THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 2019 Volume 6, Number 161 EIR Daily Alert Service P.O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390

• ‘China Is Not Our Problem’: We Need To Collaborate in Space and on Belt and Road
• China’s Yang Jiechi and Pompeo Meet in New York, Issue No Statements
• President Trump Rallies for Recarbonization-Dump the Windmills, ‘We’re a Nation of Builders’
• Mixed-up McConnell Joins Anti-Trump Gang on Hong Kong, After They Made Death Threats
• Panicked Argentine President Seeks $20 Billion Loan From U.S. Treasury as Economy Unravels
• India’s Chandravaan-2 in Lunar Orbit, Heads for Lunar South Pole Landing on Sept. 7
• In China, You’re Allowed To Discuss the Sun’s Effect on Climate!
• Pakistan Foreign Minister Requests UN Security Council Meeting on Jammu and Kashmir
• U.S. Ambassador Huntsman Says U.S. and Russia Should Not Stop Dialogue on Arms Control
• Extinction Rebellion, FridaysForFuture Organize Their Mass Death Movement in Ibero-America

EDITORIAL

‘China Is Not Our Problem’: We Need To Collaborate in Space and on Belt and Road

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—“China is not our problem,” tweeted President Donald Trump today as Treasury interest rates plunged into recession territory, German’s industrial economy was reported contracting, and the Wall Street stock market plunged 800 points.

That was completely true, contrary to the propaganda over Hong Kong coming from London and from the U.S. Congress.

The President was reacting as the financial media screamed today that the Treasury’s “main yield curve” (the 10-year vs. the 2-year note) has inverted, giving the sign of recession. Treasury’s 10-year note interest was at 1.56%, just 0.07% above its lowest ever, while the 30-year bond yield is lower than ever before. Clearly neither saving nor productive investment is going on—business capital investment actually shrank in recent months. American workers’ real weekly wages are now down for the year after falling −0.3% in July, and all measures of freight traffic have dropped along with total industrial production. Waiting ahead, through a forest of bankruptcies of overindebted companies, is a financial crash.

The second part of the President’s tweet, “Our problem is with the Fed,” is beating a—literally—dead horse. The central banks endlessly kept interest rates near zero and printed masses of new money for Wall Street and London to speculate the “everything bubble” into being for the next crash. Fear of that crash—not fear of President Trump—is now driving them back down to zero and negative rates.

Unless—something is done to create investment in new, revolutionary industrial technologies, high-technology economic infrastructure, and rapid productivity growth—generating the new value from human creativity to overcome the bankruptcies and bursting bubbles.

“Not enough China” is a way to see our problem. In the simplest sense, the world’s leading engine of economic productivity and growth since the 2008 crash, has been cut off from trans-Atlantic economics by investment bans, trade war, and refusal to join its Belt and Road infrastructure great projects in Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America. China’s currency has been speculated down in value, cutting its investment capabilities.

But the solution to “our problem” is at a higher level of human endeavor.

To get out of this mess, more collaboration is needed with China, India, and Russia in a new international crash program to achieve Moon-Mars missions and breakthroughs in fusion power, along with plasma and laser technologies. These nations can lead others in creating a new credit system for international joint investments. They develop nuclear technologies; they reject the Green mania that gives up human lives to “save the planet.” They foresee the human race further developing not only this planet but also others.

President Trump spoke, after the Aug. 3-4 mass shootings in the United States, of the difficult necessity of “changing the culture.” This international Moon-Mars and fusion power fast-track program will bring out the creativity, the productivity, and the optimism of especially younger Americans, that he had to be looking for.

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

China’s Yang Jiechi and Pompeo Meet in New York, Issue No Statements

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi held talks in New York on Aug. 13, according to South China Morning Post. A brief statement released by Xinhua news agency said Yang had exchanged views with Pompeo on the relationship between China and the U.S., without elaborating. The U.S. State Department also released a brief statement without giving details about the meeting.

The SCMP cites Shen Dingli, a professor of U.S. studies at Fudan University as commenting that the meeting was an indication that both sides were seeking to prevent their confrontations spiraling out of control. “Though the two countries seem to be enlarging their scope of differences, they still understand the need to control and narrow such differences whenever possible,” Shen said, suggesting that the situation in Hong Kong and the year-long trade war were on the agenda. “On Hong Kong, China would ask the U.S. not to intervene, while the U.S. would ask China to restrain,” he said.

Wu Xinbo, director of Fudan University’s Centre for American Studies, commented that rather than trade, which is not the responsibility of either diplomat, the meeting represented a show of goodwill after disagreements over Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan further deteriorated the China-U.S. relationship. “This meeting will not be very useful, but shows that both sides can still manage to talk,” Wu said. “Even though Donald Trump has said China can handle the situation in Hong Kong and he is not interested in the city, other politicians are seeking to intervene in it. Trump cannot control them and will not stop them.”

Wu was referring to Trump’s comments on Aug. 13 when he said the situation in Hong Kong was “tricky,” but he hoped it would work out for everybody, including China. He also tweeted that the Chinese government was moving troops to the border of Hong Kong, citing U.S. intelligence.

Clayton Dube, director of the University of Southern California U.S.-China Institute, said the Yang-Pompeo talks would be focused on Hong Kong, North Korea and Iran. “The fact that the exchange of views was not characterized by either side as useful or constructive suggests each simply made sure the other understood their point of view,” Dube said.

President Trump Rallies for Recarbonization—Dump the Windmills, ‘We’re a Nation of Builders’

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—Speaking yesterday in Monaco, Pennsylvania at the Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemical Complex, a jovial President Donald Trump enthusiastically hailed what he called “a revolution in American energy,” that has occurred under his administration.

While repeating his mistaken perception that the U.S. economy is the best and “hottest in the world,” he nonetheless lavished praise on the workers present, whose productivity, he said, has been increased by his administration’s lifting of “burdensome regulations” that unfairly punished American workers. Now, he said, there is an unstoppable production of natural gas, oil, coal and steel, and more than 520,000 new manufacturing jobs created since 2016.

Trump described the Shell petrochemical complex as the single-biggest construction project in the country, producing “clean, affordable, all-American natural gas.” Forget about the windmills, which kill birds, destroy property values and stop producing power when the wind stops blowing, he said. “We’re not only unleashing American energy, we’re restoring the glory of American manufacturing, and we are reclaiming our noble heritage as a nation of builders again. A nation of builders.”

For generations, the President emphasized, “American greatness was forged and fueled and won by the extraordinary workers of this region.” Pennsylvania steel “raised the skyscrapers that built our cities…. We have to have a steel industry…. Miners lit up our towns and powered our industries; Pennsylvania factory workers made the American brand into the universal symbol of excellence all around the world.”

Trump told the Shell workers that the American political class, under previous administrations, “gutted your factories with horrendous trade deals,” such as NAFTA. The Paris Climate Accord, signed by the Obama Administration, “would have taken away our wealth.” Now, he vowed, “my administration is clearing the way for other massive, multibillion-dollar investments,” for LNG, and other energy sources to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

As for the Democrats and their presidential candidates, “They have radical plansto wipe out our coal.” Remember Hillary Clinton’s attack on coal in West Virginia, he recalled. “They want to wipe out our natural gas industries…. Virtually every leading Democrat has vowed to eliminate our fossil fuels, obliterating millions of American jobs, devastating communities and bankrupting factories.”

“Our vision,” Trump said, “is pro-worker, pro-jobs, pro-family, pro-growth, pro-energy, and 100 percent pro-American.”

Mixed-up McConnell Joins Anti-Trump Gang on Hong Kong, after They Made Death Threats

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—Exactly who, or what, controls the mind of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), is hard to figure. That he is not in his right mind is clear.

A week ago, “never-Trump” protesters were lodged on the front porch of McConnell’s home, excoriating him for blocking gun-control legislation, and making explicit and obscene death threats against him. One protester said that he wished that McConnell, who was recovering from a broken shoulder, had “broken his neck” instead. Another one talked about stabbing McConnell in the heart.

McConnell was outraged over the protests, and over Twitter’s subsequent suspension of his account, because he posted a video of the obscenity-laden threats against him.

Yet, in the past two days, he’s joined with those same anti-Trump forces, including many Congressional zombies, who are using the Hong Kong protests to force the President into a confrontation against China—which Trump has so far refused to do. And in Hong Kong, the rioters are using the same violent tactics that were used to threaten McConnell.

McConnell retweeted yesterday a statement he made on the Senate floor on July 23, that “Beijing should seek to emulate Hong Kong. Not to engulf Hong Kong and remake it in the image of the Chinese Communist Party.” Rioters’ increasing violence, which he called “protests,” are continuing he boasted, as “Increasingly brutal police tactics and pro-Mainland vigilantes are drawing blood in an effort to intimidate Hong Kongers back into submission…. The world is watching and wondering: If a government cannot respect the basic rights of people it claims as its own citizens, why on Earth would it be trusted to respect the rights and interests of its neighbors, its trading partners, or the companies that invest in its economy?”

There’s no difference between what McConnell has stated this week and the ravings from Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mitt Romney (R-UT), or Mark Warner (D-VA), all of whom claim China’s “repression” of “peaceful pro-democracy” Hong Kong rioters, is representative of Communist Party authoritarianism and “anti-Western” values—which they then blame on President Trump.

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Panicked Argentine President Seeks $20 Billion Loan from U.S. Treasury as Economy Unravels

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—Veteran Argentine reporter Marcelo Bonelli reported yesterday that the failed government of neoliberal Mauricio Macri, who suffered a humiliating defeat in the Aug. 11 primaries, will now appeal to the Trump Administration for an urgent $20 billion loan, to weather the uncontrollable financial and currency instability wracking the country. On Aug. 12, on Macri’s orders, Finance Minister Nicolas Dujovne spoke with the U.S. Treasury, while Central Bank Governor Guido Sandleris called the IMF, to request permission for the Central Bank to sell dollars to stabilize the currency—otherwise prohibited by the current $57 billion IMF standby agreement.

Yesterday, in announcing a package of emergency measures to remain in effect until at least October, Macri apologized for his Aug. 12 remarks when, in a replay of Hillary Clinton’s infamous attack on Donald Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” he blamed those who voted for Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in the Aug. 11 primaries, for causing the next day’s crash of the markets and currency devaluation. The Fernández-Fernández ticket won by 47.7% to Macri’s 32%.

Macri’s emergency measures include a 90-day freeze of fuel prices, tax breaks for small and medium-sized businesses, a reduction in workers’ income taxes, and additional subsidies to aid middle-class and low-income families, and appear to be a desperate attempt to win back voters for the first round of presidential elections on Oct. 27, promising to “do better.”

To no avail. The markets crashed again today; the peso devaluation continued, moving the exchange rate from 58 to 61 pesos/dollar, while speculators, hedge funds and others of their ilk scrambled to pull their money out of the country. Reserves are dropping precipitously—today they fell by $500 million, and over the past three weeks, by $3.5 billion

On Aug. 12, one day after the primaries, Morgan Stanley sent a memo to its clients predicting another 20% devaluation of the peso, which would bring it to 70/dollar, and emphasized the threat of default.

SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

India’s Chandrayaan-2 in Lunar Orbit, Heads for Lunar South Pole Landing on Sept. 7

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—The first spacecraft intended to land at the Moon’s south polar region has passed successfully from Earth orbit and entered what is called the Lunar Transfer Trajectory. Chandrayaan-2, of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), carried out its “trans-lunar insertion” maneuver today, after being raised to higher and higher Earth orbits. ISRO confirmed that with a 20-minute burn of its liquid fuel, the Chandrayaan-2 completely the maneuver.

In March 2010, ISRO announced that its analysis of data obtained by the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) onboard Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in October 2008, provided evidence for the presence of ice deposits near the Moon’s North Pole. The Mini-SAR instrument found more than 40 small craters (2-15 km in diameter) with sub-surface water ice located at their base. The interior of these craters is in permanent Sun shadow. In September 2009, the U.S. Moon Mineral Mapper aboard Chandrayaan-1 detected a thin layer of water ice virtually all over the lunar surface, which waxed and waned with the lunar day and night.  Two months later, results were announced from the October 2009 crash of a U.S. spent rocket stage into a region near the South Pole of the Moon, providing indisputable evidence for water ice inside South Pole craters, where Chandrayaan-2 will become the first to land. Its lander is expected to touch down on the lunar surface on Sept. 7, 2019.

In China, You’re Allowed To Discuss the Sun’s Effect on Climate!

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—Happily, scientists in China are able to publish discussions of the long-term role of solar activity on the climate, unlike those in trans-Atlantic countries who are censored when they bring up the subject, as in the case of Forbes’s deletion of Doron Levin’s interview with Israeli astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, reported in the Aug. 13 issue of EIR Daily Alert.  On Aug. 11 Asia Times and South China Morning Post were among a number of Asian media to report on newly written report accepted for publication by a group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences headed by Dr. Wu Jing.

Based on a close study of sediment layers around lakes in Inner Mongolia, Wu’s team found evidence of nearly 6,000 years of uneven but steady warming of the climate—clearly unconnected to the rise of industrial society, as the SCMP observed. This is accompanied by increasing and more developed biomass in that region over that 6,000 years.

Within that long period, the CAS team investigated a less well-defined cycle in the rate of climate variation, repeating over intervals of about 500 years. And this cycle, they linked to variations in solar activity and cosmic ray flux.  Dr. Wu forecast the cooling part of the 500-year cycle before the end of this century.

Not only that, but Dr. Wu’s team was confirming the findings of another CAS group of seven researchers which published in 2014 inNature, also after study of sediments at a volcanic lake in northern China. This study was described Aug. 11 by the SCMP. It also found a roughly 500-year climate cycle (for China), and reported: “Atmospheric responses to reduced solar irradiance could lead to the coincident increases in North Atlantic drift ice, reduces … NADW [North Atlantic Deep Water] intensity, cooling of both the ocean surface and high-latitude continent around North Atlantic and North Pacific, and trigger the negative state of Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation (AO/NAO). When TSI [total solar irradiance] reduced (increased), northern high-latitude terrestrial region experienced cool (warm) climate. This effect could lead to the increases (decreases) [of] drift ice and weaken (strengthen) the variability of NADW.”

Footnotes are removed here, but the team cites a number of predecessor studies of solar influence on climate, not including those of Svensmark or Shaviv.

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

Pakistan Foreign Minister Requests UN Security Council Meeting on Jammu and Kashmir

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—Tension between Pakistan and India over India’s revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status continues. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi addressed a letter to UN Security Council (UNSC) President Joanna Wronecka (Poland) stating: “I wish to request that you convene an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council … to consider the situation arising from the recent aggressive actions by India which pose a threat to international peace and security, willfully undermine the internationally recognized disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir, unilaterally aim to alter the demographic structure of the territory, and violate fundamental human rights,” the Aug. 13 letter said.

Qureshi pointed to the curfew, a cut-off of all communication services, the arrests of numerous Kashmiri political leaders, closures of educational facilities, and advice to hospitals to “prepare for emergencies.” He wrote that since Aug. 5 additional human rights violations have occurred, including Indian troops killing and injuring scores of unarmed citizens who breached the curfew. “There is, furthermore, a clear and present danger that India will provoke another conflict with Pakistan to divert attention from its recent actions in occupied Jammu and Kashmir,” the letter said.

The restrictions imposed in the Kashmir valley will continue for some time while those in Jammu have been completely removed, a top police officer said today, reported Press Trust of India, and further that the situation in Jammu and Kashmir is totally under control and there have been no major injuries to anyone.

Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Asad Majeed Khan told the New York Times that he doesn’t rule out the possibility that Pakistani troops will be redeployed from the Afghanistan border to the Kashmir frontier. “If the situation escalates on the eastern border, we will have to undertake redeployments,” Khan pointed out, but right now, Islamabad is “not thinking about anything but what is happening on our eastern border…. We are two big countries, with very large militaries, with nuclear capability and a history of conflict, so I would not like to burden your imagination on that one. But obviously if things get worse, things get worse,” Ambassador Khan said.

Indian Army Chief Gen. Bipin Rawat responded to concern about the movement of Pakistani military equipment near the Line of Control, being quoted by Sputnik yesterday as telling reporters: “Everybody does a precautionary deployment, and we should not get too concerned about it. As far as the Army and other services are concerned, we always have to be prepared.”

U.S. Ambassador Huntsman Says U.S. and Russia Should Not Stop Dialogue on Arms Control

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—Jon Huntsman, the outgoing American Ambassador to Russia, told Echo of Moscow radio station in an interview that the U.S. and Russia should not stop dialogue on arms control. According to RT, he also stressed that Washington has no plans to deploy intermediate-range and shorter-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

Citing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Huntsman said that if the U.S. does deploy such missiles, they’ll most likely be deployed in the Asia-Pacific region.

OTHER

Extinction Rebellion, FridaysForFuture Organize Their Mass Death Movement in Ibero-America

Aug. 14 (EIRNS)—The Malthusians from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and its allied FridaysForFuture movement have been organizing in Ibero-America for almost a year, demanding that these underdeveloped nations cease thinking about industrialization and instead kill off their “excess” populations. XR has organizations in nine Ibero-American nations—Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico and Chile.

Not surprisingly, Brazil, with its giant industrialization potential and scientific capabilities is a prime target, using “defense of the Amazon” as a pretext. Keep in mind that in recent years, China has increased its presence in Ibero-America and the Caribbean through the Belt and Road Initiative.

On Aug. 13, XR-Spain held a “die in” in front of the Brazilian Embassy in Madrid—similar action took place in other capitals—demanding that the Brazilian government act to prevent the “accelerating extinction” of the Amazonian rainforest. In a letter to the Bolsonaro government, XR dictated ultimata that must be met by Dec. 31, or it will resort to more radical action, including an international boycott of Brazil “which would harm its economy.” Among XR’s demands were “telling the truth” to Brazilians about the ecology crisis, convening a citizen assembly to address the climate crisis, declaring a climate emergency, and acting to protect the biodiversity of the Amazon forest.

In Chile, whose economic, political and trade ties with China are very strong, climate insanity appears to have taken hold. In December, Chile will host the UN’s COP25 summit, welcoming Swedish child-abuse victim Greta Thunberg as a leading participant. XR has been operating in Chile since early 2019.

On Aug. 12, EFE Verde, reported, Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt and Energy Minister Juan Carlos Jobet announced that Chile has decided to completely decarbonize by 2040, boasting that Chile is the first developing nation to commit to this policy. Jobet emphasized that shutting down all coal-powered plants will eliminate 25% of all emissions of greenhouse gases in the country (although likely not considering the effect on the rainforest biodiversity of removing what it breathes).

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