FRIDAY, JUNE 28, 2019 Volume 6, Number 127 EIR Daily Alert Service P.O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390

• One Day Before the Group of 20 Meetings
• Americans Support Tulsi Gabbard’s Warnings Against War in Democrats’ Debate
• U.S. Congress Nervous Over Danger of Iran War
• U.A.E., Saudis, Norway Find No Evidence Against Iran in Tanker Attacks, nor Does United Nations
• President Moon Jae-in Will Meet With Xi and Putin in Osaka, and With Trump in Seoul
• Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Votes To Allow Russia to Resume Participation
• Strengthening of Ties Between China and Japan Is Under Discussion
• Uganda’s President Museveni Explains Why Africa Is Turning to China, During Beijing Visit
• China’s Foreign Ministry Rips into Pompeo’s Anti-Belt and Road ‘Spell’
• With Power Grid in Crisis, Argentina’s Macri and China Sign MOU for Fourth Nuclear Reactor
• U.A.E.’s Etihad National Railway Plan Advances
• Banksters Create $100 Trillion in ‘Climate Bonds’ Green Nightmare-They Get the Green

EDITORIAL

One Day Before the Group of 20 Meetings

June 27 (EIRNS)—Among the important meetings scheduled on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting on June 28-29 in Osaka, Japan, is that between Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping.  Among other subjects, they will discuss increased Japanese participation in China’s epoch-making Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure-building program across Eurasia and Africa—and President Xi’s forthcoming visit to Japan, as the first Chinese President to visit since 2008.  President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping will meet June 29 on restarting trade talks and denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.

There will be a trilateral meeting among Presidents Xi and Putin and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  As Helga Zepp-LaRouche has pointed out, the missing party there is President Trump.  The great late statesman Lyndon LaRouche had pointed to China, Russia, India and the United States as the four great powers capable of putting an end to the present, London-dominated imperial world monetary system, and replacing it by a world credit-system of freely associated sovereign nation-states, along the lines which Franklin Roosevelt had intended for the Bretton Woods system before his untimely death.

On Friday at 2:00 p.m. local time (0500 UTC) is scheduled a one-hour meeting between Presidents Putin and Trump. The Russian government has indicated that the two men will determine their own agenda. This appears likely to be a closed, one-on-one meeting like the one they had at Helsinki on July 16, 2018. (Note that NGOs are suing the Trump Administration to force them to make available the translators’ notes of that Helsinki meeting.)

In speaking of the Trump-Putin meeting, one must add a big “if.” There are forces which are so afraid of that meeting that they are willing to accelerate a slide towards World War III to prevent it. Remember how Robert Mueller issued bogus indictments against Russian intelligence officers in order to disrupt Helsinki.  How Ukraine provoked a naval incident in the Kerch Strait last November to force the cancellation of the Trump-Putin meeting scheduled for the last G20 meeting on Nov. 30-Dec. 1. Indeed, remember how President Trump was pursuing indirect negotiations with Iran through Japanese Prime Minister Abe, at precisely the moment of the suspicious attacks on two tankers on June 13, for which Pompeo immediately blamed Iran with no evidence.

Who are the provocateurs?  It is a “third force” which hates both Russia and the United States.  One clear indication is the background of the massive economic sanctions with which the U.S. Congress has hit Russia, especially since Trump was elected—the single biggest factor in the breakdown of relations.

Listen to one of the designers of those sanctions, the Anglophile Carnegie Endowment, in their April 3 report, “U.S. Sanctions on Russia: Congress Should Go Back to Fundamentals.”

They begin: “Many in Congress have come to the conclusion that tougher sanctions on Russia are in order. Their activism can serve as a useful check on the Trump Administration but, ideally, should not undermine unity with key U.S. allies.

“Congress is slowly ratcheting up the pressure on two popular targets: The Kremlin and U.S. President Donald Trump’s well-advertised desire to get along with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin….

“Against that backdrop, many in Congress have come to the conclusion that tougher sanctions on Russia are in order, if only to box in the Trump Administration. In the words of Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ‘Trump’s willful paralysis in the face of Kremlin aggression has reached a boiling point in Congress.’ ”

Under the subhead, “Waiting for a Trigger,” Carnegie raises the February introduction of another sanctions bill called DASKA (by Lindsey Graham), but laments that another clash with Russia will be needed before it can become law. On the passage of the very first monster sanctions bill against Russia under Trump, CAATSA, in August 2017, Carnegie writes that it was “welcome news that Congress had effectively tied Trump’s hands on Russia policy.”

CAATSA passed with near-unanimity.  Americans must ask: Where was their Congressman while the seeds of World War III were being sown, and are being sown now?

Speaking June 25, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said, “The strategic situation, while we got off the 10 minute countdown to what could have become World War III, is not at that point any more, but I would absolutely urge not to give in to any de-escalation about the tension of the situation and the danger that a similar kind of situation could repeat itself very quickly, and I will immediately tell you why this is also the case still in respect to Iran.”  She went on to quote President Trump’s remarks about “obliterating” Iran if it attacked the U.S., even after he took the world off the 10-minute countdown by cancelling plans to attack Iran last week.

The American people, emphatically including President Trump’s base, are extremely concerned about the danger of war. This was proven again when polls showed that the Trump base supported Tulsi Gabbard overwhelmingly over all other candidates in the Democratic candidates’ debate last night.  Gabbard had aimed her remarks almost exclusively against the danger of war, emphasizing the danger of war with Iran and of nuclear war, and her determination not to go to war.

If Lyndon LaRouche were alive, he would be acting against it, as his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is.  LaRouche was framed up and imprisoned in 1986-94 by the same British Empire apparatus which has tried to frame President Trump, even including the same hatchet man, Robert Mueller.  LaRouche’s exoneration will mean that the black shadow of apparent forgetfulness—actually fear—which covers his decades of very public policy-shaping in the Americas, Europe and Asia will be lifted at last.  His unique means of solution for this war and economic crisis, like the Strategic Defense Initiative which he drafted for President Reagan, will be publicly acknowledged and available to President Trump now.

Americans must ask also: Where does their Congressman stand on the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche?

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Americans Support Tulsi Gabbard’s Warnings against War in Democrats’ Debate

June 27 (EIRNS)—Rep. Tulsi Gabbard forced the great strategic issue of the danger of nuclear war, the urgency of ensuring that the U.S. does not go to war against Iran, and the need to end the current wars (e.g., Afghanistan) on the agenda in the first of the Democratic Party Presidential candidate debates last night.

Drudge Report, which is followed by many in President Donald Trump’s base, headlined the “shocker” result of its online survey after the debate: over 41% of the 75,000 people who answered its poll voted Gabbard the winner of the debate.  In similar, if smaller surveys by the Washington Examiner, NJ.com (Newark Star Ledger), and Heavy, Gabbard also carried the day with between 30-40% of the “vote,” the other candidates coming in far behind.

Gabbard used the first question to her—about her position on equal pay—to force the war issue onto the agenda. After recounting her military experience—she is a war veteran who served one tour in Iraq, and a second in Southwest Asia, and now carries the rank of Major in the Army National Guard—Gabbard answered that our leaders have been leading us from one war to the next, and leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our taxpayer dollars and thousands of American lives.

Later, she hit the biggest danger: “We’re in a greater risk of nuclear war today than ever before in history.”

The American people need to understand that a war on Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly, than anything that we saw in Iraq, she stated at another point. It would take more lives, would exacerbate the refugee crisis, and would not be contained to Iran. This would turn into a regional war. She continued: “That’s why it is so important that everyone one of us, every single American, stands up and says no war with Iran.”

NBC, citing FBI agents and other known liars, immediately put out the line that Gabbard is being promoted by “the Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 U.S. election.” What worries them, as “former” FBI agent Clint Watts admitted to NBC, is that candidate Gabbard may be able to make such “positions” part of the Democratic primary debates—and thereby of the presidential election as a whole.

U.S. Congress Nervous over Danger of Iran War

June 27 (EIRNS)—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has scheduled a vote on the anti-Iran war amendment sponsored by Senators Time Kaine (D-VA) and Tom Udall (D-NM) for June 28. “The vote will start first thing in the morning and be held open into the afternoon to accommodate as many senators as possible,” he said, in reference to those Democrats who participated in the Presidential debates this week in California. The amendment would prohibit funding for a war with Iran that has not been authorized by Congress.

On the House side, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) are demanding that the State Department provide them any and all documents on whether the 2001 or 2002 war authorizations are applicable to military action against Iran. “Given the life-and-death stakes of the current situation between the United States and Iran, we can think of no issue where it is more imperative for the department to explain its rationale for, interpretation of, and limits upon the legal authorities that have been provided by the Congress,” they wrote in a letter to the State Department’s acting legal adviser, Marik String. A June 25 article inSlate reports, however, that the legal reasoning that the Trump Administration applied to the missile strikes on Syria in 2017 and 2018 actually was drawn from that used by the Obama Administration for its 2011 campaign against Syria and it may try to apply it, along with the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), to a potential war against Iran.

President Barack Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel argued at the time that there was a two-part test to determine whether the President had the authority to order the strikes on his own: The action in question had to “serve sufficiently important national interests,” and it must not be “sufficiently extensive in ‘nature, scope, and duration’ to constitute a ‘war,’ ” wrote Slate.

ENDING THE STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

U.A.E., Saudis, Norway Find No Evidence against Iran in Tanker Attacks, nor Does United Nations

June 27 (EIRNS)—Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates, said yesterday that thereis no evidence proving Iranian complicity in the tanker attacks in the emirate of Fujairah in May. Bin Zayed was in Moscow for meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Russian officials and spoke in a joint press conference with Lavrov. “The U.A.E. is not pointing fingers of accusation at any state for the recent attacks on four oil tankers in the country’s territorial waters, since clear, scientific and convincing evidence is required to do that. Should any other country have clearer evidence, the international community would certainly take it into consideration,” he said, according to the statement posted on the U.A.E. Foreign Ministry website.

He continued, of the “three states concerned with the issue,” the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Norway, “We will continue our commitment to professionalism on this issue. We have already presented the findings of our first probe to the Security Council. … We defined the attacks as aggressions that were most probably carried out by actors with a considerable amount of intelligence and technical expertise.”

The UN Security Council had also refused to attribute blame to Iran for the tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman, when it met on Monday night, June 24, and exhorted for “maximum restraint” by all parties acting in the area.

For its part, the Russian Defense Ministry has determined that the U.S. drone shot down by Iran last week had entered Iranian airspace, as Tehran claimed, and was not in international airspace when it was downed, as the U.S. claims, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev reported on June 25. “We have not seen any proof otherwise,” he said.

President Moon Jae-in Will Meet with Xi and Putin in Osaka, and with Trump in Seoul

June 27 (EIRNS)—South Korean President Moon Jae-in issued written responses to questions from six news agencies on June 26 ahead of the G20 Summit in Osaka, at which he will hold bilateral meetings with Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. He will host President Donald Trump in Seoul after the summit June 29-30, according to Cheong Wa Dae, the presidential residence.

In regard to Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan is not agreeing to a meeting with Moon as long as he continues calling for more compensation for Korean victims of Japanese actions before and during World War II. Japan insists the issue was settled by earlier agreements. There will likely be only a passing meeting of the two in Osaka.

In the interview, Moon expressed great optimism in regard to progress in establishing a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, including progress between the U.S. and North Korea. He said that Xi Jinping’s summit with Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang last week can be a “turning point” in negotiations. “As China fully understands my administration’s approach to the Korean Peninsula peace process, we closely cooperate,” Moon said. “I will hear about the results of President Xi’s visit to North Korea during my meeting with him.”

Moon said that Trump and Kim’s Hanoi summit should not be viewed as a failure, but that the “willingness to engage in dialogue has never faded,” neither in Washington nor in Pyongyang, as shown by the recent exchange of letters. He also said that “both sides have been engaged in dialogue in regard to a third summit. It’s noteworthy that the behind-the-scenes talks have been preceded by the mutual understanding of each other’s position gained through the Hanoi summit. Also underway is dialogue between the South and the North through diverse channels to sustain inter-Korean talks.”

President Moon described Kim Jong Un as “quite a flexible yet resolute person…. Not only myself but also other leaders who have met the North Korean leader in person, including Chinese President Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, all speak of their trust in Kim’s promise [to denuclearize and focus on economic development]. Trust can be said to constitute a precondition for dialogue. The key is trust. In particular, North Korea must trust the promise of the international community to ensure its security, and a bright future, provided that it abandons its nuclear program. Trust, of course, must be reciprocal.”

He continued: “The Korean Peninsula peace process is about dismantling the last vestige of the Cold War rivalry on Earth and at the same time, is a long journey the leaders of both Koreas and the United States are taking together…. The East Asia Railroad Community initiative encompassing six Northeast Asian nations and the United States, which I proposed last year, was developed based on this idea. The Railroad Community will be able to further develop into an energy community, an economic community and a mechanism for multilateral peace and security for East Asia.”

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Votes To Allow Russia To Resume Participation

June 26 (EIRNS)—Over British objections, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), based in Strasbourg, France, passed a resolution allowing Russia to participate in the assembly’s June session.

Following the Nazi-led coup in Ukraine and Crimea’s vote to reunify with Russia, the PACE had stripped the Russian delegation of its right to vote, to participate in observer missions, or hold seats on PACE leadership bodies in April 2014. PACE then tightened sanctions against Russia further in 2015. In response, Russia refused to participate in PACE activities, and in 2016-2018 further refused to apply for confirmation of its powers.

The resolution, which passed by a 118-62 and 10 abstentions, reverses the earlier decisions, allowing the Russian delegation to take part in the Assembly’s June session. It specifies that the delegation members’ “rights to vote, to speak and to be represented in the Assembly and its bodies shall not be suspended or withdrawn in the context of a challenge to or reconsideration of credentials,” reported TASS. The move follows the fact that Russia refused to make any of its financial contributions, some €33 million, because of its PACE suspension, and threatened to withdraw completely from the Council of Europe, which runs the European Court of Human Rights.

The Ukraine delegation walked out of the PACE meeting in protest, and was then joined by the delegations from Georgia, Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The British, who had joined Ukraine in opposing the Russians, did not walk out, although they are joining in lodging protests. According to Kyiv Post, the opposing governments will consider joint actions at future sessions of PACE, but there is “no substantial indication that there will be a permanent boycott.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the decision a “victory of reason,” which recognizes that PACE cannot adequately work without the participation of the Russian delegation. There is no change in PACE’s position on Crimea, but “we are determined to stay patient and to systematically explain the Crimean issue until our foreign partners change their mind,” he said, pointed out that European officials were beginning to express different points of view on the issue.

The Council of Europe, founded in 1949, and its Parliamentary Assembly is made up of 47 member-states and their parliamentary representatives, and is not related to the European Union or the European Parliament.

THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

Strengthening of Ties Between China and Japan Is under Discussion

June 27 (EIRNS)—Inviting Chinese President Xi Jinping for a state visit to Japan during their meeting today in Osaka before the start of the G20 summit, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he wanted Japan to elevate ties with China and create a new era for Asia’s biggest economies. “Around the time of the cherry blossoms next spring, I would like to welcome President Xi as a state guest to Japan, and hope to further elevate ties between Japan and China to the next level,” Abe told Xi, Reuters reported. Xi immediately responded that “it is a good idea,” the Japan Times reported.

China’s Global Times special business coverage on June 25 also emphasized the importance of stronger China-Japan relations. “Beliefs are also firmly held that wide-ranging China-Japan cooperation, especially the bonds between the two nations concerning the exploration of business opportunities in third markets, will continue on its forward trajectory despite trade tensions between the U.S. and other economies, notably China.”

Global Times, in other coverage, cited Eiichi Shindo, head of the Belt and Road Initiative at the Japan Research Center, saying that since the Belt and Road Initiative fits well into the vision for third country business cooperation between both nations, perhaps the Japanese government, while pushing for the Indo-Pacific strategy, could open its mind a bit. “Japanese companies have begun to understand the potentially huge market involving projects under the China-proposed BRI,” Shindo said.

Uganda’s President Museveni Explains Why Africa Is Turning to China, During Beijing Visit

June 27 (EIRNS)—Chinese President Xi Jinping and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni agreed when they met on June 25 in Beijing to lift relations between their nations to a comprehensive cooperative partnership, during what Museveni described as his four-day working visit, June 24-27. “China is willing to strengthen exchanges with Uganda on the experience of governance, and deepen cooperation in areas such as infrastructure construction, trade, energy, agriculture, epidemic prevention and control, human resources, industrial parks and tourism,” Xi told Museveni, Xinhua reported.

Earlier on June 25, Museveni had lashed out at the World Bank for refusing to support Uganda’s railway projects. He reported in his keynote to the Coordinators Meeting on the Implementation of the Follow-up Actions adopted at last year’s Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), that “one of our engineers recently told me that the Uganda Railways tried in vain to get support from the World Bank until one official told them that countries that build railways do so with ‘their own money.’ How will the private-sector grow if it is bedeviled with expensive transport costs, expensive electricity costs or no electricity at all, expensive cost of money, etc.? It is against that negativity, that China’s solidarity should be measured,” President Museveni asserted.

Today, Museveni presided over the opening of the first-ever China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo, in Hunan Province. The expo had been proposed at the Sept. 3-4, 2018 FOCAC summit in Beijing, and is seen as “a new mechanism for commercial cooperation with Africa, a new platform to deliver the trade and economic measures of FOCAC, and a new window for sub-national business cooperation with Africa.”

SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

China’s Foreign Ministry Rips into Pompeo’s Anti-Belt and Road ‘Spell’

June 27 (EIRNS)—China is obviously getting sick and tired of the rants of the U.S. Secretary of State against the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Today, Chinese Foreign Ministry Geng Shuang blasted Mike Pompeo for his comments during his India visit, where he said that the Belt and Road comes “with shackles.”

Geng Shuang suggested that the Secretary of State must be “under a spell or something” since he “has been so obsessed with the BRI, talking about it wherever he goes.” However, “it seems his attacks and slanders against the BRI are not working. … Why is that so?  He should give it some thought,” Geng went on, trying to help. “If the BRI indeed comes with shackles, like he said, why are so many countries and international organizations actively participating in and supporting it? If not the BRI projects, whose help can these countries look up to in terms of boosting infrastructure and economic development? Will the U.S., who has been chanting ‘America first,’ do it? Will it actually take concrete measures to help them and offer them funds?” Geng demanded to know.

With Power Grid in Crisis, Argentina’s Macri and China Sign MOU for Fourth Nuclear Reactor

June 27 (EIRNS)—Against the backdrop of the massive June 9 power outage which affected a large part of South America’s Southern Cone, and a second one June 22 in La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentine President Mauricio Macri has finally signed an agreement with China’s National Nuclear Company (CNNC) for construction of the country’s fourth reactor, Atucha III, for $7.5 billion.

Since taking office in December 2015, Macri has done everything to delay this project, originally signed in 2014 between then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Chinese President Xi Jinping—alleging environmental concerns and excessive cost, and attempting to argue that “renewables” would serve the country better. Thanks to Macri’s IMF-dictated policies, the energy grid today is a wreck, with minimal investment in maintenance, a drive for privatization, and the population is enraged. The firing of 130 workers last week from the project to build the CAREM modular reactor, using 100% Argentine technology, caused such a backlash that Macri’s Labor Minister had to get involved and temporarily reinstate the workers.

U.A.E.’s Etihad National Railway Plan Advances

June 27 (EIRNS)— Etihad Rail, the developer and operator of the U.A.E.’s national railway, has awarded $1.2 billion of civil and rail engineering work to the China Railway Construction Corporation and the Abu Dhabi-based infrastructure company Ghantoot Transport & General Contracting. The two will work on the second two “packages” of the section of U.A.E.’s national railway network which will run from Ghuweifat on the western border with Saudi Arabia to the Port of Fujairah on the eastern border with Oman, Global Construction Review reported June 26.

Shaikh Theyab bin Mohamed, chairman of Etihad Rail, said the project “will sustain the growth of our transport industry and freight carriage sector throughout the U.A.E., as railway systems are one of the most important means of transport on which countries depend to achieve their economic and social objectives.”

When completed, the 1,200 km Etihad Rail project will become a key part of a railway network throughout the Gulf Cooperation Council.=.

The first package for this stage of the U.A.E. National Rail Network is being built by a joint venture of China State Construction Engineering Corporation and South Korea’s SK Engineering and Construction.

COLLAPSING WESTERN SYSTEM

Banksters Create $100 Trillion in ‘Climate Bonds’ Green Nightmare—They Get the Green

June 27 (EIRNS)—In the background of numerous ongoing initiatives for establishing “green bonds” or “climate certificates” and like green paper assets, lies the “Climate Bonds Initiative.” The Climate Bonds Initiative says it is “an international, investor-focused not-for-profit. We’re the only organization working solely on mobilizing the $100 trillion bond market for climate change solutions,” in short, whatever sustainable nonsense anyone can create.

While the largest number of Advisory Board members are listed as being from London, it has a special emphasis on looting China (again), with a special report, “Growing a Green Bonds Market in China: Key Recommendations for Policymakers in the Context of China’s Changing Financial Landscape.”

Funders of the Climate Bonds Initiative are: The Rockefeller Foundation, Bank of America, HSBC, Inter-American Development Bank, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Swiss Confederation, U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Frederick Mulder Foundation, OAK Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, FSD Africa (U.K. government), National Australian Bank, European Climate Foundation, Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust, EU’s Horizon 2020, Climate Works Foundation, UNDP, Climate KIC, KR Foundation, Martin International. Law firms Clifford Chance, Ashurst, Shearman Sterling are providing legal support.

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