MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019

Volume 6, Number 153

EIR Daily Alert Service

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

• Pessimism Is the British Empire’s Most Deadly Weapon of Mass Destruction
• Bank of England Governor and HSBC Are Steering Oligarchy’s Move into Green Financial Bubble
• The EU Climate Policy Has Been Dictated by the Hedge Funds
• Britain Passes Most Extreme Climate Law
• New U.S. Threat of 10% Tariffs on $300 Billion of China Imports
• China Responds Sharply to Announced New U.S. Tariffs as Pompeo Retails Same Worn Slanders
• Defense Secretary Esper Declares We Will Now Build Intermediate-Range Missiles for Asia
• New U.S. Sanctions Against Russia over Skripal Case To Enter into Force on August 19th
• Trump Spoke of ‘Human Space Flight’ Goal in His Cincinnati ‘Keep America Great’ Rally
• U.S. Economy Jobs Figures Droop, and Non-Financial Corporate Debt Going Bad
• Excitement Greeting Proposed Central American Train, as Part of Regional Development Program

EDITORIAL

Pessimism Is the British Empire’s Most Deadly Weapon of Mass Destruction

Aug. 4 (EIRNS)—Over the weekend, the British Empire’s classical “strategy of tension” and irregular warfare escalated in Hong Kong, in Moscow, and in the United States with two new mass shootings—one on Saturday in an El Paso shopping center (20 killed and 26 wounded), and another early Sunday morning outside a bar in Dayton (9 killed and dozens wounded). In the Dayton case, the suspect, who was wearing body armor, was shot dead by police; in the El Paso incident, the perpetrator was arrested and, according to media accounts, is a white nationalist who said he wanted to kill as many Mexicans as possible.

Predictably, some of the Democratic hyena pack (Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, and others) tried to pin the blame on President Donald Trump for the El Paso atrocity, denouncing him for purportedly “creating an environment of hatred” which encourages such crimes. More broadly, the political environment is certainly being created internationally to unleash eco-terrorism on a heightened scale, as per the British game plan—and all of this in the context of a looming international financial blowout, and British deployments to worsen tensions between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and Russia, in order to reverse the advances achieved by President Trump’s bilateral meetings with China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Osaka.

But the weekend’s mass shootings point to an even more deadly weapon that the British have knowingly and systematically unleashed against the prospect of a New Paradigm of development, peace and classical culture: the weapon of cultivated cultural and personal pessimism.

The El Paso and Dayton butcheries bring the 2019 total of such mass shootings in the U.S. to 250 for the year—more than one incident a day during the 215 days of 2019 that have transpired! So far this year over 530 people have died in mass shootings (defined as four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooters), and over 2,050 have been injured.

Yet this is only one of the horrid heads of the hydra that is now threatening the very existence of the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the planet. “We are truly living in a Dark Age,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented on Sunday, reflecting on recent developments. “We are in the midst of a full breakdown of society, with suicide cults, children mobilized by Green fascists to call for global depopulation, mass shootings, rampant and growing drug addiction. Society has lost all sense of purpose and directionality. People hate others, and they hate themselves. They are prepared to kill others, and kill themselves.”

Zepp-LaRouche continued: “This is all a reflection of deep-seated cultural pessimism, which is a form of severe mental insanity that is being deliberately induced in the population by the British Empire.” To turn it around requires not only a full-scale mobilization around organizing a viable, creative future for Humanity, especially today’s youth, through such crash programs as the Moon-Mars mission which American statesman Lyndon LaRouche designed over three decades ago—and which is now being taken up, to differing degrees, by China, Russia, India, Japan, and President Trump in the United States.

But what is simultaneously required, Zepp-LaRouche emphasized yesterday, is a crash program for the aesthetical education of Man, to provide all of Humanity and its posterity access to classical culture in all its expressions. Krafft Ehricke, the great German-American space scientist, publicly reported that he had joined the board of the international Schiller Institute for just that reason: that along with its commitment to science, it was committed to using classical culture to create what the “Poet of Freedom” Friedrich Schiller called “beautiful souls.”

That outlook, which is the outlook needed to defeat the British Empire’s most deadly weapon of mass destruction, pessimism, was expressed most beautifully by Krafft Ehricke in his 1957 Three Fundamental Laws of Astronautics:

“1) Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on man except man himself.

“2) Not only the Earth, but the entire Solar System,and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are man’s rightful field of activity.

“3) By expanding through the universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself.”

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Bank of England Governor and HSBC Are Steering Oligarchy’s Move into Green Financial Bubble

Aug. 4 (EIRNS)—Among the key forces that created the Green Finance Initiative (GFI) to divert financial flows into Malthusian green projects, to the benefit of the City of London, and the radical reduction of humanity are Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England; the heads of other central banks; and HSBC (the Opium Wars’ Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp.)

It appears that the GFI arose principally as an instrument of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD). The Financial Stability Board was created under the auspices of the G20, to make “policy recommendations to address financial stability risks in securities financing transactions,” according to its website. Its members consist of the heads of the central banks and the Finance Ministers of the world’s major nations. Mario Draghi, the outgoing president of the European Central Bank, was the chairman of the FSB from 2006-2011. From 2012 to the present, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, has been chairman of the FSB.

The FSB was chartered to make warnings about risk, and recommend policy corrections, concerning national banking systems and the world financial system. It has done nothing to shut down the greatest world financial speculative bubble in history, led by the $1.5 quadrillion in derivatives trading. The leaders of the FSB know that their financial system is hopelessly bankrupt. Instead, in December 2015, in order to add some months of existence to this bubble, the FSB created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure, to advise “investors, lenders and insurance about climate related risks.” But using that as a pretext, the TFCD helped spawn in 2016 the Green Finance Initiative to channel what it hopes will be trillions of dollars to green anti-technology investments.

The TFCD’s oligarchical forces work closely with Her Majesty’s government. In July 2019, the British government released a 73-page White Paper, entitled “Green Finance Strategy: Transforming Finance for a Greener Future,” which was principally the work of Philip Hammond, the outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer. The paper asserts that the purpose of its strategy is “consolidating the U.K.’s position as a global hub for green finance,” and “positioning the U.K. at the forefront of green financial innovation and data and analytics.”

The White Paper declares the centrality of Carney’s TFCD, “One of the most influential initiatives to emerge is the Financial Stability Board’s private sector Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD), supported by Mark Carney and chaired by Michael Bloomberg. This has been endorsed by institutions representing $118 trillion of assets globally. An increasingly large proportion of the private sector is now beginning to implement the TFCD recommendations, and in September 2017, the U.K. become one of the first countries to formally endorse them.”

Meanwhile HSBC just announced that it has opened up instruments within the bank “to provide $100 billion in sustainable financing by 2025.”

The EU Climate Policy Has Been Dictated by the Hedge Funds

Aug. 3 (EIRNS)—Christian Thimann, a former manager at AXA (a major French-based insurance firm) and a past adviser to the EU Commission and to the European Central Bank, revealed that the EU climate policy has been dictated by the financial industry. The idea of creating a “Green bubble” to bail out the financial system, and at the same time finance the deindustrialization of Europe, has existed at least since the famous 2006 Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, commissioned by Tony Blair’s government and edited by Nicholas Stern, seen as the bible by most environmentalist factions. But it became concrete only with the 2015 COP21 UN conference in Paris where the concept of diverting capital flows to reach climate targets was introduced.

In a speech at the House of Finance at Goethe University in Frankfurt on July 27, Thimann said: “If you read the [COP21] agreement, suddenly in Article 2 the financial sector is mentioned. It was an issue for ecologists, industrialists, scientists. And suddenly in the 21st session you have a remarkable sentence about finance. It says the following: ‘This Agreement, in enhancing the implementation of the Convention, including its objective, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change … including by … Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.’

“This is now a process that is going on, where the European Commission is asking experts from the private sector: Can you please tell us, how we would do that…? And this is the program that the commission has been working on for two years, which is now being cast into law.”

Thimann goes on to praise the “FridaysForFuture” and “Extinction Rebellion” movements, saying: “And then come the political lessons, when 12 million young people come into the streets and suddenly you have this big topic going.”

Britain Passes Most Extreme Climate Law

Aug. 4 (EIRNS)—At the same time that the City of London maneuvers to make itself the hub of the green anti-technology speculative bubble, it is moving to shut down its physical economy.

On June 25, the Parliament passed into a law a target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which the Vox news website described in its June 27 headline as “the most aggressive climate target in the world.”

Vox wrote, “The United Kingdom signed a target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions into law … becoming the first G7 country to set such a goal, and cementing the most aggressive transition toward clean energy in the world to date…. It is legally-binding based on the recommendations from Parliament’s Committee on Climate Change.” Then Prime Minister Theresa May affixed her signature to make it law.

By being the first to sign such a suicide pact, the British hope to put pressure on other nations to do likewise. Germany’s Angela Merkel is pushing for similar legislation in Germany, and nut-case new EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants to impose this standard upon all of the European Union.

The Vox article stated that regarding the British legislation, “achieving these ambitions means that by 2035, all new cars must be electric. Forests must expand from covering 13% of land today to 17% by 2050. All buildings must be retrofitted and decarbonized. People must consume less meat. Thermostats in the winter should be set no higher than 19° Celsius [66°F].” Other Brits have said that cuts in goods consumption must be deeper.

The new law was passed shortly after the U.K. went for two weeks without burning coal for electricity, the longest stretch without coal since the industrial revolution. The Vox article displayed a chart showing that U.K. CO2 emissions today have fallen to below 1890 levels.

Extinction Rebellion was far from satisfied with this draconian schedule. In a post, the Extinction Rebellion wrote, “Let’s not mince words, 2050 is a death sentence; people are already dying and this will only get worse with far off dates. Were we to put our minds to it to address the threat, the U.K. could embrace transformative change and decarbonize in years not decades.”

The June 25 law makes clear that the British oligarchy is “all in” in making its green financial bubble the dominant—and maybe only—element of the British economy.

New U.S. Threat of 10% Tariffs on $300 Billion of China Imports

Aug. 2 (EIRNS)—Whatever is the rationale behind yesterday’s announcement by President Donald Trump of putting a new 10% tariff on $300 billion of imports from China, with a deadline of going into effect Sept. 1, the timing and impact of the decision is very counter-productive and dangerous. The U.S. trade negotiating team was just returning from talks in Shanghai. China had just announced a commitment for good will purchases of large agriculture imports from the U.S.

Trump made the announcement yesterday, while speaking positively of the process at the end of a long tweet, saying, “We look forward to continuing our positive dialogue with China on a comprehensive Trade Deal, and feel that the future between our two countries will be a very bright one!” However, the guaranteed impact of the uncertainty associated with the new threat of tariffs, is to further chaos. Of course, in the first hours of response, stock indices fell on the exchanges and oil prices dropped. The tariffs threat comes amidst all the signs of a looming financial crash. The major banks are looking to cadge more liquidity through the wave of quantitative easing.

Whether Trump’s economic and trade advisers are the ones who pushed him on this tariff ploy is not publicly known, but it’s what they like to do. They are Peter Navarro, assistant to the President, and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing policy, and Larry Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council. The tariffs move, instead of playing to Trump’s desire to “make a deal,” has the effect to “make a disaster.”

Both advisers have been speaking to the media today. When asked if Trump will proceed on this threat, Kudlow told Fox Business Network: “I have not heard anything definitive. The President’s not satisfied with the progress on the trade deal.” In remarks to Bloomberg TV, Kudlow played down the effect the tariffs would have on U.S. consumers: “Our view is any impact on U.S. consumers is … minuscule, and we have models to show that.”

Navarro was adamant on National Public Radio today, that China will bear the brunt of any tariffs, not Americans: “a 10% tariff will mostly be borne by China in the form of them lowering their prices and devaluing their currency. That’s what they did with the first $250 billion…. What are we to do here as a country when China cheats, steals, and takes our technology which is the seed corn for the future?”

Navarro used the interview time to call for nonpartisan discussion of China’s “aggression,” and “then we have to decide what to do about it. First, uniformed soldiers of the Chinese Army regularly hack into our business computers. If you want to be a business and access the Chinese market, you’re required to hand over your technology. We have hundreds of billions of dollars every year of intellectual property theft….”

Today’s American Journal of Transportation put out a list of 10 immediate bad effects of more tariffs, under the headline, “Tariff Threats Rock Global Economy in 24 Hours of Pain.” It observes that “China has a heavy arsenal of monetary and fiscal policy to counter the damage from new tariffs.”

China Responds Sharply to Announced New U.S. Tariffs, as Pompeo Retails Same Worn Slanders

Aug. 2 (EIRNS)—In response to President Donald Trump’s Twitter announcement that he intended to impose a 10% tariff on $300 billion in Chinese goods imports, State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that adding tariffs “is definitely not a constructive way to solve economic and trade frictions.”

In today’s regular daily briefing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying warned that the tariff announcement “is a serious violation of the consensus reached by the Chinese and U.S. Presidents in Osaka and runs counter to the right direction. It will not be helpful in resolving the issues. China deplores and firmly opposes that. If the U.S. indeed imposes new tariffs, China will have to take necessary countermeasures to uphold its core interests and the fundamental interests of the Chinese people. The U.S. will be responsible for all related consequences.”

Escalating trade frictions and imposing new tariffs, “do not serve the interests of the Chinese people, the American people and the whole world,” Hua stated, and declaring that such action will negatively impact the world economy. “China believes there is no winner in a trade war. We do not want a trade war, but we are not afraid of fighting one. China does not accept any maximum pressure, threat or blackmail. On major issues concerning our principles, we won’t back down even a little bit.” Hua expressed the hope that the U.S. will “give up all illusions, correct its mistakes and return to the right track of resolving differences through consultation on the basis of equality and mutual respect.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo clearly didn’t heed the message. As reported by Reuters, speaking today in Bangkok to a regional youth leadership program, he raved that China is guilty of unfair trade practices “that undermine competition … there have been negative implications for decades of bad behavior from China.” In an undisguised reference to the Belt and Road Initiative, he sermonized that U.S. investments “don’t serve a government … don’t serve a political party, or frankly, a country’s imperial ambitions. We don’t fund bridges to close gaps of loyalty. Ask yourself this, who really encourages self-sufficiency and not dependence? Investors who are working to meet your consumers’ needs, or those you entrap you in debt?”

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

Defense Secretary Esper Declares We Will Now Build Intermediate-Range Missiles for Asia

Aug. 3 (EIRNS)—The newly confirmed Defense Secretary Mark Esper, currently in Australia with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for the annual 2+2 meeting in Sydney, told reporters that with the Aug. 2 end of the U.S. commitment to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, he would like to develop and deploy intermediate-range missiles in Asia as soon as possible. “Yeah, I would like to,” he said, according to AP. “I would prefer months … but these things tend to take longer than you expect…. It’s fair to say, though, that we would like to deploy a capability sooner rather than later.”

He said that Washington will now fully pursue the development of new types of ground-based missiles, to boost the force posture in the Indo-Pacific region to counter China, adding that China should have no complaints, since “80% plus of their inventory is intermediate range systems, so that shouldn’t surprise them that we would want to have a like capability.”

China did respond. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said responded to a question in her briefing Aug. 2, that “if the U.S. resumes the research, development and deployment of intermediate-range missiles, it will severely undermine global strategic balance and stability … disrupt the current process of international nuclear disarmament and multilateral arms control, and threaten peace and security of the relevant region.”

New U.S. Sanctions against Russia over Skripal Case To Enter into Force on Aug. 19

Aug. 3 (EIRNS)—The second round of U.S. sanctions against Moscow over the Skripal case will enter into force on Aug. 19 and remain in place for at least one year, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement released on Aug. 2.

“These measures will take effect following a 15-day Congressional notification period and thereafter remain in place for a minimum of 12 months. The sanctions can only be lifted after this 12-month period if the Executive Branch determines and certifies to the Congress that Russia has met several conditions described in the U.S. Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991,” the statement said.

Russia must give assurances that “it is not making preparations to use chemical weapons, it has provided assurances it will not use chemical weapons in the future, it has allowed international inspectors to verify those assurances, and it has paid restitution to the victims of the Salisbury attack,” she said.

On Aug. 1, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the executive order, which stipulates the procedure of sanctioning the country found to have breached the U.S. Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991. The act was used as a legal justification for slapping the first round of sanctions on Russia over the Skripal case at the end of August in 2018, after Great Britain, offering no evidence, accused Russia of having poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, on March 4, 2018.

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Trump Spoke of ‘Human Space Flight’ Goal in His Cincinnati ‘Keep America Great’ Rally

Aug. 2 (EIRNS)—For the first time in a recent rally President Donald Trump raised the space program as a policy for re-election. He spoke last evening in Cincinnati, to a packed house in the U.S. Bank Arena, for a “Keep America Great” rally. He began the speech, thematically, with rebuilding the inner cities (in light of the Baltimore discussion), then he addressed the trade deals like NAFTA and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), rebuilding steel plants, the immigration crisis, and lowering drug prices with new import abilities. But eventually he came to a short, scripted reference to his space program, stating: “We are investing in the future of human space flight. Americans won the race to the Moon, and we will now win the race to Mars.” He followed off-script with a reference to “winning the race for great, great strategic defense and offense also,” and then moved on to the Iran situation, and many items in his list of accomplishments.

This pointed reference to the space program marks an important change since his last rally in North Carolina, which was largely a speech from 2016 in content, without a vision for the second term, and the same was true for his July 13 visit to Wisconsin. The Cincinnati event is the first time that his rally speech featured his commitment to Moon-Mars human exploration, the clearest policy he has for a successful economic program. It is necessary if not sufficient, and gives us even more reason to escalate the LaRouche PAC petition “We Commit To the Moon-Mars Mission.”

It is also of note, on the green front, that Trump expanded on how he has “ended the war on American energy.” Stating strong support for coal, he ridiculed windmills and solar. On windmills: they kill birds, wear out, need subsidies, are noisy, drive down property values, but “other than that,” he joked, they are OK. “Solar is peanuts,” he dismissed. He extolled the U.S.A. being No. 1 in gas and oil. He did not mention nuclear.

U.S. Economy Jobs Figures Droop, and Non-Financial Corporate Debt Going Bad

Aug. 2 (EIRNS)—The Labor Department report released this morning shows the rate of annual increase of employment in the U.S. economy at 2.24 million in July, as in most months of 2019, down from the rate of 2.6 million annual growth which characterized 2018. The month-to-month growth claimed from June to July was 164,000, which would have improved the rate somewhat, but there were offsetting, downward revisions to previous months.

Growth in goods-producing jobs has fallen more markedly. The annual growth was 370,000 as of July, having been 600,000 as of January. The growth in manufacturing employment was 150,000 for the year to July, having been 270,000 to January. The growth in mining employment (oil, gas, coal) was 74,000 over two years to July, but just 18,000 over one year to July, and was negative 90,000 since 2011. The growth in coal mining employment was 1,500 over the past two years, but negative 28,000 (lost about one-third) over the past ten years.

Steel employment has risen from 82,500 in 2016 to 84,100 in May of 2019, with an increase in capacity utilization; but steel employment was over 90,000 earlier in this decade. There was a big drop from 2014-2016 which has not been recovered.

Overall, there were 6.1 million Americans officially unemployed in July; but the total that includes discouraged, forced part-time, and eligible but dropped out, is two and a half times that, 15.1 million, of whom 4 million are those who “want work” but haven’t looked for work in more than a year.

There is a lot of U.S. non-financial corporate debt going bankrupt now. There have been seven major long-haul trucking companies that declared bankruptcy so far this year. Then there are the coal bankruptcies, which have come in a rush, as coal consumption has dropped to its lowest level in decades.

THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

Excitement Greeting Proposed Central American Train, as Part of Regional Development Program

Aug. 2 (EIRNS)—The proposal to build a Central American train that would connect cities throughout the region, from Panama to Mexico, generated much excitement July 30 when it was announced at the Central American Parliament (Parlacen). The Central American Economic Integration Bank (BCIE) has given the go-ahead for the project that carries a $40 billion price tag, and will require international financing.

Although nothing has been said explicitly about China’s role, there’s little doubt that China’s involvement in building the high-speed rail from Panama City to Chiriqui, on the Costa Rican border, was very much a factor in activating this proposal.

The project is also integral to the Comprehensive Economic Development Plan for Southern Mexico and Central America, devised by the UN’s Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and presented in Mexico on May 20, 2019, with the firm backing of Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador, who insists that the only way to deal with the region’s migration crisis is through economic development.

The project for the “development and modernization” of the Central American railroad system has been discussed as part of Parlacen’s 2018-2019 agenda, but now a broader regional meeting is planned, likely for October, to include leaders from all the participating countries, according to Parlacen’s president, Salvadoran Deputy Irma Amaya, the Argentine daily Infobae reported July 31.

BCIE, which functions in the framework of the Central American Integration System (SICA), will be key in obtaining financing, according to Deputy Amaya, who explained that the project provides a great opportunity for countries such as Qatar and European Union nations to “support this type of megaproject that will absolutely benefit the nations of Central America.” The idea is to enhance “connectivity” of all the region’s nations—Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. No mention has been made of Belize, but it would obviously benefit as well from this project.

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