• Time To Get Off the Planet and Back Into Space
• The Trans-Atlantic Financial System Is Set To Blow, and Britain’s ‘Hard Brexit’ May Light the Fuse
• Preparing for the Worst, China is Diversifying Reserves Away From the Dollar, Writes Global Times
• Mexico President Reiterates He Will Respect the Bank of Mexico’s “Autonomy’
• China Upbraids Pompeo For Interfering in China’s Affairs in the Hong Kong Protests
• Trump 2020 Advisory Board Member Shaffer Defends Tulsi Gabbard’s Right To Sue Google
• Liberal Democrats, Media Froth at Trump’s Naming Ratcliffe To Replace Coats as DNI
• Seminar Unveils Benefits of Joining South America’s Bioceanic Corridor and the Belt and Road
• Scientists Debunk Fraud of Man-Caused Climate Change, Point to Galactic Role in Cloud Cover
• India’s Manufacturers Are Benefitting in Contribution to ITER International Fusion Project

EDITORIAL

Time To Get Off the Planet and Back Into Space

July 30 (EIRNS)—The British Empire’s entire global system is heading for a train wreck, politically and economically, in the short term. Exemplary of the former is the damn-the-torpedoes lunacy emanating from the liberal media and Democrats in the U.S., who insist on pursuing their suicidal course of trying to impeach President Trump in the aftermath of the public discrediting of Robert Mueller’s entire Russiagate gambit.

On their economic bankruptcy, the Federal Open Market Committee meets on July 31, amid increasingly shrill calls for more and more quantitative easing, which will only make the impending systemic blowout that much worse. At the same time, the United Kingdom and Europe are careening towards a hard, no-deal Brexit come Oct. 31, with unpredictable consequences for the thoroughly bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system and its derivatives bubble, in particular.

It’s a good time to get off the Planet Earth and get back to space, to explore, colonize and industrialize the Moon and Mars, as proposed by the German-American space scientist Krafft Ehricke and the great American statesman Lyndon LaRouche. The true impulse for that needed lift-off is the wave of “Moon fever” optimism sweeping the planet on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the July 20th Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.

Such optimism is our most potent weapon, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated in a discussion with associates yesterday. It endows us with the scientific and emotional tools needed to defeat the pessimism induced by the dying British imperial system, and the wars and economic devastation it is unleashing as part of its death rattle.

No better expression of such well-founded optimism than the May 2011 interview that Apollo 13 Astronaut Fred Haise had with elementary and high school students in Huntsville, Alabama, as broadcast on RCSpace Pioneers TV. Haise, the astronaut who was to pilot the Lunar Module on the 1970 Apollo 13 mission which was aborted by an explosion in the Command Module 200,000 miles from Earth, discussed why mankind must think millions of years into the future, to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. The human species is uniquely capable of moving out into the universe to ensure its own survival, Haise stated.

The questions by the students were serious, and Haise’s answers equally so. A young, elementary school boy, for example, asked how they came up with the idea of the gravity-assist slingshot maneuver around the Moon. Haise told him, “We have to give credit to a fellow named Kepler,” the father of celestial mechanics. This was a known capability long before the Apollo program, he pointed out.

Asked if he thinks we need to go to Mars, and should we travel back to the Moon first, Haise demonstrated to these young people just how boldly a courageous scientist thinks:

“I think we ought to go, continually go, as far as we can go, based on the technology we have at hand. If you look very, very long range, and I’m talking maybe millions of years, the Earth is a dynamic body, as we’ve seen recently from what’s happening in Japan with earthquakes; I went through Katrina on the Gulf Coast, a fairly major hurricane recently…

“We are possibly going to someday be facing with a meteorite or comet. For whatever reasons, no one is for sure what happened, but by the fossil trails, five times on Earth all higher forms of life have disappeared, the last being about 60-70 million years ago with the dinosaurs.

“Now we’ve been around evolving about 2 million years, so I’m hoping that we get 200 million years like the dinosaurs before our turn.

“But I consider philosophically, we’ve been given divine providence. We uniquely are the first creatures that could plant this race elsewhere, someday.

“Right now we do not have the capability to do probably much more than go in our own Solar System, to Mars.

“I’m hoping that they will find a star with a friendly planet system, one of which may be livable, similar to our Earth, that eventually we can place people elsewhere. Probably, at least in my vision, with technology, probably the farthest that I can see is something in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, because—one of you is studying astronomy, and it’s a big place. It’s hard to conceive we might do much better than that. But who knows? We’ve gone pretty far in 2 million years. In fact, we’ve gone pretty far in the last 100 years. So I’m hoping that there will be a breakthrough suddenly in propulsion scheme that will enable us someday to do that.”

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

The Trans-Atlantic Financial System Is Set To Blow, and Britain’s ‘Hard Brexit’ May Light the Fuse

July 30 (EIRNS)—Britain’s new Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the European Commission are playing a high-stakes chicken game, as the Oct. 31 Brexit deadline approaches. At issue is control over the unpayable $1.5 quadrillion global derivatives bubble, which is currently dominated by the City of London, and the showdown could well end up with the world financial system going down in flames in the last months of 2019 or the first quarter of 2020—given its underlying bankruptcy.

Already the pound sterling is being hammered this week, Reuters noted, “as investors bet Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit brinksmanship with the European Union could trigger a messy divorce that would sow chaos through the world economy and financial markets.”

Johnson, or BoJo as he is known, came out with guns blazing, giving the EU an ultimatum that he won’t even meet with them unless they are willing to renegotiate the separation deal they had worked out with his predecessor Theresa May. “Chairing his first cabinet meeting, he demanded and received in front of the assembled cameras, in Trump style, a loyalty oath to Brexit by 31 October, do or die, from the members of his ruthlessly selected government. He then gave a bravado performance at the dispatch box in the House of Commons,” wrote Dr. Robin Niblett of RIIA/Chatham House on July 26.

However, the EU is not about to fold, as Niblett explained, “the EU 27 are refusing to yield and are all the less likely to do so for a person many of them regard as an opportunist populist, precisely the type of leader they do not want to encourage across continental Europe.” Instead, the European Commission just issued their own shot across the bow, by announcing, according to the Financial Times, “that Brussels will this week strip five countries of some market access rights, in a move set to heighten British fears that the system the City of London will rely on to serve EU customers after Brexit, fails to offer a stable and permanent regime because it can be withdrawn. According to a document seen by the Financial Times, the European Commission will deem that Canada, Brazil, Singapore, Argentina and Australia no longer regulate credit rating agencies as rigorously as the EU does, removing a status that made it possible for European banks to rely on those ratings…. Brussels has insisted the U.K. will have to rely on equivalence for market access after Brexit, when the financial sector will lose the right to seamlessly offer services across the single market.”

The Express explained clearly just how much is at stake: “The Brussels-based executive can withdraw access to its financial markets with as little as 30 days’ notice. Britain’s financial services hub fear that they could suffer the same fate after Brexit without a permanent regime being negotiated…. Brussels has already said it will grant temporary equivalence for the London Stock Exchange’s clearing house LCH until March next year if there is a no-deal Brexit in October. That has helped the capital retain the bulk of its euro clearing services, which is the market EU politicians said they most wanted to move back to the Continent after Brexit. The EU is the City of London’s biggest customer, with financial services exports worth £26 billion in 2017.”

That is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg; the real issue is that the control of the world derivatives bubble of some $1.5 quadrillion is currently located in the City of London, and Brexit threatens to sink that arrangement.

Preparing for the Worst, China Is Diversifying Reserves Away from the Dollar, Writes Global Times

July 30 (EIRNS)—An article by Hu Weijia in the July 29 Global Times reported that China’s “State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) said in a report published Sunday [July 28] on its website that non-U.S. dollar assets accounted for 42% of China’s total reserves at the end of 2014, higher than the global average of 35%. The share of the assets in the U.S. currency declined from 79% in 1995 to 58% in 2014. Although the SAFE did not provide more recent data, it is believed that the figure has continued its downward spiral in the following years.”

Hu explained that “the diversification of the reserves reflects China’s efforts to develop greater economic endurance against possible U.S. attacks. The ongoing trade war with the U.S. is prompting China to make strategic adjustments for a possible decoupling of its economy from the U.S.” China does not want such a decoupling, but has to prepare for a worst-case scenario. Decoupling “will not be easy and it will also be a lose-lose situation for China and the U.S. to decouple their economies from each other. But China must be prepared for a worst-case scenario where the U.S. uses all possible means to contain China, including cutting off links to China’s strategic sectors. The diversification of China’s reserve holdings is a milestone in the process. It is still too early to predict an outcome, but the trade war highlights the urgency of accelerating the process.”

Mexican President Reiterates He Will Respect the Bank of Mexico’s ‘Autonomy’

July 30 (EIRNS)—Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has again stated that he will respect the so-called “autonomy” of the central bank, thereby condemning the country to some of the highest real interest rates in the world. In a 50-minute interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait in Mexico City, the Mexican President told Bloomberg that “Mexico’s interest rates are too high for a slowing economy, though he added that he respects the central bank’s freedom to set them independently … [and] repeated his vow to respect the central bank’s autonomy.” Bloomberg noted that “Mexico’s central bank has kept its benchmark rate at a decade-high 8.25%, even as inflation eased to below 4%. The result is one of the world’s highest real interest rates…. The longer-run forecasts don’t look promising” for the Mexican President, who has been targeted for destabilization by Wall Street and City of London interests.

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

China Upbraids Pompeo for Interfering in China’s Affairs in the Hong Kong Protests

July 30 (EIRNS)—China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying really went after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his mucking about in his comments on protests in Hong Kong. The following exchange occurred at today’s Foreign Ministry briefing:

A reporter asked: “First question, when responding to a Hong Kong-related question in the Economic Club of Washington D.C., U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that protests are appropriate, and that they often see protests in the United States. He hopes the Chinese government will do the right thing and respect the agreements that are in place with respect to Hong Kong. What’s your comment? What are the agreements he refers to?…”

Ms. Hua replied: “On your first question, first of all, you mentioned Mr. Pompeo said that they often see protests in the U.S. I was wondering if he is happy to see those violent radicals using iron batons and lethal weapons to attack the police in the U.S., too? Maybe it will be a chance for the U.S. to show its democracy? What do you think of that?

“I think Mr. Pompeo obviously failed to put himself in a right position. I’m afraid he still regards himself as the CIA chief. He said the recent violent incidents in Hong Kong are appropriate because, as you all know, they are somehow the work of the U.S.

“Let us think about what has happened. According to public reports, at the end of February and the beginning of March, the then U.S. Consul-General in Hong Kong blatantly criticized the Hong Kong S.A.R. [Special Administrative Region] government’s bill amendment and the ‘one country, two systems’ principle and interfered in Hong Kong affairs. In March, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence met with Hong Kong opposition lobbyists. In May, Pompeo met with Hong Kong opposition and made irresponsible remarks on the amendment matter. In June, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi even called the demonstrations in Hong Kong ‘a beautiful sight to behold.’ Some members of U.S. Congress once again proposed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. In July, Pence, Pompeo and Bolton met with opposition personnel. In the scenes revealed on media, we saw some American faces among the violent demonstrators in Hong Kong. We even saw the national flag of the U.S. on some occasions. We all have this question: what role has the U.S. played inHong Kong recently? The U.S. owes the world an explanation.

“The U.S. has to be clear that we are talking about Hong Kong. It is China’s Hong Kong. Like we stressed many times, the Chinese government will never allow any foreign forces to have a hand in Hong Kong affairs. Neither will we allow them to mess up Hong Kong. The central government firmly supports the S.A.R. government in governing Hong Kong in accordance with law and support Hong Kong police in strictly punishing violent criminals to uphold security and stability in Hong Kong. Those who play fire will only get themselves burned. There have been so many lessons in history. We advise the U.S. to immediately stop playing the dangerous game of pulling chestnuts out of the fire.”

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Trump 2020 Advisory Board Member Shaffer Defends Tulsi Gabbard’s Right To Sue Google

July 30 (EIRNS)—Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer (ret.), a member of Trump’s 2020 Advisory Board, defended Democratic presidential pre-candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to file a $50 million suit against Google on grounds of censorship. Google shut down Gabbard’s advertising account for hours immediately after the first Democratic presidential debate, in which her tenacious attack on “regime change wars” gained her enormous national attention.

“I know Tulsi personally. I don’t always agree with her policies but this is clearly Google trying to put their hand on the scale at a critical time,” Shaffer told Hill.TV yesterday. “She was definitely in a position to make a lot of money, and the idea of her being at a critical moment—essentially for her First Amendment right being taken away—was something that she had every right to go after them.”

Shaffer is the retired military counterintelligence officer, who became famous in 2005 for his exposure of the Pentagon data-mining program known as Able Danger, and whose memoirs of U.S. secret operations in Afghanistan, Operation Dark Heart, had its entire first run purchased and destroyed by the Defense Department in 2010. He twice joined the late Rep. Walter Jones, EIR, other retired military, and constitutional lawyers in press conferences on Capitol Hill, in (first) insisting that the Constitutional mandate for Congress to declare war be adhered to (2011), and (second) opposing U.S. military operations in Syria (2012).

Gabbard served for a 12-month tour in the Iraq War, and a second tour in Southwest Asia, holds the rank of Major in the Army National Guard.

Liberal Democrats, Media Froth at Trump’s Naming Ratcliffe To Replace Coats as DNI

July 30 (EIRNS)—The New York Times yesterday published an article “revealing” that the real reason Dan Coats “quit” as President Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is because the White House suppressed his reports about purported “Russian interference” in the 2018 U.S. elections. Newsweek similarly ran a splashy article about “Fox News analyst” Mary Anne March (who actually turns out to have been a senior adviser to then-Sen. John Kerry) warning that the appointment of Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) to replace Coats “is Trump locking down the intelligence community for his purposes, not national security purposes,” suggesting darkly that the President “appeared to be consolidating his control over the U.S. intelligence community.” To prove how biased Ratcliffe is, Newsweek quoted him as saying during the July 24 Mueller hearings:

“So Americans need to know this, as they listen to the Democrats and socialists on the other side of the aisle, as they do dramatic readings from this report: that Volume 2 of this report [on obstruction] was not authorized under the law to be written. It was written to a legal standard that does not exist at the Justice Department. And it was written in violation of every DOJ principle about extra-prosecutorial commentary.”

While defending Trump, Ratcliffe did, however, give credence to the lie that Russia “meddled” in the U.S. elections—a lie which the liberal Democrats totally endorse.

THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

Seminar Unveils Benefits of Joining South America’s Bioceanic Corridor and the Belt and Road

July 30 (EIRNS)—The Chilean municipality of Iquique, in the north of Chile, organized a two-day regional seminar on July 25-26 to explore the development potential of integrating the global Belt and Road and South America’s Bioceanic Corridor. Most notable was that no one bioceanic route was emphasized, but representatives from all six countries involved in various possible bioceanic road and rail projects under consideration—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru—were invited. Typically, the routes are treated as competing with one another.

Government representatives at the deputy minister level, politicians, businessmen and academics from all of the six nations except Paraguay were reported as present, joined by China’s Consul General in Iquique, and other Chinese diplomats from the Embassy.

Iquique’s Mayor Mauricio Soria pointed to the potential offered by connecting this central region of South America, which he said represents one of the largest reserves of food and raw material in the world, to Asian-Pacific markets through the Belt and Road. Soria described the Bioceanic Corridor as being like the Belt and Road, because the integration that will result will benefit the people of the region, as it gives rise to building roads, waterways, railroads, ports, airports, fiber optic, and energy connections.

Bolivia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Maria del Carmen Almendras praised the Belt and Road for bringing in its wake “an innovative and prosperous path for all our peoples.”

Xinhua reported that in closing the conference, China’s Consul General Chen Ping emphasized that “Belt and Road cooperation, which puts emphasis on infrastructure, will help realize the great connection between the two continents separated by the Pacific.”

SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Scientists Debunk Fraud of Man-Caused Climate Change, Point to Galactic Role in Cloud Cover

July 30 (EIRNS)—Two Finnish scientists from the University of Turku’s Department of Physics and Astronomy released a preprint paper on June 29, titled “No Experimental Evidence for the Significant Anthropogenic Climate Change.” The two, J. Kauppinen and P. Malmi, argue that by failing to include the influence of galactic cosmic radiation on low-level cloud cover, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) exaggerates the role of greenhouse gases in changing temperatures. As Henrik Svensmark and others have noted, a global cloud cover change of a few percent can naturally cause the climate variations seen over the past century. Kauppinen and Malmi are adamant: “computational results” of computer climate models do notconstitute “experimental evidence.”

Only one day before, a team of four scientists led from the Research Center for Inland Seas at Japan’s Kobe University, published a report in Scientific Reports on their examination of the geological record at the time of the last geomagnetic reversal transition 780,000 years ago, looking for evidence of the impact of cosmic rays on the Earth’s climate. Their intent was to confirm the “Svensmark Effect,” the hypothesis that galactic cosmic rays induce low cloud formation and thereby determine the climate. (However, it should be noted that variations in the Earth’s magnetic field are thought to have a minimal contribution to the “Svensmark Effect”—when compared with solar and galactic changes.)

In the summary of this paper posted by Kobe University, authors Hyodo Masayuki and Ueno Yusuke from Kobe University, Yang Tianshui from China’s University of Geosciences, and Katoh Shigehiro from the Museum of Nature and Human Activities in Hyogo, Japan, explain their thinking: that because the Earth’s magnetic strength fell by more than three-quarters during the geomagnetic reversal transition period, galactic cosmic rays increased by over 50% in that 5,000 year period, which, if the Svensmark hypothesis is correct, would have increased cloud cover and thereby affected the climate sufficiently to be found in the geological record. They chose to examine evidence from two sites in the Chinese Loess Plateau, just south of the Gobi Desert, for changes in the loess layers (sediment created by the accumulation of wind-blown silt) around that time. The changes in sediment layers and areas of distribution uncovered did indeed demonstrate evidence of significantly stronger winter monsoons, which they associate with the effects of increased cloud cover.

India’s Manufacturers Are Benefitting in Contribution to ITER International Fusion Project

July 30 (EIRNS)—A number of Indian manufacturers are actively involved in the International Thermal Experimental Reactor (ITER) nuclear fusion research and engineering project that will be the world’s biggest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in the process of setting up in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, in southern France, according to an article posted by IANS news agency.

The 1,250-ton cryostat base, the initial two segments of which have been built by Mumbai-based multinational Larsen and Toubro (L&T), is India’s biggest single procurement contribution so far. The cryostat base will be the first machine component to be brought down into the assembly pit in March 2020. The upper cylinder is being assembled in L&T’s India facility. “The ITER facility offers industry and scientific community an unparalleled opportunity to exhibit its strength, to develop and to learn how to deliver the energy of future,” ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot revealed to IANS a week ago in L&T’s cryostat workshop.

Besides the cryostat, a number of Indian public and private sector companies, including INOX India Ltd, Engineers India Ltd, Tata Consultancy Services, and Avsarala Technologies, are involved in various other aspects of the project. “Besides cryostat, Indian companies are providing all cooling systems, cryolines, warmlines, neutron seals and many other components. So we can proudly say that Indian industry is doing very well in terms of delivery of equipment for the project,” Bigot said.

Biswanath Sarkar, who is the head of cooling systems engineering division, told IANS that approximately 30 Indian firms are directly and indirectly involved. This has provided direct and indirect employment to thousands of skilled engineers and technicians and unskilled manpower.

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