EIR Daily Alert Service, Thursday, January 23, 2020

THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2020

Volume 7, Number 16

EIR Daily Alert Service

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

  • Trump Counters Green Fascists at Davos With Renaissance Optimism
  • Carney Back Thunberg’s Malthusianism, Boris Johnson Appoints Him as Adviser for COP26
  • Davos Has To Be Kickoff for Green Mobilization, With the Bankers, Says ‘Occupy Wallstreet’ Founder
  • Davos Three-Ring Circus Continues: Green, Green, and Green
  • Talk About a Financial Crash Stalks World Economic Forum
  • Argentine Debt on Edge, as Bondholder Negotiations on Provincial Debt Go Down to the Wire
  • Trump Puts Impeachment Hoax in Its Place, and Then Carries on With Business in Davos
  • Patrick Lawrence Awards Pompeo for ‘Bottomless Ignorance’ and Foreign Policy Insanity
  • Putin Tells New Cabinet To Be a Government To Improve the Well-Being of Citizens
  • Sino-Hellenic Investors Confederation Launched in Athens
  • Chinese Authorities Exert Utmost Efforts To Get Novel Coronavirus Under Control

EDITORIAL

Trump Counters Green Fascists at Davos with Renaissance Optimism

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—While 119 billionaires and their corporate and institutional flunkeys gathered for the World Economic Forum at Davos, pushing a Green fascist agenda of Malthusianism and deindustrialization—coupled with unending financial bailouts for their bankrupt banks—U.S. President Donald Trump intervened with a different axiomatic basis. While his speech provoked hysteria among many, with some accusing him of “pointless optimism,” his praise of the citizens of Florence acting with imagination and boldness in building the great Dome—a feat often referred to by Lyndon LaRouche as exemplifying the spirit of human creativity and commitment to progress which resulted in the Renaissance—highlights again why the oligarchy is committed to ending the Trump Presidency.

In her weekly international webcast, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasized the significance of that section of Trump’s speech, noting that it opened the door to an all-out international campaign to destroy Malthusianism. The remarks made at Davos by the leaders of Green groups such as Greenpeace and Occupy Wallstreet, fully supporting the billionaires’ plan to implement horrific austerity using “global warming” as a justification, only served to confirm that the Green movement in general is functioning as foot-soldiers of the bankrupt financial oligarchy—exactly as the Schiller Institute and EIR have charged.

While China and its Belt and Road Initiative have pulled nearly a billion people out of poverty in the last 40 years, the bankers’ Green schemes will bankrupt large numbers of farmers, businesses, and workers, throwing hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Their policies are also those of geopolitics and permanent warfare, as Lyndon LaRouche proved repeatedly in his writings, such as the 1983 classic There Are No Limits to Growth and the 1991 The Science of Christian Economy.

Zepp-LaRouche emphasized the imminence of a global financial blowout—the Argentine debt crisis is just the latest lit fuse—and the related danger of regional and even thermonuclear war. Because of those twin dangers, she repeated her call for an emergency summit of the Presidents of the United States, Russia and China as a means to move into a New Paradigm to overcome the dangers. She called on viewers to join the battle to change the agenda, to bring mankind back to science and culture to counter war and destruction. Use the opportunity of this Beethoven Year, 250th anniversary of his birth, she stated, to discover the true beauty of human culture.

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Carney Backs Thunberg’s Malthusianism, Boris Johnson Appoints Him as Adviser for COP26

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—Outgoing Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, and incoming UN Green dictator, appeared in Davos speaking at Bloomberg’s Green event, where he said Greta Thunberg is right to point out that the world is rapidly using up its remaining carbon budget, and that the U.S. stance makes tackling global warming more difficult.

When asked whether a common understanding is more difficult without the U.S. Carney replied: “It is certainly more difficult,” according to the Guardian’s Larry Elliot. However, Carney also said some of the leading thinking on climate crisis is coming from U.S. financial sector and tech companies.

On Thunberg, he elaborated, “There have been many positive contributions from Greta Thunberg.” Thunberg has “a legitimate point to make” with the argument that climate science shows that the world has only eight years to continue emitting carbon at its current rate if there is to be a 67% chance of limiting global temperature increase to 1.5°C.

Meanwhile Carney, who will become the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, has also been made British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s special adviser for the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in December. He told the event that Johnson understands the challenge, saying“The prime minister is very focused on this. The full weight of the government will be engaged with it.”

Davos Has To Be Kickoff for Green Mobilization, with the Bankers, Says ‘Occupy Wallstreet’ Founder

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—Interviewed by the BBC, Micah White, one of the founders of the Occupy Wallstreet movement, which at that time claimed to be against the banks, said now that continuing with public demonstrations and attacks on the “elites” (as in the FridaysForFuture movement) will not help the climate. Instead, what is required is an alliance between the activists and the elites (bankers included this time), that is why he is going to the Davos World Economic Forum.

As he told the BBC, he believes the biggest challenge in the coming decade will be orchestrating “a massive climate mobilization” that involves hundreds of millions of people, governments, civil society and activists. And Davos was the sort of event where an initiative of that scale could be negotiated. He revealed that activists had secured an “off-the-record” session with industry leaders about “trying to get a mobilization going … we need to work with them at least on this specific goal of a climate mobilization.”

He maintained that public denunciations by the pro-climate movement did not work. “That’s the knee-jerk activist tactic and I think it misunderstands what Davos really is.” Well, what it really is: The formalization of the alliance between activists and Green Finance—make the bankers more money (that’s green, right?) and cut the human population.

Davos Three-Ring Circus Continues: Green, Green, and Green

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—The total merger and acquisition of the trans-Atlantic financial oligarchy and their environmentalist Green movement, remained on full public display in today’s activities at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Among the scheduled principal speakers are Lord Nicholas Stern, a top British Green ideologue (“China’s Green Global Agenda”); Al Gore (“Securing a Sustainable Future for the Amazon”); Prince Charles (“How To Save the Planet”); Bill Gates (“Fixing the Broken Markets”); and Steve Mnuchin and UBS’s Axel Weber (“The Future of Financial Markets”).

Michael (Mousolini) Bloomberg, who was too busy working on President Trump’s impeachment to be able to attend Davos personally—unlike the President, who did attend—nonetheless had his Bloomberg News company launch a new service: “Bloomberg Green.” Said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait: “We want Bloomberg Green to be the indispensable guide to anyone who wants to understand the great transition that is climate change—investors, politicians, chief executives and scientists to be sure, but also clever readers everywhere.”

Talk About a Financial Crash Stalks World Economic Forum

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—One commentary that is being played up in a number of financial wire services, is that of Scott Minerd, the Guggenheim Partners investment chief who is also a member of the New York Fed’s Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets. Minerd wrote a note to investors from Davos, according to Bloomberg, which compared “the inflation of asset prices caused by the loose money policies of central banks to a ‘Ponzi scheme’ that eventually must collapse.”

Minerd elaborated: “We will reach a tipping point when investors will awake to the rising tide of defaults and downgrades. The timing is hard to predict, but this reminds me a lot of the lead-up to the 2001 and 2002 recession.”

Minerd’s warning to clients came before U.S. President Donald Trump spoke. Afterwards, in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Minerd had somewhat changed his tune. Trump was right in his criticism of the Fed for not lowering interest rates sooner and more, Minerd argued. “I think he was [correct] in hindsight…. Bull markets go as long as they go. As long as the central banks keep the liquidity spigots open, I don’t see any reason why we can’t just keep pushing asset prices higher.”

He went on: “The Fed’s going to be, after everything they’ve just been through and the criticism they’ve taken, they’re going to be really hesitant to start raising rates again.”

Another “billionaire investor” interviewed from Davos on “Squawk Box,” Paul Tudor of Tudor Investment Corp., also said that a blowout is coming. “We are just again in this craziest monetary and fiscal mix in history. It’s so explosive. It defies imagination,” he said, and opining that the current situation in the stock market is reminiscent of the later stages of the dot.com bubble, right before it blew out.

And then there’s Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. Asked by CNBC if he sees any bubbles in the market, Dimon said: “Only in sovereign debt.” Dimon was critical of negative interest rate policies: “I think it’s very hard for central banks to forever make up for bad policy elsewhere. And that puts them in a trap. Do you know anyone who’s actually bought a negative interest rate bond? I would never buy a negative rate bond. Not unless I was forced. In history, whenever you see something like that, it doesn’t necessarily end well.”

Argentine Debt on Edge, as Bondholder Negotiations on Provincial Debt Go Down to the Wire

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—Axel Kicillof, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s largest and wealthiest, had set today as the deadline by which bondholders had to accept his proposal to postpone until May 1 payment of the $250 million BP21 bond, due Jan. 26. Holders of at least 75% of the bond’s principal must back the plan for it to win approval.

Given that the New York-based bondholder committee stated it needed more time to consider the “reprofiling” proposal, Kicillof has now extended the deadline to Jan. 31, and provincial Finance Minister Pablo López indicated that “constructive” dialogue is ongoing and that a “significant number” of bondholders support the plan.

Nonetheless, the situation remains on a hair trigger. Failure to reach an agreement, resulting in a provincial default, would mean that 30 days after the due date—there is a 30-day grace period before debt is declared as non-performing—a “credit event” would have to be declared, with the corresponding upheaval in the speculative derivatives market and credit default swaps embedded in this debt.

While President Alberto Fernández has indicated he seeks constructive and respectful negotiations with Argentina’s creditors, he is pulling no punches in terms of the country’s inability to pay. Yesterday, Finance Minister Martín Guzmán announced he had just sent a new debt sustainability package to Congress, aimed at creating a legal framework establishing conditions “to structure and execute the operations needed…to restore the sustainability of public debt.” Under current conditions, the debt can’t be paid, he said, reported Ambito Financiero.

Guzmán asked creditors to give Argentina time to deal with the disastrous macroeconomic crisis the country faces. There is close coordination between the national and provincial governments on the issue of debt, he emphasized, and reiterated there will be no bailout of Buenos Aires province. Moreover, he said, the government is working on an “integral macroeconomic plan,” which rejects the imposition of conditionalities by anyone. “What’s ours is ours. We designed this. We do what we do because that’s the way we want it,” Cronista Comercial reported. He warned that should creditors fail to reach an agreement, the results “will be ruinous for us all.”

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Trump Puts Impeachment Hoax in Its Place, and Then Carries on with Business in Davos

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—“Our country has to get back to business,” President Donald Trump told reporters trying their damnedest to make the Senate impeachment trial the center of his final press conference in Davos this morning. He said he was not fighting because he enjoys all this, but for the sake of the country, he said. “This was a takedown attempt at a sitting President of the United States, and we caught them.” The impeachment is a hoax by a bunch of corrupt people, a continuation of the Russia hoax which started on Day One—a Russia hoax in which even Jill Stein and Tulsi Gabbard were called “Russian agents” by Hillary Clinton, he said.

He dismissed reporters’ efforts to get into details of what the Senate should do or not do. Read the transcript of the call with the head of state of Ukraine, he insisted: “Everybody’s going to say, ‘You mean that’s an impeachable event?’  If that were impeachable, Lyndon Johnson would have had to leave office in his first day.  Kennedy would have had to leave office his first day. It’s a hoax!” he told them.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton was also “terrible,” he pointed out. That came up when he was asked why Ken Starr is now on his legal team, when he had called Starr “a disaster” in the past. He said he didn’t know Starr when he prosecuted Clinton, but “I did make that statement, because, frankly, I didn’t think that Bill Clinton should have been impeached…. And I was pretty vocal about that”—and I still feel that way, he added.

No reporter had the sense to ask Trump to expand on the vision of a new Renaissance which he presented in his speech at Davos, but he did raise other matters. Trump announced that he had spoken with World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Roberto Azevedo, and they agreed to work on a “dramatic” reform of the WTO in upcoming weeks, about which he had Azevedo say a few words. No details of those reforms were given, other than Trump objecting that if China and India are going to continue to received special treatment as “developing countries,” then the U.S. should be a developing country, too.

President Trump was also emphatic on the importance of U.S. relations with China, as well as of his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping. He told CNBC in an earlier interview that “the best thing” about the Phase One trade deal with China is that “we have two countries that like each other again, because it was getting pretty nasty.” In the press conference, he spoke in stronger terms about “some testy moments… Beyond testy. Worse than a lot of people would understand.” But, he emphasized, “we have a great relationship with China now.”

Relations with Europe look to become “very testy” soon, because Trump said that he had informed European leaders in Davos that he wants a revamped trade deal with Europe, soon, or he will “take action,” such as slapping high tariffs on their autos.

President Trump’s worst Achilles’ heel was also on display: his idea that the about-to-explode stock market bubble will secure the increased jobs, higher wages, and reduction in poverty he wants to provide the American people. Economic adviser Larry Kudlow said in Trump’s press conference, that because more than half of American households own stocks through their 401Ks, brokerage accounts and IRAs, the bottom 50% have seen a 47% increase in their “net wealth” from the increase in stock market and home values, creating great consumer spending power.

Patrick Lawrence Awards Pompeo for ‘Bottomless Ignorance’ and Foreign Policy Insanity

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—Patrick Lawrence, whistleblower and member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has a very harsh article attacking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Consortium News, in which he asserts that “the prize for bottomless ignorance must go to the bottomlessly ignorant Mike Pompeo.” Lawrence describes Pompeo as “the evangelical paranoid who now runs American foreign policy,” and lays into him for his Jan. 13 Hoover Institution speech in particular.

“In a remarkable speech at the Hoover Institution last week, Pompeo termed the Soleimani assassination ‘the restoration of deterrence’ and appeared to promise other such operations against other nations Washington considers adversaries. Ominously enough, Pompeo singled out China and Russia.

“We are not safer now that Soleimani, a revered figure across much of the Middle East, has been murdered. The planet has just become significantly more dangerous, especially but not only for Americans, and this is so for one simple reason: The Trump Administration, Pompeo bearing the standard, has just tipped American conduct abroad into a zone of probably unprecedented lawlessness, Pompeo’s nonsensical claim to legality notwithstanding.”

THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

Putin Tells New Cabinet To Be a Government To Improve the Well-Being of Citizens

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has appointed the 21 ministers for his new government. “Here, of course, the main task is to improve the well-being of our citizens and to strengthen the statehood and positions of our country in the world,” Putin said. The Russian President stated that “these aims are absolutely attainable,” TASS quoted him as telling the ministers.

Commenting on the new Russian government, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev told reporters in Davos, where he was attending the World Economic Forum, that it will work to create an economic breakthrough for the country. “We see that very successful, effective ministers kept their positions in the government. New people also came who have made significant achievements in their previous positions,” Dmitriev remarked. “The previous government managed to achieve macroeconomic stability and create conditions for growth. The new government will become a government of economic breakthrough and will, of course, focus on growth, increasing investment and speeding up the implementation of national projects—that is, on the implementation of those tasks that the President outlined in his [Jan. 15] Address to the Federal Assembly. We think that such measures may increase Russia’s economic growth from 2% to 3% already next year, in 2021.”

In addition to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, there are nine new ministers, and those who remain with their portfolios include Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Sino-Hellenic Investors Confederation Launched in Athens

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—The Sino-Hellenic Investors’ Confederation was launched in Athens on Jan. 18 in order to increase the bilateral friendship and cooperation between Greece and China. The new organization aims at furthering the integration of Chinese investors into Greek society, and to help promote Greek products in China, as well as bilateral collaboration in culture, education, science, tourism, and many other sectors, according to the founding members.

“When Greece faced a severe financial crisis, China was the first country which showed trust in the prospects of our country and proceeded in the major investment at Piraeus port…. We are looking forward to deeper and wider relations and cooperation,” Greek Deputy Prime Minister Panagiotis Pikrammenos said at the event, reported Xinhua.  “You have chosen the right moment to invest in Greece, as the country is turning a page to growth. We welcome you to Greece and wish you best success in all your projects,” Deputy Minister of Development and Investments Nikos Papathanasis told the Chinese guests.

Athens Chamber of Tradesmen President Ioannis Chatzitheodosiou also participated, declaring that Greece warmly welcomes more Chinese investments and more Greek products should reach the Chinese market.

“Coexistence, Cooperation and Harmony are the key words and goals in the establishment of the confederation,” stressed Michael Xia, president of the Sino-Hellenic Investors’ Confederation.

OTHER

Chinese Authorities Exert Utmost Efforts To Get Novel Coronavirus under Control

Jan. 22 (EIRNS)—Chinese authorities are exerting every effort to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV, which was first discovered in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province. The outbreak began at a local farmers’ market in Wuhan and probably came from wild animals which were being sold there illegally. Over 500 people have been diagnosed with the disease and 17 people have died from it, all of the deaths so far in Hubei Province where Wuhan is located. But it has also spread to a dozen other countries, presumedly from people who had recently been in Wuhan.

The symptoms are those of pneumonia, colds, fever, and difficulty breathing. Presuming that Wuhan is the sole source of the disease, Chinese authorities have placed something of a cordon sanitaire around the city. Traffic to and from the city is being restricted and people having to leave are being given temperature checks to make sure they are not carrying the disease. It is not a fail-safe, as the one person in the United States in the state of Washington, who has been diagnosed with the virus after visiting Wuhan, did not exhibit the symptoms until he arrived in the U.S.

The hope is that the only source of the disease was the Wuhan market, but this remains to be seen. And given the hundreds of millions of people who are traveling in China and abroad during this Spring Festival, with the lunar New Year on Jan. 25, characterized as the greatest migration in history, the disease has the capability of becoming a major global threat. Chinese authorities are being very open about the spread of the disease, issuing updates on an hourly basis. Eric Rubin, from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, praised China’s efforts in handling of the crisis. “The Chinese authorities have done an excellent job of trying to figure out what is going on very quickly. And not only have they been figuring it out but they have been spreading the information, allowing everyone across the world to see it. They figured out what the virus was, they sequenced its genome, and they publicized that almost immediately,” said Professor Rubin.

Temperature measurements are being taken remotely at all the Chinese transport nodes, a procedure that China developed during the 2003-04 SARS emergency. Similar measures are now being taken at U.S. airports that are receiving travelers who may have been in Wuhan, at Los Angeles (LAX), JFK Airport in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Chicago.

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

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