EDITORIAL
British Forced To Counterattack Trump-Putin-Xi Cooperation—In Their Own Name
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—The British tried to subvert their upstart breakaway colony in the Americas by military means a number of times. But when Lincoln mobilized the nation against the British instigated Confederacy based on the highest moral principles embedded in our Constitution—and with help from the Russian naval fleets deployed into New York and San Francisco harbors as a warning to the Brits to stay out—London decided they had to change tactics. Since that time, they have done all in their power to subvert those higher moral principles, and use the United States as the “dumb giant” to enforce the British economic and military domination of the globe. FDR posed a problem to them, uniting with Russia and China to defeat fascism, but the little man Harry Truman did their bidding, committing mass murder with nuclear weapons, and embracing Churchill’s Cold War, to end FDR’s U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China cooperation, while waging “anti-communist” population wars in Africa and Southeast Asia.
But the too-often overlooked thrust of their subversion was cultural. The American belief in progress, in independence for all sovereign nations, and for the Leibnizian “pursuit of happiness,” had to be snuffed out if the imperial British system were to be maintained. For that, they introduced a number of satanic campaigns: the anti-progress Green perversion launched by Prince Philip’s World Wildlife Fund; the British/CIA-funded counter-culture in Europe and the U.S., orchestrated by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) under the guise of anti-communism; the new Opium War against both the duped youth of the counterculture and the impoverished citizens rendered hopeless by the “post-industrial society.” Dragging the U.S. into a colonial war in Indochina (after killing off JFK) helped their cause by undermining the economy and demoralizing the once-proud citizenry of America.
Now, a President has been elected in the U.S. who is openly dedicated to destroying that British imperial ideology—to establish friendships with Russia and China, both in economic development and the war on drugs and terrorism. For this, the British and their assets in the U.S. are responding in a most hysterical way, and, for a change, are forced to do it in their own name.
Today, London Guardian reporter Luke Harding released a book aimed at resuscitating the discredited “cash for trash” dossier by MI6 agent Christopher Steele, which is at the core of the Russiagate coup attempt against Trump by Robert Mueller and the “political hacks” (as Trump called them) from the Obama intelligence team. Harding’s book, Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House, praises Steele and assures us that Mueller will prove Steele’s fanciful charges. Not surprisingly, Harding is also the author of Mafia State—How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia, speaking about himself.
Harding also states that Steele was the primary intelligence source for the Obama Administration’s 2014 coup in Ukraine, openly backing neo-Nazis while launching the campaign against Russia. EIRdemonstrated in February of this year that the same British-Obama network that ran that neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine was behind the coup attempt against Trump (“Obama and Soros—Nazis in Ukraine 2014—U.S. in 2017?”). Harding further confirms it.
The British Monarchy last week openly declared their central role in the phony “peace deal” in Colombia, which is in reality a legalization of the murderous narco-terrorist FARC, a campaign facilitated by Obama’s criminal role in legalizing drugs in America.
The poison of the CCF counter-culture must be exposed and eradicated, if our citizens are to rise to the level required to stop the coup, and to bring the United States into the New Paradigm which has now been placed squarely before them by Trump’s historic Asia tour. Both Trump and Xi Jinping described U.S.-China friendship as the basis for solving the world’s profound problems. Trump overcame even those in his own camp who tried to prevent him from meeting with Putin. They instead met three times, addressing the need for friendship and cooperation in countering terrorism. Trump later repudiated the Russiagate hoax and its proponents in both parties and in the fake-news press.
A world-historic transformation, in science, art, and statecraft—like that of the Renaissance, but on a global scale—is necessary, and within our grasp, if we act with the necessary sense of moral courage.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
The Guardian Brags Again, Fully Exposing Christopher Steele’s Actual Masters
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—An article in today’s the Guardian of London touts a new book about British spy Christopher Steele and exposes new angles concerning the sources and funding of the Steele dossier and its geopolitical purposes. Luke Harding, the author of this book, is, in all probability, an MI6 conduit posing as a journalist. He is violently anti-Putin and anti-Russia, having been expelled from Russia in a cloud of controversy. The Guardian had previously pinpointed the British sponsorship of the coup against President Trump by bragging about the GCHQ surveillance of Trump dating back to 2013.
In EIR’s September 27 dossier on Mueller’s dodgy dossier (https://larouchepac.com/20170927/robert-mueller-amoral-legal-assassin-he-will-do-his-job-if-you-let-him) we asserted that the coup against Donald Trump began in 2014 with the Ukraine “regime-change” operation conducted by the British and the United States. The Ukraine operation was the intended first step in a plan to overthrow Russian President Putin and return Russia to the 1990s, when it was looted to the bone by the financially bankrupt Western elites. It is not accidental that Christopher Steele’s posting to Russia began in 1990.
The Guardian article confirms our statement about the roots of the present coup. It asserts that Steele’s credibility in Washington, D.C. resulted from the following:
“Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine, which were commissioned by private clients but shared widely with the State Department and passed across the desks of the Secretary of State John Kerry and the Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland who led the U.S. response to the annexation of Crimea and the covert invasion of Eastern Ukraine. The sources for those reports were the same as those quoted in the dossier on Trump.”
An article in Politico Magazine by Rick Stengel dated Nov. 15th adds further meat to this picture. It recounts how Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Rick Stengel received an unexpected and frantic call from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about a month after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Clinton was railing about new Russian propaganda techniques and disinformation.
“You need to fact check what they are saying and expose Russian disinformation in real time,” she barked. “The State Department is still issuing press releases while Putin is rewriting history.”
Thus, the elites blamed Russian propaganda for the fact that Ukrainians in the East would never accept a regime-change operation fueled by Western social media operations and executed by neo-Nazis. Putin, aware of this fact, simply outflanked them. It is well known that the Clinton campaign and the DNC openly collaborated with Ukrainian intelligence in creating propaganda against Trump. Did well-known Ukrainian deep pockets tied to Clinton, such as Victor Pinchuk, also pay for the British Steele Trump dossier?
This, rather than the diversionary wild goose chase around Uranium One, is what deserves urgent special investigation.
Financial Vulture Who Destroyed Ukraine’s Economy Runs Puerto Rico’s Financial Control Board
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—To understand the vicious behavior of the financial control board which oversees Puerto Rico’s finances, consider the fact that its executive director is one Natalie Jaresko, who served the Nazi coup in Ukraine as Finance Minister from late 2014 to early 2016 at the invitation of President Petro Poroshenko and Victoria Nuland’s friend, then-Premier Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk. At the time she was hired, Jaresko was an American citizen, but was very quickly granted Ukrainian citizenship.
Jaresko, a rabid neocon who hates Russia, has a murky background as a venture capitalist who was deeply involved in questionable financial dealings in Ukraine, related to her management of the USAID-financed investment fund, Western NIS Enterprise Fund, prior to becoming Finance Minister. She had previously worked for the State Department, serving as Chief of the Economics Section at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev in 1992.
She boasts that during her 17 months as Finance Minister, she restored “vitality” to Ukraine’s economy, ensuring imposition of the International Monetary Fund’s harsh “structural reform,” a condition of the $17.5 billion loan whose terms economist and Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine leader Natalia Vitrenko called “monstrous.” Following her nomination to head Puerto Rico’s control board last March, Jaresko boasted, according to the Financial Times, that her policies returned Ukraine’s economy “from the brink of financial disaster to stability and growth,” and that she hoped to use the same approach in Puerto Rico. In her current post, she earns $625,000 a year and makes annual trips to Kiev, where she still has business dealings.
Jaresko is adamant that Puerto Rico is not competent to manage its own financial affairs and must submit to the demands of the control board, which was imposed on the island by the U.S. Congress through the misnamed PROMESA (Puerto Rican Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act) in July of 2016. As Gov. Ricardo Rosselló documented in testimony yesterday before the House Natural Resources Committee, the board, at Jaresko’s urging, is demanding vastly-expanded powers, including more tools to monitor expenditure of federal funds; more authority to control the government through appointment of chief executive officers who will be accountable onlyto the board, and authority to veto all legislation enacted by the Puerto Rican legislature, if such legislation is deemed “inconsistent” with the fiscal austerity plan that the government is supposed to implement.
Just Where Is Press Censorship Worsening?
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—The Russian lower house of parliament, the Duma, today quickly passed—unanimously—a law which would allow the Russian government to require foreign news agencies which receive government funding to register as foreign agents. The bill is expected to pass the Federation Council, upper house, equally rapidly.
The new Russian law was motivated explicitly as a response to the U.S. Justice Department requirement that the Russian news agency RT register as a foreign agent, in the midst of a wild drumbeat of anti-Russia hysteria created by the dying Anglo-American Establishment. RT must now file reports twice a year on its funding, finances, and staffing with the U.S. Department of Justice.
That didn’t stop British intelligence’s Amnesty International from issuing a diatribe that the new Russian law means “Russian authorities will tighten their stranglehold on press freedom,” because it could impose “onerous obligations to declare full details of their funding, finances and staffing.”
The same day, ConsortiumNews founder Robert Parry tore apart the tightening “censorship” being attempted in the United States against any “independent and dissident journalists and news outlets” which report anything deviating from the “mindless groupthink inside Official Washington.” These get painted as “some kind of traitorous Russian mole whose journalism must be purged from ‘responsible’ media and who should be forced to wear the journalistic equivalent of a yellow star,” he protests. (He cites, besides the RT action, the recent decision by HuffPost to remove an article by journalist Joe Lauria “because he dared to point out that Democratic money financed the two initial elements of what’s now known as Russia-gate: the forensic examination of computers at the Democratic National Committee and the opposition research on Donald Trump conducted by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.”)
Yesterday, Nation editor Katrina van den Heuvel also warned that the RT registration requirement “is a threat to press freedom,” a part of the U.S. political establishment’s “delegitimizing of dissent,” and attempts to outlaw anyone and any story which deviates from its line that Russia is “a wholly malevolent actor” which threatens the U.S.
As Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) leader Ray McGovern noted in his denunciation of the press mockery of Trump published in ConsortiumNews Nov. 13, this witchhunt extends even to the President of the United States, who dared “introduc[e] the idea of a different kind of ‘hack’ ” in the 2016 election: the Brennan, Clapper, Comey kind of hack.
Congressional Commission Launches ‘Get Xinhua’ Campaign
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—First RT, next Xinhua? In its 2017 Annual Report released this morning, the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission—a Congressionally-mandated bipartisan committee created by Congress in 2000 to monitor national security implications of U.S.-China trade relations, notoriously staffed by neo-conservative anti-China hacks—calls for the United States to require journalists of Chinese state media in the U.S. to register as foreign agents.
Commission Chairwoman, former Pelosi Chief of Staff Carolyn Bartholomew, preposterously intoned at the commission press conference this morning that the U.S. government cannot and does notuse journalists as a cover for intelligence activities, as she accused China of using its media to “spy” and control how China is depicted globally. The report charges that Xinhua, which now has offices in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco and at the United Nations, “serves some of the functions of an intelligence agency by gathering information [!] and producing classified reports for the Chinese leadership on both domestic and international events.”
Commission members also told reporters that a section of the 650-page-plus report deals with the “threats” to U.S. business from alleged “Chinese overcapacity” in 17 or 19 industries (steel, aluminum, glass, rubber, etc.) In their view, it is unacceptable that China use the Belt and Road Initiative to maintain industrial “over-production,” keep their people employed, and thereby control unrest! If the World Trade Organization will not address this unfair practice, the Trump administration should, these idiots demanded.
China’s crime, in the eyes of these people, is that it has dared rise above and leave behind the 170 years of colonial humiliation begun with Great Britain’s Opium War against it. As Commission chair Bartholomew put it, China’s “three risings” are the threat: “rising authoritarianism, rising techno-nationalism, and rising assertiveness.”
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Senate Panel Debates Trump and Nuclear Weapons, but Ignores War-Making Authority of Congress
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held its hearing on President Trump and presidential authority to use nuclear weapons. The statement that led the headlines was that of retired Gen. Robert Kehler, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command, who said that the U.S. military is obligated to follow legal orders, but not illegal orders.
“It’s important to remember that the United States military doesn’t blindly follow orders,” he said. “A presidential order to employ U.S. nuclear weapons must be legal.” He added that the legal principles of military necessity, distinction, and proportionality also apply to decisions about nuclear weapons use. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) asked him if that meant that Strategic Command can deny the President’s order if it fails the test of proportionality and legality.
“Yes,” Kehler replied, but he also said that that would be a “very difficult conversation.” On the other hand, if a President’s order to employ nuclear weapons preemptively is determined to be sound and legal, it can’t be stopped.
What prompted the hearing wasn’t a desire to examine presidential authorities with respect to nuclear weapons, as important as that topic is, but rather because Trump is the President. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the chairman of the committee, is in a feud with Trump, and the Democrats are questioning not only the legitimacy of Trump’s election through the contrived Russia-gate scandal, but also his sanity because of some of his rhetoric regarding North Korea.
“We are concerned that the President of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapon strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said during the hearing.
In any case, Kehler expressed opposition to making any radical changes to the current system, which is designed for an entirely different scenario than what Murphy was describing.
“I urge Congress to carefully consider the potential impacts to deterrence and extended deterrence that any potential changes to nuclear command-and-control might have,” he warned. “I also urge you to consider that conflicting signals can result in loss of confidence, confusion, or paralysis in the operating forces at a critical moment.”
It’s not clear from the reporting, whether anyone at the hearing noted the irony of a Congress suddenly worried that the President might launch a nuclear war out of the blue, when for decades, especially for the last 16 years, the Congress has watched Presidents wage war against countries that did not attack the United States and were no threat to the United States, and Congress did nothing.
Mike Pompeo, the Neo-Cons, and the Alleged Al Qaeda-Iran Link
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—On Nov. 1, the CIA released a huge trove, amounting to some 470,000 files, of documentation that had been captured from Osama bin Laden’s computers during the Navy SEAL raid in May 2011 during which he was killed. Almost immediately, in far less time than it would take to actually review the trove and separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, the neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) had published one particular 19-page document in its news site called “FDD’s Long War Journal,” which, the authors claimed, “proved” the Iranian links to al-Qaeda. Shahir Shahidsaless, an Iranian-Canadian journalist, writing in a Nov. 8 article in the Middle East Eye, reports that FDD and its blog received favorable treatment from the CIA by getting a preview of the files before they were publicly released.
“What gives this neoconservative advocacy organization such a privileged status compared to the hundreds of other organizations with similar expertise that the CIA chooses to make the documents available to it in advance?” Shahidsaless asks. FDD’s Long War Journal had prepared a post, ready to go upon release, to provide early context to the huge cache: Iran cooperated with al-Qaeda and could now be labelled as a “state sponsor of terror” based on al-Qaeda’s internal documents, he notes. The next step is obvious: “Advocating regime change in Iran similar to that which occurred in Iraq’s case.”
Shahidsaless goes on to explain the tight relationship between CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the FDD, citing an Oct. 19 FDD event at which both Pompeo and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster spoke and showered praise all over the FDD. Pompeo hinted at the time that the bin Laden release was coming soon and that it would include evidence supposedly linking Iran to al-Qaeda.
“The story is reminiscent of the claim that al-Qaeda members were trained by the secular and nationalist Ba’athist Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein,” Shahidsaless writes, and recalls that that earlier story proved to be a hoax.
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
EU Adds Gasoline to the Fire of Unstable Financial System
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—Two recent decisions by EU institutions will add gasoline to the fire in the financial world.
On Oct. 26, two days after the EU Commission announced its dropping of plans for a banking reform (ring-fencing), the European Parliament approved a financial law to expand the securities market in Europe, by camouflaging toxic assets as quality paper.
On Nov. 10, the EU Commission issued a paper backing the ECB’s new guidelines on non-performing loans (NPLs), which will deal a mortal blow to the credit sector.
On the securities law, Member of the European Parliament Marco Valli (Italy) wrote on his Facebook page that “they are relaunching the instrument that determined the 2008 financial crisis.”
“In the text, they are called Simple, Transparent and Standardized (STS) securities, but unfortunately, these financial instruments won’t have much of simple, transparent and standardized. Suffice it to say that the STS label includes, in its definition, tranching and derivatives.”
Banks are allowed to issue and spread those STS securities out. They are mandated to keep only 20%.
The MEP Valli continues, “This is only the last piece of a project that loots savings and penalizes our [commercial] banks, under pressure through growing capital requirements and a special attention to credit risk but never to the financial risk, which is being subsidized through EU law.”
Valli then polemicized for bank separation: “They won’t tell you, but the truth is that bank separation is a real alternative to the bail-out and the bail-in, capable of protecting at the same time taxpayers, savers, and depositors.”
Sixteen Years of Afghan War Results in Record Opium Production
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—The Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics unit reported this month that opium production skyrocketed by an astonishing 87% this past year, reaching a record 9,000 metric tons of opium. Most of the increase came from a 63% increase in the area under cultivation, including three provinces that had been previously opium free. So much for 16 years of U.S. and British military occupation of Afghanistan. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Executive Director Yury Fedotov said: “It is high time for the international community and Afghanistan to reprioritize drug control, and to acknowledge that every nation has a shared responsibility for this global problem.”
While the U.S. and much of the Western world are suffering from the worst opioid epidemic in their history, the Afghan farmer is getting even less for his labor—average farm-gate prices at harvest time decreased in all regions of Afghanistan ranging from −7% in the west to −50% in the northeast, according to the UNODC report.
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Russia To Assist Philippines Nuclear Energy Development
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—During Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to the Philippines to attend the 12th East Asia Summit, Philippine Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi and Rosatom Deputy Director General Nikolay Spassky signed on Nov. 13 a Memorandum of Cooperation, whereby Russia and the Philippines will work together in several areas, including carrying out nuclear infrastructure studies towards national energy policy development and nuclear energy program implementation in the Philippines, World Nuclear News (WNN) reported today. The Memorandum follows a Memorandum of Understanding signed in May 2017, between Rosatom and the Philippines Ministry of Science and Technology on cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
In the Nov. 13 agreement, two parties agreed to conduct an audit and assessment of the technical condition of the mothballed Bataan nuclear power plant, “including the option of its rehabilitation,” WNNsaid. The Westinghouse-supplied 620 MW Bataan nuclear plant was completed in 1984, but was never fueled or operated.
In addition, WNN covered the fact that Russia will also assist the Philippines in feasibility studies on the construction of small modular reactors, either onshore or offshore. Cusi said, “The cooperation with Russia is part of the government’s intention to develop a variety of applications of nuclear energy that are within our policies, particularly for power generation.”
SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
NASA Is Getting Ready To Test a Nuclear Reactor for Moon and Mars Missions
Nov. 15 (EIRNS)—NASA will be carrying out the first ground test of a new nuclear reactor that is designed for space missions some time this month, the agency announced Nov. 13. NASA’s Kilopower program is tasked with creating a small fission reactor that can provide electricity for use onboard a spacecraft, and on the ground on the Moon and Mars. NASA’s first space nuclear program, which successfully flew a reactor in the mid-1960s, was cancelled in 1972 when the manned Mars mission was cancelled. But many of the facilities from that time are being brought back into this program. The current Kilopower test will be run at the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). In the 1960s, the reactors for the ROVER and NERVA NASA space nuclear programs were tested in facilities at Jackass Flats, which is in the southwest part of what today is the NNSS.
This first test of the new design with a nuclear reactor, rather than a simulation, will be done using a reactor core about the size of a paper towel roll, NASA explains. Inside will be uranium-235 fuel, and a Sterling piston engine will convert the fission heat to electricity. Development is a step-by-step process. This first test is aimed to produce tens of kilowatts of power. The scientists and engineers explain that the new technology could evolve into hundreds of kilowatts, and eventually, megawatts of electricity.
The researchers stress the benefits of a nuclear reactor for deep space exploration, as compared to solar, considering there are two weeks of nighttime on the Moon without sunlight, and dust storms on Mars, without very much sunlight. Nuclear technology also can provide much higher potential power levels than solar, or the decay of radioisotopes, which are also used today for planetary missions.
In a parallel effort, nuclear manufacturer BWXT was awarded a NASA contract in August to carry out design work on a nuclear thermal propulsion concept, with an efficiency double that of chemical rockets.
The 1960s space nuclear programs were cancelled when there was no vision, and no mission that required them. To power the missions of tomorrow—the development of the Moon and the exploration of Mars—nuclear technologies, including fusion, are prerequisite.
