EDITORIAL

‘Climate Accord’ Exposed as Macron Raises Truncheon To Enforce It: New Paradigm of Human Progress Confronts It

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—A growing resistance, being provoked by attempts to impose the Paris Climate Accord’s grim regime of taxes, fees and shutdowns, is opening the door wider for a new paradigm of progress directly opposed to that regime.

This will depend on  bold cooperative action by those nations most capable of it—especially the United States, China, Russia and India—to use the frontiers of technology, including nuclear power and thermonuclear fusion technologies, to give humanity new powers for progress. The World Land-Bridge development reports of the Schiller Institute have been prepared for 30 years to guide that New Bretton Woods international development bank, which the leaders of these nations can be organized to create.

Exactly as the “COP24” Climate Conference in Poland is being lavishly praised in much of the world’s media, its attempted global “eco-dictatorship” is being exposed as a mix of insanity and austerity. IMF, United Nations, NGO officials in Katowice are demanding a global monopoly of wind and solar by 2035, the conversion of mining and power production areas into nature parks, the complete elimination of motor vehicles that burn fuels. Having proliferated pollution by trying to shut down all nuclear power, they now claim to attack the pollution by stamping out industry and human households themselves, calling for a worldwide “two-child limit” for families and other anti-population acts. Demonstrations of climate revelers embrace this human retrogression like Medieval Flagellants.

That’s the insanity. The governments trying to enforce it, epitomized by Emanuel Macron’s in France, lay on the austerity in the form of rafts of “climate taxes” and industry shutdowns.

Thus the resistance to this eco-dictatorship erupting in France, spreading to Belgium, appearing in different form in Germany and Italy, and having brought Macron to the verge of martial law.

What is really happening here, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today, is the economic and cultural breakdown of an order. It began nearly 50 years ago when Richard Nixon was forced into severing the dollar from gold and all others from the dollar, triggering the new global monetary order of the “floating exchange-rate” system. That meant London had succeeded in destroying Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods system. Lyndon LaRouche quickly forecast then, in August 1971, that the floating-exchange rate system would bring on a new order of international wage cutting, deindustrialization, even imposed by fascism again.

That order is now breaking down, in an attempt at eco-dictatorship but also in the threatened second trans-Atlantic financial collapse within a decade.

It is time for at least those four powers—which are space-faring nations, leaders in nuclear fission and fusion development, with great industrial and infrastructure capacities—to start a New Bretton Woods credit system. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, made falsely controversial, is actually the leading step to the World Land-Bridge great projects that system will build.

And President Trump, in his messages today, has shown himself optimistically looking for such collaboration in the aftermath of the Buenos Aires G20 conference.

Citizens are called on to take a hand in this, and elevate “resistance” to G20 taking responsibility for humanity.

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Trump Optimistic, Points to Future Agreement with Xi and Putin

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump has used his Twitter account this morning to make several forward-looking statements about his potential cooperation with Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, following the U.S.-China “trade truce” agreed to at Buenos Aires. While some of his direct statements about the “trade truce” are being obfuscated by press attempts to find disagreements between him and his secretaries and aides, the President’s statements about cooperating with other great-power Presidents are optimistic.

Trump’s first tweet was, “My meeting in Argentina with President Xi of China was an extraordinary one. Relations with China have taken a BIG leap forward! Very good things will happen. We are dealing from great strength, but China likewise has much to gain if and when a deal is completed. Level the field!”

An hour later the President brought in the North Korea summits or “Singapore process”: “President Xi and I have a very strong and personal relationship. He and I are the only two people that can bring about massive and very positive change, on trade and far beyond, between our two great Nations. A solution for North Korea is a great thing for China and ALL!”

Interestingly Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in a CNBC-TV interview, said the President would be leading the next 90 days’ trade talks with China personally; whereas trade advisor and China-basher Peter Navarro, on NPR, claimed that Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer would lead them.

Trump’s third tweet, at 8:30 a.m., was most optimistic: “I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race. The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!” This flies in the face of Robert Mueller’s McCarthyite attempt to criminalize any American contact with Russia, and outright demands for war with Russia from British intelligence and like-thinking Atlantic Council, etc., figures.

Significant Steps on U.S.-Inter-Korea Cooperation

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—South Korean President Moon Jae-in spoke to the press after the G20, where he had held a half-hour meeting with President Donald Trump. President Moon spelled out significant agreements going forward. “President Trump said that if Chairman Kim [Jong-un] visits Seoul within the year,” Moon said, “he wants me to convey the message that he holds a very positive view of Chairman Kim, that he likes Chairman Kim and hopes he will follow through on their remaining agreements. He also promised to achieve what Chairman Kim wishes.”

On relations with the North, Moon said: “If you look at the trends so far, things are moving in a very positive direction. [Kim] has pledged to accept U.S. observers for the dismantlement of their nuclear and missile test sites, and he has promised to dismantle all nuclear facilities at Yongbyon if there are corresponding measures.”

Moon said that he and Trump agreed that the sanctions should not be lifted at this point (although the recent agreement to allow a train-crossing of the demilitarized zone to test the tracks in the North constituted an “exception” to the sanctions, which could be a precedent for future similar “exceptions”). Moon said that corresponding measures from the U.S. and South Korea to North Korean steps could be “postponing or downscaling South Korea-U.S. military exercises, humanitarian aid, nonpolitical forms of exchange in areas like sports and art, preliminary research efforts for inter-Korean economic cooperation, and an end-of-war declaration as a political declaration.”

The South Korean daily Hankyoreh reported that Moon was angry about press reports claiming discord between the U.S. and South Korea. “U.S. President Donald Trump also holds a very positive view of the current situation,” he confirmed. “There is absolutely no discord between South Korea and the U.S. in terms of the process of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and advancing inter-Korean relations.”

On the rail connections, Moon said: “Actually beginning work and connecting [the railways] could be in violation of international sanctions. We’re considering having a launch ceremony in the sense of beginning work as opposed to actual construction. We also plan to hold ample discussions with the U.S. on that.”

Trump himself also said on Dec. 2 that the next U.S.-North Korea summit will be in January or February, and that “three sites are under consideration.”

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Why the Fed Is Giving Up Rate Increases in 2019

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—When Federal Reserve System Chair Jerome Powell on Nov. 28 abruptly abandoned the course of discount-rate increases past this month, it was said he had been “jawboned” by President Donald Trump. The Federal Reserve’s quarterly Financial Stability Report, issued the same day, was less noticed. But it contained a “warning of near-term risks to the U.S. financial system” from deteriorating masses of debt in European markets, in particular, but which could affect the U.S. corporate debt market in the short term. Powell probably feared a crash more than the President.

The U.S. non-financial corporations’ deteriorating bubble of debt remains the place to watch. A report published by BNP Paribas and referenced in Seeking Alpha and in Zero Hedge Dec. 3, gave this picture. Total such bonded debt (not including corporate loans): $10 trillion. Total investment-grade bonded debt: $6.5 trillion. Amount of that which is BBB-rated (one grade above junk): $3.3 trillion, up (or in this case, slid down) from $3.1 trillion at the end of the third quarter, just two months ago. Amount of that which is BBB−, falling towards junk: $735 billion. The other $7 trillion in non-financial corporate debt is loans, and the quality of that mass of debt is worse than the bonds.

In addition, the amount of that corporate debt needing to be refinanced is $540 billion in 2019, $705 billion in 2020, $760 billion in 2021, or about $2 trillion in three years. By comparison, in June 2007, as the first crash signs appeared, there was less than $500 billion in corporate debt that had to be refinanced within three years.

GE and GM give names—big names—to this shaking bubble. Michael Snyder in the Economic Collapse Blog on Nov. 26 described how both the former industrial giants have ridden the corporate debt bubble to disaster. GM, after being bailed out in 2009, spent $14 billion in 2014-17 buying back its own stock, borrowing $10 billion to do so. Its stock value fell 15% during that time. Now GM’s “restructuring” and elimination of 15,000 jobs and seven plants is going to cost the firm $3.8 billion in charge-offs. It will, again, borrow this money, further increasing its debt while its physical capital shrinks.

As for GE, it borrowed to buy back $40 billion of shares at prices between $20 and $32 in 2016-2018. The share price is now $8.60, so the company has lost $23-29 billion of its shareholders’ money on this futile borrowing. Those losses were three times its net income over that period. Snyder quoted MarketWatch: “GE has now left itself with −$48 billion in tangible net worth at Sept. 30, with actual genuine tangible debt of close to $100 billion.” It is getting into a “Lehman” over-leveraged condition. These two industrial champions have become so-called “fallen angels,” one step above the “zombie companies” which have lost all ability to pay their debts.

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

British Empire, Geopolitical Assets Deploy for War against Russia in Ukraine

Dec 3 (EIRNS)—Stephen Blank, a Senior Fellow at both the American Foreign Policy Council and the Foreign Policy Research Institute, with “over 900 articles” to his credit, found himself so inspired by the courage shown by the Ukrainians, standing up to the Russian Bear in the Sea of Azov, that he wrote yet another piece on Nov. 26, offering his years of insight on the crisis. The Atlantic Council found Blank’s insights worthy enough to post on their website, as did the Kyiv Post.

Posted under the title, “Russia’s Provocations in the Sea of Azov: What Should Be Done?” Blank is first of all certain that Putin was the aggressor, and that Russia’s actions “By any standard, these are acts of war.” This “Blank” shooter then cynically compares them to actions of the British in the United States in 1812(!), actions over which the U.S. “went to war.” Not only are these actions by Russia “part of its intention to close the Black Sea to foreign shipping in defiance of international convention,” he says, they also, “closely resemble China’s in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.”

Then, sounding every bit as incendiary as the British Integrity Initiative’s Edward Lucas’s posting last week, Blank tells us what must be done: “Ukraine should give careful consideration to a special operation that might disrupt the bridge that Moscow built over the Kerch Strait that joins Crimea to Russia,” he writes. “But that’s not all. Ukraine should invite the United States and NATO to send a fleet of armed ships to visit Mariupol, the main city on the Sea of Azov coast and defy Russia to fire on or block NATO from exercising the right to visit Ukraine’s ports. Those ships should be armed and have air cover but be instructed not to fire unless fired upon.”

In this light, then, comes a report from Sputnik—sourced to the Russian Embassy in London, and ultimately to a BBC-Russia broadcast—that the United Kingdom has deployed 1,200 servicemen of the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a top-secret unit specializing in electronic and psychological warfare, to Ukraine. In a statement issued Dec. 2, the Russian Embassy stated, “Earlier, we had information about the [United Kingdom] dispatching its military experts to train the Ukrainian military to conduct special operations against civilians of Donetsk and Luhansk. Now it turns out that the U.K. presence has expanded through, as BBC reports, conducting psychological and information operations in this country. As we see, it all happens in the run-up to the presidential election in Ukraine” in March. The embassy further said that if the alleged information is correct, then the new troops represent a new element of a large-scale U.K. military presence in Ukraine.”

U.S. on Drive To Get NATO To Say Russia Is Violating INF Treaty

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—The Trump Administration has been on a drive to pressure its NATO allies to accept the U.S. claim that Russia is in brazen violation of the Intermedia-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This includes the sharing of raw intelligence data with NATO members, said to have already convinced the relevant persons in Germany, and a briefing to reporters by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats on Nov. 30, all in the run-up to a NATO foreign ministers meet in Brussels on Dec. 4.

During his Nov. 30 briefing, Coats provided what he said was evidence that shows that Russia tested and put into service the 9M729 cruise missile, which violates the treaty. “The Intelligence Community assesses Russia has flight-tested, produced, and deployed cruise missiles with a range capability prohibited by the Treaty,” Coats said. “Russia has shown no sign that it is willing to acknowledge its violation, let alone return to full and verifiable compliance.”

According to Coats, Russia’s Novator design bureau began work on the 9M729 in the mid-2000s and began flight testing it in the late 2000s. The flight tests used both a fixed launcher at ranges greater than 500 km—which would not be a violation of the treaty if testing a weapon intended for air or sea deployment—and then tested it at ranges of less than 500 km from a mobile launcher.

“By putting the two types of tests together, Russia was able to develop a missile that flies to the intermediate ranges prohibited by the INF Treaty and launches from a ground-mobile platform,” Coats said.

Russian nuclear weapons and arms control expert Pavel Podvig, writing on his “Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces” blog on Dec. 1, looked at what Coats presented and said, in effect, what’s the big deal? What Coats presented about the missile tests, Podvig writes, is not exactly news.

“[T]his was the theory that first appeared back in 2014 and then was very much confirmed by the people who knew details of the case. Not in so many words, of course, but there was enough information out there to put it all together.” If this is the case, why was it kept secret for so long? “There is absolutely nothing in the DNI statement that could not be released back in 2014. And it would have probably helped find a way to deal with the problem.” Attempts to find out were dismissed, Podvig writes, which “helped bring us to the point when we are discussing the impending collapse of the INF Treaty.”

Podvig also says that, while the United States considers the mobile launcher tests an attempt to obfuscate the real intention of the program, “Russia probably considers them legitimate measures that ensure that the program is in compliance with the letter of the treaty.” In Podvig’s view, the evidence being used to convince the Europeans may not be all that solid.

His conclusion: “The situation is not totally hopeless, but it would require a fairly high level of trust, strong commitment to preserve the treaty, and probably Russia’s willingness to take some corrective actions. Alas, all these are in short supply these days.”

Saner Voices Urge Calm After Ukraine Provocation in Kerch Strait

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—Writing from Moscow, John Helmer, “the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia,” tears apart the unfortunately “over-doctored” Stephen Blank’s geopolitical fantasy of World War III (see above, “British Empire, Geopolitical Assets Deploy for War against Russia in Ukraine”), most appropriately adding, “Blank has never served in the U.S. armed forces, nor held command posts at the Pentagon. Instead, he has made a career of fighting Russia from an armchair at the U.S. Army’s War College, the Air Force University, and a consultancy at the CIA. Blank proposes doing what the U.S. military, and some White House officials, contemplate doing if only they had the firepower to get away with it unscathed. But they don’t.”

Thomas Graham, Jr., managing director of Kissinger Associates, while observing the difficulties, nonetheless calls for calm in his Nov. 29 piece, “Neither Russia nor Ukraine Will Easily Give Up the Sea of Azov.” Stating that there will be no resolution of the Donbas conflict without progress on Crimea, Graham, writing in The National Interest, writes: “To be sure, there is no easy solution to the Crimea dispute, but creative diplomacy has resolved no less vexing issues in the past, such as the status of Taiwan or Russia’s right of access to Kaliningrad through Lithuanian territory.

Writing the lead on his website Dec. 1, Pat Buchanan appropriately asks, “Is Putin the Provocateur in the Kerch Crisis?” After thoroughly undercutting the “mainstream” version of events, Buchanan writes, “The incident in the Black Sea was a provocation organized by the [Kiev] authorities and maybe the President himself … [Poroshenko’s] rating is falling … so he needed to do something.” Furthermore, he states, “For his part, Putin has sought to play the matter down, calling it a ‘border incident, nothing more.’ ”

While acknowledging the neo-con tendency to inflame every controversy, Buchanan—ever the isolationist—continues that “there is a larger issue here. Why is control of the Kerch Strait any of our business? Why is this our quarrel, to the point that U.S. strategists want us to confront Russia over a Crimean Peninsula that houses the Livadia Palace that was the last summer residence of Czar Nicholas II?

“If Ukraine had a right to break free of Russia in 1991, why do not Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk have the right to break free of Kiev?

“Why are we letting ourselves be dragged into everyone’s quarrels—from who owns the islets in the South China Sea, to who owns the Senkaku and Southern Kurils; and from whether Transnistria had a right to secede from Moldova, to whether South Ossetia and Abkhazia had the right to break free of Georgia, when Georgia broke free of Russia?

“Do the American people care a fig for these places? Are we really willing to risk war with Russia or China over who holds title to them?”

SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Nir Shaviv Tells IPCC, It’s the Sun, Stupid!

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—At a hearing before Germany’s Bundestag environmental affairs committee on Nov. 28, Prof. Nir Shaviv, at the Racah Institute of Physics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, testified that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is grossly misled in blaming human activity for the rise of global temperatures as well as of CO2. The reason, he said, because the IPCC disregards the role of the Sun, which, as real climate science knows, has been the main cause of warming and cooling periods in the past millennia and is also responsible for most of the warming in the 20th century.

This is documented in surveys published in 2008. Even if mankind were not to undertake any measures to protect the climate from alleged anthropogenic change, the rise of temperatures during the 21st century would not be dramatic, no climate catastrophe would occur, and there is no reason to panic. Similarly, there is also the correlation between increased solar activity and sea levels, another key aspect disregarded by the IPCC, although the latter’s own data material documents it.

Real science is not democratic, Shaviv said, and what the majority believe are not necessarily true; the hard facts of climate science speak against the IPCC.

OTHER

Global Warmers Meet in Poland

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)—There is plenty of room at the two-week COP24 conference in Katowice, Poland over Dec. 2-14, the big follow-up event to the Paris COP21 in 2015; global warmers from all parts of the world will convene to map out new, costly, and nonsensical projects to “protect the climate.”

The World Bank has already announced that it is arranging a special new credit line to developing countries in the range of $200 billion by 2025. Only half of that is a direct commitment by the bank; about $30 billion will be given by other international institutions, the rest by “climate-conscious” private sector companies. Hysterical experts predict 133 million “climate refugees” globally by 2030.

The climate hysteria has also deeply infected German Development Minister Gerd Müller, who said on his departure to Katowice that the world climate had to be protected in the developing sector, and particularly so in Africa, with huge investments into renewable energies. If every African household were connected to a fossil-based electricity supply, no less than 1,000 new coal power plants would have to be built, he said. Typical of a contemporary leading German politician, Müller omitted the option of nuclear power, and did not even mention thermonuclear fusion power.

The $200 billion now earmarked by the World Bank for wasteful projects in “renewables,” would more than suffice to build the number of nuclear power plants needed to supply all Africans with safe, calculable and affordable electricity. The question is really how much longer can humanity can afford the global warmers?