EDITORIAL
Columbus Day—Defend Civilization and Trump, against Antifa and Mueller
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—The mobilization by antifa and related anarchist groups against Columbus Day, which is being celebrated today in the U.S., has nothing to do with the defense of indigenous people, as many city and state governments would have you believe when they changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People Day. Rather, it is aimed at destroying the Renaissance, which gave birth to the idea of linking Europe with China by sailing west, avoiding the imperial control of the sea lanes to the east. It is aimed at destroying the concept of the New World as a City Upon a Hill, as John Winthrop said to the Massachusetts Bay colonists, escaping the oligarchical monarchies of a decadent Europe. It is aimed at destroying the United States itself, and most certainly, it is aimed at furthering the attempted coup d’état against the President of the United States.
An Open Letter to President Donald Trump in Defense of Columbus, written by Liliana Gorini, chairwoman of Movisol, the LaRouche-affiliated movement in Italy, which presents the broader historic context of the Renaissance movement behind the Columbus voyage, has been circulated in the Congress, around the nation, and to the many participants of the celebrations today of Columbus Day (see http://www.larouchepub.com/other/editorials/2017/4439_defence_columbus.html). Also being distributed with that letter is the 26-page EIRdossier on the crimes of Robert Mueller, providing the necessary ammunition to end the traitorous legal assassination by Mueller’s “Get Trump Task Force” of our President, just as Mueller ran the “Get LaRouche Task Force” in the 1980s. Both of these crimes were carried out for the same reason—to prevent the building of bridges between the United States, Russia and China, as promoted historically by LaRouche and as advocated today by President Trump, which is the necessary precondition for restoring the American System of our forefathers, and of our greatest Presidents, from John Quincy Adams to Lincoln to FDR and JFK.
Lyndon LaRouche has long identified the fact that the concept of the Nation-State, born in the mind of Nicholas of Cusa as the foundation of the Renaissance, has always been the enemy of Empire, while our nation’s true mission has always been a coalition of sovereign nation-states, working together toward the common aims of mankind. In less than a month, President Trump will travel to Asia, including visits to China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. His meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping has the potential to be world historic, bringing these two nations together in the spirit of the New Silk Road, to build modern industrial nations around the world, where once the colonial powers of Europe imposed backwardness, and which until today continue to be held in financial chains controlled in London and New York.
President Trump has responded to the destruction in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico with a profound recognition that it was precisely the collapse of infrastructure across our land that created the devastation caused by those storms, and has declared that we can no longer accept the lie that the private sector would, or could, do anything to rectify that decay. He has said, to the horror of Wall Street, that the Puerto Rican debt cannot be paid—a self-evident fact—and that it must simply be written off.
This then begs the question of the LaRouche Emergency Plan of Action. Restoring the Hamiltonian system of national credit is literally the only means by which the trillions of dollars required to both repair the nation’s decrepit infrastructure, and restore the nation’s historic scientific and industrial strength, can be generated. Every penny wasted in bailing out the gambling debts of the western financial system, through quantitative easing totalling approximately $14 trillion, simply drove the system deeper into bankruptcy, with essentially none of it going into the real economy.
Now is the time to end the British Empire once and for all. Now is the time to defeat their “regime change” operations once and for all, including emphatically their regime change against our nation. The New Paradigm is already being built today under Chinese leadership, waiting only for the United States to restore the American System, and establish cooperative relations with Russia and China. That must become the passionate commitment of our nation and its people, as patriots of our land and citizens of the world.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Behavioral Economist Wins Nobel Prize in Idiocy
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—Recalling Lyndon LaRouche’s insight that the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics are the only people in the world who can truthfully claim to be certified idiots, the Nobel Committee today so certified Richard Thaler, the behavioral economist. Thaler is the co-author with Cass Sunstein of the 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. It should be adequate proof that the book is total nonsense that it was declared the best book of the year by City of London mouthpieces The Economist and Financial Times, and was serialized in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the daily based in Germany’s, and the Europe’s, financial center of Frankfurt, among others.
Sunstein, of course, was Barack Obama’s information administrator, and is married to the madwoman Samantha Power, Obama’s UN Ambassador.
Lyndon LaRouche refused to acknowledge that Thaler was an economist—behavioral or otherwise—since his insane book about “nudging” people to follow the wishes of Big Brother was at best very bad behavioral psychology, not economics.
The U.K., in 2010, set up a Behavioral Insight Team (lovingly called the Nudge Unit) within the Cabinet, with Thaler as an advisor. In 2015, Obama issued an executive order titled “Using Behavioral Science Insights To Better Serve the American People.” It encouraged executive departments and federal agencies to “identify policies, programs, and operations where applying behavioral science insights may yield substantial improvements in public welfare, program outcomes, and program cost effectiveness.”
LaRouche responded to Obama’s embrace of these Bertrand Russell acolytes in his famous April 11, 2009 “Nero” webcast on Nerobama, and the initiative to provide Obama with the iconic Hitler moustache. The full transcript is available in the April 17, 2009 issue of EIR.
Trump’s EPA To Repeal Obama’s Anti-Coal ‘Clean Power Plan’
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—Obama declared the Clean Power Plan the law of the land in June 2014. By February 2016, the Supreme Court had ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to halt enforcement of the Obama decree. On Oct. 10, Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said he intends to “withdraw” completely from the moribund Clean Power Plan.
In his announcement today—made in Kentucky, flanked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—Pruitt steered clear of the larger “Climate Change” motivation behind Obama’s overreach, saying that the law was about “picking winners and losers,” and something the government should not be involved in. “The past administration,” he said, “was using every bit of power and authority to use the EPA to pick winners and losers and how we generate electricity in this country. That’s wrong.”
The Clean Power Plan had forced coal burning power plants to cut their emissions a whopping 30%, making them economically uncompetitive with highly subsidized “renewable” sources, including wind and solar generation sources. Obama had argued that his computers told him that cutting these emissions would save 2,700 and 6,600 lives, and prevent asthma attacks in 140-150,000 children!
Pruitt did not immediately announce a replacement action. According to the Washington Examiner, he intends to open discussion, involving “the energy industry and others,” on the issue, to find a “legal” replacement based on the Nixon-era Clean Air Act.
California Hepatitis Outbreak Nearing “Epidemic” Proportions
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—Breitbart News today reports that an outbreak of hepatitis A (hepatitis A virus, HAV), which started in San Diego earlier this year, but has now spread as far as San Francisco and Sacramento— “is on the verge of reaching statewide epidemic status.”
“At least 569 people have been infected with the hepatitis A liver disease and 17 have died,” in California since the outbreak was first identified in San Diego County last November, they report. “Cases have migrated north to homeless populations in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Sacramento over the last 11 months.”
Although the number is likely under-reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), lists the most recent annual totals for cases of hepatitis A in the United States was 1,390 in 2015. That year, California only reported 179 cases, according to Breitbart.
Hepatitis A is a highly contagious but easily avoidable disease spread by unsanitary conditions where humans are in contact with excrement from an infected individual. This current outbreak likely began as a result of the City of San Diego’s efforts (in the run-up to the July 2016 “All-Star” baseball game) to push the homeless out of the fancy downtown tourist venues. In addition to relocating the destitute to congested tent city encampments, that effort also included locking public bathrooms.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Just Why Did the U.S. Military Enter Syria?
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has written a 45-page self-encomium to his decision to send U.S. forces into Syria in 2015 that was published by the Belfer Center at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government this past week. This news service has yet to review the full document, but according to Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky, Carter still doesn’t answer the question: why? In Bershidsky’s view, what the Obama Administration did accomplish in Syria by its intervention was to draw Russia into the conflict by training and arming anti-Assad groups, “and Carter personally, if indeed it was he who brought about the change of strategy,” that he’s taking credit for.
Once Russia did get involved, Carter reports that it persistently sought cooperation with the U.S., efforts which Carter rebuffed for three reasons: one, coordinating with Russia, which was closely allied with Iran in Syria, could have weakened Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi’s resolve to work with the U.S.; two, it could link the U.S. to the “inhuman” Russian campaign (a questionable reason at best given the multiple civilian casualties inflicted by the U.S.-led coalition, Bershidsky notes), and, thirdly: “it would naively grant Russia an undeserved leadership role in the Middle East.”
What’s not mentioned by Bershidsky but otherwise obvious from this is that the U.S. under President Obama could not fight terrorism without seeking geopolitical advantage over Russia, but what Bershidsky does note is that this strategy failed. “In fighting ISIS, the U.S. managed to step on everybody’s toes in a battered, short-fused region that was already leery of U.S. interference after the Iraq and Libya adventures,” Bershidsky writes. Later he concludes: “The U.S. involvement has only intensified after the Obama administration left, and political stability in Syria and Iraq is ever more elusive as Middle Eastern nations and armed groups try to get used to the U.S./Russia/Turkey triangle of power brokers. Carter can proudly claim a part in bringing about this new, volatile configuration.”
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
PPP Proponents Scream About Trump’s ‘About-Face’
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—The Washington Examiner spoke with several leading public-private partnership proponents who expressed their horror and panic over President Trump’s announcement that his infrastructure plan no longer has a place for PPPs. (See EIR Daily Alert for Thursday, September 28, 2017.)
“It’s very dismaying,” said Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, a free-market research group. “You saw during the first six months of this year, everyone involved with public-private partnerships, including the construction and finance industries, were all saying, the U.S. will be the big next frontier for these deals. That now has a huge question mark on it.”
They write that D.J. Gribbin, Trump’s special assistant for infrastructure policy, previously worked on public-private partnerships for Macquarie Capital and Koch Industries. Poole said: “The whole reason Gribbin was hired was to do P3s. That has been his specialty for the last 20 years both in government and out of it. It’s very strange…. It’s so frustrating someone would make off-the-cuff comments like that about P3s. I can’t imagine that he was coordinating with his staff.”
On the other hand, Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said: “I was actually very encouraged to hear that. I guess he [President Trump] is a businessman and can see through that concept [PPPs] as a false promise. Hopefully, he sees infrastructure as capital expenditures as opposed to operating costs and is willing to get innovative on how we are going to finance it.”
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Chile Wants China To Build Large Bioceanic Projects: ‘Without China There Is No Integration with the World’
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—Speaking to China Hoy in an interview published Sept. 5, Chile’s Undersecretary of Public Works Sergio Galilea emphasized that “without China, there is no integration with the world,” and that Chile can serve as a “a good bridge nation [to China] primarily for South America.”
Galilea continued that the vision that Chile and China share can help create a “community of interests,” particularly in the field of infrastructure. Chile wants, and needs, China’s expertise in building large-scale infrastructure projects, he said, pointing to the binational, two-way Agua Negra tunnel under the Andes, which will create a bioceanic corridor connecting the Pacific port of Coquimbo (in central Chile) with Brazil’s Atlantic port of Porto Alegre. “It’s not just anyone who can build tunnels at 4,500 meters of altitude,” Galilea states, referencing the expertise of Chinese construction firms.
The Minister noted that these large projects “also require in their construction phase types of technologies and a productive organization in which China plays a vanguard role in the world.” The construction of Agua Negra, he said, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of other infrastructure projects in which Chinese companies can participate. There is, for example, the Las Leñas tunnel, another binational project in the central O’Higgins region of Chile, which is not at such a high altitude. During the early-September “Chile Week in China,” Chilean and Chinese officials discussed many other infrastructure projects, including possibly building a railroad at the San Francisco border crossing, in northern Chile’s Atacama region, passing into the Argentine province of Catamarca.
‘New Silk Road Spirit’ Grows in Australia
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—Australia must look to the Belt and Road initiated by China for where the future lies, leading Australian Labor Party figures have declared in recent weeks. “We could see the future. If we are not part of that action, we are going to be left behind,” former Labor Party Foreign Minister Gareth Evans said in speaking of the Belt and Road on the occasion of releasing his new book Incorrigible Optimist, at the National Press Club in Canberra on Oct. 4. China is becoming the world’s No. 1 economy, and has been a “huge, huge, huge” economic engine in the world, Xinhua reported.
A few days before, in laying out the new overall approach to Asia which a Labor government would adopt, Labor Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen told the Asia Society on Sept. 29 that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) will have “profound ramifications for years to come.” While not speaking at length about the BRI, Bowen did say that Labor “will come to office if we win the next election with an open mind as to how Australia and China can best collaborate on the Belt and Road Initiative.” Labor, he said, would “examine proposals on a case by case basis, including considering how the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility and the Belt and Road Initiative can best complement each other.”
Labor’s Luke Foley, leader of the opposition in the state of New South Wales, declared that not joining the BRI would be “economic suicide,” in a press conference for Chinese-Australian media reported on Sept. 27 by the Australian. Australia should sign up to the BRI, as New Zealand has, he said.
This discussion has horrified Australia’s top China-basher, Peter Jennings. Jennings was outraged that Bowen spoke about Asia policy without referring to missiles, the nuclear threat, North Korea or the South China Sea! Citing unspecified negative “consequences of becoming a partner” in the BRI, Jennings denounced the Labor policy speech as “naive” and “bizarre” for only considering economic opportunities and not the strategic downsides.
From Spain to Poland, Fighting Out the Belt and Road Spirit in Europe
Oct. 9 (EIRNS)—The largest-yet academic event in Spain on the opportunities offered by the Belt and Road Initiative was held in Santiago de Compostela, in the northern region of Galicia on Oct. 6, jointly organized by the IGADI international relations think tank in Galicia and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Opened by the Mayor of Santiago de Compostela, more than 50 participants came from China, including scholars and media from both the national and provincial level, to meet with Spanish scholars from Galicia and elsewhere, to hash out the potential role of Galicia, Spain and Europe in this great international project. Spain’s immediate participation ranges from the freight train from Yiwu, China to Madrid, to the maritime corridors, across both the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
According to El Correo Gallego, two other such conferences will be held this year in Paris and Rome, both under the title “European Forum on the Chinese Development Model.”
Such conferences are crucial for bringing the nations and cultures of the world together in a common project. Xinhua reported that a major theme of the two-day “Third China-Central and Eastern Europe Conference on Cross-Cultural Dialogue, Education and Business,” held in Ohrid, Macedonia on Oct. 6-7, was on the need to examine cultural differences between the nations involved, in order to avoid “misunderstandings” which “arise through sloppy thinking,” as one Hong Kong professor put it. Professors from Macedonia, China, the U.S., Australia, Serbia, Romania, India, Hungary, and Slovenia, among others participated.
Similarly, the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), the China-CEEC Think Tanks Network, CASS, and the Chinese Embassy in Poland held an all-day conference on Sept. 14 in Warsaw, on the subject, “How Belt & Road Influences China-CEE [Central and Eastern Europe] Relations? Opportunities and Challenges.” Xinhua reported that Poland’s Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Development Pawel Chorazy, in his keynote speech, “stressed the need for a more balanced collaboration that would see win-win for both sides.” For his part, China’s Ambassador to Poland Xu Jian emphasized that “the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed by China but belongs to the world.”
A summary of the conference by former Polish diplomat Marcin Przychodniaka, now with the PISM, indicates the conference was a hard-nosed discussion of different concerns of the European participants on the BRI and China’s 16+1 program, or CEEC, with the Central European countries. Chinese participants emphasized that these projects need to be viewed in “a long-term perspective…. In the summary, both sides acknowledged that Belt & Road is far more of an initiative than a precise action plan, and 16+1 should be considered as a useful platform to facilitate regular contact between Central Europe and China,” Przychodniaka concluded.
