FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019

Volume 6, Number 172

EIR Daily Alert Service

P.O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390

• The Fight Is On
• Argentina Announces Debt ‘Reprofiling’-Selective Default-Amidst Financial Meltdown
• Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Convenes in Rome in October
• Lyndon LaRouche Continues To Haunt the Washington Post
• New Justice Department Inspector General Report on James Comey Is Scathing
• Russia and NATO Hold Bilateral Consultations by Phone
• China Investing in Gulf of Genoa Container Port, But Regional Infrastructure Is Crucial
• Hamburg Seaport Sees Itself as Part of New Silk Road

EDITORIAL

The Fight Is On

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—To wait until the next financial crash hits before launching an all-out, tooth-and-nail fight for the LaRouche recovery program, would be to wait too long. If we are to succeed—and there is simply no choice but to succeed—we must begin now, today. Over the coming days and weeks, we are going to bring this program, not just to the Federal Congress, but to state legislatures, county government bodies and city councils, as well as trade unions and other groups. All Democratic Presidential campaigns will have to address it. We will do all this to ensure that LaRouche’s recovery plan becomes law under this President, with his support, before the world is catapulted into a new, worse depression than that which began in 2007-08.

If that new depression is allowed to unroll, along with the wars that will likely accompany it, what will be left of humanity before it ends? No one really knows.

The recovery plan relies on the proven expertise of the world’s pre-eminent economic forecaster of the 20th and 21st centuries to date, the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019). Mastering the basics is essential. We will help that process in every way.

There are two overlapping areas involved: domestic and international. The domestic part was summed up by Mr. LaRouche in his “Four New Laws” of June 8, 2014. (See “The Four New Laws To Save the U.S.A. Now! Not an Option: An Immediate Necessity,” EIR, June 13, 2014.)

Although that paper has vast implications, it is only three to four pages in length, and should be read in conjunction with this editorial. But to summarize the Four Laws for our purposes here: The First Law is the re-instatement of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 Glass-Steagall law, to separate out Wall Street’s speculative junk assets from what must remain as a viable commercial banking system.  Only honest banking, not speculation, will get Federal support if needed. This, rather than $23 trillion of bailouts for Wall Street’s gambling debts, was the first step that should have been taken in 2007-08. This time around, the bad gambling debts will simply be split off and written down, in a way which does no harm to the real economy.

The Second is “a return to a system of top-down, and thoroughly defined as National Banking,” referencing the model of President Lincoln’s “Greenbacks” policy. That is, the credit which the Federal Reserve and our current, sick banking system refuse to provide for uses such as industry and agriculture, will instead be provided at low interest by a Federal institution under the U.S. Treasury, subject to the limitation which follows.

The Third Law specifies “The use of a Federal Credit-system is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the intention to increase the physical-economic productivity and standard of living of the persons and households of the United States….”

The Fourth calls for a crash science-driver program to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion power, and a Moon-Mars mission leading to human colonization of Mars.  Only such science-driver crash programs can provide the leaps in productivity, through scientific and technological spinoffs, which can revive our economy after decades of decay. (At the same time, they require crash-programs of education of our largely wrecked youth and our labor force.)

The international component of the LaRouche Plan is integrally an inseparable part of it. It calls for the “Four Powers” of the United States, China, Russia and India to initiate the creation of a new world credit system (not monetary, but credit system), to replace the failed speculative financial system of the City of London, Wall Street, and the IMF.  LaRouche called this the “New Bretton Woods system,” because it echoes the intention Franklin Roosevelt had for the original Bretton Woods system, while also learning from the errors committed back then. The system will be oriented especially towards development credits which will allow massive high-technology capital-goods exports from the “advanced” sector to developing countries. This way, both sectors will become prosperous together, as Roosevelt intended. Otherwise, like the original Bretton Woods, it will be a gold-reserve, dollar-based system of relatively fixed currency parities—without which long-term, low interest credits are impossible.

Most (but not all) contemporary historians blind themselves to the abundant evidence that Roosevelt’s whole approach began with these questions of international development.  A major article planned for the upcoming, Sept. 6 EIR will set this straight.

As we campaign for this LaRouche Plan, we will keep up the campaign throughout these institutions for LaRouche’s exoneration from the false charges on which he was convicted in 1988 and imprisoned for five years.

After eight Presidential campaigns with numerous television infomercials, combined with the mass circulation of some of his writings, and his demonization by major media, which nevertheless insisted that he was “insignificant,” Lyndon LaRouche has a massive support in the United States. The proverbial 99% of these supporters are not members of any organization publicly associated with LaRouche, but they tend to be the organic leaders among their friends and associates. Alongside these older generations, students on campuses are becoming newly acquainted with LaRouche’s ideas.

It is time now for older veterans to join alongside the young recruits for the sort of relentless, no-holds-barred campaign rarely if ever seen in this country. One we must win whatever the odds.

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Argentina Announces Debt ‘Reprofiling’—Selective Default— Amidst Financial Meltdown

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—After another day of uncontrolled market turbulence, last evening, Argentine Finance Minister Hernan Lacunza announced that the Mauricio Macri government will “reprofile” its foreign debt—others call it a selective default—in an admission that the debt is no longer “sustainable” according to the International Monetary Fund’s criteria, and that meeting upcoming debt obligations is impossible.

The measures announced, which include extending maturities on short- and long-term debt and renegotiating the current $57 billion standby loan with the IMF, are necessary, Lacunza said, to relieve an enormous “financial burden” on the government, and protect foreign reserves. An IMF mission which had been in the country since Aug. 24 to evaluate whether to release the next $5.4 billion tranche of standby loan, left shortly before Lacunza’s announcement. Many Argentine analysts suggested today that the Fund itself had recommended the “reprofiling,” since the government has failed to meet the key guidelines that would qualify it for the next tranche.

The last two days have seen total market chaos—with uncontrolled peso devaluation which several Central Bank dollar auctions couldn’t stem (the peso now stands at 61 to the dollar), hemorrhaging of reserves and stock market crash. More broadly, inflation is out of control at 51%. The “zero deficit” the government promised the IMF is unattainable; economic growth will decline again this year, and failure to roll over short-term Treasury bonds, as occurred this week, has left the government with no access to private capital markets. As Ambito Financiero’s Carlos Burgueño pointed out today, while the IMF mission was only supposed to look at numbers through June, the projected negative figures for the third quarter would have likely clinched its evaluation that only a “reprofiling” could justify releasing the $5.4 billion. Even then, the $5.4 billion isn’t guaranteed.

The plan will delay $7 billion in payments on short-term local debt due this year; seek “voluntary reprofiling” of $50 billion of longer-term debt (much of it held by foreign investors), and postpone repayment of $44 billion owed to the IMF, due between 2020 and 2023.

The unstable Macri, meanwhile, continues to blame financial upheaval on the results of the Aug. 11 primary, in which he was crushed by the opposition Fernández-Fernández ticket, and demands that Presidential candidate Alberto Fernández take responsibility for ensuring financial stability. Fernández refuses, and in a tough Aug. 26 statement, charged that “those who have caused this crisis, the government and the IMF, have the responsibility of ending the social catastrophe which today an ever-larger portion of Argentine society is living through.”

Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Convenes in Rome in October

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—From October 6-27 in Rome, the Vatican hosts the “Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon,” which was first announced in 2017 by Pope Francis, and is now set to play a part to confuse and herd people into the “eco-emergency” mindset coherent with the eco-fascist financial push.

The fall calendar of such major events includes—after the September global warming events at the UN in New York—the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit over Nov. 16-17 in Santiago, Chile, whose agenda the government plans to connect with the UN’s COP25 climate change summit, starting with pre-sessions of COP25 Nov. 25-30 in Santiago, then the COP25 proper from Dec. 2-13. (COP is Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.)

The preparatory document (instrumentum laboris) for the October Vatican Synod was released in June (“Amazonia: New Pathways for the Church and for an Integral Ecology,” Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni San Paolo, 2019,) which presents the multiple themes on the agenda, a leading one of which contains scare stories about Amazon ecology. There is a full section on this in the document, which states at one point, “From an environmental point of view, the Amazon is a lung of the planet and one of the sites of greatest biodiversity in the world.”

A key figure in the upcoming Synod is Cardinal Claudio Hummes, from Brazil, who has been calling for “new models of development” based on claims of serving tribes in the Amazon. The document asserts that in the Amazon rainforest, “a deep crisis has been triggered by prolonged human intervention, in which a ‘culture of waste’ and an extractivist mentality prevail. The Amazon … is a mirror of all humanity, which, in defense of life, requires structural and personal changes by all human beings, by nations, and by the Church….”

Many other church leaders are denouncing this outlook; there is an international outcry against the Synod’s orientation, which, they say, implies approval of married priests and other liberal theological plans.

As of mid-August, at the same time French President Macron called for emergency action on the Amazon by the G7, preparatory meetings for the Synod are underway in South America. An article in the U.S. news agency, the Catholic News Service Aug. 26, was titled, “Wildfires Point to the Urgency of Upcoming Amazon Synod, Bolivian Bishop Says.” The “issues” expected from Bolivia include, states the article, “migration from the Andean highlands to the Amazon region, the expansion of farming and ranching, and helping young people maintain Christian values.” Also, “assistance in obtaining tractors or other equipment to help farmers prepare their fields so they would not have to use fire.” These are identified by northern Bolivia’s Bishop Eugenio Coter.

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Lyndon LaRouche Continues To Haunt the Washington Post

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—The Washington Post is truly haunted by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. This fact was proved again on Aug. 28th in their obituary for Albert V. Bryan, Jr., the infamous autocrat and scion of Northern Virginia’s Hunt Country squires, who, as Chief Judge of the Eastern District of Virginia’s Alexandria federal court, presided over LaRouche’s 1988 frameup trial. Referencing Bryant’s almost three-decade-long career as a Federal Judge, beginning in 1971, continuing as Chief Judge of the Eastern District from 1985 through 1991, and then continuing as a senior judge, the Post concludes that LaRouche’s conviction was Bryan’s most significant achievement.

For those who don’t know, the Eastern District of Virginia has been the U.S. intelligence community’s preferred venue for judicial dispatch of those who challenge it, largely as the result of Judge Bryan’s imposition of the so-called rocket docket, shortening the time between indictment and trial in criminal cases, and, most believe, short-circuiting due process. In the LaRouche case, Judge Bryan outdid himself, ruling that the defense would have six weeks between indictment and trial, a ruling which was decried as a fundamental injustice, by hundreds of criminal attorneys throughout the United States who filed an amicus brief on LaRouche’s behalf, before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

In order to justify the LaRouche judicial railroad and atrocity as an “accomplishment,” the Post obituary claims that both Bryan, Jr. and his father Albert V. Bryan, were some sort of civil rights icons in the desegregation of Virginia. Nothing could be further from the truth. Both Bryan, Jr. and the father he honored and imitated were complete and total servants of a Southern aristocracy which was viciously racist and only implemented Supreme Court precedent when their campaign of massive resistance failed. In the case of Albert V. Bryan, Sr., the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, directly reversed his decision preventing desegregation of Virginia’s Prince Edward County School System. It is no accident that the statue of “Justice” in front of the Albert V. Bryan Federal District Courthouse in Alexandria, appears to be fleeing the place.

Lyndon LaRouche’s 1988 Alexandria trial followed a six-year campaign, initiated by British intelligence and U.S.-based Tory loyalists, led by Henry Kissinger and Vice-President George H.W. Bush, to smear and defame the political economist and scientist, who had authored Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and served as a back-channel in negotiating the SDI with the Soviet Union. The first fake prosecution of LaRouche in Boston, led by Robert S. Mueller, dissolved in a mistrial, after extensive hearings exposing classified operations and, in the words of U.S. District Judge Robert Keeton, “systemic government misconduct” against LaRouche and his associates. Moreover, jurors in that case told the Boston Herald that at the point the Boston case mistried, after the government presented its fraud claims, they would have voted not guilty, without even hearing the defense case, believing that the government was responsible for any misconduct.

The Justice Department then quickly switched venues to Alexandria’s rocket docket, indicting LaRouche on conspiracy to hide his tax liability from the IRS, and loan fraud conspiracy concerning political loans issued by entities associated with him.

Judge Bryan played a key role in engineering the federal loan fraud charges. In 1987, he upheld a totally unprecedented bankruptcy, brought by the Federal government, against the political entities which issued the political loans, foreclosing repayment of the loans at issue in the indictment.  On the date the bankruptcy was brought, the FBI began a nationwide manhunt for witnesses against LaRouche and his associates, having previously been unable, despite substantial effort, to find any witnesses who would say they had been defrauded. At trial, Judge Bryan then barred defense attorneys from referencing the bankruptcy. One year after the Alexandria trial, Bankruptcy Judge Martin Bostetter found the bankruptcy to be illegal and a constructive fraud on the court, a decision which was upheld on appeal. Judge Bryan also denied LaRouche’s habeas motion following conviction, despite volumes of evidence presented to him documenting brazen government misconduct.

The Bryans were fierce allies of the racist Congressman Howard W. Smith, who led the opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1955, Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr., endorsed Virginia’s Gray plan, which flaunted its opposition to the Supreme Court and called for public funding of all-white public schools. Bryan, Jr. was the elected delegate of Alexandria’s elite families in a convention called to support the plan. The Gray plan was adopted and finally declared unconstitutional in 1969.

In 1955, Bryan, Jr. helped to create Interarms, an international arms company centered in Alexandria and London. As EIR has documented, Interarms was a CIA/British linked gun-running depot. Its first project moved a half-million rifles purchased from the British war ministry to the government of Argentina. Judge Albert V. Bryan’s autocratic and Lost Cause Southern proclivities were so well known that the noted African-American defense attorney, the deceased William Moffitt said, upon encountering the Judge at the local Home Depot, “Your Honor, I didn’t know that your kind ever ventured here.” Moffitt told this author that he “just couldn’t help himself.” For more on Judge Bryan’s actual biography see, “Albert V. Bryan, Jr., Alexandria’s Tory Racist Establishment” (EIR, Vol. 22, #50, Dec. 15, 1995).

As for the Post, well, they are the authors of the fake news policy on LaRouche, having declared through an editorial by editorial page editor and CIA asset Stephen Rosenfeld on Sept. 24, 1974, that the nation’s papers should either not cover LaRouche at all, or to cover him solely in a defamatory or derogatory fashion. Perhaps they fear more than most the Erinyes who exact justice upon those who bear false witness, particularly in light of their recent crimes against the sitting President.

New Justice Department Inspector General Report on James Comey Is Scathing

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—Today the report was released by the Inspector General of the Justice Department, on former FBI Director James Comey’s leaks of his memos about Donald Trump. This follows the announcement last week that Comey would not be prosecuted because he was careful not to leak classified information.

The IG’s report on Comey is scathing and EIR will be providing in-depth coverage in the near term. The findings show that Comey violated every FBI and Justice Department procedure in the book, in writing about every encounter he had with the President, while secreting those memos in a private safe at his house. Comey claimed he could do this because he considered the memos personal papers and not government property, despite the fact that they were clearly written in pursuit of his quest, on behalf of an out-of-control intelligence community, to set up and indict the President.

After Comey was fired in May 2017, he famously leaked one of the memos to the New York Times, to his friend, Daniel Richman, whom he had made a government agent, which leaking was done in order to facilitate the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel. Only after Mueller was appointed and in place did Comey tell the FBI about his private store of government memos and whom he had delivered them to.

As many have observed in media coverage today, the Inspector General paints Comey accurately as a malignant narcissist, although being so is not, necessarily, criminal. It seems clear that Comey is not out of the woods, and that the prosecutorial decisions on these leaks were made in consideration of the highly inflamed Democratic Party-oriented juries in D.C. and Northern Virginia. Process crimes sit differently if juries have not been inflamed, as they were with Michael Flynn and others, by round upon round of media poison.

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

Russia and NATO Hold Bilateral Consultations by Phone

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—NATO’s and Russia’s most senior military officers spoke on the phone yesterday. “Russian Chief of the General Staff and First Deputy Defense Minister Army General Valery Gerasimov has held telephone talks with Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Air Chief Marshal Stuart Peach. The parties discussed pressing issues concerning Russia-NATO relations,” the Russian Defense Ministry statement reads, reported TASS.

NATO said in a press release that “the phone call demonstrates the continued mutual interest to maintain military lines of communication to promote predictability, in line with NATO’s policy of transparency and ongoing dialogue at the political level with senior Russian leadership.” NATO further stated that Peach and Gerasimov “agreed to continue using the military lines of communication in the future, according to the TASS coverage.

SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

China Investing in Gulf of Genoa Container Port, But Regional Infrastructure Is Crucial

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—Vado Ligure in the Gulf of Genoa, with a population of some 8,500, has an ongoing big construction project: The Vado Gateway terminal, scheduled to open in December, will be able to service large container ships. The terminal was a project of the Netherlands-based APM Terminals, part of the Danish conglomerate Maersk, and two Chinese companies, including COSCO Shipping Ports, reported Xinhua yesterday. COSCO has purchased a 40% stake in the terminal. The new terminal will have an annual capacity of 900,000 TEUs (20-foot equivalent unit), and a new off-dock four-lane rail facility with a capacity for 14 trains per day will also provide rapid access to central and northern Europe.

The major city of Genoa to the east is currently Italy’s busiest sea port. Genoa Deputy Mayor Giancarlo Vinacci told Xinhua he believes “in this case there is a need in the western world to fuse ‘old’ Europe together with ‘young’ China.”

Chinese investments are welcomed, as they bring exactly what Italy needs the most—infrastructure, as EIR has documented, reporting on the fight in Italy’s government over the Lyon-Turin rail line, and infrastructure in the south. Italy hasn’t developed infrastructure in its ports or inland areas in the past few years, Paolo Cornetto, managing director of APM Terminals at Vado Ligure, told Xinhua: “In Italy, the period required to create infrastructure is very long. In this context, the arrival of COSCO has accelerated the conclusion … of the project.”

The Vado Gateway is set to be the first semi-automated port in Italy with a fully-automated gate and stacking yard after the construction of the terminal is completed, Xinhua reported today. Anticipating booming transportation of goods at the terminal, logistic companies have rented or bought warehouses nearby in the hope of taking a slice of the cargo in the future.

“It is good that all these firms want to enter into Vado (Ligure) port. Now we have to develop the infrastructure to speed up the transportation process,” said Danilo Causa, who is in charge of the local transport federation of the CISL trade union confederation. “It would be useful if part of the investment in infrastructure could come from China. This would speed up the process, as in Italy it is quite slow.”

Pointing out that Italy is the first G7 country to sign on to the Belt and Road Initiative—which occurred last March when Chinese President Xi Jinping made a state visit to Rome and the Mezzogiorno—University of Genoa Prof. Gian Enzo Duci, president of Italian National Federation of Ship Brokers and Agents, told Xinhua “there will be a big part of cargo of the present and the future (through Italy). And if we are able to update and upgrade our road and rail infrastructure, we can be the Chinese door to Central Europe.”

THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

Hamburg Seaport Sees Itself as Part of New Silk Road

Aug. 29 (EIRNS)—As reported on Chinese media, the Port of Hamburg has become the largest sea-rail combined port in Europe thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). About one-third of the freighters at the Port of Hamburg are bound for China or originate there, and more than 30 international cargo trains commute between Hamburg and Chinese cities every week, said Peter Tschentscher, the First Mayor of Hamburg at the Shanghai-Hamburg Business Forum on Aug. 26. The BRI has boosted Hamburg’s role as the gateway for Chinese enterprises to enter Europe and has brought us new opportunities of development, he said.

Hamburg’s official data show that more than 550 Chinese companies have invested in Hamburg, and every year about 4.8 million standard containers are transported by sea between Hamburg and China, which is “more than any other port in Europe,” said Tschentscher.

Angela Titzrath, chairwoman of the Executive Board of Hamburger Hafen und Logistik, said that Hamburg has been trying to strengthen its status as a global hub in recent years with more efforts focused on Asia, especially China.

She estimated that rail cargo volume between Hamburg and Chinese cities is expected to exceed 600,000 standard containers by 2025 thanks to the BRI. Beyond Germany, many Central and Eastern European countries also trade with China through Hamburg, the central freight-handling hub for transport along both the maritime and overland Silk Road, according to Titzrath.

Reach us at eirdailyalert@larouchepub.com or call 1-571-293-0935