TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2019 Volume 6, Number 244 EIR Daily Alert Service P.O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390

• Pelosi Exposes Herself as Apologist for Genocide, Unfit To Discuss Impeachment of President Trump
• Lindsey Graham Excoriates DOJ, Calls It a Criminal Enterprise, Reminiscent of J. Edgar Hoover
• GOP Senate Chairs Grassley and Johnson Demand FBI and Justice Dept. Info on Chalupa
• Anti-Russia Propaganda Campaign Even Failing Within U.S. Military
• Not Just in Poverty Eradication, China Also Leads the World in Education Promotion
• Helga Zepp-LaRouche Addresses Beijing Ceremony To Launch ”CGTN Think Tank’
• Central Banks Act as If the Crash Is Nigh, While BIS ‘Explains’ Repo Crisis
• Pentagon Documents LEaked to Washington Post Reveal Total Failure in Afghanistan
• Test of Long March 5 Prepares Next Phase of Chinese Space Program
• COP25 Meeting in Madrid Drops the Mask of the Real Enemy, the Global Green New Deal

EDITORIAL

Pelosi Exposes Herself as Apologist for Genocide, Unfit To Discuss Impeachment of President Trump

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—In a reversal of her earlier position against impeaching President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now insisting the House of Representatives file impeachment charges against the President for alleged abuse of power. She claims, in spite of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s assertion that there was no quid pro quo making military aid conditional on the investigation of Joe Biden (which aid has been delivered, without the investigation): “The facts are uncontested. The President abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of our national security, by withholding military aid and a crucial Oval Office meeting in exchange for an announcement of an investigation into his political rival.”

Pelosi, in her response to an audience member at her Dec. 5 CNN town hall meeting, exposed herself either as a deliberate liar, or as a person with a remarkable ability to bend the facts to suit her agenda, regardless of the consequences.

She admitted that in her capacity as Ranking Member of the Intelligence Committee, she opposed the impeachment of President Bush, despite the fact she knew that the basis of the Iraq War was false: “So, I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. It just wasn’t there. They had to show us they had to show the Gang of Four all the intelligence they had. The intelligence did not show that that was the case. So, I knew it was a misrepresentation to the public. But having said that, it was, in my view, not a ground for impeachment.”

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, based on lies which, as Nancy Pelosi now reveals, she knew to be lies in 2003, resulted in more than 1 million Iraqi deaths (around 275,000 direct deaths from the war itself, with an equal number wounded, causing, in the post-war period, more than 1 million civilians to die of starvation and disease), as well as the deaths of over 8,000 American soldiers and contractors, not to mention the devastation of hundreds of thousands of American families whose loved ones are now suffering PTSD or have ended it all by committing suicide, at the rate of 22 veterans per day. The Iraq War also contributed substantially to the refugee crisis, which has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of additional families, while shattering the credibility of Western values, human rights and democracy in the entire world.

One can only agree with President Trump on this point, that the Iraq War, as part of the post-9/11 policy of endless wars, at a cost of $7 trillion—a sum which was thus not invested in the physical economy of the United States—has been the biggest mistake in U.S. history. As recently as two years ago, Pelosi apparently agreed with President Trump on this point. On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Nov. 3, 2017, she had said that impeaching President Trump “is not someplace that I think we should go.” She added that many on the left were upset at her for not impeaching President George W. Bush in the wake of the Iraq War. “What could be worse than that?” (i.e., worse than lying to start the Iraq War) she asked.

• The fact is, Pelosi did not expose what she has now admitted was a misrepresentation to the public in order to prevent this terrible Iraq War.
• Be it memory lapses, or an estranged relationship to truth, Pelosi has zero credibility in respect to the demand for impeaching President Trump. If she has only a shred of conscience left, she should start paying war reparations to the Iraqi people and American families who lost their loved ones as a result of her complicity in that war.
• She has no authority to speak on impeachment and should end the fraudulent impeachment attempt against President Trump.

[Iraq casualty figures are from the Costs of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University; surveys by The Lancet (2004 and 2006); ORB International, 2007; and on-the-ground sources.]

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Lindsey Graham Excoriates DOJ, Calls It a Criminal Enterprise, Reminiscent of J. Edgar Hoover

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—Sen. Lindsey Graham gave a short but brutal press conference this afternoon, about his conclusions based on certain facts set forth in the FISA report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Graham said that the FBI and DOJ became a criminal enterprise with respect to Donald Trump’s campaign and, for a period of time, relived the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover.

The Senator reviewed two facts presented by Horowitz. First, the FBI interviewed Trump dossier author, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s main Russian sub-source in January 2017, and was told that what that sub-source had told Steele was a mixture of gossip, hearsay, and barroom speculation, that he never understood would be used in any official document. Yet, the FBI told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, after this interview, that the same FBI sub-source had vouched for Steele, and was completely reliable himself. As Graham said, that was an outright lie.

Second, Graham highlighted the fact that Carter Page was an operational asset of the Central Intelligence Agency at the same time as the FBI was calling him a Russian agent in order to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign.

Graham’s full press conference can be found here is available on C-Span.

GOP Senate Chairs Grassley and Johnson Demand FBI and Justice Dept. Info on Chalupa

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—The Republican U.S. Senate chairmen of the Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees, sent a letter in late November to the FBI and Justice Department demanding information on the role of former Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa in seeking dirt from Ukraine on the Trump campaign in 2016, Marianne Levine reported in Politico on Nov. 22. Levine reported that Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had also made the demand for information to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray, citing the 2017 Politico report that Chalupa had met with Ukrainian officials to discuss ties between Russia and President Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Both Senators also referenced separate news reports that Chalupa had spoken with the FBI after her email was hacked during the time she worked at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

“If this reporting is accurate,” the Senators wrote, “it appears that the DOJ and FBI have in their possession material relevant to our Committees’ ongoing investigation into collusive actions Chalupa and the DNC took to use foreign government sources to undermine the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

Both Senators also sent a letter on Nov. 22 to the National Archives and Records Administration asking for White House records of 2016 meetings between Obama Administration officials, Ukrainian government representatives, and DNC officials.

Since House Democrats’ impeachment efforts rely on evidence that Trump used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, some Republicans have suggested that Ukraine’s government helped Hillary Clinton. In September, Grassley and Johnson requested that Attorney General Bob Barr investigate ties between Ukraine and Ukrainian political operatives.

Anti-Russia Propaganda Campaign Even Failing within U.S. Military

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—Is the anti-Russia propaganda campaign starting to wear a little thin? Even in the U.S. military? The Voice of America cites (negatively) the second annual Reagan National Defense Survey, completed in late October, which found that nearly half of armed services households questioned, 46%, said they viewed Russia as an ally. Generally, the pollsters found the positive views of Russia seemed to be “predominantly driven by Republicans who have responded to positive cues from President Trump about Russia,” according to an executive summary accompanying the results, VOA reports.

This seems to be a problem for the Pentagon. “There is an effort, on the part of Russia, to flood the media with disinformation to sow doubt and confusion,” Defense Department spokesperson Lt. Col. Carla Gleason told VOA. “This is not only through discordant and inflammatory dialogue but through false narratives designed to elicit sympathetic views,” she said, adding, “we are actively working to expose and counter Russian disinformation whenever possible.”

Zero Hedge website suggests there may be other, reasons for increasingly positive views of Russia among the rank-and-file in the U.S. military that are more realistic but never discussed in the mass media. “Perhaps American soldiers are simply sick and tired of the U.S. military and intelligence machine’s legacy of ashes across the globe and recognize the inconvenient fact that Russia most often has been on the complete opposite side of Washington’s disastrous regime change wars,” Zero Hedge reports. “Perhaps U.S. military households are also smart enough to know the Cold War is long over, and only bad things can come from a direct confrontation with Russia, not to mention that involvement in proxy war in Ukraine has nothing to do with America’s national defense or to ‘protect and defend the Constitution.’ ”

THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

Not Just in Poverty Eradication, China Also Leads the World in Education Promotion

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—The 2018 report on education of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been released, and China is at the top—again and again. The PISA is a worldwide survey of education, sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which assesses 39 million 15-year-old students in 79 countries, every three years since 2000. Not only is China at the top in all three categories tested—reading, mathematics and science—but in science China is so far ahead as to see no one behind them. PISA puts this all together in a 64-page report with charts and numbers; the full report fills three volumes, with three more yet to be released.

Probably the most notable issue here is that there is a direct relation between economic income and education level. Quoting the report: “In many countries, the quality of the education a student acquires can still best be predicted by the student’s or his or her school’s socio-economic background.” In reading scores, for example, the difference between the highest and lowest income brackets amounted to “the equivalent of over three years of schooling.” Fully 10 million students in these 79 countries “were not able to complete even the most basic reading tasks,” primarily because of the low level of education in poor countries. Here, China’s having lifting at least 800 million of its citizens out of poverty, by itself, allowed the country to improve education levels. The two countries at the bottom of all three rankings of the study were the Philippines and the Dominican Republic.

As to direct comparison between China and the world, the report says, “students in four provinces/municipalities of China—Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang—outperformed their peers in all of the other 78 participating education systems—in mathematics and science by a wide margin, and in reading, only Singapore came close…. What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD [European] average.”  In comparisons over the 18 years of six PISA reports, only three countries—Jordan, China (Macao) and Russia—showed continuously increasing scores (in reading). The United States was among a dozen countries whose reading scores had flatlined—no improvement since 2000.

In the “honorable mention” category, PISA observes that Albania, the Moldova, Peru and Qatar, while still below statistical “average,” saw remarkable improvement in the last three years. Turkey is also noted for having increased national enrollment percentages between 2003 and 2018 “from 36% to 73% during that period.” Five other countries—Albania, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Uruguay—also significantly increased enrollment “and maintained or improved their mean reading, mathematics and science performance. This shows that the quality of education does not have to be sacrificed when increasing access to schooling.”

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Helga Zepp-LaRouche Addresses Beijing Ceremony To Launch ‘CGTN Think Tank’

Dec. 9(EIRNS)—CGTN (China Global Television Network), the CPC-run English-language video network, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, founded the “CGTN Think Tank” as part of the third annual CGTN Global Media Summit, with over 300 people from the world’s political, business, media and technology circles. The new think tank will have “cooperative relationships with 50 renowned think tanks worldwide, with goals to offer insights on world development and promote communication among different cultures,” according to a statement from CGTN covered in Xinhua.

Among the founding members at the event was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, introduced as the “Founder and President of the Schiller Institute.” Other prominent members include the heads of institutions dedicated to a dialogue of civilizations, Chambers of Commerce, and other similar institutions. Among them is Alexander Lukin, the Director of the Center for East Asia and SCO Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a prominent member of the Valdai Club.

Here is the address of Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche to the founding in Beijing of the CGTN Think Tank:

“I think we are experiencing the end of an epoch. The neoliberal system is not sustainable, and the whole world stands before the urgent decision, to either implement in the short term a new credit system, a new Bretton Woods system, or look at the danger of an uncontrollable collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system.

“It was clearly premature when [Francis] Fukuyama, at the end of the Soviet Union, declared the end of history, because we see the opposite happening right now. The effort to impose a unipolar world, to impose the neoliberal system around the world, which meant shock therapy for Russia—which was the intention: to turn a superpower into a raw materials-producing Third World country; to think that by getting China into the WTO, China would automatically adopt the democratic liberal system.

“This went along with the deregulation of the financial markets, the idea that maximizing profit for the speculators would be a main aim of the economy, which obviously increased the gap between the rich and the poor.

“This went along with color revolutions, regime change, humanitarian-interventionist wars, and all of that had a first high point in the systemic crisis of 2008.

“Instead of eliminating the root causes of that crisis, the trans-Atlantic powers continued the same system with bailouts, quantitative easing, zero interest-rate policy, negative interest-rate policy; and now we are at the point of distributing helicopter money. This went along with massive austerity against the population, both in the so-called advanced sector and in the developing sector.

“This has led to a complete global backlash, which has expressed itself in the Brexit, the election of President Donald Trump, the Yellow Vests phenomenon in France. The mass strike against neoliberalism is taking place right now in Chile, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon—the entire Arab world is in a global revolt.

“Now, this requires an urgent need to reorganize the entire trans-Atlantic financial system through bankruptcy reorganization. We need to urgently impose a global Glass-Steagall system of banking separation, go to a New Bretton Woods system, establishing a credit system which focuses on the industrialization of the developing sector. And the only solution will be that the United States—and there I disagree with Mr. [Martin] Jacques—and Europe have to be brought to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative in the industrialization of Africa, in the reconstruction of Southwest Asia. We have to have a common development strategy for the entire Eurasian continent, the two Americas, Africa.

“If we extend the Belt and Road Initiative in such a way into a global World Land-Bridge conception, we also have the basis to replace the obsolete NATO. Not only is NATO brain-dead, but it is obsolete, because it no longer expresses the self-interest of its member countries. Now, once we have a global Belt and Road Initiative cooperation, we can also create a new international security architecture.

“And while people may think that this is a utopian conception, I am saying it is the only way out of an existential crisis for all of humanity. I think it requires a new thinking, a thinking from the standpoint of a New Paradigm, a new system of international relations among nations, and looking at the present crisis from the standpoint of the future. We have to think how should mankind be in a hundred years from now. We should have thermonuclear fusion, we should have international space cooperation, and if we have that kind of a view, then we can attack the problems of the present world in a completely different mode.”

Central Banks Act as if the Crash Is Nigh, While BIS ‘Explains’ Repo Crisis

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—“Central banks are acting as if a global financial crisis is just around the corner,” according to a Bank of America report by bank economist Michael Hartnett. The 53 interest cuts by central banks around the world this year “represents the fastest pace of central bank cuts since the financial crisis. Central banks have injected $400 billion in liquidity since last Christmas, while the dovish ECB and now Fed … are set to boost central bank balance sheets by another $600 billion in 2020.” Hartnett’s blog is reported by Zero Hedge Dec. 9.

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

Pentagon Documents Leaked to Washington Post Reveal Total Failure in Afghanistan

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—A “trove” of documents published by the Washington Post highlight the complete failure of U.S. policy in the “perpetual war” zone of Afghanistan. Although a decision in a three-year court battle under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit is pending since September, the Post decided to go ahead with their publication now—in a six-part series in a newspaper that until now had endorsed the war—signaling that a national policy reassessment away from the perpetual wars under Cheney, Rumsfeld, Petraeus, and Obama may be under way.

Their publication is also a confirmation of President Donald Trump’s continual assertion that these wars have been a complete failure (and waste of money). As the article by Craig Whitlock notes to start, 775,000 soldiers deployed to Afghanistan since 2001, resulting in 2,300 dead and over 20,000 wounded (not counting victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD), with a price tag just shy of $1 trillion (not including CIA or VA hospital care expenses). The additional deaths of Afghan security forces, Taliban fighters, and civilians brings the total to over 157,000 since 2001.

At issue are more than 2,000 pages of after-duty reports from over 400 “insiders”—active-duty soldiers from recruit to highest command level—in “Lessons Learned,” a $11 million project “to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.” Done under the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR (created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone), “Lessons Learned” was a departure from protocol, directed by (civilian) John Sopko, begun in 2014.

Seven reports have been released since then, but they were written in Army-speak, and therefore are not clearly presented. What the Post sued for under FOIA, in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. under Judge Amy Berman Jackson, were the underlying interviews, which were much more frank and understandable to the layman. The Post stitched the interviews together and identified 33 of 62 named interviewees (366 had been blacked out) and tracked them down.

Then, in 2017, in response to a (separate) FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the Pentagon began releasing some 59,000 policy notes—called “snowflakes” by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—which helped complete the picture. “Together,” writes Whitlock, “the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.”

In an apt description, the Post compares the “Lessons Learned” release with that of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971. “With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government’s determination to conceal them from the public, the cache of ‘Lessons Learned’ interviews broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War.”

That release sparked a public outcry which eventually did lead to the end of the war in Vietnam. If we do our job, this release may end the “forever wars,” forever.

SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Test of Long March 5 Prepares Next Phase of Chinese Space Program

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—If things go well, China will launch its Long March 5 rocket into space in December, to test the system which has been worked over after two failed launches in 2017. The following launch will then carry China’s Mars spacecraft in late July or early August 2020, using the same launch window as NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, the European-Russian ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars mission are all targeting, reported Andrew Jones for Space.com on Nov. 30.

After that, some time in late 2020, Chinese will launch the 8,000 kg Chang’e-5 lunar spacecraft on the Long March 5, a mission designed to collect 2 kg of lunar samples and return them to Earth via a complex automated lunar orbit rendezvous between an ascent vehicle and a service module,

With a core stage 5 meters across, the rocket is too wide to be transported by rail as China’s earlier rockets had been. Instead, specially designed cargo ships, dubbed Yuanwang 21 and Yuanwang 22, collected the rocket components from Tianjin, delivering them to the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in late October.

If these launches, on which all future bigger missions depend, go well, China may also begin the construction of its own space station in 2021, and realize plans to place a Hubble-class space telescope into the same orbit, which would allow it to dock with the space station for maintenance and repairs, reported Jones, who covers the space industry for GBTimes and SpaceNews.

Zhuang Jingguo, chief engineer of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told the Fifth China International Commercial Aerospace Forum on Nov. 19, that there will be around 30 rocket launch missions next year, including the Chang’e-5 mission, reported China Daily last month.

Also to be tested next year, is the Long March 8, a medium-lift launch vehicle, China’s first test of vertical takeoff/vertical landing capabilities for an orbital launcher, Jones reported in SpaceNews Dec. 3.

OTHER

COP25 Meeting in Madrid Drops the Mask of the Real Enemy, the Global Green New Deal

Dec. 9 (EIRNS)—At the 10-day-long international “climate emergency” conference of the UN in Madrid, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has targetted the United States, Russia, China and India as the greatest danger to “the planet.” This, because they continue to build and modernize nuclear power plants, coal power plants, and other fossil-fuel technologies essential to human progress on Earth—not to mention human exploration of space. The green, deindustrializing, economically sinking European Union, said Secretary General Guterres, should “correct” the four spacefaring, pro-nuclear, pro-coal powers he named.

For either the UN or Europe to correct the opposition to a global green new deal by these four powers, would be a disaster for the human race. Beginning 1999, these four powers were identified repeatedly by Lyndon LaRouche as uniquely qualified to launch a long-overdue New Bretton Woods credit and monetary system. They could replace the hyper-speculative floating-exchange-rate monetary system of the City of London and Wall Street which has ruled since the early 1970s. That floating casino system has fostered deindustrialization in developed countries and looting of developing countries, and caused repeated financial crashes and deep recessions.

At the same Madrid conference Guterres named Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, as the “UN Climate Change Ambassador.” Thus top City of London financial figures continue to be made UN officials charged with shutting down coal and other fossil fuel power sources and industries. Their mission is to use financing cut-offs to force deindustrialization, regression to throwback wind and solar technologies, and thus forcible reduction of the human population. This is the long-standing preference of the British Empire and its royal family and City of London elites, as well as the brutal objective of fascist regimes in Europe’s 20th century.

Carney adds an aim which is both anti-United States and anti-economic development. He told the August 2019 bankers conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that the dollar should be eliminated as an international trade reserve currency, replaced by a digital world currency controlled by the central banks.

The UN Climate Change Ambassador in 2019 has been Wall Street billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Sir Michael (he was be-knighted in 2014) resides in London, but is staging a “U.S. presidential campaign” whose purpose is anti-Trump advertising and propaganda. In just two weeks of this cynical election-buying “campaign,” Bloomberg has spent $60 million of his money on TV and social media ads—twice what all other candidates combined, including President Donald Trump, have spent so far. All his ads attack the President.

Carney and Bloomberg together run the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, the gang of European central bankers and private banks and funds working to “risk off” fossil fuel industries and stop investment in them. Their carbon-tax partner is perhaps the most senior Wall Street financial figure of all, George Shultz.

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