EDITORIAL
An End to Geopolitics; An End to the British Empire’s Bestial Concept of Man
Feb. 25 (EIRNS)—On Feb. 24, the Congressional Democrats issued their response to the devastating exposure that the FBI, the Department of Justice and their partners in crime have endured as a result of the Nunes memo and related reports—emphatically including EIR’s dossier fully exposing Britain’s Mueller operation. The ten-page Democratic memo was nothing but an unabashed defense of the FBI, the DOJ, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, based on shameless lies and sophistry that would have made Thrasymachus and Callicles proud.
But remember who and what Mueller et al. are actually defending, through their campaign to topple the elected President of the United States: the dying Old Paradigm of the British Empire. That paradigm is based on geopolitical each-against-all warfare; savage economic looting of subject populations (including that of the United States); and, above all, a bestial concept of man which has been carefully cultivated and spread across the planet.
This—and not some profiled debate around gun laws—is the issue that is posed by the recent Florida student massacre, and the dozens and dozens of similar incidents that have happened across the country over recent years. As Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin stressed in a recent video interview that is getting wide circulation on the internet, the problem is that the entirety of today’s U.S. culture has wreaked havoc with our youth. “We have a culture that is desensitized to death, that is desensitized to the value of life, and we celebrate death through our musical lyrics, we celebrate death through video games that literally reward you with extra points for going back and finishing people off.”
Although Bevin did not point to those responsible for the crisis, nor did he pose a positive solution to it, he did call for an urgent national debate. Helga Zepp-LaRouche today stressed that Bevin’s remarks are a very useful contribution to that debate, which must also include the necessary economic policies which Lyndon LaRouche has uniquely specified. She contrasted the cultural decay and paralysis regarding necessary economic policies that permeates the United States and Europe, with China’s optimistic drive for development—as reflected in their announcement yesterday of over $1.5 trillion in investment in “a slew of big projects” including infrastructure and new, high-tech industrial sectors.
If we are to in fact make 2018 the year in which geopolitics is finally buried, as Zepp-LaRouche has urged, this must also be the year in which the British Empire’s bankrupt financial system is interred, along with its bestial concept of man. As Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche stressed at the end of her Feb. 22 webcast:
“We just have to go back to the highest level of culture in each nation. Now, in the United States, this would obviously mean Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Fathers, John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy—these periods, when the United States had a positive vision about its role. I mean, John Quincy Adams, for example, had a foreign policy approach which is pretty much like what China is doing today. Benjamin Franklin was an absolute, enthusiastic student of Confucius, and he used the Confucian philosophy to develop his own system of morality! These are the kinds of discussions which would really help….
“In Germany, we are very blessed to have a very rich culture: We had many, many thinkers, from Nicolaus of Cusa, Kepler, to Leibniz. We had many composers of Classical music, from Bach to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, many others. We had fantastic poets, like Schiller, Lessing, Heine, Mörike, and again, many others. Italy, we had the Golden Renaissance; in Spain, we had the Andalusian Renaissance. We had the Baghdad Caliphate—Baghdad used to be, in a certain period, during the Abbasid Dynasty, the most developed city in the world! Then you had the various centuries where China was the leading nation in terms of science and culture. So what we have to do, is we have to activate the best potential of each nation. Because this is about to be lost….
“We have to shed a lot of the present, populist culture. We have to get rid of this idea of ‘money makes money,’ we have to get rid of wasting our time with speculation, of playing video games, or—people are really losing their creative potential! But you can regain it by studying Classical music, Classical poetry, reading the philosophers, Plato, Cusa, Leibniz, in the original…. I think it would be very easy to create a new Renaissance of thinking. And I think the new world economic order, the New Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative, in the final instance, will only succeed if it goes along with a Renaissance of Classical culture….
“That is an urgent question if we don’t want to have more horror shows like the school shootings, which I think—naturally, the weapons discussion is important—but more important is really the question of how do we give people the inner strength, the sense of inner beauty so that they don’t go in this direction? You have many troubled people who could absolutely be saved if there would be a serious effort of an aesthetical education, an education of the moral beauty of their character, which is why you need the classics and not some modern versions of poetry and drama. Because only if you have the highest ideal of man, man as a beautiful soul, as a beautiful character, then the education system can inoculate people against such horror shows. And I would really wish that people would join with us in this effort.”
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Kentucky Governor Urges National Dialogue on Changing ‘Culture of Death’ in U.S.
Feb. 25 (EIRNS)—Following the Jan. 24 school shooting in western Kentucky which left two dead and 19 wounded, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin videotaped a dramatic statement, calling for an urgent national dialogue about how to change American popular culture, with its glorification of violence, killing and death in all forms of “entertainment.” Since the Feb. 14 Florida massacre, he has been widely interviewed in the media, along similar lines.
More Americans had guns in earlier times than today, but young people did not go out to kill other young people en masse, he argued. “If people believe they don’t have responsibility to anyone other than themselves,” and that “there is no absolute right or wrong,” then we have a cultural problem. Individuals “don’t assume that their actions matter in any kind of consequential way beyond that immediate moment.”
Why are we shocked at these killings when we surround ourselves and our children with violence, he asked.
“Look at our popular culture. Look at our movies. The violence, the disregard for the value of human life…. We have a culture of death in America. We can pretend we don’t; we can think that people can separate fact from fiction from their lives from that which they see, but if they are immersed in it at every turn, in television, in movies, in music—all of it. Listen to the lyrics of music today; it celebrates a culture of death….”
Young people need to know that, “what you put in … becomes a part of your entire physiology, your entire mental makeup, it becomes a part of who you are. You are a creation of what you surround yourself by,” he said.
“Watch the television shows. We glorify murder, we glorify killing. It is becoming increasingly explicit, and we are desensitizing young people to the actual tragic reality and permanency of death…. Look at the video games that are played…. When you get extra points and are encouraged to brutally kill people, and when the blood and the mayhem and the carnage is increasingly real, it desensitizes people.
“And it’s a shock to us now? That suddenly we are seeing a prevalence of, an increasing amount of this happening, not in a video game, not on a television show, not in a movie, not in lyrics of a song, but in real life as young people act out that which they are surrounded by, that which they are immersed in?”
Bevin said he did not know what form it should take, but “something has to be done.” He called for other governors, the President of the United States, the U.S. Congress, everyone in a position of influence, from school superintendents to the CEOs of the companies that produce violent video games, movies, and recordings, to engage in a national dialogue on what has to be done.
“We’ve got to step up. We are the adults. Let’s act like it. … Let’s figure out how to try to repair the fabric of America that’s getting shredded beyond recognition.”
‘Schiff Memo’ Shows Democratic Coup-Backers Desperate over Being Caught Red Handed
Feb. 25 (EIRNS)—Those who have read LaRouche PAC’s dossier “Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin; He Will Do His Job if You Let Him,” and its Feb. 20 update, “The Mueller Dossier Revisited: How the British and Obama Diddled the United States,” will find almost amusing the sophistical contortions contained in the heavily-redacted, 10-page so-called “Schiff Memo” released on Feb. 24 by the House Intelligence Committee Democratic Minority.
The memo purports to “correct the record” vis-à-vis the January memo on FISA court abuse issued by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes. It insists that “FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.”
Nunes was on the mark when he characterized the Democratic memo last Saturday as “clear evidence that the Democrats are not only covering this [FISA court abuse] up, but they’re also colluding with parts of the government to cover this up.”
For example: The Schiff memo piously asserts that the DOJ was upfront with the FISA Court on “the assessed political motivation of those who hired” Steele, and cites as proof the wildly convoluted paragraph included in the DOJ’s FISA applications, which, the Schiff memo writes, contained “generic identifiers that provided the Court with more than sufficient information to understand the political context of Steele’s research.” Only one problem: Neither the cited paragraph—nor the Democratic memo—ever mentions that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign had hired Steele.
One of the funnier examples of wild-eyed desperation, is the acknowledgment that Steele met with journalist Michael Isikoff in September 2016 and that the FBI/DOJ did submit Isikoff’s subsequent Yahoo! article to the FISA court as “independent” corroboration of the Steele dossier’s claims, but, the Democratic minority writes, there is no “evidence” that Steele briefed Isikoff on his dossier as the Republican majority wrote, “since the British Court filings to which they refer do not address what Steele may have said to Yahoo!”!
Similarly, the memo claims that because the notorious FBI paramours, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, did not sign the FISA application, Strzok being merely one of those involved in the “closely-held investigation” of Trump-Russian collusion, their political bias is irrelevant.
And so on. Nunes has released a useful point-by-point response to each assertion in the Democratic memo, and a one-page summary of its key points. At the Feb. 21-24 Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, he was clear that the fight will escalate: “The point of our memo was for one purpose only, and that was to show that FISA abuse had occurred. To have a secret court that gets abused like this is totally unacceptable…. We have to make sure that people are held accountable so that everyone knows that it’s never going to be okay to take dirt from a foreign actor that was essentially made up out of whole cloth, and then use it against the other candidate, no matter whose candidate that is.”
As China-Bashing Proliferates, Trump Praises His Relationship with Xi Jinping
Feb. 23 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump made strong remarks in praise of the U.S.-China relationship, at his joint press conference Feb. 23 in Washington with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Trump said, “We’ve got a great relationship with China, but they’re killing us on trade.” He continued, “My relationship with Xi is extraordinary. I like him, and I think he likes me.”
Trump expounded on this further, in response to a reporter who raised a point about Defense Secretary Mattis calling China a revisionist power (which is also stated in the recent National Security Strategy). Trump said, “China’s tough. And they’re getting stronger. But previous administrations have let that happen. But our relationship with China has never been better. I think we can have a good relationship with China and I hope that my relationship to President Xi will allow that to happen.”
Even Turnbull replied to the question. “I have seen the positive relationship President Trump has to President Xi,” Turnbull said. “And we have to see China’s rise as important for the region and the world. There are people that want to try to paint the United States and its allies like Australia as being against China in some sort of rerun of the Cold War. But … that is not accurate.” He said, “Our concern should only be about maintaining the rule of law. The rule of law is there to protect everybody. And everybody has a vested interest in it, the big countries as well as the small.”
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Leaders of North and South Korea Meet at Close of Olympics
Feb. 25 (EIRNS)—As the Olympics were wrapping up today, South Korean President Moon Jae-in met with the North Korean delegation to the closing ceremonies. Some observers were surprised, as the North Korean delegation was headed by Kim Yong-chol, a highly decorated military general who is considered the mastermind behind the 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship, Cheonan, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.
President Moon, however, has made it clear that he seeks a peaceful solution to the crisis. The South’s Unification Ministry issued a statement saying that it would continue to pursue further talks with the North going forward, that there needed to be progress on the nuclear issue for there to be better inter-Korean ties, and that the South is ready to work as a mediator to expedite talks between the U.S. and North Korea. “Without hurrying, Seoul will make efforts to improve inter-Korean to improve inter-Korean ties step by step.”
North Korea’s KCNA news agency, for its part, reported that “the two Koreas have cooperated together and the Olympics was held successfully. But the U.S. brought the threat of war to the Korean peninsula with large-scale new sanctions on the D.P.R.K. ahead of the Olympics closing ceremony.
China Sharply Protests U.S. ‘Largest Ever’ Sanctions Against North Korea
Feb. 25 (EIRNS)—Immediately following U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s Feb. 23 announcement of the “largest ever” package of sanctions against the D.P.R.K., targeting 56 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses, some of them Chinese, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a sharp protest, taking particular note of the “extraterritorial jurisdiction” being employed by the U.S.:
“The Chinese side firmly opposes the U.S. imposing unilateral sanctions and ‘long-arm jurisdiction’ on Chinese entities or individuals in accordance with its domestic laws. We have lodged stern representations with the U.S. side over this, urging it to immediately stop such wrongdoings so as not to undermine bilateral cooperation on the relevant area.”
A Xinhua article further reported that “Washington’s latest move, however, came as Pyongyang and Seoul have embarked on an apparent rapprochement with the PyeongChang Winter Olympics used as an opportunity over the past month.” And a commentary by Xinhua writer Zhu Dongyang charged that the sanctions “would serve as an indisputably undesirable gesture and risk undercutting the current international effort to lower the temperature on the Korean Peninsula…. [This] sends a disturbingly ominous message to the world that the chance for peace through Olympics is brittle.” The commentary also stated that “aggressive rhetoric and military drills proved to have fortified the D.P.R.K.’s sense of insecurity, rather than mollify it,” and that “the fragile balance of power and chance of peace to the Peninsula cannot afford bellicosity and the vicious circle it creates anymore.”
UN Security Council Approves Resolution for 30-Day Syria Ceasefire
Feb. 24 (EIRNS)—The UN Security Council unanimously approved a draft resolution Feb. 24, calling for a 30-day ceasefire in Syria to allow for the delivery of humanitarian supplies to, and medical evacuations out of, besieged areas, including the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. This follows discussion, beginning Feb. 22, to include features to try to make the ceasefire workable.
After the vote today, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, in a statement to the Council, predictably and repeatedly blamed the Russian Federation for delaying the vote on the resolution, for what she characterized as minor amendments.
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia stressed that the resolution specifically excludes ISIS, Al Nusra and any other terrorist group designated as such, or which is associated with Al Qaeda. “It took us so much time to reach agreement due to fact that we did not support directions for immediate cessation of hostilities because, as it stood, it was not feasible to achieve this,” he said. He called on those external powers with influence on armed groups inside Syria to help implement the ceasefire. “Some external sponsors of armed factions fall short of, and at times skirt, their obligations,” he said.
In direct response to Haley, Nebenzia called on the U.S. to end its occupation of parts of Syria, including in Al-Tanf, near the Iraqi-Jordanian borders in southeastern Syria and to stop the “reckless” rhetoric threatening aggression against the Syrian government.
Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari issued a statement saying that Syria will continue to exercise its sovereign right to defend itself against the terrorist groups, and then denounced the U.K., U.S., and France for their colonialist plans vis-à-vis Syria, the official news agency SANA reported. “These governments should also recognize that the strategic schemes to divide Syria and to change the governing system in it by force and to guarantee the continuity of terrorism and the illegal military presence on our territories, will not succeed,” Jaafari said.
‘We Are Working on Russia Sanctions,’ Mnuchin Offers at Press Conference
Feb. 24 (EIRNS)—Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, at the conclusion of a Feb. 23 press conference announcing new sanctions on North Korea, made a special point of saying that the Administration is working on new sanctions against Russia. “We are working on Russia sanctions,” he volunteered without having been asked. “I can assure you that is in the process. I will be back here within the next several weeks to talk about that.”
Mnuchin also said that the Treasury Department had sent both classified and unclassified reports under section 241—on Russian oligarchs—of the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act” (CATSA) passed nearly unanimously by the U.S. Congress last Summer, and reluctantly signed by President Trump. Mnuchin continued, “And as I’ve repeatedly said, we are working on sanctions as a follow-up to that.”
In response to a follow-up question, Mnuchin said that the Department is continuing to look at (alleged) Russian meddling in U.S. elections, and “we are closely working with the FBI on them, giving information…. And as appropriate, we will look at sanctioning individuals from the information they have.”
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Invest over $1.5 Trillion in Infrastructure? No Problem—At Least Not in China
Feb. 25 (EIRNS)—“A slew of big projects, with total investment of more than 10 trillion yuan ($1.58 trillion), are about to kick off in a number of Chinese provinces and regions in the new year,” China Daily reported Feb. 24. Most of the projects, the publication said, “will be in strategic and emerging industries, such as high-end equipment manufacturing and information technology, as well as infrastructure construction related to transportation and energy including the building of high-speed railways and airports.”
For example, Shandong province in eastern China—about halfway between Beijing and Shanghai—will be launching some 900 projects with a total investment of about $400 billion. Liu Jiayi, Communist Party chief of Shandong province, stated: “Upgrading industrial structure is a hard fight that we must win. We will speed up fostering emerging industries and upgrading traditional sectors, while axing outdated capacity, to improve our economic growth quality and competitiveness.”
China Daily explained that local governments are “shifting their development strategies in accordance with the call by the country’s top leadership for high-quality development,” although the projects “will also offer strong support for traditional industries, such as construction machinery, coal and steel.”
By way of contrast, the recently surfaced so-called White House infrastructure plan calls for $200 billion in federal government spending on infrastructure, which would then somehow leverage $1.3 trillion in additional state and private sector spending—although no one has yet explained how that is supposed to happen under conditions of a bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system, that is asphyxiating under nearly $2 quadrillion in speculative financial aggregates.
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
National Governors’ Association Leaders in PPP Love-Fest with Australians
Feb. 24 (EIRNS)—Leaders of the U.S. National Governors’ Association (NGA) conference in Washington, D.C., staged a love-fest with the Australian privatization model of economic infrastructure Saturday, two days before their meeting with Congressional leadership on the issue. Despite Australian media reports prior to the conference, the mobilization of an “Indo-Pacific” counter to China’s Belt and Road was not featured—indeed, scarcely alluded to—but the model of letting private corporations have the infrastructure portfolio was very much front and center.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was accompanied by a huge Australian delegation including all of its state chief ministers (governors), keynoted the NGA Conference with a largely boilerplate speech on the importance of the U.S.-Australian alliance since World War I. He focussed the corporate agenda: large tax cuts being enacted in both nations now; free trade (a “TPP 11” trade pact will be signed in Chile in July, he said); and “leveraging President Trump’s commitment to infrastructure.” Turnbull said, “We want to see U.S. and Australian companies working together on this in Southeast Asia.” He repeated, “We want to partner with U.S. companies in third countries to bring transparency, sustainability, and market need assessment to infrastructure … working with countries including Japan, the United States, China and others.”
Turnbull’s government infrastructure minister is from Macquarie Corp., the world’s leading infrastructure privatizer, EIR was told. The Prime Minister did not answer a question from EIR about the infamous Route 95 and Route 66 toll looting around Washington, D.C., run by an Australian consortium. NGA Chair Gov. Brian Sandoval (NV), to the same question in front of many media, claimed the governors were not talking about tolling roads the way Australian companies have done it in the United States, and that “they do privatization differently in Australia,” apparently referring to “recycling of infrastructure.” Sandoval said the governors were meeting Congressional leaders Monday on the subject of infrastructure; separately, he responded to both a national infrastructure bank and a significant gas tax increase as “good ideas.”
But it was Sandoval, a Republican, and co-moderator Gov. Steven Bullock (MT) who drew Turnbull out after his speech with questions about “the Australian approach to infrastructure.” Turnbull then spoke at length about lowering and “stretching out” Federal grants; doing more “value capture,” as in tolling all highways and “viewing building urban rail as a real estate venture”; selling public infrastructure like ports to pension funds in order to reinvest (infrastructure recycling).
Then followed a long roundtable with the six Australian territorial premiers/chief ministers. Victoria’s premier extolled PPPs (it alone has 31 of them underway) and claimed President Trump wants to encourage them. The New South Wales premier promoted recycling publicly built infrastructure “which has no business being on our government books” to private companies. So did the chief ministers of the Northern Territory and West Australia.
Overall it was a demonstrative move by the NGA—but in the wrong direction for building new infrastructure platforms for the U.S. economy.
OTHER
Putin on ‘Fatherland Defenders’ Day’: World Needs ‘Indivisible Security for All’
Feb. 25 (EIRNS)—Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a gala meeting dedicated to “Fatherland Defenders’ Day” in Moscow on Feb. 23, and strongly invoked Russia’s patriotism and defense of the fatherland under the most adverse circumstances. Speaking in the presence of the country’s top military leaders and a number of invited foreign defense ministers, Putin stated:
“Russia has many times countered foreign threats, infringements on its independence,” and he cited as an example the Battle of Stalingrad. He continued: “Developments of the past several years have shown we’ve gotten to the top position in the world if you take our combat efficiency and the quality of defense technologies. We can say with assuredness today that Russia has guaranteed its own security.” Putin particularly thanked those Russians “who have been taking part in the combat operation on Syrian territory.”
Addressing the same gathering, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov, until recently a Deputy Defense Minister, restated President Putin’s international security policy: “Our common goal should be developing an equal and indivisible security for all. A system that can adequately respond to modern crises and build on non-bloc basis. That’s the only way we can secure peace and tranquility of our citizens… We simply have to join forces in combating such evils as terrorism, which truly challenge our civilization.”
