem Solvers Caucus on Oct. 25.
The only significant indication from Cohn’s reported discussion, is that it shows that the Trump Administration is now pursuing public funding for infrastructure building, rather than “public-private partnerships” (PPPs).
But this remains subjugated to Wall Street’s demand for tax reform to hold up the unpayable debt bubble a while longer.
SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Chinese Engineers Plan World’s Longest Water-Transport Tunnel from Tibet to Xinjiang
Oct. 30 (EIRNS)—The South China Morning Post reports that Chinese engineers are testing techniques that could be used to build the world’s longest tunnel—1,000 km—to carry water from Tibet to China’s largest province of Xinjiang to make it “bloom.” The proposed tunnel, which would drop down from the world’s highest plateau in multiple sections connected by waterfalls, “would turn Xinjiang into California,” said one geotechnical engineer involved in the planning, referring to such 20th-century agricultural projects as California’s Central Valley.
Today, more than 90% of Xinjiang is unsuitable for human habitation because of the lack of a water supply. The Tibetan Plateau stops rain from the Indian Ocean monsoon from reaching Xinjiang, which is bordered by the Gobi Desert in the north and by the Taklimakan Desert in the south. However, the Taklimakan sits right at the foot of the Tibetan Plateau, which is known as the “water tower of Asia.” The more than 400 billion tons of water the plateau releases each year—almost equivalent to the size of Lake Erie—feeds the source of major rivers, including the Yellow, Yangtze, Lancang/Mekong, and the Ganges.
Last August, the Chinese government started building another tunnel in the center of Yunnan province, which could be considered a “rehearsal” for the use of the new technology, engineering methods, and equipment needed for the Tibet-Xinjiang tunnel, which would divert the Yarlung Tsangpo River in southern Tibet to the Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang. Downstream in India, the Yarlung Tsangpo becomes the Brahmaputra, which joins the Ganges in Bangladesh. The Yunnan tunnel will be more than 600 km long, and will comprise more than 60 sections, each wide enough to accommodate two high-speed trains. It will pass through mountains several thousand meters above sea level in an area plagued by unstable geological conditions.
Currently, China’s longest tunnel is the eight-year-old, 85 km Dahuofang water project in Liaoning province, while the world’s longest tunnel is the 137 km main water supply pipe beneath New York City.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Abe Offers Military and Infrastructure Aid to Philippines
Oct. 30 (EIRNS)—Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is in Japan. After meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Abe offered the Philippines assistance in fighting terrorism and in infrastructure development, including rebuilding the largely destroyed city of Marawi in Mandanao, where the ISIS-linked terrorists were recently routed after a five-month battle. China has also offered help in rebuilding Marawi as part of their large infrastructure package for the Philippines.
“I express my heartfelt respect for President Duterte’s leadership on the recent declaration of liberation in Marawi,” Abe said, as reported today in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “We will provide full support for counterterrorism efforts and steps to ensure peace and stability in the region.”
Among the projects in the agreement: a subway system for the gridlocked capital city Manila, energy development, maritime safety, a water management project in Cavite province just south of Manila, patrol boats and speed boats for the Philippine coast guard, and Duterte’s war on drugs. The package, announced earlier this year, totals $9 billion over five years.
Duterte said of Japan: “The true friend of us stood squarely behind the Philippines in my country’s onward advance at greater peace, progress and prosperity.”
OTHER
Situation in Catalonia Calm, as Puigdemont Seeks Haven in Brussels
Oct. 30 (EIRNS)—Despite secessionist calls for massive civil disobedience, today the situation in Catalonia remained calm, with public employees returning to work as usual at 9:00 a.m. Teachers, firefighters and police apparently decided to ignore orders from secessionist leaders telling them to refuse to obey central government authorities.
The pro-independence party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) has announced it will participate in the snap elections Dec. 21.
Meanwhile, Spain’s Attorney General José Manuel Maza today called for the deposed Catalonian President Carles Puigdemont and his Vice President Oriol Junqueras to be charged with rebellion, sedition and embezzlement, charges that will have to be taken up by a judge who can subpoena them to appear in court. Puigdemont however, has fled to Brussels—headquarters of the European Union!—where he is said to be meeting with leaders of the Flanders secessionist movement, and may seek political asylum. Although Belgian Migration Minister Theo Francken suggested that the Belgian government could offer Puigdemont political asylum, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel immediately contradicted Francken, saying it was out of the question, RT reported today.
Of note are the remarks made today by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, who, in her regular press briefing today responded to a media question: “China’s position on this issue has been consistent and unequivocal. We think it falls within Spain’s internal affairs. We understand and support the Spanish government’s effort to uphold national unity, ethnic solidarity and territorial integrity, oppose the act of splitting the country and undermining the rule of law, and believe Spain is capable of upholding the social order and safeguarding the rights and interests of its citizens.”
